You cannot be a journalist in the West anymore. Look at what they do to those who question the state propaganda.
“The Cradle contributor was questioned for five hours by counter-terrorism police over his journalistic work and political opinions
UK counter-terrorism police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival in his home country from Belgrade, Serbia, on 17 May, subjecting him to an extended interrogation over his “political views” and his reporting.
Klarenberg has written extensively for The Cradle, exposing London’s many covertoperations in West Asia.
According to The Grayzone, six plainclothes police were waiting for him outside his plane, promptly moving him to a back room and informing him of his detention under Schedule Three, Section Four of the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act.
Klarenberg was questioned for over five hours about his journalistic work, including “his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The counter-terrorism police seized his electronic devices and SD cards, took DNA swabs, fingerprinted him, and photographed him multiple times. He was threatened with arrest if he failed to comply.
Klarenberg’s most recent investigation for The Cradle exposed how UK government-affiliated contractors have been training Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces using US funding.
He made waves in recent months by exposing London’s use of Yemeni NGOs to covertly undermine the Ansarallah-led government in Sanaa as well as Jordan’s use of UK intel techniques known as “digital media exploitation … used to monitor, manipulate, and disrupt dissent in the kingdom.”
Klarenberg has also ruffled feathers in London with his reporting for The Grayzone, exposing “major British and US intelligence intrigues,” including a report on how at least two of the hijackers who carried out the 11 September attacks in New York had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation.
Another of his major exposés was a report revealing that journalist Paul Mason worked as a UK security state collaborator tasked with discrediting alternative media outlets, academics, and peace activists critical of NATO’s role in the Ukraine war…”
UK police detain journalist Kit Klarenberg over ‘political views’
Everyone needs to watch this devastating dissection by one of Canada’s leading journalists of how global media icons were transformed into slavish government propagandists during Covid crisis. This testimony should be mandatory in every journalism school.https://t.co/RteufoJReI
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) May 31, 2023
The longer this war carrie’s on by the own hands of the West the more I see the truth about Russia. He’s bang on that they don’t want us western countries to see how Russia really is! The enemies are our own govt… they destroyed our nations beyond recognition with wokeism. https://t.co/qJ5FNOhlRX
In his speech on Red Square, Putin denounced the “disgusting, criminal and deadly” ideology of Western supremacy and the globalists who “pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human.”“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” the Russian president pointed out.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday attempted to describe Russia as analogous to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Her remarks followed a claim to reporters that the “US and allied forces” had secured victory in the Second World War.
“This week marks, as you all know, the anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe and the victory of the United States and allied forces over fascism and aggression on the continent,” President Joe Biden’s press secretary told reporters at the daily briefing.
“The European continent now faces new aggression,” Jean-Pierre added. “The US has rallied the world in response, and we will continue to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their independence and their democracy.”
After announcing a $1.2 billion package of ammunition and other supplies for Kiev’s military, Jean-Pierre offered more thoughts about the meaning of WWII and the speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the triumphant parade in Moscow.
“Victory Day is supposed to be about peace and unity in Europe. It’s supposed to be about the end of war and bloodshed and suffering. Instead, Mr. Putin promised only more violence and spewed only more lies about the war he falsely claims has been unleashed against Russia,” she said.
In his speech on Red Square, Putin denounced the “disgusting, criminal and deadly” ideology of Western supremacy and the globalists who “pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human.”
“It seems that they have forgotten what the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to. They have forgotten who defeated this monstrous, total evil,” the Russian president pointed out.
The Soviet Union did the lion’s share of the fighting in Europe, at the cost of 8.7 million soldiers and up to 20 million civilian lives. May 9 is the date on which the remnants of the Nazi regime signed their surrender to the Red Army, a week after the banner of the 150th Rifle Division was planted atop the Reichstag in Berlin.
A lifelong Democrat political operative, Jean-Pierre worked for Biden when he was Barack Obama’s vice-president, then moved to the cable channel MSNBC as a political commentator. She returned to the White House in 2021, and replaced Jen Psaki in May 2022, as the “historic first” openly lesbian black woman to ever hold the post of press secretary.
The Western mainstream media have never been so blatant in their propaganda for the U.S. empire
The war in Ukraine is becoming more evident as a war-racket and imperialist proxy war against Russia. That war is in desperate danger of spiralling into an all-out world war that could unleash a nuclear catastrophe.
All Western media outlets have ignored credible investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh (and others) who have very plausibly implicated the sabotage of Nord Stream by the U.S., carried out under the instructions of American President Joe Biden.
The Western mainstream media have never been so blatant in their propaganda for the U.S. empire.
The pretensions are threadbare. As the warmongering U.S. government/regime and its Western/NATO imperialist lackeys are becoming more exposed and desperate to maintain credibility, so too are their media tools. The likes of the New York Times, BBC, CNN – and many more – are a contemptible joke on the public. They are an insult to common intelligence.
Fake news has been around for centuries, but it’s now becoming glaringly obvious and self-destructive. In the same way that the U.S. warmongering empire is becoming glaringly obvious and self-destructive.
The disconnect with reality and degradation of supposed independent journalism is reflected in record levels of distrust among the Western public toward the mainstream, corporate-controlled news media.
In this interview, U.S.-based writers Bruce Gagnon and Daniel Lazare demolish the pretensions of Western media.
The systematic cover-up of the Nord Stream sabotage by the United States and its NATO allies – an act of war and state terrorism – demonstrates the servile function of Western media outlets that claim to be pillars of independent news and freedom of information.
Media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the British state-owned BBC, among many others, have been exposed as pathetic propaganda tools for the United States and other NATO imperialist regimes.
All Western media outlets have ignored credible investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh (and others) who have very plausibly implicated the sabotage of Nord Stream by the U.S., carried out under the instructions of American President Joe Biden.
Another touchstone subject is the vile persecution of Julian Assange. Western media have again covered up what are a shocking violation of Assange’s rights and principled publishing through the whistleblower organization Wikileaks. Julian Assange’s only “crime” is that he revealed the war crimes committed by the U.S. and its imperialist lackeys.
Assange’s appalling mistreatment, indeed torture – four years in British solitary confinement awaiting extradition to the U.S. over spurious “spying charges” – is a vicious attack on journalism and the public’s right to know. Yet supposed self-declared Western media defenders of “truth” and “fact-based” objective information – have conspired to be silent and permit Assange’s persecution. Western media are shown to be complicit in destroying the very principles of journalism that they claim to uphold.
