David Corn: "It’s madness. Where is the stream of front page stories on Trump calling for military tribunals and prison time for his political rivals and critics?" #media

David Rothkopf: "Journalism is broken. The fact that the two top US newspapers are leading with a non-story about a misinterpreted statement by a non-candidate when Trump is the hellgate through which hate flows into American politics is insane and grossly irresponsible." #media

»How to Sell on Facebook Marketplace: A Guide for Businesses« https://smallbiztrends.com/how-to-sell-on-facebook-marketplace/?eicker.media #media #socialmedia

"The Washington Post is probably not going anywhere and on some level we need large journalistic institutions to continue to exist. But even well-run large outlets are surely full of waste and bloat that are funded on the backs of and at the expense of the actual journalism. The “wealth and business interests” of billionaire owners, as Bezos writes, are not a “bulwark against intimidation” for journalism. They are, themselves, the biggest threat.

404 Media is barely a year old and we employ four people. You cannot compare our business or what we have done to the Washington Post. As our friend Molly White explained last week, “Just Go Independent” sounds good in theory, but it is not necessarily easy. Doing high quality, investigative journalism is hard, and it is expensive. But it’s not that expensive, and the infrastructure to do it on the internet is getting cheaper and easier to pull off. Printing presses, middle managers, fancy offices, and executive salaries are the expensive things, and they are unnecessary.

Still, it’s unclear whether “Just Go Independent” is a sustainable career path for the number of journalists who we need to have a functioning society. But I do know that relying on the passing interest of billionaires to keep journalism alive is not sustainable. And I know that 250,000 subscribers could fund a lot of independent journalists."

https://www.404media.co/the-billionaire-is-the-threat-not-the-solution/

#WashingtonPost #Bezos #Journalism #Media #News #Billionaires

Big test for #Iowa #media today as state AG Brenna Bird releases a false statement about a voting rights lawsuit.

LULAC & other plaintiffs are challenging new last-minute barriers for some US citizens.

Bird falsely claims plaintiffs are trying "to let noncitizens illegally vote."

Telegram si rinnova: video migliorati, nuovi strumenti per tutti
#Aggiornamento #Android #App #Bot #Chat #Comunicazione #Hashtag #iOS #Media #Messaggistica #Notizie #Novità #NuoveFunzioni #Personalizzazione #Qualità #Tecnologia #Telegram #Video

https://www.ceotech.it/telegram-si-rinnova-video-migliorati-nuovi-strumenti-per-tutti/

Willi Zwingmann verlässt Radio C: statt in Rente zu gehen, stürzt er sich nochmal in ein großes Projekt ...

#media #radio #radioc #vintageradio #80s #fmukwOdvFnw

https://www.radioszene.de/192344/willi-zwingmann-radioc-luxembourg.html

#KAOS is cancelled by Netflix after one season.

Honestly, I didn't like it, although it had some good storylines. But also, I know it was popular, so it's once again a promising show being cut for... whatever reason.

I am sick and tired of streaming sites being full of unfinished stories.

As a storyteller, I don't think this trend is good for our collective mental health.

#Netflix #streaming #TV #PopCulture #storytelling #media #mythology

#Guardian parent company in talks over potential sale of Observer - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/sep/17/guardian-parent-company-in-talks-over-potential-sale-of-observer "Guardian... will remain a seven-day-a-week digital operation regardless of the outcome of the negotiations." #media

ICYMI: Australia's award-winning science magazine Cosmos has recently published AI-generated science 'explainers' that make use of freelance contributors' content without their consent, AND did so with funding from the Walkley Foundation-administered Meta Australian News Fund (which was supposed to support and encourage journalism, not kill it).
This comes after half their staff were laid off – including national and international journalism award-winners – when the magazine was sold to CSIRO.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-08-08/csiro-cosmos-magazine-generating-articles-using-ai/104186330
#journalism #AI #ChatGPT #media

"Rupert #Murdoch is locked in a secret legal battle against 3 of his children over the future of the family’s #media empire, as he moves to preserve it as a conservative #political force after his death...

