By Jonathon VAN MAREN

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Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, is a town of 2,300 people in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Peace River country. On Wednesday, it became the site of one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings. A trans-identifying 18-year-old named Jesse Strang (Van Rootselaar) murdered his mother and 11-year-old stepbrother before heading to Tumbler Ridge High School, where he killed a teacher and five children (three 12-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy, and a 13-year-old boy) and injured more than 25 before shooting himself.

As flags across a mourning nation were lowered to half-mast, Canada began making international headlines not just due to the tragedy, but because the horrific events showcased for the world the extent to which transgender ideology has conquered the country. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were alerted to the presence of an active shooter in the high school, they issued a public alert describing the suspect as “a female in a dress with dark hair.” (To their credit, the officers rushed directly into the school.)

In the immediate aftermath, the RCMP referred to the shooter as “the deceased gunperson” to avoid referring to the trans-identifying shooter as male. The term has never before been used in an official capacity, and it instantly made headlines in The Sun, The New York Post, Sky News, GB News, and elsewhere. When asked, an RCMP spokesperson stated, “We identify the suspect as they chose to be identified in public and in social media.” The Toronto Star published a short, inaccurate headline: “Police identify 18-year-old female Jesse Van Rootselaar as Tumbler Ridge school shooter.”

Many mainstream Canadian journalists initially refused to identify the killer, and the story was left to independent media outlets like Juno News, which had reporters calling the killer’s family members in Tumbler Ridge and doing the sort of shoe-leather journalism that once defined the profession. Jesse Strang, as it turns out, was a deeply disturbed young man who began to “identify” as a “girl” around 2023; the profile picture of his YouTube account is “an anime-style figure overlaid on a transgender pride flag alongside an SKS rifle.” His mother Jennifer had previously posted about his behavioral issues and defended the transgender cause on Instagram.

Once the facts could no longer be ignored, much of the Canadian press shifted into damage control mode. CityNews appears to have applied beauty filters to photos of him to make him appear more female. The CBC, Canada’s government-funded state broadcaster, referred to Strang by female pronouns and stated that “the 18-year-old was assigned male at birth, but began transitioning to female about six years ago.” One LGBT activist claimed that Strang, in fact, was the “first victim” of the mass killing that ended the lives of five children because he suffered from the “small mindset” of the small town of Tumbler Ridge. (When asked by a journalist pursuing this narrative, the police said there is no evidence Strang was bullied at school.)

Just hours after the shooting, the CBC published a long piece featuring interviews with LGBT activists debunking “false claims about trans people” and mass shootings, as did CityNews Halifax. CTV featured an article unsubtly noting that “Mass shootings in Canada have helped prompt changes to firearm laws over the decades.” The BC Teacher’s Union rushed out a statement condemning the “politicization” of Strang’s identity; as Tristin Hopper of the National Post, a major Canadian newspaper, noted:

The attack was literally on a BC school, and the BCTF’s first impulse is to deflect attention from a system they’ve helped enable that systematically prioritizes the gender delusions of dangerous men over basic public safety. They’re telling you they’re prepared to accept much more collateral damage.

Indeed, as much as the mainstream press would like to claim otherwise, the implementation of transgender ideology into Canadian law is very much a part of this story.

Under Bill C-4 (2022), it became illegal for young men like Strang to acquire counseling to address gender dysphoria and to become comfortable with his body; the Trudeau government claimed, absurdly, that body-affirming counseling constitutes “conversion therapy.” Several journalists pointed out that the RCMP’s inaccurate description of the shooter, while the situation was ongoing, as “female” was a “prime example of political correctness being chosen over public safety.”

As Hopper noted, the police “have issued missing persons alerts telling the public to look out for a ‘they/them,’ even when the missing person is clearly male or female.” This prioritizes ideology over truth and also reduces the credibility of law enforcement.

There is also the fact that a male killer is being referred to as female by the press. “Since Bill C-16 in 2017, crimes committed by a member of one sex can now be logged under another, skewing the data, and in the case of women, making one sex appear much more violent than they actually are,” wrote Terry Newman, senior editor at the National Post. “This is an injustice to women everywhere inside and outside this country. It’s also dangerous for the public.”

The connection between transgender extremism and mass shootings is complicated, as the available data shows—but it is undeniable that there has been a recent surge in violence by trans-identifying perpetrators.

Trans activist violence and violent rhetoric against women’s rights activists have become common. Last year, a trans-identifying shooter opened fire at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, killing two children. In 2023, a trans-identifying killer murdered six at the Covenant School in Nashville. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s attempted assassin identifies as transgender, as did the individual who recently attempted to break into Vice President JD Vance’s house. The alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk had a trans-identifying boyfriend. The mainstream press, of course, is disinterested in tracking this extremism; they would not feel the same way if the criminals were of a right-coded orientation.

The tragedy in Tumbler Ridge has drawn the eyes of the world to Canada’s transgender regime and starkly highlighted the reality that once gender ideology is implemented by the state, we can no longer even agree on basic facts. The Telegraph and other international outlets referred to the killer as male; much of the government-funded Canadian press referred to Strang as a female. Were eight people—including six children—murdered on February 11 by a mentally ill teenage boy suffering from fundamental delusions? Or was the killer a young woman? Just a few years ago, the question would have struck Canadians as absurd.

As Terry Newman observed, “I can only hope that Canada becoming the laughing stock for the phrase ‘gun person’ will set us back on a course for reality.”

Original article: europeanconservative.com

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From the truth about who really killed Diana to the depraved world of government officials sexually abusing children and the subsequent cover-up, it is now clear that nearly all major stories are either blocked from publication or rewritten by Soviet-style propaganda agents working for the British deep state.

Virtually nothing you read in British newspapers about security, defense, and wars is honest journalism. Instead, it is propaganda crafted by a new secret UK military department tasked with rewriting journalists’ copy or, in some cases, simply ensuring their articles never see the light of day.

That is the shocking conclusion of a new investigation by The Grayzone, which obtained secret documents exchanged between the UK and Australian governments over Canberra’s plans to adopt Britain’s “off-the-shelf” operation and incorporate it into its own government practice for handling journalists.

The impressive reporting by Kit Klarenberg and William Evans reveals, in short, that the UK military has created its own censorship department. It either blocks journalists from exposing major stories of public interest or, more commonly, redrafts the thrust of journalists’ pieces to present a different version to the gullible public.

A trove of secret communications reveals how the secretive Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee censors the output of British journalists while categorizing independent media as “extremist” for publishing “embarrassing” stories. What sounds like an account of secret police operations in Eastern Europe during the Soviet era, the documents show that this army intelligence department regularly blocks journalists from continuing to investigate a subject through a formal system called “D Notices” – which, remarkably, journalists almost always respect.

“The DSMA imposes what are known as D-Notices, gag-orders systematically suppressing information available to the public,” The Grayzone report states.

The files provide the clearest view to date of this underground committee’s inner workings, exposing which news items the state has sought to shape or keep from public view over the years. These include “the 2010 death of a GCHQ codebreaker, MI6 and British special forces activity in the Middle East and Africa, the sexual abuse of children by government officials, and the death of Princess Diana,” the report reveals.

British media, it seems, is in a crisis it never anticipated. Its journalists are, in reality, no longer working as journalists but as propaganda agents of the state. Under this system, which nearly all journalists sign up to, when a reporter wants to pursue a story, they must consult this department, which then effectively controls both the journalist and the story from that point forward. The absurd practice of ‘copy approval’ – where journalists send their final draft before submitting for publication – is routinely enforced.

This practice, a milestone in the death of British journalism, comes as no surprise to me. For decades, I have sent questions to the UK’s Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, only to become a victim of the comical, if not pathetic, game that follows. A spokesperson asks for your deadline and then, mysteriously, 30 minutes before that time, you receive a “response” meant to serve as a quote from a senior official. It not only looks computer-generated but is often irrelevant to the subject. This is Britain – a country once seen by the whole world as a beacon of freedom and democracy, now operating like a cheap West African dictatorship, pumping out lies and manufacturing consent on an industrial scale.

That such a secret censorship department exists and flourishes should shock no one. In 2023, my own investigation discovered that UK and US weapons were being resold on the dark web. It wasn’t exactly a great scoop, but the hard work lay in substantiating the story with expert opinions and forensic analysis of photos and website postings. I was amazed as weeks passed while I badgered the Daily Mail’s absurdly young Defense Editor to run the story. He played every trick in the book to avoid it until finally he and others agreed to publish – but watered it down so much, removing all the top quotes from hardcore military and political experts that supported the story’s thrust. Clearly, he and others were under the control of these DSMA censor agents, who could not allow a piece alleging that shoulder-mounted rocket systems used by both the US and UK armies were being openly sold on the black market.

A second, much more detailed investigation – which supported the belief that barely a third of all UK military kit was actually reaching frontline Ukrainian soldiers – I didn’t bother sending to the Daily Mail but published on Patreon. One of its chief findings was that a senior Conservative MP admitted to me in a WhatsApp exchange that the UK had, in fact, installed tracking devices in some of the more expensive equipment, like Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), but at a certain point these devices were simply switched off and disappeared from the screens. It also revealed the bombastic stupidity of the then–UK Defence Minister, Ben Wallace, who conveniently chose to ignore a UN report identifying the influx of cheap Western-made assault rifles into the Libyan arms bazaar as a main reason for the spike in terrorism in the Sahel region – while insulting the Nigerian president who had made the claims, saying he “probably watches RT television.” When I suggested to Mr. Wallace that a simple way to verify these claims would be to send agents to Libya to conduct their own surveillance, his reply was, “Why don’t you do that?” before blocking me.

Wallace’s extraordinary rudeness shocked me at the time. But it was clear he was used to a much more servile, sycophantic manner from UK journalists who didn’t ask difficult questions – and that I was obviously breaking from tradition. Clearly, the DSMA department controls all those Westminster-based hacks, their stories, and even their story ideas, so it’s understandable that his rage boiled over.

The Grayzone’s findings make for depressing reading for anyone old enough to remember when British journalism was the finest in the world. But they also raise other questions, chiefly: Who is actually behind British titles? Or more specifically, who is funding them? Most UK newspapers don’t make any money, so it’s understandable that a new relationship with the deep state might help them remain relevant – especially now that the news is being baked for them, ready to be served. This has changed the role of the British journalist: no longer the baker, but relegated to the delivery boy on the moped.

