A Ukrainian government official frequently cited as a source by western news media for her allegations of atrocities committed by Russian troops has been fired by the Ukrainian parliament, in part because of the unevidenced nature of those claims.
A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, removed Lyudmila Denisova, the parliament’s commissioner for human rights, from her post, according to Ukrainska Pravda. No new appointment has been made to fill the role.
The move to dismiss Denisova came after outrage about the wording used in public reports about alleged sexual assaults committed by Russians, as well as the alleged dissemination in those reports of unverified information. Despite accusations from Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes or sexual assaults during the invasion.
As it happens, Newsweek is one of the many western outlets who have uncritically cited Denisova’s unevidenced claims in their reporting of events in Ukraine. She was the “Ukraine official” in Newsweek’s incendiary April headline “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official,” an article whose entire first half featured unevidenced claims by Denisova.
"The racist occupiers must bear the strictest responsibility!" said Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Lyudmila Denisova, of Russian soldiers. https://t.co/ObN7cDbEJv
A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.
Denisova’s name featured just the other day in my own critique of the western media’s blind-faith regurgitation of Ukrainian government assertions when multiple western media outlets parroted her unevidenced claims about two Russians raping a one year-old baby to death.
Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, The Sun, Metro, The Daily Mirror and Yahoo News all published reports on the same story, and the one and only source for all of them was a post made by Denisova on a Ukrainian government website which contained no evidence and concluded with a call for more weapons and sanctions against Russia from the western world.
Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government
"The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death."https://t.co/tuYauL2Hol
This is not just brazen journalistic malpractice, this is actual atrocity propaganda. This latest development shows that even the Ukrainian government is more skeptical of Ukrainian government claims than the western mainstream press.
_____________________
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A critical analysis of the rise and fall of the George Floyd uprising in so-called Eugene, Oregon.
To start from the beginning would take a very, very long time. So, I’ll start from the middle.
From the middle of a march that felt very different than any other I’d ever attended in Eugene.
From the middle of a crowd unafraid to yell at the cops, to chant angrily, and also unafraid to take pleasure in all the fun things about being rowdy together: shooting off fireworks, dragging signs into the street for makeshift barricades to slow police, and enjoying the open expression of anger itself.
From the middle of the on-ramp to the I-5 where police attempted to disperse the crowd with pepper spray, getting the windows of their cars smashed out by skateboarders in response. The cops squealed off in fear, not to engage again for hours.
From the middle of that intersection on Washington we took over uselessly, celebratorily, for several hours. The one we decorated with countless tags and built a bonfire in the middle of, those excessive gestures that can only be expected from forced shut-ins finally brought out to the street to respond to an anti-Black cop lynching.
And from the middle of a sea of outrage and disavowal produced in the wake of the riot by many so-called radicals after something real finally happening; these counteractions being fatal to the expansion of the rebellion in Eugene.
M29
This was May 29th, the night of the nationwide insurrectionary response to the murder of George Floyd. The night when both the police and the activist managers lost all control, and when those of us present got a taste of what it can feel like to retake our power together.
In Eugene, hundreds gathered at Washington and 7th avenue to revel in the moment, loot nearby stores, set shit on fire, and hold the space for several hours. National context aside, this was an uncharacteristic development in this town: a place with a massive counter-insurgency operation in the form of an active liberal political movement, the reformist activism stemming from NGO’s and the local University, and a police department that hasn’t forgotten the lessons of the Green Scare. What took place was the first riot since the ‘Golden Days,’ when Eugene was known as one of the anarchist ‘capitals’ of the world.
Unfortunately, the intensity of May 29th was quickly pushed back under the surface by a multi-pronged counterattack from the EPD, the progressive political class in Eugene, and activists. Discourse swirled amongst some of Eugene’s so-called radicals who either refused to endorse the riot or outright condemned it. ‘I have mixed feelings’ became the slogan of those who were caught wholly unprepared for revolt but had the sense not to express their discomfort. Meanwhile, the city wasted no time in imposing a curfew to prevent further unrest. On the night of the 30th a small march of dedicated rebels tried to break the curfew, but it resulted in a swift crackdown by the EPD and several arrests. Within the span of a day, momentum shifted back to the side of order.
At the federal courthouse in Eugene reporting on the protest against the killing of George Floyd and the centuries of policy that got us here: pic.twitter.com/E59CBSbnMu
The day after—May 31st—a permitted march organized by Black youth in collaboration with the city’s political class, the EPD, and the NAACP, directed a crowd of nearly 10,000 into a park to be talked at by congressmen and other politicians. Billed as a rally to unite Eugene against racism, it was really a maneuver by Eugene’s political establishment to mobilize their constituency, and direct energies into non-productive channels. Unfortunately, and in part due to the speed of the political operation, anarchists were ill equipped to confront this moment of co-optation.
The huge crowd marched from the Federal Courthouse to nearby Alton Baker Park. Once there, people were subjected to speeches, various moments of silence, and empty gestures such as kneeling. Not feeling the vibe, many began the slow migration out of the park. Due to the uneven pace of exit from the rally, a crowd wasn’t able to aggregate in the same size they were before. Still, around 200 protesters managed to link up in front of the jail after a brief confrontation with police, to attempt a breakaway march against the curfew. Though courageous in their actions, an overwhelming police presence, vigilante counter attacks, and unhelpful rumors of Proud Boy incursions, rendered this attempt fruitless. At the end, there were only a few dozen standing against every cop that EPD could muster. In the week that followed, nighttime marches were attempted by various crews but met little success and heavy repression from police and vigilantes. Admittedly, those marches lacked any discernible strategy or conflictual orientation, which partially made them more vulnerable to the problems they encountered.
