Introduction by the Senior Editor: God only knows, we love Finnian Cunningham, the Irish Rebel. To get an article in Sputnik, which spends half its time whitewashing Trump gaffs, you have to leave out a lot. The FBI still thinks I run Sputnik, but this is the lovely Margarita, who also runs RT as well.
He is my complaint. We talk about the Charlie Hebdo “issue” where the Mossad faked a terror event, killed the chief investigating officer, stacked the internet with 4th rate faked evidence and used Google to cover it up.
The worst of it is the fake Netanyahu parade of millions, the only remaining photo which Google has banned countless times, just as they ban the videos of the phony shootings as well.
When is Russia going to “grow a pair” and start calling out crap like Hebdo or 911 or other phony terror acts where we know for certain, and I am briefed on this, that Russia holds “slam dunk” evidence these are fakes? You know, after World War II, it was the Russian government that went to Auschwitz and built the smoke stack for the ovens there.
The ovens, of course, don’t exist, the smoke stack was built in 1947, and it isn’t attached to any building that has ever existed. They simply poured a foundation behind a building to fake photos, just like the one above, and it all still stands there while Jewish families flock to Krackow’s hotels and take the bus ride down there, careful not to photograph that the whole thing is faked.
[ Jim W. Dean Note: Ernst Zundle made several video tours of Auschwitz and aired them on public TV in Canada and the US. The building above was actually the morgue for the SS hospital in the background.
The photo to the right shows the holes cut into the roof, four of them I think, to give credence to the story of poison gas pellets being dropped down on screaming Jews, who of course were never there.
The Red Cross, who was at Auschwitz the whole time, has not a word in its records about massed gassing there. Countless Poles paid fees to be walked through this pitiful fraud. Two regular commercial cremation units were put inside for show. ]
I, at least, drove my own car, a rented Audi, last one of those things I will ever drive. Junk. And so it goes.
*
…by Finnian Cunningham for Russia’s Sputnik News
This year French President Emmanuel Macron has declared he will crack down on “fake news” with new laws banning publication of “offending” information.
The question is: who decides what “fake news” is? It is the French government. That means any article or viewpoint published across various media platforms is liable to be deleted – if French authorities judge the content to be “fake”.
It’s not hard to imagine how these new laws will be used to target Russian news media in particular. Macron has already made tendentious claims that Russian media outlets, Sputnik and RT, interfered in the French presidential elections last year by allegedly spreading “fake news” about his campaign.
Sputnik and RT both rejected the allegations made by Macron. When Sputnik ran a couple of articles during the French elections they were based on critical comments issued by Macron’s opponents. Nothing more sinister than that.
During an official visit to Paris three weeks after Macron’s election last May, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a press conference that the French leader did not delve into allegations of Russian media interference during their private conversations.
If Macron had a case, why didn’t he raise it during his high-level meeting with Putin? The fact that he didn’t suggests that the French president is grandstanding with baseless claims of “Russian meddling” – in the same way that American and British politicians have been doing over the past year.
Let’s get back to the issue of forthcoming French media laws and the danger they pose to free speech. So, if the French authorities deem any published content to be “fake”, they are arrogating the power to ban it.
The bitter irony of this development comes on the third anniversary this week of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.
Recall that three years ago on January 7, 2015, a pair of Al Qaeda-linked gunmen stormed the offices of the satirical magazine and shot dead 11 people. The atrocity prompted millions of people on to the streets of Paris declaring, “Je Suis Charlie”. It was supposed to be a rally in defiant support of the right to free speech and freedom of expression.
Three years on, Macron’s government is proposing to shut down freedom of expression with its new laws purportedly targeting “fake news” – or any viewpoint designated by French authorities as “not established in facts”. As already noted, Macron has made the provocative assertions that Russian media outlets are purveyors of “fake news” – a claim that he makes without credible evidence or facts.
The danger of this development to free speech is illustrated by a survey published this week which alleges that the French public are susceptible to believing in “conspiracy theories”.
State-owned channel France 24 reported that nearly 80 per cent of French people believe in one or more “conspiracy theories”, according to the cited recent survey.
From the France 24 report: “The poll by the Ifop group on behalf of the Fondation Jean Jaures think-tank and the Conspiracy Watch organization found that large sections of French society believed in theories with no grounding in established fact.”
Fair enough, some of the expressed beliefs among the 1,200 people sampled do seem a bit whacky. For example, some 10 per cent of respondents reportedly said they believe that the “Earth is flat”; and another 16 per cent apparently think that the American moon landings were faked.
However, the report carried by France 24, as well as by Agence France-Presse (AFP), goes on to conflate those dubious concepts with other “conspiracy theories” which are in fact, very arguably, valid alternative points of view.
It was reported that “54 per cent of respondents” believe that the American CIA were involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963; and that “31 per cent agreed” with the viewpoint that Western state secret services have manipulated jihadist terror groups like Islamic State.
Here is how France 24 describes the JFK question: “One of the best-known conspiracy theories – that the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963 – was believed by 54 per cent of respondents.”
On the jihadist terror topic, it reports: “Other theories tested in the survey… included that jihadist groups Al Qaeda and the Islamic State were manipulated by Western secret services (31 per cent agreed).”
Note how the established, government-aligned French media are making pejorative judgments about the assassination of JFK and the nature of jihadist terror groups. Any viewpoint that does not conform to the “official” one on either of these topics is denigrated as “a conspiracy theory not based on established fact” – or, in short, “fake news”.
Under President Macron’s new media laws, articles or opinions which contend an alternative version of either the JFK assassination or jihadist terror groups are liable to be banned from public platforms. Moreover, those media outlets that do carry such alternative views could be sanctioned for publishing “fake news”.
We do not have the space here to go into depth on the two subjects cited above. But suffice to say that there is abundant, credible research and literature to support alternative explanations to the “official narratives”.
On the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, the official story that he was murdered by a lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald has been debunked by several reliable sources. The elaborate nature of the shooting in Dealey Plaza and the subsequent cover-up had to involve a high-level covert state operation, including the CIA.
The fatal headshot from the front is paramount proof that Oswald was not the assassin. Former American President Richard Nixon, as well as the late French President Charles De Gaulle, are both on record dismissing the official explanation about JFK’s murder as absurd (see JFK: An American Coup, by John Wilson-Hughes).As for Al Qaeda and their offshoot jihadist terror groups, it has been scrupulously documented by Peter Dale Scott (The Road to 9/11), Michel Chossudovsky (America’s ‘War on Terrorism’), among other respected authors, that these groups were first created by American and British military intelligence as proxies to fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
More recently, during the war in Syria, there is hard evidence showing that US, British and French intelligence agencies, along with Turkish counterparts and Saudi funding, instrumented Al Qaeda-linked terror proxies to wage a covert war for regime change. This contradicts the official Western government and media claims that Western states are “fighting against terrorism”. The evidence in fact shows Western government agencies colluding with terror groups to advance their geopolitical objectives, such as regime change.
Therefore, it is the official versions on JFK and terror groups that are arguably “fake news”. They are the “conspiracy theories not based on established fact”.
Yet, under Macron’s new laws, French authorities will be able to suppress valid, critical thinking and freedom of expression simply on the basis of assigning the label “fake news”.
This is a grave assault on democratic rights and the power of citizens to hold their governments to account, especially when those governments are up to their necks in criminality.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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JohnZ,
you are perfectly right on this. Our censor law was brought into existence through the SPD (Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice, what a joke, which are our democrats in your political system). Now there is already a big, big backslash, because they thought “hate speech” was an “inherent conservative or political right thing” solely. Now they realize that they are targetted as much as their opponents already, which shows that the makers of this sloppy law were even too dump to forsee this development.
The saying “Sie lügen wie gedruckt” which means “They lie as printed” goes back to god old Guttemberg times, when the printing began. This alternative view on things printed is virulent up to this day, especially by the better informed people and especially after some rigorous fact checks of the things stated, now preferably found in non official sites and books which only after big struggles against severe interferences can be published, including basic things like making it very hard to buy even ink and paper.
France is a true follower of Germany, which recently brought us the “Netzwerkdurchsuchungsgesetz”. They are very eager to zensure on Twitter, Facebook, Google interfered directly with government money in the last elections, see here a current female whistleblower about this:
The tricky thing is, they made the zensus a private job, this is the current trend. So, they think that they cannot be blaimed in future courts for this. They now use old school Stasi spies for this, for instance in a private company Anette Kahane (read her name carefully) from Markus Wolff’s famous service and many more.
Since Charly Hebdo, France does not grant full democratic rights to his citizens, because it implemented some special “current state”, which is very near to mashall law. They always prolonged it up to this day.
Democracy is anywhere else but not in France since then, not to mention Germany, where this always was a joke.
Sorry, I forgot the video-link in the above text. She tells exactly how joung peole were fooled into the censur system, then trained, brainwashed and eventually forced to perform rigorous deleting of posts and links without the knowledge of the targets (shadowing):
https://youtu.be/LpwXEv-eVRs
(sorry, this is German, I hope someone can understand it here)
I often watch RT on the tube and the subject Thursday @7pm was Pablo Escobar’s hitman “Popeye” ,a real pos that guy. He does a regular pod cast on you tube This idea of who can say what is in the hands of gate keepers with hint of propaganda in mind.
C’mon the Bolshevic’s did the Holocaust bull shit; the Russians suffered 66 million killed by the same Bolsheviks. Stop saying Russian when you should say Bolshevik.
I’m always glad to read your comments and these were especially well written. Thank you and best to you and your loved ones.
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