Those 3 siblings... were caught completely off-guard by their father’s effort to rewrite what was supposed to be an inviolable trust & have united to stop him"
#GiftArticle #GiftLink
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/business/media/rupert-murdoch-succession-fox.html?unlocked_article_code=1.900.BKTm.Phy6Zss2sBv1&smid=em-share

#Press #News #Politics #GOP #Conservatives #USA #USPol

#Assange #PressFreedom #Wikileaks #Journalism #Media #News: "After weeks of negotiations, Mr. Assange is pleading guilty to one of the charges in the indictment — conspiracy to disseminate national defense information — which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

Mr. Assange and his supporters have long argued that his efforts to obtain and publicly release sensitive national security information was in the public interest, and deserved the same First Amendment protections afforded to investigative journalists."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/us/politics/assange-plea.html

Project Maven was meant to revolutionize modern warfare. But the conflict in Ukraine has underscored how difficult it is to get 21st-century data into 19th-century trenches.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-american-technology.html

Russia’s Electronic-Warfare Troops Knocked Out 90 Percent Of Ukraine’s Drones


#Western #media #lie about #Russia #russian #war #ukraine #NATO #Pentagon #fail in #failstate

Jonathan Cook on the moral collapse of Western #media as it actively avoids portraying the reality of #genocide “.. even the liberal elements … have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold”. #gaza #propaganda #israel https://open.substack.com/pub/jonathancook/p/how-the-western-media-helped-build?r=2s2cq2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.

#Rant

I am so, so done with streaming and the whole TV show business lately. They cancel things left and right with no rhyme, reason, or closure. You get into a story and a set of characters, and then nope, sorry, no more of this. No one gets to give us a whole complete story, or even a longer arc.

As a storyteller, I am WILDLY annoyed by this.

#TV #Media #TVShows #Streaming

#ukraine #vassalage #ukrainian #terrorism

#western #media serve #narrative #capitalism #mindmanipulation #deepstate

@pluralistic brilliantly clarifying our modern world for us, as usual:

*We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.*

https://doctorow.medium.com/i-assure-you-an-ai-didnt-write-a-terrible-george-carlin-routine-83d447bfbd72

#ux #design #media #uxdesign #hcd #HumanCenteredDesign #tech #technology #ai #aihype

Michael Huckleberry Hudson:
And you can look at Ukraine as an example of how the United States would like Russia, China, and the Arab countries to exist. You would suspend elections once you have your guys, your president in there. You would become the most corrupt country in your region, as Ukraine has been. You will ban local languages and religions that are not Judeo-Christian.

You will essentially prevent strikes.

And you know the joke, the aristocrats. A stage group of actors talks about a family coming on and doing all sorts of horrendously devious sexual acts and incest, and it goes on and on. The producer who’s being offered this act and said, what do you call this act? And the answer is, the aristocrats.

Well, what do you call the Ukrainian act of suspending elections, banning foreign languages, assassinating critics? We call it democracy. Well, that’s hilarious. That’s indeed what #America calls it. America has two models of #democracy, #Ukraine and #Israel. Again and again in the press, it says Ukraine is the model of democracy that we want for what used to be the whole Soviet Union. And you have Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania clapping, and we want the democracy in Israel. Israel is the only democratic country in the Near East.

We want Israel to be the model for the Near East.

Well, what are they saying? That there won’t be any more Arabs in the Near East? That they’ll all be Americans with dual citizenship? This is what it’s all come to. We’re living in an Orwellian world is trying to deter people’s consciousness from realizing the reality of work and the dynamics that are at work.

#USA #us #orwell #1984 #american #mindmanipulation #lie in #media

Michael Huckleberry Hudson:
I think you should say October 2nd. That was the destruction of the attempt to destroy the mosque. It’s October 2nd that triggered all of this. It was the Israeli attack on the mosque that was intended to say, We are going to destroy the Islamic presence in #Palestine so that it can be entirely non-Islamic. That was the declaration of war. So don’t be suckered into the New York Times saying it’s all October 7th.

