The non-embedded, those independent of the U.S. command who attempted to cover the war beyond the troops, would pay dearly for the privilege. On the first day of the arrival of the U.S. army in Baghdad, in the 2003 war, journalists covering the events from the Palestine Hotel learned this very quickly, a U.S. Army tank fixed its sights on them and two cameramen were killed, among them the Spaniard José Couso. No one was ever held accountable for Couso’s death. First, the right-wing Spanish People’s Party government was part of the coalition that, against the UN’s will, invaded the country, and later, the “left” government of the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) pulled the troops out of Iraq, but the instructions it received from the U.S. State Department, exposed by Wikileaks, make clear that both Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido, and the Chief Prosecutor of the National Court, Javier Zaragoza, and then Social Democratic Vice President, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, reached an agreement with the U.S. embassy to close the case. Such is the unanimity of a multiparty system when it comes to matters of interest to the empire.

Wikileaks confirmed the persecution and arbitrary moves of a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations against this truly independent journalistic project. Perhaps one should expect philanthropists such as George Soros and his Open Society – who have sponsored media and “think tanks” for Cuba in the name of freedom of information and expression – to have a different attitude, but a former collaborator of Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, tells us in his book Inside Wikileaks, that “Julian (Assange) spoke to a representative of George Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI), who asked him where we got the money for Wikileaks, and implied that OSI was subsidizing projects like ours. According to Julian, Soros was also interested in our needs, and commented that we should not be modest. As far as I know, we didn’t get anything.” That’s how it is with power, governmental or any other real type, when you don’t say what they don’t want to hear
Photo: Internet

And what do they want? The soldier in Full Metal Jacket who gives the journalists orders is a U.S. armed forces officer, but according to John Stockwell, the CIA officer in charge of working with the press – who remained in Saigon practically until the last U.S. citizens left their embassy hanging from helicopters, captured in images that have become emblematic – the job of commissioning and positioning stories in major media outlets, publishing houses, and press agencies is one the Agency has always assumed, using paid journalists and writers, or fabricating the stories themselves and requesting only a signature.

In a long interview, soon to be published on the lapupila.cu website, Stockwell, who also led the CIA propaganda operation during the U.S. intervention in Angola’s independence struggle, recalls how he fabricated fake news about Cuban troops there, placing them in a newspaper in neighboring Zambia, where the AFP agency released dispatches based on the stories, which were in turn picked up by European and U.S. media. The former CIA official likewise reports that complete texts along these lines were placed in Time magazine and The Washington Post, and numerous books written on orders from the CIA, that remain in circulation and available in important U.S. libraries, but never identified as paid propaganda.

It could be said that the above facts are dated, that this is no longer the case, that things have changed with the dominance of social networks on the Internet and the increasing concentration of media ownership, making such invasive intervention unnecessary; but it is very difficult to change methods when one is accustomed to acting with such impunity.

More recently, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, who worked for 17 years at the eminent German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, describes events very similar to those cited by Stockwell, in a 2014 book entitled Journalists for Hire. Ulfkotte writes about the U.S. embassy in Berlin sending payments to the main German media, and reveals a list of U.S. and European “non-governmental” foundations and organizations, and journalists involved with the operations. These include the Marshal’s Fund, Puente Atlántico, American Academy and Aspen Institute, among others. The German reporter notes the topics they were commissioned to cover, particularly press campaigns on Russia, Libya and Ukraine, in which German and U.S. intelligence service officials gave them full texts on which they only added their signatures. In an interview, Ulfkotte explained what could happen to anyone who refused to cooperate, with examples of his colleagues’ work situations. But the most convincing testimony comes from his own life, which ended with a heart attack, at only 56 years of age, after having repeatedly reported death threats and raids of his apartment by security agencies.

We been able to learn very little in the great Western press about the above, nor have we heard much about the repeated attacks to which Cuban artists, journalists and intellectuals have been subjected by media financed from the United States, in an effort to force them concede a certain political position. But we can only imagine what would happen if a case like that of Ulfkotte were to occur in Cuba. The hate campaign unleashed on the Internet against musicians who participated in the video clip “Con Cuba no te metas” is an example of how the censorship machine works: On the one hand, big media is only interested in Cuban artists and intellectuals if they “protest against the government,” ignoring any event of cultural or political value produced by individuals with recognized artistic careers, while the media war machine, especially the anti-Cuba one funded by the United States, disseminates slanders, insults and attacks on them. One of those targeted wrote me regarding the situation: “The attacks that have been made on me lately, organized, coordinated and all saying the same thing, obviously respond to one guiding organization. If I had any doubt about that, they have taken care of clearing it up.”

