(ANTIMEDIA) Preparations by various cogs of the national security complex, including FEMA, indicate a coming worldwide food shortage — and a resulting crisis marked by extreme civil unrest around the globe.
As Motherboardnoted of two reports published previously by CNA Corporation, but which largely escaped attention, the world’s food supply could be insufficient to maintain even current populations much further into the future. And the crisis — which several factors indicate may already be underway — may begin to worsen considerably as early as 2020.
Employing a desktop game simulation of the conditions of a global food shortage, titled “Food Chain Reaction,” CNA’s Institute for Public Research brought together “65 officials from the US, Europe, Africa, India, Brazil, and key multilateral and intergovernmental institutions,”Motherboard explained. And the Institute, which oversaw the simulation, “primarily provides scientific research services for the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA].”
According to the website for Food Chain Reaction: A Global Food Security Game — no commentary on Orwellian overtones needed — the “simulation and exercise intended to improve understanding of how governments, institutions, and private sector interests might interact to address a crisis in the global food system,” and took place in early November 2015.
“The scenario,” the description continues, “is set five years from today in a world where population growth, rapid urbanization, extreme weather and political crises combine to threaten global food security. The game’s players — high-level decision makers representing nations, international institutions, and the private sector — will collaborate, negotiate, make decisions, and confront tradeoffs while dealing with a chain reaction of consequences resulting from their actions.”
Participants received the briefing for the game through a mock TV newscast, which“challenged players to imagine a global food system under stress due to extreme weather and other environmental factors, urbanization and other demographic pressures, rising global food prices, and falling food stock levels.”
After receiving information specific to each participant’s national and regional geography and climate, players were also permitted to employ solutions to the game’s burgeoning food crisis scenario on “national, bilateral, and/or broadly cooperative” levels.
Divided into four rounds, the simulation found spikes in food prices up to a whopping 395 percent, driven by extended crop failures in key regions, resultant from the confused reactions by international officials, drastic changes in the environment, and skyrocketing oil prices — many similar factors, the report notes, that drove a global food crisis spanning 2007 to 2008.
Though, at the height of the simulation’s worst repercussions, the food crisis affected virtually every societal and governmental aspect — such as mass civil unrest and widespread crop failures in the planet’s ‘breadbasket’ regions — the Institute ultimately painted a rosy picture of economic and agricultural recovery.
But for as detailed and reactive as the scope of the game sought to be, several glaring omissions likely skewed both results and proposed solutions — and despite backing from the U.S. government, the simulation’s corporate participants could have tacitly or overtly influenced the outcome.
Commissioned in part by Cargill, an industrial agribusiness behemoth, and Mars, the giant whose candy business has vested interests in promoting both genetically-modified food and industrial agriculture, the Food Chain Reaction simulation excluded among possible solutions the abolishment of industrial, factory farming. Considering large-scale agribusiness’ sizable impact on the environment, as well as the paradoxical system whereby industrial agriculture largely supports livestock from factory farms, that exclusion certainly calls into question any results.
Additionally, with FEMA an aspect of the futuristic simulation, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility to see a call for increased funding in the name of ‘being prepared’ for a coming crisis of epic proportions.
Perhaps, though, an imperative exists in examining both the aspects of massive food shortage studied as well as potential solutions omitted. China recently began the push away from a meat-centric diet, in part because pollution from factory farms has wrought havoc in the air and water. All moralistic pontificating aside, a return to small-scale, organic farming and switching to vegetarian diets, or at least a reduction in consumption of meat, could avert or abate the coming crisis.
"La disintegrazione dell'Ue è irreversibile". Il finanziere e filantropo George Soros ritiene che il voto britannico sulla Brexit rende "la disgregazione dell'Unione europea praticamente irreversibile". Soros che aveva avvertito del tracollo finanziario se il Regno Unito fosse uscito dall'Ue, ha ribadito che gli effetti del voto danneggeranno anche il Regno Unito stesso.
"Il Regno Unito alla fine può o non può essere relativamente migliore rispetto ad altri Paese, ma la sua economia e la gente soffriranno in modo significativo nel medio termine", ha scritto in un commento sul sito Project Syndicate, in cui in cui sottolinea che "la sterlina è precipitata al suo valore più basso da oltre tre decenni, immediatamente dopo il voto, e i mercati finanziari in tutto il mondo probabilmente rimarranno instabili finche' viene negoziato il lungo e complicato processo per il divorzio politico ed economico".