Yet where the big titles get their revenue to stay in business remains a mystery. Is part of the same deal on censorship and copy control that the state funds them through surreptitious, murky channels – perhaps via companies with close links to the heart of power? Follow the money.

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James Bradley, author of Precious Freedom

Finian Cunningham, author of Killing Democracy

Best-selling American author James Bradley talks about his latest book, Precious Freedom, and how the genocidal war against Vietnam (1965-75) was enabled by the U.S. media’s false propaganda of the “Domino Theory.”

The theory was that Vietnam was falling under Soviet and Chinese communism and that the U.S. was defending the “free world” and “democracy.”

Bradley spent 10 years living in Vietnam, talking with Vietnamese veterans and survivors of a war that killed over three million of their people. He tells about the horror of mass violence from the Vietnamese perspective and how they defeated an imperialist aggressor that dropped more bombs on their small country than all the explosives that were used in the Second World War.

Our interview focuses on the “Domino Theory” and how a giant deception was played on the American public to justify a huge crime as an act of virtue. The U.S. media propagated the lies and falsehoods to enable the war of aggression.

The Domino Theory was used to justify many other illegal wars for United States imperialism during the Cold War decades from 1945 to 1991. The U.S. and Western news media no longer use the term “Domino Theory,” but the essential theme is still played out in portraying wars as a necessary “defense” against an assumed enemy.

Take how the Western governments and media claim that Russia is going to invade Europe after it defeats Ukraine and that NATO must be ready to go to war against Russia, or how China must be confronted because it is allegedly threatening Taiwan (a part of China) and other Asia-Pacific countries. Take how Venezuela is portrayed as poisoning Americans with drugs and needs to be confronted by the U.S. military.

James Bradley discusses how the Western news media are an insidious and powerful propaganda service for U.S. militarism. The crimes of empire are enabled by a lying media system.

We also refer to Finian Cunningham’s new book, Killing Democracy, which explores how the media is used as a weapon of public control. There is a foreboding sense of world collapse and growing war. To understand what is happening and try to avert catastrophe, we need to recognize the power of Western media in deceiving and confusing people into acquiescing to criminal, self-destructive policies.

The U.S. and its Western allies have gotten away with mass murder for decades, violating international law with impunity. Impunity is afforded by the media’s brainwashing of the public, which prevents democratic accountability. The U.S.-led Western powers are driven by war as a form of economic engine. The “Domino Theory” and other lies are what the Western media tell the public to permit political, legal, and moral cover for imperial crimes.

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Il Corriere della Fuffa

The Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera refused to publish an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. How strange, isn’t it?

The introductory note states that Lavrov’s words “contain many controversial statements that require fact-checking or further clarification, the publication of which would exceed reasonable limits.” The editorial staff responded with a refusal to the Russian Foreign Ministry’s proposal to publish an abridged version in the newspaper and the full version on the website. In the version that the newspaper proposed to publish, the editorial staff deliberately removed all passages that were inconvenient for official Rome.

So why interview him? What were these hacks in the pay of the Western information mafia hoping to find? Russian leaders are not like their Western counterparts; they cannot be bought for a plate of lentils.

This is a clear act of censorship, yet another, practiced as a result of the ideological hatred typical of political totalitarianism. This case is a clear example of how Italian citizens are not being provided with objective information about the situation in Ukraine, but are being deliberately misled.

The Russian news agency Tass, citing a ministerial note, reported that “In recent months, we have seen an increasing number of fake news stories about Russia. To put an end to this flow of lies, we offered one of Italy’s leading newspapers, Corriere della Sera, an exclusive interview with the minister,” the note reads. The editorial staff, the note continues, “accepted enthusiastically” and sent numerous questions. “The text was prepared very quickly and was ready for publication. However, the newspaper refused to publish Lavrov’s answers to its questions,” the ministry points out.

Corriere della Sera, the ministry reports, “stated that Lavrov’s words contained too many controversial statements that needed verification or clarification, and that publishing them in full would exceed the limits of reasonableness.” The ministry called this decision “a clear manifestation of censorship,” arguing that “Italian citizens have the right to access information, as established by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

According to the same source, two texts were released: the full version of the interview and the one reworked by Corriere della Sera. In the latter, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, “all passages that official Rome prefers not to make public have been deliberately removed. This episode is a striking example of how objective information about the situation in Ukraine is being hidden from Italian citizens, who are being deliberately misled,” the statement concludes.

Corriere’s response states: ‘The Russian Foreign Ministry responded to the questions we sent with a very long text, full of accusations and propaganda. When we asked to conduct a real interview, with a debate and the opportunity to explore critical points, the ministry flatly refused. Evidently, it intended to treat an Italian newspaper according to the rules of a country where freedom of the press no longer exists. When Minister Lavrov is willing to grant an interview that respects the principles of free and independent journalism, we will be ready to host it.”

Truth versus lies

Censorship is one of the most revealing symptoms of a democratic crisis. It occurs when freedom of speech, instead of being protected as a pillar of pluralism, is subordinated to the needs of political or media power.

This phenomenon is part of a broader context of cultural and ideological Russophobia, in which Russia is reduced to a caricature, and every expression of it—political, intellectual, or artistic—is interpreted as a tool of propaganda or a threat to security, in defiance of centuries of history and culture, friendship between peoples, and peaceful and fruitful interactions.

What is striking is the persistence of a systematic attitude of demonization of the other. Western universities have suspended courses dedicated to Russian literature, orchestras have excluded musicians solely on the basis of their nationality, and the mainstream media tend to filter or silence any position coming from Moscow. In this climate, censorship no longer presents itself as an obvious authoritarian imposition, but as a widespread mechanism of exclusion: those who do not conform to the official line are marginalized, accused of “disinformation,” or branded as “agents of influence.” Paradoxically, everything is propaganda.

Russophobia thus becomes a form of moral legitimization of censorship. It is used to justify the suppression of doubt, debate, and complexity. Russia is no longer a geopolitical actor to be confronted, but a symbol of evil to be rejected without discussion. Reductio ad hitlerum. This attitude is also reflected in political and journalistic language, which is increasingly steeped in moralism and binary simplifications: on the one hand, “democracy,” on the other, “barbarism.” But when freedom of speech is subordinated to the logic of the front, democracy itself is emptied of its meaning. So what is the collective West’s response to this violation of democracy?

True freedom does not consist in blind adherence to a single truth, but in the possibility of expressing and listening to different perspectives, even uncomfortable ones. Selective information, manipulation of content, and editorial self-censorship are tools that, in the name of “security” or “the fight against propaganda,” undermine the right of citizens to form their own opinions. Thus, in an attempt to combat the “great Russian enemy,” the West adopts a form of ideological conformism that denies the very freedom it claims to defend.

Dear West, when conscience returns, it may unfortunately be too late to apologize.

The full text

To give voice to the truth of what the Russian Foreign Minister said, we are publishing the full text of the long interview.

Question: It is said that the new meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Budapest did not take place because even the U.S. administration realized your unwillingness to negotiate on the Ukrainian issue. What went wrong after the Anchorage summit, which had raised hopes for the start of a genuine peace process? Why does Russia remain faithful to the demands made by Vladimir Putin in June 2024, and on which issues would you be willing to compromise?

Answer: The Anchorage agreements represent an important step on the path to lasting peace in Ukraine, by overcoming the consequences of the bloody unconstitutional coup in Kiev in February 2014, organized by the Obama administration. They are based on the situation that has arisen and are closely in line with the conditions for a fair and sustainable resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, as set out by President Vladimir Putin in June 2024. We believed that these conditions had been heard and understood, even publicly, by the Donald Trump administration, especially with regard to the inadmissibility of Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which would create strategic military threats to Russia right on its borders. Washington has also openly acknowledged that it will not be possible to ignore the territorial issue in light of the referendums held in five historic regions of our country, whose inhabitants have unequivocally expressed their desire for self-determination from the Kiev regime, which had called them “subhuman,” “beings,” and “terrorists,” and for reunification with Russia.

The American concept was built precisely around the theme of security and territorial realities. A week before the summit in Alaska, it was brought to Moscow by U.S. President Donald Trump’s special representative Steve Whitcoff. As President Vladimir Putin told President Trump in Anchorage, we agreed to take it as a basis, while proposing a concrete step that would pave the way for its practical implementation. The American leader replied that he would have to consult, but even after his meeting with allies the following day in Washington, we received no response to our positive reaction to the proposals mentioned, presented in Moscow by Steve Whitcoff before the summit in Alaska. Even during my meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in September in New York, I received no response when I reminded him that we were still waiting for a reply. To help our American colleagues decide on their own idea, we put the Anchorage agreements in writing unofficially and sent them to Washington. A few days later, at Donald Trump’s request, he had a telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, during which it was agreed to organize a new meeting in Budapest, to be carefully prepared in advance. There was no doubt that the Anchorage agreements would be discussed. A couple of days later, I had a telephone conversation with Marco Rubio, after which Washington, describing the conversation as constructive (it had indeed been serious and useful), announced that, following this conversation, a personal meeting between the Secretary of State and the Minister of the Russian Federation in preparation for the summit was not necessary. Where and from whom the confidential reports came that prompted the American leader to postpone or perhaps cancel the Budapest summit, I do not know. But I have presented the sequence of events to you in a precise manner, taking full responsibility for it. However, I do not intend to respond to the obvious falsehoods about Russia’s “unwillingness to negotiate” and the “failure” of the Anchorage results. Please refer to the Financial Times, which, as far as I know, has spread this mendacious version, distorting the substance and sequence of events in order to attribute all responsibility to Moscow and divert Donald Trump from the path he himself proposed, namely that of a stable and lasting peace, rather than that of an immediate ceasefire, as Zelensky’s European masters, obsessed with the desire to obtain a truce and supply the Nazi regime with weapons to continue the war against Russia, are pushing him to do. If the BBC went so far as to falsify a video of Trump’s speech, putting words in his mouth calling for an assault on the Capitol, then it will cost the Financial Times even less to lie, as we say here. We are still ready to hold the second Russian-American summit in Budapest, provided that it is really based on the carefully worked out results of Alaska. However, the date has not yet been set. Russian-American contacts continue.