Consolidation of Leadership and the Summer’s Overview
Across the US, the murder of George Floyd called for a response that went far beyond anything reformers could provide, at least at the very onset. The outpouring of rage, here like everywhere else, was quickly seized upon by political actors looking to steer it in their own direction.
In the weeks following M29, the ‘Movement’ in Eugene replaced the revolt, using its insurrectionary energies as a catalyst, while rewriting its own history everyday. Countless marches to nowhere were led by mainly two factions, one group of cop collaborators that eventually coalesced into the organization called Eugene Black Unity and the other being a left-wing militant formation called the BIPOC Liberation Collective. The latter seemed well-intentioned but unable, or unwilling, to seize the moment and lacked the experience to overcome this. The former barely disguised their intentions of keeping a lid on things. The dynamic that developed in Eugene paralleled the peaceful social movement daytime demonstrations/militant nighttime demonstrations dynamic seen in other cities, except that the latter never became consistently combative.
We could spend a great deal of time discussing Eugene Black Unity (EBU), but many cities saw similar formations: liberal Black leadership who led countless marches around downtown cores, collaborated with the police on their routes, and who were quick to turn on radicals and “agitators.” It’s fair to say that we did not attend many of their demos, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. The EPD adopted a strategy of keeping a hands off approach for Eugene Black Unity’s demos, while reserving viscious repression for everyone else. Their marches would often be escorted by the EPD, who justified this by saying they were preventing vehicular attacks (a common occurrence in Eugene that summer). This made it easier for EBU and their reformist message to spread and for them to attract demonstrators, since in theory one wouldn’t need to be worried about being attacked by vigilantes at one of their rallies. The notable exception to this strategy happened in Springfield, a smaller town right on the border of Eugene. After the harassment of a Black resident, Eugene Black Unity led a series of marches through the Thurston neighborhood, the final one being brutally attacked by white vigilantes who collaborated with cops from the Springfield Police Department. Apparently, SPD didn’t get the memo about Eugene Black Unity, and this difference in strategy by both police departments is something that warrants further investigation.1
The other faction was the BIPOC Liberation Collective (BLC). The BIPOC Liberation Collective was born of a dramatic split that occurred at an afternoon rally organized by the mainstream activist Left (including some of the founders of Eugene Black Unity) in the week after the riot. The split occurred due to the more liberal activists’ insistence on letting white people pushing patriotic, pacifistic bullshit speak on the mic. These speeches were interrupted by heckling from the crowd, as well as arguments from Black and Brown radicals present. After a short breakaway march, a group discussion ensued, and the new group emerged publicly in the days after. The following is a rough timeline of events that summer.
June 7th
BLC held their first event on June 7th, a little over a week after the uprising. It began with a large rally (500+) in front of the Lane County Courthouse which included speeches. BLC then led a march that cut through downtown, towards the University of Oregon. The chants and aesthetics of the march were militant, but a noticeable atmosphere of hesitation hung over the crowd. Whereas the May 29th riot in Eugene had the energy of an angry mob bent on vengeance, the atmosphere at this demo felt heavy, and this effected the confidence of the demonstrators. Although there was no police presence, minimal property damage occurred on the route. The march arrived at the University of Oregon, where tables had been set up, and speakers prepared to address the crowd. The content of the speeches was much more agreeable than the week before, with speakers on topics such as the abolition of the police and the justification of property destruction. Towards the end, a speech on ‘how to deescalate’ was confronted by a protester. After this, the rally ended, and the group marched across the river towards the police headquarters where a children’s mural of support for the police was torn down and spray-painted. Pathetically, close examination of the ‘mural’ showed the same handwriting over and over again, indicating just a few children had made the entire thing. Talk about having real supporters!
After a few speeches at this location, the crowd headed back into town. Once more, a tense energy pervaded, dampening the possibility of the march escalating further. This was compounded by the paranoia of the organizers yelling at people to “tighten up” when there was no visible police presence at all. The march dispersed shortly after.
June 13th
More energizing was the event BLC held to take down the Pioneer Mother and Father statues at the University. Both of them were blatant monuments to Oregon’s bloody colonial history, and for the better part of a decade, attempts to negotiate with the University’s institutions to remove them had failed. This event tapped into the broad wave of iconoclasm against colonial and white supremacist statues that had reached a crest nationwide. Promoted as a ‘teach-in,’ the event started with some speeches explaining the history of colonization of Oregon, and Lane County in particular (which is Kalapuya land).2 Fairly quickly, however, the organizers led the crowd to the statues and wasted no time in affixing ropes to them and encouraging attendees to pull them down as a group. The University decided not to put the statues back up after this.
July 25th
The last highlight of the summer worth mentioning is the July 25th Day of Solidarity with Portland, a series of regional and national protests in response to the federal occupation of Portland, OR. The event was called for via an anonymous flyer, and it quickly picked up traction through anarchist networks, liberal formations such as the Wall of Moms – Eugene, and everyday people who were upset about what was happening just north of us. The result was another large gathering in front of the Federal Courthouse. No doubt inspired by the brave fighters of Portland, many of the attendees came ready for confrontation, with a mixture of black bloc and frontliners present. This proved useful almost immediately as a large group of far-Right “patriots” came with their own shields and poles and attempted to attack the gathering as soon as it began. Initially, the Wall of Moms took position directly in front of them but were too few to prevent skirmishes between protesters and fascists, which resulted in a firearm being discharged on the right-wing side. This had the effect of both scaring off many attendees on both sides and agitating everyone who stayed. Skirmishes escalated until the fascists were literally stripped of their large wooden shields and forced to retreat.
