“The distinctions between leadership and management constitute a major shift in our thinking about how the private sector should be organized. A mere [six] decades ago, leadership was a conception business and industry generally chose to ignore. But now the best and brightest afree that leadership belongs in the private sector as much as it does in the public one. The only question is how exactly leadership and management should be defined” (147)
Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Business and Politics by Barbara Kellerman was published by the State University of New York press in 1999 and is volume in the SUNY series in Leadership Studies. At the time of the book’s publication, she was the Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
While an academic work, the book’s message is also directed to leaders and managers in both the upper reaches of the private sector as well as the public sector – something that is reflected in its style. The first premise of the book is that a number of significant failures of government has shown that earlier models of political leadership are inadequate. The second is that changes in social norms and conceptions of leadership wrought by political events have made traditional notions of management that came into prominence in the period of the 1950s to the early 1970s no longer relevant. The third and final premise is about the advantages of the convergence and synthesis of leadership values that embraces traditional government and business positions. Given the increased necessity of business and government leaders to communicate and collaborate this helps to develop a common language so as to better understand each other and the interests they represent – the public and private capital interests.
Kellerman defines management as the efforts of those who hold a position of authority at some level to ensure that the activities of a firm continue as needed and that leaders are those that engage followers in the mutual pursuit of agreed-on goal representing, usually, significant and not merely incremental change. These two conceptual inputs for the synthesis she believes is now needed were defined by various authors writing for either the professional or government leader/manager. By showing the typical continuing education paths for both the professional and the government official and analyzing professional literature – such as Harvard Business Review publications as well as an impressively large list of books on management and leadership in corporate America – Kellerman shows how divergently the ideals character traits and habits of thought for each social actor was first conceived – and how large political scandals and failures drew the two together in a way that more contemporary theorists would categorize as a mix of neoliberal or technocratic with a human face.
Whereas previously managers did not view their role as to influence – simply to command, control and if necessary to coerce – the changes in cultural and legal norms mean that this no longer was valid. In some workplaces where there hasn’t been much change wrought by America’s changing labor laws, such as extraction and agricultural industries, these were few alteration in norms. In worksites dealing with more intangible goods and services, like those of the many value-added business-to-business industries, the impact was significant and well commented on in the journalism and editorials of the professional and government press.
A number of seminal business leaders from the 1960s to the 1980s are presented as case studies to show the varying trends in how leadership was approached as a theory and practice and a number of common threads highlighted. One such theme found in the private industry, but not in that of the public, was of the need for management to “know themselves” in a way that included rigorous self-assessment so as to become more aware of the interpersonal dynamics at the workplace and within the market in general. If this all sounds curiously “new-agey,” or vaguely psychotherapeutic in nature” Kellerman says in one of her many amusing asides, “that’s because it is” (76).
Another of Kellerman’s observations is that while egalitarian ideas increasing permeated literature on leadership in business that in practice a noticeable change in work relations towards something that might be defined as “workplace democracy” never materialized. In its stead there became an infatuation with “collaboration” and “teams”. While anachronistic to this book, a good modern example of this is found in Agile, Scrum, and DevOps, coding and testing team practices associated with software development firms that shown in their literature and practice to be highly consultative and communicative in nature. The scandals of presidents and CEOs as well as changed in legal regulation – especially the opening of borders for trade – all feed into the changing workplace dynamics. Because certain types of labor could be more easily moved in the face of organized discontent by workers, which increased the reserve army of labor able to replace those in other, less at risk sectors, there was an additional shift in those work cites as well. Not a point which is gone into in detail – it seems that the effects of this would be another large influence for the imperative to blur the lines between public and private leaders and managers. And on this topic, Kellerman cites three specific imperatives wrought by the new, post-NAFTA globalized:
Politicians will have no choice but to take cues for their corporate counterparts
Business executives will have no alternative but to learn lessons from leaders in government
Leaders in both domains will have to reinvent themselves to create something altogether new.
In the closing section of the book Kellerman extensively quotes a number of business leaders to make the point that “although real-world problems are interdisciplinary, and solutions are interdepartmental, interprofessional, interdependent , and international, our institutions – particularly our institutions of higher education – start with a heavy bias against breadth.” (219)
The book closes with a description of the image of the new ideal for a political leader and business leader. The traits that they should have, the challenged they face, the strategies that they deploy and the values they embody to strive are listed as they could go on the back of a baseball card. All in all, it’s a fascinating read on how Leadership and Management as a concept and practice have evolved in America and how it is that one should act if one desires to be a Leader or Manager in the modern political-economic environment.
