While 16 year old Greta is a passionate and well-meaning advocate for change to our headlong dash to climate and species loss disaster; it is eminently clear that talk-fests by leading politicians and climatologists are definitely not going to make one damn bit of difference to our current polices rapidly destroying the planet.
The Paris Accord, hailed as some turning point in human behaviour to our planet, was simply a cruel facade and a hoax. Global emissions have increased, not declined since that accord was signed, and the environmental destruction of our living world has accelerated. We now elect clowns and idiots to run our countries. Those who participate in those climate talk-fests are those who are in league with those who knowingly destroy our world- the business men, the media men, the investors, the politicians- all locked in to making more money from the destruction of the thin veneer of life that used to make our little blue world a safe place for all its inhabitants.
The solutions are not to be found with those who have created this disaster. The solutions are simple ones which do not provide any profits or backhanders for those in power. In fact the solutions will help to demolish the lie of the ‘human progress’ model that has been sold to us for the past 200 years.
Planting billions of indigenous trees, ripping up the concrete and tar that seals the life out of our once living earth; growing plants of all kinds, not for profit or ‘development’ but to help restore our natural world, is our only saviour. We cannot ‘develop’ our way out of this tragedy, or find a new technological solution- that is the way of the con-man. We must return to nature- our natural heritage.
Native indigenous trees not only breathe in carbon dioxide , they provide a refuge for enormous numbers of living things, from the insects that feed from trees, the local fungi and bacteria that symbiotically live near the roots of the trees, the birds that live on the insects and the multiplicity of other organisms ( including humans) that thrive in proximity to the trees. Trees also have a huge capacity to provide shade in hot climates, to eliminate human made toxins from the air , and to increase the level of water vapour in the air bringing life-giving rain while protecting the soil beneath from erosion. Despite the ongoing hype and lies from the mass- killers of animals – we humans do not need to consume the vast amount of dead cows, pigs and sheep that we are led to believe keeps us healthy. Dramatically reducing the area of land used for grazing and replanting with the trees that once lived there, can indeed help save our planet.
The fishing industry empires, scouring the seas for the last surviving fish in our over-heated oceans are not required. Humans can and will have a much smaller footprint on our earth.
Do you need that air plane trip to Bali for your holiday? Do you need that new car? that non- repairable piece of technology ?
Each of us can plant a tree, can help save our world- now!
That racist old warmonger, Winston Churchill, has often been quoted as saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”…
Is it true now?- and was it ever true?
The capacity of taxpayer funded government institutions to manipulate public opinion has grown over the past 100 years as the theories of propaganda and the power to influence individuals’ beliefs with media, particularly electronic media, has grown exponentially.
Modern government bureaucracies have always constructed ‘stories’ for their publics about how the world is: who is our ‘enemy’ – what is ‘safe’ and what is ‘appropriate’ etc; and the major medium in the past has been via status quo newspapers ( the vast majority of modern newspaper and visual media publishers are active mouthpieces of state propaganda ( as in the U.K. with the BBC and The Guardian) perhaps because of the enormous costs of printing and distribution which requires substantial funding from status quo funders.
Solely online social media however; blogs and online newspapers require far less input and resources, and their legitimacy and media sources can be easily hidden. They are easily accessible at minimum cost to every member of society, and the public can be ‘fed’ the official line-subtly and invisibly through advertising and other online preference algorithms. The one small downside of the electronic medium world for governments however, is that ‘rogue’ alternative media outlets also have access to this cheap media distribution process (hence the desperate measures by ‘respectable’ news outlets and governments to promote the ‘fake news’ narrative and the need for major search engine algorithms to be tightly controlled by ‘respectable governments.
To foster and maintain the government narrative therefore requires more and more input to feed the official media line. As Craig Murray notes, in the U.K. there are very large amounts of tax payer money going into manipulating public opinion for the benefit of those currently in power. The 77th Brigade of the British Army, the Integrity Initiative, MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ all run major programmes of covert online propaganda. These information warriors operate on twitter, facebook, and in comments sections across the internet.
We can be sure that those U.K. manipulation agencies also exist everywhere across the world where there is sufficient taxpayer money, and sufficient need to maintain the status quo.
