Media

Caitlin Johnstone November 15, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article here So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online. Originally published in Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter on November 1, 2022 While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”: According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review,...

Caitlin Johnstone November 9, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination. Originally published in Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter on October 28, 2022 The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that...

Tim Hayward – TFF Associate September 8, 2022 Introduction What does propaganda have to do with academic research and teaching? Citizens can reasonably expect the academic community to generate scholarly understanding and public awareness of what propaganda is and how propaganda operates. Academics should certainly aim to ensure their own research and teaching are not influenced by it. But how well does the academic community actually deal with propaganda? Addressing this question means considering both how propaganda should be dealt with and how academics actually deal with it. Given the distinctive social role of academics, there are five general responsibilities that it is reasonable to expect them to fulfil in relation to propaganda. The most basic is to engage in research and teaching with methods of developing and communicating knowledge quite different from those that constitute propaganda. Whereas propaganda involves strategically communicating information selected on the basis of a prior agenda, the methods of...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to tff@transnational.live or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...

Democracy Now July 14, 2022 As the Pentagon authorizes an additional $400 million for Ukraine’s defense on Friday, bringing estimated total U.S. security spending on Ukraine under President Biden to a staggering $8 billion, we speak to Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, about the pressure on news media to follow a single approved narrative on the Ukraine war. The independent media outlet recently had their PayPal account shut down and received notice from NewsGuard, a fact-checking group, that they are under review for publishing fake news. “American and European audiences have been fed the idea that Russia has been failing in this war and that Ukraine still has a chance to win, but I think we’re starting to see reality seep into the reporting,” says Lauria. • Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González....

Jan Oberg May 31, 2022 It was the first visit to China by a UN human rights chief in 17 years. For years, governments and human rights organisations have accused China of many kinds of human rights violations – and a series of them calls what has happened in Xinjiang “genocide” in line, one could add, with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “determination” that that was the correct label to put on it while not publishing one word of documentation to back up that grave accusation against China and its president. After years of meticulous preparations, Mme Michelle Bachelet – a former President of Chile, a physician who has studied military strategy and who has served as both Health Minister and Defense Minister and has a significant personal experience with Pinochet’s reign of terror – sent an advance team, then went to China herself, had a zoom conversation...

Gordon DumoulinTFF Associate May 24, 2022 Introduction Here we go again. On the same day, leading Western mainstream media – such as BBC, Politiken, Dagens Nyheter, Le Monde, etc – 14 media from 11 countries – publish a new accusation against China, ‘Xinjiang Police Files’: Exclusive documents reveal China’s machine of repression against the Uyghurs. They are produced by the extreme right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the United States. It appeared the day after President Biden had stated, in Tokyo, that the US would come to the rescue of Taiwan if China should attack it. And it coincided also with the UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, started her fact-finding mission in Xinjiang. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Perhaps the material was put together and made ready by the foundation so it could be published at the right moment? Clearly, the untold purpose has been to undermine...

Sunday the 15th, 2022, I was asked to comment from a peace research point of view on Finland and Sweden’s moves to become full members of NATO. I gladly do so since it is a long time since I commented on anything on RT. For those who think that it is surprising or even wrong to speak with Russian media, my media policy can be found here. The denial of access by the EU and others to RT is an indisputable violation of human rights – but most people do not know it. I’m talking about the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 19 from 1966. If you want to get around that violation of your rights, download and pay for a proxy server such as PrivateVPN, set it to e.g. Finland and you will be able to access RT. Then you may also read my front...

Members of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment march in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2019. Their flags display the group’s Wolfsangel logo, a variant of that used by the Nazi SS. (Goo3 / Wikimedia Commons) Branko Marcetic April 29, 2022 The same Western media that once documented and decried Ukraine’s far right is now playing it down and even rehabilitating its leaders — including actual Nazis. Such apologetics aren’t doing any favors for Ukrainians or their fight against Russia’s aggression. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of neighbouring Ukraine a month ago, something curious has happened with Western media coverage of the country’s far-right. Amid the global wave of indignation at Russia’s war of aggression, which Moscow has justified on the pretext of “denazification,” the Western press — fixated for the last five years on the prospect of fascism and the far right at home — has begun playing the issue down....

Truth will out, as they say, and sometimes it in strange ways. On March 9, 2022, the former Danish Prime Minister and former NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, gave an interview to Danish Television 2. Here a 30 sec excerpt. In my view, it was deeply shocking for three reasons. First, what he actually says: “If we send planes, it’s to protect Ukrainian airspace, and then we have to be ready to shoot down Russian planes. That would undeniably mean war between NATO and Russia.” That doesn’t worry him. He does not say that the West/NATO should therefore refrain from doing so. See below how he thinks it will go. “I think if it’s going to deter Putin, we shouldn’t rule anything out. And I’m among those who say we should keep Putin in maximum uncertainty.” Not ruling out anything in NATO parlance indisputably means that the use of nuclear...

John Pilger April 5, 2022 Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain. On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now. Originally published by EurasiaReview on February 19, 2022 But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream. The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”....

Edward Curtin April 5, 2022 Oliver Stone Documents the Past to Illuminate the Present The timing of the early March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in US history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events. Originally published at Off-Guardian While Kennedy was the last US president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness that the promotion of war and the military-industrial...