Question: The armed forces of the Russian Federation currently control less territory than they did in 2022, after the first weeks of the so-called special military operation. If you are really winning, why can’t you deliver the decisive blow? Can you also explain why you do not provide official information about your losses?

Answer: The special military operation (SMO) is not a war for territory, but an operation to save the lives of millions of people who have lived on these lands for centuries and whom the Kiev junta wants to exterminate – legally, by banning their history, language, and culture, and physically, with the help of Western weapons. Another fundamental objective of the Special Military Operation is to reliably ensure Russia’s security by thwarting NATO and EU plans to create a hostile puppet state on our western borders, structured in law and practice on Nazi ideology. This is not the first time we have stopped fascist and Nazi aggressors: it was so during World War II, and it will be so this time too.

Unlike the West, which has razed entire city districts to the ground, we protect people, both civilians and military personnel. Our armed forces act with the utmost sense of responsibility, carrying out precision strikes exclusively against military targets and related transport and energy infrastructure.

As a rule, we do not speak publicly about losses on the battlefield. I will only say that this year, as part of the repatriation of fallen soldiers, the Russian side has handed over more than 9,000 bodies of Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers. We have received 143 bodies of our own soldiers from Ukraine. Draw your own conclusions.

Question: Your appearance at the Anchorage summit wearing a sweatshirt with the letters “USSR” raised many questions. Some saw it as confirmation of your desire to recreate, if not restore, the former Soviet space (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic states). Was it a coded message or just a joke?

Answer: I am proud of my country, where I was born and raised, received a high-quality education, and began and continue my diplomatic career. Russia, as is well known, is the heir to the USSR, and overall, our country boasts a thousand-year-old civilization. The popular government of ancient Novgorod dates back to long before the West began to play at democracy. By the way, I even have a T-shirt with the coat of arms of the Russian Empire,, but that doesn’t mean we want to bring it back to life. One of our greatest assets, of which we are rightly proud, is the continuity of the development and strengthening of the state throughout its great history of unification and cohesion of the Russian people and all other peoples of the country. President Vladimir Putin recently touched on this topic during the celebrations of National Unity Day. So don’t look for political signals where there are none. Perhaps in the West, patriotic sentiment and loyalty to the motherland are disappearing, but for us they are part of our genetic code.

Question: If one of the objectives of the special military operation was to bring Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence, as might appear, for example, from requests to determine the amount of its armaments, do you not think that the current armed conflict, whatever its outcome, gives Kiev a well-defined international role and identity that is increasingly distant from Moscow?

Answer: The objectives of the Special Military Operation were defined by President Putin in 2022 and are still relevant today. They do not concern spheres of influence, but Ukraine’s return to a neutral, non-aligned and non-nuclear status, strict observance of human rights and all the rights of Russian and other national minorities: this is precisely how these commitments were enshrined in Ukraine’s 1990 Declaration of Independence and its Constitution, and it is precisely with these declared commitments in mind that Russia recognized the independence of the Ukrainian state. We are achieving and will achieve Ukraine’s return to the healthy and stable origins of its statehood, which presupposes the refusal to servilely grant its territory for military exploitation by NATO (and the European Union, which is rapidly transforming itself into a no less aggressive military bloc), the purification from Nazi ideology, outlawed at Nuremberg, and the restoration of the full rights of Russians, Hungarians, and all other national minorities. It is significant that the elites in Brussels, dragging the Kiev regime into the EU, are silent on the blatant discrimination against “non-native peoples” (as Kiev contemptuously refers to Russians who have lived in Ukraine for centuries) and at the same time extol Zelensky’s junta as a defender of “European values.” This is further confirmation that Nazism is rearing its head in Europe. There is food for thought here, especially in light of the fact that at the UN, Germany and Italy, together with Japan, have recently begun voting against the General Assembly’s annual resolution on the inadmissibility of glorifying Nazism.

Westerners make no secret of the fact that they are effectively waging a proxy war against Russia through the Ukrainians, a war that will not end even “after the current crisis.” This has been discussed on several occasions by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Brussels bureaucrats Ursula von der Leyen and Kaya Callas, and the U.S. President’s Special Envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. It is clear that Russia’s determination to ensure its own security in the face of threats created by the West with the help of the regime it controls is legitimate and justified.

Question: The U.S. is also sending weapons to Ukraine and recently even discussed the possibility of supplying Kiev with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Why do you have a different position and assessment of U.S. and European policy?

Answer: Most European capitals currently form the core of the so-called “coalition of the willing” that wants only one thing: for hostilities in Ukraine to last as long as possible, “until the last Ukrainian.” Apparently, they have no other way to divert the attention of their electorate from domestic socio-economic problems that have drastically worsened. With European taxpayers’ money, they finance the terrorist regime in Kiev, supplying weapons with which civilians in Russian regions and Ukrainians who want to flee the war and Nazi executioners are systematically killed. They sabotage any attempt at pacification and refuse direct contact with Moscow. They constantly introduce new “sanctions” which, like a boomerang, hit their own economies even harder. They are openly preparing for a new major European war against Russia. They are persuading Washington not to accept an honest and fair diplomatic solution.

Their main goal is to undermine the position of the current U.S. administration, which was initially in favor of dialogue, understood Russia’s position, and showed a willingness to seek a peaceful and lasting solution. Donald Trump has repeatedly acknowledged publicly that one of the causes of Russia’s initiatives was NATO’s expansion, the approach of the alliance’s infrastructure to our country’s borders, which is exactly what President Putin and Russia have been warning about for the past 20 years. We trust that common sense and adherence to this principled position will prevail in Washington and that they will refrain from actions that could escalate the conflict to a new level.

That said, our armed forces make no distinction between the origin of the weapons supplied to the Ukrainian armed forces, whether they are European or American. Any military target is immediately destroyed.

Question: You were the one who pressed the “reset button” with Hillary Clinton, even though things turned out differently. Is a restart of relations with Europe possible? Could common security be fertile ground for improving current relations?

Answer: The conflict caused by the reckless and short-sighted policy of the European elites was not Russia’s choice. The current situation is not in the interests of our peoples. It would be desirable for European governments, most of which pursue a fiercely anti-Russian policy, to realize the danger of this destructive course. Europe has already fought under Napoleon’s banners and, in the last century, under Hitler’s Nazi banners and flags. Some European leaders seem to have short memories. When this Russophobic fury – there is no other way to describe it – has passed, we will be open to contact and to listening to how our former partners intend to behave towards us in the future. Only then will we decide whether there are still prospects for honest cooperation.

The Euro-Atlantic security system that existed until 2022 has been completely discredited and dismantled by the efforts of the West itself.

In this regard, President Vladimir Putin has put forward an initiative to create a new, equitable and indivisible security architecture in Eurasia. It is open to all states on the continent, including its European part, but it will be necessary to behave respectfully, without neo-colonial arrogance, on the basis of the principles of equality, mutual consideration and balance of interests.

Question: Has the armed conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent international isolation probably prevented you from acting more effectively in other crisis areas, such as the Middle East?

Answer: If the historical West has decided to isolate itself from someone, then it is self-isolation. And even in this case, the ranks are not so tight: this year, Vladimir Putin met with the leaders of the United States, Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia. It is also clear that the modern world is not limited to the Western minority. Those days are over with the advent of multipolarity. Our relations with the countries of the South and East, which represent over 85% of the world’s population, continue to expand. In September, the Russian president paid a state visit to China, and in recent months alone, Vladimir Putin has participated in the summits of the SCO, BRICS, CIS, and Russia-Central Asia, while our high-level government delegations have participated in the APEC and ASEAN summits and are now preparing for the G20 summit. Russia-Africa and Russia-Gulf Cooperation Council ministerial summits and meetings are held regularly. The majority of countries in the world are guided by their own fundamental national interests, not by the dictates of former colonial powers.

Our Arab friends appreciate Russia’s constructive contribution to efforts to resolve regional conflicts in the Middle East. The current discussions on the Palestinian issue at the United Nations confirm the need to involve all influential external actors, otherwise nothing lasting will be achieved, only superficial ceremonies. On many other international issues, our positions coincide or are very close to those of our Middle Eastern friends, which facilitates cooperation within the UN and other multilateral platforms.

Question: Don’t you think that in the new multipolar world order that you promote and support, Russia’s economic and military dependence on China has grown, thus creating an imbalance in your historic alliance with Beijing?

Answer: We are not “promoting” a multipolar world order; it is objectively taking shape, not through conquest, slavery, oppression, and exploitation, as the colonizers did when building their “order” (and later capitalism), but through cooperation, consideration of mutual interests, and the rational distribution of labor based on the combination of the comparative competitive advantages of the participating countries and integration structures.

As for relations between Russia and China, this is not an alliance in the traditional sense of the word, but a more effective and advanced form of interaction. Our cooperation is not a bloc and is not directed against third countries. The categories of “leader” and “subordinate,” typical of alliances formed during the Cold War, are not applicable here. Therefore, it is inappropriate to speak of any “imbalance.”

The equal and self-sufficient relations between Moscow and Beijing are based on mutual trust and support, as well as centuries-old traditions of good neighborliness. We are firmly committed to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs.

Trade, technological, and investment cooperation between Russia and China brings tangible practical benefits to both countries, contributes to the stable and sustainable growth of our economies, and improves the well-being of our citizens. Close cooperation between our armed forces ensures important complementarity, helps our countries defend their national interests in the field of global security and strategic stability, and effectively counter new and traditional challenges and threats.

Question: Italy is a ‘hostile’ country. You yourself have repeated this several times, in November 2024, and even emphasized it in particular. However, in recent months, including on the Ukrainian issue, our government has shown solidarity with the U.S. administration, which Vladimir Putin has described not as an ally, but undoubtedly as a ‘partner’. And the recent change of Italian ambassador to Moscow suggests that Rome wants a certain rapprochement. What is the state of our bilateral relations?

Answer: For Russia, there are no hostile countries or peoples, there are countries with hostile governments. With such a government in Rome, Russian-Italian relations are going through the most serious crisis in their post-war history. This did not happen on our initiative. We were surprised by the ease with which Italy, to the detriment of its own national interests, sided with those who bet on Russia’s “strategic defeat.” So far, we see no significant change in this aggressive attitude. Rome continues to provide all-out assistance to the neo-Nazis in Kyiv. The desire to sever cultural ties and contacts between civil societies is also striking. The Italian authorities are canceling performances by prominent Russian conductors and opera singers and have not authorized the “Verona Dialogue,” which originated in Italy and is dedicated to issues of Eurasian cooperation, for several years. This does not seem at all typical of Italians, who are usually open to art and dialogue between people.

