All posts tagged 'Russian propaganda'

EU's Infowar On Russia - Putting In Place A Totalitarian Media Regime And Speech Control

Author: Jon Hellevig December 16, 2016

Download this article as pdf

INTRODUCTION

After a decade and a half of intensive anti-Russian propaganda, the Western mainstream media and their masters are experiencing a virtual meltdown of their propaganda narrative. During the last half a year, they doubled down on their propaganda with a campaign of declaring all critical alternative media and dissidents as ‘fake news” sources. This campaign has now culminated with the first round of repressive media and speech control laws both in the European Union (EU Parliament, 14 October 2016, on EU strategic communication to counteract propaganda against it by third parties; referenced below) and in the United States (US House of Representatives bill of November 30 announcing a crackdown on media, blogs and individuals who are involved in “spreading Russian propaganda and misinformation”).

However, while Russia has been identified both in the EU and the US as the supposed adversary against whom these states are supposedly protecting, the real target of their crackdown is internal dissent. Their scandalous calls to an infowar against Russia is actually a red herring intended to conceal the much more sinister aim of establishing a totalitarian media regime and speech control with all-out propaganda and censorship internally in the EU states.

Obviously the EU and USA have very little to fear from Russia's quite limited media resources. Russia has no propaganda reach over the West and based on my observations has not even been engaged in any such attempts. Russia has, however, increased its legitimate reporting in English with an aim at Western and other global audiences. These are quite insignificant operations and reach only a very limited audience. Hereby, there is no need for Russia even to try to do anything called propaganda – in the sense of trying to push false narratives by subterfuge. The Western propaganda machine is the one that takes care of producing the propaganda content, and Russian and other alternative media sources need not do anything else than sit there and refute the Western propaganda narratives 24 hours a day, as well as report the real news.

For sure, this is annoying enough for the West, but their real concern is yet much more baleful. They have a need to enact a totalitarian media regime and speech control in order to continue unhindered in their geopolitical new world order machinations and in their endeavors to establish a World Government with its political and cultural agenda.  

The EU represents a proto-World Government and a testing ground for its intended policies. However, Project EU is now in serious trouble.  Presently the EU is a walking disaster and its masters find it harder and harder to keep the growing chorus of critics in check with its traditional media monopoly. The totalitarian powers are therefore needed to safeguard their political agenda and to prop up the European Union, which they have destined to serve as the proto-World Government. This political agenda may fairly be referred to as the New World Order or NWO agenda.

Tons of problems have accumulated on all fronts and the EU would rather stow them away from public scrutiny: The economy is a disaster and getting worse. The Euro currency is an utter failure and strangling the economies and people’s livelihoods with that. New independent political parties are challenging the traditional pro-EU consensus parties from right to left. People are fed up with the EU elite’s program of mass importation of migrants. The European populations are up in arms against what they see as a forceful superimposition of a repulsive alien culture and the wrecking of Europe’s traditional values by a centrally led campaign of promotion of new sexual mores, invented gender identifications and a despicable newspeak politically correct language. People have woken up to oppose the eradication of national sovereignty and the imposition of the EU superstate. The EU and the West at large are being increasingly marginalized economically, politically, culturally and militarily in the face of ever growing significance of China, Russia and other emerging free world countries.

These and other problems pose insurmountable problems for the EU and World Government projects of the Western elite, and it is therefore they are busy strengthening their repressive powers.

That the European mainstream media had been converted into a totalitarian propaganda machine should have become clear to the most lazy observer by the latest in 2013/2014 with the jaw-dropping anti-Sochi propaganda and the massive propaganda support and whitewashing of the Ukrainian coup and the atrocities in its wake - which clearly were perpetrated by people and groups that openly displayed their adherence to fascist and Nazi ideologies – on the Maidan, Odessa, Mariupol and its war of terror on the population of Donbass. The Western propaganda war on Syria in support of jihadists and Western mercenary terrorists labeling these groups “moderate rebels” should have come as final proof for those who still wanted to give the Western media the benefit of the doubt. – Now, they want to remove that doubt once and for all by the introduction of a totalitarian media regime and speech control.


LIST OF CONTENTS:

1. CEMENTING A TOTALITARIAN EU AND THE PROTO-WORLD GOVERNMENT
2. THE EU’S VERY REAL PROBLEMS
3. THE FAKE NEWS HOAX
4. MERKEL’S PLAN TO CENSOR THE MEDIA, OR THE GHOST OF GOEBBELS RISING IN BERLIN
5. THE EU’S PLAN FOR A TOTALITARIAN MEDIA REGIME AND SPEECH CONTROL
6. EU’s FULL PROGRAM OF MEDIA REPRISAL AND CENSORSHIP
7. US PLAN FOR A TOTALITARIAN MEDIA REGIME AND SPEECH CONTROL
8. REAL FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS A COMPETITION OF ARGUMENTS
9. CONCLUDING REMARKS


1. CEMENTING A TOTALITARIAN EU AND THE PROTO-WORLD GOVERNMENT

Totalitarian media regime and speech control

The scandalous resolution by the European Parliament (November 2016) calling to an infowar against Russia is actually a red herring intended to conceal the much more sinister aim of establishing a totalitarian media regime and speech control with all-out propaganda and censorship internally in the EU states. I would not deny, though, that they in fact are also to a certain degree concerned about the impact the Russian media may have in making cracks in the EU’s propaganda wall and sneaking in some truths here and there. But, even so, it wouldn’t be a concern if they didn’t fully realize that what they are doing is trying to protect the monopoly of the giant propaganda machine that their lying mainstream media is. Nobody likes it when their lies are challenged.

In an attempt to further distract the people from their more sinister aims, the drafters slipped in a hapless reference to Daesh (which is the newspeak name the EU lately prefers for what they first branded as ISIS). It reads like: “We are fighting Russia and the ISIS, that’s why we need to shut you up.” It seems to me, it would be easier to start the fight on ISIS by blocking their twitter account. And stop airing their propaganda videos.

EU is a totalitarian project from the very beginning

To fully account for the historic roots of this campaign would entail retelling the history of the European Union, for the EU in its entirety is a totalitarian project and therefore media control and propaganda have been its integral elements from the very beginning. (See, e.g. How a secretive elite created the EU to build a world government[1], The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover[2] and BBC Bias, Brexit, the EU, Bilderberg and Global Government[3]). In brief, the decisive coup was carried out when the dark forces behind Project EU managed to establish a totalitarian control over the mainstream media across Europe. I cannot put an exact year to when this was accomplished but it is fair to estimate that it was done by the early years of the 2000s (a dominant position was naturally reached much earlier). With the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a shift to the right in all media. The Marxist left media moved towards the social-democrats, the social-democratic media to the center, and the center to the right. Within a decade, the editorial policies of them all had more or less merged into one neoliberal stance, excepting some residue populist jargon in the former Marxist media. Simultaneously there occurred a forceful concentration of media ownership. - Ditto the mainstream political parties and their leaders from left to right.

That the European mainstream media had been converted into a totalitarian propaganda machine should have become clear to the most lazy observer by the latest in 2013/2014 with the jaw-dropping anti-Sochi propaganda and the massive propaganda support and whitewashing of the Ukrainian coup and the atrocities in its wake - which clearly were perpetrated by people and groups that openly displayed their adherence to fascist and Nazi ideologies – on the Maidan, Odessa, Mariupol and its war of terror on the population of Donbass. The Western propaganda war on Syria in support of jihadists and Western mercenary terrorists labeling these groups “moderate rebels” should have come as final proof for those who still wanted to give the Western media the benefit of the doubt.

Alternative media challenged the monopoly of the propaganda machine

In connection with the abovementioned events, the Western propaganda center was in for a massive shock seeing its narrative – so carefully scripted – challenged by the alternative media, bloggers and social media activists. The barbarians were now storming the gates of Western Fortress Propaganda. The propaganda center decided to counterattack the challenge by declaring all criticism unwarranted and fraudulent deception spread by “Russian trolls.” Their imagination then discovered an "army of well-paid trolls" laboring day and night in “troll factories” with the “Kremlin paid” task to spread false information on the internet. In the mindset of the propaganda creators this hoax then snowballed into the McCarthian bluff of labeling any dissidents – on any key point of the NWO agenda - as Russian trolls or Kremlin agents. If anybody needed proof of how unhinged the propaganda machine had become, they got it when the US Government and its media actually went as far as designating Donald Trump as a Russian agent, a Putin stooge doing the Kremlin’s bidding, whose “vast troll army” was now posing as American conservatives. Oh yes, and Russia hacking DNC and Clinton emails and even the voting systems to ensure Trump’s victory.

Assumptions regarding the “Propaganda center” and “NWO”

At this point, I must make a caveat regarding my use of concept “propaganda center.” This report provides a wealth of details proving that the Western media is habitually engaged in massive propaganda operations. These propaganda campaigns commence at the same time across the globe, or at least across the West. Hereby, leading Western politicians, “experts,” celebrities, and other opinion makers appear across the West repeating similar statements – having an obvious rehearsed character - concerning the events forming the subject of the media campaign. - As I personally follow news in seven languages, I have had the opportunity to marvel at the perfect synchronization of the timing of news campaigns (both their commencement and end). Sometimes when an event would call for immediate reaction there might not be any for hours or even or days. I have learned to put that down on the fact that the propaganda center is still working on what kind of spin to give to the events.

This report also outlines the role the CIA and the other Western intelligence agencies have in the propaganda war. I deem that the CIA has the absolutely most crucial and fundamental role in this and that it controls and directs the work of all the other intelligence agencies in this respect. Based on this and other circumstantial evidence, I have drawn the conclusion that the CIA operates a central Western propaganda center. – I share further down more details evidencing the central role of CIA as the central force coordinating the Western media propaganda.

In this connection, it is worth mentioning that the Russian FM Sergey Lavrov just recently revealed that Moscow is aware of the EU issuing periodic guidelines on how EU officials in all countries should refer to issues concerning contentions issues between Russia and the EU/USA/NATO.[4] In my understanding, these guidelines are issued by the international propaganda center. Hereby there are guiding statements for long-term propaganda operations but also rapid reaction guidelines are issued for any question that may come up from time to time.

I must make another caveat in regards to the “NWO” or the New World Order. This report outlines my understanding of the NWO and its political agenda as a globalist elite project. I consider that the European Union serves as a precursor of the NWO or its initial platform. The political and cultural agenda of the EU and its system of governance shows it as a proto-World Government.

The EU clearly follows the NWO agenda as outlined in this report. Established Western figures and sources speak openly about the desirability of a World Government, or Global Government, or a bit more euphemistically about “need for global governance” and “global integration.” For example, in his final UN speech 2016 President Obama openly called for speeding up the establishment of a global government.[5], [6]  Basically, the NWO or the “new world order” is the system of governance under the global government as well as its political vision and agenda. For some reason, though, the term “new world order” and its acronym, NWO, is not something that the Western establishment likes to use in public. While everything is true about its agenda, as outlined in this report and while they have no problem with talking about global governance, they want to see the new world order concept labeled as a conspiracy theory. However, sometimes they still let it slip through as in the speech the former President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso (who successfully segued into the position of chairman of Goldman Sachs) delivered in 2014 to the Yale School of Management titled “The European Union in the New World Order”.[7]  

We are well advised to remember that the whole concept “conspiracy theory” is a label devised by the CIA specifically for the purpose of discrediting legitimate criticism of their very own covert operations. In its first massive use, it was directed to counter the groundswell of public skepticism toward the CIA-led Warren Commission’s findings on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In this connection in 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch, which coined the term “conspiracy theory” and recommended methods for discrediting such theories and their authors. Back then, the CIA was still quite naively formal in its approaches and actually marked the dispatch “psych”, short for “psychological operations” or disinformation, and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.[8], [9] 

Considering these arguments as well as all the data presented in this report, I conclude that the Western elite, indeed, is driven by a vision and political agenda that we may call the New World Order (NWO). Whether they call the agenda by that name or not is irrelevant, what is relevant is the reality of the agenda and the reality of the forces that push the agenda.

Open society shut down

Coinciding with taking over the European media, the CIA and other new world order agents had managed to co-opt and coerce the European political elite and practically all the parliamentary parties across Europe.

Artists and the cultural elite had also been made to acquiesce through the powers that the NWO exercised over them by their control of Hollywood and the entertainment industry at large, and of course through their very media monopoly.

Even the Academy was silenced and subjugated, as professors and researchers became entirely dependent on grants from the EU, national states and multinational corporations with a stake in the globalization on the terms of the Western elite. Long-term tenures with a guaranteed income is of the past and today scholars must vie for these grants on a continuous basis with well-defined projects. And obviously in this Orwellian system the winning projects must be so defined as to meet the values and goals of the donors.

Finally, even civil society across Europe was taken over by the EU elite, the Deep State shadow government, by way of infiltrating and hijacking the relevant NGO’s and the peace movements from the 60’s. Some of the NGO’s were simply hijacked others created de novo as propaganda fronts. Among the former there are NGO’s like Amnesty International, Transparency International, Reporters without Borders, Freedom House, and the International Red Cross. Among the latter there are organizations like National Endowment for Democracy.

A myriad of think tanks were set up to cover the territory between the Academy and politics and to provide “reliable” sources for fake news that the mainstream media spreads and the politicians parrot. Television and newspapers have taken to interviewing carefully vetted “experts” who would confirm the agenda of the propaganda scriptwriters. For a better show a few dissenting experts are invited from time to time knowing that their voices will anyway be drowned by the overwhelming chorus of the propaganda shills.

