How mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media pump their government’s lies to deceive the public

Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end.

On July 19, a neoconservative Democratic Party newspaper, the Washington Post, headlined one of their many anti-Trump news-articles, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” Their angle on this (actually momentous and constructive) action by Trump to abandon ‘the rebels’ (almost all of whom are, in fact, jihadists), was that this Republican president had done that in order to please Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (who defends Syria’s government, which secular government is knee-jerk-vilified in this and all American newspapers), and the WP article quoted neoconservatives who criticized the move by Trump to end the program.

The August 7 issue of a neoconservative Republican Party magazine, The Weekly Standard, headlines “Trump Got This One Right: Shutting down the CIA’s ghost war in Syria,” and doesn’t attack the previous, Democratic, president for having initiated and run that “ghost war,” and doesn’t make clear what it was, or why it was being waged, but does say hostile things against the leaders both of Russia and of Syria, such as that “Putin . . . has the blood of many Syrian civilians on his hands,” and allegations also against the Syrian government, such as:

Russian and Syrian jets have indiscriminately and repeatedly bombed civilian targets. The Assad regime has used chemical weapons, which Trump himself objected to, bombing a Syrian airfield in response. The United States cannot endorse these war crimes by allying itself with the perpetrators of mass murder in Syria.

Besides the fact that at least some of those assertions are demonstrably false, the United States government has actually (and often) done such things as that propaganda-article alleges Russia and Syria to have done, but nothing is said in this far-right magazine about that; readers of The Weekly Standard don’t get to see even a mention of this reality. The publication fools its readers, instead of informs them.

What’s even more important to take note of here, however, is that the article does not so much as even just mention the key fact: that Russia’s forces were invited into Syria by Syria’s secular government, in order to defend it against the jihadist gangs America was assisting, and that America’s forces weren’t invited by Syria’s government, but are instead invaders there, trying to overthrow that government, and are not only trying to help to defeat the ISIS jihadists who have also invaded Syria in order to overthrow Syria’s secular government. The crucial fact, that the Obama administration was insistent that Russia in Syria not bomb Al Qaeda forces in Syria and that that insistence upon protecting Al Qaeda there was the key reason why Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to reach an agreement with Russia about Syria had failed (they were actually sabotaged by his own boss, President Obama), is ignored by The Weekly Standard. (Also ignored by this far-right magazine is that the U.S. government has the blood of at least as many “Syrian civilians on its hands” there, as does the Russian government or any other participant in the war. That magazine’s playing to this false ‘us’-against-‘them’ prejudice, insults the intelligence of its readers, but is done in order to divert their duped reader’s attention away from the reader’s real enemies, which include the owners of that magazine, who want to manipulate, instead of to inform, their readership, for the benefit of Republican aristocrats. Those aristocrats need these dupes to remain duped.)

This shows that even when Republican ‘news’ media defend a Republican president who is reversing an imperialistic policy of his Democratic predecessor, it’s done in such a way, so it’s designed to keep the American public still deceived about the actual ugly history, which indicts both of America’s political parties—indicts the U.S. government itself, at its highest levels, where both parties are united together, in order to conquer the entire planet (including Syria, including Russia), for the benefit of America’s aristocrats.

Instead of reporting this crucial truth, The Weekly Standard says:

Russia intervened in Syria in September 2015, and the timing was not accidental. Just months earlier, in March, the “Army of Conquest” took over the northwestern province of Idlib. This rebel coalition was no band of moderates. It was led by Nusra and included its closest Islamist and jihadist partners. The Army of Conquest was on the march, threatening the Assad family’s stronghold of Latakia on the coast.

The message the magazine is trying to convey to its conservative American readership, is that Russia there was defending “the Assad family,” and not defending Syria’s sovereignty over Syria’s own territory—not defending the independence of the Syrian government, from the demands of the U.S. aristocracy (which are mainly concerned with building oil and gas pipelines through Syria in order to replace Russia as the main energy-supplier to the world’s biggest energy-market, the EU, by the U.S. and its royal Arab allies as the main energy-suppliers there).

This is an imperialistic war, and the only way for the U.S. aristocracy to win it, is militarily (and/or via coups such as it did in Ukraine) to break apart Russia’s foreign alliances, in order to grab control of Russia’s assets (including that oil and gas)—but the U.S. oligarchs are also going after China’s assets, and Iran’s assets, and the assets of any well-armed government that’s not yet a vassal-nation to the U.S. aristocracy (vassals such as Europe, Japan, and all other U.S. allies).