At the same time, many of your citizens are trying to understand the reasons for the Ukrainian tragedy. For example, the book “The Ukrainian Conflict as Seen by an Italian Journalist” by the well-known Italian publicist Eliseo Bertolazzi contains documentary evidence of violations of international law by the authorities in Kiev. I would recommend reading this publication. Today in Europe, it is not easy to find the truth about Ukraine.

Equal and mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and Italy is in the interests of our peoples. If Rome is willing to move towards restoring dialogue on the basis of mutual respect and consideration of the interests of both sides, let us know. We are always ready to listen, including to your ambassador.

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The BBC is in turmoil, its director-general and head of news forced to resign after a memo leaked to the Daily Telegraph highlighted editorial malpractice at the state broadcaster’s flagship news programme Panorama. The documentary had spliced together two separate clips of Donald Trump speaking on 6 January 2021, shortly before a riot at the Capitol building in Washington. The speech’s sentiments that day may not have been much misrepresented, but its contents technically were.

But Panorama, and the BBC more generally, have been exposed peddling far worse misinformation. In those cases, there have been precisely no consequences for such out-in-the-open journalistic abuses.

The reason heads have rolled at the BBC this time are not because it made a journalistic blunder – it makes them all the time. It is because the corporation foolishly offered an open goal to the billionaire right and its media outlets. This is just the latest, particularly damaging skirmish in a years-long battle by the right to bring down the BBC – while, in the meantime, ensuring that the corporation turns even more pliant than it already is in promoting the right’s interests.

We are now in a death loop in which the BBC becomes ever more craven to the billionaires, thereby shifting the political centre of gravity ever further rightwards. Much of the British public have been convinced by the billionaire-owned media that the BBC is actually “leftwing”. And as a result, the right grows ever more confident in advancing the billionaires’ self-interested agenda, knowing there will be no pushback.

British politics, as Keir Starmer illustrates only too keenly, is in exactly the same death loop. The billionaires are in charge, whoever leads. The main political battle is over image-laundering: where to direct the hate.

Open-for-business, austerity-affirming Starmer wants us hating chiefly on those who criticise him from the left, such as opponents of his support for Israel’s genocide. Open-for-business, austerity-affirming Nigel Farage wants us hating chiefly on the immigrants. But, of course, both hate the left and immigrants.

If anyone is falling for the manufactured “furore” over Panorama’s latest journalistic gaffe, there are examples of far graver malpractice by Panorama – especially on issues related to Israel and Palestine. These editorial crimes have barely caused a ripple, even after they were exposed.

Why? Because the billionaires love Israel and hate its critics. Israel is their vision of the future: the model of a fortress state in which they believe they can protect themselves from the people whose lives they are destroying around the globe.

Israel is also the laboratory where they can test and refine the surveillance technology, the weapons and the policing methods they will need if they are to keep their own publics controlled and subdued as austerity bites ever deeper. Gaza may be coming to street near you soon.

Here are two examples of crimes against journalism from Panorama that illustrate what you can get away with as long as you keep the billionaires happy.

The first gave Israel cover for the crimes it committed against peace activists trying to bring aid to Gaza in 2010 – thereby setting the tone for subsequent coverage that would ultimately lead to, and justify, the Gaza genocide.

The second marshalled disinformation to cement Jeremy Corbyn’s reputation as a supposed “antisemite” in the immediate run-up to 2019 general election. Starmer would go on to use the confected antisemitism row to seize control of Labour, oust Corbyn, approve as opposition leader of Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population, and back Israel’s genocide as prime minister.

Death in the Med (2010)

In 2010 reporter Jane Corbin fronted Panorama’s “Death in the Med”, about an Israeli commando raid a few months earlier on the lead aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in a humanitarian flotilla that was trying to reach Gaza, despite an illegal Israeli blockade.

(The programme now serves as an unwelcome reminder that the “conflict” between Israel and Hamas did not begin on 7 October 2023, as the western media would have us believe. For the proceeding 17 years, Israel had been trapping the people of Gaza inside the tiny enclave while blocking food and medicine from reaching them – what Israel referred to as “putting them on a diet”.)

The commandos attacked the ship in international waters and killed nine activists on board, several with close-range shots to the head. The illegality of invading a ship in international waters was not mentioned by Panorama, nor were the execution-style killings. Instead the programme featured “exclusive” interviews with some of the commandos, largely presenting them as the victims.

Ludicrously, Israel had accused the activists of belonging to al-Qaeda. A central justification for its violent raid was footage Israel had produced suggesting that it was the commandos who had been attacked by the peace activists, not the other way round. Israel also released a radio communication in which an activist could supposedly be heard, shortly before the raid, telling the commandos to “Go back to Auschwitz”. Corbin referred to this as a “warning sign”.

Panorama made no mention of the fact that Israel had seized all media equipment from the journalists and activists onboard the Marmara. The activists were forcibly taken to Israel, where they were held incommunicado for several days. The purpose was clear: to ensure that Israel exclusively controlled the narrative while the Mavi Marmara incident was making headlines.

Early on, the Foreign Press Association in Israel warned that the Israeli military was “selectively using footage to bolster its claims that commandos opened fire only after being attacked”. The Committee to Protect Journalists similarly denounced Israel’s editing and distribution of the footage it had confiscated.

By the time Panorama aired “Death in the Med” three months later, the Israeli-imposed fog had lifted further. Israel had been forced to make a “correction”, admitting that it had doctored the incendiary “Auschwitz” recording and that it had no idea who had made the comment. The voice was from someone with a strong southern US accent, but none of the people on the Marmara with access to the radio were American.

It was quite extraordinary that the programme posed as the central question whether this was a case of “self-defence or excessive force” by Israel. Israel had no right to “defend” itself in international waters from unarmed peace activists. But the question was even more preposterous given all the critically important evidence that emerged subsequently but that Panorama chose to ignore.

Instead, Jane Corbin excitedly joined Israeli commandos on a “training operation” and breathlessly interviewed some of the men who had attacked the Marmara. Corbin’s introduction gave a taste of her approach:

They called it Operation Sea Breeze, but what these Israeli naval commandos encountered on the Mavi Marmara was anything but a breeze. It caused a storm of international condemnation. But did Israel fall into a trap, and what was the real agenda of some of those people who call themselves peace activists?

This is a staple of journalistic malpractice from the BBC when it comes to Israel. Appear to offer contrasting possibilities, while actually offering only one – the one that encourages sympathy for Israel. According to Panorama, either heavily armed Israeli commandos were lured into a “trap” (presumably by peace activists bent on violence), or the peace activists were not as peaceful as they seemed (because they were actually bent on violence).

Panorama was effectively helping Israel to justify an act of piracy on the high seas, the siege of Gaza, and the murder of nine humanitarian activists.

Is Labour Antisemitic? (2019)

In the run-up to the 2019 election, Panorama broadcast a special, hour-long episode on the state of the Labour party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. For the programme-makers, the question mark in the title was entirely redundant. Panorama was bent on proving that Labour was indeed antisemitic, whatever the evidence.

Corbyn, the first leader of a major British political party to place the right of Palestinians to be free of Israel’s illegal occupation ahead of Israel’s supposed “right” to continuing its illegal occupation, had been the target of relentless criticism since he was elected leader in 2015. The media accused him of overseeing – and encouraging – a supposed “plague of antisemitism” among party members.

To anyone who was paying attention at the time, those allegations seemed, at the very least, to be highly convenient, particularly given that the British establishment was all too obviously rattled by the risk that a politician who was an avowed socialist and was calling for a wide-scale redistribution of wealth might become prime minister.

But the malicious purpose of the antisemitism smears should be far clearer by now. Millions of Britons who have gone out to protest against the Gaza genocide have been defamed as antisemites. As have students setting up encampments to stop their universities from colluding with the genocide. As have Jews who oppose Israel’s genocide. As have the West Midlands police for trying to stop Israeli football hooligans, many of them likely to be Israeli soldiers who have helped carry out the genocide, from bringing their brand of racist violence to the UK’s streets. We could go on.

The Panorama programme on Corbyn made its case through serial misrepresentations – too many to document here. But the case against the Panorama episode is dealt with fully in this documentary here.

Those deceptions included a series of interviews with unidentified “party members” who claimed to have faced antisemitism in Labour. What Panorama did not tell viewers was that these talking heads belonged to an aggressively pro-Israel lobby group inside Labour called the Jewish Labour Movement.

By the time Panorama aired its programme, senior members of the JLM had already been exposed in a series of filmed investigations by an undercover Al-Jazeera reporter. The series had shown the JLM’s leaders, such as Ella Rose, who featured prominently in the Panorama special, conspiring with the Israeli embassy to oust Corbyn as Labour leader. None of this important context was mentioned in the Panorama programme.

Nor did the BBC interview the significant number of Jewish Labour party members – many of them in the group Jewish Voice for Labour – who disputed the JLM’s claim that the party was antisemitic. Many of these pro-Corbyn Jews – branded the “wrong kind of Jews” by the media – regarded the JLM as effectively an anti-Corbyn, entryist group.

Other examples of journalistic malpractice included an email from a top Corbyn adviser, Seumas Milne, which had been misleadingly edited by Panorama – echoes of the Trump episode – to wrongly suggest he was interfering in disciplinary hearings and doing so to protect antisemites.

An interview with a JLM member, Izzy Lenga, was also edited misleadingly – to put it charitably – to suggest she had been subjected to horrifying antisemitic abuse in Labour, such as comments that “Hitler was right”.

In fact, that was not true, as the clip below, from al Al-Jazeera exposé, shows. The antisemitic comments Lenga referenced had happened four years earlier, when she was at university, and had nothing to do with the Labour party. At the time, Lenga had told the Daily Mail about neo-Nazis placing “Hitler is right” posters around her campus.

The BBC issued a correction – a minor one, hidden away on its corrections page – three years later. It was barely noticed and came long after the damage had been done to Corbyn.

Notably, Lenga’s unedited quote, cited in the correction, shows that Panorama’s editors were fully aware of what had really happened to Lenga. Their doctoring of the interview looks designed to deceive viewers, encouraging them to think Corbyn presided over an institutionally racist Labour party. That deception happened just weeks before a general election.

