{"id":357483,"date":"2018-04-19T15:19:02","date_gmt":"2018-04-19T14:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=357483"},"modified":"2018-04-19T15:19:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-19T14:19:02","slug":"guardian-newspaper-fulfills-george-orwells-prediction-newspeak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/guardian-newspaper-fulfills-george-orwells-prediction-newspeak\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Guardian newspaper fulfills George Orwell\u2019s prediction of \u2018Newspeak\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

On Sunday April 15th, Britain\u2019s Guardian bannered “OPCW inspectors set to investigate site of Douma chemical attack\u201d<\/span><\/a> and pretended that there was no question that a chemical attack in Douma Syria on April 7th had actually occurred, and the article then went further along that same propaganda-line, to accuse Syria\u2019s Government of having perpetrated it. This \u2018news\u2019 story opened [and clarificatory comments from me will added in brackets]:<\/span><\/p>\n

UN chemical weapons investigators were set on Sunday to begin examining the scene of a chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma, which had prompted the joint US, French and British strikes against military installations and chemical weapons facilities near the capital, Damascus.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The arrival of the delegation from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) came as the Syrian military announced that it had \u201cpurified\u201d [<\/i><\/span>no source provided, but <\/i>this<\/i><\/span><\/a> \u2014 <\/i><\/span>from 7 March 2018<\/i><\/span> <\/i>\u2014<\/i><\/span> <\/i>is the only source that existed prior to the April 14th missiles-invasion of Syria, and its meaning is very different: <\/i>https:\/\/translate.google.com\/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=https:\/\/sana.sy\/fr\/%3Fp%3D113016&prev=search<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span>] the region of eastern Ghouta, of which Douma is a part, after a two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians [<\/i><\/span>no source provided as regards either the number, or that all of them were \u2018civilians\u2019 and that none of them were jihadists or \u201cterrorists”<\/i><\/span>], following years of siege.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The propaganda-article continued directly: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cUnits of our brave armed forces, and auxiliary and allied forces, completed the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations,\u201d the general command statement said.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

No source was provided for that, but this sentence is a sly mind-manipulation, because here is what the Syrian Government\u2019s General Command had actually said: “Statement of the Army General Command declaring Eastern Ghouta clear of terrorism\u201d<\/span><\/a> as headlined by the Syrian Government itself. <\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: the Guardian\u2019s \u2018journalist\u2019 had substituted the word \u201cclear\u201d by the word \u201cpurify\u201d and did this after having already asserted but not documented, that the Government had just completed \u201ca two-month campaign that killed nearly 2,000 civilians.\u201d When the Syrian Government announces that an area has been \u201ccleared of terrorists (or of terrorism),\u201d the U.S.-allied propagandist uses the word \u201cpurify,\u201d such as \u201cpurified the region of eastern Ghouta\u201d or “the purification of eastern Ghouta, including all its towns and villages, of armed terrorist organisations.\u201d But by the time that the reader gets there to \u201cpurification \u2026 of armed terrorist organisations,” the reader has already been doctrinated to believe that Syria\u2019s Government is trying to \u201cpurify\u201d land<\/i>, or perpetrate some type of ethnic-cleansing<\/i>. That\u2019s professional propaganda-writing; it is not professional journalism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Later, the article asserts that, \u201c<\/span>The OPCW<\/span><\/a> mission will arrive in Douma eight days after the chemical attack, and days after the area fell to the control of Russian military and Syrian government forces. That delay, along with the possibility of the tampering of evidence by the forces accused of perpetrating the attack, raises doubts about what the OPCW\u2019s inspectors might be able to discover.\u201d However, a fierce debate is being waged over whether this was not any real \u201cchemical attack\u201d but instead a staged event by the jihadists in order to draw Trump back into invading Syria. In other words: any journalistic reference yet, at this time, to the event as \u201cthe chemical attack\u201d instead of as \u201cthe alleged chemical attack\u201d is garbage, just as, prior to the guilty-verdict in a murder trial, no journalistic reference may legitimately be made to the defendant as \u201cthe murderer,\u201d instead of as \u201cthe defendant.\u201d That is lynch-mob \u2018journalism\u2019, which Joseph Goebbels championed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Joseph-Goebbels-following \u2018journalist\u2019 has thus opened by implying that the Russia-allied Syrian Government is trying to crush a democratic revolution, instead of the truth, that the U.S.-allied Governments are trying to overthrow and replace the Russia-allied Syrian Government. It\u2019s a big difference, between the lie, and the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another story in the April 15th Guardian was “Pressure grows on Russia to stop protecting Assad as US, UK and France press for inquiry into chemical weapons stockpiles\u201d<\/span><\/a> and this one pretended<\/span> that the issue is for \u201cRussia to stop protecting Assad,\u201d who is the democratically elected<\/span><\/a> and popular<\/span><\/a> President of Syria, and not to stop the invasion of Syria since 2011 by U.S. and Saudi backed foreign jihadists to overthrow him<\/span><\/a>. Furthermore, as regards \u201cpress for inquiry into chemical weapons stockpiles,\u201d the real and urgent issue right now is to allow the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into Douma to hold an independent and authoritative investigation into the evidence there. Russia pressed for it at the U.N. Security Council and the U.S. and its allies blocked it there.<\/span><\/a> But the OPCW went anyway \u2014 even after the U.S.-allied invasion on April 14th \u2014 and this courageous resistance by them against the U.S. dictatorship<\/span><\/a> can only be considered heroic. Now that they are there, the remaining jihadists in Douma are firing shots at them to drive them away<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

That type of \u2018news\u2019-reporting is virtually universal in The West, among the U.S. and its allied governments, which refer to themselves as \u2018democracies\u2019<\/span><\/a> and refer to any Government that they wish to overthrow and replace by their own selected dictator, as \u2018dictatorships\u2019, such as these regimes had referred to Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria forever, and Ukraine in 2014. It\u2019s Newspeak.<\/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>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org On Sunday April 15th, Britain\u2019s Guardian bannered “OPCW inspectors set to investigate site of Douma chemical attack\u201d and pretended that there was no question that a chemical attack in Douma Syria on April 7th had actually occurred, and the article then went further along that same propaganda-line, to accuse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":357161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,519],"tags":[96,1035,524,754,55,76],"class_list":{"0":"post-357483","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-newswire","9":"tag-cover-up","10":"tag-daily-news","11":"tag-russia","12":"tag-syria","13":"tag-uk-news","14":"tag-warfare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}