BETTER THAN CHINA? Propping Up Empire With Platitudes & Propaganda Of US Exceptionalism

The past 15 bloody months of the US/Israel Gaza genocide has exposed the arrogant hypocrisy of the creaky Western Empire’s self-benediction of superiority.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

— Noam Chomsky

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Mask Off Moment Exposing The Deceptive American Myth

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (1/28/25)

I awoke early Tuesday morning to a BBC report on supposed progress toward a hollow Gaza ‘ceasefire’ that began with a review of the events of Oct. 7. While they described the Palestinians crossing the border as Hamas “fighters” instead of “terrorists”, the report was standard western media fact washing, rinsing, spinning and drying to historical desiccation. (BTW, it is not a ceasefire.)

There was no mention of Israel ignoring two months of repeated warnings from the US and Egypt of a possible attack. No mention of relocation of the music festival closer to the border and troops away from the area, despite those warnings. No explanation that approximately a third of the 1,200 casualties were caused by Israeli troops firing missiles at fleeing cars. No reminder that Hamas didn’t have tanks to do the destruction of homes hit with tank fire. No reminder about the hyperventilated lies of babies in ovens, decapitated babies or mass rape. No context provided of the preceeding 78 years of fascist Zionist abuse leading up to the revolt of concentration camp victims.

No admission that the BBC network’s Middle East editor, Raffi Berg, was recently exposed as a former CIA employee and Israeli intel agency Mossad asset. A story, BTW, that caused nary a ripple in the western media.

But, but China!

In other words, same old standard bleached and squeegeed western media propaganda. I switched channels and happened upon Erasing China, an episode of the BBC’s The Documentary podcast on how the Chinese government is brutally squeegeeing away the memory and history of the 2019 Hong Kong democracy uprising and annual commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to suppress memory of life in Hong Kong before return to Chinese control.

The BBC detailed the oppressive suppression, censorship and removal of books from libraries, museums closed for ‘review’, and art events inspected for anti-China themes. Whole media archives have suddenly disappeared, students dropped from universities and people losing their jobs for expressing any dissenting views or opinions, including the recent jailing of three teachers who had produced a children’s book Chinese censors found offensive.

The report was, of course, framed as a dramatic ‘be-thankful-you’re-not-there’ counterpoint to the supposed open, free society mythology of the western empire.

Western freedom … to fall in line

But of course, none of it is different than what we have seen and continue to experience under the brutish bullying rule of the Zionist thought police firing professors from universities, kicking student protesters out of school, blocking and demonetizing videos on YouTube, canceling social media accounts and zipping up editorial straitjackets at scripted media outlets from Fox News to The New York Times, Washington Post and MSNBC.

In the cause of uniformity of thought, the ‘antisemitism’ slur has been so overused, stretched, warped and twisted into whips of compliance it has become an empty, meaningless label of vicious discrimination and dumb bludgeon of compliance.

As with other ghost virtues of championing democracy, human rights and freedom, the past 15 bloody months of the US/Israel Gaza genocide has exposed the arrogant hypocrisy of the creaky Western Empire’s self-benediction of moral superiority.

Rather than confronting the dark, fascist history of Zionism that has led to our funding, arming and running diplomatic cover for Israel’s US-funded and armed Gaza holocaust, Zionism has — wrongly — been equated to Judaism. The significant presence of Jews at protests has been largely ignored or downplayed by media.

In a nation known for school shootings and violence, a popular trend in naming babies celebrates gun culture and violence with such names as Wesson, Caliber, Shooter, Trigger, Arson, Cutter and Dagger.

As comedian Jimmy Dore correctly observes, we Americans are the most “Propagandized people in the world.”

The stories below are examples of how faded platitudes of patriotism and entitlement has led America to accepting genocide and pointless wars.

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“The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don’t mean anything… That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about.”

— Noam Chomsky

Photos by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

BBC: Erasing Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a changed place - a place where memory wars are being fought, where history and your interpretation of it can lead to long prison sentences or exile.

BBC
The Documentary (8/4/24)

Hong Kong's history is being revised and erased - it's early origins, colonial legacy, post 1997 handover period and the crucial years since the mass 2019 democracy protests are being uprooted, overturned and rewritten by a government guided by the ruling Communist Party in Beijing.

This 'rewriting' of history is being enforced in schools, universities, libraries, the local media and online. This process has seen library shelves raided, museums shut down for 'review', art galleries censored, media archives wiped, commemorations and memorials banned. Every department of government seems affected - library users asked to scour the shelves for 'banned' books, the arts sector to purge itself of 'anti-China elements', the annual commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre shut down.

Democracy activists, authors of children's books, students, and newspaper owners have been jailed for holding contradictory views, telling alternative narratives. All in the few years since 2019 and Covid-19. Hong Kong is a changed place - a place where memory wars are being fought, where history and your interpretation of it can lead to long prison sentences or exile.

Link to 33-minute audio

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MEDIA COWARDICE: Palestinian Journalist DESTROYS Western Media's Complicity In Genocide

Owen Jones (1/14/25)

14-minute video

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America's Academic Gulag: MIT Student Activists Speak Out On The Costs Of Standing For Human Rights In Academia

58-minute video

“Generations of people are going to look back at those who were alive and ask them what did you do to stop a genocide? Did you just stay quiet? Did you side with the forces of violence and death, or did you speak up? I think that can be very difficult and it can cost you your reputation, but in the end you'll find that your soul is much more free and you're much more at peace with yourself because you know you're on the right side of history and and of humanity.”