We could accurately call these individuals and agencies, the ‘Secret Thought Police’.
Perhaps, if those agencies had some access to a higher truth; a global need for a better life for all, saving the planet or simply creating a more equitable world, we might be able to possibly argue that those secret agencies are to our mutual benefit. But the reality is far from that. Those agencies are designed to entrench those in power with more power, and with more money, and to negate, satirize and destroy by whatever means available, alternative arguments, alternative strategies that might benefit and save ourselves and the planet. They are in consequence, administered by humans with limited understanding of their world, with vast prejudices and with limited ethics and morality.
With those huge resources of thought engineering at their disposal, ‘governments’ which across the world, have demonstrated their blindness and total incapacity to respond to the catastrophes of global heating and species loss facing us now, have instead steadfastly maintained their incestuous linkages with the very corporations and industries which have created the nightmare unfolding day by day in front of us.
When many Western governments, but especially the U.K. and U.S., have knowingly and actively collaborated with states, individuals and agencies over many years in many countries that create public fear through violence (the anatomy of terrorism), then we have a sick and debauched set of governments who have no moral right to govern. Certainly the current leaders of Britain and United States will, in the future, be key defendants in the dock for war crimes in Yemen and other countries.
The Colour revolutions of the past 10 years , (harnessing local discontents with resources from foreign governments and NGOs and businesses such as Soros) which have destabilized both authoritarian and socialist governments alike across the globe, have also, perhaps inadvertently , cast into question the authority of ‘democratic’ governments. Election results are more easily able to be questioned and invalidated in their eyes of their voting publics. Even those governments who have destabilised other foreign governments with such tools for many years; particularly the U.K. and the U.S. , now find themselves the victims of such anti-establishment processes.
We have the somewhat unique situation of the U.K.s Brexit poll being questioned by many in the U.K.; not because the voting was flawed, but simply because it was not the result that the powers that be , wanted. The U.K. may therefore hold further Brexit votes until they get the answer they want; a process which naturally underlines the key premises of the democratic system- that you vote for a party or issue at a certain moment in time to make longer term changes which you may or may not disagree with later.
The recent Hong Kong riots are an example of the complexity of the issues where governments are actively destabilised by internal groups. The fears that the proposed new extradition laws from semi-autonomous Hong Kong to mainland authoritarian China will create opportunities for Hong Kong dissidents to be controlled or imprisoned in China are likely correct. As a former British colony , ceded by the Qing dynasty of China to the British after the First Opium War, a brutal and ethically bankrupt war raged by the British to ensure a good supply of Chinese opium addicts, British Hong Kong was governed by a British Governor appointed by the British “Crown” and who had significant powers of authority up to 1997 . The current dissidents therefore hancor for a non existent time when there was in fact a democratic Hong Kong not controlled by ‘foreigners”. It is very likely that , in the current anti-Chinese climate being rapidly developed by U/S. intelligence agencies, that their British underlings are supporting the dissidents in Hong Kong to put further pressure on Communist China, along with the National Endowment for “Democracy”, an NGO front for the U.S. government destabilization agenda.
We are in desperate need of change. Our ‘democratic’ system is deeply flawed, easily manipulated by the powerful, and does not benefit in the longer term or even, in many cases, the short term , its constituent publics.
I note that the Mayor states in the forward to the Council’s proposed Annual Plan that: ‘A strong area of focus for our Annual Plan 2019/20 is climate change. Council recognises that climate change mitigation and adaptation present key challenges for our region, country and the globe. We need to build our resilience and harness innovation to ensure we can plan and act in a responsive and responsible way”
It is rather difficult to reconcile this statement, which confirms the enormity of climate change as a fundamental threat to human sustainability, with the actions proposed in this Plan.
It is interesting to note that there is no mention in the Plan about species loss and ecosystem collapse- issues which have equal weight in terms of human capacity to survive on this planet in the medium to long term, and which are completely interrelated to climate change. Other than the Department of Conservation, which has a very limited range of actions permitted to it , there is no human agency out there looking out for nonhuman survivability either in this region or nationally. Councils must act!