The real opposition defamed as “far-right parties”

The defamation of the European so-called far-right parties alleging their supposed Russian connections and subservience had also started a few years back. The emergence of a number of populist parties and the challenge they pose to the elite and their Project EU had taken the propaganda center by surprise. Very few of those parties are in essence “far right,” which is mainly a defamatory label stamped on them by the propaganda machine.

In this question - as in all the other central issues at stake - the NWO planners had banked on a scenario of a static world basing their agenda on the following tacit: perpetually growing economies, which would enable keeping the Western voter calm and quiet; infinite abilities to brainwash the public on the strength of the mainstream media monopoly; a weak and dying Russia; no global challenge from China and other emerging countries around the world; and a political spectrum divided once and for all between the then existing parties and their supposed ideologies.

They have failed in each of these assumptions, the NWO project is not going as it should and problems are piling up everywhere. Therefore, this is what in reality is at stake here: they must shut up the critics and silence the discontented populations so as to hide away the problems and disguise their agenda. To accomplish this the EU and the USA Deep State governments - under the guise of countering a non-existent Russian propaganda threat - aim at establishing a totalitarian media regime and speech control. They need it to safeguard their political agenda and to prop up the European Union, which they have destined to serve as the proto-World Government. This political agenda may fairly be referred to as the New World Order, or NWO agenda.

2. THE EU’S VERY REAL PROBLEMS

Media control aims at hiding the EU’s very real problems

The EU is a walking disaster and its masters find it harder and harder to keep the growing chorus of critics in check with its traditional media monopoly.

Tons of problems have accumulated on all fronts and the EU would rather stow them away from public scrutiny. The economy is falling and the ultimate crash is delayed only by massive money printing and direct lending of it on zero rates to the governments by the ECB (the EU central bank). The result is an ever-increasing financial bubble which is about to burst any day now. While keeping the system seemingly afloat the constant infusion of the bogus money has pushed the general price level artificially high up so that it is now strangling consumers and critically hampering Europe’s business competitiveness.

For the EU-elite, the Euro monopoly is a convenient tool for financial manipulation but for the overwhelming share of the populations, it has spelt a disaster. Not ready to ditch the Euro and get rid of the economic woes, they try to cure the problems by constant rounds of new austerity measures, which do nothing but send the economy tailspinning into further destruction. Even those who are lucky to still have a job have seen drastic cuts in their income and purchasing power.

Many ask why they stick with the Euro through thick and thin when it is so obviously a failure. The reason is that the Euro, from the very beginning emerged as a product of geopolitical dreaming and scheming, as a tool to solidify the foundations of a unified Europe, a future superstate. Financial considerations and obvious flaws in the scheme acknowledged even by the die-hard planners had to yield to the all-encompassing geopolitical expediency.  - In 2009, WikiLeaks released a document, which seems to be the meeting report from the 1955 Bilderberg conference in West Germany. The document shows that the Western elite was already back then secretively working on the idea of creating the Euro.[10] I have written about the destruction wrought by the Euro monopoly and the impending catastrophe caused by it in this report from 2015: How the Dollar and Euro Monopolies Destroyed the Real Market Economy. And What Hayek Told about the Need for Competing Currencies[11]

Blindfolded towards a EU superstate

The chaos has made people realize that that the mainstream political parties - including the Greens, their newest family member - no longer address the popular needs and hopes. (European Green parties pay lip service to the ecology while they in reality pander to the neoliberal agenda). The (former) ideologies of the traditional parties from right to left have coalesced into one single indistinct mass of a neoliberal globalist ideology. Ordinary citizens in Europe – and in the US as Trump pointed out for us – feel that they bear the brunt of a rigged globalist system.

People are also fed up with the bureaucratic Juggernaut that the EU has become and its unelected EU Commission, which while blabbering about “European integration” has been in fact covertly transforming the original customs union into a transnational superstate. People feel that the EU suppresses the democratic aspirations at the level of nations as it encroaches on every aspect of people’s lives with absurd rules, directives and standards. There is understandable enormous disappointment and frustration at the EU having over the years constantly been chipping away at the right to self-determination of the nations to the point that the EU countries have lost their national sovereignty.

Superimposition of a new alien culture and the forging of Homo europaeus

In addition to the enormous frustration with the economy, a large part of the European populations is also up in arms against what they see as a forceful superimposition of a repulsive alien culture and the wrecking of Europe’s traditional values by a centrally led campaign of promotion of new sexual mores, invented gender identifications and a despicable newspeak politically correct language. The opponents feel that their way of life is subject to a countercultural transformation on the terms of cultural marxism. Judging by European Union resolutions, statements of their political leaders and the mainstream media (which the EU has officially taken under its special protection), the EU strives to deliberately replace national states, nationalities, and traditional cultures and identities with something they call multiculturalism, where people have no gender, no faith and no national allegiances. The agenda is supported by a carefully crafted code of politically correct speech and by labeling criticism as “hate speech.” Indeed, there is a feeling that the European Union tries to forge a new form of a human being, the Homo europaeus, who embodies these newly fabricated values.

People are annoyed with what seems a deliberate effort to haul in migrants from the Middle East and Africa even as their own people are suffering under increasing economic hardship and while severe reductions are being done in social spending on the elderly and other vulnerable groups of people. There is a widespread and motivated belief that the migrant influx forms part of the conscious effort to forge on people a singular EU identity and an allegiance to the superstate. The EU and its media are going to great lengths to conceal the facts of the mass import of migrants – not to mention the goals of it. They do not want the public to understand how they have rolled out the red carpet welcoming migrants at the same time as more and more of the citizen fall into poverty and deprivation. Keeping with this, they have already enacted severe rules of censorship aimed at gagging officials and the media to prevent public awareness of the inevitable problems the mass influx of these migrants have caused. Reporting on migrant crimes is now classified as hate speech. – Hereby, I must stress that the migrants themselves are innocent victims of these machinations, the blame which lies squarely on the EU-NWO leaders. Some of them are refugees and some migrants in search of a better life, and even so they naturally have a moral right to do so, the more so as they have been enticed by the EU to come.

The agenda driven multiculturalism also involves a creeping assault on the Christian church. The church is seen as an independent center of authority, which has the standing to potentially challenge Project EU (and the grander Project World Government) and therefore based on the evidence it seems that the change agenda calls for a gradual dismantling of the roles of the Christian churches. Amazingly some of the churches, namely the Nordic Lutheran churches seem to be fully collaborating – and conspiring - in the effort of their own demise.

The EU’s murderous foreign policy

The EU also has a need for media control and censorship to cover up for its aggressive foreign policy. They wish to maintain their popular image of a benevolent EU as the Nobel Peace prize laureate (sick). They do not want alternative media to remind people about the EU’s wars of aggression and terror that have led to the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and terrorism at home, and their instigation and support for the violent coup in Ukraine and the mayhem in its wake. And, they are terribly concerned about being outed as warmongers with their ferocious anti-Russian propaganda. About their lies of alleged Russian invasion of Ukraine. Or supposed threats of Russia’s imminent invasion of Poland, the Baltic countries, or Finland and Sweden. Or their propaganda narrative about a “nasty” Russian state and its “dictator” Putin. Their lies about persecution of gays in Russia, or the “doomed” Russian economy, or the nature of Russia’s democracy etc., etc.