It began the week earlier, just as in #Ukraine. The Ukraine war did not begin with #Russia moving to protect its population, its Russian speaking population in Donetsk and Luhansk.

It began not only with #Maidan, but with the Ukrainian army shelling, bombing civilian apartment buildings and civilians in the Russian speaking territories and refusing to pay any social security or healthcare to the Russian speaking territories and banning the Russian language. Russia was the country under attack, not the attacker.

So again, you have to be very careful as when you date the beginning of this. And the Americans want to date all wars as when after it attacks and when other countries are protecting themselves. They call other countries protecting themselves an attack on the United States. Yeah.


#USA #us #Israel #fakemedia #western #media #mindmanipulation #american #lie of #deepstate #history

#fakemedia #western #media #fail #infowar #mindmanipulation

#ukraine #western #nato #ukrainian #terrorism against #media

#CIA #mindmanipulation #western #media #lie #history #Africa

After 9 years of #ukrainian #war in #Donbass, the #western #media finally got to see this war.

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.

She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch and better connected.

Are we? Or do we live in a media society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies is based in North America. The internet and social media — Google, Twitter, Facebook — are mostly American-owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The extent and scale of this carnage are largely unreported, and unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“US foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”

In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said this: “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.”

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage — that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.“

It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars”: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that President Joe Biden’s theft of $7-billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors’. In other words, nuclear war.

It says: “Nato’s enlargement has been a historic success.”

I read that in disbelief.

A measure of this “historic success” is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, and omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

In 2014, the United States sponsored a government coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor who the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.

Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23-million people dead in the Soviet Union.

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.

On the same day, Russia invaded — according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.

On 25 April, the US defence secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken”.

America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it?

According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14 000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”

“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.

Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and “think tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labelled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and called for these “pests” to be “eradicated.”

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point-blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of World War I was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory-style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Assange’s character, he was made a public enemy. Then vice-president Biden called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange — the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Original: https://www.eurasiareview.com/22082023-john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works-oped/
From google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AmuRBvCCjQIoJ%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.eurasiareview.com%2F22082023-john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works-oped%2F
#western #media #lie #propaganda #USA #warmongers #ukraine

"Our soldiers had years to work it out, while the Ukrainians only had a few weeks," she said.

This is a direct lie, or rather a #hutzpah. With the help of NATO countries and the US in particular, the ukrainian army has been preparing for this war at least for 9 years, starting in 2014 #Maidan.


https://aftershock.news/?q=node%2F1281750
#nato #USA #us #weapon for #ukraine #failstate #ukrainian #army #western #media #lie #wsj

This photo is often seen with the caption "A Soviet soldier takes away a bicycle from a German woman in 1945". In the original publication of LIFE magazine, the caption under the photo reads: "There was a misunderstanding between a Russian soldier and a German woman in Berlin over a bicycle he wanted to buy from her". But a careful parsing leads to the conclusion that this photo is a staged fake. The location of the photo is on the border of the Soviet and British zones of occupation, near Tiergarten Park, right by the Brandenburg Gate, where at that time there was a Red Army regulation post.
When examining the photo, virtually everyone standing nearby shows complete indifference to the situation. In addition, there is a US Army soldier in the background, also acting indifferently. The photo itself raises a lot of questions.

The soldier is alone and unarmed (he is a "looter" in an occupied city!), his uniform is not up to his size, with a clear violation of the uniform and the use of elements of someone else's uniform. He is wearing a Yugoslavian cap, his trench coat is worn in a different way than was customary in the Red Army, and the material of the trench coat is also not Soviet. Soviet turtlenecks were made of first-class felt and did not wrinkle as it can be seen in the photo. He looted openly, in the center of the city, near the post, and even on the border with the foreign occupation sector, that is, in a place that initially enjoys increased attention.

