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In what looks like a desperate move by the US government to manipulate and misinform the US populace due to the waning popularity of Congress, the Intelligence Community, the “War” Department, and the President, on 2 July the US government quietly lifted a prohibition on allowing government-produced propaganda to be directed at Americans inside the USA. The new “modifications” to the Smith-Mundt Act will allow propaganda produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the propaganda arm of the US government, which broadcasts Voice of America and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, to be fed to and directed at the American populace. That is, in their words, “they’ll provide access” to their “material” so Americans can see what’s being broadcast abroad.
If you’re reading this, then, you’re one of a growing number of the world’s English-reading population that’s sought news and information from non-US corporate or government-controlled entities. Whether you’re interested in hearing unbiased reporting, seeking the truth, attempting to get the whole story, or trying to get an opposing view, you’ve come to the right place. Thanks to the internet, it’s possible for people, both in the USA as well as the world, to access non-US-based independent and alternative media in order to get a real perspective about events that don’t go through American filters, which may be biased or censored.
An example of such bias might be calling Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi a dictator rather than a leader, calling foreign-import terrorists and cannibals in Syria “rebels”, or calling Edward Snowden a traitor rather than a whistleblower. Examples of censorship and blackouts are even more numerous and insidious, some examples include the complete media blackout that exists in the UK with regard to Julian Paul Assange, the limited reporting in the USA on Snowden, or the complete and almost total blackout and manipulation that exists in Serbia and on any news coming out of that country. A couple years back, US Secretary of State Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton indignantly complained that the USA was losing the global media war. Apparently, the US government thought that the internet would be an American-controlled propaganda distribution and spying tool, but unfortunately for Washington, this hasn’t been the case, as the internet allowed Americans to access alternative media and alternative views.
This latest step in the American media mind-control battle is chilling for many reasons. The extreme and violent reaction by the US government to the recent revelations of it own illegality by WikiLeaks, Bradley Edward Manning, and now Edward Snowden, to name a few, shows just how truly terrified and obsessed the US government is, now that its illegality is revealed. The Obama Administration and the US government’s war on journalists, whistleblowers, and truth-seekers and their continuing attempts to control, muzzle, and censor the internet and the American mass media hasn’t been enough apparently. Now, the USA wants to transmit propaganda to the American populace, in effect, filling the information vacuum they’re creating with their own “manufactured” content, therefore, nullifying the mission and the purpose of the Fourth Estate.
This latest move makes it appear even more as if the US government is using George Orwell’s Oceania as a blueprint for the new “Amerika” and the “Homogenous American World” planned by the Project for a New American Century… a plan that needed an event such as 9/11 to serve as a catalyst. 9/11 allowed for the total global military expansion of the USA and its surrogate NATO, in order to force the world into submission if it decides it doesn’t want to be part of a Homogenous American World. We’ve seen the endless state of war that the citizens of Oceania had to live with brought to reality with the endless “Global War on Terror”, with endless threats and fabricated battles against “evil” leaders such as Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar Hafez al-Assad, and ex-CIA asset Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, with countries destabilised and invaded by the USA as examples of how terrible the world is, and how “honourable and “just” Big Brother is in “protecting American lives” and “spreading democracy”.
We’ve also seen the complete and total surveillance state that the Oceanians had to live under realised though the internet and the NSA’s PRISM and related programmes. With the help of “Internet Giants”, the American populace has become glued to their monitors and their narcissistic social media pages ready to accept that everything they do on-line is recorded and watched by “Big Brother” in order to guarantee their own safety. Microsoft even has a patent, taken out in 2011, for something almost exactly like the Oceanian telescreen surveillance system. Even Oceania’s Ministry of Love and the constant fear of torture or secret indefinite arrest have been realised with the knowledge that the USA tortures and renditions, and maintains “Ministry of Love”-type installations in Guantánamo and Super Max. Moreover, the US government can now drone and indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial or contact with the outside world. The only thing that was lacking, as if the corporate-controlled American mass media, which almost never goes against the government line, wasn’t enough, was an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. Orwell wrote, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past”. With the allowing of US government manufactured propaganda to be directed at Americans, the USA now has its own internal Ministry of Truth.
