Information-Management In The U.S. Dictatorship

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture

The dictatorship manages information both by deceiving the public to believe what the regime itself knows to be actually false (such as that Saddam Hussein might be only six months away from having an atomic bomb), and also by removing the lie from its ‘news’-media as soon as that lie has served its purpose and becomes no longer useful to the regime. The lie goes down the memory-hole, instead of being focused upon and analyzed by the regime’s media, and the reason why they disappear the lie is that after a certain amount of time, the percentage of the public who know that it was false has risen high enough so that any further mention of that false allegation (remember ‘Saddam’s WMD’? Does anybody today even discuss that lie?) would serve only to increase the percentage of the public who will figure out that it hadn’t been a mistake, but instead had been an intentional deception of the public — a lie. The media hide their lies, instead of report on them. The lie is not investigated; it’s always a corpse that was buried without any autopsy, funeral, or tombstone, and that will always stay buried, by the regime.

A classic example of this was George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s bold lie on 7 September 2002 that the IAEA had come out with “the new report” which found that Saddam Hussein was “six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon,” and two days later the IAEA sent out to the media a notice saying that it had issued no new report at all and nothing after 1998 when they had found that Iraq had destroyed its entire nuclear-weapons-development capability. All of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, except a brief UPI news-report that was published in no major news-media, ignored the IAEA’s statement, and so the IAEA repeated the denial, and all of the ‘news’-media yet again ignored instead of published the fact — the fact that both Bush and Blair had lied through their teeth and invented that new IAEA report. 7 September 2002 was the date when the U.S. and allied regimes started their saying, as U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said the following day, on September 8th, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And, then, on September 12th, U.S. President Bush delivered his speech at the U.N. saying that they must authorize action so that “a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.” If he had been referring there to the U.S.-and-allied regime — the U.S. empire — then that would have been a true statement, but instead it was the puny Iraqi regime — and its leader — that were overthrown and murdered, by Bush and Blair, on their fraudulent basis, and they were not tried and executed for having perpetrated “Aggressive War” (as it’s called in international law) — invading a foreign country only on lies — the same legal violation that the Nazis were executed for at Nuremberg.

Of course, Barack Obama and Donald Trump also perpetrated aggressive war, against Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and other targets which likewise never threatened the U.S., but they were likewise not prosecuted for it. Right now, under President Joe Biden, even just a month into his Presidency, Caitlin Johnstone headlined on February 27th, “US bombs Syria and ridiculously claims self defense” — yet again, aggressive war, by the U.S. regime (and that was after his predecessor Trump and U.S. allies had perpetrated a 100-missile strike against Syria that likewise was based on a baldfaced lie).

Instead of fearing to be held to account like the Nazis were at Nuremberg, America’s tyrants face no such international prosecutions whatsoever. Only good leaders become assassinated in America. The Deep State gets rid of them. Today’s American Government is clearly fascist — and not like Franco was fascist but like Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were fascist: imperialistic fascists.

One of the reasons for this is that the lies that the U.S. mainstream media make public are rebroadcast in all of its vassal-nations’ ‘news’ media. On 19 April 2018, just five days after the U.S. and its allies had committed an international war-crime by invading Syria on the basis of lies, RT headlined “US media’s love affair with war: Major outlets showed zero opposition to Syria strikes”, and they made the case against the U.S-and-allied regimes: for example, “Out of 26 newspaper editorials on the strikes, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found no dissenting voices.” If that isn’t a totalitarian country, then what is? And the United States has a higher percentage of its population being in prison than does any other nation on the planet. How is that NOT a “regime”? (Many ‘news’-sites refuse to publish my articles because I use the term “regime” to refer to today’s U.S. Government. Honesty is forbidden, in and by the U.S. regime.)

At least regarding international news-reporting, the highest percentage of fake-‘news’ is in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, because only a few of America’s news-sites (all of which are small because no billionaire is funding them) even try to filter-out the many lies that come from the U.S. Government about foreign governments.

Up until February 1st of 2021, U.S.-and-allied international news reported obsessively about Alexei Navalny, who was being promoted throughout the U.S. empire as an ‘anti-corruption’ campaigner against Putin. But then on February 1st, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a “Press release on Russian-German contacts on the ‘Alexey Navalny case’” countering a string of U.S.-and-allied lies about the case, and Russia’s RT headlined “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia's FSB claims to reveal” and opened:

The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.