One of the most well-known writers in the English language, George Orwell is known primarily for his works of political fiction. Recommended or required reading for literature programs across U.S. high schools, in the American political imagination Big Brother and Winston from are familiar characters while newspeak and thoughtcrime are well known concepts.
Not as well-known is how Orwell’s writings were promoted by the state intelligence services of the United States and England during the Cold War. This fascinating irony is teased out in detail in The New Yorker’s 2003 article Honest, Decent, Wrong: The Invention of George Orwell by Louis Menand. There, after illustrating how Orwell’s fiction was mobilized as a means of influencing populations not within America’s sphere of influence, Menand describes the trajectory of Orwell’s writing: “The great enemy of propaganda was subjected, after his death, to the deceptions and evasions of propaganda — and by the very people, American Cold Warriors, who would canonize him as the great enemy of propaganda.”
This is not the only great irony of how George Orwell’s work and thought has been mobilized by groups seeking to claim him as a guiding moral force.
By presenting a case study of the means by which the Venezuelan state media company TeleSUR has acted to propagandize the notion that Americans are living in an Orwellian, totalitarian dictatorship — this article will provide another example of such irony. A type of irony that is so unique given the circumstances that it deserves a new term to describe it: Orwellian Irony.
Before doing this, however, I’m going to first briefly describe the impetus for TeleSUR’s founding and how it’s primary funder — the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) — understands it’s mission. Then I will contextualize TeleSUR’s relationship to Russian state and para-state media and then define some terms.
TeleSUR English: Propaganda, Not News
TeleSUR was conceived following the attempted coup in against Chavez in 2002. It was seen as a project to help the government maintain control of the country. Because of this it’s sensible that Chavez describes the goal for TeleSUR in December 2003 at a meeting of media professional not to be a news station, but as a means “create a breach in the media wall” that would “use social networks”.
After stating that capitalism is reaching a potentially terminal crisis, former president of Chavez stated in his Program for the Homeland 2013–2019 that: “In the words of Antonio Gramsci, the old must finally end so that the birth of the new can be manifested to the full… it is difficult to know exactly when this great horizon will become visible, but we should deploy significant and well-aimed efforts in the interest of its advent.” (bold added)
Lest it appear that Chavez is the only one with such a vision for TeleSUR it’s worth pointing out that the Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information — the body which oversees TeleSUR — presented a report to the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2015 which clearly states that TeleSUR’s goal is not to present news, but to help create a new world order. Furthermore on page 36 of the Red Book, written by the PSUV — in the section titled Declaration of Principles, the party states explicitly that TeleSUR is one of the “spaces for diffusion for socialist experiences to the people of the world.” This explains why TeleSUR was so highly praised by Fidel Castro before his death.
Given that TeleSUR’s stated goal to help with the formation of a new, multi-polar world order and that one way to achieve this is by undermining American’s trust in their government — it’s no surprise that they would hire people to direct their organizations with a history of political activism aligned with their own goals instead of journalists and why they would partner with the Russian state — who has similar ambitions — to achieve their goal.
TeleSUR English and Russian Social Media Manipulation
In Fake News: A Roadmap, propaganda is defined as writing or audio-visual content that:
“does not disregard truth, but uses elements of truth in the ‘deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions’, in order to achieve a specific response or reaction from an audience, meant to benefit and ‘further the desired intent of the propagandist’”
During an investigation conducted by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Labs that identified a Russian social media propaganda campaign they found that one of the ways that Russian nationals sought to do this was by mobilizing American’s familiarity of 1984 against the government.
This, however, isn’t the only time that Russian-originated media sought to make such a connection between 1984 and the present.
One of the videos that Abby Martin features in before she left her position at Russia Today for Venezuela’s TeleSUR English was, basically, a book report that sought to connect the present political environment in the United States to George Orwell’s description of Oceania. While a few of the connections are valid, as a whole they fall flat. To demonstrate why, I’ll briefly put on my professor’s cap to review what Orwellian means.
