South Front
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Written by Julian Macfarlane
Among my favorite websites are SouthFront and Strategic Culture. I know they are good because Facebook won’t let me post links saying they are “against community standards”. Wouldn’t matter if the post were from God.
You will notice the Jesus doesn’t post on any of the social media.
Just as Facebook warnings about Sy Hersh validate his investigations, the out right banning of posts from various sites tells me that I simply have to read the articles there. (You should too!).
They:
- a.) contradict the “official narrative
- b.) tell you stuff you are not supposed to know or think
- c.) contain a lot of original content
I am particularly attracted to b.) which reminds me of when I was 12 and discovered sex. When I asked my parents, they didn’t tell me anything– just not to “do It”. So I really wanted to find out what “it” was.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest of the Legacy Media are all Mommy and Daddy. Eat your CNN or you will be punished.
Unlike the mind-numbing uniformity-conformity of Google, where any search gives you a million versions of the same misinformation, sites like SouthFront and Strategic Culture offer a wide range of opinions and points of view which stimulate discussion.
Is “woke” awake?
Diversity of thought— ie “dialectic”— is a no-no in the Facebook / Meta world, where you may only differ on things of no consequence, like pizza toppings, although a preference for pineapple may get you banned as Un-American. I am sure Socrates would been ostracized on Meta, too.
“Diversity” is celebrated only when it conforms. Since I am “on the spectrum” I speak from experience. “Woke” is not “awake”. It’s a kind of zombie state where you seek out brains — not to eat —but to copy. For the record, I officially belong to one of those marginalized groups that comes with the label “disorder”. I think differently.
For example, it is all right to have any kind of sexual orientation, as long you get married and adopt kids and act “normal”. But what if you opt for a different, “non-normal” lifestyle? It is all right to be superficially different but not to think differently.
It’s OK to be black or Asian or whatever, if you conform to media stereotypes—and, of course, are American.
Like SouthFront, for which I write and do voiceovers, Strategic Culture has some superb writers. One is Alastair Crooke, who actually started the thing. He is not a favorite of the Social Media, which is like being in high school and never getting invited to a party.
Here’s what my favorite propaganda source, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia of Official Information, has to say. I talked about Wikipedia in my last article — as a site that rubber stamps mainstream views.
Alastair Crooke CMG, sometimes misspelled as Alistair Crooke (born 1949), is a former British diplomat, and is the founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organisation that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West. Previously he was a ranking figure in both British intelligence (MI6) and European Union diplomacy. He was a spy for the British Government, but retired shortly after meeting his spouse.
OK —Crooke did his time in the Government, where he is said to have had a falling out with Tony Blair. Whether true or not, it is always a sign of personal integrity when you don’t get along with war criminals. But Wikipedia shares mainstream opinion that Crooke is “offensive”.
The “Conflicts Forum” founded by Crooke, has been a consistent advocate for the protection of the Assad regime in Syria, in spite of the extensively documented war-crimes and other atrocities it committed against the Syrian population. These include the use of poison gas to kill civilians, which was verified by the United Nations. Thus, Aisling Byrne, a projects coordinator for the “Conflicts Forum”, has dismissed documentation of systematic torture used by the Assad regime as ‘a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government’. This advocacy of the Assad regime, has led to criticism by Syrian human rights activists, who describe the Conflicts Forum as being “beyond redemption because they have knowingly chosen to adopt a stance that is at variance with the truth.”
Oh dear. Naughty Alastair. He wanted to “protect” one of the remaining secularist, semi-democratic regimes in the Middle East against…ummm… murderous, head-cutting CIA backed Sunni jihadists.
Repeat after me: we LOVE the White Helmets. We LOVE Bellingcat.
The poison gas story, of course, has been thoroughly debunked as a complete hoax, as has “systematic torture” by the Assad government—which, if i t were true, would contradict the mild-mannered ophthalmologist monster’s strong local support from Syria’s religiously diverse community.
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This is why I hesitate to get my eyes checked. I fear eye doctors.