Given the recent government report; ‘Environment Aotearoa 2019’, which as “Stuff” notes ‘ paint a grim picture in many respects, the report’s assessment of native ecosystems and the plants and animals they contain is particularly bleak. Almost two-thirds of rare ecosystems were threatened by collapse, the report said, and thousands of individual species were either threatened or at-risk of extinction. Those species include 90 per cent of all seabirds, 84 per cent of reptiles, 76 per cent of freshwater fish and 74 per cent of terrestrial birds.”
Actions which focus on th city’s “development’ are fundamentally in opposition to working to reduce climate change and at the very least, slow down our catastrophic species loss. Whether we like it or not, humans are entirely dependent on the other species on this planet for our survival. We cannot live on shopping precincts and electronic baubles.
Human ‘progress’ equals the substitution for living and wild areas for dead spaces or toxic farming areas. Like it or not, your city planners will be forced sooner rather than later to plan for a zero growth economy – why not start now?
E.O Wilson’s book “Half Planet” and the Half-Earth Project https://www.half-earthproject.org/ make it very clear that humans will not survive on this planet without urgent and dramatic restoration of the eco-sphere that protects us all . The Extinction Rebellion movement of our youth also makes it very clear where our future does not lie and what our options are. Act now with bravery! https://rebellion.earth/
Since coming to this city I have been amazed at the amount of concrete “easy-care’ properties; in a climate where plants grow well and where lawns could quickly become low maintenance shrub and vegetation areas that support a wide range of habitats and species.
Surely our recent wildfires are a lesson to be learnt? Re-plant hill areas with native shrubs and trees that provide shade and damp ground areas beneath them and provide moisture back into the air, increasing the likelihood of rain. Stop the planting of pines and eucalypts – plants which are adapted for drought conditions and which minimise moisture loss from their leaves and produce resins that encourage wild fires in dry times.
Some Proposed Actions:
Develop and environmental code for all city planning decisions , which place predominant weight in planning decisions that ensure minimal disruption to all wildlife, along with specific actions to increase wildlife . Equal species rights is the only survivable option https://www.humansandnature.org/humans-nature-the-right-relationship
Apply permaculture strategies for urban planning https://permaculturenews.org/2012/03/07/re-imagining-urban-design-and-city-life/ (and please note that quote there in terms of busineses co-opting open spaces: The enclosure of public spaces, by the same reasoning, is anti-democratic. When shopping malls and office towers eliminate our public squares, our parks and our promenades, we lose our capacity to see each other, to socialize and speak publicly, to identify and empathize with each other, to be commoners. Without these spaces, we are forced into playing roles dictated by the Market or the State.
Develop city planning processes that are aligned with human and other species centric behaviour https://centerforthelivingcity.org/janejacobs. Develop a city whose structures and systems fosters and celebrates other species in our presence, that encourages interactions between all members of its human society (the poor, the unemployed, the wealthy , the young and the old) , that promotes safety, connection and wellbeing for all.
Replant most large lawn areas owned by the council with native and edible plantings. And stop putting toxic acid bark as mulch. Pine bark kills most of the native insects and other organisms for some soil depth – mulch with living plants.
Completely eliminate immediately the spraying of weedicides to keep berns and other grassed areas “tidy”.
Develop a city by-law to limit the concreting over of properties – all new driveways remain gravelled and unsealed .This will allow the soil to breathe underneath and permit the multiple soil species in that area to survive. It will also allow rain water to soak into the ground and help create more life, rather than being siphoned off into concrete storm-water drains and into the sea.
Extensively replant all stream, river and estuarine boundaries to the water’s edge with plants natural to those habitat areas. This will reduce erosion, silting up and improve water quality, and greatly improve the diversity of all species surviving in the area and beyond the water.
Severely restrict fishing in all areas close to the shore. Such fishing is helping (along with the commercial companies) to destroy our oceans, by eliminating essential breeding grounds for fish and other marine animals.
Stop the development of more commercial areas unless they are densely planted with native and other species.
Provide extensive education training and practical opportunities for communities to ensure their neighbourhoods are safe places for all species. (learn how to provide natural habitats, how to plant your backyard, compost etc etc ) Develop a free city-wide ‘creative commons’ of internet shared space for creating community, connection and environmental sustainability.
