Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
On February 20th, the anti-Russian propaganda site “Newsweek” headlined “How We Can Defeat Putin,” and
presented an essay from Evelyn Farcas, of the NATO-generated Atlantic
Council, but didn’t indicate her being controlled by the same people who
control NATO (the U.S. aristocracy). (Newsweek hid her connection to
NATO — gave no indication of it.)
NATO is run by the North Atlantic Council, and its main PR agencies are the Atlantic Council and the Atlantic Treaty Association, both of which receive funding from international corporations. The head of the Atlantic Council is billionaire Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former U.S. Presidential candidate, and a member of the Bilderberg organization, which was founded in 1954 to
engineer a takeover of national governments’ regulatory abilities and a
replacement of national economic regulations by international economic
treaties, which will supersede any national authority and will not be
answerable to any voters except the controlling stockholders in
international corporations. (Bilderberger David Rockefeller
then created the Trilateral Commission in 1974, to extend the globally
controlling aristocracy to include also Japanese aristocrats, and
Huntsman is also a member of that Bilderberg spin-off: he’s a member of the Trilateral Commission’s ruling Executive Committee.) The list of donors to the Atlantic Council includes:
Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Kingdom of Bahrain (ruled by a
fundamentalist-Sunni royal family who are friends of the Saud family
that rules Saudi Arabia), the (far-right) Smith Richardson Foundation,
Google, Raytheon, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Thompson Reuters, (the
far-right) Ukrainian World Congress, Bank of America, City of London,
ExxonMobil, General Electric, PriceWaterhouse, Frontera Resources,
Blackstone Group, United Technologies, Bank of Tokyo, Barclays Capital,
ConocoPhillips, Gulf Keystone Petroleum, Microsoft, U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, U.S. State Department, Bloomberg LP, Embassy of Latvia; and
three donors who each contributed over a million dollars to the Atlantic
Council during 2014: Adrienne Arsht (who sold her bank to Banco Popular
Español), Bahaa Hariri (the billionaire “eldest son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri” — the “Lebanese-Saudi business tycoon”
who had been a famous assassinated enemy of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad),
and United Arab Emirates (whose six royal families are friends of the
Saud royal family and all of whom are among the top funders of jihadist
movements; and, according to a U.S. State Department cable,
“UAE-based donors have provided financial support to a variety of
terrorist groups, including al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT and other
terrorist groups, including Hamas.”). Saudi Arabia is the world’s top
purchaser of U.S. weapons, but isn’t directly represented at the
Atlantic Council. They buy enough U.S.-made weapons, so they provide far
more financial support to NATO than do any of those others. However,
that same State Department cable also said, “Donors in Saudi Arabia
constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist
groups worldwide.” So: outfits such as Al Qaeda are well-represented in NATO — and at the Atlantic Council, and the much smaller Atlantic Treaty Association.
Farkas’s propaganda-piece (written
specifically for the Atlantic Council) opened: “Russia poses a
geostrategic threat to the United States and our interests. Indeed,
earlier this month Defense Secretary Ash Carter listed
it first among the threats faced by our nation.” She continued: “The
Kremlin’s objectives are clear: 1) Retain Vladimir Putin’s position as
the leader of the Russian Federation, preserving the
autocratic political system and mafia-style crony economy that
together make up ‘Putinism’; 2) restore Russia’s status as a great
power; 3) rewrite the international rules and norms to prevent
intervention in states to protect citizens; 4) maintain political
control of Russia’s geographical periphery; and, if possible, 5) break
NATO, the European Union and trans-Atlantic unity.”
One could turn that around against the
United States by saying that we Americans have a less personalized, more
institutionalized, form of dictatorship, which doesn’t require
continuance of the same person to be in control, but which provides
foreign policies that extend little changed from one President to the
next, even if the rhetoric differs considerably between individual
Presidents, such as it did and does from George W. Bush to Barack Obama,
with little real difference in policies except this: tortures such as
waterboarding might possibly now be actually forbidden here. However,
Putin’s international policies have been changing far more than that.
