McCarthyism
2.0 – part 3
The
U.S. government is creating a new $160 million bureaucracy to shut
down information that doesn’t conform to U.S. propaganda
narratives, building on the strategy that sold the bloody Syrian
“regime change” war.
by
Rick Sterling
Recent
Propaganda: Blatant Lies?
As the armed groups in east Aleppo
recently lost ground and then collapsed, Western governments and
allied media went into a frenzy of accusations against Syria and
Russia based on reports from sources connected with the armed
opposition. CNN host Wolf Blitzer described Aleppo as “falling”
in a “slaughter of these women and children” while CNN
host Jake Tapper referred to “genocide by another name.”
The Daily Beast published the
claims of the Aleppo Siege Media Center under the title “Doomsday
is held in Aleppo” and amid accusations that the Syrian army was
executing civilians, burning them alive and “20 women committed
suicide in order not to be raped.” These sensational claims
were widely broadcast without verification. However, this “news”
on CNN and throughout Western media came from highly biased sources
and many of the claims – lacking anything approaching independent
corroboration – could be accurately described as propaganda and
disinformation.
Ironically, some of the supposedly
“Russian propaganda” sites, such as RT, have provided first-hand
on-the-ground reporting from the war zones with verifiable
information that contradicts the Western narrative and thus has
received almost no attention in the U.S. news media. For instance,
some of these non-Western outlets have shown videos of popular
celebrations over the “liberation of Aleppo.”
There has been further
corroboration of these realities from peace activists, such as Jan
Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research who
published a photo essay of his eyewitness observations in Aleppo
including the happiness of civilians from east Aleppo reaching the
government-controlled areas of west Aleppo, finally freed from areas
that had been controlled by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and its
jihadist allies in Ahrar al-Sham.
Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical doctor
from Aleppo, described the liberation of Aleppo in an interview
titled “Aleppo is Celebrating, Free from Terrorists, the Western
Media Misinformed.” The first Christmas celebrations in Aleppo
in four years are shown here, replete with marching band members in
Santa Claus outfits. Journalist Vanessa Beeley has published
testimonies of civilians from east Aleppo. The happiness of civilians
at their liberation is clear.
Whether or not you wish to accept
these depictions of the reality in Aleppo, at a minimum, they reflect
another side of the story that you have been denied while being
persistently force-fed the version favored by the U.S. State
Department. The goal of the new Global Engagement Center to counter
“foreign propaganda” is to ensure that you never get to hear this
alternative narrative to the Western propaganda line.
Even much earlier, contrary to the
Western mythology of rebel “liberated zones,” there was strong
evidence that the armed groups were never popular in Aleppo. American
journalist James Foley described the situation in 2012 like this:
“Aleppo, a city of about 3
million people, was once the financial heart of Syria. As it
continues to deteriorate, many civilians here are losing patience
with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition — one
that is hampered by infighting and a lack of structure, and deeply
infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups. The rebels
in Aleppo are predominantly from the countryside, further alienating
them from the urban crowd that once lived here peacefully, in
relative economic comfort and with little interference from the
authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad.”
On Nov. 22, 2012, Foley was
kidnapped in northwestern Syria and held by Islamic State terrorists
before his beheading in August 2014.
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