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Newswashing occurs when dominant media portals like The Guardian and the BBC take events and people that are covered in moral shit and attempt to wash it off.
Conversely, victims of western geopolitical sins and those who protest against them are endlessly undermined so as to leave the news factories as the sole arbiters of ‘truth’. It’s called ‘narrative management’ or ‘battlefield disinformation’ – lying in old money.
In a just world, Tony Blair would be a convicted and jailed war criminal, instead he resides in luxurious splendour in Belgravia. Blair and the Iraq war have been newswashed, leaving Blair rehabilitated as a public statesman and the illegal invasion of Iraq buffed as a ‘humanitarian intervention’.
Julian Assange exposed the lies behind the Iraq war and tried to hold those responsible to account. For actually doing the job that the western media purports to do, his life has been destroyed. Blair of Belgravia is feted by the media and a few short miles away Assange of Wikileaks is dying in Belmarsh Prison. Newswashing is about washing the shit off liars and war criminals, while punishing truth tellers and hiding western sins.
Jeremy Corbyn, a life long anti-racism campaigner and champion of Palestinian rights was successfully newswashed into political oblivion; the revitalisation of democratic socialism that he briefly led ruined by a political and media establishment desperate to disenfranchise voters with moral principles.
Keir Starmer is a serial liar, a genocide enabler, a self-confessed tory and in thrall to the very lobbyists Corbyn opposed. Starmer is newswashed on a daily basis. They dress up his vacuous prattle with puff pieces, bury his tone-deaf gaffes and stuff his dreadful lies into landfill sized memory holes.
In Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky’s dubious cronies and offshore tax fiddles were newswashed away and he was reinvented as a Churchillian statesman on the front cover of Vogue and Time magazine. Now that Russia is prevailing in Ukraine, much narrative management will be required to explain why the west is about to dump this failed geopolitical gambit and walk away. I suspect Zelensky will soon experience the other end of the hosepipe.
The most egregious newswashing is for Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza, the most morally bankrupt and mendacious PR campaign ever mounted in human history.
Salaried hacks of the western empire are trying to convince you:
(a) That this live streamed genocide (that you can watch with your own eyes) is not happening, even though the Israelis stated their intentions for it in plain sight and now boast openly of their progress.
(b) That the victims of the genocide are somehow responsible for their own deaths.
(c) That the west is powerless to act – when in fact it could end the genocide with a click of its fingers by stopping the flow of money, armaments and political cover to Israel.
(d) That the west is awfully upset by the ‘suffering’ of the Palestinians – reframing mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide in the language of a natural disaster. But they don’t give a damn about anything except the geopolitical implications for their power.
Whether you ingest the BBC or The Guardian or Sky News or The Spectator or The Economist, their lies are designed to gaslight you.
Gaza has one gift for us all – it has finally and irrevocably removed the mask from western imperialism and the captured political / media class that enables it.
People in the west love to point the finger at Soviet-era propaganda and say how terrible it would be to live in such a world.
Look in the mirror and wake up – you are living in that world.
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