The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.

Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.

“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said. …

That is treason. And what is the normal penalty for treason? But instead, the Russian Government has prosecuted, convicted, and on-and-off imprisoned him, only for cases of fraud and embezzlement, and the U.S. regime and its allies lie and allege that Navalny, who is extremely unpopular and widely despised by the Russian public, has been a hero in the view of most Russians and would be the winner in any election where he would be fairly contesting against Putin. Perhaps Putin simply doesn’t want Navalny to be executed for treason because Russia’s enemies would then immortalize Navalny as having been a martyr for ‘honest government’ and ‘against corruption’.

Here is a video that Alexei Navalny posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title of “ ” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVNJiO10SWw

He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches.

An article by Kevin Rothrock, on 25 April 2017, “How Alexey Navalny Abandoned Russian Nationalism”, explained Navalny’s switch from being an exterminationist far-right-wing nationalist libertarian Russian to gravitating, after 2011, toward the U.S. liberal position and the key event that caused him to become intensely backed by the U.S. regime being the February 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine and the subsequent breakaway of both Donbas and Crimea. Rothrock quoted a Russian commentator: “The story with Crimea, where Putin acted like a Russian nationalist [no, Putin acted like a Russian patriot, and patriotism isn’t, at all, the same as nationalism] for the first and only time in his 15-year rule, plunged Navalny into deep confusion. He didn’t know how to act. Support the reabsorption of Crimea? But then they’d consider you a Putin supporter. Oppose it? Well then say goodbye to your patriot image.” (Obviously, that commentator equated “patriotism” and “nationalism.”) This was during the period when Navalny decided that he’d better stick with his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign, in order to replace Putin. The nationalism focus would no longer work for him. And patriotism was alien to Navalny’s character, just as it is alien to the character of any traitor.

Key to all of this is that the major media hide, instead of report about (such as is being done here), each-others’ fraudulence. Amongst all of America’s major media (and also in the majority of this country’s ‘alternative news’ media, since the majority of those, too, are controlled by billionaires), the thing that is the most forbidden of all to report is the fraudulence of any of them — even not to report this against their own competitors — because they’re all in this together. The few sites that are honest are small and therefore no threat to the rest. Though some news sites are controlled by Democratic billionaires, and other news sites are controlled by Republican billionaires, they’re virtually all controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires (and/or a few centimillionaires). This is a class-war, not a war within any class. And the lower classes are only victims in it, not perpetrators of it. Only the top class participates in this war against all of the other classes, and against foreign leaders whom America’s billionaires require the U.S. Government to replace. (And Karl Marx got this wrong: it’s not the “bourgeoisie” — the middle class — that’s the problem. It’s the aristocracy — the top wealth class — that is, and always was. Imperialism comes from the aristocracy — not from the middle class — and is a major part of the problem, but only a part. There is lots more harm that billionaires do, which is of the purely domestic or internal-affairs type.)

The media in U.S. and allied nations simply refuse to publish the reality of their respective government’s policy-objectives regarding Russia and China. That objective is conquest, first by subversion (exploiting traitors) and then by any other means that are necessary. The regime’s media are not to be trusted — especially not on international news. The lying there is unanimous, on foreign affairs. Whereas Democratic Party sites foment hatred against Republicans, and Republican Party sites foment hatred against Democrats (and are so far-right as to be also White-supremacist, the new-Dixiecrat party, which even needs the support of KKKers), all of the regime’s media foment hatred against any foreign leaders whom America’s billionaires want to replace. Truth is dangerous to the regime, but truth is patriotic everywhere.

Of course, this doesn’t show itself only in U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations. For example, America is also allied with the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, and they want the oil that’s in Yemen; so, America, which sells more weapons to the Sauds than to any other country, is also supplying and guiding the Sauds’ bombing of the food-supply lines that feed the Houthis, who control an oil-rich part of Yemen. The strategy of America and the Sauds is to starve these people out, to slaughter enough of them in this famine so as to take that oil. Walter Bragman at “The Daily Poster” (one of the few American news-sites that’s not controlled by billionaires) explained this on April 22nd, under the headline “I Feel The World Is Turning A Blind Eye: While the Biden administration drags its feet on the Yemen crisis, aid workers on the ground there say the situation is worse than ever.” It’s the sort of news that’s NOT “Fit to Print” in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and etc. Nobody in America turns a profit publishing the important truths. The people who have the money won’t support any of that. But publishing the right lies will draw money from billionaires like garbage attracts flies. (However, even “The Daily Poster” doesn’t report on the fraudulence of the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media. Nobody does that, except Glenn Greenwald, and now he, too, is only an independent blogger. Nobody will hire him. In effect: there’s no market for truth in America, and in its allied regimes.)

On April 19th, Jeremy Kuzmarov at Covert Action Magazine headlined “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — Former Member of Raytheon Board of Directors — Has Awarded Over $2.36 Billion in Contracts to Raytheon Since His Confirmation in January” and he documented that Raytheon had previously sold billions of dollars worth of the weapons that are causing the famine in Yemen, and that Raytheon is especially close to the Saudi royal family:

Raytheon was … the first major defense contractor to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, selling the kingdom over 1,000 cluster bombs designed to maximize civilian casualties between 1970 and 1995. The company further hired members of the Saudi Royal Family as consultants, and opened a branch in Riyadh in 2017. …

In 2019, Raytheon sold an estimated $8 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are centrally involved in the war in Yemen. After an October 2016 Saudi airstrike on a funeral home in Sana’a that killed 140 people and wounded 500 more, human rights workers discovered a bomb shard bearing the identification number of Raytheon.[2] It was one of at least 12 attacks on civilians that human rights groups tied to Raytheon’s ordnance during the first two years of the war. In order to secure the lucrative Saudi deals, Raytheon took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials to lobby their former colleagues, and later benefitted by having their former top lobbyist, Mark Esper, appointed as Defense Secretary in June 2019 in a precursor to General Austin’s hiring.

Kuzmarov had also headlined on April 15th “Biden’s Claim To Be Ending America’s Longest War Misleading” and he documented that though Biden is ordering the acknowledged U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September 11th,

As of January, more than 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Department report, when official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500. These totals reflect the U.S. government’s strategy of outsourcing war to the benefit of private mercenary corporations, and as a means of distancing the war from the public and averting dissent, since relatively few Americans are directly impacted by it.

Unfortunately, Scott Ritter had unintentionally erred in the last word of the headline when he headlined at RT on April 14th “US to withdraw from Afghanistan after two decades of war leaving behind a tortured wasteland and having accomplished… NOTHING”. That invasion and military occupation of Afghanistan has accomplished a lot — and will continue to accomplish more — for the people whom the U.S. Government, America’s actual military government, serves as its top priority: U.S.-and-allied billionaires (who own those Government-contractors). Kuzmarov’s report documented, for example, that “One of the biggest mercenary companies is DynCorp International of Falls Church Virginia, which has received over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan. From 2002-2013, DynCorp received 69 percent of all State Department funding. Forbes Magazine called it ‘one of the big winners of the Iraq and Afghan Wars;’ the losers being almost everyone else.”

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that privatizing everything is a better way of running a country, and this Biden policy regarding Afghanistan is the reality of it. Furthermore, spending this money through the U.S. State Department instead of through the U.S. ‘Defense’ (Aggression) Department, sounds so much kinder and gentler. Everything is about fooling the public.

And, yet, Americans continue to subscribe to the media, and to vote for the political candidates, who — not merely once but time-after-time and constantly — are perpetrating those U.S.-imperialist lies (such as against Saddam in 2002-, Gaddafi in 2011-, Assad in 2012-, Yanukovych in 2013-, Maduro in 2015-, and Putin and Xi always).

The majority of Americans are blinded by their particular political Party’s propaganda and read (and listen to) only the ‘news’-media that are controlled by the billionaires who fund their particular Party. This is true for academics just as much as it’s true for the general public. As an example of the obliviousness by academics: in 2012, the scholarly journal Psychological Science published a 26-page ‘study’, “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing”, which simply assumed that America’s mainstream ‘news’-media are honest and don’t intentionally deceive the public. Its five authors were presuming that only Republicans are a problem, and they also were ignoring the entire matter of CIA and major-media collusion in the deceptive reporting of international ‘news’ throughout the major ‘news’-media, and were ignoring the entire U.S. power-structure and its control by billionaires. (It was pompous, pontificating, stupidity, which is unfortunately normal even for peer-reviewed journals in the psychological and social ‘sciences’.) The lies are, at the top, not only intentional, but carefully planned.