The wording of the legislation and the ease by which it will be manipulated will soon make Americans the subject of Ministry of Truth-type propaganda. Not only will your news be filtered, Americans, as it is now, but now it’ll also be cleverly manufactured. At this point, the only hope for Americans is that the US State Department, which controls the BBG, is as inept as “winning the hearts and minds” of Americans as they are at winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the world. There was probably a good reason why it was illegal for the US State Department to broadcast “internally-authored news stories” that are broadcast around the world by US government-controlled and -financed broadcasters. However, in the name of “security” and “terror”, Americans have been conned into letting another right fall to the wayside through the passing of this new law. In an extreme scenario, one could view this as the death of the Fourth Estate.
The bill to change the Smith-Mundt Act was introduced by US Representatives William “Mac” McClellan Thornberry (R-TX), and David Adam Smith (D-WA). They pushed the entire security and terror reasoning to the extreme with Smith saying in 2012, “Effective strategic communication and public diplomacy should be front-and-centre, as we work to roll back al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence among disaffected populations. An essential part of our efforts must be a coordinated, comprehensive, adequately-resourced plan to counter their radical messages and undermine their recruitment abilities. To do this, Smith-Mundt must be updated to bolster our strategic communications and public diplomacy capacity on all fronts and mediums, especially online”. We know that the USA already censors, blocks, and shuts down al-Qaeda and extremist sites worldwide and the internal American internet is almost under a complete and total lockdown. So, what’s the real reason for allowing government manufactured propaganda to be directed at the American masses? Big Brother needs a voice to maintain his power and legitimacy, this change to the Smith-Mundt Act gives it that.
Look for the Ministry of Truth, coming soon, in subtle ways, to the American populace.
17 July 2013
John Robles
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_07_17/Broadcasting-Board-of-Governors-to-be-US-Ministry-of-Truth-next-step-in-information-war-2897/
Editor’s Note:
Guess Who works for the BBG? Yep… Victor Potapov. This piece means that the BBG (and RFE/RL and VOA) are on the Centre‘s shit-list. This means that Darling Fr Victor may become persona non grata at the Centre (one can hope). Freddie M-G is part of Uncle Sugar‘s spin-machine, too… she works (or worked) for NPR as a manager. Two propagandists for the price of one! Perhaps, Hilarion Kapral should rethink allowing her to speak at ROCOR parishes, as she’s part of (or was part of) the American dezinformatsiya apparat (of course, it goes twice as much for Potapov). Let’s not forget Fatso… he’s part of the rightwing K Street slimeocracy and the Moonie crowd at the Washington Times. Well, well, well… shitbirds of a feather DO flock together. Do we really want such sorts amongst us in influential places? Interesting question, no?
One last thing… the BBG is a well-known Langley front. Do we really want those mixed up with such questionable sorts as influential clerics/figures in our Church? That’s the $64,000 Question…
BMD
Voices from Russia 
It’s Worse Than You Thought: The “Kremlin Troll Army” Exposed
Tags: black propaganda, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Computer, computers, cyberspace, cyberwar, internet, internet troll, Langley, political commentary, politics, propaganda, propaganda war, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Liberty, RFE, RFE/RL, RL, Russia, Russian, United States, USA
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Editor:
It’s time for Victor Potapov to quit Radio Liberty and to condemn it on the “front-page” of the official ROCOR website. It’s issuing egregious lies about the Rodina and about the Church. I didn’t believe that I could think lower of Potapov (a man hated by most of his brother-priests for his arrogance), but he’s hitting new lows. He aids the enemies of Christ’s Church… full stop. I don’t believe that he’s going to quit… draw the appropriate conclusions. He holds a knife to the back of Russian patriots and to the throats of all Russian Orthodox Christians by working for such a theomachistic organisation. I’d say, “Look at what he does, don’t listen to what he says. He makes his money as a Judas”. Don’t fight with such sorts… but do avoid their company… they have spiritual “cooties”.
