Favorite Targets the BBC Loves To Bash (Under the Cover of "Journalism")

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence.  They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so are human rights and democracy being delegitimized by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

But then, I'm not a propagandist.

In Surprise Upset, Egyptian Military Dictator Wins 97% of "Vote" In "Presidential Election"

Barely a peep out of U.S. establishment media about it. Which provides a stark and very politically revealing contrast with how they went on and on about the "so-called election" of Putin, just concluded. Putin ran against 7 opponents, and received 76% of the vote.  Sisi imprisoned and intimidated all of his opponents, and ran against a ringer who said he was supporting Sisi!

It's true that there were reports of ballot box stuffing in Russia. And the West's choice for Russian president, Viktor Navalny, was barred from voting. However there is no reason to doubt that Putin would have won in a fair election against Navalny, if by a less impressive margin.

Western media gave Putin another demerit for the "low" turnout of 64% in Russia. (It was only 40% in Egypt- of course that was lightly skated over.) I suppose the media hacks forgot that turnout in U.S. presidential elections is only 54-55%!

The elephant in the room here is how U.S. media barely mentioned the Egyptian pseudo-election, and the ongoing, horrible repression in Egypt. It is another example of the blatant, hypocritical, double standards Western media apply. The lack of objectivity is what distinguishes journalism from propaganda.

Favorite Targets the BBC Loves To Bash

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence.  They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so human rights and democracy are being delegitimzed by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

But then, I'm not a propagandist.

Swindler Trump's Presidential Campaign Run By a Swindler- U.S. Media Acts As Accomplices

Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a known swindler who stole $19 million from a Russian businessman. The businessman has been trying to get his money back for eight years now. He had to hire a private investigator just to try and find out where Manafort was hiding.

This is not some crazy "Internet rumor" or "conspiracy theory" from "a blogger sitting in his parents' basement in his underwear," as establishment propagandists like to sneer when they want to discredit (as distinct from disproving) some inconvenient information. This is from the Washington Post, an organ that sits at the apex of the U.S. bourgeois propaganda system. [1]

According to an article in the Post, Manafort and an accomplice, Richard Gates, swindled the Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, by tricking him into "investing" with them. Manafort's mark has been futilely trying to get is money back. In fact, the victim can't even get an explanation of where his money is from the thief Manafort. [2]

Manafort has long been involved with state criminals such as Reagan, Bush the Elder, U.S.-backed Philippine tyrant Ferdinand Marcos, and the recently-ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. You would have thought that this last bit of unsavory business would have occasioned loud denunciations in U.S. media, but naaah. What coverage there is is quizzical and faintly admiring. (Tells you something abut the moral and ethical sewer the U.S. elites inhabit.) Manafort was also a helpmate to Jonas Savimbi's terrorist UNITA, a U.S.- favored Angolan group trying to overthrow the government there until Savimbi finally met his maker. [3]

The curious- and damning- thing is, that despite the prominence and "respectability" of the Washington Post, the rest of the propaganda system has virtually ignored the story. This despite all the hand-wringing about what a disaster a Trump presidency would be. (One must wonder, given how the corporate propaganda system, which likes to call itself "the media," has been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the prospect of a Trump presidency, mainly over his unpredictability, and his failure to get on board the Hate Russia bandwagon. To the contrary, he apparently is quite favorably inclined towards Putin, and is suspected of having prospective business dealings in Russia. The leaking of Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, proving that Hillary Clinton's handpicked hit-woman, DNC chair and Florida Congresswoman Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, deliberately orchestrated a campaign of sabotage against Senator Bernard Sanders' campaign for the party's presidential nomination, has been blamed, so far without any evidence presented- unless you consider the opinions of unnamed "experts" to be evidence, the few identified ones hedging their identification of Russia as the "culprit,"- this outing of information we are all entitled to, as it affects our lives, by being blamed on Russia, is adduced as more proof that Trump is somehow in Putin's pocket. [4]

It's quite natural that Manafort should wind up at Trump's side. Manafort is a scoundrel with a history of service to corrupt reactionaries, and Trump, even with his idiosyncracies, certainly qualifies as one of those. And both Manafort and Trump are rip-off artists, although from what we currently know, Trump is much more accomplished as one.