News, with the exception of natural disasters, is not spontaneous, and even these events are interpreted and covered journalistically with political intentions. It is evident that an agenda is imposed on the world, one which cascades from the elite media (CNN, The New York Times…) to newspapers in small provincial towns. Anyone who seeks to change the agenda must be willing to lose sources of funding and advertisers. If this were not enough, there are legal complaints, lawsuits and smear campaigns. In the Latin American environment, with honorable and very few exceptions, including La Jornada, in Mexico, confirm the rule that dictates the death, announced and executed, of dissident newspapers such as O Diario, in Portugal (spending more than a thousand hours in court facing lawsuits); the Spanish Liberación (economically asphyxiated by banks and distributors), and the Basque Egin (criminalized and closed down at gunpoint by the government of José María Aznar), to cite only three examples of how freedom of expression works for those who seek real independence. Noam Chomsky long ago explained the three filters that decide the content of the media: owners, advertisers and sources. If anyone still doubts this reality, the former director of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo has taken on the task of confirming it in a recent book, with impressive, although not surprising, testimony.

Fidel’s insistence that the people must have broad freedom “to use the media to favor the interests of the cause, to strongly criticize anything that is done poorly,” adding, “I believe that the more criticism there is within socialism, the better it is…” remains an aspiration in our media, not in those the United States pays in an attempt to deny Cubans the ownership of our own country and make it theirs. Is independent journalism possible without an independent country?

With $50 million a year budgeted publicly by the U.S. government for anti-Cuba propaganda, and 12 administrations obsessively persisting in the objective of changing the island’s regime, is it possible to think that the methods Stockwell and Ulfkotte have described are not being used in “informative” coverage of Cuban issues?

Nonetheless, participants in the anti-Cuban financial-propaganda web talk endlessly about their independence. As recently recommended by Argentine philosopher Néstor Kohan, they should read Frances Stonor Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War. She defines psychological warfare as the planned implementation by a nation of propaganda and non-warlike activities that promote ideas and information aimed at influencing the opinions, attitudes, emotions and behaviors of foreign groups in a way that favors national achievements and objectives. Nothing is more eloquent than when she quotes a CIA official defining the “most effective form of propaganda” as that in which “the individual acts in the expected manner, for reasons he believes to be his own.”

Not everything is as explicit as sending envelopes of money. Ulfkotte states: “They don’t come to you saying: We are the company, do you want to work for us? No, they invite you to discover the United States, they pay all your expenses and you are increasingly corrupted.” People are bought not only with money, but also by financing celebrity with trips, interviews, awards and invitations to events that make them feel important, their “rebellion,” “independence” and “objectivity” are applauded, especially if they are convinced that their country “needs new leaders” and that they can be the prophets of change, the Cuban Vaclav Havels.

During a conference at the Havana Book Fair, Stonor Saunders stated categorically: “There is no point in discussing these definitions, they are based on government documents and provide the main arguments for the cultural cold war strategy.” But some may prefer the red banner with gold lettering that presides over the Full Metal Jacket scene I described at the beginning of this article: “First to go, last to know.”

(Taken from Granma)

Chomsky gave the keynote address “Internationalism or Extinction” in the framework of the first (virtual) summit of the Progressive International, which emerged in May to unite, organize and mobilize progressive forces in a common front and thus stop the advance of the right in the world.

“The Progressive International (PI) has a crucial role in determining the course of history. Human life is in direct danger and the great imperialist powers of the day are fighting. British power is leaving Europe, becoming more of a satellite of the United States of what it already was. For the significance of the future it is important to see what happens in global hegemony, diminished by Trump’s delusions, but with the power and military advantages of the United States “, reflected the thinker from 91 years.

Close to midnight
A possible reelection of Trump would be a final, terminal crisis, which can have very serious consequences. There are other crises too: they are the ones that make you five to midnight. To extinction. 75 years ago we lived under this ticking clock, “Chomsky slipped.

At the time of the dropping of the atomic bomb, it was believed that human intelligence had reached the point of ” having the capacity for total destruction of its species.” It was not yet known that, later, “he was going to destroy the environment in this way, which now brings us to an end point”. In turn, each Trump year in power also means being closer to midnight.

In times of Covid-19 “the same crises as always” converge, to which the pandemic is added: the threat of nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, the destruction of democracy. “The issue of democracy might seem out of place. It is not. It is this collapse that allows the other two threats of extermination. Informed citizens, engaged in a real democratic process, would not let these other two threats pass,” explained.

