Putin & Trump and Journalists

[Joseph Tracy]

Some real heart in this one from ish. We all want wars that are better organized with  good guys vs. bad guys and don’t know what to do when its mostly bad guys and their shitloads of lies. No one wants to despise their own government or religion; most Russians love Russia, try to believe their leaders are acting on their behalf, same with Americans, Syrians, Sunni, Shiah, Zionists, Hamas. Some of us are more cynical, watching the blood soak into the ground. 

The earth cannot tell the good guys from the bad. Neither can I, fool that I am. I have no gun, want no gun, if you want to shoot me I am an easy unarmed target, I need no poison gas, openly adocate miscegenation, same sex love, faithful hetrosexual marriage,  openly practice Sufism, Quakerism, Taoism, Shamanism, children’s art. 
   I just feel if we stopped this belief in weapons we could save what our hearts love and avoid many tears. Where, my friends and enemies, do we start?
  
> On Jan 28, 2017, at 7:24 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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