Summary: We see the news as individual stories. This makes it easy to miss the trend. Such as the growing control of our rulers over our news. Unless we act soon, a kind of 1984 might lie in our future.
After generations of lying to us, our elites have grown confident about our gullibility and disinterest in truth. In the past year our elites have prepared us for the next step: formal machinery to control the flow of information in America.
We saw the early stages of this in their protests against unauthorized releases to the American public of accurate information – information we were not to know. The ClimateGate emails. The revelations from Edward Snowden. The revelations of Chelsea Manning. The leaks of the emails from the Democratic National Committee.
Outrage about truth we were not to know. Dangerous truths, dangerous to our rulers.
Now the giant social media corporations have begun censoring their content.
Next comes the big step: formal open government machinery to control the information flow to us. They believe that our passivity and apathy have grown sufficiently deep in our minds to accept this step. The big step to the death of the Republic, infowar waged against us. Here is one of the many articles pushing us to accept this.
“We Need a NATO for Infowar“
By Elisabeth Braw at Defense One.
“Western countries have pitifully few defenses against ever-more-powerful disinformation campaigns.
Banding together can help.”
“…Russian media deliver a dizzying range of exaggerations and falsehoods about our countries, while we usually opt for the high road of near-silence. But truth won’t prevail on its own. We need a robust defense not just of our borders but of our free and open societies: in other words, a Communications NATO for information warfare. …
“{R}esponses to disinformation are like swatting flies: time-consuming and ineffective. But not addressing disinformation is ineffective, too. ‘Western media still have this thing where they try to be completely balanced, so they’ll say, “the Russians say this, but on the other hand the Americans say this is not true,” They end up giving a lie and the truth the same value,’ noted Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia. …
“‘Why do we even allow RT to broadcast in our countries?’ asked Ilves. Why, indeed. But as ‘USA Really’ shows, even if EU or NATO member states collectively revoked RT’s broadcasting licenses, Russian disinformation would not go away. …
“So who will go head-to-head with Sergey Lavrov, the way NATOwould confront, say, Russia’s armed forces if they made aggressive moves? And what if other countries or entities (say, ISIS at its zenith) attack us with propaganda campaigns? We can’t hang the job on our own news media. …
“What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation — call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart … Such a move would help strengthening citizens’ resilience against disinformation. …”
Most of this is lies. Some is madness. Caitlin Johnstone gives her usual fact-rich, analytical debunking in …
“Atlantic Council Explains Why We Need To Be Propagandized For Our Own Good.“
“As I wrote recently, mainstream media outlets have been going out of their minds churning out attack editorials on anyone who questions the establishment narrative about what happened in Douma. A BBC reporter recently admonished a retired British naval officer for voicing skepticism of what we’re being told about Syria on the grounds that it might ‘muddy the waters’ of the ‘information war’ that is being fought against Russia {details here}.
“All day, every day, western mass media are pummeling the public with stories about how awful and scary Russians are and how everything they say is a lie. …
“Russian propaganda is not dangerous. Having access to other ways of looking at global geopolitics is not dangerous. What absolutely is dangerous is a vast empire concerning itself with the information and ideas that its citizenry have access to. Get your rapey, manipulative fingers out of our minds, please.”
Russian propaganda is dangerous because when your government decides it’s time to go to war with Russia, you might not want them to.
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 3, 2018
But none of that matters. All that matters is our willingness to defend our liberty, our commitment to the truth, and our resolve to govern ourselves. Without that we are no longer America, just a bunch of people working for our rulers – no different in nature than the peons in a Third-world nation.
For More Information
See more examples of info war waged against us: “Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such.”
The big picture about US – Russia relations: We ended the Cold War by lying to Russia. They remember, even if we don’t.
Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about Russia, about RussiaGate, about propaganda, and especially these…
- About the Ukraine war: The first rule of American war is not to believe what we’re told.
- Learning from the Cold War to prevent war with Russia today.
- Trump says the truth about our wars. Do Not Listen!
- The Russian cyberattack on the world that wasn’t (again).
- Debunking RussiaGate, attempts to stop the new Cold War.
- Debunking the story about Russia’s hit on Sergei Skripal.