The EU’s eleventh hour

It is now or never for the EU as they are well aware of the fact that they are facing a Trump-moment in elections across Europe. Project EU has taken a beating in recent elections and opinion polls promise them even more agony. They lost in the last elections to the EU Parliament, they lost in parliamentary elections in Poland, Portugal, Spain, they lost the referendum in the Netherlands, they’ve recently lost in several state elections in Germany, they lost the Brexit, they lost the Italian referendum, they nearly lost the Austrian presidency, they are heavily losing in polls in Sweden, etc. etc. Popular discontent has got out of hand, the EU cannot cure the economy and does not want to back off its counterculture agenda, therefore the elite sees stifling of dissent and the imposition of a totalitarian media regime as their one last chance and best hope.

3. THE FAKE NEWS HOAX

The Western propaganda center has nearly simultaneously launched a campaign in all the Western countries to discredit alternative media, websites and blogs, by arbitrarily labelling them as “fake news” sites and accusing them of “peddling Russian propaganda.” The qualification criteria for making it to the list basically involves nothing more than that the site refuses to parrot the propaganda lines of the Western elite and their pocket governments and media. It is noteworthy that the EU and the USA have for the past two decades moved in perfect lockstep with their anti-Russian propaganda and the same marching orders are being followed now in the crackdown on dissent. It is evident that this “fake news” hype is a propaganda ploy designed by the CIA propaganda center aimed – in the first stage – at stirring false indignation concerning the alternative media and then – in the second stage – at proceeding with enacting repressive legislation to crackdown on dissenting media and establish a severe regime of media control and censorship across the Western countries.

I have not undertaken a comparative study so as to pinpoint the exact dates when the “fake news” campaign kicked off in different countries, but I remember that shills working as opinion makers (mostly journalists) have been writing columns and posting in social media about the topic for about two years now. By spring 2016, the campaign seemed to be seriously live. For example, in Finland (a tightly controlled tiny state with strong historic totalitarian tendencies as a willing ally of Hitler’s Germany) the chief editors of all mainstream media houses (including state-owned) went public with a widely published appeal condemning alternative media as “fake news media” and vowing that they themselves would stick to the principles of “ethics and good practice journalism and honest reporting” (talk about wolves in sheep’s clothing). Finland beat the USA with 2 months, publishing its own “fake news” hit list already in mid-September.

Fake news hoax and US propaganda and censorship laws

According to Zerohedge[12], the US House of Representatives passed on November 30 a bill announcing a crackdown on media, blogs and individuals who are involved in “spreading Russian propaganda and misinformation.” The bill had been introduced on November 22, that is, just two days before the Washington Post published its by now infamous and libelous article[13]    about “fake news” sites and supposed Russian propaganda. To back up its allegations, the Post cited a bogus report by a group of self-professed "experts" who want to advance the hoax that Donald Trump was elected on the strength of an elaborate Russian misinformation operation by means of infiltration of the US alternative media. The members of this shady group - which runs a website set up only this year called propornot.com (clear sign it is a special purpose propaganda vehicle) - want themselves to remain anonymous although they are supposedly calling for media transparency. (On their website they identified themselves as a “Propaganda Identification Service, since 2016”). The report listed 200 highly respected and professional alternative media websites and blogs as “fake news” sites and purveyors of Russian propaganda. Albeit the listed websites span the gamut of political ideas from right to left the accused sites largely shared five things in common:

  1. Independence from the mainstream media
  2. Criticism of the Clinton candidacy.
  3. Criticism of U.S. foreign policy.
  4. None of them publish fake news. (In a bid to raise the credibility and tarnish the reputation of the legitimate sites, the drafters included 3 actual fake news sites in the list, among them veteranstoday.com).
  5. None of them have nothing to do with “Russian propaganda,” while some of them do challenge the US Government’s neoliberal anti-Russian party line

PropOrNot claims that its fake methodology to identify “fake news” sites included the identification whether the sites carried content “in praise for Putin, Trump, Bashar al-Assad, Syria, Iran, China, and radical political parties in the US and Europe.” – All sure signs of Russian propaganda influence. Or, worse yet, the “fake news” sites were in a habit of criticizing of the United States, Barack Obama, Clinton, the European Union, Angela Merkel, NATO, Ukraine, “Jewish people,” U.S. allies, the mainstream media, Democrats, and “the center-right or center-left, and moderates of all stripes.”[14]

Both the article and the report it referred to are insipid stories seemingly penned by immature and shallow authors. But this manifestation of complete collapse of journalistic standards comes as the logical result of a couple of decades of hubris over “winning the cold war” and the ensuing virtually unchallenged global propaganda monopoly that filled the US mainstream media with propaganda shills and drained it of talent and real professionals. In the last few years with the inane anti-Putin propaganda they hit rock bottom. And this Wacko, er, WaPo article perfectly illustrates this universal degradation. Washington Post pretends to be a quality newspaper and yet they published this hogwash, where every contention is more incredible than the other. They had no qualms in shaming all those opposition media outlets as Russian propaganda shills even when the bogus report offered no evidence backing up their claims. Obviously, the Post did not expect any evidence to be forthcoming because they were into the scheme from the very beginning. But not only was there any evidence, there was actually a statement from Propornot, the fly-by-night propaganda outlet, confirming that they actually would ignore evidence altogether and that evidence wouldn’t matter anyway because they would declare a website a Russian propaganda outlet just for the mere fact that they were critical of the American propaganda or did not echo the neoliberal and NATO party lines. The claim is that in this case they would be "useful idiots" who unwittingly did Russia’s bidding.

The mainstream media is the real fake news network

It is in order to remind that it is the US and the Western mainstream media in general that are the veritable fake news networks, and have been so for decades if not for centuries. The Western elite’s recent desperation of hysteric proportions is a reflection of the panic into which they have been thrown when realizing that their increasingly brazen and preposterous lies have been successfully challenged by the alternative media and the knowledge that they have all but lost the game. For each passing year, fewer and fewer people believe their propaganda lies. Therefore, they are staking all on their one remaining card, the imposition of a totalitarian media regime and speech control.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the big lies that the mainstream media has been peddling in recent years. The fake war on terror following 9/11 as a means to pursue the neocon geopolitical agenda of absolute world hegemony, specifically the ferocious campaign of lies to justify the invasion of Iraq with the patently false claims that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and about his alleged al-Qaeda connection. “Iranian nukes,” the Libyan meltdown, “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” Pentagon’s hiring of British public relations firm Bell Pottinger to create fake news stories about terrorist attacks in Iraq, creating and promoting the al Qaeda related propaganda group White Helmets, which creates and distributes fake stories about the Syrian war, “Putin persecuting and killing journalists,” “Putin persecuting gays.” “Russia invading Ukraine,” “Russia intending to invade the Baltics, Poland, Finland, Sweden,” “Rebels downing the MH-17 jet over Ukraine,” the Maidan coup being a peaceful revolution without foreign interference, new Ukrainian regime not being extremist and not relying on radical fascist and neo-Nazi forces, etc., etc. 

