#FreeAssange

Mainers Turn Out On Tax Day To Say NO $$ For Ukraine War

/ went2thebridge / 2 Comments
About 50 people and 2 dogs turned out April 15, 2023 (not all stayed for our group photo)

A slew of new people, many of them young and many of them first-time protesters, came to our tax day protest yesterday in Topsham, Maine. 

One told me they have family in Germany who see the Ukraine war as a reenactment of WWI with its trench warfare stalemate dragging on indefinitely. 

One told me they drove almost two hours to join us after seeing me the previous evening on the Jimmy Dore Show promoting the event. 

One told me they’d been reading my blog and looking for the next opportunity to get out and protest. 

One told me how excited they were to be joined by fellow members of the UU Church. 

And a group from the Party of Socialism & Liberation brought cool signs, a megaphone, and indicated they plan on returning each time we do this. 

Hooray!!

What I learned yesterday: there is a LOT of pent-up desire to resist supporting the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. And many people don’t know where or how to express it.

In some cases, this is because the groups they belong to don’t object to this war in particular, or imperial wars in general (for example, Peace Action Maine is siding with NATO in the overture to WW3).

In some cases, they’re individuals who engage on social media but for the first time in years came out on the pavement to communicate with the thousands of people who drove through the intersection.

Several people who may not be the expected audience for the Ric Tyler George Hale show listened to my interview there Friday morning, and felt motivated to join us.

It was great to see so many Veterans for Peace out with us yesterday, stalwarts of the resistance to imperial wars for decades now.

One lovely person I’ve been standing with for years observed that passing around the megaphone at our closing circle was a smart idea. They said,

“Some shaky voices spoke up for the first time. Today was a gust of fresh air!”

Democracy Then! Propaganda Now

/ went2thebridge / 3 Comments

Democracy Now!, legacy alternative media for the latte left, has been repeatedly exposed as biased in favor of the U.S./NATO empire. But most who watch DN! cannot tolerate the cognitive dissonance to acknowledge this shift.

Credit for the title of my post — Democracy Then! Propaganda Now —  goes to “Diogenes” who posted a version of it commenting on this discussion between Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and Randy Credico on The Grayzone’s YouTube channel. 

A shorter version of the video can be found attached to this Grayzone tweet, but the longer version (11 or so minutes) is worth watching if only to see Julian Assange lied about to his face as he repeatedly denies the false charge that wikileaks said Donald Trump would be less dangerous as president than Hillary Clinton. 

Count how many times Assange says “No, we didn’t” while DN!’s guest talks over him.

Summary of The Grayzone’s charges against Democracy Now!:

  • John Pilger told Blumenthal he was banned from DN! because their funder the Lannan Foundation did not like Pilger’s views
  • DN! was wrong on wikileaks & Julian Assange, and has never apologized
  • DN! was wrong on the Syrian war & the White Helmets
  • DN! was wrong on Russiagate, which it heavily promoted
  • DN! was wrong on alleged Uyghur genocide
  • DN! is wrong on the Ukraine war origins & goals, and clearly biased against Russia

The propaganda of the U.S. empire is, as many have observed, outstandingly effective. 

It has split the antiwar movement in the U.S. by capturing many of their sources of information.

I once worked in marketing (for cars) and learned of the strong spending to build brand loyalty among college students. Because research shows that brand loyalties are formed when we are quite young and these loyalties are extremely resistant to change for most people. 

This is why it’s effective to lure people into trusting a news outlet like Democracy Now! (or Common Dreams, or NPR, etc. — those are posts for another day). Once trust has been established, the slow drift toward supporting the imperial narrative can begin. Much like the frog in that pot of slowly warming water, most won’t notice and many will employ strong denial tactics to maintain  that they’re not being boiled to death.

Some have identified the first sign of Democracy Now!’s rightward drift in their coverage of the unfortunate events of 9/11/01. Since the current nonstop warmongering of the U.S. kicked off using 9/11 as a pretext, that makes a lot of sense. But substantiating that claim would take more research than I have time for at the moment. 

Just something to think about.