"Ora lo scenario catastrofico che molti temevano si è materializzato, rendendo la disintegrazione dell'Ue praticamente irreversibile", ha scritto Soros. "I mercati finanziari di tutto il mondo rischiano di rimanere in fibrillazione durante il processo lungo e complicato del divorzio politico ed economico da parte dell'Ue". Ma non dobbiamo arrenderci", esorta infine, sostenendo che "dopo la Brexit tutti quelli di noi che credono nei valori e principi per cui la Ue è stata creata, si devono unire per salvarla, ricostruendola a fondo. Sono convinto che quando le conseguenze della Brexit si svilupperanno nelle settimane e nei mesi a venire, sempre piu' persone si uniranno a noi".
Per quanto riguarda l'Italia, infine, "la caduta del 10% del mercato azionario segnala chiaramente la vulnerabilità del paese a una crisi bancaria conclamata, che potrebbe portare al potere il movimento populista 5 stelle già l'anno prossimo".
Joint Communique from the National Indigenous Congress and the EZLN on the cowardly police attack against the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers and the indigenous community of Nochixtlán, Oaxaca.
June 20, 2016
To the People of Mexico:
To the peoples of the World:
Faced with the cowardly repressive attack suffered by the teachers and the community in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca—in which the Mexican state reminds us that this is a war on all—the peoples, nations, and tribes who make up the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation say to the dignified teachers that they are not alone, that we know that reason and truth are on their side, that the collective dignity from which they speak their resistance is unbreakable, and that this the principal weapon of those of us below.
We condemn the escalation of repression with which the neoliberal capitalist reform, supposedly about “education,” is being imposed across the entire country and principally in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Michoacán. With threats, persecutions, beatings, unjust imprisonments and now murders they try to break the dignity of the teachers in rebellion.
We call on our peoples and on civil society in general to be with the teachers who resist at all times, to recognize ourselves in them. The violence used to dispossess them of their basic work benefits with the goal of privatizing education is a reflection of the violence with which the originary peoples and rural and urban peoples are dispossessed.
Those who delight in power decided that education, health, indigenous and campesino territories, and even peace and security are a commodity for whoever can pay for them, that rights are not rights but rather products and services to be snatched away, and they dispossess, destroy, and negotiate according to what big capital dictates. And they intend to impose this aberration through bloody means, murdering and disappearing our compañer@s, sending our spokespeople to high security prisons, making shameless torture into government marketing, and with the help of the paid press, criminalizing the bravest part of Mexican society, that is, those who struggle, who do not give in, who do not sell out, and who do not give up.
We demand a halt to the repression against the teachers in struggle and the immediate and unconditional liberation of ALL political prisoners.
We invite all of the peoples of the countryside and cities to be attentive and in solidarity with the teachers’ struggle, to organize autonomously in order to remain informed and alert in the face of the storm that is upon all of us, knowing that a storm, in addition to its turmoil and chaos, also makes the ground fertile where a new world is always born.
From the mountains, countryside, valleys, canyons, and barrios of the originary peoples, nations, and tribes of Mexico.
Never Again a Mexico Without Us!
National Indigenous Congress Zapatista Army for National Liberation Mexico, June 20, 2016
(COMMONDREAMS) The Mexican government’s deadly crackdown on a teacher’s union protest has rattled the nation in recent days, as 200,000 doctors on Wednesday joined the ongoing national strike against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s neoliberal reforms.
Anti-government sentiment is mounting after police forces opened fire on a teacher protest in Oaxaca on Sunday, killing at least eight.
Since then, two high level government officials from that state, Oaxaca Minister of Indigenous Affairs Adelfo Regino Montes and Secretary of Labor Daniel Gutierrez, have resigned in protest of the “authoritarian actions that repress and kill Oaxacan people who defend their rights and the government’s negligence to any possibility of dialogue,” as Gutierrez put it.
On Wednesday, members of the medical organization Yo Soy Medico 17 from 32 states joined the ongoing strike, stating their opposition to Peña Nieto’s health reforms, which they say are a “disguised way of privatizing health in Mexico,” according to TeleSUR.
Further, the group —which translates to “I’m a Doctor”—has vocally condemned the killings and what they describe as intimidation and repression by authorities and organized crime. “According to doctors,” TeleSURexplains, “as violence has increased in Mexico they have suffered the consequences of crimes like kidnappings, enforced disappearances and killings that have gone unpunished by authorities.”
The dissident Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE) teacher’s union—which largely represents educators in Mexico’s predominantly rural and Indigenous southern states—has been staging dramatic demonstrations and road blockades against new mandated teacher evaluations, which they say ignore the challenges of their region while enabling mass layoffs.
These protests have been met with violent government repression, including the recent arrest of two of the union’s leaders. But members explain that the government’s opposition to the teacher’s union runs far deeper.
A social media post by the Twitter handle @puzzleshifter has been shared widely as a valuable explainer of the forces shaping the current violence.
“Why would [Peña Nieto] want to fire teachers en masse? Because they teach social justice curriculum as guaranteed under gains made in the Revolution,” they write. As the post explains, these teachers, known as “Normalistas,” work at the same “Escuelas Normales” that the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students were training to lead.
The post continues:
Normalistas are passionate about their profession and have a strong desire to impact the lives of children in dire rural poverty in Mexico. Many who become teachers, grew up in same communities/conditions as children they seek to teach – about their ability to change conditions.
According to the Mexican Constitution, rural [Indigenous] children have as much right to education as the children of the wealthy.
This is how and why the Escuelas Normales were instituted. However, ever since they were instituted, they have been egregiously underfunded.
This has resulted in teachers who enter the profession, specifically to teach the most left out kids, in Mexico’s society.
For this, over the years, rural teachers have been accused of bringing kids revolutionary ideas. Many say, of course, that’s our job!
So there’s been a constant battle to stay true to the goals of the Revolution to teach rural kids and Central gov to reign them in.
The government violence has also been criticized by the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which issued a joint communique on Monday blasting the “cowardly police attack,” and assuring the teachers, “you are not alone.”
“We condemn the escalation of repression with which the neoliberal capitalist reform, supposedly about ‘education,’ is being imposed across the entire country and principally in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Michoacán,” the missive states.
“We call on our peoples and on civil society in general to be with the teachers who resist at all times, to recognize ourselves in them,” it continues. “The violence used to dispossess them of their basic work benefits with the goal of privatizing education is a reflection of the violence with which the originary peoples and rural and urban peoples are dispossessed.”
The fight seems to be just beginning as the union is vowing to “stay here until the government is willing to talk.”
As one teacher from Nochixtlán toldDemocracy Now! on Tuesday: “If tomorrow the government is open to dialogue, then the conflict ends. The governor wants what he calls educational reform. And what we want is a dialogue for the kind of change that the people require, the kind that meets their needs.”
The unnamed educator continued: “If you go to our communities, there are many needs. How are the kids doing? The children can’t go to school to learn. All they think about is eating, because they don’t eat. No one can learn if they don’t sleep well, if they walked many miles to go to school. So the government should go and see what happens firsthand. And until there is a dialogue, we will not end our protest demanding educational reform.”
“And who will revive our dead?” they added. “The dialogue won’t bring our dead back to life. And those who are imprisoned, there aren’t just five or 10, there are thousands.”
As Gustavo Esteva, founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, further explained, “This is a very complex war. It doesn’t—it did not start in Oaxaca. The teachers’ struggle, it is a global struggle. It started in Colombia, in Brazil, in Chile, in the U.S.—everywhere.”
“[W]e are in a war trying to say a very firm no to this kind of education. It is useless instruction,” he added. “And we are saying no very firmly to all the so-called structural reforms that mean basically a change of only ownership. They are selling our land, our territory. The people are resisting. And then we are resisting with them to oppose this kind of operation.”
As “Czech” Anarchist Black Cross and the AntiFenix Collective, we call for international solidarity actions against the repression of anarchists in the so-called Czech Republic. This repressive wave is labeled Operation Fenix – 8 people are accused or charged, some with possible life sentences, and with many more harassed by police, interrogated, raided, devices confiscated.
Our call for international solidarity is to support all of charged and affected, but also in particular to support Martin, an anarchist who was entrapped and accused of preparation of a terrorist attack, all planned by two state infiltrators. He has been locked away already almost 14 months in terrible conditions, and in response, he has just gone on hunger strike. Especially in places where you have Czech embassies or consulates, you can show that borders can’t stop anarchist solidarity.
Although Martin’s English isn’t very good, he will be very happy to receive any mail, here is his address:
Martin Ignačák 10.8.1986 V.V. Praha – Pankrác P.O.BOX – 5 Praha 4 140 57 Czech Republic
–
On the antifenix website there are already some pictures from solidarity actions from foreign countries.
Propaganda is as old as human society. However, it developed considerably during the age of mass society, and now follows strict rules. Thierry Meyssan looks at the history and the principles of the science of lying.
Popaganda is a military technique which should be distinguished from strategic subterfuge. The former seeks to trick one’s own side, generally in order to garner support. The latter, whose antique archetype is the Trojan horse, aims to damage the adversary. As is often the case, this military technique has known many civil applications, in the commercial as well as the political sector.
While at first, the monarchic and oligarchic régimes were satisfied with making a display of their power, particularly through ceremonials and public architecture, the democratic régimes, as soon as they appeared, incited propaganda. Thus, the Athenian democracy favoured Sophism, in other words, a school of thought which attempted to present any presupposition as logical.
In the 16th century, a commercial family, the Medicis, imagined a way of re-writing its history and inventing a patrician origin for itself. To do so, it used «artistic patronage», soliciting the greatest artists of their country to materialise these lies through their works.
Later on, while religious wars were becoming generalised in Europe, Pope Gregory XV, facing the breakthrough of Protestantism, created a Ministry («dicastery») to defend and extend the Catholic faith. This was the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith («Congregatio de Propaganda Fide»), which is the origin of the word « propaganda ».
Propaganda in the industrial era
1- The Great War
The industrial era provoked a massive rural exodus, the creation of vast urban groupings and the pooling of the working class. While the «masses» entered politics, the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon studied the psychology of «crowds», in other words, the infantilisation of the individual as part of a large group. By doing so, he identified the basic principle of modern propaganda – in order to be manipulable, the individual must first be submerged in the crowd.
At the beginning of the First World War, in September 1914, the British secretly created the Bureau of War Propaganda («Wellington House») as a branch of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
- Re-adopting the model of the Medicis, they recruited the great writers of the time – such as Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells or Rudyard Kipling – to publish texts attributing imaginary crimes to the German enemy, and also painters,who would render them in the form of images.
They then also recruited the heads of the main daily newspapers - The Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Chronicle – to ensure that these dailies would publicise their falsifications.
This model was then used by President Woodrow Wilson, who created, in April 1917, the Committee on Public Information. This organisation is famous for having employed thousands of local leaders to spread the government gospel (the «Four Minute Men»). It developed visual propaganda:
- by forming a departement dedicated to the creation of posters, which produced in particular the famous «I want you !» image.
- Another group also attempted to produce films.
Above all, instead of recruiting famous writers, it gathered a group of psychologists and journalists around Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) and Walter Lippmann – the group was charged with inventing extraordinary, terrible and edifying stories on a daily basis, which they would then publish with the collaboration of the Press moguls. In this way, the orientation given by Power to artists was replaced by «storytelling», fabricated systematically according to scientific rules.
2- Second World War
While the Anglo-Saxons aimed only at striking the imagination and making adhesion to the war a popular trend, the Germans were experimenting with the means of forcing people to participate in the imaginary stories they were being told.
- They made a wide-spread use of uniforms, which enabled the individual to play a role,
- and organised grandiose spectacles - political and sporting events – which presented the opinion of the majority.
- This was without doubt the moment when «modern propaganda» was invented - in other words, the dissemination of beliefs which could not be criticised, and which could not be doubted.
The individual who had participated in a black uniform marching in torch-light parades could no longer question his Nazi beliefs without questioning himself and having to rethink his past and his vision of the future.
- Joseph Goebbels instituted a daily briefing at the Ministry of Information during which he defined the «elements of language» that the journalists were ordered to use.
It was not simply a question of convincing people, but modifying the crowds’ references. In addition, the Germans were the first to master the new means of communication, radio and the cinema. Thus they invited themselves into peoples’ homes by installing television.