“Orwellian” as a Term for Describing the Present
“Orwellian” emerges from the description of the social and political qualities of the fictional world of Oceania in 1984, which was modeled on Orwell’s understanding of the Soviet Union during the leadership of Joseph Stalin. For Orwell the Soviet state, then defending it’s very existence in Stalingrad again Nazi invaders, had too much control over the individual and thus he claimed in the pages of the Socialist Journal Monthly Review that it is “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin [that] is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous”.
While one does not need to know this history to be able to use the term, it’s useful for understanding Orwell’s intent in writing 1984 and also to help distinguish it from other literary works that fall within the literary category of dystopia. A Handmaid’s Tale and The Iron Heel are dystopias, but they are not Orwellian.
To illustrate specifically what it is that Orwellian means, the below graphic organizer provides a number of the socio-political qualities of 1984. I’ve also included the header 2018 not to reference another book, but to show the book’s relationship to the qualities of the United States at present.
Based on this chart, I’d claim that saying that the present is “Orwellian” is analogous to arguing that since Peter Parker undergoes a metamorphosis into a human-insect hybrid, Spiderman, and then has an identity crisis and major issues with his job and family that the story is Kafkaesque. Yes, there’s some element of truth there, but that doesn’t mean that the metaphor fits. Anyone describing the present political and technological moment as Orwellian is intentionally misusing the term in order to promote a specific political perspective. Or, less likely, they simply have reading comprehension issues.
In what follows, you’ll see further evidence of Russian-Venezuelan collaboration and more examples of how TeleSUR English seeks to propagandize the notion that 1984 is now.
TeleSUR English’s Propaganda
Like Abby Martin’s video for RT, Paul Street’s editorial for TeleSUR English titled The Logical Bipartisan Insanity of Endless War similarly pitches the notion that 1984 is now. The irony is that it is don’t so in a style filled with the type of linguistic choices that Orwell hated. Unsurprisingly for someone who wrote a book entitled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy, Street’s article is most similar to the writing qualities of the Communist writer that Orwell analyzes in Politics and the English Language. Orwell state there that “the [Communist] writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.” The first paragraph hints at this — with it’s “always supremely evil foreign others”, “toiling masses” and repetitions of “endless war”– while the rest of the article that seeks to frame the present in terms of 1984 continues it.
In another article on TeleSUR, this time by respected filmmaker and news analyst John Pilger, again the United States is cast as Big Brother.
The irony here is that this article published before the full extent of Russian disinformation campaigns in relation to their annexation of Crimea and had been analyzed and made available to the public. According to thorough analysis by experts on the matter: “Crimea may be considered a test-case for Russia in trying out this new form of warfare where hybrid, asymmetric warfare, combining an intensive information campaign, cyber warfare and the use of highly trained Special Operation Forces, play a key role”.
Following the two-day unpublishing of TeleSUR English’s Facebook page in August, the pace of “Orwellian” comparison accelerates. Adriano Contreras, a current TeleSUR English presenter, uses the term in the organizations public response video. Abby Martin again uses the term in an interview with Comedian Jimmy Dore for his television show on RT. Thus we can see that with the increase in use of the term it also becomes easier to connections between Venezuelan and Russian media becoming more apparent.
Russia Today and TeleSUR English: Propaganda Partners
Following the two-day unpublishing of TeleSUR English’s Facebook page in August not only does the acceleration of the Orwellian smear rapidly accelerate, but the connections between Venezuelan and Russian media also become more apparent.
On Sputnik and RT several editorials about TeleSUR English’s unpublishing were posted that were not only fundamentally, factually wrong in their presentation and assessment of what transpired but that also quoted a known propagandist, Pablo Vivanco, without fact checking statements he made that I was able to prove untrue with great ease. More than this, these articles all demonstrate the qualities that Orwell warned of while at the same time invoking his name.
Ask a credentialed reporter, a seasoned news editor or an English teacher about the use of the term “vanishes” in the above headline and all will likely agree that it is inappropriate. Vanish, which comes from the Latin ‘evanascere’, means to make nothing, to die away, to completely disappear. As should be clear from the fact no criminal charges have been made against Facebook executives, its staff or their contractors for either theft or destruction of TeleSUR English’s equipment or for the kidnapping or murder of their employees, we can see that the language used here is that of gross overstatement.
political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer
cloudy vagueness… [this] inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
To keep the casual reader interested I’m not going to undertake a close reading of the entirety of the articles, but suffice it to say that the qualities of the headline — maybe the most important part of the story for a reader in determining whether or not they will click through to read it — are replicated throughout the story.
