Why I attack anyone who shares RT
Almost anyone — sometimes I’m too tired for a fight, and sometimes I think someone is too stupid to be worth trying to argue with. So really if I don’t attack you for sharing RT you should consider that as an even bigger insult.
I fully intend to do so consistently without fear or favor for anyone, so if I omit to challenge you for doing this it’s only because of those two reasons above.
I’ve warned and explained why I do this before, but I’m seeing more of it again (unfortunately it’s a game of whackamole with a positive feedback loop due to Facebook’s algorithm showing you more of what you appear interested in or are repeatedly infuriated by), so I’m going to put my explanation in a more durable place, once and for all.
What I mean by ‘attack’ is to aggressively challenge: “Why are you doing this? Do you really not know what they do? Have they not done enough harm already without you helping them to spread through online networks?”
The Russian mafia-Cheka putative ‘State’ is currently engaged in crimes against humanity directly and by its client regimes in several countries— widespread or systematic crimes of “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”, but the one I know most about is Syria.
Russia Today exists for the purpose of spreading disinformation to enable the Russian regime to carry on acting as it does with international impunity, partly by maintaining or increasing popular support for its “alternative” geopolitical narratives and “alternative facts” and use of framing cognitive-linguistic techniques to increase support for its allied neo-fascist and ‘Alt-Left’ parties, politicians and groups, so that then ‘Liberals’ and ‘Democrats’ who think ‘democracy’ just means populist majoritarianism with no constitutional constraints feel they must compromise and effectively politically collaborate with them.
That is really categorically different from e.g. the BBC being quite seriously flawed, usually shallow and systematically biased in predictable and easily cognitively filterable pro-government and conservative ways, such as, tediously predictably always underestimating protest numbers, when they can’t ignore the event totally. The BBC does not routinely totally make shit up, and does not frame victims of State terrorism as “terrorists” in order to enable an ongoing extermination and forced displacement campaign, with industrial scale torture, forced disappearance and murders against mainly civilian political opposition, to continue without “interference in domestic affairs”.
The BBC does not seek to systematically undermine public confidence in the possibility of reasonable objectivity about facts in the external world and to brainwash people into believing that individual subjective feelings, popularity and authorities are what makes a claim ‘true’, it does not systematically manipulate people through groupshift and deindividuation to create isolated and polarised modules on the internet in order to more easily hypertarget those new virtual “countries” on social networks with different disinformation narratives each and then to set them in conflict — a divide and control tactic.
Russia Today only pretends to be a normal media site just enough to gain some apparent credibility in order to misuse it for evil. The BBC etc. are seriously flawed but not on the same level or in the same kinds of ways.
Russia is now apparently refusing to support Assad with finishing the extermination and forced displacement of all the remaining 5.4 million opposition civilians who are mostly in N Syria, not because they’re not willing to — they’ve shown consistently and persistently that they have no morals or scruples whatsoever, but because the international bad PR was maybe getting a bit much for them to manage and they have a gas pipeline deal with Turkey. The Turkish government would not be able to manage either the Turkish public reaction to more extermination of Syrians or more mass influxes of Syrian refugees over the Turkish border, so they will restrain the Russians.
I was closely involved in monitoring the part extermination and the forced displacement of people from East Aleppo in early to mid December 2016. Despite the Russian, Iranian and Assad regimes’ big bold lies (große Lüge), the vast majority of the people in E Aleppo were obviously civilians. By the time of the final forced expulsion around 15–17th December, there were only about 150 Jabhat Fateh al-Sham fighters out of at least 60–70,000 people, and about 5000 FSA or allied militias. There were no Daesh fighters in E Aleppo because they were driven out by the FSA in early 2014, despite the usual regime bullshit saying otherwise. (The regime calls all the Syrians it kills “ISIS and Al Qaeda” in propaganda targeting idiots in “the West” because those are the names the intended audience think they know and react to. Very few people know anything realistic about Daesh, but everyone has an opinion about them.) At that time, the Russian regime was dropping bunker busting bombs on underground hospitals and incendiary cluster bombs in areas where civilians had been deliberately concentrated already by their Iranian allies on the ground, and of course lying about it all on Russia Today to say they were “defeating ISIS” and “liberating Aleppo”. Far from it, they’d actually avoided hitting Daesh and even given them air cover to attack the FSA:
As has the Assad regime repeatedly given air strikes in de facto tactical coopertion with Daesh to attack the FSA and enable Daesh to gain ground:
This should not be surprising since the Assad regime actually appointed Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former Iraqi Ba’ath army officer, codenamed Haji Bakr, to actually organizationally setup Daesh, buys the oil they extract, and still has shabiha agents within and can direct Daesh or choose to not disrupt attacks internationally, as Khaled Aboud, a regime official, explicitly threatened against Turkey in January 2017, although of course they constantly apply the mirror accusation propaganda tactic to accuse all their international enemies of doing so instead. They have pseudo-independently corroborated and repeated those claims that through their vast network of grey sites til now I think probably the majority of people outside the directly affected countries, Syria and Iraq, believe there’s ‘probably some truth in it’.