There's Trump "University," There's using Polish immigrant construction workers at a fraction of the normal pay, without even providing them hard hats. There's cheating his casino workers out of overtime pay. He didn't pay contractors who built his casinos, causing some of them to go out of business. (Great job creator you are, Trump!) There's fleecing banks by taking out loans and not repaying them.

Trump brags about his numerous bankruptcies. He presents this as a savvy business practice, gaming the system. In other words, he plotted in advance to go heavily into debt and declare bankruptcy,

That means he planned to rip people off by "legally" stiffing them for what they were owed. Contractors, workers, banks, and business "partners."

Trump almost never uses his own money. He started out using his father's money, then went on to using the money of saps who "invest" with him, and of dumb bankers. Conniving, corrupt politicians grant him favorable tax "abatements" (exemptions from what by law he would otherwise pay) and various regulatory preferences.

Trump doesn't even make his own charitable contributions. Others fund his "foundation," and his own "donations" over the years have consisted of letting people use his golf courses gratis for charity events, which he then takes a tax write-off on! He had the chutzpah a few months ago to loudly bray about a million dollar donation to veterans' organizations which he then didn't make, until the Washington Post forced his hand by exposing him. (Naturally he excoriated the Post for this terrible terrible deed they did!)

What I always found most stunning over the decades was how the New York City media relentlessly promoted this obvious egomaniacal hustler. The only exception was the weekly paper the Village Voice, which consistently practiced actual journalism and reported on his scams. [5]

There have long been creeps, immoral con men (Clinton, Obama), and reactionaries feigning a human face (Reagan, Nixon, the Bushes) in U.S. politics, but Trump is new in that he doesn't even wear a mask. The fact that millions of people are drinking his obviously rancid, poisonous Kool-Aid forces one to the conclusion that there are far too many imbeciles in America for comfort.


And America is a nation that threatens the whole world.

Slipping in and out of the shadows: Election manipulator 

and swindler Paul Manafort.

Paul is the PERFECT guy for me! 

1]  I am writing this from my very own home, and I'm not wearing underwear, I'm BUCK NAKED! Take THAT, bourgie propagandists!

The Washington Post has long been in a permanent rivalry with the New York Times to be at the very top of the media pecking order in terms of status and influence. As it is based in the capital city of the U.S. empire, Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), it is also a sort of hometown paper for the the imperialist nomenklatura and national political elite.

Its editorial stance is consistently quite reactionary, unlike the New York Times, which is "liberal" mostly and reactionary partly. Its reporting is frequently quite ideological. The people who write it would probably be too self-conscious to do so naked, especially if they knew there were hidden cameras observing them.

2]  "Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking," Washington Post, April 26, 2016.

3]  "Mystery man: Ukraine's U.S. fixer," Politico, March 5, 2014. The article bemusedly describes Manafort's disappearance, apparently to avoid Deripaska's lawyers, process servers, and investigator.

4]  An ideologue/apparatchik by the name of Anne Applebaum pushed this line very hard yesterday on "The Takeaway," a "public" radio show on government network NPR, hosted by John Hockenberry. Applebaum was miffed that people were paying any attention at all to the content of the emails instead of piling on Putin and leaving the Clinton machine out of it. How unfair that Wasserman-Schultz should be targeted. To Applebaum, the only story here is Russian subversion of a U.S. election.

Applebaum is an unreconstructed, career Cold Warrior, as her official bio on the Washington Post website makes clear. The way people like her have dealt with the disappearance of the organizing principle of their lives, the Evil Soviet Union, is by substituting Russia for the SU. Problem solved!