Through their lies and propaganda for war, the mainstream media is complicit in numerous war crimes, as Paul Craig Roberts writes: “Since the Clinton regime, the accumulation of war crimes committed by Western governments exceed those of Nazi Germany. Millions of Muslims have been slaughtered, dislocated, and dispossessed in seven countries. Not a single Western war criminal has been held accountable. // The despicable Washington Post is a prime apologist for these war criminals. The entire Western print and TV media is so heavily implicated in the worst war crimes in human history that, if justice ever happens, the presstitutes will stand in the dock with the Clintons, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Obama and their neocon operatives or handlers as the case may be.”[15]

Or what about the more recent propaganda lies? The hoax that Russia was hacking into DNC and Podesta email? Or that Trump is a Putin agent?

The Washington Post’s laughable fake news hoax came as the perfect climax for the whole fake news saga, as a grand finale to announce the total bankruptcy of Western mainstream media. After all, that story of the fake news sites is in itself the most revealing item of fake news, they’ve done us a service in taking the mask off finally and for good.

CIA is the mastermind behind the fake news propaganda hoax

Everything points to the fact that the CIA is the mastermind and puppet master coordinator of Western media propaganda. There is a lot of direct evidence of this as well as solid circumstantial evidence. Hereby the CIA, in partnership with the Pentagon and NATO, uses the national intelligence services of other countries as their local branches in this and other operations of subversion.

The public in general would think that the CIA is an intelligence service or spy agency tasked with finding out what foreign nations are up to (“gathering, processing and analyzing national security information”). To a certain extent that is true, however, from its very founding in 1947, the CIA was engaged to carry out clandestine and covert operations ranging from propaganda to false flag attacks and military coups and other regime change operations. For covert propaganda, the CIA had journalists on its payroll from its inception. In what was called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network to advance the ideology of the CIA's masters. The operation was directed on influencing foreign media and political campaigns and covering up for the CIA’s covert and false flag operations. It also included the funding of some student and cultural and youth organizations as well as setting up magazines as propaganda fronts. This is a fact to which the CIA itself admitted when it in 1976 explicitly announced that it would discontinue that practice in regards to the domestic media: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” – The admission is true, but nobody believes that they actually stopped doing it, and rightly so, as we have recently had ample reason to see.

It is known that prior to the announcement the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird had its own stable of writers, editors and publishers consisting of as many as 3000 individuals. The disinformation network was supervised by Philip Graham, a former publisher the Washington Post. There is all reason to believe that the Washington Post is still a card-carrying member of the CIA network. The circumstances surrounding the “fake news” article, the substandard reporting that went into it and the reference to the shady and anonym bogus organization points strongly in this direction.[16]

Several influential observers of the US media give credence to the suggestion that the CIA is the mastermind of the PropOrNot scandal. Anatoly Karlin[17] argues that given “the extensive ties of Western intelligence services with MSM editors, as claimed by whistleblowers such as Udo Ulfkotte and Paul Barril, and the CIA’s allegiance to the “blue empire,” the direct involvement of Western intelligence services” in the recent fake news hoax “cannot be excluded.” Paul Craig Roberts also seems to be suspecting that PropOrNot’s funding comes from the CIA or related structures.[18] The Strategic Culture makes the convincing case that CIA and the network of assets it controls is the major purveyor of fake news.[19] It shares some very incriminating evidence also making the case of the intimate connection between the CIA and the Washington Post. According to Strategic Culture “media influencing operation targeting Russia appears to be an outgrowth of the US State Department’s Counter-Information Team of the Bureau of International Information Programs,” set up by the spymaster George W. Bush and designed to counter “Soviet disinformation.” Washington Post has a historic special relationship of longstanding with the CIA, but their ties were further deepened and sealed with gold in 2013, when the owner of Amazon (on-line bookstore) Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own The Washington Post, signed a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide cloud computing services to the agency. Based on its analysis this news service deems that it is “very likely that PropOrNot.com is a creation of The Washington Post’s cloud computing business partner, the CIA.”

The anonymous “experts” of propornot.com described themselves as a group of “concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs.” According to Strategic Culture, this is a baggage of expertise that clearly points towards a background in the CIA or any of its assets. The WaPo article itself refers to a host of the “usual suspects of Russia-bashers and CIA mouthpieces: The Daily Beast; former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul; Rand Corporation; George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs; the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.”

In its article relating the “fake news” scandal, The Intercept[20] throws more light on the controversy. It reveals that Clint Watts - the other expert (apart from PropOrNot) on which Washington Post relied – is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which is a think tank that advances a neoconservative and imperialist geopolitical agenda and a policy of aggression against Russia, the same malevolent geopolitical agenda of which the CIA is the custodian. Watts has personally a background as a warrior for these causes having previously worked as an FBI special agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force and as the executive officer of the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center.

4. MERKEL’S PLAN TO CENSOR THE MEDIA, OR THE GHOST OF GOEBBELS RISING IN BERLIN

After the Clinton debacle, the Russian hacking and fake news hoax relay was passed on to Germany’s Merkel (the last vassal standing). Speaking in parliament end of November, Merkel expressed concern that alternative media outlets are responsible for subverting the government’s control over the public. She[21] claimed that alternative and social media pose a “danger to national security” as the public opinion was being swayed away from establishment politics. Translating from German, this means that Merkel tells the elite and establishment media now face overwhelming problems in spreading their lies. “We must confront this phenomenon and if necessary, regulate it,” Merkel proposes in order to rescue the license to lie. Merkel stresses that, “opinions aren’t formed the way they were 25 years ago.” Could be a reference to her native GDR, but most probably she just meant the Western mainstream media, which two are more or less the same, only the Western media used to put up a better show.

Hereby Merkel is using the CIA developed toolkit: accuse them of fake news, lies, hate speech, extremism, and even populism and then crackdown on it. – Interesting her inclusion of “populism” in the list of dangers. Participation in political processes is “democracy” when it fits the elite agenda, but “populism” when the people dare support alternative programs that contradict the elite’s totalitarian agenda. In fact, it is the same with “social media.” What is this social media but a platform for people to express and share their opinions? A crackdown on social media is then nothing else than a crackdown on people, on their right to free speech.

Merkel has concerns about the stability of our “familiar order,” no doubt the real question is about the “familiar new world order.” She wants to establish a totalitarian media regime and speech control in order to safeguard the transatlantic NWO project and the EU proto-World Government.