It began as a peaceful demonstration at the Lane County Courthouse but ended in window smashing, burning and looting. Eventually, EPD deployed SWAT teams to disperse protesters angry over the death of George Floyd. https://t.co/26C0sxtewepic.twitter.com/TlQekMXhnc
Winning a fight such as this ballooned the confidence of the crowd, and after holding the space for another hour, around 150 people departed the courthouse, smashing targets across downtown before reaching the jail where members of Eugene Black Unity attempted to impose order. Fortunately, they were left yelling into a megaphone by themselves as the crowd ignored them to make a loop back towards the courthouse, breaking windows at the Whole Foods and at Elkhorn Brewery, who notoriously allowed Proud Boys to meet in their parking lot before attacking demonstrators.
Not to be lost in this story, and keeping tabs on the situation with drones overhead, the Eugene police waited to make their move, finally swarming in with vehicles, and bikes, and deploying teargas. This was responded to with rocks, bottles, and dumpster fires, and a riot was declared. A game of cat and mouse developed, and the next hour saw clashes spread into neighborhoods throughout the inner core of Eugene, involving both protesters and residents. In the mayhem, the Eugene police deployed teargas which wafted into homes, and became a scandal. They were also implicated on video standing by as a fascist assaulted a teenage demonstrator in the mayhem. Following this, the city leaned into damage control mode and vowed they would not allow downtown to become the playground of rioters again. It was the last major victory of the summer.
August 5th crackdown, and September 4th rally
Unfortunately, two events happened in succession that significantly stifled the energy locally. The first was a wave of repression from the Eugene Police, which as of this time is still ongoing. In the span of a few hours on the morning of August 5th, 11 people were arrested on charges stemming from the May 29th riot. This sent a shock-wave through town as many feared they could be next, and some people decided to lay low after that. The second was a botched rally to support arrestees that was scheduled by some well-established anarchist activists for the evening of September 4th. The rally was again set to start at the Federal Courthouse; however, it was called off by the organizers a couple hours ahead of time due to rumors that the Proud Boys were coming to clash with demonstrators. A small crowd of around 25 still showed up, either out of defiance or ignorance, to the cancelled march and were engaged by an equally sized group of Proud Boys who took advantage of the small numbers to harass and intimidate. The protesters were only let out of their predicament when ample backup showed up to assist them. This was an extremely embarrassing scene for the organizers of the event and demoralizing for Eugene as a whole. Frustratingly, it inaugurated an era where control of the streets shifted over to the far right for the next year, after they came to the understanding that Eugene was not ready to match their level of force. The protests of the summer ended on this note.
For the most part the BLC lacked the experience and confidence to take things in an insurrectionary direction, instead mainly content to be a more militant counterpart to Eugene Black Unity. For example, they led more militant chants, were okay with spray paint, and wouldn’t be weird to you for coming in black bloc attire. Despite this, the feeling of their rallies was often very heavy and dampened the confidence of the crowd. In saying this, it is not our intention to denigrate the leadership abilities of BLC as much as commenting on the inherent limitations of that model of mobilization and struggle. When an individual or group is put into a leadership position, it limits the agency of both leader and led. The leaders are left with the weight of logistical and strategic responsibility, unable to improvise and act in more creative ways in the streets. Meanwhile, followers are expected to abdicate all of their strategic insight, and instead be pawns for whatever the leadership wants to do. Both parties become frozen in their specialized roles rather than being able to fully participate in the events. This causes a parody-like situation where a dedicated group attempts to recreate the aesthetic of a revolt through the use of the same rhetoric and visuals (such as masks) but contains none of the collective confidence that makes a revolt possible. It is a reminder that insurrection has no party.
This is not meant as a wholesale rejection of all forms of leadership and roles. Especially when it comes to demonstrations, there will generally be a core group who is calling the action and is committed to seeing it through, has plans for how it will go, is bringing gear to make that a reality, etc. Even in the most otherwise ‘leaderless’ of contexts. But it is important that this not stay a fixed role, that those in that position do everything they can to share their skills and connections, to make it known they aren’t the only ones ‘allowed’ to call actions. An additional qualification to the critique of leadership is that it is not necessarily the case that, in the absence of leadership, everything magically works out. While there are some seasoned comrades in Lane County, the majority of anarchists here lacked the extensive experience in combative street action possessed by many in, say, Portland or Seattle. If the leadership/led dynamic emerged in the summer of 2020, it was not exclusively due to the self-deputization of the leaders but also because many were looking for someone to tell them how to act in the streets. To overcome this, we need not only to remove the leaders, but to build and spread the various skills, abilities, and connections that allow people to show up powerfully to events and make them theirs. Not so much a lack of leadership as the proliferation of leadership ability to as many as possible.
On the part of anarchists, this will require intervention, experimentation in acting together, and an eye to encouraging newcomers and learning from each other. This is one place where it is important that those of us in mostly-white networks and organizations do our best to reach out to Black, Indigenous, and other comrades of color. It is not just financial wealth white people in Lane County have disproportionate access to, but also a wealth of connections and other resources (such as increased access to free time financial wealth secures). Part of working to further Black liberation in Lane County means doing our best to share these connections, resources, and capacity to make shit happen.
Narrative
Within every conflict, the terrain and terms, the sides and the stakes of the antagonism are themselves also under constant contestation. This can be imperfectly named the struggle over narrative—the struggle to determine what meanings and understandings of the conflict prevail, the set of battles and interventions in both speech and in deed that determine what war is being fought in the first place. What immediately occurred after M29 was that the proponents of insurrection lost the narrative war. The revolt was subsumed under the terms and stakes laid out by the liberal movement for democratic and cultural assimilation. This subsumption was helped along by many so-called ‘radicals’ who added that ‘it was just white anarchists acting out of line; they didn’t follow Black leadership.’ Most anarchists who didn’t wholesale accept this framing of events were too hesitant, or isolated, to make a real dent in the discourse, or carve out their own space. We have to admit we were defeated in this arena. For the most part, we were left scrambling to react against the narrative already laid out for us by the liberals, activists, reactionaries, and their media apparatuses, rather than asserting our own. Better than engaging on their terms to defend the actions of the rioters, we should have been more clear in affirming that the vandalism and looting were the acts with the closest possible fidelity to the spirit of the Minneapolis uprising, short of burning down our own police station.
