The answer will tell your politics.<\/b><\/p>\n
Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n On June 27th, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, headlined “Latest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he documented gross misrepresentations, including many outright fabrications, in the \u2018news\u2019 reporting regarding the alleged \u2018Russian\u2019 \u2018hacking\u2019 of \u2018the vote\u2019 and other alleged manipulations, of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, by the Russian government; and these media-lies and other fabrications constituted the \u2018news\u2019 as supposed facts instead of fabrications, on CNN, MSNBC, Slate, C-Span, Fortune<\/i>, Washington Post, New York Times,<\/i> and Britain\u2019s Guardian<\/i>, just to cite the examples that Greenwald described \u2014 big-name media, including \u2018reporting\u2019 by Pulitzer-prize journalists. <\/span><\/p>\n Greenwald concluded that, \u201cblatantly inane anti-Trump conspiracists and Russia conspiracies now command such a large audience because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump internet and cable news viewers for stories, no matter how false.\u201d And, he said: \u201cA related, and perhaps more significant, dynamic is that journalistic standards are often dispensed with when it comes to exaggerating the threat posed by countries deemed to be the official enemy du jour. That is a journalistic principle that has repeatedly asserted itself, with Iraq being the most memorable but by no means only example.\u201d To him, this massive false \u2018news\u2019 reporting is innocent, and the motivation for it comes from the audience, not from the journalistic organizations that are doing it. However, strong evidence exists that it\u2019s not innocent, at all \u2014 that it is systematic, and includes all of America\u2019s major \u2018news\u2019media. But understanding what motivates it, requires digging far deeper than Greenwald did.<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, Greenwald\u2019s reference to \u201cIraq being the most memorable\u201d earlier example of this phenomenon, ignores the key fact: that in the Iraq \u2018WMD\u2019 or false reporting of weapons of mass destruction, issue, the problem was the U.S. press\u2019s stenographic reporting of the Administration\u2019s lies as if they were automatically truths<\/span><\/a>, whereas today the \u2018news\u2019media are pouring forth with their own false concoctions, which sometimes cite as their sources people who are in the opposite (now out<\/i>-of-power) political Party. No longer is the fake \u2018journalism\u2019 stenographically reporting what is being alleged by the White House. Now much of it is stenographically reporting the allegations by the political opposition to the White House.<\/span><\/p>\n On June 28th, Gallup bannered, \u201cIn US, Confidence in Newspapers Still Low but Rising\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span>, and opened:<\/span><\/p>\n STORY HIGHLIGHTS<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2022 27% say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2022 24% have high confidence in television news<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n \u2022 16% have high confidence in news on the internet<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n WASHINGTON, D.C. — Despite an ongoing controversy over “fake news,” more Americans this year (27%) say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers than did so last year (20%). Although confidence in newspapers is up from last year’s record low, it remains lower than it typically was in the 1980s and 1990s.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Newspapers are one of 16 institutions Gallup tested in a June 7-11 poll. The jump of seven percentage points from 2016 is the largest one for any institution — though newspapers only tie for 11th overall on the list, based on Americans who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n From a long-range perspective, confidence in newspapers hasn’t been high at any point over the past 30 years; the highest was 39% in 1990. The 27% who express confidence this year is the highest recorded since 2011.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Democrats primarily are driving the overall increase in confidence in newspapers this year from last year’s all-time low. In 2016, 28% of Democrats had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in printed media, but that percentage rose to 46% this year. Sixteen percent of Republicans last year had confidence but, in contrast to Democrats, that has edged down to 13% this year.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Gallup got closer to the truth than did Greenwald: Instead of this matter being driven by the audience, the response by the audience is now varying in accordance with the particular audience\u2019s politics<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Another interesting finding by Gallup there, was that \u201cAmericans’ Already-Low Confidence in Internet News Declines,\u201d while confidence in newspapers is soaring: \u201cThe jump of seven percentage points from 2016 is the largest one for any institution.