nuclear-news

Wars, Propaganda Wars and Funding Them

CoounterPunch, Eve Ottenberg, September 27, 2024

By now it’s clear even to the thick-skulled nabobs running our government, that the U.S. can’t win actual wars. It puts up a more respectable performance with propaganda campaigns, probably because those are things the mighty intellects in the CIA truly enjoy, but even those, with their ferocious philippics against malevolent Moscow in The New York Times and Washington Post, even those go down eventually to ignominious defeat. Truth will out.

Like it did in Afghanistan where, for 20 years our military men assured us victory was just around the corner and the established press harrumphed at any peacenik outraged by the slaughter. Then, practically overnight, the whole house of cards collapsed. Even those of us who had predicted a Taliban victory were stunned at the speed with which the U.S. puppet regime folded. It was a disgrace for the Empire. Not unlike the imperial misadventure in Iraq, but somehow worse. It brought all too forcibly to mind those U.S. military helicopters fleeing from Saigon rooftops so many decades ago…

For the past two and a half years, we Americans have been deafened by the clang of a stupendous propaganda war waged against Moscow and on behalf of Kiev and supposedly the west in our mainstream news outlets. We read early on that Russia would soon run out of missiles. It didn’t. Embarrassed silence greeted this uncomfortable fact. Even worse for our press and elite political fabricators, it turned out Russia BRISTLES with missiles. Little said about that in our corporate media. We also read that the desperate Russian military cannibalized washing machines and dishwashers to produce weapons, a lie that I’ve never seen retracted.

Also, those fiendish northern Slavs were accused of every conceivable atrocity against the Ukrainian population, and when later it emerged that the Russian military actually avoids targeting civilians with a care utterly absent in, say, the U.S. assault on Iraq or the Israeli one on Gaza, there were no apologies, no retractions, no expressions of contrition. Nope. The press just moved on to the next tall tale. My guess is that when this whole sorry proxy war ends with Ukraine’s defeat, the propaganda chickens will NOT come home to roost, no, they’ll flap their wings to the next nest of lies. Located where? Farther over the horizon. In China, of course.

For those who dread these frenzies of press prevarication, the news that Washington may allocate $1.6 billion for anti-Chinese propaganda cannot be good. According to a Responsible Statecraft article September 11 by Marcus Stanley, the House passed the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund” on September 9. This money is “about twice, for example, the annual expenditure of CNN,” and it goes to the state department and the infamously, covertly CIA-associated USAID over the next five years. The Global Engagement Center and USAID will lead on spending these monies, making “grants to foreign media and civil society organizations.” The bill, “HR 1157 would supercharge these programs.”

Because the bill doesn’t require transparency to foreign citizens for this U.S. financing, “it’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging…Such anti-Chinese messaging could cover a wide range of bread-and-butter political issues in foreign countries.” In other words, the U.S. government is poised to launch a MASSIVE black propaganda campaign. Foreigners exposed to its efforts can expect epics of Chinese depravity that make J.D. “One Whopper After Another” Vance’s phony cat-eating Haitian fantasy in Ohio look like child’s play. Who knows what the state department and CIA chefs of hogwash will serve up, but you can be sure it will explode your tastebuds. And for the constipated American legacy purveyors of CIA poppycock, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, it’ll doubtless barrel through them like magnesium citrate…………………………………………………………. more  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/27/wars-propaganda-wars-and-funding-them/

September 28, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized