How western citizens have been indoctrinated [The WW2 Example]

PROPAGANDA TEST

Hi ha un test que crec molt vàlid, per valorar si una informació és tal o és una altra cosa. I és senzillament invertir la situació que analitzem.

Un exemple seria els especials que van fer al Catalunya Migdia de Catalunya Radio sobre Adan, un jove sirià que havia quedat en cadira de rodes per culpa de la guerra i al que van ajudar a participar en la marató de Barcelona. Li van dedicar hores i hores.

La qüestió és que hauria passat si haguessin dedicat les mateixes hores a un sirià terrorista que hagués atemptat a Europa. Sense cap dubte haurien estat acusats de promoure l'islamofobia i de racista. Com pot ser que el mateix tractament, depenent de la persona en la que es posa el focus, sigui informació o racisme?

El cas és que no és diferent: els dos casos són informació o propaganda, segons el cas. I en el cas al que ens referim, tant els reportatges que van dedicar a l'Adnan com si haguessin fet el contrari, són propaganda, adoctrinament.

LIES IN THE POST-TRUTH

1. First lie: Conflict is between the truth and the post-truth (that's the word that the holders of the truth, for some reason, use for what they call lies).

Reality: the Conflict is between an "official truth" (brought by the shapers and providers of the "official truth", mainly corporate media and the state) and an "alternative truth". This doen't necessarily mean that one is the truth and the other is a lie. We see every day how mainstry tell part of the truth, the part that supports their agenda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany#Criticism_of_late_media_reporting).


2. Second lie: Corporate media never tell lies.
(I later developed this point in http://thalassiana.blogspot.com/2017/05/pre-truth.html)

Although the ways the corporate media manipulate viewers are usually more complex than using straight lies, being more common hiding the information that they don't want viewers to know, corporate media also lie.

2.1 Clear examples are how the American corporate media went along with the Bush administration's lies connecting Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.

2.2 Another example was how the Western media justified the Kosovo war (http://thalassiana.blogspot.com/2009/08/stolen-kosovo-truth-about-kosovo.html)

2.3 A great recent example is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As Wikipedia says, it "is frequently quoted by major Western news media, such as Voice of America, Reuters, BBC, CNN and National Public Radio."

Also from Wikipedia is the description of this organization: "The organisation is run by one man, Rami Abdulrahman (sometimes referred to as Rami Abdul Rahman), from his home in Coventry. He is a Syrian Sunni Muslim who owns a clothes shop." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Observatory_for_Human_Rights)

So major Western media are quoting a guy from Coventry, as if he was some international organization working in Syria.

2.4 A local example from Catalonia, is how the public Catalan radio invited several times the director for Europe of the Soros' foundation, Open Society Foundations, without mentioning Soros' involvement in Ukraine, to speak about the Ukrainian conflict as an independent observer.


3. Third lie: Corporate media are accountable for the information they give.

In the famous documentary "Manufacturing Consent", Noam Chomsky makes a case against The New York Times about the bias when documenting crimes done by American allies and American enemies, and he uses as example the cases of East Timor and Cambodia (http://spichtinger.net/Uni/et-case.htm).

The New York Times justified the obvious bias, arguing they just can not be everywhere. Did they even apologize? No. The thing is that we can see a similar case nowadays, with the wars in Syria and Yemen, and how the western media avoid the conflict in Yemen, where Arabia Saudi is bombing the rebels.

The EU Ridiculous Propaganda

I read some time ago that Angela Merkel was worried about anti-EU Russian propaganda. She blamed this propaganda for the rise of AfD in Germany. (1)
I think this tells us a lot about Merkel's perception of reality.

(We talked some time ago about the stupidity of blaming Russian propaganda for the critical opinion of Western country citizens.)

The article said that Merkel wanted to counterbalance this propaganda.

"East StratCom Task Force" must be this answer. The official website defines it as "The task force has been set up following the European Council in March 2015, which tasked the High Representative to submit, in cooperation with EU institutions and Member States, an action plan on strategic communication in order to address Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns".

But of course, for all these mediocre politicians and bureaucrats that fill the EU it is easier to blame Russian propaganda than to analyze what it is really going on in the EU.

So they thought that they would create a Twitter account and make their own propaganda to show us how Russian propaganda is the source of all negative news about the EU.

I will not spend time analyzing each tweet this account had published, but I will need just one to show the level of stupidity involved here:

Figures leave no doubt that pro-Kremlin disinformation gives EU a bad name in Russia pic.twitter.com/ba0oTXnD6C

— EU Mythbusters (@EUvsDisinfo) October 30, 2016

Let me just drop some ideas about this tweet:

- First the geographical factor. The author of the tweet maybe is not aware that Russia has borders with the EU. China doesn't. And guess what? There's an ocean between the US and the EU!

- It would be really interesting to see how often the EU is in the US news. I bet it is much more often than the opposite (US in the EU). I bet the proportion is quite outstanding. So according to the author of this tweet, this would mean that in the EU there must be a propaganda campaign against the US.

- So Rusians have a negative point of view of the EU because of, again according to the tweet, propaganda. Then, what do we have in the EU about Russia? Has any of you head anything positive about Russia in the news in the, let's say, last 10 years? Again, according to the tweet's reasoning, we must be victims of fierce anti-Russian propaganda. Well, this is the only thing the tweet got right, in fact.

(1) About Merkel's obsessions on this subject, one tweet says: "Chancellor #Merkel recognises the presence of disinformation from Russia in Germany." Well, it would be funny if Merkel didn't "recognize the presence" of what she blames the source of her problems:

PS: Here, the Stratcom twitter account recommending an article from a pro-NATO organization...

Recommended #longread by @AtlanticCouncil on Kremlin's influence in Europe (focus on France, Germany & the UK): https://t.co/FoChiDCmVi pic.twitter.com/z16zbDEnkZ

— EU Mythbusters (@EUvsDisinfo) 20 de novembre de 2016

I loved the comment by one user:

@EUvsDisinfo @AtlanticCouncil basically... @LBaggiani @Hayektheripper @powisle16 #StabiloGruppe pic.twitter.com/4RO3KS911M

— Evidenziatore Oscuro (@TheExtremista) 20 de novembre de 2016

Victims of "Russian propaganda"

One of the accusations made to me in Twitter that I find more surprising and ridiculous is that of being victim of "Russian propaganda" or "Putin's propaganda". This accusation is a big insult to anyone's intelligence.

I live in Spain. When I turn on the TV there is not even one channel that broadcasts anything similar to "Russian propaganda"; quite the opposite, the only version given is that of the the EU, the US and NATO. When I turn on the radio, there is no "Russian propaganda" to be found anywhere; as in the tv, everywhere there is only the Western version. Exactly the same can be said about printed newspapers and magazines. But not only that, whenever you enter the internet, the headlines that services like Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc. suggest me are those from big Spanish and International news corporations. Everything a Spanish citizen receives is EU/US/NATO propaganda. And I am quite sure that exactly the same happens in every Western country.

To receive "Russian propaganda" you have to look for it. A Spanish citizen will never come in contact with RT (Russia Today - the most popular "Russian propaganda" news service), or any other pro-Russian site, if they do not actively look for it (or a contact in a social media actively looks for it). So you simply can not be a victim of "Russian propaganda" if you live in a Western country: you can only be a victim of Western propaganda or a "rebel".

PS1: One of the recurrent moments when I get the accusation of being victim of "Russian propaganda" is when I oppose the affirmations "Russia invaded Ukraine" or "Russia occupied Crimea". But there is no influence of the "Russian propaganda" in my opinion; in fact it is the influence of Western propaganda. The Western propaganda that recurringly showed maps of the Ukrainian election results to show "how unfair was for half of the Ukrainians that Yakunovych was president". And I thought, why is this unfair, and not the opposite situation? And when Yanukovych was removed from the Presidency, I thought how can this be fair for the half of the Ukrainians that voted for him? And I foud it logical that the regions of Ukraine that had majorily voted for him, wanted to leave a country where their democratic vote could be washed away by a revolution by the other half who have voted for the other option. More essentially, my option is based on the maps of the elections that the Western media published over the years, until Yanukovych was removed.