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Newspapers are the core of the traditional<\/i> newsmedia, and the tradition until recently has been that the broadcast media (radio and TV) base their news upon what the prestigious newspapers \u2014 New York Times<\/i>, Washington Post<\/i>, and Wall Street Journal<\/i> \u2014 post on their latest front page. Gallup\u2019s finding is that the American public is increasing its respect for those print media, the very media that are actually leading in introducing today\u2019s false \u2018news\u2019 reporting<\/b> (as Glenn Greenwald and many others have pointed out), and Gallup also finds that the public are losing respect for online articles, even though only in an article online (such as you now are reading) is it even possible<\/i> for a reader to click directly through to a source, and to evaluate for oneself, whether or not that source is at all trustworthy. The U.S. public are responding to the rampant false reporting in the print \u2018news\u2019media, by increasing its trust in those media, and by decreasing its trust in news that (like here) is being received online and can thus be web-searched in order to check out whether or not it is reliable. This reaction \u2014 trusting the reports that rely only upon (their own, actually shaky) \u2018authority\u2019 \u2014 is perverse, but it\u2019s what Gallup is finding. The same mainstream \u2018news\u2019 media that the U.S. aristocracy used for deceiving the American people into believing that Saddam Hussein had WMD and was a danger to the U.S. in 2003, and that did the same to Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and has been trying to do the same to Bashar al-Assad since then \u2014 and that wants to do it ultimately to Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin \u2014 continues on with undiminished prestige and ability, to do the same ad nauseum<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n The argument that will be made here is that neither the public nor the press-commentators has a truthful understanding of what is happening, nor why, and that there really is a nefarious truthful explanation of all this, an explanation that the public needs to understand. The owners of newsmedia consciously hide their motive from the public, in order to prevent the public from understanding international relations \u2014 the explanation for which is driven by the controlling stockholders of international corporations, not<\/i> by national interest (nor by any public\u2019s<\/i> interest). The fallacious news-reports that will be examined here will be from mainstream and traditional media, but will be different from the ones that Greenwald discussed; and the focus here, as opposed to other articles that have been written about America\u2019s trashy \u2018journalism\u2019, will be on the methods of deceit that are being employed by the press \u2014 intentional deceit, for business-purposes:<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019re an American, do you trust the Washington Post<\/i>, which headlined on June 23rd, “Obama\u2019s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin\u2019s election assault\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and which reported there that “The intelligence captured Putin\u2019s specific instructions on the operation\u2019s audacious objectives \u2014 defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump\u201d? That article linked to that newspaper\u2019s earlier articles demonizing Russia\u2019s President (such as “Putin \u2018ordered\u2019 effort to undermine faith in U.S. election and help Trump, report says\u201d<\/span><\/a>). It stated that, as a consequence of this \u2018election assault\u2019: “Obama faced a successor who had praised WikiLeaks and prodded Moscow to steal even more Clinton emails, while dismissing the idea that Russia was any more responsible for the election assault than ‘somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds\u2019.\u201d (The WP\u2019<\/i>s phrase \u2018election assault\u2019 presumes a reader\u2019s belief in what the newspaper is conveying in this article \u2014 the reader is supposed to assent to that belief prior to<\/i> reading the article, which article is clearly intended to reinforce<\/i> this belief.) <\/span><\/p>\n President Obama was portrayed in that WP<\/i> article as a modern-day real-world Hamlet, wracked by indecision \u2014 as having been deficient in his antagonism against Russia, too much of a peacenik, up against that horrible demon:<\/span><\/p>\n In political terms, Russia\u2019s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy. It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin through cyber-forensics and intelligence on Putin\u2019s involvement. And yet, because of the divergent ways Obama and Trump have handled the matter, Moscow appears unlikely to face proportionate consequences.