Similarly, Panorama misrepresented an interview with two pro-Corbyn party members in Liverpool under investigation by Labour for antisemitism. The programme failed to mention that both women were Jewish. That fact would have substantially undermined the premise of Panorama’s programme.

Instead the documentary concentrated on the fact that the man interviewing them, Ben Westerman, was Jewish. He claimed to Panorama that he was on the receiving end of antisemitic abuse from the pair. He said the women had asked: “Where are you from? Are you from Israel?”

He told Panorama: “What can you say to that? You are assumed to be in cahoots with the Israeli government. It’s this obsession with the fact.. that it spills over all the time into antisemitism.”

However, as the same Al-Jazeera exposé revealed, the women had taped the interview, with Westerman’s consent. The recording shows they made no such comment. One, Rica Bird, can be heard asking at the end of the interview: “I’m just curious because I haven’t been in the Labour party very long, and I’ve certainly never been to anything like this informal interview before. So I’m just curious about, like, what branch are you in?”

Panorama is the BBC’s flagship news investigations programme. It spends months working on programmes and has a huge budget. Westerman’s claim that the women had been antisemitic needed to be checked with them. They had a right to respond to his allegations. The fact they themselves were Jewish made his claims even less plausible.

Had Panorama done the most elementary fact-checking – checks that any journalism student would be expected to do – its researchers would quickly have learnt from the women that the interview was recorded. The recording would have shown that Westerman’s claims were untrue.

Proper checks weren’t done in the case of “Death in the Med” or “Is Labour Antisemitic?” because Panorama editors knew that no one in power would care. Defaming peace activists trying to bring aid to a besieged population; smearing a socialist standing to be prime minister. No one would hold the BBC to account.

Why? Because those weren’t errors by the BBC. That’s its job. That is what it is there to do. It is there to uphold narratives that support the interests of the British establishment, as its founder, Lord Reith, explained in the 1920s. “They [the government] know they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

The fact that the BBC is now in hot water for editing a Trump speech – altering its contents without altering its sentiments – is a sign that its senior staff have been misreading the political climate. The establishment itself is now at war – over strategy. Between the traditional right, desperately trying to enforce a crumbling popular, liberal consensus, and the MAGA far-right trying to exploit the crumbling consensus to their own advantage.

It is a sign that the far right is now too far in the ascendant to be given even a small taste of the treatment regularly faced by the left or Israel’s critics. The far right – backed by, and serving, the billionaires – is winning. Time for the BBC to catch up, and bow even lower.

Original article: jonathan-cook.net

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No es de hoy que los brasileños se informan (o se desinforman) sobre los acontecimientos internacionales a través del monopolio de agencias de noticias occidentales, estrechamente ligadas a los intereses de los gobiernos de los principales países imperialistas. Vemos diariamente los ataques y mentiras lanzados contra los revolucionarios palestinos que luchan contra la barbarie genocida de Israel y del imperialismo en Medio Oriente, describiéndolos de la peor manera posible y deseando que sean aplastados. Esto no es ninguna novedad.

De acuerdo con una investigación realizada por un grupo de estudiantes de periodismo, las informaciones difundidas en la prensa brasileña hace más de 100 años sobre la Revolución Rusa provenían exclusivamente de agencias extranjeras. Y la mayoría de las noticias destacaban únicamente el supuesto “lado malo” de los bolcheviques.

Incluso antes de que estos tomaran el poder en octubre (según el calendario ruso de entonces; noviembre, en el occidental), ya eran retratados de forma negativa y con muchos adjetivos. Astrojildo Pereira, fundador del PCB, denunciaba en un artículo de la época las “calumnias e imbecilidades de que se ha servido nuestra prensa en las apreciaciones sobre la obra de los maximalistas rusos”. “Sus apóstrofes de maldición se precipitan sobre los maximalistas, ‘monstruos’ satánicos y crueles, provocadores de la ruina de su propia patria”, ironizaba el militante anarquista, que tras la victoriosa Revolución de Octubre se convirtió al comunismo.

Al igual que en la prensa estadounidense, en las páginas de los periódicos brasileños se leía que los bolcheviques estaban al servicio de Alemania. Augusto Buonicore recuerda que A Noite, del 5 de mayo de 1917, llegó a afirmar que los trabajadores rusos que protestaban contra la guerra durante el gobierno provisional estaban “dirigidos por agentes alemanes”, siendo uno de ellos Lenin, quien había sido “asesinado en Petrogrado” en aquellos días. Esta última información fue atribuida por el medio a un “corresponsal de un periódico noruego”. Pocos días después, el periódico brasileño volvió a publicar la muerte de Lenin (¡por segunda vez!) “durante una trifulca entre obreros y soldados”.

O Combate, del 25 de julio de 1917, describía a Lenin como “jefe del espionaje alemán, habiendo gastado en los últimos meses varios millones de rublos”.

El líder comunista fue varias veces perseguido por los periodistas burgueses. Artículos surrealistas como uno del Correio da Manhã decían lo siguiente: “El célebre agitador Lenin falleció en 1916 en Suiza, y el falso Lenin que últimamente ha agitado a Rusia no es otro sino cierto Zaberlun, antiguo amigo de Lenin.” Según Buonicore, era común retratar a Lenin como judío, en “un claro intento de relacionar la revolución rusa con un supuesto complot judío internacional para conquistar el mundo”.

Aún sobre Lenin, el periódico Época, del 1º de octubre de 1917, inventaba: “Su manera de vestir es de las más descuidadas (…) lo que no le impide desde la revolución llevar diamantes en los botones de los puños de las camisas”, además de informar que había sido arrestado por el gobierno provisional, lo cual no ocurrió.

Después de la Revolución Socialista, el 7 de noviembre según el calendario occidental, la campaña continuó, esta vez asegurando la inevitable caída del gobierno revolucionario.

El 11 de noviembre, A Noite afirmaba que los bolcheviques caerían sin demora: “Los cosacos, ayudados por los minimalistas, están a punto de dominar a los leninistas, con los cuales han entablado combates en las calles de la capital.” Al día siguiente, recuerda Buonicore, el mismo periódico “informaba” que “Kerenski, al frente de 200 mil hombres dedicados y apoyado por la gran mayoría de la población, así como por el Ejército y las organizaciones conservadoras”, estaba luchando contra los bolcheviques, que a esa altura ya habrían huido. “Esperemos, con optimismo, el resultado de la lucha que se está librando, porque de ella debe salir triunfante la buena causa que es la que defiende Kerenski.”

O País y O Imparcial anunciaban, respectivamente, que “el gobierno encabezado por el Sr. Lenin se reconoció incapaz de detener las considerables fuerzas de Kerenski” y que no cabían dudas: “Kerenski dominará por completo el desorden leninista.” O Imparcial también afirmaba que “fuentes autorizadas” informaban que las tropas de Kerenski marchaban sobre Petrogrado.

Y llegó el colmo de la mentira, el 13 de noviembre, publicado por A Noite: “El Sr. Kerenski sale una vez más triunfante de sus enemigos. En los arrabales y dentro de la propia capital (…) se libró una batalla que terminó (…) con la derrota de los maximalistas. Estos ya reconocen, por lo demás, su perdición y procuran ahora llegar a un acuerdo, que Kerenski rechaza por completo, declarando que los maximalistas depusieron las armas, dominando la ciudad otro comité, formado por el expresidente de la Duma.”

Pura ficción. Vergonzosa y completa distorsión de los acontecimientos. En realidad, no eran más que mentiras inventadas por las fuerzas contrarrevolucionarias rusas y difundidas por los medios de comunicación occidentales. A Noite continuaba la historia, esta vez predicando un castigo a los bolcheviques: “Es necesario que esta aventura sea castigada ejemplarmente para que los cómplices de Lenin u otros agitadores anarquistas, al servicio de Alemania, no tengan ganas de repetirla.” Pobre del público lector de ese periódico…

La derrota y la huida de las fuerzas revolucionarias fueron anunciadas durante un largo período. El 17 de diciembre de 1918, A Gazeta publicaba una nota del inglés Daily Mail, reproduciendo la declaración de un militar sueco que afirmaba que Lenin y sus camaradas se preparaban para huir de Rusia debido al avance de las tropas extranjeras. Como se vio en el artículo anterior, esa mentira fue común también en la prensa internacional.

También llegaron a las páginas de los periódicos las supuestas atrocidades cometidas por el poder soviético. “Los bolcheviques persiguen a ingleses y franceses en Rusia”, “Continúa el reinado del terror en Petrogrado” y “En Rusia se cometen casos monstruosos en nombre del socialismo” eran algunos de los titulares del periódico A Gazeta. Este último título pertenecía a una nota publicada el 13 de septiembre de 1918, reproducida de un corresponsal del New York Times. El periodista afirmaba que el gobierno de los sóviets estaba realizando masacres contra personas inocentes, exterminando a supuestos enemigos, y pedía la intervención de las potencias occidentales.

Como escribe Buonicore, así se originó uno de los mitos más ridículos acerca del comunismo: Durante la gran hambruna que azotó aquel país a comienzos de la década de 1920 —fruto de la sequía y de la guerra civil impuesta por las potencias capitalistas—, un periódico escribió: “Allí los hambrientos desenterraban cadáveres para comer. Los adultos, hambrientos, envidiaban a los niños alimentados por la American Relief Administration, provocando casos frecuentes de canibalismo. Además, en Samara, la policía cerró un restaurante que servía a los clientes carne de niños.” Surgía así la leyenda, repetida durante décadas, de que los comunistas comían niños. (Y, de paso, que los santos salvadores estadounidenses alimentaban a los hambrientos, tratando de protegerlos de la miseria impuesta por el comunismo).

El periódico carioca A Razão, el 16 de noviembre de 1917, poco después de la toma del poder por los bolcheviques, los llamaba “locos”, “notables canallas”, por querer abolir la propiedad privada y entregar las tierras a la “plebe inconsciente”. Para ese periódico, Lenin era un “monstruo” y los bolcheviques, financiados por Alemania, traicionaban “de modo escandaloso” a los Aliados.