As Bruce Gagnon and Daniel Lazare point out, it is a crime to tell the truth and Western media stand exposed in their odious dereliction of duty to report independently. They are seen more than ever as out-and-out tools of empire.
A proper understanding of the Nord Stream sabotage and the case of Julian Assange would give the Western public a critical insight into the imperialist nature of their governments – regimes that serve warmongering capitalist interests. Critical mass must be thwarted at all costs by the Empire’s media foot-servants.
From the point of view of U.S.-led Western imperialist power, it is imperative and absolutely vital to cover up the scandals of the Nord Stream attack and Julian Assange, among others. If the public were to become more widely cognizant then the whole edifice of Western governments implodes. This is why the Western media are more blatant than ever to cover up. But the truth will win out.
The war in Ukraine is becoming more evident as a war-racket and imperialist proxy war against Russia. That war is in desperate danger of spiralling into an all-out world war that could unleash a nuclear catastrophe.
The same Western media cover-up is at work with regard to the U.S.-led NATO aggression toward China. Again, the Western media are spinning imperialist propaganda of alleged Chinese menace in order to justify what is an insane warmongering agenda to confront China and prop up American hegemonic ambitions.
A tantalizing positive prospect is that critical, independent media are gradually and relentlessly breaking the monopoly of Western propaganda media. The internet and global communications are seeing to that – albeit against sinister censorship by Western regimes.
Nevertheless, the establishment of Western media are increasingly held in distrust and contempt by the Western public and globally.
We are living in an exemplary time of the fabled Emperor With No Clothes. The false image of dominant Western regimes and their lying corporate media has never been so degraded but also never so fragile. The Western lie machine’s days are numbered. It only has itself to blame because of its abject disservice to the public interest.
Western state-complicit media claim to be “free”. Laughably, they are “free” to be slaves of lies and propaganda.
An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war, Peter Cronau reports. The sample size dwarfs other studies of covert propaganda about the war on social media.
Rally for Ukraine outside the White House in Washington, Feb. 27, 2022. (Mike Maguire, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.
An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.
The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.
The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable “angst” in the online discourse.
The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets, sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Feb. 24. The researchers looked at predominately English-language accounts. A calculated 1.8 million unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posted at least one English-language tweet.
The results were published in August in a research paper, titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war,” by the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Science.
The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding the Ukraine war.
The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research on Western disinformation, analysed by Declassified Australia in September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts.
The Meta/Facebook research on Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) a fortnight later, looked at only 1,600 Facebook accounts.
Reports on the new research have appeared in only a few independent media sites, and on Russia’s RT. The ground-breaking study exposing a massive anti-Russia social media disinformation campaign has been effectively ignored by Western establishment media, showing how stories that don’t fit the desired pro-Western narrative are routinely buried.
Disinformation Blitz Krieg
The Adelaide University researchers unearthed a massive organised pro-Ukraine influence operation underway from the early stages of the conflict. Overall, the study found automated “bot” accounts to be the source of between 60 to 80 percent of all tweets in the dataset.
The published data shows that in the first week of the Ukraine-Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity. Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week.
In fact, it was like someone had flicked a switch at the start of the war as pro-Ukraine bot activity suddenly burst into life. In that first day of the war the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag was used in as many as 38,000 tweets each hour, rising to 50,000 tweets an hour by day three of the war.
By comparison, the data shows that in the first week there was an almost total absence of pro-Russian bot activity using the key hashtags. During that first week of the invasion, pro-Russian bots were sending off tweets using the #IStandWithPutin or #IStandWithRussia hashtags at a rate of only several hundred per hour.
Given the apparent long-range planning for the invasion of Ukraine, cyber experts expressed surprise that Russian cyber and internet responses were so laggard. A researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in Switzerland, said: “The [pro-Russian] cyber operations we have seen do not show long preparation, and instead look rather haphazard.”
After being apparently left flatfooted, the #IStandWithPutin hashtag mainly from automated bots, eventually fired up a week after the start of the war. That hashtag started appearing in higher numbers on March 2, day 7 of the war. It reached 10,000 tweets per hour just twice over the next two days, still way behind the pro-Ukraine tweeting activity.
The #IStandWithRussia hashtag use was even smaller, reaching only 4,000 tweets per hour. After just two days of operation, the pro-Russian hashtag activity had dropped away almost completely. The study’s researchers noted the automated bot accounts “likely used by Russian authorities,” were “removed likely by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”
The reaction against these pro-Russian accounts had been swift. On March 5, after the #IStandWithPutin hashtag had trended on Twitter, the company announced it had banned over 100 accounts using the hashtag for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy” and participating in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour.”
Later that month, the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) reportedly raided five “bot farms”’ operating inside the country. The Russia-linked bot operators were reportedly operating through 100,000 fake social media accounts spreading disinformation that was “intended to inspire panic among Ukrainian masses.”
Ukrainian security forces unearthed a pro-Russian automated “bot army” operating out of an apartment in March 2022. The raid found 100 sets of GSM-gateways, left, and 10,000 sim cards, right, operating 100,000 fake bot accounts. (SBU)
Unfiltered Research
The landmark Adelaide University research differs from these earlier revelations in another most unique and spectacular way.
While the Stanford-Graphika and Meta research was produced by researchers who have long-term deep ties to the U.S. national security state, the Adelaide University researchers are remarkably independent. The academic team is from the university’s School of Mathematical Science.
Using mathematical calculations, they set out to predict and model people’s psychological traits based on their digital footprint.
Unlike the datasets selected and provided for the Stanford/Graphika and the Meta research, the data the Adelaide University team accessed did not come from accounts that had been detected for breaching guidelines and shut down by Meta or Twitter.
Adelaide University campus, in Australia, 2008. (Pdfpdf, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Joshua Watt is one of the lead researchers on the university team, and is a Master of Philosophy candidate in applied mathematics.
He told Declassified Australia that the dataset of 5 million tweets was accessed directly by the team from Twitter accounts on the internet using an academic license giving access to the Twitter API.
The “Application Programming Interface” is a data communication software tool that allows researchers to directly retrieve and analyse Twitter data.
The fake tweets and automated bot accounts had not been detected and removed by Twitter before being analysed by the researchers, although some were possibly removed in Twitter’s March sweep.