He does not react at all to the people around him (the American, the photographer), although by all the rules of the genre he should have given up by now. Instead, he continues to pull the wheel, and does it for so long that he has time to be photographed, the quality of the photo is almost studio quality.
The conclusion is simple: to discredit the former allies it was decided to produce a "photo-fact" confirming the "crimes of the Red Army" in the occupied territory. The actor portraying a Russian soldier was dressed in elements of various military uniforms, trying to get as close as possible to the image of a "Soviet soldier".

To avoid conflict with Soviet soldiers, the authentic elements of uniforms, such as epaulettes, emblems and insignia, are not used. For the same purpose, they refused to use weapons. It turned out unarmed "soldier" in the cap of the "Balkan" army, with an incomprehensible cloak or a piece of tarpaulin instead of rolling pin and in German boots. When creating the composition, the actor was deployed in such a way as to hide from the camera the absence of cockades, awards, badges and patches; the absence of epaulettes was concealed by an imitation of a cape, which had to be worn in violation of the statute, which they, quite possibly, did not even suspect.

source: https://aftershock.news/?q=node%2F1265949
#photo #history #fake #western #myth #media #lie about #WWII #WW2 #Berlin #germany #blameRussia

Last month (october 2019), on the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the European Parliament voted on a resolution entitled “On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” The adopted document:

“…Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of influence; Recalls that the Nazi and communist regimes carried out mass murders, genocide and deportations and caused a loss of life and freedom in the 20th century on a scale unseen in human history, and recalls the horrific crime of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime; condemns in the strongest terms the acts of aggression, crimes against humanity and mass human rights violations perpetrated by the Nazi, communist and other totalitarian regimes.”

For 75 years, we have been told that the war started on September 1st, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, even though the Pacific Theater between Japan and China began two years earlier. Now we are to understand that it actually began eight days prior when the German foreign minister visited Moscow. Take no notice of the inherent doublespeak in the premise that a war could be the consequence of a peace agreement, which without any evidence provided is said to have contained “secret protocols”, not provisions. You see, unlike the other pacts signed between European countries and Nazi Germany — such as the Munich Betrayal of 1938 with France and Great Britain to which the Soviets were uninvited while Austria and Czechoslovakia were gifted to Hitler for the courtesy of attacking Moscow — Molotov-Ribbentrop was really a confidential agreement between Hitler and Stalin to conquer Europe and divide it between them.

This is pure mythology. The fact of the matter is that neither the Soviets or even Germany drew the dividing line in Poland in 1939, because it was a reinstatement of the border acknowledged by the League of Nations and Poland itself as put forward by the British following WWI. Even Winston Churchill during his first wartime radio broadcast http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1939/1939-10-01a.html later that year admitted:

“Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland, instead of as invaders. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.”

Yet according to the EU, even though Moscow was the last country to agree to a peace deal with Hitler, it was all part of a hidden plot between them. In that case, why then did Germany choose to invade the USSR in 1941? The EU leaves this question unanswered. Forget about its racial policies of enslaving slavs or that Hitler openly declared in Mein Kampf that Germany needed to conquer the East to secure the Lebensraum . Nevermind that in the Spring of 1941, less than two months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin gave a speech to the Kremlin at a state banquet for recent graduates of the Frunze Military Academy to give warning of an imminent attack:

“War with Germany is inevitable. If comrade Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two or three months through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that will be our good fortune, but you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our forces.”

The EU has redacted that the entire reason for the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 had been to buy time for the Red Army’s attrition warfare strategy to adequately prepare its armaments against a future invasion by the Wehrmacht. The Soviet leadership well understood that Germany would eventually renege on the agreement, considering that in 1936 it had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy directed at the Communist International. For six years, the USSR was thwarted in its attempts to forge an equivalent anti-fascist coalition and to collectively defend Czechoslovakia by the British and the French, whose ruling classes were too busy courting and doing business with Germany. It had been the Soviets alone who defended the Spanish Republic from Franco in the final rehearsal before the worldwide conflict and only when all other recourses had run out did they finally agree to a deal with the Hitlerites.