And on the deliberate strategy of destroying hospitals in order to most efficiently terrorize civilians into “voluntary” “humanitarian evacuation” (as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornbury disgracefully called the crime of forced mass displacement of civilians, in parliament):
The Syrian Civil Defense volunteers (White Helmets) made Russia look bad by credibly showing and reporting what was actually happening, so the entire Assadi, Russian and Iranian, and their fascist and Alt-Left non-State allies’, propaganda and disinformation network globally has made it an obsession to attack the White Helmets with disinformation that maintains a level of popular support for their continuing war crimes targeting Syrian humanitarian rescue workers and medics in opposition territory, including the murders of seven White Helmets while they were off-duty resting, in Idlib by a shabiha (pro-regime paramilitaries) gang two weeks ago.
Added later: network graph of twitter mentions of “White Helmets or “whitehelmets” —
The astroturfed ‘popular’ attacks initially by bot-nets and trolls against MSF Sea particularly on Twitter and flooding the comments under Facebook posts by other humanitarian maritime Search and Rescue NGOs operating in the Libya-Italy sea route to rescue refugees and other people in distress at sea are also linked to the Russian ‘Active Measures’ network. Often then RT will ‘report the other side’ and hook more susceptible fools into their network that way too, but the facts which they are reporting to hook in people who are opposed to the defamation and then consequent physical attacks by Libyan ‘coastguard’ ships on maritime SAR NGOs they have in fact created in the first place. This is provokatsiya, a strategy based on the fact of social reflexivity.
Another issue close to my heart: during the mass influx of refugees starting in summer 2015, Russia Today and its grey sites network (covertly associated disinformation and propaganda sites = ‘grey’) largely created the political phenomenon of Europeans hating refugees by their deliberate framing of it as “migrant crisis” and using misrepresentative and manipulative framing to establish false popular beliefs and incite xenophobic and Islamophobic scapegoating, such that ‘Liberal’ politicians rushed to appease the fascists (again, like they’d none of them ever read any history) and to seek to compromise with them by closing borders and trapping about 13,000 already traumatized people at Idomeni in abjectly degrading conditions for months, then making the most evil international deal Europe has done in my lifetime so far (the EU-Libya deal if it continues to completion will be even worse) .
Added later:
The EU-Turkey deal has only achieved establishing as a new social norm that extraterritorial refoulement by refusing admission at frontiers and forcing people to remain in countries of persecution and threats of serious harm is tolerable, while establishing the habit of EU governments blatantly lying and basing policies on total political fictions with no plausible objective basis in reality and not even attempting to even substantiate their claims when challenged to do so by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). The astroturfed ‘popular opinion’ against welcoming refugees in Europe (and some of the for side have been exploited by pro-Kremlin proxy political fronts, e.g. the UK SWP, too) was largely created by the Russian regime’s propaganda network and its network of fascist / Neo-Eurasianist allies across Europe.
I am not particularly a fan of the USA, but I am certainly much more not a fan of them manipulating popular stupidity to install a vaguely fascist populist egomaniac who is displaying daily public signs of mid-stages dementia as the POTUS, which was also a major propaganda campaign victory of Russia Today and its associated grey sites. And now they “report” both sides, of course.
I have seen far more of the grey sites network because I actively investigated, as I explained before in my Easy Beginner Guide to Open Source Intel (OSINT) Techniques guide, also published on here. Russia Today functions as the flagship of their network, its special role within their overall strategic communications program is to establish ideas they’ve already introduced in the fringes of their network as ‘normal,’ by doing just enough apparently genuine news reporting in between the lies in order to create some apparent credibility to spend it on corroborating and normalizing total lies later on.
Underlying all their particular lies, misrepresentations and use of framing to incite scapegoating and destabilize societies, they also promote a perverted form of postmodernist epistemology that replaces even reasonable expectations of objectivity with individual subjective sentimentality and popularity as standards of ‘truth’. I detest and abhor this with all my soul.
Misinformation doesn’t just misinform, it stops people believing in facts per se. Or as Garry Kasporov puts it, misinformation “annihilates truth.”