Sobre este pasaje de A Razão, Astrojildo Pereira escribió: “[…] es un documento que merece registro y del cual debemos acordarnos para las necesarias satisfacciones, el día en que la revolución, atravesando el océano, irrumpa justiciera por estas riquísimas tierras brasílicas de miserables y hambrientos…”

Esa reflexión del dirigente comunista brasileño es de total actualidad. Por lo visto, poco ha cambiado en cien años en la cobertura de la prensa sobre los acontecimientos mundiales. Las difamaciones contra Cuba, Venezuela, Corea del Norte, etc., siguen la misma línea hoy en día. Los grandes medios de comunicación, controlados por un puñado de capitalistas, continúan siendo enemigos implacables de la clase trabajadora.

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O veto da Rússia, com o apoio tácito da China, à continuação da existência do famigerado painel de “especialistas” das Nações Unidas sobre as sanções à Coreia do Norte foi um marco da virada de jogo nas relações de Pyongyang com o imperialismo e o ocidente. Ele simbolizou um fenômeno que já vinha ocorrendo há quase dez anos: as contradições de Moscou e Pequim com os Estados Unidos as levaram a dar as mãos à RPDC e a selarem um pacto para a defesa conjunta contra a opressão exercida pelo imperialismo.

Os prognósticos para a Coreia são os mais animadores desde a década de 1980. Os contatos, visitas de alto nível, trocas de diferentes tipos e outras ações aumentaram exponencialmente. O convite de Xi Jinping para que Kim Jong Un ficasse a seu lado (e do outro, Vladimir Putin) no desfile militar dos 80 anos da vitória da China na guerra contra o Japão, e todas as atividades que os três participaram juntos, como se fossem os líderes dos países oprimidos, é de um significado que só teremos ideia verdadeira futuramente.

Torna-se propício, portanto, no âmbito da comunicação, desmistificar e desmontar toda a mitologia construída ao longo de décadas pela propaganda rasteira do imperialismo contra a Coreia do Norte. É claro que a reinserção do país nas relações internacionais, devido à aliança com Rússia e China, por si só, já é um duro golpe àquela propaganda. Mas as mentiras são tão grandes que é preciso um trabalho constante de exposição da realidade e desmantelamento das falsidades contra o país.

Na era do suposto combate às fake news, aqueles que se dizem os grandes guerreiros da verdade são os reais produtores e difusores de uma das mais completas e longas campanhas de mentiras da história moderna.

Pagam “desertores” para mentir sobre a RPDC. As emissões de rádio e por alto-falantes desde a Coreia do Sul, bem como diversas outras formas de infiltração, buscam atrair norte-coreanos de situação econômica mais vulnerável. Os serviços de inteligência sul-coreanos então fazem ofertas tentadoras para que digam ao mundo como o governo do Norte é terrível e a vida é penosa. Em 2017, Seul quadruplicou a recompensa para os “desertores” que oferecessem informações “secretas ou sensíveis” sobre o Norte – o valor chegou a incríveis 860 mil dólares. Os próprios jornais internacionais, bancados por Wall Street e a City of London, pagam 500 dólares por hora de entrevista e, quanto maior o sofrimento relatado pelo “desertor”, maior o pagamento.

Quando não há “desertores” disponíveis, quem inventa as mentiras é o próprio serviço de inteligência e desinformação sul-coreano – chamado até certo tempo atrás de KCIA – e sua matriz americana, para o que utilizam também os veículos de comunicação que eles mesmos criaram, como a Yonhap, Voice of America ou Radio Free Asia.

Os próprios veículos “profissionais” do ocidente, aproveitando todo o clima criado pelos serviços de inteligência e desinformação e pela imprensa governamental dos EUA e da Coreia do Sul, espalham as mentiras, aumentam as distorções e inventam novas. Os exemplos abundam na Internet. A Vice News, por exemplo, produziu uma reportagem intitulada “What North Korea Doesn’t Want You To See?”, com imagens por satélite que comprovariam o “estado policial” que é a RPDC.

A reportagem aborda o trabalho de um “especialista e analista sobre a RPDC” que mapeou o país inteiro usando o Google Earth e é tão “profissional” que, ao sinalizar uma casa qualquer, afirma ser uma mansão onde vive Kim Jong Un. O “especialista” chega ao cúmulo de explicar o que tem dentro de cada cômodo da casa, e isso a partir de imagens do Google Earth – que, até onde sabemos, não tem visão de raio-X…

Mas quem é o “especialista” que descobriu os segredos da “ditadura hereditária” coreana, como ele a designa? Trata-se de Jacob Bogle, um ativista do Partido Republicano dos Estados Unidos, que escreve para portais especializados em Coreia do Norte como NK News e 38th North, sites que são fachada da CIA, e compartilha notícias falsas veiculadas pelos grandes jornais ocidentais contra o país. Até setembro deste ano, pelo menos, ele também colaborou com a Radio Free Asia, fundada pela CIA e mantida pelo Congresso dos Estados Unidos.

Park Yeon Mi and Jacob Bogle. (Jacob Bogle Website)

Mas talvez o que mais escancare a farsa Bogle seja a sua foto com Yeon Mi Park, uma das mais famosas “desertoras” da Coreia do Norte, aclamada por todo o aparato de propaganda imperialista e que, por isso mesmo, foi muito fácil para veículos alternativos descobrirem as suas mentiras.

Esse é o tipo de “profissional sério” e “especializado” em Coreia do Norte, que inventa e espalha fantasias surreais, dignas dos mais criativos filmes de ficção científica. Coisas que ninguém acreditaria se a Vice ou a Radio Free Asia relatasse que estão ocorrendo em outros países, mas que, graças a essa poderosa e ampla rede de mentiras, fazem parte do imaginário da classe média sobre a RPDC.

Tal campanha supera, de longe, as mentiras contadas contra a URSS na época da Guerra Fria ou contra Cuba. Ela, no entanto, revela também o nível intelectual e cultural do cidadão médio de um país que é dominado pelo imperialismo – ou dos próprios EUA. Homer Simpson representa fielmente o cidadão de classe média americano. E essa mesma propaganda anti-Coreia ainda nos diz que são os coreanos os ignorantes e ingênuos que sofrem lavagem cerebral do “regime”!

By Lucy KOMISAR

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Two major western propaganda operations, self-described international investigative news outfits that distribute stories picked up by major media across the globe, list their addresses at the same Amsterdam letterbox company that provides no space, just answers phones and forwards mail. They are the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP, and Bellingcat. Both organizations are funded by the US, UK and other Western European (and NATO-aligned) countries. They both run “news” stories that promote the political interests (mainly by portraying Russia as an enemy civilization) of their western funders which are then picked up by other western media outlets.

What is the likelihood that two western government-funded “independent” media use the very same European mailbox as their headquarters addresses? (The address is of a charming narrow building on a canal. I emailed the person who runs the service, and she said no other company has offices in the building.)

Drew Sullivan founded the OCCRP in 2007. The office that runs its European operations is at Herengracht 449A in Amsterdam. Bellingcat lists a European headquarters at the same Herengracht 449A in Amsterdam. Neither has an office there. The address they give is that of Amsterdam Office Space, a phone-answering and mail-forwarding service. Plus, they get a Chamber of Commerce registration.

This is Bellingcat’s registration in Chamber of Commerce with the same address. It is listed as a company focusing on film production and research and development in the social sciences and humanities. There is nothing about its claim to be “a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group.”

Why This ‘Coincidence’ Matters

First, the Netherlands is famous as an offshore money-laundering center. Curiously, in April, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, Sullivan said the OCCRP laundered money for other journalists organizations. He said, “OCCRP does that for its member organizations. We will take the money and pass it on to other journalists. Launder money legally, move the money away so there is not a direct connection between you and the donor.” He suggested other groups should do the same.

So, the Amsterdam shell company may also facilitate money-laundering, with the address used to set up bank accounts to make cash transfers.

OCCRP

OCCRP was founded right at the same time Julian Assange established Wikileaks, which exposed US global abuses. Sullivan had been an aerospace engineer and a stand-up comic. He set up the parent Journalism Development Network, registered in Delaware with a postbox in New York.

Here is how the money works

OCCRP was established with funding from the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The money came through the Journalism Development Network.

Eventually, the OCCRP handlers transitioned to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which years before had taken over the CIA’s soft money operations, In November 2021, during an event titled “Independent Media and the Advancement of Democracy,” USAID chief Samantha Power referred to OCCRP as a “partner” of the US government. In fact, the contract allowed the federal government to approve senior personnel decisions, including the CEO and editor-in-chief.

Journalism Development Network filings show that almost all its funding is from the US government and a significant amount from the UK. (DOS is Department of State, FCO is UK Foreign Office.)

This page lists grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), set up to take the place of a scandalized “soft-power” operation of the CIA.

Money is passed through to local media groups, most going to those in Europe and Russia, so, these groups don’t have to admit to getting funding from the US government.

Money comes in from the NED and cash grants are funneled out to groups around the world. As Sullivan explained at the Perugia conference, OCCRP “laundered money for other journalists” to obscure the source of funding. (Here are the international media groups that get grants and where the money comes from).

OCCRP has more than 200 staff in some 60 countries and works as a hub for local reporters around the world. Between 2014 and 2023, the US government provided more than half (52%) of OCCRP’s funding, totaling at least $47 million since its founding. Other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, have also contributed significant amounts over the last decade.

Since 2016, OCCRP has partnered with Transparency International to run the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium, which is funded by multiple western governments. Its investigations reportedly aim to provoke judicial actions and mobilize civil society against “corruption.” The funds go to media seeking to topple the governments of US adversaries.

Another source of funds is the RUSI partnership. RUSI is The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), self-described as the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defense and security think tank. RUSI vice-president is the CIA’s former director, David Petraeus.

OCCRP’s project with RUSI’s Centre for Finance and Security is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Helping a government deal with sanctions evasion seems more a government operation than a journalistic one.

Besides that collaboration, here is how OCCRP earns its US and UK government funding

Assange

As a good US “partner,” Sullivan publicly rejected calls for the release of political prisoner Julian Assange. He declared, “For me his work on behalf of the Putin government crossed the line and so I no longer consider him a journalist but a self-serving media celebrity who has been destructive. He played a different game and he is reaping what he sowed.” So according to “journalist” Sullivan the exposés such as the famous “Collateral Damage” video which showed American helicopter pilots slaughtering innocents are to be ignored because they “sowed” condemnation of the US around the world.