Watt told Declassified Australia that in fact many of the bot accounts behind the 5 million tweets studied are likely to be still up and running.
Declassified Australia contacted Twitter to ask what action they may have taken to remove the fake bot accounts identified in the University of Adelaide research. They had not responded by the time of going to press.
Critical Tool in Info War
This new research paper confirms mounting fears that social media has covertly become what the researchers call “a critical tool in information warfare playing a large role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
The Adelaide University researchers tried their best to be noncommittal in describing the activities of the fake Twitter accounts, although they had found the vast majority – over 90 percent – were anti-Russian messages. They stated: “Both sides in the Ukrainian conflict use the online information environment to influence geopolitical dynamics and sway public opinion.”
They found the two main participating sides in the propaganda war have their own particular goals and style. “Russian social media pushes narratives around their motivation, and Ukrainian social media aims to foster and maintain external support from Western countries, as well as promote their military efforts while undermining the perception of the Russian military.”
While the research findings concentrated on automated Twitter bots, there were also findings on the use of hashtags by non-bot tweeters. They found significant information flows from non-bot pro-Russian accounts, but no significant flows from non-bot pro-Ukraine accounts.
As well as being far more active, the pro-Ukraine side was found to be far more advanced in its use of automated bots. The pro-Ukrainian side used more “astroturf bots” than the pro-Russians. Astroturf bots are hyper-active political bots that continuously follow many other accounts to increase followers of that account.
Social Media Role in Boosting Fear
Crucially, the University of Adelaide researchers also investigated the psychological influence the fake automated bot accounts had on the online conversation during those early weeks of the war.
These conversations in a target audience may develop over time into support or opposition towards governments and policies – but they may also have more instant effects influencing the target audiences’ immediate decisions.
The study found that it was the tweets from the fake “bot” accounts that most drove an increase in conversations surrounding “angst” amongst people targeted by them. They found these automated bot accounts increased “the use of words in the angst category which contains words related to fear and worry, such as ‘shame,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘threat, ‘panic.’”
By combining the “angst” messaging with messages about “motion” and geographical locations, the researchers found “the bot accounts are influencing more discussion surrounding moving/fleeing/going or staying.” The researchers believe this effect may well have been to influence Ukrainians even away from the conflict zones to flee from their homes.
The research shows that fake automated social media “bot” accounts do manipulate public opinion by shaping the discourse, sometimes in very specific ways. The results provide a chilling indication of the very real malign effects that mass social media disinformation campaigns can have on an innocent civilian population.
Origins of Twitter Bot Accounts
The researchers report that the overwhelming level of Twitter disinformation that was anti-Russian was from bots “likely [organised] by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”
The researchers asserted no further findings about the origin of the 5 million tweets, but did find that some bots “are pushing campaigns specific to certain countries [unnamed], and hence sharing content aligned with those timezones.” The data does show that the peak time for a selection of pro-Ukrainian bot activity occurred between 6pm and 9pm across U.S. time zones.
Some indication of the origin and the targeting of the messages could be deduced from the specific languages used in the 5 million tweets. Over 3.5 million tweets, or 67 percent, were in the English language, with fewer that 2 percent in Russian and Ukrainian.
In May 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) director and U.S. cyber command chief, General Paul Nakasone, revealed that the Cyber Command had been conducting offensive Information Operations in support of Ukraine.
“We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations,” Nakasone said.
U.S. Cyber Command training exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, 2011. (Fort George G. Meade Public Affairs Office, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Nakasone said the U.S. has been conducting operations aimed at dismantling Russian propaganda. He said the operations were lawful, conducted through policy determined by the U.S. Defense Department and with civilian oversight.
Nakasone said the U.S. seeks to tell the truth when conducting an information operation, unlike Russia.
U.S. Cyber Command had deployed to Ukraine a “hunt forward” cyber team in December to help shore up Ukraine’s cyber defences and networks against active threats in anticipation of the invasion.
A newly formed European Union cyber rapid response team consisting of 12 experts joined the Cyber Command team to look for active cyber threats inside Ukrainian networks and to strengthen the country’s cyber defences.
The U.S. has invested $40 million since 2017 in helping Ukraine buttress its information technology sector. According to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the investments have helped Ukrainians “keep their internet on and information flowing, even in the midst of a brutal Russian invasion.”
Wars &Lies in Our Pockets
With the rise of the internet, war and armed conflict will never be the same. Analysts have noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a “new digital era of military, political and economic conflict” being manipulated by “laptop generals and bot armies.”
“In all dimensions of this conflict, digital technology plays a key role – as a tool for cyberattacks and digital protest, and as an accelerator for flows of information and disinformation,” wrote analysts at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Brussels. “Propaganda has been a part of war since the beginning of history, but never before could it be so widely spread beyond an actual conflict area and targeted to so many different audiences.”
Joshua Watt, one of the lead researchers on the University of Adelaide team that conducted the landmark study, summed it up: “In the past, wars have been primarily fought physically, with armies, air force and navy operations being the primary forms of combat. However, social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale.”
“CNN brought once-distant wars into our living rooms,” another analyst stated, “but TikTok and YouTube and Twitter have put them in our pockets.”
We are all carrying around with us a powerful source of information and news media – and also, most certainly, disinformation that’s coming relentlessly at us from influence operations run by “bad actors” whose aim is to deceive.
The West has wet dreams about removing Putin from power. Imagine they manage to have Putin assassinated and Medvedev takes over. It will rain nuclear warheads on the West in no time. The world should worry about what happens without a level-headed and reasonable Russian leader.
Dmitry Medvedev
April 2023
1. Europe doesn’t need Ukraine. The forced support of the Nazi regime, by the American mentor’s order, has put Europeans into a financial and political inferno. All for the sake of Bandera’s Unterukraine, that even the snobby, insolent Polacks don’t take for a valid country, and time and again toss in the issue of its western areas Anschluss. There’s a nice perspective ahead: to permanently put the nouveau-Ukrainian blood-sucking parasites on the decrepit EU’s arthritis-crippled neck. That’ll be the final fall of Europe, once majestic, but robbed off by degeneration.