(They changed a lot after Obama
overthrew the democratically elected and pro-Russian President of
Ukraine in February 2014 and instituted a rabidly anti-Russian fascist
regime there.)
Domestically, Obama continued Bush’s Wall Street bailouts and reduced the prosecutions
of white-collar crooks (and also of higher-level “financial fraud”),
even lower than was the situation when Bush was the nominal President. Also, the prosecutions of government corruption declined under Obama. This was not the type of “change” that Obama’s voters had been voting for, but it’s what we got.
The
only scientific study that has been done of whether or not the U.S. is a
democracy or instead a dictatorship (rule of the public by an
aristocracy, which may or may not have a king or other nominal dictator
that rules answerable to that elite but not to any broader public) found
that the U.S., at least since 1980, has been a dictatorship (the
authors called it an “oligarchy”). That doesn’t sound much different from Russia, either.
The readers of Ms. Farkas’s
propaganda-article, if one judges by the reader-comments there, were far
less damning against Mr. Putin than they were against the con-job that
had just been delivered to them by Newsweek (and so perhaps that
‘news’-site’s constant ads seeking new subscribers to the site are not
producing nearly as much income as are the propaganda-services Newsweek
delivers on behalf of their international-corporate advertisers). To
read those comments from readers, Americans are getting jaundice from
reading America’s propagandistic ‘press.’ Here were two typical such
comments:
“I have been reading and watching western
media and russian media equally. There is no bad guy here in
geopolitics. If there is then its the US.”
Another said:
“Meanwhile Putin plays chess
Americans play checkers. and the Americans(Obama) are sold as chess
players(at least they make themselves believe it) to start with..Now
they have propaganda outlets like this one, that want to sell you a
‘checkers’ play to win the game.”
Of course, such cynicism is also widespread among Russians, against their own nation’s media.
The Newsweek propagandist wrote in her
article: “We must be united with our allies and partners worldwide and
resolute toward Russian bad behavior.” But, what about America’s “bad
behavior”: unjustified and catastrophic invasion and destruction of Iraq
in 2003, of Libya in 2011, and of Syria in 2013, and Obama’s keeping in power the coup-regime in Honduras that was installed there on 28 June 2009?
That’s not very nice, either — and, unlike anything that can be charged
against Russia, there’s no NATO-like organization against the United
States to have provoked our invasions, as there is with regard to
Russia, which had long ago terminated its equivalent, the Warsaw Pact
(in 1991). They disbanded theirs; we continued and still continue ours,
even though its alleged raison d’être likewise
ended in 1991 (and NATO and its propaganda-arms now drown us with
propaganda such as Newsweek published here). Clearly, the U.S. is the
international aggressor, par excellence, and it needs
propagandists — the U.S. press — in order to make the American public
fear “Saddam’s WMD” (to invade Iraq in 2003) and “Russian bad behavior”
(to attempt a “color revolution” against Russia’s leader, Putin, whose
approval-rating among his people is nearly twice as high as Obama’s own —
and yet America calls itself a ‘democracy’ that brings ‘democracy’ to places such as Ukraine, Libya, Syria, and Russia).
More and more Americans are learning that they’re suckers if they pay for
their ’news’ — if they pay their hard-earned money in order to be
manipulated by their insatiable corrupting aristocracy. And now, with google Chrome’s free autotranslate feature,
one can receive the news from the media in every country, immediately
translated into English, and thereby get a read not only on America’s
propaganda but on that of the countries that the U.S. aristocracy want
Americans to overthrow (in overthrows that are becoming a very bad habit of this country, and that drain America’s tax dollars for rotten weaponry and a bloated army but enrich the ‘defense’ contractors that our aristocrats invest so heavily in, so as to conquer the lands they don’t currently control). Americans are increasingly coming to recognize that they’ve been (and are being) had: by ‘their’ government and by ‘their’ ‘free press,’ if not by the aristocracy that controls them both.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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