Now, we do have to acknowledge that in terms of narrative control, the deck is stacked against us partisans. On a material level, it is overwhelmingly the party of order who have access to the means of propagation through wide-reaching media infrastructure and platforms. On an ideological level, it is those narratives that confirm people’s preconceived biases and prejudices that generally spread most widely. The purpose of capitalist media apparatuses is to generate consent for governance among citizens or at least enough confusion and stimulation to ensure passivity. To be clear, we are not trying to beat capitalist media at their own game; however, there are some things only anarchists can say, and those things tend to resonate in the midst of a revolt. Our goal as anarchists intervening in the sphere of publicity is to work upon desire, to raise tensions and encourage people to take action in their own lives. This can be difficult because successfully achieving this means working against the grain of all contemporary forms of media. Friendly media outlets like DoubleSided Media can play a positive role in some contexts, but ultimately, the very figure of the Journalist is problematic: we must assert our own perspectives instead of relying on specialists to speak for us. The whole of journalism in this society works to hollow out the substance of revolt, repackaging it as a series of images to be consumed. Even radical-friendly media outlets help to reproduce an alienated way of relating to life, wherein we are reduced to passive spectators in our own lives. Not to mention that disseminating non-anonymized video footage of a rowdy demonstration is a great way to get comrades arrested.
There is a longstanding practice of anarchists releasing public communiqués on actions taken, analyses about recent events, and report-backs on demonstrations, and for good reason. It gives us the opportunity to contribute our own meanings to the proceedings, signal our involvement and presence to fellow travelers who might not be as incorporated into our networks, and build habits of debate and critical thought within the milieu. There were a few attempts at this during the summer of 2020, but none proved very influential.3 This essay is an offering towards exactly this practice. Lane County lacks a dedicated counter-info website (Portland has Rose City Counter-Info and the Seattle-Olympia area has Puget Sound Anarchists), but reports of this type can be submitted to It’s Going Down and other websites. Additionally, building up platforms on social media and being quick to the draw with analyses, memes, and other forms of expression can have a big impact. In this online arena, humor and absurdity are our friends—get silly with it!
There are other ways of strategically garnering visibility for our perspectives: banner drops, graffiti in high-traffic locations, and projecting movies or images in public places are just a few tried and true creative outlets anarchists have used over the years. Visibility itself can be problematic (we don’t disagree with Foucault’s Admiral Ackbarian assertion that it is “a trap”), but anarchist engagements with publicity might best be viewed as a means to obliquely communicate with each other and those who we might find affinity with, not to communicate with those in power nor to get more passive adherents to our ideology like a politician grooming voters.
Wendy Trevino’s “Revolutionary Letter” sums up this approach to playing the games of visibility and publicity nicely:
find the people who will help / be loud
& clear so they know where you are — focus on them, be encouraged
by them, encourage them, work with them, don’t worry
about the people who won’t help. they will be of no help even
if they are on your side.
Afterwards
So, where did all that energy go? Have there been any changes since Summer 2020? Surely, we would argue that anarchists are not as marginal and isolated from one another as they were before. Consistent efforts at networking have helped to create a more cohesive movement of our own. Things like the successful anti-fascist action at the Planned Parenthood in September 2021 showed a stronger capacity to act together than had existed at the beginning of the Uprising (and shifted control of the streets back to partisans!). Additionally, it is now rare for a demo in Eugene to happen without property destruction, a scarce occurrence before the rebellion.
But what of the demands and lip service? Excuse us if we’re not shocked that a Joe Biden presidency has put even more resources in the hands of the police, and excuse us if we don’t care that your favorite movement politician’s pet policies didn’t get passed. The elements of the movement that acted for social reform, for policy adjustments, whose struggle consisted of raising visibility for demands made of those in power: these contained all the essential elements of counter-insurgency, regardless of whether or not participants in these actions intended on it.4 Black Liberation was quickly thrown aside in favor of a spectacle wherein more Black faces in politics and some extra cash going to Black business owners was going to just have to be good enough compensation for everything. That is to say, symbols and crumbs are handed over in exchange for the eternal continuance of this genocidal, anti-Black world.5
But the quietude of the streets belies the ongoing influence and legacy of the George Floyd Uprising here in Eugene. As Your Lazy Comrades asserts in their text “The Great Refusal,” “the movement didn’t simply leave the streets, but translated itself from the streets into workplaces, homes, schools, prisons, families, social gatherings, in other words, into proletarian everyday life.” (emphasis original). We already saw this process of translation begin in the summer of 2020, as the the Uprising helped to catalyze a hunger strike at the Lane County Jail that lasted a total of 81 days.6 The echoes of the Uprising live on in refusal of work as proletarians continue to quit their jobs en masse, in the increasing number of student walkouts in response to legislative attacks on transgender life and reproductive autonomy, and in the uptick in traditional labor movement tactics like unionization. Additionally, since the summer of 2020 there has been a subtle but marked increase locally in the frequency of isolated attacks against the symbols and infrastructure of capital and the State.7 The intensity has dimmed, but the terrains of struggle have multiplied.