- Another rush to war! This time in Syria.
- Secrets about our attack on Syria & Russia to help jihadists.
Two new books about our new Cold War.
Return to Cold War
Who Lost Russia?: How the World Entered a New Cold War
See Tony Wood’s review of these new books in the London Review of Books.
Since when does the Press give a flying f about the Russians? Exactly.
I’m somewhat confused by the mention of Snowden and Manning as if they provided some greater good to the public. Snowden lost all credibility fleeing the country and taking his information with him to China and Russia. Manning should have been injected with massive amounts of testosterone and forced to join a fight club. Other than these two turds I’m with ya on the info wars.
Gute,
I don’t understand your point. I evaluate the value of whistleblowers by the utility to us of the information they provide — not how God evaluates each as a person (He neither needs nor wants our opinion).
There is zero evidence that Snowden’s info compromised the security of the US — despite massive govt efforts to find some impacts.
Dear Gute,
I know these two statements may not stand apart, but let me take them apart:
G: Snowden lost all credibility fleeing the country
It would take courage to face your certain lynching or permanent loss of meaningful freedom. That he blinked doesn’t necessarily discredit the facts of what he leaked. The Russians will not trust him with state secrets, I assure you, LOL. He lost all credibility (among many) when he put his conscience in front of his sworn responsibilities. I won’t say what I think in the matter, just that it’s legitimate to think there are multiple mutually exclusive well-meaning perspectives in an environment of uncertainty and certitude that the USG, other Gs, MSM, etc. can and will lie to us when it is convenient to do so.
G: and taking his information with him to China and Russia.
If he brought something beyond what was published in Wikileaks, etc., how would we know? And if he didn’t, what did he bring that Russia and China couldn’t just read online? Besides, of course, his operational expertise and “star power” among a set probably 1/100 of oh, say, T Swizzle or Beyonce? Maybe I give Snowden too much credit on his audience base.
All that said, it would have been better, perhaps, to have leaked to a senior ACLU lawyer or a Federal judge than just putting it all out there through the Wikileaks process.
Regards,
Bill
Bill,
Snowden and Manning both took steps to leak responsibly. In Manning’s case, I believe she ended up leaking more than she intended, because some of the files she shared were either not encrypted properly or sent to the wrong person (still trying to find the source that described what happened). She lost control of her intel, and more of it got out than she wanted. As for Snowden, he cleared everything he released through Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. They may not be the filters you wanted, but he did seek out filters.
I think Snowden knew that his life would be destroyed, but felt he had to expose this egregious thing government was doing. He is not diminished in my eyes by fleeing the country.
Manning was a disgruntled piece of shit with a history of troublemaking who just wanted to see the world burn. IIRC, he simply downloaded entire hard drives, regardless of what was on them, and released them. Nothing principled about it. The names of Afghans who worked with us and of informants were leaked; valuable information to a bearded, turbaned-someone. Julian Assange’s feelings about it are repulsive, “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”
Dark,
People are whistleblowers for many reasons. Some noble, some not. I suggest that instead of playing God and judging them, you show some gratitude. Without whistleblowers we’d know much less about the deeds of our government.
“The names of Afghans who worked with us and of informants were leaked; valuable information to a bearded, turbaned-someone.”
Please provide a link to a reliable source showing some damage was done. As I recall, the US government was unable to do so.
I’m playing human when I judge him. I’m grateful to Snowden, not to Manning. I’ll concede that may be through ignorance, but I’m not aware of anything valuable I gained from that (I am open to persuasion).
One reliable source, my terp, who asked me to “drop him off on the corner in Kabul” when we were heading there in early 2010 so he could bop down the road to visit his family, told me his family received a letter saying ‘we know who your son is’ later that year after the leak.
It doesn’t take an internet link or government press release to see that a massive database of operational history, communications blackout areas, planned future ops, which village elders were talking with us and what they were saying, route clearance items of concern, etc, is going to be useful to various groups (HIG, Taliban, ISI, etc) and provide nothing valuable to the American people.
