The War Propaganda Machine Has Never Been This Vulnerable

As journalists like Sarah Abdallah, Seymour Hersh, and Jimmy Dore have spoken up against the transparent lies the western empire is telling about Syria, they’ve come under intense attack. The BBC has slandered the “online activists pushing conspiracy theories” about Syria. The Times of the UK has put out the large headline“Apologists for Assad working in universities,” in an attempt to discredit any academic who doesn’t follow the government’s line. A general media sensation has developed around “Assad apologists,” following the same pattern as the “Saddam apologists” of fifteen years ago.

We know that the CIA has an operation for covertly spreading propaganda within foreign and domestic media, and that most media is owned by just a few large corporate conglomerates. And we know that these attacks have to largely be happening at the direct orders of the deep state, as it decides how it will respond to this threat to its propaganda power. What’s unique about this attack is that in past cases, the war propaganda machine hasn’t felt the need to attack these “online activists” very much.

When the empire carried out a similar Syria WMD deception last April, those who spoke out were attacked, but not as thoroughly as they are now. Tulsi Gabbard underwent character assassination for questioning the narrative that Assad had committed a chemical attack, but lower-profile people generally went ignored.

There were no factually inaccurate pieces in The Guardian which pointed to Russian trolls as the source of doubt over the establishment’s claims. Dore and other online journalists opposed the war narrative, but they didn’t get named in similarly fallacious CNN articles as punishment.

This is because unlike a year ago, these figures are too influential to be ignored, so they have to be attacked. It’s also because the U.S.-centralized power establishment no doubt thinks that getting a consensus for the Syria and Russia war narratives is crucial. People like Dore and Abdallah are the main thing that stands in the way of this, so they must be attacked with full force.

Writes Caitlin Johnstone about how bizarre this sudden media obsession with online journalists looks: “Are we really meant to think it’s normal for all these mass media corporations to suddenly start ferociously attacking anyone who expresses skepticism about the military agendas of western forces that have an extensive and well-documented history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to manufacture support for military agendas? Are we really meant to believe that Syria, a nation for which the US and UK have been plotting regime change for many years, is just now in sore need of humanitarian regime change? And that anyone who says otherwise just loves Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and dead babies?”

This is a David and Goliath situation. The establishment has shown us this with its tactfully foolish overkill attack. Keep working to expose the war machine’s deceptions while it’s in this vulnerable position. Because if the war machine is defeated, so might also be the oil empire, corporate capitalist economic system, and white supremacist power structure that war helps sustain.