Last weekend’s Black Unity protests turned tumultuous when marchers came face-to-face with police and counter-protesters. The weekend ended with a Children’s March in Eugene where a driver struck Black Unity member Isiah Wagoner with a car. https://t.co/9vVtRvO845pic.twitter.com/rKW2PjLQHv
In terms of policy changes, or even what most would consider ‘material’ results, the Uprising changed little in Lane County. But the city still bears scars of the uprising: they never quite got the spray-paint off of the Whole Foods from the July 25th Riot, the Pioneer Mother and Father statues will never stand again on UO campus, and the Jimmy John’s at the intersection of Washington and 7th is still boarded up. More importantly, however, is the way that the lives of so many were forever changed by that summer. That taste people got of freedom, of active joy, of incandescent refusal, will stick with them forever. Endnotes has noted that the GFR produced “revolutionaries without a revolution.” A disheartening state of affairs, for sure, but also an opening. Countless people have glimpsed what the overcoming of racial capitalist social relations and the creation of communal forms of life could look and feel like, and many will likely not settle for less.
Transmuting the experiences of 2020 into an inclination that pulls people towards the creation of a revolutionary force is a question of what some call ‘revolutionary becomings.’ The foundations of their lives shaken by these events, people are undergoing a wholesale re-evaluation of their life’s priorities, what they want their lives to be about and who they want in it, amidst a climate of ever-compounding crises and very uncertain future prospects. To live through and witness the unceremonious, quiet death of an insurrection as briefly earthquaking as the George Floyd Rebellion is a hope-shattering experience. Combined with the general spiritual wreckage of our era, the slow-moving disaster that is colonial modernity, it is easy to take this death as yet another reason to escape from life. To try and get excited for that next politician, for a career, for whatever new show is coming out, for little distractions, to try and convince yourself that any of those can banish the void that continues to grow within, around, and between every being. This society will never cease to offer new images of happiness, lulls of peace and small morsels of contentment with which to be bought off. It can be easy to float through life without ever having to truly confront the utter existential poverty of this existence. Especially easy, in fact, to do in a playground for Pacific Northwest hippies and yuppies such as Eugene.
The only way out of this kind of nihilism is through; the only way to banish this emptiness is to complete it. To become powerful, we need to learn how to grieve, how to move towards connection within and through grief. There is a kernel of affirmation there for us to find within all of the pain if we fully let it in and allow it to teach us. To become revolutionary is not to harden into a soldier, but to connect our warlike impulses to everything soft and loving within and between us. The 20th century Workers’ Movements came and went; the Black Power, Gay Liberation, and militant Feminist movements of the 60’s and 70’s likewise were bitterly defeated. We are still fighting an entire civilization built on work, anti-Blackness, (cis)heterosexuality, and patriarchy, but we cannot merely import the strategies of bygone eras. Where we’re at, we have little other choice but to fully accept our historical defeat and fashion a means of victory out of its ragged threads. To gather together all of the sparks that have lit up our life, to attach the joy of living to the determination to fight against all that prevents us from actualizing this joy. Every moment of business as usual is an indescribable tragedy, but every moment stolen from societal control is a gift, and those moments are our starting place.
Now
The struggle against domination finds its roots in everyday life—it is a tapestry of actions, relations, and resources, a certain combination of motion and rest, slowness and speed. A prime mistake by activists, self-described revolutionary or not, is to place the burden of changing the world solely on their shoulders. That practice leads only to burnout and further despair at never being enough as they struggle to fill shoes that were never theirs in the first place. The truth is, it is forces that far exceed activists which cause conflagrations like the M29 Riot, those moments of social upheaval that force rupture in our city. To imagine that it’s a small amount of activists who make revolutions happen is to buy into the mythology of the vanguard, regardless of whether or not you think of yourself as a vanguardist. This mythology states that the exploited and abused masses need conscious revolutionaries to lead them, either through education or by direct authority. As anarchists we reject this notion and contend that capital and the State can be abolished only by the self-activity of the exploited themselves. We are not the spark that makes it all explode, and we are not going to create a “new society in the shell of the old” through non-confrontational mutual aid efforts (and trying to do so leads only to exhaustion and burnout). What we can do, however, is keep the fires lit during down periods—to keep alive the insurrectionary spirit of Eugene’s rioters. To spread, not just ideas, but material acts that might have resonance and might spread in that strange and unpredictable way that acts of insubordination do. We mean acts that get lodged in people’s muscle memory and emotional psyche, as weapons to pick up in future moments of crisis.8
In accepting that we are not the prime movers of revolutionary upheaval, we can take a more grounded perspective as to what our activity should look like and what our capacity and ability to intervene in social struggles actually is. This can be a time to make friends; to increase the extension and connection of networks; to hone already existing skills and learn new ones; to study theory, history, the local conditions and insurrections in other places; and to expand and alter our perspectives and discuss these with comrades. We should do things that nourish us and refuse, to the best of our abilities, that which depletes and drains us. Rebellion takes root nowhere if not in our own, first-person way of moving through the world, and a revolution premised on the subsumption of individuals to a collective and the sacrifice of individual desire for some abstraction like ‘the community,’ or even ‘the revolution,’ is doomed to sad conformity and bitter self-hatred. This does not entail a rejection of organization or collectivity, rather the insistence that our forms of organization give back more than we put into them. Let us be done with spinning our wheels building organizations with people we don’t like just to prove to ourselves we’re ‘doing something.’ Let us be done with trying to grow the quantities of comrades without attending to the quality of our relationships to one another, and to whether or not we’re acting as we wish to act. As experiences last summer such as the utterly deflating march to Alton Baker Park, showed us, a vast amassing of bodies is no guarantee of collective power.
Until rupture turns Eugene back into a wetland—together towards the party of disorder!