Goebbels considered the art of propaganda as a combat against individuality. He underlined the importance of repetition and «brainwashing» to overcome intellectual resistance. This was even more important in that the use of television brought the crowd to the individual.
3- UN Resolutions
At the end of the Second World War, the UN General Assembly, under the insistence of the USSR and France, adopted a series of resolutions (n° 110 [1], 381 [2] and 819 [3]) which forbade propaganda, and guaranteed the access to contradictory information. Each member state wrote these principles into their own national law. But in general, legal proceedings against propaganda can only be initiated by the public Ministry, in other words, the state, while propaganda is first of all practiced by the state. So nothing changed.
4- Cold War
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviets were rivals in matters of propaganda. Contrary to a widely-accepted idea, the USSR made few innovations, except in matters of the re-writing of History. By retouching official photographs, they wiped out one current of thought or another and «disappeared» the leaders who represented them.
As for the United States, they developed radio broadcasts aimed at the Soviets (Radio Free Europe), and others aimed at the Allies (Hollywood). At the same time, they innovated by creating pemanent organisations and «think-tanks» – allegedly private and scientific - charged with the a posteriori justification of public policy. As their name indicates, the purpose of these groups is not to study and offer propositions, as university teachers do, but to test the arguments in the Sophist sense of the term.
More interestingly, when faced with nationalist insurrections in the Third World, the US Army employed propaganda techniques to intimidate the Communist rebels and maintain the neo-colonial régimes. Until then, psychological warfare had worked to make the enemy believe that they could not trust their leaders, and should accept defeat as inevitable. For example, in the Philippines, General Edward Lansdale invented and staged a mythological monster which haunted the forest and devoured human beings. In this way, he discouraged the population from going to the help of resistants who were hiding in the forest.
Propaganda in the satellite and digital age
Three phenomena have been combined over the last twenty-five years - the entertainment industry, satellites, and the arrival of digital technology.
1- The entertainment industry
Since television is a spectacle, propaganda first of all supposes the organisation of spectacular events.
1990 Iraq war
For example, in order to present the reunification of Kuwait and Iraq as a war of aggression (1990), the US Department of Defense employed a public-relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, who produced the interview of an alleged nurse. She claimed that she had seen Iraqi soldiers steal the incubators from a Kuwaiti maternity hospital, leaving 312 babies to die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agLW-otK0a4
1999 Kosovo War
In 1999, propaganda was pushed even further - NATO organised a gigantic event for the Press agencies to film and immediately impose their scripted interpretation. In three days, 290,000 Albanophones migrated to Macedonia. The resulting images made it possible to present the repression of UÇK terrorism as a plan for the extermination of Muslims («Operation Horshoe»), an invention by the German Minister for Defence, Rudolf Scharping, and thus to justify the war in Kosovo.
2001 Iraq War
Even bigger - in 2001, two planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which then collapsed. Other inexplicable events surround these events – a fire ravaged the offices of the Vice-President, two explosions occurred at the Pentagon, and a third building collapsed in New York. The incoherencies in the narration of these events was used to disarm all questioning, while the authorities hid behind the contradictions, which were attributable to live coverage. For several days, television channels broadcast over and over again the images of two planes hitting the two towers, and nothing else, until the critical capacities of their audience were exhausted. In shock, Congress voted the permanent state of emergency (Patriot Act) and a series of wars was then launched.
Manipulation achieves perfection when it hammers home its message, invites spectators to accept it, then reveals that they are being tricked and forces them to follow what they now know to be a lie.
So, in 2003, the world watched Iraqis destroy a statue of Saddam Hussein. President George W. Bush commented live that the sight of a demonstrator hitting the feet of the statue with a sledge-hammer reminded him of similar images during the fall of the Berlin Wall. The message was that the fall of President Saddam Hussein was a liberation. We then discovered a wider shot of the square, which was barricaded by the US Army, and saw that the demonstrators were in reality just a small group of actors. Then the commentators continued as if nothing had changed [4].
2- Satellites CNN
In 1989, using new communication satellites, the US Army transformed a local TV channel in Atlanta [CNN] into the first international «24-hour news network». The point was to use live coverage to guarantee the veracity of the images, since there there was no time to fake them. In reality, live coverage does not allow such images to be studied or checked [5].
