Excellent; your writing on journalism is always very powerful. And I’m so happy to see you substack. I don’t know how quickly it’ll lead to the kind of revenue that will allow you to upgrade the cats to more than a half sausage each, but you sure have an enormous amount of talent... so here’s hoping. I hope to become a paid subscriber when I can, but in the meantime, I am eager to read your work.
Superb writing. Shared on VK and subscribed. Have seen you write about Republika Srpska/Bosnia, will get to that. Was lucky to have read your comment at Edward Slavsquat ( another brilliant and honest journalist) and am happy to be here!
I am assuming that the final footnote reference you make - to the Ethical Journalism site - is deep irony.. it starts with Bellingcat - Elliot Harris' NED cut-off which has worked so hard to support the collective West's false narrative so long.. this devious trend towards 'open source investigation techniques' has become just another manipulative way the intelligence services spoon feed the sheeple their lies.. is there no hope.. Oh, yeah.. Elon Musk.. hahahahahahaha..
An excellent essay, I agree with the other readers here. I appreciate your position as insider-outsider, which can offer very valuable insights to those who are prepared to think critically. One of the engines of ideological dominance during the past 2.5 years has been academia, which has come as close as possible to being a living monolith as one can ever "hope" to find. The media (or regime media as I call them) and academia have been two of the main creators and distributors of the preferred narrative, and god help that handful of dissenters who dared to deviate from the party line. Thanks again for this article and for your comment on Zero Anthropology.
It strikes me that Stalin’s airbrush exercises are tremendously crude by modern standards. I’m sure that the propagandists of the West were studying Soviet Russia with immense interest and constantly putting forward the pros and cons of the Stalinist model of totalitarianism – eventually concluding that it was all too awkward and unwieldly. The moment you have to resort to such sledgehammer tactics it is clear that your propaganda system is deficient.
And so I reckon the Western model adopted various subterfuges and devices by which to minimalize all extraneous influences and smooth it all into a sleek multi-levelled machine in which possible embarrassments could be pre-arranged to have minimal effect.
It’s funny how the smallest and apparently most trivial comments can reveal so much. I recall one letter in a tabloid paper in which a viewer took exception to “Yes Minister” saying something like: “Nobody could really believe our government actually works in this contemptuous and cynical way”. I would say that that sentiment still sums up the way the vast majority think.
Excellent; your writing on journalism is always very powerful. And I’m so happy to see you substack. I don’t know how quickly it’ll lead to the kind of revenue that will allow you to upgrade the cats to more than a half sausage each, but you sure have an enormous amount of talent... so here’s hoping. I hope to become a paid subscriber when I can, but in the meantime, I am eager to read your work.
Thank you for the kind words, Frieda. The cats will have to wait )
Superb writing. Shared on VK and subscribed. Have seen you write about Republika Srpska/Bosnia, will get to that. Was lucky to have read your comment at Edward Slavsquat ( another brilliant and honest journalist) and am happy to be here!
Thank you for the kind words... sorry to reply so late!
Better late then never, right? 😊
I am assuming that the final footnote reference you make - to the Ethical Journalism site - is deep irony.. it starts with Bellingcat - Elliot Harris' NED cut-off which has worked so hard to support the collective West's false narrative so long.. this devious trend towards 'open source investigation techniques' has become just another manipulative way the intelligence services spoon feed the sheeple their lies.. is there no hope.. Oh, yeah.. Elon Musk.. hahahahahahaha..
Oh yes! Bellingcat is quite a piece of work.
An excellent essay, I agree with the other readers here. I appreciate your position as insider-outsider, which can offer very valuable insights to those who are prepared to think critically. One of the engines of ideological dominance during the past 2.5 years has been academia, which has come as close as possible to being a living monolith as one can ever "hope" to find. The media (or regime media as I call them) and academia have been two of the main creators and distributors of the preferred narrative, and god help that handful of dissenters who dared to deviate from the party line. Thanks again for this article and for your comment on Zero Anthropology.
Sorry to respond so late.. the comments did not show up at the time you and others posted. Very strange.
The media and academia are indeed in some malevolent ideological synchrony.
It strikes me that Stalin’s airbrush exercises are tremendously crude by modern standards. I’m sure that the propagandists of the West were studying Soviet Russia with immense interest and constantly putting forward the pros and cons of the Stalinist model of totalitarianism – eventually concluding that it was all too awkward and unwieldly. The moment you have to resort to such sledgehammer tactics it is clear that your propaganda system is deficient.
And so I reckon the Western model adopted various subterfuges and devices by which to minimalize all extraneous influences and smooth it all into a sleek multi-levelled machine in which possible embarrassments could be pre-arranged to have minimal effect.
It’s funny how the smallest and apparently most trivial comments can reveal so much. I recall one letter in a tabloid paper in which a viewer took exception to “Yes Minister” saying something like: “Nobody could really believe our government actually works in this contemptuous and cynical way”. I would say that that sentiment still sums up the way the vast majority think.