Russia

Convicted tax fraudster William Browder has been an early and central figure in the US campaign against Russia. Browder declared in a 2015 deposition in US federal court that he obtained documents from OCCRP to support his allegations against the Russian government. (Bill Alpert of Barron’s, noted in the deposition, is also a Browder collaborator, writing puff pieces about him in that business magazine.)

OCCRP promoted Browder’s narrative on the Browder-Magnitsky hoax, invented by former State Department official Jonathan Winer who wrote the State Department’s Magnitsky law which was passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2012. It levied sanctions against anyone deemed responsible for Magnitsky’s arrest and death. (Magnitsky was the accountant who managed Browder’s Russian tax evasion. Coincidentally, Winer had worked for the Bureau of International Narcotics and was a central figure in spreading the Steele dossier around Washington during to 2016 presidential campaign).

Browder’s hoax, supported by the OCCRP, was an early, colorful and invented story aimed at winning public sympathy for the “victim” that had the added benefit of sowing hatred of Russia, which is why OCCRP has been devoted to writing Browder’s fabrications and getting them printed in media in the US and abroad.

OCCRP promoted its 2014 Russian Laundromat investigation based on allegations of money laundering involving Russian businesses. It got a lot of ink in western media; however, it had no evidence and none of the sensational charges led to actual cases much less convictions in the western countries named in the reports. Switzerland was a typical example, formally dropping the investigation after ten years.

In 2017, OCCRP reported that in 2008 Sergei Magnitsky, portrayed in the report as an independent lawyer, uncovered evidence that police and tax officials stole ownership of three Hermitage subsidiaries and claimed a $230 million tax refund.

That was a lie. First, Magnitsky was an auditor at the Moscow firm Firestone Duncan—he handled Browder’s tax evasion. OCCRP reported that Magnitsky uncovered evidence that police and tax officials stole ownership of three Hermitage subsidiaries and claimed a $230 million tax refund.

But the scam was that Hermitage itself set up fake shells that claimed they had been cheated and demanded restitution. The company duly paid and restated its tax filing to conveniently wipe out all profits and taxes.

Browder insisted his companies had been stolen and the scheme carried out by miscreants. OCCRP dutifully wrote that crooked Russian investigators had seized documents and company stamps from Hermitage and used them to set up counterfeit subsidiaries. Then Magnitsky presented evidence about this to Russian officials and was arrested. The story, with no evidence, was duly repeated by international media. It was fiction.

There is also no evidence that Magnitsky was murdered by anyone, though he got bad medical care. An extensive investigation was done by the Public Oversight Commission, a Russian NGO that monitors prisons. It found no evidence of Browder’s claimed beatings or murder. Its report was filed in US federal court and was used in a report by the Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, Mass.

So OCCRP’s Browder/Magnitsky story was a fake from start to finish. But it allowed the US government, with the help of compliant media, to create a story of “evil” Russia and target Russian government and corporate officials.

The Panama Papers

OCCRP played a significant role in the Panama Papers investigation, again focusing on Russia.

A German reporter, Bastian Obermayer got a huge cache of documents from the Panama company, Mossack Fonseca, which set up offshore accounts for tax evaders and other law-breakers. He worked with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which brought in OCCRP to help organize the data and recruit journalists to work on the project. David Kaplan, who organized the project for ICIJ, was an OCCRP board member.

Browder’s Berkeley Advisors had been set up by Mossack Fonseca to hide money moved out of Russia.

OCCRP should have tagged that. But none of the nearly 400 journalists writing about high profile offshore account holders mentioned Browder. ICIJ director Gerard Ryle in answer to my query of why not, said that the journalists decided what to write. But, somehow, when it set up the Panama Papers data base, it failed to include William Browder or Berkeley Advisors. So reporters couldn’t write about him.

OCCRP also played a key role in the Pandora Papers, the Suisse Secrets, and China Tobacco investigations, most targeted at US adversaries.

Regime change

Sullivan has claimed that OCCRP has been responsible for facilitating regime changes in several countries, including Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, the Czech Republic, and Montenegro. This again raises questions about the organization’s role on behalf of Washington.

Bellingcat

OCCRP’s colleague as a US-UK client is Bellingcat, which listed OCCRP as a partner in its 2021 annual report.

Bellingcat was founded in 2014 by Eliot Higgins, who lives in Leicester, England. In 2016, Higgins became a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the State Department, the arms industry and NATO, and which lobbies on behalf of its sponsors in Washington.

Here is how the money works

Bellingcat is part of a network funded by US and UK government and pass-through organizations to promote anti-Russian narratives. It has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy since at least 2017 and participates in several organizations funded by the UK foreign office.

Bellingcat’s own reports show it getting money from western governments and pass-throughs. (For more see, https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2022/05/Bellingcat-Annual-Report-2021.pdf and https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2024/06/Bellingcat-Annual-Accounts-2023.pdf)

Aside from the State Department’s NED, Bellingcat takes in money from the European Union and other Western governments and cut-outs, including the Dutch and Swedish Post-code Lotteries.

It’s connection to OCCRP is through its subsidiary, the Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative is funded by the UK Foreign Office and Bellingcat is a collaborator. It is organized by “clusters” of operatives whose role is to promote opposition to Russia.

Here are some of the operatives listed. They include, Browder, Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council, the journalists Ed Lucas and Anne Applebaum (who is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski).

What the US and UK get for financing Bellingcat

Bellingcat disseminates stories that the US and UK intelligence agencies prefer not to source themselves. This allows for narratives against adversaries, especially Russia, to be promoted without governments being asked for evidence. In effect, it specializes in disinformation, which used to be called propaganda.

According to Amy Mackinnon in Foreign Policy magazine, Bellingcat has been crucial in exposing Russian activities, enabling US officials to discuss these issues without disclosing intelligence sources (or proof).

Marc Polymeropoulos, the CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia said, “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this… instead of trying to have things cleared or worry about classification issues, you could just reference their work.”

Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA chief of station, said, “The Russians routinely deny, and say, well, present us the facts. The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and then say, there you go.”

And the compliant media calls it an open-source investigative outfit instead of an intelligence front. They like getting dicey anti-Russian stories. They don’t ask how Bellingcat got information that only an intelligence agency could get.

Bellingcat is officially partnered with major media outlets CNN and NBC. CNN’s Jake Tapper has called Bellingcat “a great journalistic organization.”

Since when are media such as CNN partnered with operations funded by the US government or EU state intelligence agencies? Bellingcat’s investigators claim to have access to “open source” information that is nowhere to be found on the internet or public data bases or files and that only state actors would possess.

MH17

The launch of Bellingcat came curiously just three days before the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was shot down in Ukrainian airspace. The plane crash became the first “serious case” for Bellingcat, which quickly found irrefutable evidence of Russia’s guilt. The best reporting on this is by Dutch journalist Eric van de Beek.

Bellingcat immediately provided “evidence” regarding the downing of Flight MH17, including photos allegedly tracking the movement of a Russian missile.

Where did it get them?

An email from November 2020 revealed that the Bellingcat investigation was shared with Amsterdam’s National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) prior to publication, indicating a collaboration to shape media narratives. Or did the sharing work both ways?

Bellingcat’s “investigations” into MH17 were accepted by western governments and mainstream media without question, despite the presence of numerous eyewitness accounts contradicting their narrative. Even Dutch intelligence files record that while many Ukrainian Buk systems had been spotted in eastern Ukraine, Russian equivalents were nowhere to be seen. Eyewitnesses claimed they saw fighter jets operating in the area of eastern Ukraine at the time MH17 crashed. Bellingcat smeared journalists writing such reports as agents of Russian intelligence.

According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, the author of the report in which Bellingcat accuses the Russian Defense Ministry of falsifying satellite imagery related to the MH17 case was Timmi Allen, pseudonym for a former employee of the East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi secret police.

No mainstream journalist questioned how Bellingcat acquired the highly sensitive documents upon which its investigation was based. It somehow got confidential Russian intelligence emails and phone data showing calls between purported Russian intelligence officials and cell tower data tracking their movements. None of this information is remotely “open source.”

The only defendant to get a lawyer and give testimony during the Netherlands trial, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted on all charges. The court found there was “no indication” he was involved in obtaining the missile system.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Christo Grozev, a prominent Bellingcat operative from Bulgaria, took over from Higgins as chairman and general director of the Bellingcat Foundation in 2022. He had just organized the 2022 propaganda film “Navalny,” which won an Academy Award. The film accused the Russians of putting a deadly poison in the underpants of Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny. Navalny survived. It seems the Russians are pretty bad at making a lethal Novichok poison. (And again, the German military hospital that examined him did not make results public.)

The film said Bellingcat obtained voluminous telecom and travel data that implicated Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) in the alleged poisoning of Navalny. Telephone communications of Russian intelligence officers and the content of their mailboxes are highly confidential. They cannot be found on open sources. Bellingcat said that the information was bought on the black market. Grozev said that he had paid for it from his own pocket. Seriously. Is it reasonable to assume that the FSB, monitoring emails and internet, never discovered this market? The claims Grozev makes in the “Navalny” documentary are dissected here.

Grozev would be out of his job a year later, in 2023. He was discredited for his involvement in a failed attempt to get Russian pilots to defect and for defending the bombing of a café in St. Petersburg in which a war reporter was killed and 30 others injured. He said the reporter was a “legitimate target” because he was a “propagandist.” He said the same about the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin whose daughter was killed in Moscow after a bomb exploded under his car. Apparently, the National Endowment for Democracy funders were not pleased.

With some irony, PBS Frontline, had just posted an admiring film about Grozev. It says, “Antidote follows Christo Grozev, whose reporting with the open-source investigative group Bellingcat has exposed Russian spies and assassins…”

He actually hasn’t. The film was finished before Bellingcat fired him.

Even its friends say Bellingcat lies

Bellingcat deflects criticism by blaming external forces, such as Russia, for any negative assessments of their operations. However, a leaked report indicated that they have been discredited by their own side for disseminating misinformation.

The Zinc Network was seeking support for organizing NGOs to confront the “increasing threat from Kremlin-backed disinformation.” In a 2018 report produced for the UK Foreign Office, called “Upskilling to Upscale: Unleashing the Capacity of Civil Society to Counter Disinformation”, it discussed possible partners. It said that “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports to anyone willing to pay.”

