Brian Whitmore — The Daily Vertical: Why Navalny Can't Lose (Transcript)

• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government-funded broadcasting organization that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, where it claims "the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed".[3] RFE/RL is a 501(c)(3) corporation that receives U.S. government funding and is supervised by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an agency overseeing all U.S. federal government international broadcastingservices.[4]

Just how is this different from RT and Sputnik International? Oh, right, it's "us" and not "them."

In facts, this is basically fake news to promote Navalny. Navalny has virtually no constituency in Russia, where Putin is overwhelming popular. In the case of a change of government is almost no chance that Navalny would be in the running to take the reins. He is unqualified to run a county, especially the size and complexity of Russia.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
The Daily Vertical: Why Navalny Can't Lose (Transcript)

• Brian Whitmore

• 
  

Grete Mauthner — America’s Propaganda Central is Going to Cash in Big

A bipartisan initiative led by senators Rob Portman and Chris Murphy has authorized 160 million dollars over two years to fight state actors through a little-known agency office housed at the State Department called the Global Engagement Center....

America’s state propaganda agency Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) released a report about the range of its last year’s activities.…

The report states that in 2016 the agency would cooperate with all sorts of investigators, directors and journalists for them to promote US foreign policy and national security interests “through independent journalism”.

The target audience of such instances of “independent journalism” can be found in Russia, across the entire post-Soviet space, China, Iran, Cuba, along with a number of other regions. The BBG would broadcast its propaganda manifests in national languages of the countries it has been operating in, while adding programs in the languages of national minorities living in the above mentioned regions. By the end of 2016, the total number of employees of BBG reached 2,940.

In mid-June, the [US State Department's] Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor would release a tender that would demand the contenders to present the bureau with considerable capabilities for “independent and objective media coverage” across the Baltic States, in order to promote the “values of democracy and human rights” and wage information wars. Under the conditions of the tender, it is emphasized that the media should create competitive modern content on actively developing digital platforms, while targeting the Russian-speaking audience in those states. The tender will provide the agency that would get an upper hand with a sum ranging from 1.5 million to 3 million dollars, however it would be forced to closely coordinate its activities with US embassies in the Baltic countries. In addition, the agency that is to win the grant should get registered with the NSPA – NATO Support and Procurement Agency.

Last month it has also become known that the Broadcasting Board of Governors remains in control of such propaganda stations as Radio Liberty and Voice of America demanded the US Congress to allocate a total of 22 million dollars on its operations in spite of the fact that public interest towards above mentioned stations has been declining due to all sorts of unfounded public statements that they have been making. In total the Board has demanded US president to allocate over 685 million dollars on its operations for the year 2018. It’s curious that Washington is spending almost as much money on spreading propaganda in Russia as it spends on similar activities in China....

Simultaneously, US propagandist rail against Chinese government sponsored Confucian Institutes in US universities and Russian government sponsored RT operating in the English-speaking world.

Let's get some perspective here. The US is way out front in funding and carrying on information war and stratcomm than it's putative "adversaries."

NEO

America’s Propaganda Central is Going to Cash in Big

Grete Mauthner

Tatzhit — Radio Liberty: "UAF are shelling Donetsk in response to rebels shelling Donetsk"

Just let that headline sink in.

Here is the actual language: “The ATO* spokesmen [Major General Taran and colonel Sergei Galushko] have presented proof that Donetsk is being shelled by the rebels themselves, in order to provoke return fire from the UAF forces, and then blame them for shelling Donetsk.” 

So, here is the reality as presented by "Voice of Langley" in East Europe: 

The rebels start randomly shelling their own families in Donetsk. UAF see it, get “provoked” by somebody else doing their job, and start indiscriminately shelling Donetsk as well.

Fort Russ
Radio Liberty: "UAF are shelling Donetsk in response to rebels shelling Donetsk"

Tatzhit

Robert Parry — Enforcing the Ukraine ‘Group Think’

Good article hitting many important points. This is just one.

One of the ugliest episodes came when the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies joined the bash-Cohen mob. The academic group spurned a fellowship program, which it had solicited from Cohen’s wife, The Nation’s editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the program’s title included Cohen’s name.

“It’s no secret that there were swirling controversies surrounding Professor Cohen,” Stephen Hanson, the group’s president, told the New York Times.

In a protest letter to the group, Cohen called this action “a political decision that creates serious doubts about the organization’s commitment to First Amendment rights and academic freedom.” He also noted that young scholars in the field have expressed fear for their professional futures if they break from the herd. Cohen mentioned the story of one young woman scholar who dropped off a panel to avoid risking her career in case she said something that could be deemed sympathetic to Russia.

Cohen noted, too, that even established foreign policy figures, ex-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, have been accused in the Washington Post of “advocating that the West appease Russia,” with the notion of “appeasement” meant “to be disqualifying, chilling, censorious.” (Kissinger had objected to the comparison of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler as unfounded.)

So, as the United States rushes into a new Cold War with Russia, we are seeing the makings of a new McCarthyism, challenging the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t get in line.

Consortium News
Enforcing the Ukraine ‘Group Think’

Robert Parry

A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all. And a ruthless, reckless insistence on attempting to stamp out everything that could conceivably constitute a reflection of improper foreign influence in our national life, regardless of the actual damage it is doing to the cost of eliminating it, in terms of other American values, is the one thing I can think of that should reduce us all to a point where the very independence we are seeking to defend would be meaningless, for we would be doing things to ourselves as vicious and tyrannical as any that might be brought to us from outside.

This sort of extremism seems to me to hold particular danger for a democracy, because it creates a curious area between what is held to be possible and what is really possible — an area within which government can always be plausibly shown to have been most dangerously delinquent in the performance of its tasks. And this area, where government is always deficient, provides the ideal field of opportunity for every sort of demagoguery and mischief-making. It constitutes a terrible breach in the dike of our national morale, through which forces of doubt and suspicion never cease to find entry. The heart of our problem, here, lies in our assessment of the relative importance of the various dangers among which we move; and until many of our people can be brought to understand that what we have to do is not to secure a total absence of danger but to balance peril against peril and to find the tolerable degree of each, we shall not wholly emerge from these confusions. — George F. Kennan, Radcliffe Commencement Address (16 June 1954), published as "The Illusion of Total Security" in The Atlantic Monthly, # 194 (August 1954)

There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own war propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side, on the other hand, is the center of all virtue. The contest comes to be viewed as having a final, apocalyptic quality. If we lose, all is lost; life will no longer be worth living; there will be nothing to be salvaged. If we win, then everything will be possible; all our problems will become soluble; the one great source of evil--our enemy--will have been crushed; the forces of good will then sweep forward unimpeded; all worthy aspirations will be satisfied.— From Russia and the West under Lenin by George Kennan (1960)

Above Kennan quotes from Wikiquote.