Glenn Greenwald headlined on April 16th, “Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One”, and he called attention to the nearly simultaneous climb-down that the regime’s media had done on their accusation back on June 26th that “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says” at the same time while the Government (which initiated and had been lying about that matter ever since) were now

targeting … Russian-Ukrainian political consultant, Konstantin Kilimnik, with new sanctions. One sentence of this press release asserted a claim that the Mueller investigation, after searching for eighteen months, never found: namely, that “Kilimnik provided the Russia intelligence services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” that he received from then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Is it true that Kilimnik passed this polling data to the Kremlin? Maybe. But there is no way for a rational person — let alone someone calling themselves a “journalist” — to conclude that it is true. Why? Because, like the CIA tale about Russian bounties — a claim they learned yesterday had no evidence — this is nothing more than a U.S. Government assertion that lacks any evidence.

Supposedly, America’s major ‘news’-media are mere suckers for being repeatedly spreaders of “fake news” from the U.S. Government; but they are, instead, just another privatized part of that Government.

On April 15th, Russia announced that beginning “next week,” and continuing at least until October, Russia will prevent any military vessels of or allied with the United States from passing through the Kerch Strait, which transits from the Black Sea, into the Sea of Azov, which latter accesses the conflict-zone near Ukraine’s coast (see the map, showing this Strait). Only governmental, not commercial ships, would be prohibited passage by Russia. However, the warmongering American Axios ‘news’ site reported this as referring instead to merchant ships, commercial vessels (as if it weren’t intended to prevent U.S. warships from getting too close to Russia and to Ukraine’s conflict-zone). Axios headlined about this matter on April 20th (five days later), “Scoop: Leaked Ukraine memo reveals scope of Russia's aggression” (though it wasn’t “leaked” but had been openly published by Ukraine’s Government as having been reported to it by Russia’s Government; and it wasn’t a “Scoop” because it was already five days old). This lying ‘news’-report by Axios went on to assert that “Russia has been holding last-minute military exercises near commercial shipping lanes in the Black Sea that threaten to strangle Ukraine's economy, according to an internal document from Ukraine's ministry of defense reviewed by Axios. … Russia announced it intends to block foreign ships in parts of the Black Sea. … The leaked memo shows Russian forces escalating their presence on all sides of the Ukrainian border.” However, in reality, Russia’s action didn’t relate to commercial shipping, at all.

Axios had been launched by money from a few intensely neoconservative Democratic Party billionaires, including Brian Roberts who controls NBC, and also including the person who controls ABC and The Atlantic, Laureen Powell Jobs, who is the heir to the Apple Computer and Disney fortune of her deceased husband Steve Jobs.

Of course, since such ‘news’-reporting is loaded with lies, U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media also need lots of hired ‘non-governmental’ ‘independent’ ‘experts’ to quote ‘explaining’ and ‘justifying’ U.S. foreign policies. A typical such organization is The International Crisis Group. This is yet another example of privatization of the U.S. military state.

On April 22nd, I headlined “The International Crisis Group: Do its funders control the world on behalf of American-and-allied billionaires?” and identified the main funders of that ‘nonpartisan’ ‘non-profit’ ‘expert’ commentator on international relations, which is often cited and interviewed by the U.S. regime’s media. These are people who are billionaires, and who serve billionaires, but the billionaires themselves prefer not to be mentioned and instead for the public ‘credit’ (as funding such front-organizations) to go to the other ‘non-profits’ that they control. This way, the U.S. regime is kept anonymous. (For more information on the International Crisis Group, see Matthew Ehret’s 17 November 2020 “Lord Malloch Brown Revealed: The British Hand Behind the Coup Shows Its Scales Again”.) And that is today’s American ‘democracy’. It’s trying to rule the entire world, through remote control (vassal leaders in each ‘allied’ nation). Part of the plan is for the U.N. to wither and ultimately die. (This is Truman’s world — definitely not FDR’s.)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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