Something else that I noticed in the comments section of the RT articles about the brief unpublishing of TeleSUR English was the numerous anti-Semitic comments.
I decided to respond to one of these trolls to see what kind of response I would get and sure from them enough I “learned” that Menlo Park is not the real place where Facebook policy is made.
This isn’t a trend related to the second unpublishing of TeleSUR English’s Facebook page. In Danielle Ryan’s opinion piece “Facebook pretending to care about democracy now is the height of hypocrisy” published on RT after their first unpublishing more anti-semitic comments popping up — though in a more covert fashion. For those not in the know the phrase dual nationals is allusion to American politicians with a Jewish background.
In the comments section on Sputnik’s article about TeleSUR English’s unpublishing I was able to get more interesting information as they use Facebook for their news comments. After reading this comment:
Since Rob’s profile was public (a requirement for allowing non-Facebook algorithm’s to include those social media actions in their calculations), I decided to review it. Sure enough it has all the qualities of a sock-puppet account: few friends — many without picture, no photos that would indicate this is a real person, and a very high level of posing for “alternative news” websites
Twitter, TeleSUR English and Orwellian Irony
It wasn’t just in the editorials and comments sections of Russia news outlets that Orwellian notes were being played.
The irony in this Aaron Mate tweet is like a German chocolate cake: sweet despite its darkness and with such efficiency linguistically that it contains multiple layers of decadent pleasure.
The first layer of irony is the fact that I’ve already referenced above: 1984 is not 2018 and a private company and a non-governmental organization partnering is literally the opposite of anything described in 1984.
The second layer of irony is how the original tweet by TeleSUR English, like the Resisters tweet shown above, also uses improper English.
A third level of irony is in the factual incorrectness of two of Mate’s claims. The Atlantic Council had nothing anything to do with the brief unpublishing of TeleSUR English and, as reported elsewhere, an explanation had been provided.
The fourth level of irony is the fact that Aaron Mate tweets this analogy to promote an interview for “The Real News Network”. This is ironic not merely because the title for such an organization sounds so similar to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, but as The Real News Network was founded and is directed by Gregory Wilpert, one of the former directors of TeleSUR English!
The fifth level of irony stems from the fact that The Real News is engaged in exactly the same sort of promotional behavior that is prohibited by Facebook that causes their algorithm to flag and shut down the page!
Below are screenshots of two Facebook groups that I’ve found with memberships of 2 and 3 people whose sole activity is the reposting of links from The Real News as well as Venezuela’s TeleSUR English, Russia’s RT, CounterPunch, Global Research, Iranian.com, World Socialist Website and several other leftist “alternative media” outlets.
There’s a sixth level of irony in the Tweet, though it requires a story for context.
On September 3rd I emailed the contact listed on the Left Forum website to inquire about obtaining a copy of the 2016 Building Left Media in the Digital Commons panel. I wanted to view Pablo Vivanco’s presentation as while there is a screenshot available online of the presentation it is one of the few panels not available on YouTube.
This is itself ironic — as according to Marcus Graetsch, the only current full time volunteer for this “organization”, this was the year that the “organization” decided to have presenters arrange their own recording of the events and neither of these Directors of large media firms felt that what they had to share was worth recording and sharing for the sake of posterity. –
I expressed my frustration in a follow up email asking for something other than a story and this is when the seventh level of irony was revealed.
He said that though he couldn’t help he would ask Gregory Wilpert, who organized the panel to assist me.
In my exchange with Wilpert, the Managing Editor of an alternative news network, he claimed not to have a copy and then refused my request to ask others that were present if they had one as he believes that criticism of TeleSUR English should remain private.
Another words, in Aaron Mate’s tweet he dishonestly maligns Facebook for behavior that his employer is engaged in!
The Fifth Estate Masquerading as the Fourth Estate
Given that CounterPunch and WSWS — a Trotskyist political group — are similarly promoted by the above listed fake social media accounts and websites associated with TeleSUR English it’s not surprising seems also to be in on the game of promoting the U.S. and Facebook as Orwellian in nature.
