US Tax Dollars and Ukraine’s Finance Minister

Special Report: Though touted as the face of reform inside Ukraine’s post-coup regime, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko enriched herself at the expense of a U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund – and USAID now says it’s missing some of the audit records detailing Jaresko’s dealings, reports Robert Parry. By Robert Parry The U.S. government is missing – or…
from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/us-tax-dollars-and-ukraines-finance.html

Emancipate Yourself From Mental Slavery!

Dark Times

These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatized and illusion legitimized.

-John Pilger

The following reprinted article by John Richard Pilger an Australian journalist based in London is the text of a speech given for the launch of the book, The WikiLeaks Files.

Pilger chronicles the heart breaking reality of illusion triumphing over truth today. The launch of The WikiLeaks Files, herald’s the first attempt to pair expert commentary on cable content to historically relevant events. Pilger has  high praise for the modern day warriors of truth and his cautionary warnings about propaganda should be of interest to readers of this blog. Those wanting more of the Files can get the book on Amazon

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire

Pilger is a well known and honored journalist having twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries, screened internationally, have gained awards in Britain and worldwide. In addition, Pilger has received numerous honorary doctorates.

Originally printed September 30^th, 2015 on Information Clearing House

The Revolutionary Act Of Telling The Truth

By John Pilger

John Pilger, speaking at the launch in London of The WikiLeaks Files, with an introduction by Julian Assange.

George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatized and illusion legitimized. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.

Wondrous technology has become both our friend and our enemy. Every time we turn on a computer or pick up a digital device – our secular rosary beads — we are subjected to control: to surveillance of our habits and routines, and to lies and manipulation.

Edward Bernays, who invented the term, “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda”, predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, “the invisible government”.

He wrote, “Those who manipulate this unseen element of [modern democracy] constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country …we are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…”

The aim of this invisible government is the conquest of us: of our political consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think independently, to separate truth from lies.

This is a form of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to leave it in the flickering past.  But an insidious modern fascism is now an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. ISIS bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting bad. Bombing Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is good. War is normal.

Those who question these official truths, this extremism, are deemed in need of a lobotomy – until they are diagnosed on-message.  The BBC provides this service free of charge. Failure to submit is to be tagged a “radical” – whatever that means.

Real dissent has become exotic; yet those who dissent have never been more important. The book I am launching tonight, The WikiLeaks Files, is an antidote to a fascism that never speaks its name.

It’s a revolutionary book, just as WikiLeaks itself is revolutionary – exactly as Orwell meant in the quote I used at the beginning.  For it says that we need not accept these daily lies. We need not remain silent. Or as Bob Marley once sang: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

In the introduction, Julian Assange explains that it is never enough to publish the secret messages of great power: that making sense of them is crucial, as well as placing them in the context of today and historical memory.

That is the remarkable achievement of this anthology, which reclaims our memory. It connects the reasons and the crimes that have caused so much human turmoil, from Vietnam and Central America, to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with the matrix of rapacious power, the United States.

There is currently an American and European attempt to destroy the government of Syria. Prime Minister David Cameron is especially keen. This is the same David Cameron I remember as an unctuous PR man employed by an asset stripper of Britain’s independent commercial television.

Cameron, Obama and the ever-obsequious Francois Hollande want to destroy the last remaining multi-cultural authority in Syria, an action that will surely make way for the fanatics of ISIS.

This is insane, of course, and the big lie justifying this insanity is that it is in support of Syrians who rose against Bashar al-Assad in the Arab Spring. As The WikiLeaks Files reveals, the destruction of Syria has long been a cynical imperial project that pre-dates the Arab Spring uprising against Assad.

To the rulers of the world in Washington and Europe, Syria’s true crime is not the oppressive nature of its government but its independence from American and Israeli power – just as Iran’s true crime is its independence, and Russia’s true crime is its independence, and China’s true crime is its independence.  In an American-owned world, independence is intolerable.

This book reveals these truths, one after the other; the truth about a war on terror that was always a war of terror; the truth about Guantanamo, the truth about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Latin America.

Never has such truth telling been so urgently needed. With honorable exceptions, those in the media paid ostensibly to keep the record straight are now absorbed into a system of propaganda that is no longer journalism, but anti-journalism. This is true of the liberal and respectable as it is of Murdoch. Unless you are prepared to monitor and deconstruct every specious assertion, so-called news has become unwatchable and unreadable.

Reading The WikiLeaks Files, I remembered the words of the late Howard Zinn, who often referred to “a power that governments can’t suppress”.  That describes WikiLeaks, and it describes true whistleblowers that share their courage.

On a personal note, I have known the people of WikiLeaks for some time now. That they have achieved what they have in circumstances not of their choosing is a source of constant admiration. Their rescue of Edward Snowden comes to mind. Like him, they are heroic: nothing less.