This article below proves that RFE/RL issues black propaganda of the vilest sort… Potapov must leave it. He won’t… that speaks volumes.
BMD
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As an alleged Kremlin troll army continues its apparent octopus-like spread across the globe, the US government’s international broadcaster RFE/RL has courageously struck back by exposing it right in its lair. However, would that be enough? In the past few days, articles have been popping up around the web, providing explicit details about a “Kremlin troll army” which operates out of a St Petersburg suburb, a scary place where laughter is prohibited and 400 professional trolls toil day and night to convert public opinion in Russia and abroad. There is only one problem with the article… there’s no pro-Kremlin “trolling” taking place in the evidence the authors provide. Whilst employees of these “troll farms” do allegedly make hundreds of political posts, they’re made on local forums with tiny membership, rarely over 500 users, and even tinier posting activity at most, 5 posts per person, most of which appears to be from the “trolls”.
Considering the extremely low impact of such posting, the goal appears to be not to convert public opinion, but rather search engine optimisation (SEO)… search engines such as Google crawl the web for keywords and links, which are then used to give weight to certain web pages when search terms are entered. The interviewee even admits it himself, “There are keywords, tags that are needed for search engines. We’re given five keywords… for example, “Shoigu”, “Defence Minister”, “Russian Army”. All three of us have to make sure these keywords appear all over the place in our comments. You can’t even conjugate or decline them. Sometimes, it’s very hard to write when you can’t use any declensions!” The bit about declensions is important because Google doesn’t work well with Russian morphology; for example, processing the keyword “armies” separately from the keyword “army”, unlike Russian search engines such as Yandex. Keywords give weight to certain words when used in Google searches. Then, there’s the question of “fake discussion”. Of course, no forum moderator would be happy if they discovered that their forums are used to post link spam. However, if the articles do generate some discussion, which seems to be limited to 2-5 replies, and do seem to be expressing different points of view, forum moderators would be more likely to keep them. The use of tiny forums with low readership is also important for this, as that allows the posts to remain on the websites for months or years, without deletion, because there are other threads discussing the same topics or being archived.
The US government’s international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) did discover something, but it’s quite the opposite from an ominous troll army working around the clock to convert the entire world to a Putin-based religion. They found a search engine optimisation (SEO) company, likely subcontracting for a political consultancy firm. The history of SEO… in particular, “Google bombs“… as well as their use by businesses and politicians goes back to the 1990s. Google and other search engines combat their use by blocking their most obvious use, but hundreds, if not thousands of SEO companies continue working to promote business and political interests around the world.
However, some use fear of “Russian propaganda trolls” to whip up hysteria, which they then use to push through funding increases for RFE/RL and other foreign broadcasters. This coincides with the very poor journalism of the article reporting on the “troll army”, as the authors don’t attempt to corroborate the story. There doesn’t appear to be security risks involved, as it publishes the first and last name, as well as a photo of the interviewee, and considering advancements in modern technology, hidden camera investigations have become one of the easier things in the world.
In this sense, the sensationalism of the story, the poor quality of the research, and the lack of definite information about the “troll army” somewhat ironically contributes to the decline of government-controlled international broadcasters, which now ring the alarm about the rising popularity of networks such as RT. The sentiment is also echoed in Europe, where politicians such as German parliamentarian Norbert Rottgen claim that “Russian propaganda” presents itself as a “source alternative to Western media”, which must be countered by “strengthening European international media, Deutsche Welle, BBC International, and RFI (Radio France International)”.
28 March 2015
Sputnik International
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150328/1020147102.html