Snowden, Putin, Greece: It’s All The Same Story
By Raúl Ilargi Meijer
June 16, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "
Automatic Earth"
- Through the last decades, as we have
been getting ever more occupied trying to be what society tells us
is defined as successful, we all missed out on a lot of changes in
our world. Or perhaps we should be gentle to ourselves and say we’re
simply slow to catch up.
Which is somewhat curious since we’ve also been
getting bombarded with fast increasing amounts of what we’re told is
information, so you’d think it might have become easier to keep up.
It was not.
While we were busy being busy we for instance were
largely oblivious to the fact the US is no longer a beneficial force
in the world, and that it doesn’t spread democracy or freedom. Now
you may argue to what extent that has ever been true, and you
should, but the perception was arguably much closer to the truth 70
years ago, at the end of WWII, then it is today.
Another change we really can’t get our heads
around is how the media have turned from a source of information to
a source of – pre-fabricated – narratives. We’ll all say to some
extent or another that we know our press feeds us propaganda, but,
again arguably, few of us are capable of pinpointing to what extent
that is true. Perhaps no big surprise given the overdose of what
passes for information, but duly noted.
So far so good, you’re not as smart as you think.
Bummer. But still an easy one to deny in the private space of your
own head. If you get undressed and stand in front of the mirror,
though, maybe not as easy.
What ails us is, I was going to say perfectly
human, but let’s stick with just human, and leave perfection alone.
What makes us human is that it feels good to be protected, safe, and
prosperous. Protected from evil and from hard times, by a military
force, by a monetary fund, by a monetary union. It feels so good in
fact that we don’t notice when what’s supposed to keep us safe turns
against us.
But it is what happens, time and again, and, once
again arguably, ever more so. What we think the world looks like is
increasingly shaped by fiction. Perhaps that means we live in
dreamtime. Or nightmare time. Whatever you call it, it’s not real.
Pinching yourself is not going to help. Reading Orwell might.
The Sunday Times ran a story today -which the
entire world press parroted quasi verbatim- that claimed MI6 had
felt compelled to call back some of its operatives from the ‘field’
because Russia and China had allegedly hacked into the encrypted
files Edward Snowden allegedly carried with him to Russia (something
Snowden denied on multiple occasions).
Glenn Greenwald’s take down of the whole thing is
– for good reasons- far better than I could provide, and it’s
blistering, it leaves not a single shred of the article. Problem is,
the die’s been cast, and many more people read the Times and all the
media who’ve reprinted its fiction, than do read Greenwald:
The
Sunday Times’ Snowden Story Is Journalism At Its Worst
Western journalists claim that the big
lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War
to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous
journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them
propagandize the public, then uncritically accept those
anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they’ve learned no such
lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major US
and British media outlets “report,” especially in the national
security area. And journalists who read such reports continue to
treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials –
laundered through their media – as gospel, no matter how dubious
are the claims or factually false is the reporting.
We now have one of the purest examples of
this dynamic. Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times
published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined
“British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.” Just as the
conventional media narrative was shifting to pro-Snowden
sentiment in the wake of a key court ruling and a new
surveillance law, the article claims in the first paragraph that
these two adversaries “have cracked the top-secret cache of
files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden,
forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile
countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the
Home Office and the security services.”
Please read Greenwald’s piece. It’s excellent.
Turns out the Times made it all up. At the same time, it’s just one
example of something much more expansive: the entire world view of
the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, and that means you
too, is weaved together from a smorgasbord of made-up stories,
narratives concocted to make you see what someone else wants you to
see.
Last week, the Pew Research Center did a survey
that was centered around the question what ‘we’ should do if a NATO
ally were attacked by Russia. How Pew dare hold such a survey is for
most people not even a valid question anymore, since the Putin as
bogeyman tale, after a year and change, has taken root in 99% of
western brains.
And so the Pew question, devoid of reality as it
may be, appears more legit than the question about why the question
is asked in the first place. NATO didn’t really like the results of
the survey, but enough to thump some more chests. Here’s from an
otherwise wholly forgettable NY Times piece:
Poles were most alarmed by Moscow’s muscle
flexing, with 70% saying that Russia was a major military
threat. Germany, a critical American ally in the effort to forge
a Ukraine peace settlement, was at the other end of the
spectrum. Only 38% of Germans said that Russia was a danger to
neighboring countries aside from Ukraine, and only 29% blamed
Russia for the violence in Ukraine. Consequently, 58% of Germans
do not believe that their country should use force to defend
another NATO ally. Just 19% of Germans say NATO weapons should
be sent to the Ukrainian government to help it better contend
with Russian and separatist attacks.
Do we need to repeat that Russia didn’t attack
Ukraine? That if after all this time there is still zero proof for
that, perhaps it’s time to let go of that idea?
Over the past week, there have been numerous
reports of NATO ‘strengthening’ its presence in Eastern Europe and
the Baltics. Supposedly to deter Russian aggression in the region.
For which there is no evidence. But if you ask people if NATO should
act if one of its allies were attacked, you put the idea in people’s
heads that such an attack is a real risk. And that’s the whole idea.
This crazy piece from the Guardian provides a very
good example of how the mood is manipulated:
US
And Poland In Talks Over Weapons Deployment In Eastern Europe
The US and Poland are discussing the
deployment of American heavy weapons in eastern Europe in
response to Russian expansionism and sabre-rattling in
the region in what represents a radical break with post-cold war
military planning. The Polish defence ministry said on Sunday
that Washington and Warsaw were in negotiations about the
permanent stationing of US battle tanks and other heavy weaponry
in Poland and other countries in the region as part of NATO’s
plans to develop rapid deployment “Spearhead” forces aimed at
deterring Kremlin attempts to destabilise former Soviet bloc
countries now entrenched inside NATO and the EU.