2. The US doesn’t need Ukraine. True, the military and sanction campaigns are attempted for PR by political blabbermouths, who long ago attested to their impotence and imbecility. Average Americans don’t understand what “Ukraine” is, and where “it” is. Most of them won’t show this “power” on the map on the first take. Why won’t the US establishment focus on inflation and job issues, or emergencies in their home States, instead of a country 404, unbeknownst to them? Why does so much dough go across the ocean? Sooner or later, they’ll ask for that. Then, the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 would seem like scout games.
3. Africa and Latin America don’t need Ukraine. The hundreds of millions spent by the US on pointless fights in Ukraine could finance many development programmes for Latin American and African states. Latin America is gringos’ backyard – that’s what they’ve been rubbing in for decades. Africa’s had its share of suffering from the genocide, and colonial dependence, imposed by former Western slave traders. That’s why the people of African huts and Latin American favelas ask a very reasonable question: for their former suffering and present-day loyalty, why is somebody else rewarded – very, very far away?
4. Asia doesn’t need Ukraine. By Russia’s example, they see “colour” technologies at work to eradicate the largest competing powers. They understand what scenario the America-led collective West has for them if they disobey. “Help us to overcome Russia, and we’ll soon come to you”, the utterly brazen Western leaders tell them. Such gigantic countries as India, China, and other Asia-Pacific states face the big enough challenge of post-pandemic economic recovery, let aside the drugged clowns, with their whining for aid. “We are not interested in you”, Asia tells their messengers, responding to the calls to support Ukraine and confine Russia. This country, geopolitically many times closer to Asian powers, is the one that historically has proven itself a reliable strategic partner. Do Asian giants need such headache coming from former colonizers?
5. Russia doesn’t need Ukraine. A threadbare quilt, torn, shaggy, and greasy. The new Malorossiya of 1991 is made up of artificially cut territories, many of which are indigenously Russian, separated by accident in the 20th century. Millions of our compatriots live there, harassed for years by the Nazi Kiev regime. It is them who we defend in our special military operation, relentlessly eradicating the enemy. We don’t need Unterukraine. We need Big Great Russia.
6. Finally, its own citizens don’t need the Nazi-headed Ukraine. That’s why out of 45 million people there’re only some 20 million remaining. That’s why those who stayed want to leave for any place: the hated Poland, EU, NATO, to be America’s 51st state. Joining the Antarctic with its penguins will also be fine. As long as it’s quiet, and the food’s good. The ruling junta’s criminal ambitions forced Ukrainians to beg and roam around the countries and continents, searching for a better life. All that is for an obscure European perspective. Or rather, to let the harlequin in a khaki tricot and his band of thievish Nazi clowns to put the money stolen from the West into their offshore accounts. Would ordinary Ukrainians need that? Nobody on this planet needs such a Ukraine. That’s why it will disappear.
WHY WILL UKRAINE DISAPPEAR? BECAUSE NOBODY NEEDS IT 1. Europe doesn’t need Ukraine. The forced support of the Nazi regime, by the American mentor’s order, has put Europeans into a financial and political inferno. All for the sake of bandera’s unterukraine, that even the snobby,…
The Twitter CEO revoked the newspaper’s ‘verified’ badge after it refused to pay for the privilege
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” the billionaire declared. “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has branded the New York Times “unreadable propaganda” after the newspaper refused to pay for verification. Earlier, Twitter began removing its iconic blue checkmarks from accounts that had received the badge before Musk’s subscription system was introduced.
Twitter announced last month that, as of Saturday, it would begin removing “legacy verified checkmarks” from accounts that were verified before Musk announced his subscription system last year. The New York Times declared on Thursday that it would not pay the $1,000 per month required of businesses, or reimburse its employees for signing up for Twitter’s $8 per month personal plan.
The New York Times’ @nytimes account lost its checkmark on Saturday, meaning its tweets will no longer show up in the ‘for you’ tab, the default timeline where Twitter users see content from accounts they follow.
Tweeting on Saturday, Musk suggested that the vanishing of Tweets from the Times would be no great loss for most users.
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” the billionaire declared. “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable.”
“They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles,” Musk continued, adding that the “same applies to all publications.”
The New York Times is one of a number of US newspapers and news outlets boycotting the paid verification system. The White House is also refusing to pay for blue checkmarks for its staffers, according to a report by Axios on Friday.
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October, promising a host of reforms that would roll back the platform’s censorship policies and make it a “digital town square” for free and open debate. While he has restored hundreds of previously banned accounts – including that of former US President Donald Trump – and relaxed Twitter’s content moderation rules, he has simultaneously struggled to boost the platform’s declining revenue.
Despite Musk rolling out paid subscriptions and firing around three quarters of Twitter’s staff, the company is currently worth half of what Musk paid for it last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Musk has previously clashed with the New York Times and suspended reporter for the paper, Ryan Mac, in December for sharing information about the billionaire’s whereabouts.
“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted at the time.
UN spokesman: “There’s no US armed forces inside of Syria” Reporter: “5 US servicemen were injured in that attack. If there are no US serviceman, how could they got injured?” UN spokesman: … Reporter: “That’s weird, right?” -> LMAO … the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while! pic.twitter.com/mA3tYmxe83
Winter made the remarks during a webinar hosted last week by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a leading American think tank.He accused RT’s news outlets of being “just as pure a propaganda arm as you can get of the Russian government,” but said that he was “continually impressed by the quality of Russian propaganda in Latin America.” “Those guys are really good. You look at RT en Español – it has one of the biggest social media followings of any media company in the region,” Winter acknowledged, arguing that people who are not even “pro-Russia” still share content and videos from RT.
Washington’s already-tarnished image is being further damaged in the region, a vice president of policy at the Americas Society has warned
Russian “propaganda” is of exceptional quality in Latin America and the US is struggling to portray itself as “the shining city on the hill,” Brian Winter, a lobbyist at Americas Society and Council of the Americas has claimed.
Washington largely has itself to blame for the situation, given its long history of displaying its “worst behaviors” in the region, the activist added.
Winter, who is also the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly magazine, made the remarks during a webinar hosted last week by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a leading American think tank.
Winter made the remarks during a webinar hosted last week by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a leading American think tank.
He accused RT’s news outlets of being “just as pure a propaganda arm as you can get of the Russian government,” but said that he was “continually impressed by the quality of Russian propaganda in Latin America.”
“Those guys are really good. You look at RT en Español – it has one of the biggest social media followings of any media company in the region,” Winter acknowledged, arguing that people who are not even “pro-Russia” still share content and videos from RT.
