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Nebojsa Malic

Ukraine, Asterix and Rules: Notes from the Birthplace of American Empire

Tuesday November 1, 2022

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“The first parliamentarian summit of the International Crimea Platform showed the world Europe ALMOST entirely united against Russian aggression,” the US embassy in Belgrade posted on Twitter last week, accompanied by a map showing all of the continent in blue – with Belarus, Serbia and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad in grey.

No doubt the embassy thought this would bring home the “isolation” of Serbia. Not the first time, however, the Imperial legation had miscalculated. The map made Serbia look more like the “one small village of indomitable Gauls” from the famous prologue of Asterix, while the representation of “Kosovo” as a separate, independent state just lost Washington another 10 points in favorability polls. I know this, because I had just come back from several weeks in Serbia and Bosnia, where the vibe was very much in evidence.

American ambassadors in Belgrade have acted less like diplomats and more like imperial gauleiters ever since the October 2000 “color revolution” that ousted the legitimately elected Slobodan Milosevic and installed a US-friendly regime. Activists trained in Hungary by the National Endowment for Democracy went so far as to sack the Yugoslav National Assembly and torch the ballots, so no one could dispute their claims. Yet the Western media did not label them “insurrectionists” or “election deniers,” but celebrated them as democratic democrats. The model was then applied elsewhere, including Ukraine – twice, in 2004 and 2014 – triggering the conflict that eventually went fully kinetic.
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As Sanctions Fail to Work and Russia's Advance Continues, Western Media Changes its Tune on Ukraine

Friday June 3, 2022

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Even as the collective West continues to insist – against all observable reality – that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own. 

Meanwhile, some major publications have begun to report on the actual situation on the frontlines, rather than uncritically quoting myths like the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ or the ‘Snake Island 13’ propagated by Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, as they did early on. There have even been hints, however vague, that the West should perhaps stop unconditionally supporting Kiev and promote a negotiated peace instead. 

“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote.

Elliott actually argues that the recent US announcement of sending rocket launchers to Ukraine is proof that sanctions are not working: “The hope is that modern military technology from the US will achieve what energy bans and the seizure of Russian assets have so far failed to do: force [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to withdraw his troops.”
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George Soros backs liberal media company with a mission to counter fake news & promote ‘GOOD INFORMATION’

Wednesday October 27, 2021

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The newest combatant in the US "disinformation" wars is a media company bankrolled by Democrat mega-donors Reid Hoffman and George Soros, and run by an operative whose astroturfed local news outfit was actual misinformation.

Good Information, Inc. launched on Tuesday as “a civic incubator committed to investing in immediate solutions that counter disinformation and increase the flow of good information online.” According to Axios, it is bankrolled by LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman, Soros, as well as Silicon Valley investors Ken and Jen Duda and Incite Ventures.

Tara McGowan, a former Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2012 and 2016 campaigns – and ran a progressive nonprofit called ACRONYM that spent a whopping $100 million on a digital ad campaign to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 – has been put in charge of the venture. 

ACRONYM was a major investor in Shadow, the outfit that mangled the results of the Iowa caucuses early on in the Democratic primary process, hurting the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Another of its operations, Courier Newsroom, will be sold to Good Information for an undisclosed sum; McGowan reportedly recused herself from the deal.
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‘F-15s and Nuclear Weapons’: Biden Brushes off Point of 2nd Amendment & Undermines ‘Insurrection’ Narrative in Gun Control Push

Thursday June 24, 2021

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President Joe Biden’s new gun control crusade challenged the US founding fathers as well as the Democrats’ own January 6 “insurrection” narrative, by arguing armed citizenry would have no hope against an oppressive government.

“Those who say the blood of patriots y'know and all the stuff about how we're going to have to move against the government. Well the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots,” Biden said on Wednesday, announcing new gun control actions from the White House. “What's happened is, that there never been, if you wanted, you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons,” he continued.

Biden was presumably referring to the quote by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third US president, who famously wrote in 1787 that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants,” in response to the recently quashed Shays’ Rebellion.