In Andre Damon’s article Facebook Details Plans to Censor News Feeds and Manipulate Public Opinion he states the following: “It is exactly to prevent the distribution of “true news” that Facebook is, using Orwellian language, employing “fact checkers” to flag stories and opinions that are to be suppressed.”
TeleSUR English and “Independent” Blogs
It’s not just current TeleSUR English employees, former TeleSUR English’s employees, the current employees of former TeleSUR English employees, TeleSUR English’s official media partners, and TeleSUR English’s unofficial media partners that are in the “Orwellian” campaign.
Several blogs that exist seemingly only to echo TeleSUR’s position also do this, which is to be expected as any modern propaganda campaign on social media is not going to be limited solely to “official” news outlets to propagate the notion that such views are normal.
One blog, from which the above image comes, is from Luis Garcia and is titled Nomadic Thoughts.
Another blog, by the Russian-born Dimimtry Orlov, is titled the An Outsiders Sojurn. The not so subtle title of his blog: “The Social-Media Tech-Giants are an Orwellian/Dystopian Tentacle of this Anglo-Zionist Rogue-Empire!” gives a hint at the thrust of his analysis.
In addition to the videos, articles and blogs promoting the notion that Americans are living in an Orwellian epoch, there are also comments like the one below.
TeleSUR English and Orwellian Irony
One of George Orwell’s views about people who wrote from the party line was that: “Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” While the president of TeleSUR claims to be an impartial news outlet when other countries decide to stop funding them or continuing to their cable distribution packages, TeleSUR English is a propaganda outlet.
In their quest for cultural and political hegemony Venezuelan and Russian media find their interests overlapping and thus combined their efforts propagate a distorted worldview through their outlets in Russia Today and TeleSUR English.
Propagating the notion that contemporary America is “Orwellian” through a series of official, semi-official and quasi-official outlets is just one of many examples of this. If the above wasn’t able to convince you that it’s not, consider this last point in the form of a graphic organizer:
Sources
1984 by George Orwell
Analysis of Russia’s Information Campaign Against Ukraine: Examining non-military aspects of the crisis in Ukraine from a Strategic Communications Perspectives
Curso Basico de Formacion Socialista Para La Militancia de Vanguardia del PSUV
Digital Hydra: Security Implications of False Information Online
Documentos Fundamentales: Libro Rojo by Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
Proposal of the Candidate of the Homeland, for the Socialist Bolivarian Government 2013–2019 by Commander Hugo Chávez
The Logical Bipartisan Insanity of Endless War by Paul Street
Fake News: A Roadmap Editors: Jente Althuis and Leonie Haiden
Facebook Details Plans to Censor News Feeds and Manipulate Public Opinion by Andre Damon
A visitor to TeleSUR’s website can quickly see Israel holds a special place in TeleSUR’s news coverage. Despite the rest of the countries following an alphabetical organization, Israel is the first country listed.
While this could be just an instance of poor design which that made its past the eyes of everyone involved in the construction and user testing of its website — this isn’t the case.
As you’ll learn after reading the below, this little aesthetic glitch is anything but a mistake. It’s a not so sly code, which will be illustrated in detail below, that TeleSUR is a media company oriented towards helping Venezuela’s PSUV achieve the political goals stated in their Plan de Patria related to Israel rather than applying professional journalism standards.
What does this mean for their brand? Well, when it comes to international news reporting, truth-telling takes a back seat to the desire to delegitimize America by working to malign by any means necessaryits ally Israel.
The official news organization along with its media partners — a mix of private and state media companies as well as contractors — collaborate on projects that go far beyond anything that could be called principled anti-Zionism. Instead, TeleSUR consistently publishes in a false light; while their partners share a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook and the web.
TeleSUR Reports Fake News of Child Abduction
In 2010 the Anti-Defamation Leaguepublished Anti-Semitism in Venezuela: In the Wake of the Gaza Flotilla which contained extensive documentation of anti-Semitic views being expressed in various media outlets and by various members of the Venezuela government — including false accusationsthat Israeli doctors had stolen human organs from Haitians affected by the 2010 earthquake.
Nicolas Maduro, the president of TeleSUR, was cited as describing a situation wherein any potential attack could be ascribed to Mossad — “a conspiracy theory similar to one typically used by anti-Semites who claim Jews and Israel were behind terrorist attacks such as the 1994 AMIA attack in Buenos Aires or 9/11.”