Winter is vice president of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, the parent organizations of Americas Quarterly. The two influence groups were originally founded back in 1960 by David Rockefeller at the request of President John F. Kennedy to counter Communism in Latin America.
The former Reuters correspondent, who is based in New York, alleged that Moscow has a “whole network of sites that are more subtle and that push very sophisticated and sometimes not particularly obvious narratives that are designed to undermine the United States or promote the views of China and Russia.” However, he failed to offer any examples of such websites.
In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a “new era” in the strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the “leader” of the world.
The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”
“The two countries have grown closer. But they are both countries that chafe and bristle at U.S. leadership around the world.”
“And in China’s case in particular, they certainly would like to challenge U.S. leadership around the world.”
“But these are not two countries that have, you know, decades-long experience working together and full trust and confidence. It’s a burgeoning of late based on America’s increasing leadership around the world and trying to check that.”
“Peter, these are two countries that have long chafed, as I said to Jeff — long chafed at U.S. leadership around the world and the network of alliances and partnerships that we have.”
“And we work on those relationships one at a time because every country on the continent is different, has different needs and different expectations of American leadership.”
“That’s the power of American convening leadership. And you don’t see that power out of either Russia or China.”
“But one of the reasons why you’re seeing that tightening relationship is because they recognize that they don’t have that strong foundation of international support for what they’re trying to do, which is basically challenging American leadership around the world.”
John Kirby really wants everyone to know that America is in charge of the world. This is from one single press conference. pic.twitter.com/HeE9uGEwrW
The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.
We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.
US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.
The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”
US Ambassador To China: "We're The Leader" Of The Indo-Pacific
The way US empire managers talk about "leading" ostensibly sovereign states with ostensibly independent governments shows you they really do think they own the world.https://t.co/obSehF6xZ1
Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.
I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.
The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.
It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no valid reason why the US needs to remain in charge of the world and can’t just let different people in different regions sort out their own affairs like they always did before. There’s no valid reason why governments need to be brandishing armageddon weapons at each other instead of collaborating peacefully in the interest of all humankind. We’re being pushed toward disaster to preserve “American leadership around the world,” and I for one do not consent to this.
Again, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, forced to endure the brutality of the US in their daily lives, are not so fooled, and they are quite understandably looking elsewhere for their news, and even for help. Thus, people protesting US intervention in such countries as Haiti and Peru are even waving Russian flags and asking for Russian help against this intervention.
In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Harold Pinter spent a good deal of his time detailing the crimes of the US in the world, but especially in Latin America. He spoke about how most people have been lulled into forgetting about these crimes, if they ever knew about them at all, thanks to Washington’s sophisticated propaganda machine:
“The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Of course, the people who suffered from the relentless US attacks have not forgotten them. And as might be expected, these attacks have not stopped, or even slowed down, with the US supporting right-wing coups in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years – for example, in Honduras in 2009; Bolivia in 2019; and most recently the ongoing unrest in Peru. The US also helped instigate a very violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, though it ultimately failed. Moreover, in addition to forcibly kidnapping Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and flying him to the Central African Republic in 2004, it appears that the US had some role in the recent murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
Meanwhile, Washington is leading NATO’s expansion of its forward-operating capacity in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Popular Resistance, at the end of 2022, the US had “12 military bases in Panama, 12 in Puerto Rico, 9 in Colombia, 8 in Peru, 3 in Honduras, 2 in Paraguay, as well as installations of this type in Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Cuba (Guantanamo), and Peru among other countries.” Washington is seeking to control the entire “land and maritime surface of the region”, including a network of NATO bases on islands in Argentina’s territorial waters “usurped by the United Kingdom.”
In light of all this activity and history, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean can be forgiven for doubting the claims that the US is helping to spread democracy, peace and truth in the region. The people of this region are simply tired of being bullied by the US, and they are equally tired of being blatantly lied to by the US government and its corporate media mouthpieces. As such, it should come as little surprise to anyone paying attention that the people of this region are increasingly looking to non-US sources like Russia’s RT to get their information, much to the chagrin of the US.
As CNN laments, “Russian propaganda has long exploited simmering resentments against the West’s imperialistic past and recent foreign policy interventions, now promoting the view that Ukraine is a puppet of the West. The narrative is particularly powerful in Latin America, where Kremlin-controlled media outlets such as RT have big audiences.” Similarly, POLITICO complains, “When it comes to Russian state media, the Kremlin’s Spanish-language services – most notably RT en Español – are a juggernaut, particularly in Latin America. Its glitzy television studios, anti-gringo editorial line and ability to tap into locals’ desire for outside news sources have made the outlet by far the largest proponent of Moscow’s talking points.”
There is much to unpack in these alarmist statements. First of all, in its very assertion about “Russian propaganda,” CNN itself engages in its own, quite typical pro-US propaganda, attempting to claim that the West’s imperialism is in the “past” and reducing its recent, anti-constitutional coups in Latin America to mere “foreign policy interventions.” For its part, POLITICO acknowledges that the appeal of RT to Latin American viewers is its “anti-gringoeditorial line” without explaining why Latin Americans would be attracted to that – that is, without acknowledging it is the cruel US actions which have driven Latin Americans away from American sources and towards those like RT.
Of course, the problem is that the US government and its compliant propaganda outlets like CNN and POLITICO have gotten high on their own supply. They believe their own line about the nature of US imperialism in the region and cannot seem to fathom that they themselves are some of the biggest purveyors of false news in the world, including about Washington’s role in the world.
Again, the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, forced to endure the brutality of the US in their daily lives, are not so fooled, and they are quite understandably looking elsewhere for their news, and even for help. Thus, people protesting US intervention in such countries as Haiti and Peru are even waving Russian flags and asking for Russian help against this intervention.
There is an easy solution to this. If the US wants the people of the region to look to it and its media outlets for news and information, it might be honest about its interventionist past and present conduct in this hemisphere, and it can start treating the people of this hemisphere and their countries with respect and as equals. As long as the US continues to treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard” in which it is free to meddle for its own gain, it will only continue to alienate the people and to push them towards Russia and other points eastward. This should be an obvious point, but it seems to be lost on those policymakers in the US who seem incapable of seeing past their own self-interest, all the while believing that they are somehow the good guys.
