Putin & Trump and Journalists

[ish mailian]

The suffering, the murder of countless children of women, of men, the
destruction of property, of the good earth, its waters and plants and
beasts, the waste of resources and monies, the fractioning and
sullying of cultures and peoples is far worse than the propaganda
reports. The barbarism of Assad and Putin is far worse than anything
that has been reported by  anyone thus far. How do I know this? It
doesn't seem to make sense since all sides are out to exaggerate the
war crimes of their enemies while making themselves out as saviors or
at least on balance the better devils in a battle that must be waged.
This war is not merely a figment of mass propaganda and mass media
simulations. It is not a war game. It is not rhetoric and images. The
rhetoric, the images, the mass media feeds from embedded propagandists
paid for with Western greed and US Empire, do not exceed the
real-world suffering and barbarism. This is not a chessboard of
deterrence where pivots and real-politic are the real war, what's
really going on. What's goin on as Marvin Gay says, is that, "there's
too many of us dying." We once believed that war was not the answer
and that deterrence might save us because war was unthinkable,
unwinnable, had become more rhetorical, a way to manage the masses
through the mass deception media, a machine of the establishment and
the military complexes to manufacture the illusion of consensus, to
produce, mass produce and re-produce attitudes and cultures that would
make war cold and prevent world war, and that the difference between
words and war, between what was going down in SE Asia and what was
produced for the audience, the TV-war, and eventually in the Gulf Wars
and elsewhere, where the President of the US would view the film of
the assassination of the chosen goat in Pakistan while the nation and
the world watched the President watch the brave special forces in
night vision screens, from cameras on their helmets, watch the
frontlines, edited and clipped, augmented and enhanced, countered and
counterpunched by soldiers who were sworn to secrecy and to a band of
brotherhood that with lawyers and money was broken and sold in books
and films and blood and brotherhood and medals and honor and phony
propaganda simulated. What war? What reality? Where is the truth?
Behind, beneath, embedded in the images and words? John Lennon says,
"Just give me some truth!" The images are often more powerful than the
dying and killing because the truth is measured by the impact a lie
has on opinions.  Unless you are not viewing it but doing it. In which
case, belligerent deeds trump bellicose words and images every time.
It's a slippery slope that Thomas has veered onto here because his
analysis implies that the dying and killing, the barbarism of Putin
and Assad can't be measured or condemned because there is no truth we
can count from, no truth we can stand on. Who knows what's goin on?
There's too many of us dying. We know this much is true.
>
> This is certainly true but does not go far enough. The "activists",
> "civilian defense workers" and "citizen journalists" who provide information
> to the Western media are not only embedded with the rebels but have been
> prepared for this job and are paid enormous sums by the West to perform it.
>
> The Western mainstream media duly report everything these embedded citizen
> journalists or first responders tell them as fact. The White Helmets have
> produced hundreds of fake photographs of children "pulled from the rubble".
> Even if it isn't explicitly mentioned, through their publication by
> supposedly respectable newspapers like the NYT, the Guardian or Die Zeit
> these fake photographs have become documents of Russian and Syrian barbarism
> in the public perception. Politicians then quote from the newspapers and add
> some buzzwords: Guernica, Ruanda, Srebrenica. A German talkshow host even
> managed to mention the Holocaust...
>
> This is war propaganda of the highest order, provided as a public service by
> an enormously sophisticated and well-oiled propaganda machine. It is Frank
> Wisner's "mighty Wurlitzer" on steroids.
> research on the sources of funding for the White Helmets and the Aleppo
> Media Center is solid. Please note also that, while many of the photographs
> taken by the White Helmets are certainly fakes, some are not. Nobody denies
> that many children have actually been wounded and killed during the bombing
> of East Aleppo.)
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l