America (with the assistance of the Sauds, and of the U.S. aristocracy’s other fundamentalist-Sunni business-partners in the Middle East) uses jihadists to serve as those “boots on the ground,” against secular governments such as Syria and Russia, because that’s a lot cheaper to do than to re-institute the U.S. military draft and to send tens of thousands of American soldiers out to overthrow, or at least to weaken, the ‘enemy’ government. It’s much cheaper “boots on the ground,” to grab new territory via these proxies, than via U.S. troops.

The supreme international issue in our time is sovereignty—the independence, or freedom, of nations. It’s international democracy, which is really at stake, in all of this. The alternative (which the U.S. government leads) is international fascism. It’s a vast program, not composed merely of invasions (the ‘Defense’ Department) and of coups (the State Department, etc.).

Now that (after 24 February 1990) the United States has been committed to world-conquest, there is, regarding international news-reporting in the United States, nothing that is fundamentally true that’s reported in the U.S. ‘news’ media, regarding international relations—it’s all based upon a shared lie by both wings of the U.S. aristocracy, Republican and Democratic, saying that the U.S. government supports freedom and democracy around the world, and that the nations which the U.S. government is trying to conquer, do not favor international freedom and democracy. The standard American account (that it supports, instead of opposes, democracy around the world) is the exact opposite of the truth.

For example: How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when twice in one day the secretary general of the United Nations said that the U.S. president’s insistence upon having a veto-power regarding who would, and who would not, be allowed to become Syria’s next president, was “totally unfair and unreasonable” and that instead “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.” No publicity for those statements. None at all. The fact (that the U.S. president refused to accept that “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people”) was shocking. But it wasn’t reported to the American people. Americans never knew about it.

How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when the U.S. government was one of only three governments in the entire world to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against a resolution to condemn racism, fascism, and denial of the Holocaust? None. None at all. The fact was shocking. But it, too, wasn’t reported.

And: How many Americans know that on the night of 24 February 1990, the U.S. president secretly told the chancellor of West Germany that all of their statements to Soviet President (soon to become only Russia’s president) Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. and its alliances would end the Cold War on their side if the Soviet Union and its alliances did on theirs, had been mere lies and that the Cold War would henceforth continue to be waged on the Western side until Russia itself would be conquered?

How can a nation be a ‘democracy,’ while its government (and its ‘news’ media) hides the most important parts of history, and pumps instead lies, to its people, regarding international relations? Who is the actual sovereign in the United States—its public, or its aristocracy?

And how many U.S. news media will carry this article, which is submitted to all of them, to publish free-of-charge? For any of them that has a large audience, to publish it, could precipitate an unprecedented revolution within the U.S. aristocracy itself (a revolution against their lies), because it would, in effect, officially acknowledge that the existing ‘history’ is founded upon lies. But, if this fact is not publicly recognized in the U.S. now, then when will the truth about these matters be allowed to be published here? Or, will it ever? Or will it never.

The Washington Post’s article said that “a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” said: “Putin won in Syria.” The anonymous source didn’t say: “The Syrian people won in Syria.”

Western-sponsored polls in Syria showed that 55% of Syrians wanted Assad to remain as president, and 82% of Syrians blamed America for the presence of jihadists in Syria trying to overthrow Assad.

Are the U.S. ‘news’ media hopeless—beyond salvaging? Is democracy in America beyond salvaging? Is 1984 here locked-in? What would that mean for the future of the world?

‘News’ media in the countries that are allied with the U.S. are just as trashy. For example, here’s an article from a brilliant blogger ripping to shreds an August 1 article from Britain’s Reuters ‘news’ agency, about the war in Yemen. That Reuters ‘news’-report could just as well have been published by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Maybe ‘news’ media now are that rotten all over the world. But any mainstream ‘news’ medium in the U.S., or its allied countries, has no realistic basis for criticizing ‘news’ media in other nations. Yet they do criticize the press in those nations, constantly. That’s just another lie, from ‘news’ media that might as well be pure lies.

The presumption when reading the ‘news’ should therefore be: What are they really trying to sell, and to whom? In a world dominated by lies, the thing that’s actually more important than anything else, is the motives. And nothing should then be believed on the basis of trust. In international relations, everything now is war, and the first victim of war is truth. And that is the reality today.

This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910–2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.