“These three threats have been on the rise thanks to Trump’s policies. He has been unraveling gun control policies and developed more dangerous weapons; he has decreased protections against threats of nuclear war. He has dedicated himself to destroying the environment. environment and any sustenance of life. It has opened the last places protected against oil exploitation, for example. ”

In short, the president of the United States carries out “systematic policies to dismantle regulatory policies to protect the environment and populations from toxic contamination from the oil exploitation of fossil energy.”

In the talk, Chomsky defined from the beginning the role of the Progressive International in this complex world panorama: “Let us not panic now and act on this. The crises we are facing in this unique moment are international. Environmental catastrophes, nuclear war, the pandemic … none of these dangers have borders. There may be differences between countries, but there are common trunks. ”

Risks of a civil war in the United States
In another passage, he questioned the fact that Trump grants government positions without the approval of the Senate, which he “changes so that they are willing” to follow his will. “There are no independent voices. Congress had long established that an inspector general monitor the work of the executive branch, but looking at the corruption that Trump has left in Washington we can clearly see that it is not working,” he criticized. ” Trump began to say that if he does not like the result of the elections, he will not leave his post. It is a direct threat,” he warned.

Although “the military leadership published a letter in which it recalled its constitutional duty to remove from power a president who did not want to leave it,” we must take into account the paramilitary units that “have been distributed in the country to scare the population”. “In the absence of a very clear Trump victory, there are imminent risks of civil war. They are strong words, which we have never heard in public voices. I am not saying it; other people are saying it. Many people have that fear. Nothing of this kind. it had happened in the complex history of parliamentary democracy. The megalomania that dominates the world, that of Trump, for him is no longer enough. He could not respect the Constitution and do what he calls ‘negotiating’ for a third term. ”

The philosopher noted that “Trump’s agenda for the rich goes beyond neoliberalism.” Fiscal policy experts have detected that for the first time in recent centuries, billionaires pay less taxes than workers, which implies “a great victory within the class war.” “That is called having the hegemony,” he declared.

Optimism of the will
The conference continued with a panel discussion featuring Kenyan writer and activist Nanjala Nyabola, African-American activist and philosopher Cornel West, and Labor MP John McDonnell.

West’s – also an actor in films like The Matrix reloaded – was a beautiful, poetic intervention. It added one more factor to the confluence of crisis. A crisis “of the imagination”. It is necessary to give, then, an “intellectual and ideological” fight. “There may be a nuclear crisis tomorrow, or an economic and ecological catastrophe, but there is also a civic catastrophe: people cannot even imagine what a vibrant and lively public life would look like,” said the philosopher, and urged to recover values lost: intellectual integrity, decency, honesty. “The best of the human species is love, happiness, play, community. We must nurture a collective rebellion to open possible worlds.”

Echoing what was raised by the members of the table, Chomsky referred to the “human qualities” that emerged in the pandemic, as “mutual aid.” It grows stronger where people are most oppressed and poorer. “They come together to help each other and get food, much more than the people stuck in their departments. For example in Brazil, in the favelas. They don’t have access to anything. The government has done nothing. But they are organizing themselves and they have support systems. Mutual. Who started it? The criminal gangs of these neighborhoods. They transformed their mission to organize mutual aid, “he said.

Gramsci appeared several times in the conversation: “We are living in the age of monsters when the new world has not yet emerged,” proposed the thinker, who urged to maintain intellectual pessimism but also optimism of the will. “The Black Lives Matter movement did not come out of nowhere. It has been a process of growing consciousness for many years. To date it is the largest social movement in the history of the United States, more than that of Luther King. It is also international . Blacks and whites together, fighting with very important ideas. Not only against the police murder of African Americans but with ideas of how to fight racism and class oppression. The PI focuses on these issues to get us out of the age of monsters and let us enter a world of justice, “he said.

Finally, he called on society to get rid of the fossil energy industry: “We don’t need it.” For him it should remain in the hands of the working class and function on the basis of “sustainable programs.” “The world bank should be a public bank. We’re close to this as consciousness shifts. Ten years ago, after the 2008 housing crisis, Obama has basically nationalized the auto industry. If we give that industry back to them. the powers that be are going to continue doing what they have always done. We could hand it over to the communities and the workforce, “he suggested. And he concluded: “Less than 100 years ago it was clear to people that the industrial relations of the factories were intolerable. The New Green Deal has to have that at its core.”

(Taken from Pagina 12)