For an example of Hockenberry's journalistic ethics, see "John Hockenberry Illustrates Lying By Omission." To be fair, Hockenberry isn't all bad. He's more of a mixed bag. He "balances" normal, even humane journalism with reactionary crap and power-sycophancy.

5]  There are hundreds of articles on the Village Voice website exposing Donald Trump. And Wayne Barrett, who reported for the Voice for many years, wrote an important book about Trump, as have a few other authors. David Cay Johnston has also been on Trump's tail.

Bad History: The Myth that the Versailles Treaty Caused Nazism and World War II

One of the pernicious myths of “history” as created by ideologues called historians is that the blame for the rise of Hitler and the ensuing Second World War is down to the “unjust” and “harsh and punitive” Treaty of Versailles. That is to say, when dealing with obvious criminal psychotics like the Germans, if you are only NICER to them, they’ll leave you alone.

But who made Germany attack an invade France in 1890? Who made the Germans ravage and lay waste to France from 1914-1918? They won the previous war with France, and got what they wanted. Wasn’t that “fair” and “generous” enough for them? No, they went on and did it again in 1914, on the pretext of some Austrian aristocrat getting bumped off by a Serb nationalist! (“Grand Duke Ferdinand,” was the puffed-up title of the imperialist parasite who bit the dust.)

Does appeasing aggressive psychopaths placate them? I think the evidence of concession after concession handed to Hitler disproves that. And the Germans only paid a small fraction of the reparations they agreed to pay for the destruction they wreaked when they signed the Treaty.

Remember that in World War I Germany invaded neutral Belgium, to carry out the Schlieffen plan, a grand flanking maneuver aimed at annihilating the French army. While in Belgium, they busied themselves committing atrocities, murdering civilians, and committing cultural genocide But the Germans were “provoked,” you see. The Belgian army had the effrontery to resist the invasion of their country. What arrogance! Why, the Germans HAD to kill Belgian civilians and burn a historic library down, destroying irreplaceable manuscripts, to teach the Belgians a lesson. The lesson being, don’t resist invasions by psychopaths.

The fact that British propagandists during the war invented fake atrocity stories has for years been trotted out by U.S. (and other) “historians” to discredit the FACT that Germany committed REAL atrocities in Belgium- not to mention the crime of aggression by invading a neutral country in the first place. This is mendacity disguised as history. People who do that should be called propagandists, NOT historians. When you deliberately falsify history to advance a covert political and ideological agenda, that makes you a propagandist, not a historian. Unfortunately, most well-known “historians” seem to fall into this camp to some degree. This creates a huge burden on people who want an accurate understanding of the world. You have to read so much, and study for years, just to find out more or less what really happened. Needless to say, the average person does not do this and is thus an easy mark for the professional brainwashers to dupe. And professional brainwashers are what propagandists really are.

And what about the Holocaust? Did the Treaty of Versailles cause the Holocaust? I guess the “historians” should say yes- although few seem to have the nerve to do so. But if the Treaty “caused” the rise of Hitler, and "caused" the Second World War, then it must follow that it is to blame for all of Hitler’s works, including the Holocaust. Now you truly enter the arena of ludicrousness.

But it has been in the interest of Zionists to lay the blame for the Holocaust on historical anti-Semitism (obviously appropriately, but that isn’t sufficient explanation by itself), and the Zionists have dibs on Holocaust-causation. And there’s the uncomfortable fact that the “Western democracies” barely lifted a finger to save Jews, and in fact blocked their escape from the Nazis’ clutches for the most part.

Now what was the motive for the distortion of history claiming Versailles as causative for World War II? It is to exonerate Germany, because Germany after World War II was part of the U.S.-bossed anti-Soviet bloc in Western Europe. The former German enemy had to have a heavy coating of ideological make-up applied to make it attractive to Western publics who had been put through two major, costly wars by Germany. (The Soviet Union, on the other hand, NEVER invaded Western Europe, NEVER declared war on the U.S. or bombed its ships at anchor as Japan did- another rehabilitated foe turned subaltern nation to the U.S. The Soviet Union was invaded by two dozen western nations right after the Bolshevik revolution, in a failed attempt to reverse that revolution. And of course Germany invaded in 1941 and caused horrendous carnage and wreckage. But the Soviet Union was the Bad Guy.)