Just a week prior to the signing of the neutrality treaty, Stalin gave a secret speech to the Politburo where he explained:

“The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual assistance treaty with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off of Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western Powers. War would thus be prevented but future events could take a serious turn for the USSR. If we accept Germany’s proposal to conclude with it a non-aggression pact, Germany will then attack Poland and Europe will be thrown into serious acts of unrest and disorder. Under these circumstances we will have many chances of remaining out of the conflict while being able to hope for our own timely entrance into war.”

This latest resolution is part of a long pattern of misrepresentation of WWII by the Anglo-Saxon empire, but is perhaps its most egregious falsification that truly desecrates the graves of the 27 million Soviet citizens who were 80% of the total Allied death toll. Earlier this year, for the commemoration on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Russia and its head of state were excluded from the events in Portsmouth, England. As if the ongoing absence of Western European leaders from the May 9th Victory Day ceremonies held annually in Russia weren’t insulting enough, while it’s true that the Eastern Front was not involved in Operation Overlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously been in attendance at the 70th anniversary D-Day events in 2014. No doubt the increase in geopolitical tensions between the West and Moscow in the years since has given the EU license to write out Russia’s role in the Allied victory entirely with little public disapproval, though many of the families of those who volunteered in the International Brigades were rightly insulted by this tampering of history and voiced their objection.

The EU motion‘s real purpose is to fabricate the war’s history by giving credit to the United States for the liberation of Europe while absolving the Western democracies that opened the door for the rise of fascism and tried to use Germany to annihilate the USSR. History itself should always be open to debate and subject to study and revision, but the Atlanticists have made this formal change without any evidence to support it and entirely for political purposes. Like the founding of the EU project itself, the declared aim of the proposal is supposedly to prevent future atrocities from taking place, even though the superstate was designed by former Nazis like Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission, who was a German lawyer in several Nazi Party law organizations and fought for the Wehrmacht in France until his capture as a POW after the invasion of Normandy.

Rather than preventing future crimes, the EU has committed one itself by deceptively modifying the historical record of communism to be parallel with that of the Third Reich. Even further, that they were two sides of the same coin of ‘totalitarianism’ and that for all the barbarity committed during the war, the Soviets were equally culpable — or judging by the amount of times the text cites the USSR versus Germany, even more so. It remains unclear whether we are now to completely disregard the previous conclusions reached by the military tribunals held by the Allies under international law at Nuremberg of which all 12 war criminals sentenced to death in 1946 were German, not Soviet. The document doesn’t even attempt to hide its politicized direction at the current government in Moscow, stating that:

“Russia remains the greatest victim of communist totalitarianism and that its development into a democratic state will be impeded as long as the government, the political elite and political propaganda continue to whitewash communist crimes and glorify the Soviet totalitarian regime.”

This accusation does not stand up to critical observation, as Russia has since erected official memorials to those executed and politically persecuted during the so-called ‘Great Terror.’ However, the stark difference between the EU resolution and the Wall of Grief in Moscow is that the latter is based on evidence from the Soviet archives. It has become a widespread and ridiculous belief in the West that Stalin somehow killed as much as five times as many people as Hitler, an absurdity not reflected in the now disclosed and once highly secretive Soviet archives, which after two decades of examination show that over a period of three decades from the early 1920s to his death in 1953, the total recorded number of Soviet citizens executed by the state was slightly less than 800,000. While that is certainly a horrid number, how does it even begin to compare to an industrial scale extermination based on the race theory?

How can anyone believe Stalin killed tens of millions of people when even the most simple analysis of a population demographics chart shows that the Soviet population rate consistently increased each decade with the only reduction taking place during WWII as a result of their casualties? Socialists, who perhaps more than any other political tendency seem to suffer from autophobia, should defend their own history from such falsification. It is only when flaws occur under communist states that the entire political and economic system is to be denounced outright, but never capitalism which for five centuries has colonized half the world while enslaving and killing entire nations.

