MEDIA LITERACY AND RESISTANCE

                         

This is the second in a series of articles meant to help anyone struggling to understand the underlying logic behind global crises that seem chaotic and disconnected. 

Starting with the fall of the Syrian government, these essays will explain the basics of US foreign policy since the turn of this century. They will explore how events are related to stated and unstated goals of those who determine what is euphemistically referred to as U.S. "national security" policy. 
 
Here is the link to the first article. 
 
 
Before diving too deeply into things that most Americans have been taught to regard as "propaganda," it is helpful to understand how the media works to manufacture consent for endless war. This is a topic that could fill many books, so I'll only skim the surface here. 
 
In Soviet Russia, there were two state newspapers, Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiya (News). everyone knew the phrase, "There is no pravda in Izvestiya, and no izvestiya in Pravda." Not laboring under the delusion that they lived in a democracy, Russians knew that they were being lied to by a ruling class that controlled the media. Not so in the Western world. 
 
To understand how world events result from 21st century U.S. foreign policy, we need to recognize that we cannot find the necessary information from corporate-owned media sources. Americans must learn that they cannot trust anything they are told by the Western media regarding foreign affairs. You will have a far more accurate picture of events if you start by assuming that the opposite of what you are told is true and sort out the facts from there. As Mark Twain said, "Those who don't read the newspapers are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed." 
 
   Western reporting on world events is always slanted toward what war  
        profiteers who determine U.S. foreign policy want us to believe.  
 
Mainstream media manipulates public opinion by leaving out facts and context that would enable informed opinion on foreign events and reveal the real reasons for US interventions. This is in large part due to media reliance on official statements and information from unnamed government sources that are ultimately the products of a network of CIA media handlers. If you find that hard to believe, read my short introduction to how was developed and how it works.  

Note that a lot of this information came out in the late 70s when the Church Commission investigated the CIAs activities within the U.S. during the 60s and early 70s. Some of this (and more) can be found even in Wikipedia. Despite the best efforts of the CIA and FBI to control the narrative at that site, they have so much to cover up that they must focus on contemporary events, trusting Americans to forget their history. I can't present an exhaustive review of how media propaganda works in this short space.  
 
Americans are brought up to believe that they live in a democracy and that the U.S. only goes to war for noble reasons. This is the Big Lie that makes all the others easy to swallow. Recognizing that the US is an empire is the key to deciphering U.S. foreign policy since WWII. As Madison pointed out, empires are inherently undemocratic.  Only when Americans recognize that citizens of an empire are also its victims, and that their true interest is standing with the rest of world citizenry, can they truly be free. 

 

               American exceptionalism is deeply ingrained. 
 
Even after learning that the Vietnam and Iraq wars were based on lies, most Americans implicitly accept both as exceptions to the rule that America strives to make the world safe for democracy. If it were understood that the U.S. is an empire, such nonsense would never be taken seriously. 
 
If Americans were taught real history in school, they would know that that "making the world safe for democracy" was the slogan used to market WWI, billed as the "war to end all wars." If they were also taught to think, this would raise some questions about why we are now in a period of endless war. Because they are not taught to think for themselves, far too many Americans are too incurious to consider anything they don't see on the evening news. 
 
Even many people who think of themselves as peace activists initially believed that sending weapons to Ukraine was a good idea. People who understood history and military logic knew better and tried to tell them, but it was a struggle to get them to understand. It was not just that the U.S. had provoked the war, as many thought. More importantly, Ukraine never had a chance to win it, and saner voices in the U.S. military said so. 
 
What many don't realize is that the war could have been prevented, if Biden had been interested in peace. In addition, an agreement to withdraw was essentially finalized in March of 2022, only to be nixed by the U.S. in the form of an edict delivered by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Zelensky, having been publicly threatened by the U.S.-backed neo-Nazis in his government not to negotiate, took the hint. He never seriously considered negotiations based on realistic conditions again. 
 
Since then, Biden has crossed so many of his own red lines in the obsessive quest to kill more Russians at the risk of nuclear war that it should be obvious weakening Russia was always the real U.S. objective. Although that goal is now discussed openly, most Americans do not suspect they have been had once again. 
 
Moreover, most still feel arming Ukrainians to fight and die for is increasingly recognizable as an unwinnable cause was right. They remain oblivious to the fact that in doing so, the U.S. is risking nuclear Armageddon. Only the egotism that comes from deeply ingrained American exceptionalism can explain this failure to recognize the limits of U.S. power. 
 
                                 Syria in a wider context 
 
If you're asking yourself why you are reading about the Ukraine and Russia when this series began with understanding how Syria fits into US plans for global dominance, you are paying attention.  I could, after all, have just as easily explored media manipulation by focusing on how Americans have been kept from understanding U.S. involvement in Syria. It is not just about stealing their oil. 
 