Let’s repeat that. “Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports to anyone willing to pay.” And this is the organization whose “news” accounts anyone takes seriously?

Higgins doesn’t like people pointing that out.

Far from being an independent “open-source “investigative outfit, Bellingcat is paid by Western governments to spread state narratives.

Their funding and dubious output show that OCCRP and Bellingcat are propaganda operations. Readers and serious media should not accept their reports without solid independently confirmed evidence. Or their own credibility will be compromised by publishing disinformation.

Original article: therealistreview

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Já tive a oportunidade, aqui na SCF, de denunciar o mecanismo de desinformação, propaganda e mentiras contra a República Popular Democrática da Coreia. Esse mecanismo é tão antigo quanto o próprio país, já que a própria revolução coreana, que libertou a península em 1945, foi contrária aos interesses imperialistas dos Estados Unidos.

Uma das principais fontes de notícias sobre a RPDC é a Radio Free Asia, fundada pela CIA no início da guerra fria e mantida com verba do Congresso americano. Sua principal tarefa é trabalhar diariamente para levar a propaganda imperialista aos povos da Ásia a fim de convencê-los que os EUA são os seus melhores amigos, que devem se distanciar de China e Rússia, que governos minimamente independentes são ditaduras e que aqueles que vivem em países assim devem fazer revoluções coloridas. Além disso, com sua cobertura pretensamente jornalística, cria fake news que são espalhadas por outros veículos de propaganda imperialista mundo afora.

A rádio e seu site de notícias veiculam reportagens invariavelmente negativas sobre a RPDC e o tipo de fontes que eles mais gostam são as “anônimas”. De pouco críveis em sua reputação de esgoto, suas reportagens costumam ser muito contraditórias com elas mesmas. Vejamos um caso.

Um artigo intitulado “Fed up with corruption, North Koreans are attacking police, secret documents show” (“Cansados de corrupção, norte-coreanos estão atacando a polícia, mostram documentos secretos”), assinado por Ahn Chang Gyu e publicado em 2 de junho de 2023, cita testemunhas anônimas que mencionam episódios em que cidadãos cansados da “tirania” da polícia resolvem acertar as contas individualmente com agentes policiais.

“Um residente do condado de Paegam e seu filho encurralaram um policial no acostamento de uma estrada e ele infligiu diversos hematomas na cabeça do policial”, disse um oficial administrativo da província de Ryanggang à RFA sob a condição de anonimato. “Dizem que foi uma revanche porque o policial insultou sua mulher ao tratá-la como uma criminosa em seu local de trabalho ao forçá-la a confessar que era responsável por uma perda ocorrida no local de trabalho.”

Em resumo: a notícia trata de um espancamento de policial por parte de um cidadão comum. Vejam bem: foram um cidadão comum e seu filho que espancaram o policial. Alguém já viu isso acontecer em alguma parte do planeta? No Brasil, ninguém tem coragem de olhar torto para um policial, porque sabe que, por motivo nenhum, a polícia já mata. Só quem pode “acertar as contas” com a polícia no Brasil são as maiores facções do crime organizado, e isso sabendo que haverá consequências. É absolutamente impensável para um cidadão comum, como no suposto caso coreano, “acertar as contas” com um policial, ainda mais estando desarmado.

E aqui surge a grande contradição da RFA. Como é possível que em uma “ditadura militar” – muitas vezes descrita como a pior ditadura militar do mundo –, onde, segundo a própria reportagem da RFA, a polícia é “tirana”, um policial seja espancado por um mero trabalhador desarmado? Em uma ditadura militar tão tirana, não se pode crer que a polícia ande desarmada e sem equipamentos de segurança. Como funciona, então, essa tirania da polícia, se os agentes estão desarmados? No Brasil os policiais usam armas até quando estão à paisana, mas na Coreia do Norte eles não usam armas nem quando estão em serviço? Que tipo de ditadura militar é essa, que tipo de polícia tirana é essa que apanha de um civil desarmado? Até agora, pensava-se que os cidadãos coreanos tinham medo da própria sombra devido à vigilância e repressão do regime, como então um cidadão sente-se tão livre a ponto de bater na polícia?

Um outro residente de Ryanggang, logicamente também “anônimo”, disse à mesma reportagem que, “quando você vai ao mercado, pode-se ver frequentemente mulheres protestando ou discutindo em voz alta, e apontando o dedo para o policial”, podendo inclusive ocorrer brigas. No Brasil, ou mesmo nos Estados Unidos, uma situação como essa nunca é tolerada pela polícia “democrática”. Há menos de um mês um entregador de comida tomou um tiro por discutir com um policial só porque ele se recusou a levar a comida ao apartamento do agente e pediu para que ele fosse buscar na portaria do prédio. No melhor dos casos, se alguém ousa levantar a voz contra um policial, é levado à delegacia por desacato.

Onde, afinal, existe tirania policial?

Se diz que a RPDC é o “país mais fechado do mundo”, onde as pessoas são proibidas de se comunicar com o exterior e onde qualquer tentativa de burlar a proibição é punida pelo regime. Como a Radio Free Asia conseguiu entrar em contato com essas duas fontes diretas? As duas testemunhas “anônimas” têm medo de fornecer seus nomes para a reportagem, mas os moradores de Ryanggang não têm medo de brigar e bater na polícia “tirana”?

Essa é apenas uma das milhares de notícias absolutamente inconsistentes e contraditórias sobre a República Popular Democrática da Coreia. Os veículos de propaganda imperialista e seus partidários veem na RPDC os próprios males que afetam seus regimes. Acusam a Coreia de ter miséria, fome, repressão policial, censura, enquanto tudo isso é inerente às sociedades capitalistas da nossa época, não a uma sociedade como a da RPDC.

Olham para a Coreia e o que está à sua frente não passa de um espelho. Aquilo que falam sobre esse país é o que ocorre neles próprios. Não querem (e não podem) tirar esse espelho de sua frente para enxergar a verdadeira Coreia, porque ao fazerem isso os mitos que eles criaram sobre si próprios desmoronariam.

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Barely a heartbeat after black columnist Karen Attiah was fired from her position of opinion editor at the Washington Post for her comments about Charlie Kirk and it would appear that this censorship by proxy new trend in the U.S. has caught on.

Then came the dismissal of late night TV talk host Jimmy Kimmel who was also fired for his political comments relating to the killing of Kirk. The move comes after Kimmel said on his show “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”

And so the new all-time low for America who many still believe is the beacon of democracy in the free world is in fact that media bosses are shutting down commentators now for their views which they assume will displease the Trump regime.

“This is clearly the government overreaching” an employee of Kimmel said. “There’s no such thing as free speech in America, if the government can lean on companies to stop any content they don’t like,” he added after Trump – who it is believed despises the TV host – called the late-night show’s suspension a “great day for America.”

It’s hard to believe but Trump has finally shifted media into a position where he can manipulate its workers. He has at last created a culture of fear whereby he gets what he wants or he presumably threatens isolation for those who don’t get in line.

Remarkably, the attack on satire, is a real wake-up call which shows just what a farcical democracy America really is. Satire, traditionally, in the Anglo-Saxon world, if not the western world, always got a free pass both in terms of political interference or defamation litigation. No more under Trump.

This new media landscape under Trump has horrific consequences for America whose elite still parade it as a great democracy and example to the rest of the so called free world. Ever since Trump took power, he and J D Vance have been attacking Britain, rightly, for its abysmal lack of free speech, a country which now locks up well over 3000 people a year for posting their views on social media platforms. But now, with the Kimmel firing which is clearly political posturing by ABC owners, we can see that the old colony is following its master’s lead. Just as in countries which the West enjoyed mocking for its totally dominated media, like North Korea or China, now the UK and the U.S. have become birds of the same feather.

“We all see where this is going, correct? It’s managed media. It’s ridiculous” argues late night host David Letterman. “You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian, criminal administration. That’s just not how this works.”

Yet, sadly that is exactly how things are working under Trump 2.0. Just recently, when he was in the UK for a state banquet, he was asked at a press conference if it were really the UK or the U.S. which has a free speech deficit. In reality though the UK’s press is so entrenched into the sphincter of the deep state, that Robert Peston’s cheeky question to Trump was an ace in satire in itself. Yet in Britain, it is clear to see how political satire in shows like Have I Got News For You exist if not thrive due to the sinking level of journalism itself. You only have to see how the Ukraine war is reported, for example, to see how the government’s own ministry of defence managed to place its own talking points into journalist copy or even how British journalists have become victims of the Kiev propaganda machine and its lies. The other aspect also is that when journalism and policing gets to the point of parody that it’s so bad, that what gets presented as regular news actually appears as satire. Recently in the UK there was a report of women police officers posing as joggers so as to arrest men who ‘wolf whistled’ at them. The video report made by a national network was so surreal that it looked like it was the work of 1980s satire genius Chris Morrison who produced The Day Today and Brasseye – both spoof news shows which the BBC itself had banned as its role of chief censor.

The UK is way ahead of the U.S. here. Any really good satire which exposes inept government or corruption got cancelled decades ago so the Trump administration and its bullying of regulators to lean on networks in the U.S. who are seen as MAGA haters has some catching up to do.

The FCC, the federal body in the U.S. which is supposed to be independent and police the airwaves is taking direct action to police networks that do not align with the MAGA movement. And Kimmel’s dismissal is not the first to come under fire, either from the FCC or from Trump’s lawyers. Kimmel’s hiatus in fact follows Trump’s lawsuits against 60 Minutes and The New York Times, as well as CBS dropping The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

So why has it shocked so many? Perhaps it is in exactly what Kimmel said. When talking about how Trump took the news of Kirk’s death, he mocked Trump for talking about the renovation of part of the White House, responding to a journalist. “He’s at the fourth state of grief: construction,” Kimmel joked. “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Was this what blew a fuse and perhaps got Trump to pick the phone up and call ABC bosses? Or worse, did he even need to, or did they second guess the White House’s anger and plunge the dagger in themselves?

Many Global South countries – countries in Africa which Trump would no doubt call “shit holes” – often have in their constitutions a line about no one being allowed to mock the sitting president. It’s what you would expect from developing countries. Do we have this Trump clause invisibly woven into the U.S. constitution by tacit agreement with TV bosses and the FCC? Has America become third world?