Develop public transport systems that are innovative and flexible and light- eg shared transport options that are modelled on electric scooter technology, and also encourage community interaction.
Encourage local small scale human activities that work alongside nature. Develop community garden initiatives, seed sharing clubs, local community planting initiatives…
Significantly extend and improve the filtering and natural oxidation processes for sewer discharge. More swamp ponds and natural screening filters to ensure all sewage and other industrial water discharges are naturally filtered and no untreated discharges occur in extreme weather events (events which are becoming more and more frequent!)
The United States has implemented wide-ranging sanctions against the Maduro administration since 2014 , claiming that it is a dictatorial regime. The sanctions , along with declining oil prices and to a lesser extent, structural failures by the socialist Bolivarian presidents, Chavez and Maduro administrations , has resulted in an economic disaster for Venezuela, with rampant inflation and high unemployment . The working classes and peasants who formerly supported the Maduro government because of its extensive redistribution of state owned oil wealth and its health and social policies, appear now to be increasingly angry with the Maduro administration for the economic failures they have recently endured. Mainstream media in the West and many Western politicians are now able to insist that it is solely the socialist agenda of the Chavez/Maduro administrations that has caused this economic crisis, while ignoring the very deliberate attempts by the United States to de-stabilise the country over an extended period of years via sanctions and supporting an attempted coup in 2002, and using its pressure with other Latin American states to isolate the Venezulean administration.
The United States and its Western and Latin American ‘allies’ have a desperate need to invalidate the socialist wealth distribution policies of Venezuela; both to ensure its corporate elites, the “comprador”, continue to receive their ‘rightful’ incomes, and bank accounts in Miami , but also to ensure that their home populations do not begin to understand that state ownership and wealth distribution is a very valid and effective method to ensure a sustainable and fair world. (where would we be -God forgive!!-if we had an equitable, efficient, sustainable and accountable economic process that ensured a country’s assets actually returned to all of its population?)
The appointment of Elliot Abrams by the Trump administration to coordinate ‘diplomatic’ efforts to replace Mafuro is a clear indication of the regime change efforts of the United States. The contemptible Abrams was heavily involved in the coordination of terrorist activities by the Reagan era contras in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and would clearly be a key contender for long-term incarceration if there was in fact a neutral international War Crimes Tribunal. As the Guardian article on the 2002 notes: the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams, who operates in the White House as senior director of the National Security Council for ‘democracy, human rights and international opera tions’. He was a leading theoretician of the school known as ‘Hemispherism’, which put a priority on combating Marxism in the Americas.
What Guaido and his American neocon advisors seem to fail to understand, is that his possible ascension to the Venezuelan presidency ( a re-run of the coup of the U.S. 2002 attempted coup ), while allowing the US regime to remove sanctions and its stranglehold over the Venezuelan economy, will inevitably lead to a nationalist backlash in Venezuela as it becomes clear that the majority of the country’s resources are being sold off to US corporates and the IMF, with possible negative implications for the recently installed intellectually impaired Bolsonaro extreme right wing administration in neighbouring Brasil-as it becomes clear who is pulling the strings in that country.
In addition, as the centre of global power inexorably moves from the United States to China , Latin American states aligned to increasingly erratic and violent U.S. corporate and state imperialist ambitions, will find themselves isolated.
What is also equally disturbing is the alacrity which which EU nations have fallen in line behind the United States’ sponsored coup in Venezuela. Their insistence on interference in another country’s domestic issues and their pronouncements on who is the ‘legitimate’ ruler of Venezuela do not bode well for human rights and the international rule of law.
The recent Guardian article penned by Luke Harding – of famed ‘the Russians are invading Ukraine with a convoy of (mythical) tanks” and other anti-Russian hysteria, and co-author Dan Collyns, alleges that Paul Manafort, U.S. convicted felon and former Republican campaign chief for Donald Trump’s election campaign, met and conspired with Julian Assange of Wikileaks to ensure Hilary Clinton was not elected President.