A quick google turned up this link:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/01/john-mccain/mccain-says-taliban-murdered-people-because-chelse/
Where McCain said that “The information I received when I was there was that the Taliban went after these people. I assume, killed them.” Politifact then said they couldn’t find anything to corroborate that statement. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence though, especially WRT Afghanistan, where journalistic coverage is definitely lacking.
Anyway, my point remains that nothing of value was gained by informant’s, contractor’s, or interpreter’s names being made public except by the groups I already mentioned.
Dark,
” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence though, e”
I don’t know what that means. I do know that Deep State officials lie like rugs, esp in a self-serving way. Our gullibility is their greatest asset. Until that changes, reform is impossible in America
It occurs to me that I am one of the elites you are referring to.
Dark,
“It occurs to me that I am one of the elites you are referring to.”
While possible, color me as skeptical of that.
As in, I am protesting about this unauthorized release of accurate information, just like those nasty elites.
Dark,
“As in, I am protesting about this unauthorized release of accurate information, just like those nasty elites.”
(1) To support the elites of the State does not make you one of them. To support the King does not make you a King. Did I really need to point that out to you?
(2) “just like those nasty elites.”
They are not “nasty.” They are exploitive, just like most ruling elites across space and time. Most people understand this after completion of high school history.
(3) You are either very young, very poorly educated, or being deliberately obtuse. I vote for the latter.
” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence though, e”
I don’t know what that means. I do know that Deep State officials lie like rugs, esp in a self-serving way. Our gullibility is their greatest asset. Until that changes, reform is impossible in America
—–
I mean that you can’t take a lack of evidence to mean that our enemies didn’t target anyone based on the Manning leaks for several reasons. Most all reporting that was done in Afghanistan was done by stringers, and their entire journalism industry is based in Kabul. Most Afghans go by first names, so record keeping is a nightmare. Lastly, so many contractors that worked with Americans were kidnapped/murdered, it was a major objective of the Taliban, I doubt they’d turn down free intel.
All of which is a different topic from your reply, of course. I don’t like being lied to as much as you. I am just not aware of anything from the Manning leak that showed we were being LIED to. There’s an obvious difference in not being told something you don’t need to know (grid coordinates where patrols are out of radio contact with their TOC), and being lied to (“We don’t have a domestic spying program”- Pres. Obama in 2013) about something the government is doing, even though you could call unmasking them both examples of transparency
Dark,
That’s a very long way to avoid the fact that the US govt tried very hard to show damage from those leaks, failed, but you believe there was anyway.
Americans are a joy to their rulers. So docile, so gullible, so easily led. All that we ask is the right to whine loudly when we don’t like the result.
Larry, who said anything about playing God? But I can have an opinion. Personally I find the testosterone therapy for Manning creative. He would have lost his mind being a manly Manning😁
Bill, you are right we don’t know what information he has but going to China or Russia doesn’t help. He had other options and he chose the wrong one. Again, just my opinion. Maybe he didn’t feel in the political climate at the time that he could get a journalist, the ACLU or a federal judge involved – not like you could now.
Dark – mic drop. Boom!
Gute,
“But I can have an opinion.”
America would be must stronger, imo, if people focused more about evaluating the info brought to us by whistleblowers — vital info about the Republic — and focused less on making judgements about the whistleblowers (blowing smoke, since nobody cares what you or I think).
As I showed at the time, the public’s reaction mirrored the news covered — with those priorities reversed. How happy our rulers must be to have a people so docile and easily led.
“but going to China or Russia doesn’t help.”
Perhaps he was disgusted at our reaction. He brought vital information to us, at great personal risk. We did not and do not give a damn.
It’s easy to lie to people who don’t like the truth. A lie requires two people: a liar and a dupe. Given how little our people are interested in truth, I agree that a ministry of propaganda is already at hand in our MSM which is really just the communication arm of Deep State organs and corporations. Have you noticed most “news reports” are actually “press releases” (ie, marketing literature) from government and corporations? The press has gotten so lazy it doesn’t even bother to write content for 330 million saps like us. Instead, it just passes on what its given through its channels.
PRCD,
I agree on all points. Which is why making America more skeptical and interested in Truth are necessary elements for reform.
See my posts about this here.