PS2: If you want to know my theory about why people look for it, for "Russian propaganda", as well as for any alternative source of information (zerohedge, infowars, etc.), is that people do not trust anymore Western media, because you feel they are not telling the truth, or not telling the entire truth, and they want to see another point of view.

The "peace" princess who turned out to be an antisemite frog

"Young Muslim woman trolls anti-Muslim demo with defiant selfies"
"Muslim woman's cheeky selfie with anti-Islam group goes viral"
"Muslim Woman Takes ‘Peace Selfie’ In Front Of Anti-Muslim Protesters"
"This Woman Took A Selfie With Anti-Muslim Protesters And The Internet Went Berserk"

These are some of the headlines dedicated to Zakia Belkhiri, a 22 y.o. who has become some kind of hero after, as described by the BBC, "When hijab-wearing Zakia Belkhiri saw members of a far-right anti-Islam group protesting outside an Islamic lifestyle event she was attending in Belgium she responded like a true Millennial.
The 22-year-old took out her phone and snapped a series of selfies with members of Vlaams Belang - a far-right nationalist group who some have described as "openly anti-Muslim"."

The problem? Not all people read the headline and retweet the photo, without any further thinking. So some people digged a little in her social networks, and turned out that the "peace hero", was a jew hater.

And it was not the only message, as you can see here.

The story behind Aylan Kurdi's death

This is one of those photos that from time to time shock the world. They are published in the cover of many newspapers, apear in the news, and are shared in Twitter and Facebook. Usually, there is only a headline with the photo.

You can not imagine anything more sad than what we see in this photo. So it is human, to want to stop it. And here is were propaganda comes in, when the headline is shaped, usually by mass media.

But, for some unknown reason, when we dig behind these iconic photos, we usually find stories that differ from the headline

This photo as many other before had been used to model public opninion. We can see a good example of how this photo changed public opinion (and therefore political agenda) in these two news from the UK: Cameron 'deeply moved' by Syria boy death and the next day David Cameron: UK to accept 'thousands' more Syrian refugees, or as described in The Independent:

"2 September: pictures of three-year-old Aylan al-Kurdi, drowned in his Syrian family’s attempt to reach Greece from Turkey, provoke a wave of public sympathy for refugees.

3 September: the slogan ‘refugees welcome’ goes viral; 250,000 people in 48 hours back an ‘Independent’ petition calling for Britain to take its fair share of refugees. Mr Cameron says Britain will fulful its ‘moral responsibilities’."

But, as usual, the complete story was hidden from the public.

Some facts:

1. Abdullah Kurdi was living and working in Istanbul before the sea crossing
2. He and his family were renting a small house paid for by his sister
3. Kurdi worked for £5.50 a day supervising women making Islamic garments
4. A passenger on the doomed boat claims Kurdi was working with the gang

Let's put the allegations made on the last point aside (Second passenger claims Aylan Kurdi’s father was working with people smugglers and was driving the boat on which his son died), because they don't change the point. The point is:

"But once the family settled in Turkey nearly a year ago, could the Kurdis still truly be classed as refugees in the same plight as those sheltering in a dusty tented city?"

So they were not refugees fleeing from death and destruction but migrants looking for a better life. A better life or better teeth for his father...?

I have read many times that the real reason the family took this dangerous trip was because the child's father, Abdullah Kurdi, wanted new teeth. But I couldn't find the source of this version, so I didn't want to publish it.

But here is the source: child's aunt, Teema Kurdi explains in Sky News:

“The situation is that Abdullah does not have any teeth. Another story about it. So I been trying to help him fix his teeth. But is gonna cost me 14,000 and up to do it. He need teeth implant. So when I told him there is now way I can get you the money in one time because dentist need to get paid right away and Western Union usually – if I send them the money – they only allowed 1,000 at a time – not under their name of course – has to be a third person to collect the money and give it them. So I said to him, actually my dad, he come up with the idea, he said to me, "I think if they go to Europe for his case and for our future, I think he should do that, and then we’ll see if he can fix his teeth." And that’s what I did three weeks ago.”

Read more inconsistencies here.