Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has issued updated guidance to its “Nuclear Explosion” readiness public awareness website, which includes tips to avoid Covid!
“Fallout is most dangerous in the first few hours after the detonation when it is giving off the highest levels of radiation. It takes time for fallout to arrive back to ground level, often more than 15 minutes for areas outside of the immediate blast damage zones.
“A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning,” reads the page, which was updated on Friday.
We’re only four days into Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, and yet the propaganda cogs are whirring fast as lightning, churning out “news”, opinion and content grist for the media mill.
In just the last 48 hours dozens of stories, images, narratives and videos have circulated as being taken from the fighting in Ukraine, a huge percentage of which are fake.
Now, some of it could be attributed to misunderstandings, mistaken identity, misattribution…but many and most are likely deliberate deceptions designed to provoke a response. Let’s dive right in.
1. “The Ghost of Kiev”
Early Friday morning it was reported that a single Ukrainian plane, a MiG-29, was patrolling the skies above Kiev. The English speaking press called the unnamed pilot “The Ghost of Kiev”, and claimed he had downed 6 Russian jets in air-to-air combat in less than 2 days, making him an official Fighter Ace, and probably one of the fastest to ever earn that title.
The trouble is there is almost no evidence this happened at all. To quote Newsweek:
There is zero evidence the “Ghost of Kyiv” exists”.
Neither side can confirm Russia has lost six planes in total, let alone to one man inside a single day. And a video alleged to be “the Ghost” in combat – shared by the Ukrainian Armed Forces – is confirmed to actually be footagetaken from a video game.
Nevertheless, he already has his own Wikipedia page. A testament to how fast a lie can move while the truth is putting its boots on.
The problem with that is it’s not Kiev, it’s Moscow. And it’s not today, it’s two years ago. It’s footage of what is likely a rehearsal for the 2020 Victory Day Parade flyover.
3. “Zelenskiy visiting the troops”
Possibly no politician in history has had a PR makeover quite as fast as Vlodomyr Zelenskiy. Last week he was just some guy, this week he’s a war hero, there’s talk of building statues of the man. A (not at all staged) “leaked” phone call had him turning down the US offer of an airlift to safety.
Twitter is dotted with people sharing photos of him in combat fatigues, comparing him favourably to Trump and Trudeau and asking “what other leaders would fight alongside their troops?”
This is President Zelensky. He is a brave man fighting shoulder to shoulder with his people. This man was blackmailed and extorted by Trump, who is a corrupt criminal and a coward. So yes, if I have to pay more for a gallon of gas, democracy is worth it. #UkraineStrongpic.twitter.com/4J8x8FnTZH
More than a billion dollars are held in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s accounts abroad.
This was announced by the deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of the Opposition Platform – Party For Life Ilya Kiva.According to him, Zelensky has accumulated $1.2 billion in the Dresdner Bank Lateinamerika in Costa Rica during the two and a half…
”This war has been mercilessly murdering an innocent population for 8 years while everyone .. looked the other way. Your ‘No to War’ signs cruelly arrive too late and at the indirect service of NATO interests”.
by Ramiro Gómez at La Haine. rough translation by theFreeonline 02/26/2022 Article by a member of the Rubén Ruiz Ibarruri Brigade and participant in the Banda Bassotti Antifascist Caravan (la Caravana Antifascista)
I am writing this trying to contain the anger and indignation that the reactions of the western left and society in general produce in me about the Russian counterattack against Ukraine.
Honestly, I’m not expecting much from this. I have more than proven that there is no one more blind than the one who does not want to see, and that no matter how much you all repeat a thousand times that the TV…
”This war has been mercilessly murdering an innocent population for 8 years while everyone .. looked the other way. Your ‘No to War’ signs cruelly arrive too late and at the indirect service of NATO interests”.
by Ramiro Gómez at La Haine. rough translation by theFreeonline 02/26/2022 Article by a member of the Rubén Ruiz Ibarruri Brigade and participant in the Banda Bassotti Antifascist Caravan (la Caravana Antifascista)
I am writing this trying to contain the anger and indignation that the reactions of the western left and society in general produce in me about the Russian counterattack against Ukraine.
Honestly, I’m not expecting much from this. I have more than proven that there is no one more blind than the one who does not want to see, and that no matter how much you all repeat a thousand times that the TV manipulates, you continue dancing to the rhythm set by the Western mass media.
Since yesterday I have seen social networks full of NO TO WAR signs from which you have removed the almost 20 years of cobwebs since the Iraq war.
I could say that those same posters have been forgotten at the bottom of the drawer of infamy, while Israel massacred Palestine. While the US devastated Afghanistan, or Libya, in massive bombings that have caused the death of more than 150,000 people, including thousands of children.
Deaths that the US has refused to investigate. But saying all this would be too easy. I could say that when the media told you again, that as with Libya you had to intervene in Syria, you have kept quiet while the US attacked a sovereign country and plundered its oil reserves.