While the whole publication is worth reading — especially for the connections it draws between Venezuela and their state news media’s coverage of international affairs — this article focuses solely on the past five years. Between 2010 and 2015 the Venezuelan state and its media apparatus, TeleSUR, learned to be overt about it’s anti-Zionism and use covert means to spread anti-Semitism in order to achieve political goals.
In May of 2015, for instance, TeleSURand their partner HispanTV, the Iranian’s Spanish-language news service, were both sharply criticized by the Wiesenthal Center and the International Center for Countering Anti-Semitismafter both of them falsely reported that “Israel used humanitarian aid to Nepal in order to disguise the smuggling of 25 infants.”
The article, which is still hosted on TeleSUR’s website, cites unidentified non-governmental organizations and falsely claims that these 25 infants were whisked away by the Israeli adoption agency Tammuz. Adding an extra element sure to inflame people with conservative and traditional religious belief, they also note that “the Tammuz clients include a number of homosexuals”.
Sergio Widder, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Latin America Desk, stated on record that “HispanTV and Telesur Channels are behaving as the successors of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer. The editor of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, would have been certainly proud of such a dark and vile legacy.”
Worth noting is that this isn’t the first time that these news sources fabricated news of an anti-Semitic nature.
TeleSUR and Holocaust Denial Light™
In 2017 TeleSUR again published two articles of anti-Semitic Light™ content in Spanish, this time to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Apparently having learned from the backlash received the first time around they didn’t publish outright fabrications, but instead chose to present the Holocaust in a false light.
One doesn’t need to be a subject area specialist in order to understand ASININE such a comparison is. Let’s look solely at the images above.
I make a point of going into the math here not to make the case that Palestinians have such a quantitatively far smaller life debt that comparing the Israel state is just fundamentally unsound comparative political analysis — using the number of dead to measure the analogy, according to TeleSUR’s own reporting, the 10,000 dead divided by 7,000,000 dead = .001428571429 or .015% — but as it provides a means for applying pressure counter-point to TeleSUR’s reporting on their partner, Russia.
10,000 Palestinians killed, is roughly the same number of people that died fighting in the Russian invasion of the Donbass region. Given the timeline for this violence compared to the decades of Israel’s border consolidation, wouldn’t that then make Russia, using the same logic exhibited by this narrative, SuperNazis?
While the first article equated the Israeli government with that of Nazi Germany; the other informs about five other mass killing events that were “less known about than the Holocaust”. This unto itself isn’t problematic, but the framing within the text is. Specifically, by intimating that Jewish people are evil for having taken steps to ensure their collective survival by forming a state misrepresents the will of those other groups.
No TeleSUR reporter asked any high ranking member of political or cultural leaders from the groups that they named in the article if they wished they had a state organization and military capacity to ensure something like what happened before never did again.
And yet look to the news and you will see the groups mentioned therein working towards exactly that.
But does TeleSUR report this? No. Instead they publish stories in a false light using yet another false analogy. This time the narrative is “Jews have become Nazis”.
A pattern of Misrepresenting History Matches PSUV’s Plan de Patria
Misrepresenting history through maps.
What’s missing from TeleSUR’s coverage regarding similar conflicts as that which occur within Israel is as telling as what is there.
There’s no similar coverage of conflicts which have far higher casualty counts in the Philippines, India, Java, etc.The indigenous dispossession engaged in by TeleSUR’s current and former media partners — Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Peruetc. — so that those government-supported resource extraction; intensive agriculture; and transportation infrastructure development projects can proceed — isn’t something that’s discussed. Given TeleSUR’s claim that they represent and speak for “The South”, this is quite puzzling.
When one considers that this is because such coverage aligns with the PSUV’s Plan de Patria, however, it makes sense. Venezuela abstains from truth-telling about what’s going on in their partner countries so as to stay on the “good side” of the politicians there.
While Nicolas Maduro, the Ministry of Popular Power and Information and Patricia Villegas — TeleSUR’s executive core — officially only promote crude anti-Zionism, their “off-brand” media partners produce and share media conspiratorial anti-Semitic content. The insulation that they believed to have from such content is, however, easy to take apart following some investigation.
Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2008. Her campaign imploded and political career fell apart, however, after her father expressed a number of anti-Semitic views. Following her fall from grace she reinvented herself as a journalist. She blogged for TeleSUR, gave interviews to RT, wrote a series of books based upon her experience in war zones, and obtained a doctorate of Philosophy in Leadership and Change from Antioch University.
Her Ph.D. thesis, titled “El No Murio, El Se Multiplico!” Hugo Chávez: The Leadership and the Legacy on Race”, a stylistically appalling but at times insightful reflection on issues related to race, leadership, and statecraft. Less worthy are Cynthia McKinney’s Tweets related to such issues.
The first screenshot about ZioCon’s — which I presume means either Zionist Conservative or Zionist NeoConservative — represents a misinterpretation of the relationship between marketing and production companies and consumer. Seemingly a variation of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy, it suggests that there is a vast conspiracy by American Jews seek to destroy the black community through music.
Cynthia McKinney’sre-Tweet about Ethiopian Jews stem from Lizard-People-Rule-the-World conspiracy theorist David Icke. Like Janus, there’s two faces to what the Tweet claims.
The first claim is that Ethiopian Jews — aka Beta Israel — are “the Real Jews” and that those the settled in Israel and those who live in the Diaspora aren’t.
The Invention of Ethiopian Jewsby Steven Kaplen is published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and shows how this claim is incorrect. After extensively documented primary research and numerous interviews with members of the Ethiopian Jewish community, he comes to the conclusion that:
“Both the Beta Israel’s oral traditions and the testimony of their literature offer strong evidence that crucial components of their religions system developed no earlier than the fourteenth of fifteenth century. Beta Israel accounts of their history trace virtually all major elements of their religion to the influence of the originally Christian monks, Abba Sabra and Sagga Amlak.”
A list of websites too long too name — without sources, without real author attribution, with clear intent to slur a whole group of people as Satanic — states otherwise.
The second face of the claim is that the “fake Jews” are actually part of a giant, murderous, secret criminal empire which practices worships the Devil and practices their black magic order to gain power and profit.
I haven’t reviewed every article writing about it online, but all that I did either were anonymous; the author listed on it didn’t appear to exist anywhere else; had no sources; or sources that were easily shown to be fake following a Google search.
To give an idea of the sophistication of such a views I’ll share an excerpt. Following a history that lays, basically, every mass tragedy in European and American history at the feet of the “fake Jew” Khazarians, of which the RothschildFamily is one “tentacle,” this group takes over America from behind the scenes. Following this they then start to practice their “social manipulations”:
“The Rothschild Khazarian Mafia decided to gain complete control over all public education by setting up the Department of Education and creating globalist and socialist curriculums based on political correctness, diversity and “perversion is normal” teachings. Fluoride is added to the public water and toothpaste, and dentists are mind-kontrolled to believe that fluoride prevents cavities, and is not harmful to brain function or thyroid function, which it is.
The addition of fluoride to the public water supply and to toothpaste is to dumb-down Americans by on average lowering the operational IQ and making folks much more docile than they would normally be. Programs to develop and deploy vaccinations to dumb-down children and create huge numbers of future chronic health problems were initiated. Doctors have been mind-kontrolled and misled by biased research that was cherry-picked, ignoring any studies that were negative — and that included most of them. All vaccine cell lines are contaminated with SV- 40, a known carcinogenic slow-acting virus.”
The Khazarian Mafia conspiracy theory is largely a remix of claims made previously by the John Birch Society, however it also samples from others. According to this conspiracy theory, the Khazarians “continue their Satanic child blood and sacrifice rituals, and trust Baal to give them the whole world and all its riches, as they claimed he had promised them, as long as they kept bleeding out and sacrificing children and infants for him.”
This is what’s referred to as the Blood Libel — or the idea that Jews sacrifice Christian children as part of their religious ceremonies — and it’s a claim that has long been connected to pogroms that lead to the dispossession and death of Jewish people.
Following TeleSUR’s Unpublishing; Anti-Semitic blogs Signal Boost About It
TeleSUR’s brief unpublishing caused a flurry of reports decrying censorship by the news channels of TeleSUR’s media partners. The comments sections of Sputnik and RT, as I documented elsewhere, were filled with more conspiracy theories about the motives behind it.