The authors of the Guardian story, Dan Collyns and Luke Harding, were in Ecuador recently with Equadorian , Fernando Villavicencio, who ‘assisted’ with this story and who they had previously worked with on other evidence -free stories. Villavicencio ( Fernando Villavicencio, oil exsindicalista refugee in the US) has fabricated claims about people visiting Assange in the past. In May he claimed Farage visited Assange on 28 April 2009, a month after Ecuador initiated its 8 month-long isolation of Assange, banning phone calls, all visits and internet. Assange’s isolation at the Embassy coincided with the defeat of Ecuadorean presidentRafael Correa to U.S. supporter Lenin Moreno. The Guardian article states ; based on the allegations from Villavicencio, that Manafort entered the Equadorian Embassy in London where Assange is currently in refuge, and spoke to Assange, on several occasions. But as Craig Murray notes , the Equadorian Embassy security files, let alone the London Police records, strangely show no evidence of such meetings. Embassy employees who were there during that entire time period also say they never saw Manafort or heard of his visit.
Assange and Wikileaks; and also separately, Paul Manafort, are now proposing legal action against the Guardian. Wikileaks is raising money herefor their legal appeal. In likely response to these legal threats, the Guardian has now edited its original story to soften the tone of the allegations. See the edits here at https://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/1706143/diff/0/1. If both libel actions are successful against the Guardian; its capacity to survive financially are questionable -as will be its reputation as a reputable news-source. Why then would the Guardian take such a risk? It is to be noted that legal libel proceeding costs in the U.K. can be up to 140 times the costs of similar proceedings in Europe ( ironically this is a Guardian link) .
Wikileaks’ crime is not only that it did the unpardonable; it published leaked information that accurately and truthfully described war crimes committed by both the U.K. , the US and other Western states, but more importantly Wikileaks also has put into question the very lucrative financial dealings of the City of London and also the Maltese government. Without these illegal financial dealings, (primarily via Russian ‘oligarchs’ who have fled Russia), it is possible that the City of London and much of the British economy, could collapse.
These murky financial dealings intermesh with much of the terrorist activities carried out by Western (particularly U.S.) intelligence agencies to ensure their corporate sponsors retain their supplies of cash regardless of the impacts on lives and the local environment. South American right wing governments and their military/intelligence agencies have played a key role in these activities – hence the arrival of the very dubious Fernando Villavicencio and his timely allegations of collusion between Trump, Assange and the Russians.
These allegations are one of many determined concerted media efforts to ensure that once Assange is no longer under the protection of the Ecuadorian London Embassy, there will be limited public backlash against those governments responsible for his subsequent deportation to the U.S. – his show-trial and likely disappearance..
That process is after all , standard practice already by the United States and others; make allegations against someone you don’t like or need , inform the necessary Western authorities, and a drone can eliminate any unnecessary evidence forthwith.
Julian Assange and Wikileaks have indeed played a very dangerous game- unmasking the extremely brutal and vicious international game of exploitation and greed by those in positions of power in the name of “democracy and freedom”…
Homo sapiens are a strange species. They self-proclaim their superiority over other species because of their supposed ‘intelligence”, while they are self-evidently systematically destroying all aspects of life on the planet they rely on for their survival. We are, branch by branch, cutting off all the limbs of the tree of life that enables our survival.
One might be forgiven for thinking that those actions of destroying life in exchange for the creation of inanimate objects might be considered the ultimate in folly and stupidity; but apparently this is not the case.
A quote from The Guardian about these illustrious Nobel Prize winners…
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two men had won the prize – which is not one of those originally instigated by Alfred Nobel – because they had “designed methods for addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth”.
The two men, it continued, had “significantly broadened the scope of economic analysis by constructing models that explain how the market economy interacts with nature and knowledge”.
One of the most recent media releases from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that global warming will certainly increase to 1.5C above previous ‘normal” global temperature levels in the next 12 years, and that that increase will dramatically impact on human being’s survival and many other species . Should global temperature increases reach 2C; as they will without dramatic intervention, then the impacts on all species will be catastrophic..
I am always reminded when I go to our local supermarket of this bizarre absurdity- of man making living things into commodities for human beings , when I see the little plastic labels on the fruit and vegetables being sold there. Human beings have somehow created a collective psychosis over many millenia that sees this world we live in as something for use- something outside of us – rather than the reality of being intimately and totally connected to us and essential for our mutual survival.