Most of the wildly exaggerated death figures stem from falsities written in The Black Book of Communism by a group of right-wing French academics in 1997 ,who did not conceal their apologism hfor the Nazi collaborationist self-proclaimed Russian Liberation Army (ROA) commanded by Gen. Andrey Vlasov who defected to Germany during the war:

“A singular fate was reserved for the Vlasovtsy, the Soviet soldiers who had fought under the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov. Vlasov was the commander of the Second Army who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942. On the basis of his anti-Stalinist convictions, General Vlasov agreed to collaborate with the Nazis to free his country from the tyranny of the Bolsheviks.”

The other highly cited work by the West for its overestimated portrayal of Soviet repression is the equally unreliable The Gulag Archipelago volumes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who as historian Ludo Martens noted also attempted to provide justification for Vlasov’s treason in his best-selling 1973 work:

“And so it was that Vlasov’s Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitulating the fate of Samsonov’s Russian Second Army in World War I, having been just as insanely thrown into encirclement. Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin’s. Treason does not necessarily involve selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one’s own marshal’s uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?”

The truth is located in the Soviet archives which indicate that Stalin’s successor, the Ukrainian-born Nikita Khrushchev, was as intent on absolving the entirety of the Soviet leadership as himself from any culpability in the purges of the 1930s so that blame for its excesses were placed squarely on his predecessor. In succession, Western historians like the British Foreign Office propagandist Robert Conquest followed his example and this account quickly became official doctrine. In hindsight, Khrushchev’s infamous 1956 secret speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, was what planted the seeds of self-doubt in the Soviet system that would eventually lead to its undoing decades later. To the contrary, what the historical records show is most of those who were purged in that period were not necessarily perceived as political threats to Stalin himself, but were targeted because of an overall systemic paranoia held by the entire Soviet government regarding internal sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity by a real fifth column getting inspiration from a certain traitorous former Bolshevik in exile and a potential invasion originating from outside the country.

Many forget that during the Russian Civil War, exactly such a scenario had occurred when the Allies of World War I, including the United States, collectively intervened on the side of the Whites only to be driven out by the Red Army, making such fearful instincts not entirely unreasonable. Not to mention, the rapid industrialization of the entire nation in a single decade while in preparation for the growing threat of war with Germany. When Hitler began his Masterplan for the East, their worst fears came to fruition when tens of thousands of Banderite turncoats enlisted in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) in Ukraine to collaborate with the German occupiers in the slaughter of their fellow countrymen and after the war ended, continued their treasonous struggle during the 1950s with assistance from the CIA. So the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…

As for the accusation of “whitewashing”, it is true that recent polls indicate that 70% of Russians today hold a favorable view of Stalin — but just as many are nostalgic for communism itself and regret the breakup of the USSR on the basis that the socialist system ‘took care of ordinary people.’ Putin did once remark that despite Stalin’s legacy of repression, he doubted that the native Georgian statesman would have been willing to drop two atomic bombs on Japan like the United States, an atrocity that killed 225,000 innocent civilians (most of them instantly) which is more than a quarter of those capitally punished during the entire Stalin era. Was he wrong to say so? A significant amount of deaths also occurred in the Soviet-wide famines of the 1930s, but there is significantly more evidence to suggest that the British deliberately starved 3 million Bengalis to death then there is to support the Holodomor fraud concocted by the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora. If the West wants to talk about deliberate starvation, it should take a look at what the U.S. did with its economic sanctions in the 1990s killing half a million Iraqi children which former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously described as “worth it.”

This isn’t the first time the Anglosphere has historically omitted the Soviet role in the Allied victory or conflated the USSR with the Third Reich. On previous occasions the European Parliament has issued resolutions declaring August 23rd “a European day of remembrance of the victims of the Nazi-Soviet alliance.” This is all an attempt by the Atlanticists to depict communism as somehow worse than fascism while disconnecting the Nazis from the lineage of European settler colonialism whose racism was its source of inspiration. Why is that which befell the Jews not considered an extension of what was already done to the Herero-Nama tribes for which Namibia is now suing Germany a century later?