Thomas Jarzombek, from Merkel’s CDU party, interviewed by Germany’s Deutsche Welle On Deutsche Welle article[22] - which is a public propaganda bullhorn of the German government broadcasting in English and some 20 other languages. (And then they have a problem with Russia’s Sputnik!) – told that time is now of essence: “We have ten months until the next national election in Germany, and we need to find appropriate mechanisms.” He wantto crackdown on opposite media but adds that hereby “it's important that we never give the impression that we're censoring anything." The dilemma, then, is how to censor without letting on that you censor. Jarzombek will surely consult Goebbels’ heritage in order to work around this delicate problem.

5. THE EU’S PLAN FOR A TOTALITARIAN MEDIA REGIME AND SPEECH CONTROL

The EU Parliament’s resolution[23] attacking Russia’s “hostile propaganda” is nothing but naked propaganda in itself and a call to further escalate its hybrid war against Russia, which has been running for a decade already. Very little of what they accuse Russia for is actually true, and what is true amounts to Russia’s normal and legitimate news reporting and intergovernmental and civil society interactions. The EU’s chief concern is – quoting from the resolution (sic) – “eroding the European narrative”, that is, a direct admission that the EU is annoyed with the fact that Russia’s officials and its media have not succumbed to the Western political and media hegemony. The Russians have the audacity to challenge the EU narrative, the carefully crafted propaganda story, the EU has concocted about itself. In short, Russia is infringing on the EU’s sacred propaganda monopoly.

Russia is, they say, “provoking doubt.” Gone are the days, when Europeans admired philosophers who on the contrary called us to doubt everything, De Omnibus Dubitandum. - That’s not the principle for the new brave totalitarian Europe. - Yes, incredible as it sounds, the EU parliament openly calls for Russia to refrain from any criticism of the EU, nothing less will do than a total accord with its policies and propaganda stunts, including the EU’s own disgusting propaganda assaults on Russia. The resolution notes that Russia “rather than establishing a real dialogue,” in interaction with officials from various EU countries, advances its “propaganda purposes” in order to “publicly weaken the EU’s” political positions. In the EU newspeak a “real dialogue” would then mean an unconditional acceptance of their dictate.

The EU is beside itself because Russia dares to maintain an independent foreign policy, it’s “provoking doubt”, ‘dividing Member States,’ ‘splitting the EU,’ ‘paralyzing the decision-making process in the EU,’ ‘engineering a strategic split between the EU and USA,’ ‘discrediting the EU institutions and NATO, TTIP’, and ‘ circulating and imposing an alternative narrative’. (Note, all points taken from the infamous resolution under review).

In this same resolution that introduces this totalitarian media regime and speech control, unheard of in Europe, since Stalin’s control over the Soviet media and dissidents, the EU Parliament has the nerve to condemn Russia for some imaginary “crackdowns on independent media, journalists and civil society activists in Russia” and call “on the Commission and Member States to reinforce the protection of journalists and civil society in Russia.” The Parliament then further calls the EU to engage by all means possible in all the same subterfuge and media manipulation of which it falsely accuses Russia.

EU’s clampdown on dissent

Yet, as I already pointed out, Russia is not the main concern of the EU in this connection. Their real and primary aim is to enhance their domestic totalitarian propaganda media and speech control and to tighten the screws on internal dissent and the opposition to the EU’s destructive policies. The resolution directly identifies the threat that the internal opposition and dissidents pose to Project EU insofar as it calls to “recognize that strategic communication and information warfare is not only an external EU issue but also an internal one, and voices its concern at the number of hostile propaganda multipliers existing within the Union.

The purpose of the resolution and the hype around it (following two years of preparation in form of the propaganda hoaxes on “Russian trolls” and the half year old “Fake News” campaign) was to create a false awareness for these “dangers” and with that to initiate a push for more actual measures of repression.

The resolution outlines what measures must be undertaken. First, the EU is tasked with determining what is to be considered “propaganda and disinformation.” We have already seen that the intention would be to qualify as propaganda and disinformation (now openly also referred to as “lies”) all dissenting opinion and criticism of the EU’s current politics and its strategic development aims (that is, the NWO) agenda. The resolution itself talks about the need to counter the danger of “anti-EU propaganda”, which calls to mind the Bolshevik campaigns against “enemies of the state.” Russia - they say- is backing “anti-EU forces” within the EU. Furthermore, these “anti-EU forces” are said to “deny the basic values of liberal democracies,” that is, they are accused of being against political program of them, the EU elite. I keep referring to ‘them.’ By this I mean the EU parliament, but more particularly (like in the previous sentence) the European transatlantic elite, who effectively control the EU, its Commission and its Parliament and the Western mainstream media. It is their political agenda that is in danger. The question is about the political ambitions of a small but powerful unelected elite that now wants to make a last desperate attempt to safeguarding their Project EU by a totalitarian media regime and crackdown at dissent.

The resolution wants to counter something it refers to as “Russian efforts to disrupt the EU integration process.” – The ‘EU integration process’ is shorthand for the stratagem to transform the EU into a single superstate governed by an unelected proto-World Government. There are no democratically enacted decisions regarding such a supposed further EU integration, strictly speaking there are not even any official proclamations in this regard. The idea of the perpetrators of this scheme is to achieve their goal by subterfuge and propaganda, just as they have up to now brought about the present EU and its Euro currency. - It then becomes clear that the totalitarian media and speech control regime is not aimed at protecting the European people, but on the contrary the scheme is enacted in order to enhance the specific totalitarian vision of the elite.

Hereby it is outright touching to see that the resolution allows for the possibility that not “not all criticism of the EU or its policies necessarily constitutes propaganda or disinformation.” There! Some criticism will remain legitimate.

Hereby not only alternative and social media are in the zone of fire, as the resolution gives this sweeping definition of sources that must be censored: “the strategy of anti-EU propaganda and disinformation by third countries may take various forms and involve, in particular, traditional media, social networks [media], school programmes and political parties, both within and beyond the European Union.” (Note also the inclusion of ‘traditional media’ in the list). The resolution also echoes the EU officials and their press in calling out “extreme-right parties, populist forces and movements that deny the basic values of liberal democracies”. This is a macabre case of sham circular reasoning, where they first label dissent as “extreme-right” and “populist” and then proceed to outlaw it based on the sham label.

6. EU’s FULL PROGRAM OF MEDIA REPRISAL AND CENSORSHIP

After concluding a broad-brush definition of “propaganda and disinformation”, the resolution outlines a full arsenal of repressive measures. Here’s what is awaiting us.

Censorship of social media. Facebook has been actively censoring its content for several years with increasing ferocity. But the EU has now demanded Facebook under threat of additional reprisals to double its efforts to establish full censorship. Several people critical of the EU’s policies have been banned or blocked for lengthy times, among them, for example, people who have made posts and shared links about the truth of Donbass. Facebook has banned or seriously hampered the sharing of links to content of alternative media, among many other measures of censorship. Similar censorship manipulation happens at search engines like Google.