In the last few weeks Facebook has become assiduous in removing “fake news’ newsposts from its servers. Telesurtv is one such example- now reinstated
One might be forgiven for thinking that Facebook serves interests other than truth and honesty in its promotion of the ‘fake news’ meme, when one looks at just one such media article listed on the Telesur website Telesur is one of the few English language media outlets in South America that promotes indigenous rights against the rapaciousness of corporate entities ( predominantly US-based).
The history of the U.S. ongoing intervention in South America to promote its own interests ( ie US corporate profits) has resulted in many many thousands if not millions of of deaths, the decades long support of South American tyrannical regimes , death squads, torture and the oppression of South America’s working classes, peasants and indigenous population- as well as the rape of its incredible environmental heritage for logging and meat production companies, and the facilitation of the drug trade .
The recent U.S. sanctions against Venezuela are just one more example of the techniques used by the United States to destabilize various Latin American governments that do not suit U.S. corporate interests.
How much longer does South America have to endure the tortures of this ignorant bully from the North I wonder? How much longer will supposedly ‘honest’ American media portray U.S. interventions as being upholding ‘freedom and democracy’?
Sadly this distortion and manipulation of ‘truth’ by powerful American companies for the benefit of corrupt U.S. businessmen has been an ongoing reality for the past century.
Its as though we are all watching in slow-motion; a dream in which we slide inexorably towards that massive motorway firey pileup – helpless to change anything and knowing the inevitability of our fate.
And yet, if it were not for almost every government across the world being in bed with international and national corporations who drive “progress’ ( ie the destruction of the natural world to create the inanimate world humans enjoy)- this whole firey end might have been (and maybe still can be ) averted.
Global warming needs to be seen as simply one of the symptoms of the catastrophic global non-human species loss caused by human beings’ insatiable lust for ‘things” over the past 1000 years- a tiny timeframe in geological terms.
“Human emissions of greenhouse gas are not the sole determinant of temperature on Earth. Our study suggests that human-induced global warming of 2°C ( The Paris Accord limit), may trigger other Earth system processes, often called “feedbacks”, that can drive further warming – even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases,” says lead author Will Steffen from the Australian National University and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, we have but 3 years to attempt to stabilise global emissions and avert major devastating climate change. We know that renewable energy has some capacity to limit global warming ; but we also now that production of renewabl energy components come at a massive cost to the environment. We also know that man is ‘requiring’ more and energy to fuel his ‘progress’ addiction. Humans have to dramitacally reduce our energy consumption if we are all to survive.
And how is it that, in the face of all the evidence and the very visible destruction of our planet’s living fabric, we continue to press on to final global destruction? Simply man’s greed for transient baubles of ‘wealth’ and power. Humankind prides itself on being a supremely intelligent species.
The evidence is out- to the contrary- we are the most ignorant of all species.
What do we need? We need a global body that transcends artificial national state borders and that forces each nation-state to rebuild its natural living fabric: beginning with massive tree-planting of native local species, a forced requirement that no non-essential products for humans can be bought and sold ; an end to the so-called global ‘consumer society” and a requirement that all non human species be prioritised for their survival over any human “progress”.
From: THE MODERN WORLD BOOK OF WONDERS BY PAUL TOWNEND (1950)
Allow One species to completely dominate all other species on the planet in numbers .
Give that species the capacity to modify the living environment to suit its own purposes.
Give that species an understanding that it has a right to eliminate all species that are not immediately useful to it.
Give that species an understanding that it is superior to all other species using criteria based on its own species’ traits.
Give that species an understanding that dead inanimate things that amuse it are more important than other living things.
Give it limited powers of empathy and understanding towards other species that are not its own.
A tragic and heart-bleeding video below of a Borneo orangutan futilely trying to fight off a mechanical digger which has destroyed its beautiful home and its sustenance and countless more other living things that will be forever no more ( note the condescending language used of “seemingly defending its home “. ) for a few dollars in pay for the loggers and a few thousands of dollars to the logging company. This is why we are destroying the only home we will ever have – our beautiful earth.