The neoliberal political establishment in Europe and its anti-EU populist opponents are fond of appearing dead-set against one another, but it seems they share the same fairytale beliefs about WWII that the Nazis and Soviets were equivalent evils as inscribed in this latest decree. It has always been ironic that the liberal billionaire “philanthropist” and currency manipulator George Soros is so derided by right-wing populists when it was his Open Society Institute NGOs which engineered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Soros may be averse to the anti-immigrant brand of right-wing nationalism currently on the rise in Western Europe, but as a fanatical Russophobe he is willing to make strange bedfellows with ultra-nationalists in Kiev to undermine Moscow’s sphere of influence and that includes revising WWII history to a version favored by the Banderites which took power during the pro-EU 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine.

The Nazi junta regime in Kiev has since instituted Russophobic ‘de-communization’ laws erasing the remaining traces of Ukraine’s Soviet past while replacing them with memorials to their wartime foes. A recent example was the city of Vinnitsa renaming a street that paid tribute to the Soviet spy and war hero Richard Sorge to that after Omelyan Hrabetsk, a commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which cooperated with Germany during the war and killed thousands of Poles and Jews. Sorge posed as a German journalist in Tokyo and famously provided timely intelligence to Moscow that Japan did not plan to attack the USSR, allowing Stalin to transfer essential reinforcements to the Battle of Moscow which proved to be a major turning point in the war. He was executed by the Japanese in 1944 and posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Now the EU is ‘decommunizing’ history in its own legislation. Meanwhile, Soros’s influence over the EU cannot be overstated as his lobbying power has enabled him to provide direct council to its executive branch more than any official head of state in the political and economic union. The hedge fund tycoon made a fortune as an investor during Russia’s mass privatization in the 1990s after enlisting Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF to apply ‘shock therapy’ to its economy as it did in Poland and his native Hungary. Under Putin, however, Soros’s NGOs have since been barred from Russia. Perhaps the reason he can so cynically provide support to fascist elements in Ukraine to undercut Moscow is that he did so personally in his upbringing in Hungary.

Born Gyorgy Schwartz, during WWII he was a teenager from an affluent Jewish family which survived the Axis occupation by using their wealth to bribe a government official from the collaborationist Arrow Cross government who provided the Soros’s forged documents identifying them as Christians, while the adolescent by his own admission delivered deportation notices to other Jews. A short time later, the young Soros impersonated the adopted gentile son of an official who inventoried the stolen valuables and property from Jewish estates and even accompanied him during his work. One would assume as a Jew he would have been haunted by these experiences, but Soros has repeatedly stated he has no regrets and even disturbingly compared it to his future work as an investor.


[video]SHOCKING: George Soros, a chief financial supporter of Antifa, was himself a Nazi collaborator and to this day has no regrets

Like Soros, the EU has no ideology except an unquenchable thirst for greed and is fond of Nazis when they are the kind that hate Russia. For its own political interests, it is willing to dangerously foster a version of history invented by a rebranded far right where the quislings who collaborated with the Axis powers elude guilt and the Soviets who courageously defeated them are maliciously slandered. Fascism was never fully eradicated only because the West continued to nurture it during the Cold War and even now that capitalism has been reinstated in Eurasia, it continues to do so to undermine a resurgent Moscow on the world stage.

As the world appears increasingly on the brink of WWIII, one is reminded of the expression by Karl Marx who famously stated that “history repeats itself…first as tragedy, then as farce” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, when comparing Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in the French Revolution with the coup by his nephew half a century later which brought an end to the French Revolution. Equally fitting is the humorous line by the legendary writer and noted anti-imperialist Mark Twain who reputedly said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Both are applicable to the unquestionable tragedy of WWII and the farcical mockery of its history by the EU whose policies continue to make another global conflict that much more likely.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in Counterpunch, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, American Herald Tribune and more. Max may be reached atmaxrparry@live.com


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