To help with legal costs for those arrested as a result of the M29 rebellion, and those who may need help in the future, Venmo @EugeneBailFund
4. The US Army Field Manual 3-24 suggests that, in order to ward off insurgency, authorities should work “(…) with factions from a population to get them to see the benefit ofparticipating in peaceful means to address their core grievances. Getting youths to understand the legalmeans they have to address root causes of conflict is a critical tool for reducing violence. If commandersand staffs believe that insurgencies may occur over extended periods, then some efforts must be made toengage this next generation of leaders who can establish a lasting peace.” We can easily read between the lines to interpret that the “violence” they would like to reduce is insurrectionary activity that would threaten their control, and that Eugene Black Unity and every other group of their ilk are exactly the “next generation of leaders” the forces of order were looking for. US Army, Field Manual 3-24, no. 10-10
6. A couple noise demonstrations in support of the hunger strikers were among the most rowdy of the summer besides the outright riots. One resulted in several police vehicles being damaged. The hunger strike and the activity around it was a great example between those incarcerated and those on the outside, and is well worth taking pointers from. More info on the hunger strike can be found here.
8. Writing about the 2008 Greek Insurrection, AG Schwarz says “…by carrying out attacks — primarily smashings and molotov attacks against banks and police stations, which constitute the most obvious symbols of capitalist exploitation and State violence for Greek society — insurrectionary anarchists created signals of disorder that acted as subversive seeds. Even though most people did not agree with these attacks at the time, they lodged in their consciousness, and at a moment of social rupture, people adopted these forms as their own tools, to express their rage when all the traditionally valid forms of political activity were inadequate.” As we mentioned earlier, the frequency of attacks like these—though still modest in number—have increased locally since 2020. It is clear that some in Lane County are seizing the initiative, and in this context anarchists have an opportunity to contribute in a conscious, intentional way to the antagonistic grammar that might compose future rebellions.
British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).
“The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”
Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change.
BREAKING: Ukrainian Nazis are getting rid of their SS symbols to stop evil propagandists in one of the smartest marketing moves ever. The Times headline tells how much Western oligarchs support fascists. ✋ pic.twitter.com/ITV7TFWA6F
Claiming it’s “Russian propaganda” to say the Azov Battalion uses neo-Nazi insignia, and is ideologically neo-Nazi, is itself propaganda. A month ago Moon of Alabama published an incomplete list of the many mainstream western outlets who have described various Ukrainian paramilitaries as such, so if it’s only “Russian propagandists” who’ve been saying the Azov Battalion is neo-Nazi then Silicon Valley social media platforms should immediately ban outlets like NBC News, the BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters.
Before this war started this past February it wasn’t seriously controversial to say that Ukraine has a Nazi problem except in the very most virulent of empire spinmeister echo chambers. Even in the early days of the conflict it was still happening with mainstream publications who hadn’t yet gotten the memo that history had been rewritten, like this NBC News article from March titled “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”
An excerpt:
Just as disturbing, neo-Nazis are part of some of Ukraine’s growing ranks of volunteer battalions. They are battle-hardened after waging some of the toughest street fighting against Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine following Putin’s Crimean invasion in 2014. One is the Azov Battalion, founded by an avowed white supremacist who claimed Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. In 2018, the U.S. Congress stipulated that its aid to Ukraine couldn’t be used “to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Even so, Azov is now an official member of the Ukraine National Guard.
So plainly it is not “Russian propaganda” to highlight the established fact that there are neo-Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine who are receiving weapons from the US and its allies. The change in insignia isn’t being made to correct a misperception, it’s being made to obscure a correct perception.
The change in insignia is a rebranding to a more mainstream-friendly logo, very much like Aunt Jemima rebranding to Pearl Milling Company due to the Jim Crow racism the previous branding evoked. The primary difference is that the corporate executives of Pearl Milling probably aren’t still interested in turning America back into an apartheid state.
As journalist Alex Rubenstein noted on Twitter, al Qaeda in Syria went through a similar rebranding not long ago for the exact same reasons:
Azov is the new al-Qaeda in Syria: "We aren't al-Qaeda! We split from them. Sure, all of us are former members but our new group, Jaysh al-Zawahiri, isn't down with that sort of thing! We still fly the black flag but changed the words on it. Now please us send more weapons." https://t.co/coh8mZPNLQ
Indeed it is very normal for the US and its allies to provide backing to fascistic extremists in order to advance imperial agendas, because those tend to be the armed factions in a given area who are willing to inflict the brutal acts of violence upon their countrymen necessary to facilitate those agendas.
From far right militias in Latin America to tyrannical jihadists in the Middle East, this pattern of backing murderous fascists and then having to manage public perception of their depravity has been going on a long time. After the US alliance began working with al Qaeda-aligned factions to push regime change Syria, it eventually became necessary for them to rebrand to appease public concerns about their image. When the US-backed Contras were committing human rights atrocities in Nicaragua to stomp out the leftist Sandinistas, the Reagan administration was launching a massive perception management campaign to manipulate the way people see the situation.
In Ukraine, neo-Nazi paramilitaries just happen to have been the armed thugs who were depraved enough to do what the empire needed done on the ground. As Ukrainian-American peace activist Yuliy Dubovyk explained for Multipolarista, they were the ones who were willing to fire upon their own countrymen in eastern part of the nation.
The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.
At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their US-backed government started.
Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.
Much like in Latin America, where US-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
The fact that factions like the Azov Battalion have been the ones willing to get their hands dirty in Ukraine has been a major factor in their ability to shore up influence over the nation’s affairs far in excess of their numbers, a dynamic described in detail by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubenstein. As noted by journalist Aaron Maté, when Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine these extremists openly threatened to lynch him if he worked to make peace with Russia as he had pledged to do.
And on that note it’s work issuing another reminder at this time that the US could easily have prevented this entire war by simply giving Zelensky protection from those factions so that he could enact the peace mandate he’d been elected to enact. But of course the US would never do such a thing, because the US always wanted this war, and because the US does not actually believe in democratic mandates, and because the US does not actually oppose Nazism.