Not just in Borneo, but all over the world for the last three thousand years , we have destroyed the trees and living world that made this world our home – for no purpose whatsoever…..
As the great journalist John Pilger notes in his 1st April 2018 article about the Ecuadorean Government’s silencing of Julian Assange , we are being subjected to a constant battering on many fronts to ensure we only listen to the ‘right’ information about the world around us.
The demonisation of Russia can partly be explained by Western Government’s concerns about the role of RT.com providing an alternative meme ( in most cases as legitimate -and often more so than its Western news-agency counterparts) to that expressed through what is termed Mainstream media (MSM) . Mainstream Media is in essence, western media which toe the dominant political party line – whether it be anti-Russian, anti-Trump, pro-‘intervention’ ( read ‘killing’) in other countries, or most importantly, pro-consumerism.
But this attempted silencing of alternative media stories, no matter how legitimate or truthful they are, not only extends to foreign entities like Russia or China , it also includes any highly visible figures like Assange who do not espouse what is known to be ‘right’ by our esteemed leaders, and the multitude of internet bloggers who research and analyse the stories behind the stories.
The recent bizarre attempt by western governments and MSM, to conflate alternative opinion as ‘fake news”, borders on the psychotic. It is a witchhunt against those who do not respect the often infantile repetitive lies told in the MSM or by apparently intellectually impaired politicians such as U.K’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, or for that matter Donald Trump. By now the old lies about the reasons we must fight wars in ‘foreign’ lands for ‘freedom and democracy” or to “save civilians”, are wearing remarkable thin.
Thus the ‘establishment’ is now flailing around for a further reason why we should just accept that the mass-killing of ‘other’ people is good for them. In John Pilger’s belief, this media frenzy against those who detour from the party line is a significant threat to the establishment, with the intended war against Russia and China looming and the drums beating ever louder – they can not afford a dissenting “fifth column” in their midst who can undermine the thirst for war or the need for civilians to rally behind the flag.
As the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal has made clear; it is not just Russia and the ‘enemy’ who is manipulating public opinion through ‘slanted stories’ and twitter bots! SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s British parent company, prides itself on its capacity to manipulate public opinion in both foreign lands and internally in the UK. We can be sure that there are many other western companies and intelligence services who, despite their actual minimal real intelligence, aim to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad. In the United States, this is an easy task. The vast majority of Americans have limited education, no understanding of foreign countries and no memory for history- an ideal subject for manipulation!
In the United States therefore we have something passed into law by Congress in 2016 called
The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act would ensure America’s national security infrastructure helps counter the false narratives that harm our security — delivering truthful information and making the world a safer place for the United States and our allies.”
Note .. that as written into the NDAA, the legislation’s provisions establish an inter-agency body “to track and evaluate counterfactual narratives abroad that threaten the national security interests of the United States and United States allies,” and to develop “procedures to expose and refute foreign misinformation and disinformation and proactively promote fact-based narratives and policies to audiences outside the United States.”
Where the ‘facts” come that the public needs re-education on, and the ‘false facts’ that the public needs protection from, do not of course need to be stated. Our respective governments always know best! -don’t they??
As we have seen in the ludicrous litany of lies put out by the British government around the Salisbury nerve gas poisoning affair, all the key mainstream UK and other Western media have jumped in lock-step to push the U.K government Russian-basking charges without once examining the implausibility of the facts presented. Whether these media agencies and their journalists are paid, bribed, coerced or blackmailed into regurgitating this British propaganda, is unknown at this point,
This is of course not something new. State entities have always attempted to manipulate their publics to ensure compliance to the official line -whether it be going to war, or maximising the potential threats of other states to maximise profits for the corporates who fund the ruling “elite” . In all cases, the states’ manipulatory processes are for short-term gain and almost inevitably have a long term negative impact on their public.
The most telling and catastrophically fatal example of this flaw in our ‘democracies”, is the media and political drive for corporates to produce more ‘things’ and for their publics to consume more things. All analysis shows that in a closed system like our little world, this drive inevitably leads to planetary disaster – but it helps keep political parties in power…for now….
Postscript
A useful analysis of military propaganda here from Adam Ramsay here
New Antarctica 