“Justice has its birth and its roots in the presentation of the truth.” (Fray. Bartolomé de las Casas, cited in Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1484–1566: a Reader, by Francis Patrick Sullivan, 1995) And likewise the reverse — systematic injustice always relies on presenting untruths, and on normalizing contempt for factually objective truthfulness as a value.
Because of the current design of social networks online, you cannot interact with a single post without effectively also promoting its source.
Yes RT sometimes covers protests which other news networks don’t cover and sometimes those protests may even be ones we sympathise with, but be sure they are not doing that out of their kindness of their hearts but because it aligns with their geopolitical strategic ‘Active Measures’ agenda. The bits of genuine unique reporting they occasionally do are always topics which make their enemies look bad. Their enemies probably are partly bad too, but RT represents a regime and allies currently engaged in ongoing crimes against humanity, genocide and ‘State’-sponsored terrorism in multiple countries while lying about it all the time and making it appear as the new ‘normal’.
I am still shocked that I have to keep repeating this argument and reminding people and attacking people when necessary to say: “What are you doing??? Why are you sharing this and promoting them? Haven’t they done enough harm already without you giving them a bit more network reach?”
States in the West have a habit of going soft on proto-fascist and populist populist groups and appeasing them until it’s too late, but leftwing-ish people still have this habit of being unduly tolerant of Kremlin propaganda and its associates. RT deserves to be absolutely ostracised the same as Das Reich.
One of the Syrian opposition media channels, Orient TV, has a section comparing Assadi and Kremlin and the Mullah’s regime in Iran’s latest “news” output with Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda.
If you want to show a RT or other detestable source’s post, use a screenshot so that there’s no effect of unintentionally promoting it through the network.
If you argue back to me why it’s ok to share a RT article or ‘the BBC are just as bad’ or any other such utter stupidity, I will simply unfriend or block you now. Life is too short to argue with the virtual infinity of idiots on the internet.
Russia Today (RT), Ruptly (RT video channel), In the Now (RT show), Pravda, PressTV (Iranian), AlMasdar, SANA, are overt ‘State’ propaganda channels of belligerent regimes currently engaged in crimes against humanity and war crimes. It is absolutely morally unacceptable to interact with, i.e. effectively promote them, through online networks in any way, even by negligence.
Frankly, how dare you present yourself as a person who cares about human rights or humanitarian issues or about refugees and then act in a way that effectively promotes the propaganda channels of the main global perpetrator of human rights abuses, apologist for atrocities and inciter of scapegoating against refugees, or politically collaborate with their front organisations e.g.the so-called ‘Stop the War Coalition’ which actually just runs some of the apologetics aspect of StratComms for the Kremlin and its client regimes?
Yes, the USA is or was also bad too, but a) we do not accept as a defense argument in a murder trial ‘but [name] member of the opposite gang murdered one of my gang’s family members’ as a valid exculpatory argument against a murder charge, and neither should we with putative ‘States’!,
b) even accounting for Bush Jr. and Obama Administrations policies in post-war Iraq which led to the widespread sectarian violence over many years and the extreme injustice with impunity conditions in which extremist sectarian militias and then Daesh could thrive, in the last generation (25 years) the Russian imperialist regime has committed or supported its client regimes internationally in committing more atrocities against humanity than the US imperialist regime. The Bosnian genocide was supported by Russia. So-called ‘Anti-imperialism’ has in most cases come to mean effectively Alt-imperialism.
Incidentally, the narrative of ‘sectarianism’ as essential to the ‘savage natives’ has also been instrumentalised for propaganda. The Orientalist form of racism this narrative is part of is more popular with the older generation now.
