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Russia vs West: who wins the propaganda war? By NSS Quoting the European NGO GEFIRA, Russia Insider reported on August 9 that the EU government is sponsoring what looks for all the world like a kind of “NGO” of its own making and under its complete control. Now this is really original. Normally, of course, NGOs (that’s NON-Government Organizations) are grassroots organizations or at least Soros-sponsored groups posing as grassroots. But, in launching a counterpropaganda program, the EU is either copying the US (which has an anti-“propaganda” program of its own) or vice-versa, and in turn both are copying Russia, which they both see as a threat in the propaganda department. What they fail to notice, however, is that Russian news is mostly just news, not propaganda 24-7 of the Western variety, and for this reason, more and more Westerners are turning to Russian news outlets. Thus the EU and the US Congress see their power trickling away fast and are blaming “Russian propaganda” for the fact that people everywhere are on to their game. One of the main targets is RT, Russia Today, which they claim is full of “fake news.” (Before you judge, read any issue of RT and you will see that most of the articles by far come from non-Russian sources and include mostly items that are not in themselves controvertible). The EU calls its “NGO” EU External Action, and to prove it is not really an invention of the EU, it has a disclaimer (yes, they actually call it that) at the end of its online reports claiming that the opinions expressed are not official EU opinions. Must be a new form of schizophrenia – paying people to write hit pieces against Russia and then pretending not necessarily to agree with them. As for the US initiative to counter “Russian propaganda,” US taxpayers will be pleased to learn that they have donated $800 million to protect citizens from the truth. One commentary featured in the EU non-NGO’s site seeks to “debunk” a report from Russian military site Zvezda which claims the chemical weapons incident at Khan Sheykhun, which was answered with Trump’s Tomahawk attack on the Syrian Sayrat air base, may have been due to a Syrian bomb hitting a lab where rebels were making chemical weapons. The clever “anti-disinformation” writers repeat the threadbare claim that the amount of chemical it would have taken to cause so much injury and death were beyond the ability of ISIS to deliver. However, ISIS has received billions of dollars from the Saudis and the GCC and still receives such aid. If they can’t muster up the wherewithal to buy and smuggle enough sarin gas or the like to kill a few dozen people, you have to wonder how Assad – groaning under US-imposed sanctions since 2003, tightened in 2011 to kill the entire Syrian economy – could have done so. Or how the indigent and impotent ISIS could have managed to seize more than half the territory of Syria. The EU version is further debunked by US msm reports of the habitual use of chemical weapons by ISIS, such as in this NYT article titled: “ISIS Used Chemical Arms at Least 52 Times in Syria and Iraq, Report Says”. Need we elaborate? The UN also reported that “rebels” have used chemical weapons in Syria. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-un-mission-report-confirms-that-opposition-rebels-used-chemical-weapons-against-civilians-and-government-forces/5363139 Another old standby argument the Atlanticist cabal raises is that sarin is destroyed when exposed to a bomb blast. However, terrorists in the Middle East have long used devices wherein sarin is released specifically by an explosive blast. The obvious, but sidestepped, question is why did Trump refuse to launch an investigation to prove his theory that Assad, and not terrorists, was responsible, before retaliating with the Tomahawk strike? The Russian government challenged him to do so but he flatly refused. And of course, the issue of motive, an oft-raised argument against the Assad-done-it assertion, was not addressed by the EU counter-propagandists. After all, Assad was winning so why risk it all by violating an international law? The desperate attempts to counter the reports presented in Russia Today and other sites (such as Sputnik) have a number of strikes against them, to whit: The EU External Action initiative, for example, does not include a reader comment section at its site. Yet Russia Today and Sputnik both feature reader feedback forums, which are extremely popular and raise lively discussion. So does Russia Insider, whose forums also attract droves, including many well-informed people. NSS staff post at these forums almost daily and we are not censored in any way, despite some comments that are highly controversial, and other RT readers sometimes add comments that are quite inflammatory to some groups. There are also a few msm-trained trolls on the Russian sites, but they are limited in number and brain power, rarely making valid points. By contrast, the EU group knows that there would most likely be more incisive arguments against them than for them were they to allow readers to comment. But this cuts deeply into their credibility and clearly shows they do not have logic and facts on their side. Likewise, RT publishes foreign language versions such as RT Deutsch, RT français, RT español, RT Russian and RT Arabic, and the reader comments at the European-language sites are numerous and enthusiastic, revealing a high degree of knowledge and sophistication on the part of readers, even those in Latin America. The most widely read German sites like Welt and Zeit online also offer comment privileges to their readers, who are unusually well informed about the things they are not supposed to know, and the comments generally differ sharply with the authors of the articles in question. The readers at the French site Figaro show even more decidedly anti-Atlanticist views and the readers seem more sophisiticated and knowledgeable than the ones at the aforementioned German sites. In other words, people everywhere are catching on. More to the point, as reported by HuffPost, an international poll was taken by WIN/Gallup in 2013 showing that the peoples of the world agree by a large margin that the US is the biggest threat to world peace. Certainly, the respondents were not all readers of Russian news sites. Therefore we can conclude that it is not Russian reporting that is swaying people against the US and that good money thrown at media designed to counter Russian "propaganda" is definitely wasted. Residents of countries like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Yemen, have their own built-in reasons not to trust the US. They don't need RT to tell them their country has been destroyed by the US and its allies. But it is also noteworthy that, according to polls, most nationals of US ally countries also deemed the US to be the worst offender against world peace. Naturally, the elites had no interest in shaping their policies according to what the people think, so WIN/Gallup were never asked to repeat this devastating poll. More recently, Pew Research Center conducted a poll in which, unlike the WIN/Gallup open ended poll of 2013, respondents were given only 4 choices, ie, ISIS, the US, Russia and China as the possible “greatest threat to world peace.” Although the poll was thus skewed to get a desired result, interestingly, the US came out as the greatest threat below ISIS. The pollsters hid their results behind the misleading title “Globally, People Point to ISIS and Climate Change as Leading Security Threats,” omitting mention of the perceived US threat, and at the end, they shrewdly state: “worries about the U.S. and its power and influence have increased in many countries in Europe and around the world since the election of Donald Trump.” So no one is thinking about the total destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Syria and Libya by the Atlanticist Establishment as threats to peace, eh? In summary, if we examine the trends and look at reader comments around the world, it becomes clear that Russia is winning the propaganda war -- and the Atlanticists know it. Add this to the growing use of the yuan in international settlements, which increasingly threaten the dollar, and we see that their efforts are aimed at nothing but prolonging the end game.
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