Wikipedia writes:
In September 2020, his online journal, the Strategic Culture Foundation (edited by Declan Hayes ), was banned from various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, following claims that it was connected with Russian intelligence services and interfered in the 2020 Presidential election in the USA on their orders.
Oh my… a Russian spy. And a Trump-lover. Just like me—and a lot of you, if you are reading this. Vlad? Are you listening? Where is my paycheck? Did I not singlehandedly get Trump elelcted.
Worse…ummm…Crooke appears to be a peacenik! What’s that song — where have all the war-niks gone?
Crooke was a Middle East advisor to Javier Solana, High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union (CFSP) from 1997 to 2003, facilitated a number of de-escalations of violence and military withdrawals in the Palestinian Territories with Islamist movements from 2000 to 2003 and was involved in the diplomatic efforts in the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He was a member of the Mitchell Committee into the causes of the Second Intifada in 2000. He held clandestine meetings with the Hamas leadership in June 2002. He is an active advocate of engagement with Hamas, to whom he has referred as “resistants or resistance fighters”.
Aha! “De-escalation”. “Clandestine” meetings with Hamas and “engagement with those who resist living in open-air prisons, and having their kids shot? “Involved in diplomatic efforts”. Oh Alistair how could you?
Crooke is definitely not a favorite of the Official Left, which in the West is the atrophied Left arm of a body whose muscular hairy, tattooed Right Arm is represented by the Tony Blairs, Bushes, Bidens of the world.
The Wikipedia article draws on sources such as pseudo progressive magazine MotherJones and its trendy pseudo journalist David Samuels who mostly writes for the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. Samuel is a moderately skillful writer. Just…well..as a journalist … pseudo—which is a recipe for success, I guess.
Crooke’s argument is calculated to appeal to true believers who are willing to abandon Enlightenment ideas about human rights in favor of a distant dream of harmony between civilizations. So what if every woman living in a Muslim country has to cover her head, if students are shot dead in the streets, or if the mullahs manage to build and test an atomic bomb?
This is counterfactual —just rhetoric.
And it follows Samuels’ derision of Crooke’s expert opinion on Islam — specifically that Shiite Islam is less doctrinaire than some sects of Sunni Islam, for the reason that the Shiites encourage scholarly debate of the Qu’ran and hadiths while, say, the Wahabis, and, of course, Al Qaeda and Isis do not.
Indeed, women in Iran are much freer in Teheran than in Riyadh— still.
As for students getting shot dead in the streets. that happens all across the Middle East, but especially in occupied Palestine, not to mention in American cities.
As for atomic weapons—the fact is that the mullahs have declared atomic weapons Haraam—forbidden.
Samuels is the kind of guy I used to meet constantly at cocktail parties in press clubs.
He writes variously and vacuously about things that the affluent upper class find “interesting” —hip-hop stars, antiabortion activists, activists in the woods of Washington, Britney Spears and Neil Young, He is the perfect “source ‘‘for Wikipedia— since he knows nothing about anything really and almost nothing about Crooke and his world other than what he can glom from journalistic gossip. He doesn’t care that the hearsay isn’t true — he only cares that it is mainstream.
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Crooke writes about geopolitics, culture and ideas. He lives in the Middle East and understands the cultural and religious complexity of the region. He is a professional. And a thinker.
His most recent article explores our current Western cultural crisis.
We are Closening to a Move Through the Cycle – But First Will Come Disorder
Which follows from a previous one:
The Slow Art of Whole-of-Government ‘Warfare’
These articles make think. But that is the subject of another article. Thinking takes me a little longer than most people. On the other hand, in a disordered world, having a “disorder” helps.
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Wikipedia is for people who think they think when they don’t. Take a look at the Wiki page on SouthFront. Who do you think wrote that?
SouthFront (sometimes written South Front) is a multilingual website registered in Russia. It has been accused of being an outlet for disinformation and being under the control of the Russian government, and is sanctioned by the US Treasury and banned by social media platforms for this reason.
The moment you see the word “disinformation” you know that SouthFront has a lot to offer. And you should visit.
No kiddies, babies don’t come out of the navel, even if Mommy&Daddy America say so.
