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Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: Mass Media Is The Enemy Of The People Like The Cage Is The Enemy Of The Bird

Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com
Fri, 24 Aug 2018 15:26 UTC
Bird in cage

The Guardian has just published an actual, non-fictional op-ed that is titled "Is my Jewish three-year-old too young to learn about antisemitism?", about a concerned mother who is teaching her toddler about the Holocaust in case Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.

The Guardian. Not The Onion. The Guardian.
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USA

SOTT Focus: Trade War Against China - 11 Myths and Delusions

Chris Kanthan
Sott.net
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 22:47 UTC
Trump China trade war
Many people are ardently supporting Trump's trade war, driven by a combination of anger, fear, hubris and confusion. While there's no doubt that globalization has inflicted misery upon many Americans, there are numerous myths and delusions surrounding the clamor for tariffs and trade wars, especially against China. Let's take a look at some of the popular ones.
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SOTT Logo S

SOTT Focus: The Gulag In Numbers: Was Stalinism Really That Bad?

Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 21:50 UTC
Gulag prisoners
© Mikhail Sokolov/RFE/RLA photo of Gulag prisoners in Perm (undated).
I'm currently reading a new book by Russian-American military expert Andrei Martyanov, Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning. It's a great book. The writing is clunky at times and could have used an editor to smooth out the text, but its content more than makes up for the deficiencies in presentation. We carried a few reviews of the book at these links: It's an eye-opening and maddening book to read. As Martyanov argues, Americans have never experienced a real war - where their citizens faced starvation, mass atrocities and casualties, and a life-or-death struggle for survival, as the Soviet Union did in World War II. This has led to a range of negative consequences for the collective USA: a profound arrogance, a romantic fantasy about the nature of warfare, an overestimation of American military capabilities, an underestimation of Soviet and Russian capabilities and achievements, a stereotyped prejudice against everything Russian, and the rise of incompetent civilian policymakers who only make things worse.

The book is definitely worth reading, so don't let the following criticism stop you from checking it out. Despite Martyanov's injection of some much-needed nuance in understanding the realities of the Soviet Union and the West's hubris-based miscalculations of its actual abilities and achievements, the author traps himself in his own black-and-white thinking on a few points, notably in his treatment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his statements about the Stalinist repressions.
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2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: Stephen F. Cohen: The Brennan Affair Reveals The Deep State

Stephen F. Cohen
The Nation
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 16:06 UTC
Valorizing an ex-CIA director and bashing Trump obscures what is truly ominous.
Former CIA director John Brennan
© Kevin Lamarque / ReutersFormer CIA director John Brennan
Ever since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, every American president has held one or more summit meetings with the Kremlin leader, first and foremost in order to prevent miscalculations that could result in war between the two nuclear superpowers. Generally, they received bipartisan support for doing so. In July, President Trump continued that tradition by meeting with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, for which, unlike previous presidents, he was scathingly criticized by much of the US political media establishment.

John Brennan, CIA director under President Obama, however, went much further, characterizing Trump's press conference with Putin as "nothing short of treasonous." Presumably in reaction, Trump revoked Brennan's security clearance, the continuing access to classified information usually accorded to former security officials. In the political media furor that followed, Brennan was mostly heroized as an avatar of civil liberties and free speech, and Trump traduced as their enemy.

Leaving aside the missed occasion to discuss the "revolving door" involving former US security officials using their permanent clearances to enhance their lucrative positions outside government, Cohen thinks the subsequent political media furor obscures what is truly important and perhaps ominous.

Comment:

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Quenelle - Golden

SOTT Focus: Russian Filmmaker Nekrasov Demolishes Bill Browder's Magnitsky Fiction

Andrei Nekrasov and Vetta Kirillova
andreinekrasov.livejournal.com
Mon, 20 Aug 2018 17:37 UTC
andrei nekrasov
Filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov
On June 27, 2018 Bill Browder tweeted enthusiastically that he had just told his story of Sergei Magnitsky to a young Berlin audience and everyone was fascinated. When he announced that he was heading straight to the Bundestag after the speech to start the campaign for a German "Magnitsky Act", the audience broke into a "rapturous standing ovation".

Who's Bill Browder? What story has he been telling with such success for eight years all over the world? What law does he lobby for so persistently in different countries and why?

We tried to answer these questions in a film. We have concluded that the Browder case reflects today's transformation of society in an essential way. That's what our film is about. But so far it has been withheld from the public. According to our lawyer, this case is unprecedented.

Despite having approved it editorially and technically, ARTE removed this important investigative documentary from its schedule shortly before its planned broadcast on 3 May 2016. Before April 27, 2017, it had been advertised on the ARTE website with trailers. Today, one can only find some sorry traces of that in the Internet archives.

One of the trailers has since been hosted by the Norwegian film festival "Movies on War" on its YouTube channel. German film title is "Der Fall Magnizki". We worked closely with the editors of ZDF/ARTE on this film. Andrei Nekrasov knew one of them from his work on the documentary series "Farewell, comrades!", for which he received a Grimme Prize. While working on "The Magnitsky case" we did not experience any major differences of opinion, had no political arguments with the ZDF/ARTE editorial staff. The editor, who was directly responsible for the film, even demanded that Andrei use more "direct language" in his voice-over narration in the film, and say, for example, that such self-serving stories as Browder's should not be made an instrument of international politics. Everything should be called by its name.

Comment: Nekrasov's film isn't the only piece of critical media that Browder and his lawyer Jonathan Winer have had banned. They strong-armed Amazon into removing Alex Krainer's expose... twice! They did so on nothing else than Winer's word that the book was "defamatory". Apparently these hacks and thieves think it's defamatory to expose their lies and crimes. But that's just how crooks operate. And Browder is a crook, make no mistake.

