Propaganda
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Robert Mugabe, yet another man the West loves to hate By William Bowles
And as long as Mugabe left Britain’s ‘kith and kin’ alone (the settler farmers), it was quite happy to let Zanu-PF spout all kinds of socialist rhetoric, as long as he didn’t actually implement any of it. Thus all the statements out of the West about the ‘miracle’ of Zimbabwe, the ‘bread basket’ of Southern… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: ISRAELI DEATHS MATTER MORE March 11, 2008
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media The horrific shooting of eight young people at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem last Thursday was followed by saturation media coverage. International statesmen lined up with condemnations of the attack and condolences for the victims and their families. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced: “This… Continue reading
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Bush’s Tower of Babble by William Bowles
3 November 2011 “[W]e got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have [sic] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon” — president… Continue reading
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(Yet More) Rumours of War and other tales from Psy-Ops Central by William Bowles
7 September 2007 “Reports that the Bush administration will put Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: It’s either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within… Continue reading
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The BBC’s hall of mirrors By William Bowles
26 August 2007 “However, especially in the years since Hutton, we’ve come to focus on it [public trust or rather, lack of it] first and foremost in the context of journalism. Accuracy, impartiality, resolute defence of our editorial independence, a willingness to acknowledge mistakes when we make them: meeting all these expectations simultaneously is an… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Facts are not sacred: Royal Tantrums And The Cold War Billions
August 9, 2007 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media When Royals Attack The big media story of the last month has been the BBC apology to the Queen for showing footage that implied she had stormed out of a portrait session during a documentary. This followed the revelation that… Continue reading
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Completely Carbonated by William Bowles
5 July 2007 — InvestigatingImperialism Well it’s started, in fact it’s more than started and it’s driving me mad. You know what I’m talking about, my fucking ‘carbon footprint’! Every time I hear the phrase, which is every damn day, it really pisses me off. ‘Carbon footprint’ is the new Osama, the new bogie man… Continue reading
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Book Review: Capitalism – past its sell-by date? By William Bowles
Historically, it has been the CIA which up until the 1990s did the dirty work for US imperialism as the record clearly shows. However, the CIA’s record in overthrowing foreign governments is far from being a success story. A new strategy was needed, and one which was untainted with the ‘dirty tricks’ label of the… Continue reading
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Book Review: Illusion and Reality By William Bowles
Around 1990, when I was living in New York, I, along with two or three other people were invited to an evening at the North Korean Mission to the United Nations where we were plied with a meal of amazing and delicious Korean cuisine followed by an interminable and utterly boring (to my jaded, Western… Continue reading
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Israel, ‘Ye reap what ye sow’ By William Bowles
Well, as the bible says ‘ye reap what ye sow’ and the events currently unfolding in the Occupied Territories constitute a real turning point. The Zionist state has created a situation for which there are only two options open to it. Either it follows through with its decades-long objective of totally erasing what’s left of… Continue reading
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How the BBC hollows out the news By William Bowles
A major problem anybody confronts when trying to sort fact from fiction in the news—aside from any confusion that occurs in trying to figure out if anything the mainstream media ‘reports’ is ‘news’ or merely opinion posing as fact—is the sheer volume and consistency of the coverage, which ultimately depends on specific words and phrases… Continue reading
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The Iran ‘crisis’ – the bullshit continues By William Bowles
A story in the London Independent (14/1/06) is typical of the kind of propaganda war being waged by the UK and the US over Iran’s alleged programme to acquire nuclear weapons. In fact, the story is a model piece, worthy of dissection for the various messages it carries to a public which has been deliberately… Continue reading
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Propaganda Review – Part II Das Kulture By William Bowles
I and a host of observers are fond of quoting the first of the self-conscious propagandists of our age, Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, but the fact is the reality we live in now is far more insidious and dangerous than the world according to Goebbels, his was a world of black and white, a… Continue reading
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Propaganda Review – from the ‘war against the ‘anti-Christ’ to the ‘war on terror’ By William Bowles
Reclaiming the public space that has been appropriated by the corporate class must figure highly on our agenda, for without it, we are at the mercy of Schiller‘s “concentrated accumulation of the productive equipment, the technological expertise, the marketing apparatus, the financial resources, and the managerial know-how” wielded by capitalism. Continue reading
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The British (State) Broadcasting Corporation – A Coalition of the Killing? by William Bowles
On May 23, we had an entire day without the BBC’s blanket non-coverage of important events due to a strike by the three main unions over threatened redundancies. A blessing in disguise? Well maybe… And if I may strike a totally au contraire view of the BBC’s plans for the future, perhaps laying off a… Continue reading
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The Pope as Spectacle By William Bowles
So the Pope is dead (just in case you haven’t noticed). Listening to the BBC, one would think that it has transformed itself into Vatican Radio. Eulogies to the Pope have been never-ending ever since the geriatric reactionary finally shuffled off this mortal coil. The BBC for one, seems already to have elevated him to… Continue reading
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Privatising Propaganda By William Bowles
The use of PR companies and ‘NGOs’ by the US government to ‘sell’ its foreign policy goes back a long way but it was the invasion of Grenada under Reagan when we witnessed a ‘test run’ of the idea and the technique really came into its own during Gulf War 2 in 1991 when the… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 