The end of the Cold War has changed nothing, since now Russia is still viewed as an adversary- apparently because it won’t let itself to be so reduced in power that its influence ends at its own national boundaries. For this it is faulted for “behaving like the Soviet Union” and “restarting the Cold War” or “acting like the Cold War never ended.” (Hey, Western imperialist propagandists, would you like me to lend you a mirror?)

In fact, to accept the Versailles Treaty as leading to World War II, because it embittered fanatical German nationalists like Hitler, is to imply Germany had a legitimate grievance to start World War II.

Well then, given that Germany suffered far worse destruction in World War II (its cities weren’t systematically bombed into rubble in the First World War, nor was it occupied), plus Germany was shrunk in size, permanently lost Prussia (the heartland of its militarism), Danzig, and more, and the truncated remainder was divided into two, logically Germany had an even BIGGER grievance after World War II than after WW I. So they should have armed themselves with nuclear weapons and started World War III!

The thing is, taking the irrational grievances of fanatical German nationalists at face value is like taking their stated grievances against Jews as having “caused” the Holocaust. I don’t hear those historians who blame World War II on Versailles (because German fascists used it to rile people up) blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. But by the same logic, they could. The point is, Versailles was just an excuse, used as agitprop by the Nazis, the same way they used anti-Semitic propaganda as agitprop. Quite simply, the Germans (many or most of them) were pathological people with burning imperialist ambitions combined with a virulent sense of “racial” superiority. They dehumanized most of the rest of humanity and had no compunction about slaughtering and enslaving most everybody else on the planet. Versailles had NOTHING to do with it. If there had been NO Versailles Treaty, Hitler would STILL have risen to power, and STILL have started World War Two in Europe. It’s idiotic to argue otherwise if one has read deeply about Germany between the wars (as I have). Who could seriously believe that the Versailles Treaty made Germany invade Russia yet again, killing twenty million of the people there, with the intention to ultimately annihilated fully THREE QUARTERS of the “subhuman” Slavs and make slaves of the rest, working on giant German plantations? Russia didn’t impose the Versailles conditions on Germany. Germany defeated Russia in World War I, and imposed onerous peace terms on it! So by the logic of “Versailles made Germany do it,” the Soviet Union should have invaded Germany in World War II, not the other way around. After all, Germany imposed an unfair peace treaty on Russia. Whereas the Versailles Treaty was fair, and should have been enforced. Hitler should not have been allowed to break it by increasing the size of the German army and by remilitarizing the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty. [1]

No, the fault lay in the pathological German character. Thankfully that character has changed to a large degree, mainly in the younger generations.

1] World War I started in 1914. Russia was defeated in 1917. The U.S. then entered the war, because New York bankers fretted about getting their war loans to Britain and France repaid if Germany won. With fresh U.S. troops on the Western front, Germany sued for peace in fall 1918. The slimy and cowardly German general staff, headed by Field Marshals von Hindenberg (who appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, opening the door to Nazi dictatordship) and von Ludendorff (who participated in the 1923 coup attempt by Hitler to overthrow the Weimar Republic government, for which he was not prosecuted for treason and subversion, not imprisoned or shot- as Hitler should have been) pulled the weaselly and cunning move of making civilians take the rap for the defeat, claiming the military was never really defeated and promulgating the “stab in the back” canard, that traitors at home (in a dictatorship- remember Germany was a monarchy headed by the Kaiser, or “king,”) made Germany surrender. The Nazis heaped a lot of the blame for the “betrayal” and “treason” on “the Jews.” In World War II this was a big factor in the Allies insistence on unconditional surrender, and occupation, so the Germans wouldn’t once again pretend that they weren’t actually defeated.