Sonia, 14, has experienced numerous attacks in and on her way to school in eastern Ukraine./ Unicef
I could also say that so far in February 2022, there have been deaths in Palestine, in Damascus due to Israeli bombing, as well as in Yemen or Somalia. And your anti war placards were still forgotten.
I could also say that Western policies have caused a constant genocide in Mediterranean waters, but it would be … demagoguery. It is obvious that there are deaths that matter, and others that do not.
As Malcolm X said, be careful with the media because if you don’t you will end up defending the oppressors.
But I want to focus on the war that broke out in Ukraine in 2014, to which your bland posters are 8 years late. Everyone can get confused, we can all make mistakes, but it is also possible that there is something more perverse than just”carelessness”.
Donbass ruins. 8 year siege.
Having memory is something very important, and more so in a society that manufactures throwaway conflicts for which most people only act by putting a fashionable avatar on their profile picture, which days later with the appearance of any news of the pink press, soccer or any bullshit expires on infertile soil.
First of all, it must be understood that a war today does not appear out of nowhere and that many of us understand that the global war began a long time ago. Another thing is that the media from which we feed, decides what the weather is like, or what conflicts exist or do not exist, but there are many corners of the world that have been at war for years and are made invisible because economic interests favor the US-NATO Western alliance.
For years, NATO-USA has been failing in its commitment and building military bases, establishing its troops there along the Russian border, with the intention of weakening and besieging the Eurasian countries that could compete with the dollar and the euro.
It’s as easy as looking for NATO bases around the world on a map and you’ll see how military harassment movements have been going on for years.
The Ukraine War is just one more chapter in a much longer series and it is essential to keep it in mind when analyzing the events of the last few days.
First of all, and to prevent the rat children from appearing, I will say that Putin disgusts me, and that Russia is not the USSR and its policies have nothing to do with its Soviet past, but I refuse to focus on Russia, because I consider that it is putting the axis of the balance in the wrong place and that it can only give rise to manipulated positions.
When the Maidan movement emerged in 2013 as a supposed social response to political corruption, the workers and miners of the Donbass viewed it with sympathy, despite the fact that they were involved in a coal strike, in cities long abandoned by the administrations, which was very far from the life of the capital.
From here we also saw the images of the massive demonstrations in Kiev and how they faced a lot of violence against the police.
So far, everything was going well. The red and black flags gave it a nice touch so that for a society of entertainment like ours, we would start applauding the symbols and supporting those movements.
Things started to go wrong when the protesters attacking the police were in paramilitary uniforms and Nazi symbols began to appear on their shields. Something was beginning to smell bad.
The red and black flag turned out to be the symbol of the Ukrainian insurgent army of the Nazi Stepan Bandera, who allied himself with the German Nazis in World War II, carrying out massacres of his Jewish Ukrainian compatriots, which even scandalized the Germans themselves.
It is curious to see how if someone throws a stone at the police in the Basque Country, Catalonia or Madrid, they are little less than a terrorist, and when someone burns a police officer alive in Venezuela or Ukraine, they are an activist for freedom.
The fact is that the events that followed were known to all. President Yanukovych (another corrupt one, like any other) left Ukraine and the coup installed a recognized fascist like Poroshenko.
The Nazis took to the streets. Little by little it would be discovered that such protests were supported by briefcases of American dollars that they inflated to raise that monster of war.
The violence since then has been savage and daily. The first thing they did was go to the communist and anti-fascist headquarters and destroy them. The armed Nazi groups came to all the assemblies, and said, either with us or we will kill you. Many fled and moved away, other so-called comrades joined the Nazi ranks in pursuit of the Unity of Ukraine. Horrible, but that’s how it was.
“I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda,” US Senator Mark Warner tweeted on Friday.
Since then YouTube has announced that it has suppressed videos by Russian state media channels
This is so that they’ll be seen by fewer people in accordance with its openly acknowledged policy of algorithmically censoring unauthorized content, as well as de-monetizing all such videos on the platform.
Google and Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta both banned Russian state media from running ads and monetizing, on their platforms.
This was in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Twitter announced a pause on ads in both Russia and Ukraine.
“Glad to see action from tech companies to reign in Russian propaganda and disinformation after my letter to their CEOs yesterday,” Warner tweeted on Saturday. “These are important first steps, but I’ll keep pushing for more.”—(@MarkWarner) February 26, 2022
For years US lawmakers have been using threats of profit-destroying consequences to pressure Silicon Valley companies into limiting online speech in a way that aligns with the interests of Washington, effectively creating a system of government censorship by proxy.
It would appear that we’re seeing a new expansion of this phenomenon today.
And the imperial media are pushing for more. Articles and news segments warning of the sinister threat posed by Russian propaganda to misinform and divide western populations using the internet are being churned out at a rate that’s only likely to increase as this latest narrative management campaign gets into full gear.
