Image by Alec Perkins via Flickr
with John Pilger
vanessa beeley on Jun 19, 2017
He has been defying the Establishment gatekeepers and telling us the truth about what’s really going on in the world for over 50 years. He has covered wars around the world from Vietnam to Iraq, and is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. For many, John Pilger is the journalists’ journalist, and he came into the Sputnik studio to give us his thoughts on the state of the press today.
And, US-led airstrikes on Raqqa have, as the UN observed, led to a ‘staggering loss of civilian life.‘ The US-led coalition has also admitted to using white phosphorus, but the media reaction in the West has been muted, to say the least. It’s all a far cry from the headlines when Syrian forces – with Russian support – were trying to liberate Aleppo in December. Vanessa Beeley has reported from Syria during the current conflict many times, so we invited her into the studio to discuss these glaring double standards in the media.
from the archives:
Self-Defense Is No Defense for US Acts of War in Syria by Finian Cunningham
Untrump the World — It Won’t Self-Impeach and The Unifying Force of War Abolition by David Swanson
Trump’s Lawless Presidency? Just Like All the Rest of Them by Finian Cunningham
Eleven Blasphemous Thoughts for the Current Russo-phobic Season by Paul Street
Mosul’s “Liberation”: Another Fallujah, Dresden or Hiroshima? by Felicity Arbuthnot
John Pilger: The Manchester Concert Attack, Trump, Saudi Arabia and WikiLeaks
Dandelion Salad 
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I really think it is high time to name and shame ~ to render the pseudo-journalism of these vile tabloids powerless; to ridicule and disarm the propaganda agencies of the corporate PR deception industry, whose mantra is business as usual at any cost….
….whether it be in human lives and broken communities, the reckless, heartless & willful destruction of biodiversity, the dereliction of moral rectitude, institutional betrayal of trust, the sabotage of legal process or iniquitous territorial ambition & cynical ‘pipeline’ & commodity wars, generally.
The real challenge as I see it is informed consensus building. That can only be successful when people are allowed, supported and encouraged to exercise responsible techniques of judicious discrimination, that can only be achieved with proper education ~ and most critically, vocational freedom. Anything short of this is brainwashing and enslavement, no matter how it is packaged and delivered.
How often is Vanessa Beeley invited to deliver talks to teenagers I wonder?
As JP suggests, younger people are now habituated to social media. Obama’s spin-merchants played that card with fiendish cunning; and Trump tries, rather sadly to tweet along with the pope and others….but tweeting alone is insufficient.
We have to re-organize ourselves around empirical contingencies that allow for the retention, improvement and continual reformation of the most critical institutions of biologically responsible public life. There are promising signs of this in evidence, if we care to heed them & ignore the falsehoods & redundancies of resentnik privilege, masquerading as warranted ‘supervision.’.
Progressive economics clearly plays a vital role, but authentic life-value and moral literacy remain our sentient and social, unfettered human capital & right ~ the absolute right to occupy and enjoy ecologically nurtured, ‘rewilded’ heads and hearts.
By the way, we should be in no doubt that depleted uranium is a nuclear weapon.
Who produces these horrific criminal abominations? Crisp-shirted executives in luxurious offices? Do the Russians deploy the same toxic materials? I wouldn’t be surprised.
It seems the United States DofD simply escalates their great genocidal tradition of atrocity, by ‘profitably’ recycling perpetual ecocide with evermore callous disregard for the terrifying biological consequences..
Who’s expected to clean up this apocalyptic mess? Some supernatural ‘multicultural’ janitor in the sky?
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