The totalitarian media regime also involves strangling of opposition media by cutting them out from revenue streams. Recently Google and Facebook moved to cut off ad revenue to opposition sites.[24]

Clamping down on alternative media and persecution of editors and publishers. The EU is already engaged in efforts to close down alternative media and persecute their editors and publishers, precisely for the same reasons that the resolution now identifies us dangers to the political course steered by the EU elite. A notable case is the persecution of Finnish MV-lehti and its publisher Ilja Janitskin.

Restricting of bank services and financing of the opposition

The resolution calls to “closely monitor the sources of financing of anti-European propaganda” and “to advance certain legal initiatives” aimed at “curtailing financial flows” concerning “individuals and entities engaged in” the activities that are defined as propaganda and disinformation. (The resolution also refers to these as stratcom - strategic communication - activities).

Further increasing and empowering the EU’s own propaganda machine. This involves enhanced support for the Western mainstream media (“to promote the strengthening of the resilience of the media as a strategic priority”); increased financial support for their own destructive propaganda actors (in all EU languages) such as their faux-alternative media outlets, think tanks and NGOs, propaganda campaigns in social media, sham civil society initiatives, and - last but not least – to harness the Academy yet more tightly to the propaganda war. (Once more, please, note that this is all explicitly stated in said EU Parliament Resolution)

Recognition of the role of the Western mainstream media as EU’s official propaganda bullhorn. The entire rationale for this present propaganda drive was the catastrophic decline of the authority and the influence of the Western mainstream media, MSM losing its propaganda clout. Therefore, everything in the resolution is about propping up the mainstream media. In this connection, I want to draw attention to the specific detail that the resolution explicitly calls for “cooperation with [main]stream media representatives and experts” to develop work on its propaganda definitions.

Jailing of dissidents. The EU has already moved to persecute dissidents with fabricated criminal charges. An infamous case is the jailing of the Polish Eurosceptic dissident Mateusz Piskorski, another being the persecution of Ilja Janitskin from Finland. – (I am myself the object of such persecution from the side of the Finnish government).

In the resolution, the EU Parliament calls for new and enhanced legal initiatives to further facilitate criminal persecution of alternative media figures and the opposition.

Unleashing of the spy agencies on dissidents. To demonstrate the truly totalitarian character of the resolution, the drafters go as far as calling for the spy agencies (aka intelligence services) to enforce the campaign of persecution of the opposition and dissidents. (Urges “Member State governments to be vigilant towards Russian information operations on European soil and to increase capacity sharing and counterintelligence efforts aimed at countering such operations”).

Calling NATO to a cyberwar. Finally, there is a call to NATO to ratchet up its cyberwar capabilities against Russia and, no doubt, against the internal opposition.

7. US PLAN FOR A TOTALITARIAN MEDIA REGIME AND SPEECH CONTROL

Very disturbingly, the US appears to be moving simultaneously with identical totalitarian media control and censorship initiatives. As a matter of fact, the United States has gone one step further with actually implementing new harsh speech control laws.

Zerohedge reports[25] that on November 30, one week after the Washington Post launched its witch hunt against "Russian propaganda fake news", with 390 votes for, the House passed the relevant law termed “H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.” This bill deals with a number of intelligence-related issues, including alleged Russian propaganda and contains provisions about a potential crackdown on "offenders.

The bill authorizes the government to "counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in  coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.” This is followed by a list of definitions of what constitute media manipulation:

  1. Covert broadcasting
  2. Media manipulation
  3. Disinformation and forgeries
  4. Funding agents of influence
  5. Establishment or funding of a front group
  6. Incitement and offensive counterintelligence
  7. Assassinations
  8. Terrorist acts

You can see that the points 1 through 4 gives as broad authority as any totalitarian government might wish for in order to silence the opposition and suppress dissent, among them the 200 alternative media sites that the Washington Post, in reference to the report from the shady CIA front organization, declared to be “fake news” sites peddling Russian propaganda.

This bill of censorship and the fake news campaign must be seen as forming part of one centrally planned and organized assault on free speech. Therefore, it is especially disturbing that the CIA front PropOrNot has gone so far as to claim that people involved in the blacklisted websites may “have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws”[26] . Furthermore, this CIA front is calling for putting the blacklisted opposition media outlets under “formal investigations” and under “further scrutiny.” This has been understood as a call for the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency or any other such government agency to harass them with fabricated investigations.[27], [28]

8. REAL FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS A COMPETITION OF ARGUMENTS

Following the catastrophic concentration of Western media ownership, the coalescing of their political views into one neoliberal ideological platform, and the CIA control of that media, the conditions of media freedom and freedom of speech at large have dramatically declined in the West. The deterioration of the situation has after 2000 been so overwhelming that we may say that free speech is gone from the West. The problem is most pressing in regards to the Anglo-American media groups with global reach, the ownership of which has been concentrated in very few hands (with only a handful of dominant media corporations holding sway over most of the Western countries). These corporations have established a de facto control – I would even say censorship - over Western thinking. With seemingly unrestricted propaganda manipulation, the media has seized control over the democratic process in most of Europe and North America. – These media groups have converted the idea of freedom of speech into a license to lie. It is my conviction that the concentration of media ownership into fewer and fewer hands and the reach of their lies is the biggest threat to democracy world-wide and by implication the biggest threat to mankind itself.

In the last decade, with the rise of the alternative media there has, however, been a considerable improvement with a trend pointing towards a restitution of the lost right to freedom of speech. The whole idea of freedom of speech necessarily requires multiple access to media, speech platforms, and an ease to set up new media outlets. For real freedom of speech it is not enough that there is a theoretical right to free speech, rather it requires the existence of real opportunities to express oneself in a mass circulation media, a true possibility to voice one’s opinions, to make competing opinions known.

Freedom of speech is traditionally understood as “the right to express one's opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation or censorship from the powers that be.” This definition is lacking a crucially important second condition, which I believe has never been articulated before, namely the condition of existence of a pluralistic competitive media which de facto would guarantee that every person has a possibility to exercise the right to free speech. I call this second condition the platform condition, in reference to the need that there must exist a sufficient number of competing media outlets, or platforms for speech. In addition to a “right” there has to be an “opportunity” a real possibility to exercise this right, a real possibility for free expression.

Without awarding due consideration to the platform condition, the “right” to free speech would remain a mere declarative statement, something that could be expressed as “that would be nice to have.” The problem with that truncated definition is that the “right” there would remain a mere abstraction. The expanded definition with my suggested addendum respecting the platform condition makes this right efficacious, it materializes the right.

