US government officials are calling to overhaul the state funded media apparatus and focus on counter-propaganda against hostile nations, according to a report seen by Reuters.

The study was written by two former Western state funded news employees, Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) governor and Radio France Europe/Radio Liberty vice president, who declared the US is losing the information war to its adversaries. Despite its annual $730 million budget, the BBG is asking Congress for an additional $15 million to combat Russian media specifically.

It’s not just BBG media outlets pumping up anti-Russian rhetoric – the entire Western establishment has resurrected the Cold War hysteria. Corporate media has become a disaster porn factory, terrorizing people with constant fearmongering about ISIS and Russia.

RT was created to put out the Russian perspective to the world, one of many viewpoints necessary to form opinions about global affairs. People watch foreign backed stations because they know the value in another side to the story, and they’re smart enough to navigate around obvious state biases.

What US officials don’t seem to grasp is that Russian media’s success is only due to the abysmal failure of American media to provide citizens with real news.

I joined RT because it gave me the space to critique empire, corporatism and militarism while providing a crucial platform to whistleblowers and activists. People want unfettered, raw truth about issues that most impact their lives, and Breaking the Set helped fill that void.

I never produced a pro-Russian story and stayed true to my moral compass by speaking out against Putin’s policies several times. Yet people still diminish my three years of paradigm challenging content on the network as mere “Russian propaganda”.

When in Berlin, I joined Jasmin Kosubek on RT Deutsch’s Der Fehlende Part to talk about RT vs. MSM media wars.

Abby Martin on RT vs MSM Propaganda Wars

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Watch the interview in German here. Check out all full episodes and segment breakdowns of Breaking the Set here.

The media propaganda double standard is being reinforced everywhere. At Colombia Journalism School, there’s a student program called “RT Watch” that’s “keeping an eye” on the Russian backed station. And while the project clearly exists to mock and undermine the network, I was happy that one of the students interviewed me and published it in full on their website.

It’s easy to ride the wave of ridicule, but until the establishment turns a critical eye at its own media cesspool, it will never be able to comprehend why Russia is winning the information war.

Abby Martin | @AbbyMartin

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Two weeks ago, Obama made a bizarre announcement that Venezuela is an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and that he is “deeply concerned” about its human rights abuses – a declaration necessary to justify a new round of harsh sanctions.

The measure comes on the heels of another round of US sanctions against the Venezuelan government, allegedly for violating protesters rights during demonstrations last year.

In this episode of Media Roots Radio, Abby Martin talks to Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy about the hidden agenda behind this latest move of aggression and why the country really poses a threat to the US establishment.

US vs. Venezeula: Regime Change and Resilience

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In fact, the US has never stopped trying to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution. Eva Golinger, author of the Chavez Code, talks about the Western backed coup happening in real time in the form of paid opposition forces, propaganda and economic warfare.

Why the CIA Won’t Give Up on Venezeula

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has launched a global signature-gathering campaign to pressure Obama to repeal the sanctions. The letter reads “sanctions, blockades and armed aggressions are no substitute for genuine dialogue.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Abby Martin | @AbbyMartin

Photo by flickr user Dan Brickley

Articles aplenty have appeared to mark the recent 50th anniversary of the first battle between US soldiers and the army of what was known in this country as North Vietnam. Come April, we can expect far more commentary on the 40th anniversary of the end of the fighting in what is still referred to as the “Fall of Saigon.”

This is especially significant considering the Pentagon recently posted a lengthy history of the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese, whose struggle for independence was waged against the Chinese, the French and the Japanese, in addition to the US, refer to this same period as the American War). Many sifting through its website might be confused as to why the stories differ dramatically from what one would hear from a war veteran or activist.

Pinpointing where US aggression in Vietnam began depends on how one determines when war starts. It’s silly to claim it began in February of 1965, as tens of thousands of Vietnamese were already dead at US hands by that point. Better to trace the origins to 1945, when the United States refused to recognize the new government established by Vietnamese independence forces.

See, Japan invaded Vietnam years earlier and French colonialists ceded the country to the Japanese. When French colonialists finished sipping cognac in Paris and decided to re-invade Vietnam, the US backed them to the hilt with weapons, financing and diplomatic cover. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese people resisted – just as they had resisted other occupiers for centuries.

As the French failed its attempt at re-conquest, the US bore more of the war’s burden until, in 1954, the Vietnamese were again on a path to independence. Yet the US undermined the elections Washington knew Ho Chi Minh would win in a landslide. As in dozens of cases over the past 100 years, the US opposed democracy in favor of aggression. Elections are praised when the right people win; machine guns raised if the wrong people win.

The US flew Ngo Dinh Diem in from New Jersey and installed him as dictator. Eventually, Kennedy had him whacked a mere three weeks before he himself was assassinated. This was not, however, before Kennedy began the saturation bombing of South Vietnam with napalm, while also calling for ground troops and organized strategic hamlets.

Lyndon Johnson’s fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 was another turning point. Within six months, the Peace Candidate who had startled the world with a campaign ad attacking Barry Goldwater as a warmonger extended the invasion and bombing campaign in Vietnam. So it remained until the Super Rich grew antsy about the financial costs of the war, the US’s growing international embarrassment, unprecedented domestic upheaval, an army that increasingly wouldn’t fight, and the stark realization that there was no way the Vietnamese could lose militarily. I recall reading years ago something a Vietnamese elder who had probably seen as much death and destruction as anyone who ever lived said (I’m paraphrasing): We can settle this now or we can settle it a thousand years from now. It’s up to the Americans.                 

It’s impossible to calculate the Vietnamese death toll. Whatever Vietnam has said has been dismissed by the powerful, as anti-American propaganda and US elites have never bothered to summarize. Their attitude was captured perfectly by a general speaking of a more recent conflagration: “We don’t do body counts.” Not, anyway, when the dead bodies are victims of US violence.  

Three million Vietnamese deaths is a commonly cited figure but undoubtedly far too low. Also completely ignored is the Vietnamese experience of Agent Orange and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example. Take the terrible suffering of US soldiers and multiply their numbers ten thousand fold or more and we get a sense of the damage to the Vietnamese. Additionally, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina (it’s often conveniently forgotten that the US also waged war against Laos and Cambodia) are full of unexploded ordinances that regularly cause death and injuries, to this day. There’s also the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands throughout Indochina immediately after the war. A countryside ravaged by bombing, combined with the curtailment of airlifts, doomed those hundreds of thousands once the US imposed an ironclad embargo. That’s an unpleasant truth, though; so much easier to blame everything on the Vietnamese Communists and the despotic Khmer Rouge.

Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with war, so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the destruction imperialism wreaks on the world will have to come from us.

Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author | [email protected]

Photo by flickr user Manhhai

Robbie and Abby Martin discuss her departure from Breaking the Set, the establishment’s Cold War resurrection, the splintering of the left over Obama’s military policies on Syria/Ukraine and Netanyahu’s recent visit to Congress.

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Photo by flickr user Igor Putina