“News,” Propaganda, or Disinformation: The World Is Not What It Seems

Over the years studying the published history about the Comintern’s Willi Münzenberg and his elaborate propaganda/espionage NKVD/GRU apparat, and of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird network of journalists and media assets, has made me jaded and suspicious, sadder but wiser about such matters. Things are not always what they seem or as initially “reported.” But I still believe that eventually truth will out, and the good guys will win in the final reel of the movie.

Recent damning reports document the extent that select contemporary journalists are in thrall to their intelligence agencies paymasters, much like the CIA’s long-standing media disinformation/propaganda campaign, Operation Mockingbird, during the Cold War.

The Agency had a focused major operation to corrupt and manipulate the non-Communist Social Democratic European Left against their Soviet adversaries, modeled along the earlier lines of Willi Münzenberg and his interwar Cominterm propaganda apparat for the Soviets’ GRU and NKVD against the West. Again, the Cold War against the Soviet Bloc was not what it seemed.

All of this becomes crucial when examining the origins of the European Union (EU).

Award-winning British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard provided a key piece of the puzzle with his important online expose’ article, “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs,” tracing the covert planning, manipulation, and financing of post-WWII European federalism to top tiers of the American intelligence establishment (which interlocked with key Wall Street investment banks and financial institutions, the major foundations which acted as covert funding mechanisms for these projects, the elite mainstream media which provided disinformation and cover for the endeavor, and entities of the foreign policy establishment such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council).

Other respected researchers have presented their evidence, which on the mundane surface level appears to be contradictory, as to the roots of “the European Idea,” European federalism, and the EU.

Most notably, I am referring to former Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov and their compact book, EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration, and British Euroskeptic (and classical liberal) John Laughland and his book, The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, which traces this collectivist impetus to its National Socialist and Fascist origins.

But as I pointed out in my own LRC articles, “Ideas Have Consequences,” and “National Socialism,” the ideological roots of collectivism, whether in its communist, fascist, or national socialist variations, have a common origin themselves. The EU superstate is only the latest manifestation of this two hundred year old reactionary philosophy.

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4:51 pm on June 16, 2020