There must exist the condition for a real possibility to make one’s voice heard, a real possibility to express oneself and for that expression being carried to the public. But this is not how it is in the world today. Today freedom of speech remains a hallowed but empty principle that the Western politicians and their monopoly media like to brag about. They pay lip service to this sacred right, while they have de facto monopolized the speech platform, the media. – Freedom of speech is not our right to stand on a park bench and bellow out our ideas or to jabber with drinking mates in a pub. Efficacious freedom of speech requires access to mass media on equal terms for all.

At the final analysis, freedom of speech, like everything else, is a function of a competition of arguments. (I have written about freedom of speech as a competition of arguments in my book All is Art.[29])

A newspaper, a media outlet is always biased. Cynically we could say that each media lies in its own particular way. In a competitive media environment one lie would be challenged by another competing lie, one lie would cancel the other lie, and in a perfect competition the outcome would be truth. The more, in a perfect competitive media environment those actors who would aim at being taken seriously would temper their lies in advance anticipating the rightful criticism from competing media.

Today, just as the Western governments have started their unprecedented attack on alternative media and social media platforms we have reached a development trend that could have ushered in an environment of true freedom of speech. The monopoly of the Western mainstream media is seriously wobbling and strong challenge has emerged from various directions: media of other than Western countries challenging the Western monopoly at their turfs; multiple strong alternative media outlets; social media, which really has enabled everyone to utilize his right to freedom of speech.

But now, the masks are off. This real environment of freedom of speech is precisely what the Western elite, their governments and their media are afraid of. They now want to stop it at all costs and introduce a totalitarian media regime a speech control. For them the slogan “freedom of speech” has really only been a cover for dressing up their media monopoly, for their license to lie.

9. CONCLUDING REMARKS

By way of concluding remarks, I think it is interesting to draw some historic parallels. During the previous Cold War, the Soviet government chose to guard against Western influences and internal criticism by establishing a totalitarian media regime and speech control just as the West is right now doing in turn. After Vladimir Putin assumed the leadership of Russia, he in the beginning of 2000’s acknowledged that the Russian society was subject to a constant brazen campaign of influence from the side of the West both through covert and open means of propaganda and other forms of subversion.  Putin back then declared that Russia would withstand that subterfuge and develop its own democracy but that Russia thereby would not repeat the errors of the Soviet Union trying to close down society, Russia would maintain an open society while developing its fragile democracy and counter the Western subterfuge with the truth. Almost two decades later, we can see that Putin has succeeded. Russia has developed into an open society with a free and sovereign democracy while it is in the West that the ghost of totalitarianism is on the rise.  

Finally, I want to point out how the EU Parliament resolution on “combatting Russian propaganda” reads as a projection on Russia of all the shenanigans and trickery that the EU and its American partner have been subjecting Russia to through the years. Below is an extract from said resolution, you could exchange “Russia” and any Russian references to “EU” or “US” and then you will have an exact list of what they have been up to against Russia during the last two decades while Russia has successfully struggled, notwithstanding the West, to become a free society. In the text, I have highlighted in bold the key devices from the EU and US regime change toolkit, which they now deceitfully accuse Russia of applying against themselves.

“The EU Parliament “Recognises that the Russian Government is aggressively employing a wide range of tools and instruments, such as think tanks and special foundations (e.g. Russkiy Mir), special authorities (Rossotrudnichestvo), multilingual TV stations (e.g. RT), pseudo news agencies and multimedia services (e.g. Sputnik), cross-border social and religious groups, as the regime wants to present itself as the only defender of traditional Christian values, social media and internet trolls to challenge democratic values, divide Europe, gather domestic support and create the perception of failed states in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood; stresses that Russia invests relevant financial resources in its disinformation and propaganda instruments engaged either directly by the state or through Kremlin-controlled companies and organisations; underlines that, on the one hand, the Kremlin is funding political parties and other organisations within the EU with the intent of undermining political cohesion, and that, on the other hand, Kremlin propaganda directly targets specific journalists, politicians and individuals in the EU.”

FOOTNOTES:The way that they now publicly wage this propaganda war shows that they are really in panic. They remind me of the famous series of videos with Hitler in his bunker surrounded by his closest advisors just before the final defeat.

They are desperate. And they will all be wiped out soon, very soon.
I really hope there will be a trial, better yet that they would be lynched on the streets the way they had Saddam and Gaddafi lynched.


[1]  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12018877/The-truth-how-a-secretive-elite-created-the-EU-to-build-a-world-government.html

[2]  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/27/the-european-union-always-was-a-cia-project-as-brexiteers-discov/

[3]  http://www.globalresearch.ca/bbc-bias-brexit-the-eu-bilderberg-and-global-government/5518878

[4]  http://tass.com/politics/918809

[5]  https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/20/address-president-obama-71st-session-united-nations-general-assembly

[6]  http://www.activistpost.com/2016/09/obama-america-must-surrender-sovereignty-embrace-one-world-government.html

[7]  http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-612_en.htm

[8]  https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-of-cia/

[9]  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-created-phrase-conspiracy-theorists-and-ways-attack-anyone-who-challenge

[10]  http://www.globalresearch.ca/bbc-bias-brexit-the-eu-bilderberg-and-global-government/5518878

[11]  http://www.awarablogs.com/dollar-euro-monopolies-destroyed-market-economy/

[12]  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-02/house-quietly-passes-bill-targeting-russian-propaganda-websites

[13]  https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.6f8355bf3b89

[14]  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byj_1ybuSGp_NmYtRF95VTJTeUk/view

[15]  http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/27/the-western-war-on-truth-paul-craig-roberts/

[16]  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/30/the-cia-and-the-press-when-the-washington-post-ran-the-cias-propaganda-network/

[17]  http://www.unz.com/akarlin/fake-news-fizzles-on-arrival/

[18]  http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/27/the-western-war-on-truth-paul-craig-roberts/

[19]  http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/11/28/major-purveyor-fake-news-cia-corporate-complex.html

[20]  https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/

[21]  http://yournewswire.com/merkel-internet-alternative-media/

[22]  http://www.dw.com/en/experts-say-laws-not-enough-as-germany-fights-bots-and-fake-news/a-36528332

[23]  http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2F%2FEP%2F%2FTEXT+REPORT+A8-2016-0290+0+DOC+XML+V0%2F%2FEN

[24]  http://yournewswire.com/merkel-internet-alternative-media/

[25]  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-02/

[26]  https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/

[27]  http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/11/28/major-purveyor-fake-news-cia-corporate-complex.html

[28]  https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/

[29]  hellevig.net

>> Return to Hellevig main site

Author

Jon Hellevig

Jon Hellevig has worked with Russian law immediately since the start of market reforms in early 1990's. Having gained 5 years' experience as lawyer and CFO for American-Russian joint venture and subsequently worked as lawyer and CFO for Armstrong World Industries (Central and East Europe). Hellevig was the founding partner of what is now Hellevig, Klein & Usov, part of Awara Group.
Further information

Archive