I could cite numerous examples of the use of propaganda in manufacturing consent for the US proxy war on Syria. Here are just a couple: 
- Despite long ago revealing that al Qaeda is an ally in the fight, the U.S. continues to misrepresent its continuing role and the nature of its ISIS-affiliated leader. 
- Russia's intervention in 2015 resulted in a rapid rout of the terrorist caravan of tankers carrying stolen oil to Turkey. This had been going on since 2013. No one in the media asked why the U.S. had failed to cut off this source of terrorist revenue despite allegedly being there to fight ISIS. Unknown to most Americans, it had exempted them from the embargo on selling Syrian oil. 
 
Countless other blatant lies and omissions went unchallenged by the stenographers of the corporate-owned media. If you want to get the bigger picture of the groundbreaking propaganda front of the war on Syria, I suggest Tim Anderson's The Dirty War on Syria. 
 
In terms of geopolitics, the dirty war on Syria is closely connected to the US-provoked war between Russia and Ukraine. Syria was targeted because it was the strategic bridge between Iran and Hezbollah, who are resisting Israeli hegemony in West Asia. They have been holding the line for decades against what can fairly be termed an Anglo-American-Israeli Empire. Russia, for its part, has been a target of Western imperialists for centuries because of its strategic position on the globe, connecting Eurasia east to west from the North Sea to the Pacific. 
 
Both these regional wars are being fought according to principles most famously outlined in former Carter Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard. The difference with today's inept imperial strategists is that Brzezinski based his strategies on the principle of realism. Foreign policy realists consider the fact that Russia's nuclear strength must be respected. He warned that attempting to turn Ukraine into a NATO vassal would be supremely reckless, and the neocons have ignored that warning at humanity's peril. 
 
The neocon strategy has backfired. America's blatant attempt to achieve world domination in one generation has awakened unaligned nations to the need to work together to stop the advance of the Empire. Russia is now closely aligned with Iran and much closer to China than it has been for over 60 years. Their cooperation and that of other BRICS nations, along with nations of the Global South, threatens the plans of U.S. imperialists to protect the primacy of the dollar (and thus the U.S.) in the world economy. 
 
Now that we know the outlines of the global struggle taking place before our eyes, we are ready to discuss how the U.S. developed its game plan, and how that explains nearly all that has gone wrong since the turn of the century. 
 
 
NEXT: The fundamentals of 21st century U.S. foreign policy 
 
 
                    How to do your own research  

If you consider media spin, you can get some basic facts from corporate media outlets. Just look out for unattributed or untrustworthy sources of information and outright lies. CIA-sourced information often contains misinformation and disinformation inserted into official statements. These are often taken as facts by the many reporters who don't seem to realize that professionals are supposed to question what they are told. 

 

There are a great many excellent independent sources of information online to study all this further on your own. You can't go wrong by starting with The Electronic Intifada to understand events in West Asia, but other important sites include The Cradle, The Grayzone, Consortium News and any YouTube channel with the guests Scott Ritter, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Max Blumenthal, and Aaron Mate’ The more sources you consult, the better picture you will have. 

 

An instructive way to find alternative sources of news and analysis on foreign affairs is to check out the websites listed by the shadowy group calling itself Prop or Not as being propaganda sources aimed at spreading Russian disinformation. Almost all of them are highly respected among those who know the difference.  

 

Tellingly, the Washington Post published a featured article on this unvetted group, lending a veneer of legitimacy to this obvious disinformation, Shortly thereafter, it was forced to print a disclaimer (on a back page). That didn't persuade many people to question the debunked claims made during the Russiagate hysteria, but it was very amusing to those of us who knew the truth. 
 
Not coincidentally, many of the sources designated propaganda by Prop or Not were later targeted by the government for publishing the truth about what was going on in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. With the help of collaborators Meta (YouTube and Facebook), Google, PayPal, Twitter and other giant corporations that determine what content Americans have access to, it began to censor, deplatform, demonetize and even arrest journalists for publicizing verifiable facts that ran counter to the pro-war narrative. 
 
  

 
 
   

 

SYRIA IN CONTEXT

 

                                                                         

This is the first in a series of articles meant to help anyone struggling to understand the underlying logic behind global crises that seem chaotic and disconnected. 

 
Starting with the fall of the Syrian government, these essays will explain the basics of US foreign policy through examining world events since the turn of this century. They will explore how these events are related to stated and unstated goals of those who determine what is euphemistically referred to as U.S. “national security” policy. 
 
I strive to make my observations concise, so parts of it may be a challenge for the novice. If you don’t understand a reference that does not have a hyperlink with more details, don’t worry. It will almost certainly be explained later.  
 
I have also tried to provide nuggets of information and analysis for those who have a fair grasp of the U.S. role in manipulating world events. If you fall in that category, I hope the way that ideas and events are put together will also be illuminating to you.  

 

The fall of Syria has elicited cheers from a lot of people you might assume would know better, most notably some Palestine solidarity activists. This likely reflects the fact that most of those Palestinian supporters celebrating Assad’s departure are new to the study of geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy.   