The current president argued that the “Second amendment from the day it was passed limited the type of people who could own a gun and the type of weapon you could own,” such as cannons. The amendment itself contains no such provision, however, and merely says that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
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Response to Fauci's Emails Proves Everything is Fake, Narrative Management Trumps Reality, and Those in Power Want it That Way

Friday June 4, 2021

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Watching the media coverage – or lack thereof – of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails and what they mean for the origin of the coronavirus, one is struck by how relentlessly fake everything is, from public health experts to science.

One of the things the emails suggest is that Fauci colluded with Peter Daszak – head of the EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled US research funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to suppress and dismiss any notion that the virus causing Covid-19 may not have evolved naturally. 

Thing is, Daszak actually went around giving interviews about his work in China throughout last year, and nobody in the media thought to connect the dots. Simply put, Donald Trump said the virus came from China and might have come from a lab, therefore that had to be wrong and racist, end of story, case closed.

That’s just one, most recent and most acute example of Narrative trumping reality at all cost. Millions of deaths, widespread destruction of the economy, tectonic changes in society itself? Small price to pay for “progress” and ensuring the “correct” outcome of the 2020 election, the fortifiers of Our Democracy might say, without anyone batting an eye. “Build back better!” the press parrots instead.
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The internet once offered a promise of free speech for everyone; Big Tech has since turned it into a prison

Thursday May 6, 2021

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I once thought the internet would have the same effect on corporate media gatekeepers as the AK-47 had on colonial empires in Africa. That was before Big Tech turned that promise of freedom into the second coming of feudalism.

Wednesday’s decision by Facebook’s “oversight board” – a transparent attempt to outsource responsibility for censorship to an international committee – to extend the ban on 45th US President Donald Trump is just the latest example, but by no means the most egregious. Earlier this week, the banhammer descended on RT’s digital project Redfish over posts criticizing… Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini and the Holocaust, of all things.

How did it come to this? Years ago, in an argument over media censorship, I had brought up the internet as the modern version of the AK-47. While the European colonial armies were able to conquer Africa in the 19th century, using machine guns and repeating rifles, they became unable to hold it once the Kalashnikov automatic rifle put the peasants in places like Congo, Angola and Vietnam on equal footing with Western armies seeking to keep them down.

Or, if you want a more peaceful metaphor, it was the promise of open pasture extended to people who had previously been treated like cattle, penned up in factory barns and fed slop from a trough.
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The Supreme Court had one last chance to keep the American Republic together. It failed.

Tuesday December 15, 2020

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By washing its hands of responsibility to hear the Texas challenge to the 2020 presidential election, the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court may have sealed the country’s fate and made a kinetic civil war much more likely.

On Friday, the highest court in the land decided that Texas “lacked standing” to challenge the conduct of elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin under Article 3 of the US Constitution. Yet the article in question explicitly states that the SCOTUS will be the original jurisdiction in “Controversies between two or more States; – between a State and Citizens of another State; – between Citizens of different States,” among other things.

Contrary to media reports, Texas did not seek to “overturn” the election of Democrat Joe Biden. The motion filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton very explicitly called for the court to order the state legislatures thereof to seat the electors, as is their constitutional prerogative. Yes, those legislatures are majority Republican, but nothing guaranteed they would actually back President Donald Trump. After all, Georgia has a Republican governor and secretary of state, and both declared the election clean as a whistle, brushing off all evidence of alleged irregularities.
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My ‘fake news’ odyssey: How I learned the media prefer narratives over facts and never tell the whole story

Thursday October 29, 2020

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With just days left to go before a US election everyone deservingly regards as pivotal, a battle is raging over ‘fake news’ and even the meaning of words. It’s a battle I’ve already watched being fought, in another war long ago.

Today, outlets like CNN would have you believe ‘fake news’ began with President Donald Trump five years ago, and that he weaponized the term against the good and honest media serving as the guardians of ‘our democracy’, or some such.

One doesn’t have to be a Republican (I am not) to reject this as misinformation at best, or at worst deliberate gaslighting. It was in fact the mainstream outlets, led by CNN, that weaponized the term ‘fake news’ against Trump, first to block his election and then to delegitimize it with the likes of the ‘Steele Dossier’.

The reason I know this, however, goes back 25 years, to Sarajevo. To most of you, the name may only be familiar in the context of the First World War, or the Bosnian War of the 1990s. It happens to be my home town. I grew up on the street where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, and almost got killed at least three times during that other war, fourscore years later.
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