The following is an incomplete list of some grey sites definitely identified, mainly by the techniques I explained before here (plus analysis of some more technical indicators such as matching Google advertising IDs), as Kremin-directed or -allied or useful-idiots being supported and used by them:
4thmedia.org
4threvolutionarywar.wordpress.com
abeldanger.net nsnbc.me
activistpost.com
ahtribune.com
allnewspipeline.com
alternative-news-network.net
alternet.org
americanlookout.com
americasfreedomfighters.com
amren.com
amtvmedia.com
ancient-code.com
anonews.co
anonhq.com
antiwar.com
asia-pacificresearch.com
assassinationscience.com
baltimoregazette.com
barenakedislam.com
beforeitsnews.com
bignuggetnews.com
bioprepper.com
blackagendareport.com
blacklistednews.com
christianfightback.com
collective-evolution.com
conservativedailypost.com
consortiumnews.com
corbettreport.com
cosmicscientist.com
countercurrents.org
counterinformation.wordpress.com
counterpunch.org
dailyoccupation.com
dailystormer.com
darkmoon.me
darkpolitricks.com
davidstockmanscontracorner.com
dcclothesline.com
dcleaks.com
defenddemocracy.press
dennismichaellynch.com
disclose.tv
disclosuremedia.net
drudgereport.com
educateinspirechange.org
educate-yourself.org
endingthefed.com
endoftheamericandream.com
endoftheamericandream.com
endtime.com
eutimes.net
eutopia.buzz
ewao.com
eyeopening.info
fellowshipoftheminds.com
filmsforaction.org
floridasunpost.com
foreignpolicyjournal.com
fourwinds10.net
freedomoutpost.com
gaia.com
galacticconnection.com
gangstergovernment.com
gatesofvienna.net
geopolmonitor.com
globalresearch.ca
godlikeproductions.com
govtslaves.info
greanvillepost.com
guccifer2.wordpress.com
hangthebankers.com
healthnutnews.com
henrymakow.com
heresyblog.net
humansarefree.com
ihavethetruth.com
in5d.com
informationclearinghouse.info
infowars.com
intellihub.com
intersectionproject.eu
intrepidreport.com
investmentresearchdynamics.com
investmentwatchblog.com
jackpineradicals.com
jamesrgrangerjr.com
jewsnews.co.il
journal-neo.org
katehon.com
kingworldnews.com
lewrockwell.com
libertyblitzkrieg.com
libertywritersnews.com
makeamericagreattoday.com
memoryholeblog.com
mintpressnews.com
moonofalabama.org
nakedcapitalism.com
naturalblaze.com
naturalnews.com
newcoldwar.org
newstarget.com
newswithviews.com
nowtheendbegins.com
off-guardian.org — see also:
oftwominds.com
oilgeopolitics.net
opednews.com
orientalreview.org
patriotrising.com
paulcraigroberts.org
platosguns.com
prepperwebsite.com
prisonplanet.com
rbth.com
readynutrition.com
redflagnews.com
regated.com
rense.com — this is an aggregator
righton.com
rinf.com — this is an aggregator
ronpaulinstitute.org
rumormillnews.com
russia-insider.com
sentinelblog.com
sgtreport.com
shiftfrequency.com
shtfplan.com
silentmajoritypatriots.com
silverdoctors.com
sott.net
southfront.org
stevequayle.com
stormcloudsgathering.com
strategic-culture.org
superstation95.com
survivopedia.com
theantimedia.org
thecommonsenseshow.com
thedailybell.com
thedailysheeple.com
theduran.com
theearthchild.co.za
theeconomiccollapseblog.com
theeventchronicle.com
thefederalistpapers.org
thefreethoughtproject.com
themindunleashed.org
thenewsdoctors.com
the-newspapers.com
therebel.media
therussophile.org — this is an aggregator
thesaker.is
thesleuthjournal.com
thetruenews.info
thetruthseeker.co.uk
theunhivedmind.com
thirdworldtraveler.com
toprightnews.com
trueactivist.com
trunews.com
truthandaction.org
truthdig.com
truthfeed.com
truthkings.com
truth-out.org
ufoholic.com
undergroundworldnews.com
unz.com
usanewshome.com
usapoliticsnow.com
usasupreme.com
usdcrisis.com
usslibertyveterans.org
vdare.com
veteransnewsnow.com
veteranstoday.com
vigilantcitizen.com
viralliberty.com
voltairenet.org
wakeupthesheep.com
wakingtimes.com
washingtonsblog.com
wearechange.org
weshapelife.org
whatdoesitmean.com
whatreallyhappened.com
wikileaks.com
wikileaks.org
wikispooks.com
worldnewspolitics.com
worldpolitics.us
www.fort-russ.com
yournewswire.com
zerohedge.com
These sites are in the Russian Active Measures network, whether consciously and intentionally or by being useful idiots and ‘supported’ / exploited and manipulated by the Kremlin for aims they do not necessarily even recognize.
The ones I have highlighted are those which most often carry Assadi dezinformatsiya and pro-regime propaganda about Syria, or which I have recently seen shared by some idiot ‘friends’ in my Facebook timeline or which targets the sort of temperamentally left-ish liberal-ish people in my area of the network, so I am warning you about them particularly.
They sometimes use the clickbait tactic of posting what are in-themselves sometimes even totally innocuous articles or or even cute animal videos to increase their network reach. Do not take the bait or spread it!
If you don’t recognise the source and you haven’t checked it out thoroughly enough to be sure who / what sites its actually networked with and what else they’re doing, do not react to or share that post.