Sarah Harrison’s chapter, ‘Indexing the Empire’, describes how she and her comrades set up an entire Public Library of US Diplomacy. There are more than two million documents, now available to all.  “Our work,” she writes, “is dedicated to making sure history belongs to everyone.”  How thrilling it is to read those words, which also stand as a tribute to her courage.

From the confinement of a room in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, the courage of Julian Assange is an eloquent response to the cowards who have smeared him and the rogue power seeking revenge on him and waging a war on democracy.

None of this has deterred Julian and his comrades at WikiLeaks: not one bit. Isn’t that something?

The post Emancipate Yourself From Mental Slavery! appeared first on PropagandaGuard.

from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/emancipate-yourself-from-mental-slavery.html

Obama Tolerates the Warmongers

Exclusive: President Obama is caught between the harsh realities of the Mideast and the fantasy world of Washington’s warmongers, but he prefers to risk a global catastrophe than to stand up to the neocons, the liberal hawks, the Israelis and the Saudis, a dilemma that Daniel Lazare explains. By Daniel Lazare “Only odd-numbered world wars…
from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/obama-tolerates-warmongers.html

Giving Saudis a Pass on Yemen War

By supporting Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, the U.S. is again finding itself on the same side with Al Qaeda in a Mideast conflict, a troubling pattern driven by a compulsion to excuse actions by U.S. “allies” no matter how outrageous, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains. By Paul R. Pillar The killing earlier…
from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/giving-saudis-pass-on-yemen-war.html

“Shaping The Narrative”- Propaganda in Disguise

Euphemistic Names For Propaganda

On June 30, 2015 Friends of the Earth released a report entitled “Spinning Food: How Food Industry Front Groups and Covert Communications Are Shaping The Story of Food. 

The organization, Friends of the earth, has done an incredible service identifying and highlighting front groups spreading propaganda in the food industry. Yes, this is propaganda and it can’t be covered over by sweet sounding modern euphemistic phrases like “shaping the story”, “defining the narrative”, “creative messaging”, “having a conversation” and “shaping public opinion”.

The use of front groups to spread these messages coincides with growing opposition on the net to decry food industry practices and standards. The food industry must find a way to counteract this competition before it has time to erode industry profits and reputation.

Just What Are Front Groups?

Front groups are simply organizations funded by industry giants set up to look like natural, organic organizations that are dispensing truth. They have deceptive sounding names that create an impression of neutrality and independence while hiding their ties to big industry. They can be used to target and attack the message of opposition groups allowing industry giants to stay above the fray and keep their hands clean.

Industry giants have been in the thrall of the propaganda spell ever since Big Tobacco’s smashing success misleading the public on the dangers of smoking.

100 Year Old Propaganda Trick

This hundred-year old tactic started by Edward Bernays, the father of modern day public relations (yet another euphemistic name for propaganda), is still little known and understood.

Around 1915, Bernays launched the Celiac Project, touting the benefits of bananas for celiac sufferers -without revealing that its sole funder was the United Fruit Company, the biggest banana producer and importer in the country.

The Celiac Project is the front group that is used to promote banana consumption in a way that seems neutral and very natural.

It takes a lot of money to erect what amounts to elaborate façades of support for industry sentiments.

As the report says, “A particular segment of the food industry-we refer to it here as the industrial food and agriculture sector, including biotech, agrochemical, pharmaceutical, and agribusiness companies, as well as industrial livestock producers- is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate the public conversation about our food. “

If you have a million dollar budget today in America, you can easily confuse, mislead and misdirect the public by creating multiple front groups.

Top Front Groups In The Food Industry

Here is a chart of top front groups in the food industry as identified by Friends of Earth

By the way, the food industry is just one of many big players doing the exact same thing, extinguishing truth wherever they find it and creating alternative realities instead. No wonder they prefer to call it “shaping the narrative”. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The post “Shaping The Narrative”- Propaganda in Disguise appeared first on PropagandaGuard.

from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/shaping-narrative-propaganda-in-disguise.html

Should US Ally with Al Qaeda in Syria?

Exclusive: The new U.S. “group think” is that Russian President Putin broke his promise to attack only the Islamic State when his warplanes hit other rebel targets in Syria. But Putin never limited which terrorists he’d hit and the targeted rebel coalition includes Al Qaeda’s affiliate, as Robert Parry reports. By Robert Parry The key sentence in…
from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/should-us-ally-with-al-qaeda-in-syria.html

Selling Access to Pope Francis

As much as Pope Francis criticized hyper-capitalism’s cruelty to the poor and the middle class, it was business as usual for the Catholic Church bureaucracy, selling access to the Pope’s events with front-row seats going to well-heeled benefactors, notes Michael Winship. By Michael Winship Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it…
from Propaganda Guard
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/10/selling-access-to-pope-francis.html