This imbecile does not understand that she is suffering from terminal idiotic propaganda coming from the evil empire.
Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy is raging at the suggestion of Russia being able to keep any territory in Ukraine. She looks so mad, she could literally strike out at any moment. She is a raving lunatic. pic.twitter.com/scGOnnHvuI
If he actually believes this he should leave MSM. Everything he says here is absolutely true. Remaining part of it keeps him complicit. He’d have no problem establishing an audience on alternative platforms. Be about it, @TuckerCarlson. Walk away. https://t.co/MQrKDn4Q1E
— Comrade Misty is Putin’s Buddy 🍀 (@SarcasmStardust) March 17, 2023
The purpose behind this Ministry of Truth is to keep a lid on the spread of information online. All information must first pass through the censorship filters established by the BBC and the UK establishment before it reaches your eyes and ears.
Further up the food chain in this decision-making process are the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), two heads of the snake, so to speak, that govern world affairs
In response to the circulation of what it described as an overwhelming amount of “misinformation” and “fake news,” the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in partnership with the British government established a “Ministry of Truth” in 2019, just prior to the launch of the covid scamdemic.
Right on schedule, the BBC and the government of the United Kingdom created a censorship operation called “The Trusted News Initiative,” or TNI, that includes as partners the following organizations:
• The Associated Press (AP) • AFP • First Draft • Google / YouTube • Twitter • Reuters • Financial Times • Meta (Facebook) • European Broadcasting Union • CBC / Radio-Canada • The Hindu • Microsoft • The Washington Post
This is not an exhaustive list, mind you – many other mainstream and corporate-controlled “news” outlets and tech platforms are still to this very day participating in rampant censorship of certain topics and ideas.
The purpose behind this Ministry of Truth is to keep a lid on the spread of information online. All information must first pass through the censorship filters established by the BBC and the UK establishment before it reaches your eyes and ears.
Further up the food chain in this decision-making process is the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), two heads of the snake, so to speak, that govern world affairs.
“The standards focused on areas such as fact-checking, transparency, and impartiality, and news organizations found to be publishing information NOT approved by powerful Governments and other powerful institutions faced severe consequences,” reports The Exposé.
Millions of people are dead because of Ministry of Truth censorship
Not just news outlets but also people were swept up in the Ministry of Truth’s censorship scheme. In order to have a voice in the conversation, scientists and other experts have had to kowtow to the “authorities” and what they deem as “true,” or else face censorship.
Those who resist face loss of livelihood, harassment and intimidation, and in some cases loss of life. Many lives, in fact, have been lost as a direct result of the Ministry of Truth’s operations. (Related: Science shows that covid lockdowns caused thousands of excess deaths.)
“Scientists and experts were effectively silenced, with any research or findings that didn’t align with the Government’s narrative on Covid-19 being dismissed as “fake news,’” reports indicate.
“It also led to a society where people were afraid to speak out, where Governments had too much control over what people could know and think, and where free speech and independent thinking were stifled.”
“The public was fed only information that the Ministry deemed to be ‘true,’ but this often meant that important and potentially life-saving information was withheld … This led to the tragic and unnecessary loss of millions of lives due to the Covid-19 injections.”
In the United States alone in 2021, nearly 700,000 excess deaths occurred that were caused by Ministry of Truth censorship. By Nov. 11, 2022, that figure had ballooned to 1.06 million excess deaths.
In Europe in 2021, the excess death count was 382,000, which ballooned more than 600,000 excess deaths by November 2022 – excluding Ukraine.
In Australia, there were only 1,303 excess deaths in 2020 before covid “vaccines” were unleashed through Operation Warp Speed. In 2021, that figure increased by 747 percent to reach 11,042 excess deaths.
“By the end of July 2022, there were 18,973 excess deaths in Australia, representing a 1,356% increase from 2020,” The Exposé explains. “This is more excess deaths in 7 months than in the previous two years combined.”
All in all, there have been more than 1.8 million excess deaths since the rollout of covid injections that are linked either to the injections themselves or to some other form of covid tyranny that the Ministry of Truth misled people into believing would “cure” the plandemic. That is a whole lot of blood on the hands of the censorship establishment.
At least ten rockets hit central areas of Donetsk on Saturday morning, damaging three residential buildings, a local Russian official has reported on his Telegram channel.
One of the projectiles fired by Ukrainian forces hit an apartment building in the Kievsky district. While rescuers continue to search for survivors under the rubble, preliminary information suggests that there were three people in one of the apartments.
There was no information on casualties at the time of writing, but the absence of victims would be unusual; indeed, the Ukrainian shelling of the capital of the Donetsk People’s Republic intensified weeks before the Russian attack in February 2022 and has taken a heavy toll ever since.
The suffering of Donbass residents
According to the human rights commissioner of the DPR, Daria Morozova, at least 1,091 civilians were killed and another 3,533 were recorded as injured last year as a result of combat operations. The figures do not include places such as Mariupol, where the full scale of the tragedy has yet to be assessed.
The 4,624 people mentioned above were victims of regular artillery strikes on urban areas of Donetsk and Gorlovka.
When Donetsk residents are asked why the Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to attack civilians, people usually have no explanation other than the desire of the Ukrainian government and military to destroy Donbass and its people. This is supported by a massive campaign to dehumanize local residents and a number of hateful statements by Ukrainian politicians. “We will kill them with nuclear weapons,” warned former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, while ex-president Pyotr Poroshenko has vowed: “Our children will go to school, while their children will go sit in basements. That’s how we will win this war.”
Ukrainian forces continue to bomb Donbass despite the shortage of shells experienced by both sides of the conflict. However, while Russia can solve this issue by activating its military-industrial complex, Ukraine is entirely dependent on foreign supplies.
It should make a lot more sense for Ukraine to use scarce ammunition on military targets rather than on peaceful residential areas. Even if a lot of the time, Kiev’s forces misfire. A typical example is a Ukrainian shell landing in the frozen Kalmius River that divides Donetsk.
How Ukraine explains the attacks
Whenever Ukrainian artillery hits a civilian object – for example, a flower market – or kills civilians, officials in Kiev deny it. Unofficial voices resort to false claims that no such thing ever happened. Over the past eight years, the latter have come up with several memes allegedly proving that the Ukrainian Army wasn’t involved – with explanations such as “the air conditioner exploded.” Even if Ukrainian forces manage to hit a military facility, such as a warehouse, they usually deny involvement, claiming that “someone smoked in the wrong place” and that the explosion wasn’t related to the conflict. Thus, an information environment is created that denies the fact that Kiev attacks cities.