These, however, were not the only outlets that sought to draw attention to TeleSUR. Several anti-Semitic blogs also started to publish content filled with outrage that such an event would happen. The websites are typical examples of the sort of fake backlinking networks, as I documeted elsewhere, that TeleSUR, RT, Sputnik, WSWS, RealNewsNetwork and MintPressNews, use. Drawing connections between them and TeleSUR beyond this would require more investigation.
TeleSUR Content Hosted by Anti-Semites on The Pirate Bay
While investigating for this article, I thought I decided to do some unconventional reporting and decided to see if TeleSUR had any content on The Pirate Bay. Sure enough they did!
One of the people seeding TeleSUR content is Joseph Blauman, aka joeblowman, the host of the The Joe Blow Conspiracy Show. Given the date that he uploaded the TeleSUR interview of Noam Chomsky and the rest of his digital footprint it’s unlikely that he’s connected with the organization.
The other account, roflcopter2110, also has a large number of anti-Semitic documentaries and is harder to determine.
To be clear I have no evidence that TeleSUR operates this accounts to spread anti-Semitism — but there is clearly a connection between those who tend to believe that the earth is flat, that vaccinations are bad, that fluoride in water destroys your precious bodily essence, and that Jewish people actually worship the devil and sacrifice babies and those that have an affinity for TeleSUR.
Anti-Semitism Spread on Leftist Facebook Groups
On Facebook there’s so much Anti-Semitism-In-the-Name-of-INternational-Extremism content isn’t not just ridiculous it’s ASININE. The bread of the photo sandwich above gives just a small hint at the amount of Rothschild conspiracy content that gets shared online in photos and posts.
Accounts with photos of Che with names in different alphabets — a simple way to determine which Facebook accounts are part of Venezuela’s coordinated inauthentic behavior network — repeat the same sort of nonsense the Cynthia McKinney does along with narratives of far greater absurdity.
What — you ask — could be more absurd then a make believe international criminal conspiracy like the Khazarians? One of the far-out-there claims I’ve seen posted in such groups as the ones shown above states that Osama Bin-Laden was both a Mossad agent AND a Jew and that he is still secretly alive and well and occasionally socializes with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
While the title of the Facebook group in the center of the photo is cut off, it’s full title is NUEVO GRUPO CON MADURO. As in Nicolas Maduro. Notable is that the person sharing this image within a Spanish language group has an Arabic name.
Showing that the point of this coordinated inauthentic behavior network is simply to spread disinformation, misinformation and thereby increase political polarization is evident in the fact that a website like rightoftheright.com would be posted in a group called ALL COMMUNISTS.
Anti-Semitic Sock Puppet Harassment on Facebook
After I saw one the accounts I identified as connected to TeleSUR’s Coordinated, Inauthentic Behavior Network post an article that denied that the Nazis burned ever destroyed the Torah I wrote a reply to their post stating that it was fake news and linked to a credible source which showed this. As is evident by the screenshot of my Facebook notifications in the center of the above picture, this did not please the operator of the sock puppet account.
He proceeded to tell me that he could tell I was Jewish by my nose and by my name — which I am, though I never heard people tell me that I have a “Jewish nose”.
After I posted a comment about how amused I was that even in the face of peer-reviewed scholarship and primary documents that showed he was spreading fake news, he then tagged me in a Facebook story and four posts which had images or text that were textbook antisemitism. I included the one about Kevin Bacon movies as while the “Jews Killed Jesus” comment is poor taste — especially in the context of a vast coordinated inauthentic behavior network promoting anti-Semitic anti-Capitalism — the meme by itself is funny.
And really, after doing this research and discovering that there’s a large scale, well-funded ongoing online campaign to spread the same sort of lies that lead to much of my family being killed in concentration camps in Ukraine a laugh is just what’s needed to help me from falling into a crushing sense of hopelessness about humankind’s ability to learn from the past by refraining from spreading bald-faced lies for political purposes no matter how just they think their cause is.
Sources
Steven Kaplan The Invention of Ethiopian Jews : Three Models.
Preston James, Ph.D -The Hidden History of the Incredibly Evil Khazarian Mafia (Updated)
Anti-Defamation League. Anti-Semitism in Venezuela IN THE WAKE OF THE GAZA FLOTILLA