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The phrase \u201cproportionate consequences\u201d isn\u2019t defined there, but some Democrats, and even a few neoconservative Republicans<\/span><\/a>, have called what Russia allegedly did, an \u2018act of war\u2019 against the U.S.; and, thus, \u2018proportionate consequences\u2019 in that context would be extremely profitable for firms such as Lockheed Martin<\/span><\/a> \u2014 which donated more to Hillary Clinton than to any other politician in 2016<\/span><\/a>. (That team lost. But President Trump nonetheless has gifted them enormously<\/span><\/a>. Is he trying to buy them away from the Democrats?)<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n Or, do you instead trust the independent investigative journalist Robert Parry, who headlined, online-only, on June 29th, “NYT Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard\u201d?<\/span><\/a> He noted that “The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards \u2013 that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails \u2013 is false.\u201d He pointed out that only four intelligence agencies had signed onto that report, and that \u201cthe false claim [of \u201817\u2019] has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, the independent washingtonsblog had headlined on June 23rd, “Russia Hacking Allegations Driven by a Serial Liar\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and took aim there against one of the Washington Post\u2019<\/i>s few identified sources demonizing Russia and Putin, Obama\u2019s CIA Director John Brennan. This article said “Brennan is a proven, documented liar,\u201d and then linked to numerous occasions in which Brennan had, demonstrably, lied, to Congress, and others. Then, the article closed:<\/span><\/p>\n Postscript: The other intelligence official behind many of the Russian hacking claims \u2013 James Clapper \u2013 is also a <\/i>confirmed liar<\/i><\/span><\/a>. And see <\/i>this<\/i><\/span><\/a> and <\/i>this<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Clapper was yet another of the few named sources for the WP\u2019<\/i>s eight-thousand-word-plus featured article demonizing Putin and making him to blame for Trump\u2019s being the current U.S. President.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n The print and broadcast U.S. newsmedia (such as the WP<\/i>) have portrayed as virtually certain, Vladimir Putin\u2019s having wanted to sway, and the vague possibility that he might have swayed, the 2016 U.S. electoral outcome, and (some of them even say) perhaps even been the chief person who made Donald Trump President. The conclusion of these, the mainstream U.S. newsmedia, is that the U.S. government under President Trump needs to be far more aggressive against Russia than it is. They\u2019re promoting: America needs more nuclear weapons, and more missiles to deliver them, and certainly needs more of the cloud-computer services that the owner of the Washington Post<\/i>, Jeff Bezos (via his Amazon.com), supplies to the CIA and U.S. Pentagon. Lots more of that. <\/span><\/p>\n However, on June 30th, the top headline at the Republican Party\u2019s Fox News Channel was “Sanders investigation: Bernie’s wife attempted to evict disabled group home residents, report claims\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u2014 nothing pertaining to Russia. It\u2019s played down by Republican sites. They don\u2019t defend Russia; they simply play down the entire issue.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n America has two Parties, the Democrats, who used to be liberal but (due to America\u2019s increasing corruption) have become only neoliberal and neoconservative (which are virtually the same); and the Republicans, who used to be aristocratic conservative but have become now populist conservative and aristocratic conservative (but both controlled by Republican aristocrats, and likewise virtually the same). Although extensive polling shows that the American public is none of those but mainly progressive<\/span><\/a>, there is no longer representation for progressives<\/span><\/a> in the U.S. federal government (except by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard<\/span><\/a>, one of the two members of the U.S. House who represents Hawaii \u2014 as a Democrat, and she had delivered the nominating speech for Bernie Sanders at the Democratic National Convention in 2016).<\/span><\/p>\n The print and broadcast U.S. newsmedia say that this U.S. government is somehow a \u2018democracy\u2019, and that no question should be published to the contrary of such an allegation. What, then, is a \u201cdictatorship,\u201d if that government\u2019s being a \u2018democracy\u2019 is not to be questioned? Is a \u201cdictatorship\u201d a government that\u2019s imposed upon the public, rather than represents what the public wants? Is the U.S. such a government? Is Russia? <\/span><\/p>\n On 6 March 2016, the WP<\/i> bannered, \u201cHow to understand Putin\u2019s jaw-droppingly high approval ratings\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and opened, \u201cRussian President Vladimir Putin has an 83 percent approval rating.