The Ukrainian side claims the attacks on civilians are “self-inflicted” – implying that the Russian Army attacks cities under its control, supposedly to blame Ukrainian forces and demonize them in the eyes of the population, as well as for propaganda purposes. This kind of post-truth has given rise to a whole area of fact-checking, where journalists collaborate with open-source intelligence to calculate the trajectory of the strikes.
For Donbass residents, all this is extremely painful. Discussions of terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure often end in profanities. According to Donbass locals, Ukrainians keep on attacking Donetsk simply because they can. Meanwhile, people are just trying to survive and are waiting for the front to move away from the area. Other details don’t concern them.
However, this is a distorted view of the situation; there is every reason to believe that the regular shelling of cities in Donbass is part of Ukrainian strategy and follows military logic. Perhaps Kiev’s “hybrid war” era military doctrine has adopted terrorist methods. So, how do these attacks on the civilian population help Ukraine?
Psychological pressure
Let’s take a clear example. In June 2022, the units of the first corps of the People’s Militia of the DPR were dislodged from their permanent locations because of the battle for Lisichansk – they had to storm a huge section of the front from Popasnaya to Verkhnekamenka, moving from south to north. The Russian Armed Forces then lacked personnel and had to use troops from Donetsk. Ukraine intensified strikes on the city to force the leadership to return the units back to their locations.
A similar thing is happening now. Some areas are under pressure – in particular, the fighters of the Wagner Group are pressing in Soledar and Artyomovsk (known in Ukraine as Bakhmut). They are advancing backed by the artillery of the Russian Armed Forces. Ukrainians use civilian strikes to provoke politicians, hoping that they will influence the military and interfere with the army’s plans. In June, this plan failed and the Ukrainians, taking advantage of the lack of counter-battery fire in the Donetsk region, committed a number of atrocities.
Commenting on the situation in a private conversation, one fighter explained why the army didn’t take the bait: “Normally, no military man – from simple soldier to general – suffers if the enemy attacks the city. This sounds harsh, but it’s better for the enemy to attack the city than the army’s manpower. This would be the usual military logic, but there is one key detail: 95% of our corps are made up of local residents who are worried about their cities. So, after completing the mission in Lisichansk, our soldiers were very angry when they got back to Donetsk.”
This is all very close to home for fighters from Donbass. In the case of a fast-paced conflict without a stable front line, such attacks would have motivated the soldiers, by enraging them. Perhaps this explains the near-complete silence of the Ukrainian artillery in the first month of the Russian military campaign. In those days, when the front line was mobile, it was better not to further motivate the enemy.
However, in positional warfare, fighters are conscious of a permanent threat to their relatives and other civilians in their hometowns. Motivated warriors who identify themselves as “defenders” feel as if they don’t have enough strength to break through. This acts to discourage. Concern for those who are not on the front line returns the soldier to his other life, behind the front lines, and distracts him from battle. By itself, this does not break morale, but soldiers are also affected by constant adrenaline swings, a risk of death or injury to themselves or their brothers in arms, the cold and damp conditions, the monotony of their work (for example, a good soldier digs more often than shoots), and numerous other factors.
Russia doesn’t have a strong memory of World War I – it has been replaced by that of World War II. However, the current fighting resembles the trench warfare of the early 20th century. With the possibility to adjust and fine-tune firing using Chinese drones and the chance to search the internet for how to repair military equipment. The rest of it – mud, trenches, the frozen front line – is like World War I, including politicians demanding a large-scale and ambitious offensive.
Why can’t the strikes be stopped?
At the end of July 2022, such an event began in the Donetsk region. Its main goal was to free the city from artillery strikes. The Donetsk corps were successful for several days, but then became stuck in positional battles. By the end of January, six months into the operation, the army had barely advanced 10km (6 miles).
The fighters were unable to break through the pre-established line of defense, and the forces only managed to wedge and slowly push through the three lines of fortifications near the villages of Vodianoye and Opitnoe, north of Donetsk airport. However, the fighters cannot give up on storming these fortifications – the strikes on Donetsk and Makeyevka must end for good.
As a result, there have been signs of an emerging contradiction. On the one hand, military leaders who are interested in achieving military goals and saving manpower, and on the other, politicians who express the interests of the civilian population and want to put a swift end to the artillery terror. Politicians want the public to like them. They don’t want to deal with the consequences of hostilities, hoping for things to return to normal so they can receive funding to restore the affected regions. As a result, they view the situation quite differently from the military.
Through manipulation, propaganda and informational and psychological influence, Ukrainians have made cunning use of the differences between civilian and military interests. This comes down to a grotesque choice between “killing the army in Avdeevka” and “allowing the Ukrainian Armed Forces to wipe Donetsk off the face of the Earth.” If politicians push the army to force the assault, the latter will make more mistakes, which will reduce their power. This, in turn, favors Kiev.
Perhaps seeking rational reasons behind the artillery strikes in Donbass is pointless – maybe it’s just the manifestation of rage on behalf of Ukrainian nationalists. However, if we ask ourselves “who benefits from this,” there is a creeping suspicion that terrorizing the population with NATO ammunition is a strategy initiated by Ukraine’s top military leadership. Firstly, these attacks tie up the forces of the Russian Army and distract it from concentrating on other areas. Secondly, they negatively affect the combat spirit of the fighters from Donbass. And finally, they allow political factors to intervene in military strategy, dealing a serious blow to its quality.
Americans demand to be entertained, thus inserting war propaganda in the stream of Hollywood pablum is a logical step.
“The propagandists are selling suspicion, hatred, murder, torture, rape, and ethnic cleansing. How better to sell it than on the bodies of semi-clad young women?”
“Saint Michael the Archangel? Now the propagandists are deep diving the Book of Enoch. This mystical character was invented by ancient Jews to act as a Torah referee and protector of Israel. He features prominently in Revelation 12:7-12, doing battle with Satan, and also in the Epistle of Jude, where heretics are denounced. Saint Michael is an archangel for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and followers of the Baha’i faith.”
In the West, all the stops are pulled out in the effort to keep the destruction of Russia, and the assassination of its elected leader, front and center.