Nekrasov's film, while banned from appearing in theaters, is available to rent on Vimeo:



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2 + 2 = 4

SOTT Focus: 'Be Careful About What You Believe' - Ken Livingstone on US, UK Media Bias & Lies

Ken Livingstone
RT.com
Tue, 21 Aug 2018 12:00 UTC
Media manipulation
Today it seems like we are in another Cold War. It was breathtaking to watch our PM Theresa May immediately blaming Russia for the poisoning of the Skripals before the police had conducted their investigation into the evidence.

Growing up after the Second World War our news was dominated by the threat from the Soviet Union, but when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 I don't think anyone could have guessed that just over two decades later we would be once again talking about the threat from Russia. Anyone who only gets their news from the British or American media is kept in ignorance of the truth; the endless accusations about the Skirpal poisoning or the conflict over Crimea is presented in a completely biased way in which most of the facts are ignored. But there is nothing new about this: dishonest reporting and lies dominated the whole of the Cold War in the days of the Soviet Union.

Although President John Kennedy in the United States started out with quite a right-wing agenda with one of his 1960 election promises being to close the missile gap with the Soviet Union, he rapidly changed and began to throw the weight of his administration behind the struggle to end racism in America's deep south. Also, if he hadn't been assassinated, he was planning to withdraw American troops from Vietnam if he had been re-elected in 1964 because he realized a full-scale war in Vietnam would be a disaster.
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Propaganda

SOTT Focus: Mainstream Media's Application of Its Collective Voice Reveals a Tragic Truth About The US

Pam Martens & Russ Marten
Wall Street On Parade
Fri, 17 Aug 2018 16:52 UTC
media fake news cartoon
August 16, 2018 will be remembered as the day there was a collective awakening by America's media that there was something intrinsically and morally and constitutionally wrong with not just the functioning of the President of the United States - but with America itself.

In response to an August 10 appeal from the Boston Globe to newspaper editorial boards around the country to write and publish their thoughts on Trump's "dirty war against the free press," more than 300 newspapers responded yesterday.

The Globe's own editorial yesterday contained one of the most poignant phrases, stating that the President tosses out lies about the media "much like an old-time charlatan threw out 'magic' dust or water on a hopeful crowd." You can read the coast-to-coast outpouring of editorials on what a free press means to democracy here.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: Social Media Censorship and the Clash of Civilizations - Manufactured, Packaged, Sold


Sott.net
Sun, 19 Aug 2018 16:00 UTC
clash civilizations newsreal
Post-9/11, the 'Global War on Terror' and the US-led wars in the Middle East produced foreseeable consequences, chief among which was the displacement of millions of people, many of whom relocated as far away as western Europe and north America. While this was going on, political movements sprang up in reaction to the terrorism and the mass immigration, with the target of that reaction being Islam and Muslims.

The result, in just a short period of time, has been a 'perfect storm' of social chaos, so perfect that it's as if events 'conspired' to bring it about. But if events conspired, then surely conspirators facilitated that?

Speaking of conspiracies... was the recent bout of censorship of social media pundits, mostly on the 'right' but also one or two on the 'left', a result of simple breaching of terms of service, or is something else afoot?

Join Joe & Niall on this week's NewsReal for a discussion on the who, how and why of this manufactured 'clash of civilizations'.


Running Time: 01:20:29

Download: MP3

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Mr. Potato

SOTT Focus: The Mind of The Mass Media: Email Exchange With a leading Washington Post Foreign Policy Reporter

William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Sat, 18 Aug 2018 20:27 UTC
mainstream media lies
July 18, 2018

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore ...?

If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?

William Blum
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Heart - Black

SOTT Focus: History Repeats as Social Tension Increases in The Netherlands

Leanne Rojik
Sott.net
Sat, 18 Aug 2018 21:47 UTC
Pim Fortuyn and his dogs
Dutch populist politician Pim Fortuyn with his dogs. The small dogs were seen in church during Pim's funeral
Sixteen years ago Dutch populist politician Pim Fortuyn was gunned down by a radical leftist, only minutes after he had given a radio interview at Hilversum media center. Many questions surrounding his assassination remain, however. Hated by the Left, but loved by many who still had their heads screwed on, he was a leader who represented the thoughts and feelings of Dutch nationals who could see where the country was headed. He warned about the encroaching totalitarianism of political correctness, so-called 'anti-racism', the destructive effects of mass immigration, problems in healthcare, education and so on.

In a prescient statement broadcast about 6 weeks before he was assassinated, Fortuyn spoke of the dangerous climate the Dutch establishment had created.
"The Dutch government, and I think it is a bloody shame, helps to create a climate of demonization of me as a person. And if something happens to me, then they will be partly responsible, and then they can't renounce it, in the sense that I haven't committed that attack. You have partly created that climate. It has to end."
On the evening of 6 May 2002, within hours of the assassination, riots broke out near the seat of parliament in The Hague. People were clearly heard chanting 'murderers' at the government, because they knew full well who was responsible for Fortuyn's murder. In order to deflect culpability, the Dutch elite very quickly shifted the blame to Fortuyn's followers by accusing them of racism. On that very night, the authorities organized a press conference where the people were told that the assassin had been apprehended (within minutes apparently) and that he was white rather than the expected immigrant (as if there were no white radical leftists). Political party leaders subsequently got the security detail that was denied to Pim Fortuyn. The same 'leaders' who had persecuted him relentlessly, were now whining about their own safety.
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