\u201d It found a way to blame Russian culture for this: In conversation with a Russian official who advises Putin, the WP<\/i> reporter managed to quote (with no follow-up as to what he actually meant), \u201cHow can you understand what to do if you can\u2019t understand the people?\u201d This wasn\u2019t taken by that reporter as a favorable reflection upon the Russian people. Yet, the article did not blame pollsters for Putin\u2019s high rating: \u201cThe Kremlin is so ratings-conscious that it frequently commissions polls on the same topics from several firms simultaneously, pollsters said.\u201d And, besides: \u201cIt is a development that has flummoxed Western nations and frustrated Russia\u2019s motley band of oppositionists. Some of them say that Russians are too scared to speak their minds to pollsters. Others claim that the poll numbers are manipulated, although most Western polling firms arrive at similar figures.\u201d It linked there to the Pew figures, which concerned only Russians\u2019 satisfaction-level with Putin\u2019s international policies, and which showed \u201cNearly nine-in-ten (88%) also express confidence in his ability to handle international affairs.\u201d While the Pew survey asked questions about Russians\u2019 satisfaction with the nation\u2019s domestic affairs, no approval-rating for Putin was published by Pew on those matters \u2014 only the Kremlin itself, apparently, did that. But why would a \u2018dictatorship\u2019 be so concerned to satisfy the public? Isn\u2019t that supposed to be the way a democracy is?<\/span><\/p>\n U.S. President Trump\u2019s recent job-approval ratings<\/span><\/a> range around 40%, with around 53% disapproval. At this time in his predecessor’s, Barack Obama\u2019s, Presidency, it was closer to around<\/span><\/a> 60% approval, 30% disapproval. No American President in modern times has had above 80% job-approval, except for George W. Bush, immediately after the 9\/11 attacks (which resulted from his failure, or worse<\/span><\/a>), and his father, immediately after the 1991 \u201cGulf War\u201d forced Saddam Hussein\u2019s forces out of Kuwait (which U.S. involvement was based not only on Saddam\u2019s invasion but on U.S. lies<\/span><\/a>, including the \u201cNurse Nayirah\u201d<\/span><\/a> hoax). Each of those two peaks above 80% was fleeting<\/span><\/a>; Putin\u2019s scoring above 80% is routine for him<\/span><\/a>, because it\u2019s based on his long-term performance<\/span><\/a>, not on lies.<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, in terms of the performance of Russia\u2019s economy under Putin, the results have been surprisingly higher than the forecasts, not only recently<\/span><\/a>, but even before the economic sanctions were placed against Russia<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n If a nation\u2019s leader\u2019s doing what that nation\u2019s public wants that leader to do is a reflection of the degree to which that nation is a democracy, then a person would be hard-pressed to say that the U.S. is a \u2018democracy\u2019, and to say that Russia isn\u2019t \u2014 unless that person is a propagandist for the U.S. government, of course (since no dictatorship calls itself<\/i> a dictatorship; they\u2019re all<\/i> \u2018democratic\u2019). But, if a nation\u2019s \u2018news\u2019media are propagandists for its government, then can that nation really be<\/i> a democracy?<\/span><\/p>\n What else than that it\u2019s not<\/span><\/a>, can explain the fact that the most-preferred U.S. Presidential candidate in 2016 was actually the progressive Bernie Sanders<\/span><\/a>, and that his Party\u2019s leadership, the Democratic National Committee, rigged the primaries<\/span><\/a> (and expert analyses also showed this<\/span><\/a>, and more of this<\/span><\/a>) so that his opponent, Hillary Clinton won the nomination? The DNC won the Democratic Party primaries.<\/span><\/a> That\u2019s a dictatorship<\/span><\/a>. But, if this is the case, then doesn\u2019t it likewise make sense that the \u2018news\u2019media that were propagandizing for the Democratic Party, would now be blaming Russia (bane of America\u2019s aristocrats \u2014 the funders of America\u2019s elections \u2014 both left and right), just as does Ms. Clinton herself<\/span><\/a>? They won\u2019t blame themselves unless they are forced to \u2014 and they\u2019re not. Unfortunately, however, since all of America\u2019s print and broadcast media (owned and controlled by aristocrats) support one or the other of the two Parties (and never any progressive), only a few independent online newsmedia, such as the present one, can publish this demonstrable fact<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n