For instance, consider the militarization of the Miss Universe spectacle, an annual gala self-described as the “Greatest Celebration of Women,” or rather some women—not those defending Donetsk and Luhansk, those are Putin’s terrorists.
Saint Michael the Archangel? Now the propagandists are deep diving the Book of Enoch. This mystical character was invented by ancient Jews to act as a Torah referee and protector of Israel. He features prominently in Revelation 12:7-12, doing battle with Satan, and also in the Epistle of Jude, where heretics are denounced. Saint Michael is an archangel for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and followers of the Baha’i faith.
On the stage in New Orleans, a blonde model, a slender female remake of Saint Michael the Avenger, spreads gold-tipped wings, and we are told she is a “warrior or light” on a mission to save Ukraine, presumably from the New Satan, Putin.
Next up, a half-naked woman prances across the stage, her cape emblazoned with “Be Brave Like Ukraine.”
It rhymes! There is no way you can forget this catchy one-liner!
The propagandists are selling suspicion, hatred, murder, torture, rape, and ethnic cleansing. How better to sell it than on the bodies of semi-clad young women?
For some reason unexplained, this grotesque promotion of Russian corpses rotting in the field is not denounced as shameless exploitation and war propaganda. It is simply more entertainment—and if anything, Americans demand to be entertained. Inserting war propaganda in the stream of Hollywood pablum is a logical step.
It’s simply another day in America, where the inequities and crimes of the state and the ruling elite are sold to the people in a form they understand, not much different than Pavlov’s dogs understanding the dinner bell.
Forget archangels. It might be time to dig deep into Slavic tradition and find a more suitable myth to recast as war propaganda.
For instance, Zorya, the Red Maiden, doubles as a warrior goddess protecting men in battle. She might be conscripted as an attractive propaganda tool in the war to defeat Russia. A neon pink Agua de Coco bikini might be appropriate. Maybe they can convince the model Olga Kurilenko to wear a skimpy bikini and a war propaganda cape?
What hegemon USA created, Russia is systematically annihilating.
And there’s nothing that the empire of lies and its Western vassals can do to change the course of history.
In challenging Russia militarily, they bit off more than they can chew and swallow.
Russia is a preeminent military power, China heading in the same direction — while the US-dominated West is in decline.
The battle to demilitarize and NeNazify Ukraine is proceeding as planned.
Russia’s liberation of Soledar assures deNazification of Artyomovsk to follow.
These triumphs hasten the end of Nazi occupation throughout Donbass, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Kharkov and demise of the US-created Ukraine monster overall.
Yet the collective West and its MSM co-conspirators can’t bear to admit what’s indisputable.
According to NYT fake news, “Ukraine denied the claim that Soledar” was liberated from Nazified occupation.
And this from the UK’s owned and controlled disseminator of state-approved propaganda, the BBC.
Defying reality on the ground, its so-called “reality check team (sic)” falsely claimed the following, saying:
“Russia has not taken a key town or city in Ukraine for months (sic), despite intense efforts to achieve military gains (sic).”
“Ukraine’s (US-installed puppet) is adamant (in falsely claiming that Russia is) not succeeding in (its) push to capture” Soledar.
Like other Western instruments of state-approved propaganda, the beeb can’t bring itself to admit that Russia liberated Soledar from the scourge of Nazified occupation.
Nor can US-installed puppet Zelensky, falsely pretending that the battle for Soledar continues despite its liberation by Russia.
Commander of Russia’s Troy volunteer special forces unit, Vladimir Novikov, explained the following:
Zaporozhye and Dnepropetrovsk hospitals are overflowing with wounded regime troops from the battle for Soledar alone.
The regime suffered huge losses of its “most capable forces,” including its elite 46th airmobile brigade — wiped out by superior Russian firepower.
By its own admission, Ukraine lost 14 battalions of troops in its futile defense of Soledar.
How many more cannon fodder troops will be lost in the futile attempt to prevent Russian liberation of Artyomovsk and other Nazi-occupied parts of Donbass?
According to analyst Larry Johnson:
Soledar’s liberation “means that (Artyomovsk) is expected to fall under Russian control in the next few days.”
“Russian forces are moving from the South, the North and the East and are creating a potential cauldron that will leave Ukrainian soldiers in (the city) surrounded.”
Separately in its latest fake news edition, the Times, like other MSM, reported the following perversion of reality, falsely claiming:
“Russia replaced the general in charge of its trouble-plagued war against Ukraine (sic), amid signs of dissension among President Putin’s top allies (sic) — a shake-up that critics (sic) said would not address what ails the Russian military (sic).”
Reality check:
On Wednesday, Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, announced the following:
“Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov has been appointed as commander of the integrated group of troops (forces).”
“His deputies are: Commander-in-Chief of the Aerospace Forces Army General Sergey Surovikin, Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces Army General Oleg Salyukov, and Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Colonel-General Alexey Kim.”
“The higher level of military command in the special military operation is related to the broader scope of missions tackled in its course and need to organize closer coordination between military branches and services of the armed forces and also the increased quality of all types of logistics support and efficiency in command and control of the groups of troops.”
No change of command occurred because of Surovikin’s performance as commander of Russia’s integrated SMO forces.
It’s been exemplary.
The above-explained command restructuring likely signals a major Russian escalation ahead as part of an overarching aim to slay the made-in-the-USA Ukraine monster.
With Surovikin in charge of Russia’s Aerospace Forces, Russian airpower will likely play a greater role ahead.
Gerasimov is a brilliant strategist and tactician.
Ukraine’s military commander, Valery Zaluzhny, praised his expertise, saying:
“I read everything he wrote.”
“He is the most intelligent of men, and my expectations of him were enormous.”
He “learned from Gerasimov.”
Increased Russian naval operations may be coming.
On Wednesday, Russian warships, including submarines, left their Black Sea base — most likely toward positions to strike Ukrainian targets.
At the same time, Russia increased its military presence in Belarus.
Because of what’s going on, Gerasimov was put in charge of coordinating Russian forces ahead of a likely major escalation of war on Ukraine to follow.
Whether it’s to slay the US-created Ukraine monster more quickly or methodically continue to grind it down daily remains to be seen.
Either way, there’s no ambiguity about how things will turn out.
Russia’s triumph over the scourge of Nazi-infested Ukraine was certain from day one of its liberating SMO.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