Which is why when concerns were raised about arming neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, the only offer on the table was a logo change.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
SubMedia presents another installment of System Fail, featuring an analysis of international news from an anarchist perspective.
Welcome to another Episode of System Fail. In this episode we will be covering the trend of rising state repression around the globe.
We start in so-called Chile where the newly elected ostensibly left-libertarian president Gabriel Boric has failed to deliver on his promise to free political prisoners.
Meanwhile in Munich, police have raided a number of apartments, an anarchist library, and a print shop.
Then in Greece, long term anarchist prisoner Giannis Michaildis has announced a hunger strike demanding his release.
Finally, a run down of the recent events at the Defend the Forest Atlanta encampment.
Communique from Mapuche political prisoners in Angol denouncing repression and racism from the new Boric government and Chilean gendarmerie against Mapuche political prisoners and communities in resistance. The original in Spanish was published by Aukin and can be found here.
To read a previous statement from Mapuche political prisoners in Angol go here.
For more information on Mapuche struggles in English go here.
May 29th, 2022: Marri marri pu lonko, pu werken, pu peñi, pu lamgen, pu weichafe, people and social organizations conscious of the dignified struggle of our Mapuche people-nation.
In the face of the racist and criminal politics adopted by the ministry of justice through the gendarmerie, the 25 Mapuche political prisoners detained in the Angol prison denounce the following:
As is public knowledge, the new government of Gabriel Boric is exercising repression against the communities in resistance of Wallmapu. With it, they are attempting to socially marginalize us through different media outlets owned by the ultra-right bourgeoisie, different unions, and anti-Mapuche groups such as APRA and CMPC, aiming to discredit and delegitimize our struggle for the recuperation and reconstruction of our ñuke Mapu (mother earth). They have conspired using different practices of communicative intimidation.
As Mapuche political prisoners in the Angol prison, we denounce the gendarmerie as an institution. It is part of the criminal political strategy of the government—utilizing practices of torture implemented during the dictatorship by the DINA—taking our pu peñi to prisons in other regions of the country. To these Mapuche political prisoners they have imposed pre-trial detention, harassing them psychologically, and seeking to demoralize the different lof that struggle with dignity for the defense, recuperation, and reconstruction of our Mapuche people-nation.
This is the case of the werken (spokesperson) Juan Alberto Millanao Huaiquillán of the lof Kollam Mapu, who was detained on May 6, 2022 in the city of Temuco. In a report issued by the gendarmerie, it was argued that the module of Mapuche political prisoners in the Angol prison is overcrowded, justifying his continued pretrial detention in the city of Temuco.
Another case is the detention of our peñi Alejandro Liguen of the lof Chacaico Huañaco Millao. On May 25 of this year, the same day of his arraignment, the Collipulli Court of Constitutional Guarantees with the report from the Angol Gendarmerie, indiscriminately took the decision to transfer our peñi to the Manzano prison in Concepcion. This was a racist decision by the court, violating his right to the presumption of innocence. A practice that has been exercised in all of the persecutions against our pu peñi and pu lamien of our Wallmapu.
We make a widespread call to all of the lof in resistance to remain attentive, firm, and united before the wave of repression that this new government, through its lackeys, together with the different capitalist unions and bourgeois media, have sought to establish in order to delegitimize our weichan.
We demand the immediate transfer of our peñi Juan Millanao Huaiquillán and Alejandro Liguen to the module of Mapuche political prisoners of the CDP of Angol. We will remain alert to the various violations that the gendarmerie carries out, both locally and in the various prisons of Wallmapu, against the various pu peñi and pu lamien kidnapped by the state.
Free all Mapuche political prisoners and prisoners of the revolt!
The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about the world. Whether you call it propaganda, psyops, perception management or public relations, it’s a real thing that happens constantly, and it happens to all of us.
And its consequences shape our entire world.
This should be at the forefront of our attention when examining news, trends and ideas, but it hardly ever gets mentioned. This is because the mass-scale psychological manipulation is succeeding. Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening.
To be clear, I am not talking about some kind of wacky unsubstantiated conspiracy theory here. I am talking about a conspiracy fact. That we are propagandized by people with authority over us is not seriously in dispute by any good-faith actor and has been extensivelydescribed and documented for many years.
More than this, the managers of the US-centralized empire which dominates the west and so much of the rest of the world have straightforwardly shown us that they propagandize us and want to propagandize us more. They have shown us with their actions, and they have at times come right out and told us with their words.
It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.
But it only got worse from there.
2. Intelligence operatives now just openly working in the media
The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media. Now The CIA Is The Media.
"This isn't Operation Mockingbird. It's so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something *to* the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting *as* the media."https://t.co/mFwHob0MFC
Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The Washington Post has consistently refused to disclose the fact that its sole owner has been a CIA contractor when reporting on US intelligence agencies as per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona, Michael Morell, John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts, James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas, Mike Rogers and Malcolm Nance, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.
Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any meaningful separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
3. Richard Stengel’s CFR remarks on propaganda
At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about "fake news," former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens – then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third world pic.twitter.com/ClAT5POv7G
— William Craddick (@williamcraddick) May 11, 2018
Former US State Department official and Time Magazine editor Richard Stengel expressed full-throated support for the use of propaganda on both foreign and domestic audiences during a 2018 event organized by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
“Basically every country creates their own narrative story,” Stengel said. “My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
Interestingly, years earlier during his time at the US State Department under the Obama administration Stengel actually provided his own definition of what precisely he means by the word “propaganda”, and it’s not nearly as innocuous as he made it sound for his CFR audience.
“Propaganda is the deliberate dissemination of information that you know to be false or misleading in order to influence an audience,” Stengel wrote in 2014.
Those are two mighty interesting positions for an empire manager to hold at the same time, especially one who just served on the presidential transition team of the current president.