And, consequently, the Americans who receive most of their \u2018news\u2019 from the print and broadcast media, are virtually mental slaves of the aristocrats who control those \u2018news\u2019media, and they cannot see outside their channeled tunnel, which was designed by agents of those aristocrats. A good example of this tunnel-vision is displayed by the passionate Democratic Party blogger, Joseph Cannon, whose Cannonfire blog headlined on June 24th, \u201cBlame Obama\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he took uncritically the WP\u2019<\/i>s “Obama\u2019s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin\u2019s election assault\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span>. He also, trustingly, quoted there other Party propagandists, who were saying, in response to that WP<\/i> propaganda, such things as, \u201cThe idea that the Obama administration withheld the fact that the Russians were ratfcking the election in order to help elect a vulgar talking yam is a terrible condemnation of the whole No Drama Obama philosophy.\u201d Now, they were starting to eat their own, in order not to see (nor acknowledge) that they\u2019d been dupes all along \u2014 and not fools of Russia\u2019s aristocracy nor leader, but only of America\u2019s. For these fools, \u2018democracy\u2019 in the U.S. consisted only of the Democratic aristocracy, in its petty competition against the Republican aristocracy, to deceive and exploit the U.S. public. That\u2019s not real progress. It\u2019s more of the same, even when the Party-label gets switched \u2014 it is, in the real<\/i> sense, a one-party government. This government doesn\u2019t give the public what it wants; this regime gives them, instead, only what they will tolerate<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n So, the operative standard here is no longer a government that the public approves, but instead one that they tolerate. The government is calibrated to meet this lower standard. It meets this standard because the oligarchs who control it are also in control of the \u2018news\u2019media. To control the \u2018news\u2019 that the public receives, is to control the public.<\/span><\/p>\n In order to understand how the U.S. came to be this way, I recommend, without reservation, the monumental 700-page fully documented 10-chapter book, and the mirroring 10-part documentary series, The Untold History of the United States<\/i>, by historian Peter Kuznick, and documentarian Oliver Stone \u2014 a breakthrough account of the 20th Century that accurately exposes the history that America\u2019s aristocracy (via their agents) have always kept hidden from the American public. The documentary presentation of this history is breathtaking, the best documentary I\u2019ve seen. It can be purchased, but it is, at least now, also able to be viewed free online. Here are the first two chapters (and chapter 2 covers the most fatally important period, when WW II ended and the post-War world, starting with the Cold War, began): <\/span><\/p>\n 1: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/136182100<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 2: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/136182101<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n I have separately published online<\/span><\/a> an account of how the Cold War ended in 1991 on the Soviet side with the termination of the USSR and of its communism and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance, while U.S. President G.H.W. Bush privately instructed America\u2019s allies, starting on the night of 24 February 1990, that the U.S.-NATO side would be secretly continuing the war against the rump remaining nation, Russia, until Russia itself is conquered and becomes a part of the U.S. empire. All U.S. Presidents afterward have been carrying out that plan. It\u2019s crucial history, which in my opinion is not adequately explained elsewhere, and which needs to be known in order to be able to understand accurately U.S.-Russia relations after 1990. The Kuznick-Stone series only touches upon it, but is entirely accurate and displays the results of that plan, up till around 2012. <\/span><\/p>\n The remaining 8 chapters are also very gripping, because they display the way in which what is shown in chapter 2 has played out, extending right into Barack Obama\u2019s first Administration. However, Obama was hiding his plans for crippling Russia, until his successful re-election, at which point he publicly exposed by his actions, that he actually agreed with Mitt Romney\u2019s assertion made (and mocked by Obama) during the campaign, that \u201cRussia, this is without question America\u2019s number one geopolitical foe.