“Armies of trolls and bots stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiment. State-controlled media outlets look to divide Western audiences. Clever TikTok videos serve up Russian nationalism with a side of humor,” AP warns.
“Analysts at several different research organizations contacted by The Associated Press said they are seeing a sharp increase in online activity by groups affiliated with the Russian state,” AP writes. “That’s in keeping with Russia’s strategy of using social media and state-run outlets to galvanize domestic support while seeking to destabilize the Western alliance.”
The “different research organizations” AP ends up citing include “Cyabra, an Israeli tech company that works to detect disinformation,” as well as the state-fundedNATOnarrative management firm The Atlantic Council.
As tends to happen whenever a consensus begins to form that a certain category of speech must be purged from the internet, imperial spinmeisters are already working to expand the definition of “Russian propaganda” which must be purged from the internet to include independent anti-imperialist commentators like myself.
Dopey Louise Mensch wannabe NatSec LARPer calling for me to be labeled “State Affiliated Media” and de-platformed across all western social media because RT is one of the many outlets who occasionally republish my blogs for free. https://t.co/54yZtQUsFzpic.twitter.com/XKzLnwvAPs
Imperial narrative manager Robert Potter has a thread on Twitter currently calling for me and other anti-imperialist content creators to be labeled “State-Affiliated Media” on Twitter and ideally de-platformed across all western social media, in my case solely because RT is one of the many outlets who occasionally choose to republish some of my blog posts for free.
I am not as Potter claims “an OP Ed columnist for Russia Today.” I don’t work for RT, I don’t write for RT, I don’t submit articles to RT, and I’ve never been paid by RT or the Russian government. RT is just one of the outlets who sometimes avail themselves of my longstanding invitation for anyone who wants to to republish my work free of charge. That RT editors would find my daily rants against western imperialism agreeable is not scandalous or conspiratorial but normal and self-evident.
Yet for agents of imperial narrative control like Potter (who ironically works directly for the US State Department but thinks my posts should be labeled “State-Affiliated Media” by Twitter), even this is enough to justify complete silencing. I will not be in the slightest bit surprised to see a great deal more of these efforts as the new cold war continues to escalate.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an empire-loyal NGO ostensibly focused primarily on fighting racism and prejudice, has published a report accusing Facebook of failing to label Russian propaganda as such 91 percent of the times it occurs. The CCDH decried Mark Zuckerberg’s “failure to stop Facebook being weaponized by the Russian state”.
Retweet if you think RT, a propaganda arm of Putin’s Kremlin, should have its licence revoked by Ofcom.
This sudden narrative management thrust has also seen RT taken off the air in nations like Australia, Germany and Poland, with pressures mounting in France and the UK to follow suit.
This despite the fact that all western powers would have to do to eliminate RT completely is simply start allowing leftist and anti-imperialist voices to be heard on mainstream media platforms. It would immediately suck up RT’s entire foreign audience as people who’d previously needed to look outside the mainstream for sane perspectives gravitate toward media made with much better funding and a higher level of talent.
But of course we all know that’s never going to happen. The imperial media aren’t going to subvert RT by platforming voices who dispute the empire’s narratives no matter how badly they hate it, because the exact reason they hate RT is because it disputes the empire’s narratives. They’re not worried about Russian propaganda operations, they’re worried about someone else running interference on their own propaganda operations.
Nazis in Ukraine? Russian propaganda. US-backed coup in 2014? Russian propaganda. Donbas provocations? Russian propaganda. US/allies armed terrorists in Syria? Russian propaganda. Mass media is propaganda? Russian propaganda. The government’s not your friend? Russian propaganda. https://t.co/OjtURhlht7
RT’s audience makes up about 0.04% of TV viewing in the UK. This isn’t about RT, it’s about the the agenda to continually expand and normalize the censorship of unauthorized speech.
That’s what it was about when they were pretending it was about the need to fight Covid misinformation before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to fight domestic US extremism before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to defend election security before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to fight Russian propaganda the first time before that one cycled back around again.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Humans are storytelling creatures, so whoever can control the stories the humans are telling themselves about what’s going on in the world has a great deal of control over the humans.
Our mental chatter tends to dominate such a large percentage of our existence that if it can be controlled the controller can exert a tremendous amount of influence over the way we think, act, and vote.
The powerful understand this, while the general public mostly does not. That’s all we’ve been seeing in these attempts to regulate ideas and information as human communication becomes more and more rapid and networked.
An entire oligarchic empire is built on the ability to prevent us from realizing at mass scale that that empire does not serve us and inflicts great evil upon our world.
The question of whether our species can awaken to its highest potential or not boils down to whether our dominators will succeed in locking down our minds, or if we will find some way to break free.
(@caitoz) 
The Free 