4. US officials telling the press they’re circulating disinfo about Russia to win an information war against Putin
US Officials Admit They're Literally Just Lying To The Public About Russia
"And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will consent to being lied to."https://t.co/mYBJ4kQhk8
Last month NBC News released a report citing multiple anonymous US officials who said the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.
The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.
So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most influential media outlets in the western world.
That this happened while the mass media is continually churning out reports warning the public about the dangers of “disinformation” is an irony that was lost on almost everybody.
5. Senators telling Silicon Valley representatives it’s their job to manipulate public thought to prevent dissent
Friendly reminder that last year representatives of Google/Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were instructed on the floor of the US Senate that it is their responsibility to "quell information rebellions" so as to "prevent the fomenting of discord.”https://t.co/X4Hc56fH0k
In 2017 representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told they must “quell information rebellions” and were instructed to come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord” on their platforms.
“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the tech giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”
When monopolistic billionaire corporations are faced with demands from a legislative body that could easily make their lives a lot harder and a lot less profitable by taking action, up to and including major antitrust cases, they are being made an offer they can’t refuse. This was made abundantly clear by Senator Dianne Feinstein during the 2017 hearings in her threat to intervene if those corporations failed to curtail the spread of unauthorized information online.
“You have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will,” Feinstein told the online platforms.
6. The Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board”
Patriot Act co-author, former DHS secretary, surveillance porn addict, & Russiagate hoax spreader Michael Chertoff will be overseeing the review of the Ministry of Truth
You can't make this shit uphttps://t.co/IeAelhFy3m
The Department of Homeland Security’s hotly controversial Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have not-unfairly labeled a government-run Ministry of Truth, has “paused” its operations pending a review in light of public outcry. That review will be headed by corrupt imperial swamp monsters MichaelChertoff and Jamie Gorelick, of all people.
No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.
Whatever happens with that review we may be sure that the board’s mission will continue, either under its current name or under some other more carefully disguised iteration. The empire is expressing far too much enthusiasm for greater and greater control over public thought to just let this one slip past.
In December of 2012 the US congress passed a revision of the Smith-Mundt Act as part of the 2013 NDAA which critics said ended restrictions that were put in place to prevent the government from propagandizing US citizens.
The legislation was first highlighted in a BuzzFeed News article by journalist Michael Hastings, who the following year would die in a rather suspicious car wreck while reportedly working on a major story.
“It removes the protection for Americans,” an unnamed Pentagon official told Hastings. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”
Hastings’ report sparked online controversy, with many agreeing with his analysis of what would become known as the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 and others saying concerns were unfounded. Either way, with all that’s happened over the last ten years, it’s clear now that Americans were right to be worried about a dramatic escalation in domestic propaganda.
8. Reagan’s Psychological Operations
Robert Parry shows how three decades ago the US began an operation to flood the world with psyops, https://t.co/xXRRRufsBS
The late Robert Parry wrotenumerousarticles for Consortium News about the Reagan administration’s operations of mass-scale psychological manipulation, which related directly to Parry’s extensive work on the Iran-Contra affair during that time.
Parry described how Reagan and his neocon goons were obsessed with countering the public war-weariness and distrust of US interventionism which followed the Vietnam War in order to gain more public consent for the depraved agendas the administration was working to roll out in Latin America. Central to this goal of consent-manufacturing, which the White House called “public diplomacy” in public and “perception management” in private, was a particularly odious-sounding spook named Walter Raymond Jr.
During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for this propaganda structure, saying: “We were not configured effectively to deal with the war of ideas.”
One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade taxpayers’ money from being spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to pressure congressional representatives. Of course, every president and his team had vast resources to make their case in public, but by tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches, testimony and one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers.
But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC Advisor Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. “We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding,” Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan personally welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office for a private meeting, according to records on file at the Reagan library.)
As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim not only at foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan Contras.
9. Canadian military leaders using Covid regulations as an opportunity to test out psyop techniques on civilians
Sad that a tragedy like COVID was used to test Canadians’ reaction to fear propaganda. I hope we didn’t lay down our freedoms at the alter of gov created fear, segregation, & hatred. Was that the purpose of the secret military op, testing our malleability? https://t.co/IPtx8eVa7u
Last year Ottawa Citizen reported that the Canadian military used the Covid outbreak as an excuse to test actual military psyop techniques on its own civilian population under the pretense of assuring compliance with pandemic restrictions.
Some excerpts:
“Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.”
“The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for ‘shaping’ and ‘exploiting’ information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
“A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario. Data was also compiled on peaceful Black Lives Matter gatherings and BLM leaders.”
“’This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine,’ the rear admiral stated.”
“Yet another review centred on the Canadian Forces public affairs branch and its activities. Last year, the branch launched a controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts.”
“The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians.”
So empire managers are not just employing mass-scale psychological operations on the public, they’re testing them and learning from them.
10. The US government funding “independent” media in Ukraine
White House fact-sheet says part of the mammoth $33 billion spending package it's requesting for Ukraine will be to "support independent media." Because nothing screams "independent" like being directly funded by the US Government as part of its "information warfare" initiative pic.twitter.com/O3JshV1Mg9
Lastly, there’s the fact that the infamous $40 billion proxy war package sent to Ukraine includes funds allocated to “Counter Russian disinformation and propaganda narratives, promote accountability for Russian human rights violation, and support activists, journalists, and independent media to defend freedom of expression.”
So information warfare. The US government is funding information warfare to manipulate public perception of this war and running cover for those manipulations by calling them activism, journalism, and independent media.
Given that the mainstream western press have been uncritically reporting even the most outlandish stories coming out of Ukraine without a shred of evidence, we can expect this government-funded propaganda to spread throughout the western world.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
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