NOTICE! YouTube has unfortunately limited monetization on this video, preventing us from earning virtually any money on this episode. We have submitted an appeal to this decision, but in the meantime hope that you can support our team in spite of Big Tech censorship and suppression of pro-Palestine content directly at The Chris Hedges Report Substack. We thank you for your support! — The Chris Hedges Report

The Chris Hedges Report (1/15/25)

“You can't just sit there and build drones and not talk about who it's serving and who does it help,” says Richard Solomon, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and member of the Coalition for Palestine at MIT. On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Solomon and fellow MIT PhD student Prahlad Iyengar detail their battle against the historic institution’s active participation in the genocide in Gaza. Their story exemplifies the repression students face across the country who dare question how their work and labor are used to advance the illegal and morally reprehensible goals of the Israeli military.

“What this ultimately means is that MIT's research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians,” Iyengar states plainly. The two students have found themselves in hot water recently following Iynegar’s tepid encounter at a MIT career fair as well as an op-ed authored by the student coalition.

Direct collaboration with genocide

Iyengar’s engagement with Lockheed Martin recruiters — where, after politely waiting in line at a career fair, he expressed his discomfort for their involvement in the genocide and climate crisis — resulted in him being charged with harassment and intimidation of the recruiters. The op-ed called out Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, for the laboratory’s direct collaboration with the Israeli military. Rus successfully pressured MIT’s paper, The Tech, to retract the article despite it presenting publicly available information and real ties to the Israeli military apparatus.

“By introducing these technologies and by enabling these technologies,” Iyengar tells Hedges, “what is really being enabled by MIT's research for the Israeli military is the ability for drones to engage in tracking, in facial recognition, in targeting of Palestinians.”

Solomon makes clear that the politicization of academic work is not novel and recently, MIT itself has distanced itself from projects that are tied to genocides or wars.

“If MIT did it for the genocide in Darfur in 2008, if they could divest from the Draper labs, if they could, at one point, I think in 2022, they ended their relationships with a Russian university that they'd helped establish — I mean, if they can do those things over political crimes and acts and recognize them as political moves, they can also do the same for the Palestinians,” he says.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

MIT STORY UPDATE [1/19]: MIT Shuts Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties — After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took away access to the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report. … Read the rest

CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: Insidious Zionist Organization Attacks ‘Doctors Against Genocide’: 8-Minute Video

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Mother Of Likely Murdered OpenAI Whistleblower Reveals All, Calls for Investigation Of Sam Altman

"When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals."

— Edward Snowden

The Tucker Carlson Show (1/15/25)

Suchir Balaji worked as an engineer for Sam Altman building AI, until he decided that Altman was committing crimes. Balaji became a whistleblower, and soon after was found dead in his apartment. California authorities claim it was suicide. Crime scene photos clearly show a murder. Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao, tells the most shocking story we’ve heard in a long time.

1-hour, 6-minute video

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CHARITY CENSORSHIP: ‘Go Fund Me’ Has Frozen Contributions To Charity

[Editor’s Note: The following is an email notice from Jewish scholar Tony Greenstein, author of the book “Zionism During The Holocaust: The Weaponization Of Memory In The Service Os State & Nation”, an eye-opening examination of the brutal truth behind the origin and truth of Zionism. — MT]

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you since you have contributed to the Al Tafawk Children's Centre appeal at least once since it was set up nearly 5 years ago.

The appeal has ensured that this centre, which has been repeatedly attacked by the Israeli army, is still able to function and provide basic food, heating and water to the children.

On 5th January Go Fund Me, the crowdfunder which hosted the appeal and which is a billion dollar corporation, suddenly froze the account because of the 'Middle East Conflict'. It asked a series of questions which I answered. It then followed up with more, totally inane questions and then having acknowledged receipt of my answers with an even more inane email proceeded to do nothing.

The freeze on payments continues. They asked me to register for transfer, and said

'If the donations are for yourself, choose Your bank account and then Get started' which is amazing since for most of the fundraiser's existence all payments have gone via PayPal Giving Fund, which is a charity, direct to our own Charity account, The Brighton Trust.

Clearly GFM haven't even bothered to look at our responses, have no interest in resolving this and are content with an indefinite freeze.

I have therefore relaunched the appeal on Chuffed which you can go to here:

https://chuffed.org/project/121096-help-keep-open-jenins-al-tawfawk-centre

I would ask you not to make any further donations to Go Fund Me as we have no access to them and they do not respond to our emails.

Many thanks for your past support and I hope that you will continue to support the Al Tafawk Appeal.

I had a very sweet message from Mona, the head teacher at the Al Tafawk Centre. I have assured them that we will not abandon them and with your help we will continue to support them through these dark days and nights.

With best wishes

Tony Greenstein

Email From Al Tafawk Children's Centre

' I saw you sharing on the facebook that they try to close the go fund me! I am so so so sorry u have to go through this.. Tony you are doing more and more thank Enough

TmAll of us relay on you .

Please be ok and good for us

Huge love

mona and all the children'

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The Vietnam Syndrome

“It was called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The Vietnam Syndrome, a term that began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined on occasion. The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force.” There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn’t understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them. It’s very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there’s a limit on foreign adventures. It’s necessary, as the Washington Post put it rather proudly during the Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people respect for “martial value.” That’s important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence. So that’s the Vietnam Syndrome. It’s necessary to overcome that one.”

― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda