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Photo composition showing hands with captions of desperation like "stressed, helpless, powerless, ignored, destitute, vulnerable," among many others. In a background with more captions but now highlighting ruling elements like "demagogue, populist, hero, autocrat, dictator, anarchist, rebel, savior," among others. Photo: Global Research.
By Stephen Sefton – Dec 18, 2022
People who have had to care for elderly loved ones who suffer from the terrible disease of dementia commonly find during this experience that our loved ones can hold grammatically correct but completely meaningless conversations. These may be with imaginary people, about non-existent situations, or recalling events that never happened. The conversation sounds normal, but is in fact completely absurd.
This same experience occurs when reading or listening to Western sources reporting on international affairs. It is worth remembering that last December 15th at the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the United States and its NATO allied countries voted against a resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. It is not that the North American and European representatives abstained. No. They opposed the resolution, that is, in fact they support Nazism, a position which contradicts all the claims members of the Western political classes make to their populations about supporting democracy and human rights.
Faced with this contradiction, the very few genuinely anti-imperialist Western media outlets often analyze how Western populations can be deceived to the extreme of accepting the genocidal policies of their fascist governments and their masters in the North American and European corporate elites. For example, a common term used in those North American media outlets which criticize the imperialism of their countries is “gaslighting” derived from the famous movie “Gaslight” released in 1944. In this film the heroine is subjected to sinister, systematic manipulation by her husband, who seeks to have her declared insane in order to seize the inheritance of her aunt, whom he had previously murdered.
So now the term “gaslighting” is applied to the Western countries’ mass media psychological warfare offensive against their own populations. By means of this psychological warfare, insane false beliefs are induced in order to convince the North American and European populations that their governments’ criminal foreign policy promotes and defends democracy and human rights. To achieve the imposition of this mass induced dementia, the fundamental strategy is the incessant repetition of big lies combined with the elimination of sources of information contradicting those lies.
Behind NATO’s ‘Cognitive Warfare’: ‘Battle for Your Brain’ Waged by Western Militaries
For this reason, the Western ruling classes implement censorship policies on social networks and eliminate information sources such as Russia’s RT or Iran’s Press TV, as took place recently through decrees of the European Union and its member countries. RT and Press TV use traditional reporting criteria in the sense of seeking to report reality. However, for Western sources of disinformation, reality is precisely what they strive to eliminate in order to be able to induce collective dementia among their populations. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, has commented on the recent censorship measures against RT noting that: “They are further proof of the European Union’s desire to severely censor information flows to the point of banning undesirable media, contrary to the principles of freedom of expression and media for which it condemns other countries. The current decision further violates the right of EU residents to access information.”
Precisely, because the reporting criteria of the Western media are formulated to induce false beliefs. For example, they promote the belief that NATO is a defensive organization, that Iran and not Israel is a nuclear threat or that Iran is a country where women are not respected, that the United States is fighting terrorism. Or they allege that China is incapable of ensuring the public health of its population, or that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are dictatorships that destabilize the region.
Of course, the reality is the opposite. Unquestionably, the revolutionary democracies of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela contribute greatly to regional stability. NATO is an aggressive military organization that attacked the civilian population of Serbia with massive bombings and supports Ukraine’s genocidal assault on the Russian-speaking population in Donbass. The United States is the most important promoter of terrorism in the world. China is one of the world’s most successful countries in defending the public health of its huge population.
It is important to understand that this is not just about the dishonest, false output of the Western media or the repressive control exercised by giant communications corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. The vast Western psychological warfare apparatus also incorporates the non-governmental industrial complex and seeks to control the academic industry, since intellectual production, especially in social sciences, is of special importance in being able to induce false beliefs. Of utmost relevance in this regard too is the aggressive action of the Western powers, especially the United States, trying to impose their control of the apparatus of international law.
These include, for example, the UN Human Rights Council or the International Criminal Court and the various special tribunals established over the years to deal with specific issues, such as Rwanda, Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia, among others. These tribunals. of dubious legitimacy, very clearly carried out their investigations in support of the foreign policy objectives of the collective West against its enemies. But their tendentious conclusions go down in history as definitive, with the effect of freezing in the form of false memories the biased premises with which their original establishment was justified.
Apart from seeking control of important instances that affect the development of international jurisprudence, the United States has managed to impose its national jurisdiction over other countries. For six decades, the United States has illegally applied the genocidal Helms-Burton Act to the people of Cuba, which in effect elevates the national laws of the United States as unchallenged international standards to the detriment of the Cuban people. Another example is how Argentina, under the government of Crsitina Fernández, was the victim of intimidation and intervention by a minor judge of a district court in New York who acted aggressively in favor of US vulture funds that rejected the legitimate restructuring of Argentina’s debt agreed with all the country’s other creditors.
Last June, the United States also imposed its jurisdiction in the case of the Venezuelan plane hijacked in Argentina at which time the authorities acted with procedures in complete violation of Argentine law based on requests from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. These examples of unjustifiable, bad faith application of the law are based on the deployment of sinister artifices, completely disconnected from reality and truth. In these cases, the evidence presented is invariably grossly biased, clearly fabricated or as often as not simply non-existent.
Among the most notorious cases of this type have been the persecution and torture of Julian Assange for having revealed the crimes of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, of Vice President Jorge Glas in Ecuador, the judicial persecution of Lula da Silva and the illegal judicial kidnapping of Alex Saab. The most recent has been the infamous conviction at the beginning of this month against Cristina Fernández after more than a decade of interminable arbitrary legal attacks against her. These abuses of national justice formalize bad faith legal processes that have the intention and often the actual effect of destroying their victims. At an international level, such processes serve to pressure, harass and condemn entire countries trying to defend their national dignity and sovereignty.
Nicaragua reflected this reality in its message this month in response to yet another false report in the United Nations Human Rights Council: “The legitimate Government of Reconciliation and National Unity of Nicaragua, will not tire of repeating with dignity, loudly and irrefutably, our total rejection of this type of mechanisms, which “update their Human Rights reports”, unilaterally and in a biased manner; acting as an “instrument of pressure and interference”, by using arguments far from our nation’s reality, with the sole purpose of keeping us underdeveloped and perverting our achievements, to have us submitted to the jurisdiction of foreign powers.”
Also relevant in this context is the message to the Iranian people last November from the Leader of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, in which he observed in relation to the failed coup attempt by the Western powers in his country, “One of their weak points is your lucidity. When you are lucid, they suffer setbacks… What the enemy wants is to gain control of people’s minds. Controlling these is for them much more valuable than taking control of territory.”
Stephen Sefton is a member of the Tortilla con Sal collective based in Nicaragua