Warsaw said that a decision whether to station
heavy US equipment at warehouses in Poland would be taken soon.
NATO’s former supreme commander in Europe, American admiral
James Stavridis, said the decision marked “a very meaningful
policy shift”, amid eastern European complaints that western
Europe and the US were lukewarm about security guarantees for
countries on the frontline with Russia following Vladimir
Putin’s seizure of parts of Ukraine. “It provides a reasonable
level of reassurance to jittery allies, although nothing is as
good as troops stationed full time on the ground, of course,”
the retired admiral told the New York Times.
NATO has been accused of complacency in
recent years. The Russian president’s surprise attacks on
Ukraine have shocked western military planners into action.
An alliance summit in Wales last year agreed quick deployments
of NATO forces in Poland and the Baltic states. German
mechanised infantry crossed into Poland at the weekend after
thousands of NATO forces inaugurated exercises as part of the
new buildup in the east. Wary of antagonising Moscow’s fears of
western “encirclement” and feeding its well-oiled propaganda
effort, which regularly asserts that NATO agreed at the end of
the cold war not to station forces in the former Warsaw Pact
countries, NATO has declined to establish permanent bases in the
east.
It’s downright borderline criminally tragic that
NATO claims it’s building up its presence in the region as a
response to Russian actions. What actions? Nothing was going on
until ‘we’ supported a coup in Kiev, installed a puppet government
and let them wage war on their own citizens. That war killed a lot
of people. And if Kiev has any say in the matter, it ain’t over by a
long shot. Poroshenko and Yats still want it all back. So does NATO.
When signing a post-cold war strategic
cooperation pact with Russia in 1997, Nato pledged not to
station ground forces permanently in eastern Europe “in the
current and foreseeable security environment”. But that
environment has been transformed by Putin’s decision to invade
and annex parts of Ukraine and the 1997 agreement is now seen as
obsolete.
Meanwhile, Russia re-took Crimea without a single
shot being fired. But that is still what the western press calls
aggression. Russia doesn’t even deem to respond to ‘our’ innuendo,
they feel there’s nothing to be gained from that because ‘our’
stories have been pre-cooked and pre-chewed anyway. Something that
we are going to greatly regret.
There are all these alphabet soup organizations
that were once set up with, one last time, arguably, good
intentions, and that now invent narratives because A) they can and
B) they need a reason to continue to exist. That is true for NATO,
which should have been dismantled 25 years ago.
It’s true for the IMF, which was always only a
tool for US domination. It’s true for the CIA and FBI, which might
keep you safe if that was their intent, but which really only
function to keep themselves and their narrow group of paymasters
safe.
It’s also true for political unions, like the US
and EU. Let’s leave the former alone for now, though much could be
said and written about the gaping distance between what the Founding
Fathers once envisioned for the nation and what it has since
descended into.
Still, that is a story for another day. When we
can find our way through the web of narratives that holds it
upright. Like the threat from Russia, the threat from China, the
threat from all the factions in the Middle East the US itself
(helped) set up.
The EU is much younger, though its bureaucrats
seem eager to catch up with America in fictitious web weaving. We
humans stink at anything supra-national. We can have our societies
cooperate, but as soon as we invent ‘greater’ units to incorporate
that cooperation, things run off the rails, the wrong people grab
power, and the weaker among us get sacrificed. And that is what’s
happening once again, entirely predictably, in Greece.
That Spain’s two largest cities, Barcelona and
Madrid, have now sworn in far-left female mayors this week will only
serve to make things harder for Athens. Brussels is under siege, and
it will defend its territory as ‘best’ it can.
What might influence matters, and not a little
bit, is that Syriza’s Audit Commission is poised to make public its
findings on June 18, and that they yesterday revealed they have in
their possession a 2010 IMF document that allegedly proves that the
Fund knew back then, before the first bail-out, that the Memorandum
would result in an increase in Greek debt.
That’s potentially incendiary information, because
the Memorandum -and the bailout- were aimed specifically at
decreasing the debt. That -again, allegedly- none of the EU nations
have seen the document at the time -let’s see how the spin machine
makes that look- doesn’t exactly make it any more acceptable.
Nor of course does the fact that Greece’s debt
could and should have been restructured, according to the IMF’s own
people and ‘standards’, but wasn’t until 2012, when the main
European banks had been bailed out with what was subsequently shoved
onto the shoulders of the Greek population, and had withdrawn their
‘assets’ from the country, a move that made Greece’s position that
much harder.
The narrative being sold through the media in
other eurozone nations is that Greece is to blame, that for instance
German taxpayers are on the hook for Greek debts, while they’re
really on the hook for German banks’ losing wagers (here’s looking
at you, Deutsche!). And that is, no matter how you twist it, not the
same story. It’s again just a narrative.
Once more, and we’ve said it many times before,
Brussels is toxic -and so is the IMF- and Greece should leave as
soon as possible, as should Italy, Spain, Portugal. And we should
all resist the spin-induced attempts to demonize Putin, Athens and
China any further, and instead focus on the rotten apples in our own
basket(s).
In short, the propaganda we should be worried
about is not Russia’s, it’s our own. And it comes from just about
every news article we’re fed. We’re much less than six degrees
removed from Orwell.
See also
Sunday Times levels copyright charges at
Greenwald after he debunks Snowden report:
In his disproving report for the Intercept, Greenwald used a
screengrab of the Sunday Times subscription-only article – and that
is what the paper is now angry about. The paper says this violates
the copyright of “the typographical