  
The most basic fact they have missed is that Syria is the linchpin of a weapons pipeline that has until now run through the so-called Shia Crescent from Iran to Lebanon. This is the route by which Iran has been sending most of the weapons that Hezbollah has used to resist Israeli aggression in Lebanon and to support Palestinian resistance to genocide. Without access to resupply of weapons from Iran, Hezbollah will be unable to resume pressure on Israel to cease its operations in Gaza by making the north of Israel uninhabitable. 
 
Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah have often been referred to as the Axis of Resistance. This term has generally been used to refer to the resistance against Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing and expansionism. However, it could also be said that Syria was holding back the expansion of the U.S. empire itself between 2011 and 2012, when Hezbollah fighters entered in force from Lebanon.  
 
For many years, and against overwhelming odds, Syria held its ground against the relentless juggernaut of U.S. military aggression that started in the wake of 9/11. It is for that reason that its fall is especially tragic. It had given hope to millions who had feared the U.S. Empire could not be stopped. Syria later began receiving critical help from Iranian-backed militias and in 2015, Russian airpower but throughout the struggle, the Syrian Arab Army had been fighting not just for Syria, but for everyone in the world wanting to see the end of America's bloody march to global military domination. 

 

Iraqi militias and the Yemeni resistance group Ansar Allah (aka the Houthis) have become integral parts of the resistance since October 7. Their roles following the collapse of the Syrian Army and likely withdrawal of Russian forces may become critical to protecting Iran from attack following this devastating blow to its influence with the collapse of the Syrian government.  
 
With Hezbollah largely out of the fight, Iraqi militias will likely further step up their attacks on U.S. military illegally occupying parts of Syria. However, with Israel flush with victory and under no restraints, it is free to attack Iraq. In that event, Iran may choose to enter the conflict with Israel directly, with disastrous and unpredictable results that could include use of nuclear weapons.  

 

Ansar Allah, on the other hand, has nothing to lose and no apparent fear of retaliation. It has proven very hard to attack or defend against and will undoubtedly continue to do its part by shutting down Red Sea traffic for the foreseeable future. This is an important contribution to the serious economic pain that Israeli officials and their fanatic supporters have been ignoring in pursuit of their goal of the ethnic cleansing of all of historic Palestine to establish a Greater Israel. 
 
It is this economic damage that may be the greatest hope for the resistance, if global outrage over the genocide continues to give momentum to the BDS movement. Although the mainstream media has largely ignored the issue, it may eventually make it difficult for American politicians to continue to give Israel a blank check to make up for all they have lost and will continue to lose. 
 
The consensus among analysts seems to be that Syria will come to resemble Afghanistan, with a repressive Islamist government that rules with an iron fist. Since it is doubtful that Syria's new nominal leader can control rival forces, it is more likely it will resemble Libya, a failed state thanks to NATO “saving” it from Gaddafi.  
 
As in Syria, the “liberal interventionists” in the Democratic Party joined forces with Republican neocons in 2010 to destabilize Libya by removing Gaddafi from power. In that case, they used the lie that the popular leader intended to commit genocide. The National Security establishment then used this manufactured threat to justify killing 10,000 Libyan civilians with U.S. firepower. The goal was to assist the largely foreign terrorists who eventually defeated Gaddafi.  
 
As is the case in Syria, the terrorist groups supported by the U.S. were portrayed as patriotic “rebels.” However, U.S. intervention left Libya in the hands of warring factions that are still fighting for control, leaving the country in the hands of warring factions that are still fighting for control. Similar infighting among competing terrorist groups has already started in Syria, though this has as yet received little if any attention in the mainstream media. 
 
It is important to note that liberal interventionists and neocons share the same goals. The only difference is that Democrats don’t want to be associated with the “crazies in the basement,” as some described neocons during the first Bush administration.  
 
“Liberal” interventionists and neocons both favor throwing out the longstanding foreign policy doctrine of realism, which recognized limits on American power. This was not because of any moral objection to pure power politics. Far from replacing it with a more idealistic foreign policy, they have ushered in a new era of endless war in the cause of extending American hegemony worldwide. 
 
To understand the challenge the antiwar movement faces, one must first abandon the notion that either party has any real interest in peace with America's designated enemies short of a Pax Americana. Everything Israel has done since October 7 in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria has occurred with the full knowledge and support of the Biden administration, despite claims to the contrary. Biden could have forced Israel to negotiate for peace long ago by simply cutting off offensive weapons shipments. Now, Trump has promised to provide even more support to Israel, which he has encouraged to “finish the job.”  
 
Fully comprehending the significance of Syria’s collapse requires knowing the recent history of American Mideast policy. For a richer understanding that may help anticipate coming events, it is also helpful to know a bit about the history of relationships between regional players. Such history is not systematically covered in most articles or videos found in the alternative media. This series is an attempt to provide an analysis of the most essential historical information required to evaluate current events. To understand how to do your own analysis of events, you must start by unlearning what you have been led to believe about foreign affairs

NEXT: Media literacy and resistance