\u201d<\/span><\/a> So, the history continues on after when Kuznick-Stone end. And here are the remaining 8 chapters of that:<\/span><\/p>\n 3: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/136256488<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 4: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/143509988<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 5: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/148421741<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 6: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/151432899<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 7: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/154794997<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 8: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/album\/3810613\/video\/159082231<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 9: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/album\/3810613\/video\/161845469<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n 10: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/album\/3810613\/video\/162599340<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n I think that if America\u2019s Founders, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and then topped it off with the U.S. Constitution, were to learn about this America, today, they would say: \u201cWe did not conquer the British aristocracy in order to establish our own. These people are usurpers; this is not the country that we founded.\u201d Even merely reading the Preamble to the Constitution<\/span><\/a>, the part of the document that asserts the public\u2019s sovereignty here, makes this intention of the Founders absolutely clear. There has been in America a secret counter-Revolution, and it has succeeded. The U.S. today has the highest incarceration-rate in the world (except for Seychelles, whose total population is only 92,000).<\/span><\/a> In China, \u201cThe total number of prisoners held, 1.6 million, is second to that of the United States despite its population being over four times larger.\u201d But routinely, the U.S. \u2018news\u2019media treat China as a dictatorship, and the country they deceive as being \u2018the land of the free\u2019. Look at the chart there, \u201cIncarcerated Americans, 1920-2014\u201d: it shows that the prison-population was gradually rising (along with the nation\u2019s population) until it reached a half-million around 1980, and then (starting with Reagan) just skyrocketed, to above two million in 2000, and it\u2019s still above that, but no longer soaring; and that period, of around 1981-2002, also happens to be the very same period that the only scientific investigation into whether or not the U.S. is a democracy examined, and the study (which still is the only one ever done) found that the U.S. definitely is an aristocracy, not a democracy: it found that<\/span><\/a> \u201ceconomic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.\u201d The common word to refer to such a nation is that it\u2019s an \u201coligarchy\u201d or a nation that\u2019s ruled by its aristocracy; or, in short (and the most ordinary term), the country is an \u201caristocracy\u201d instead of a \u201cdemocracy.\u201d So: did America\u2019s Founders conquer the British aristocracy in order to establish their own? The founding documents say no \u2014 this is not the country they founded. It is a very alien government, nothing of what the Founders had intended. It\u2019s been stolen \u2014 removed from its foundation, to a very alien place.<\/span><\/p>\n This will be very difficult for Americans to believe, because we have been so inundated, for so long, by the lies from the American aristocracy. But, if a reader wants to explore and test-out in more detail the ramifications of this in a specific case \u2014 that of an American couple who lived and worked in Libya and travelled extensively throughout Libya until the U.S. and its allies destroyed that country in 2011, and who have presented their written account, \u201cThe truth about Gaddafi’s Libya, NATO’s bombing, and the Benghazi ‘consulate’ attack\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and who were then interviewed about it in a podcast<\/span><\/a>, and who have, since at least 2014, been advertising their services as \u201chousesitters\u201d in Dallas<\/span><\/a> \u2014 then, the reader will find, in that case, an account of America\u2019s invasion of Libya that is almost diametrically the opposite of what Americans have been told, and the reader can then judge that test-case, by considering which historical narrative (the standard one, or this very opposite one) is the likelier one to be true.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Whom do you trust \u2014 reporters such as Robert Parry and the writers at washingtonsblog and the \u201cSigns of the Times\u201d blog, or instead ones such as are employed by the Washington Post<\/i> and by the New York Times?<\/i> The answer will tell your politics. But if you click onto the sources here, you\u2019ve now read a summary of what you will find. And it\u2019s not what the owners of (and advertisers in) the mainstream media want you to believe. It is American samizdat<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>