- CNN passed off the attempted coup d’état by ex-Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang in China as a popular revolt which was murderously repressed on Tienanmen Square [6].
- It glorified the «Velvet Revolution» in the Czech Republic by pretending that the police had killed a demonstrator.
- It validated the discovery of the mass grave at Timisoara, in reality corpses which had been taken from a mortuary and presented as having been killed by the police during demonstrations, or else as victims of torture, in order to justify the coup d’état by Ion Iliescu against the Caucescus.
- Etc. Al-Jazeera [BBC arabic branch]
On the same principle, in 2005, the Emirate of Qatar took over the Arabo-Israeli dialogue channel Al-Jazeera [BBC arabic branch] and transformed it into a loud-speaker for the Muslim Brotherhood [7].
- In 2011, it played a central rôle in the «Arab Spring» operations. But its audience followed the same curve as the audience of CNN – after having enjoyed a resounding success with its imaginary scoops, it lost most of its audience when its lies were discovered.
Radio Marti-Cuba
The principle of radios destined for foreign parts was improved by Radio Marti [afincada en Miami], which the CIA broadcast from airborne AWACS [scout planes] off the coast of Cuba.
NSA
In 2012, a vast project was organised to disconnect Syrian TV channels from their satellite and replace them with fake programmes which were to announce the fall of the régime and the flight of its leaders. This was prepared by the use of synthetic images showing the flight of President Bachar el-Assad [8]. But seeing the reactions of Syria and Russia, the operation was cancelled, although a signal from an NSA base in Australia had already replaced that of Syrian TV on ArabSat.
3- Digital
During the same period, the progress of digital techniques, in particular the wide-spread use of computers and the Internet, caused a resurgence of the role of individuals, but without dispersing the crowd phenomenon.
In 2007, the CIA sent anonymous SMS messages to the areas inhabited by the Luos in Kenya, accusing the Kikuyus of having falsified the Presidential election. The Luos widely distributed the messages, and this led to riots. More than a thousand people were killed, and 300,000 displaced. Finally, the «ONG’s» offered to mediate, and then imposed Raila Odinga in power [9].
The same year, the CIA tested the credibility of anonymous videos filmed by portable telephones. These narrow angle sequences do not permit the visualisation of their context, and their uncertain origin makes it imossible to know where they were filmed. And yet the videos showing monks setting themselves on fire, or scenes of military repression during the «Saffron Revolution» in Myanmar were held to be authentic. They were broadcast by television channels and were seen around the world.
The coalition of lies
Propaganda techniques have not evolved over the last few years. But they have been reinforced by the creation of a coalition of lies. Until now, each state managed its own campaign, but during the war against Iraq, in 2002, coordination was set up between the Ministries for Defense of the United States, the United Kingdom and Israël, then extended to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. This coalition tried first of all to manipulate the UN inspectors in Iraq into believing in the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Then, since it failed, it set about intoxicating the international media [10].
- In 2011, it was this coalition which filmed, in an open-air studio in Qatar, the images of the arrival of the rebels on Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli. Broadcast at first by the British channel Sky News, they were sufficient to make the Libyans believe that the battle was over, when in fact it was just beginning. As a result, NATO was able to take the city without notable losses (but 40,000 dead Libyans). Saïf al-Islam Kadhafi was obliged to go down to the Square and allow himself to be applauded by his followers in order to contradict the images which had been falsely filmed there the night before by Sky.
- This coalition of lies got started during the war against Syria, which was started with the participation of 120 states and 16 international organisations – the greatest coalition in History.
In October 2011, NATO set up a show village, Jabal al-Zouia, in the North of the country. One after another, Western journalists were taken there by the public relations service of the Turkish Prime Minister. There they apparently witnessed the Free Syrian Army supported by the population. However, the operation ended when a Spanish journalist recognised the heads of this Free «Syrian» Army – the leaders of al-Qaïda in Libya, Abdelhakim Belhaj and Mahdi al-Harati [11]. But no matter, the image told the story that there really existed a vast army composed of defectors, ex-soldiers of the Syrian Arab Republic.
In 2012, for the space of a month, the world was shown Baba Amr’s revolutionaries, beseiged and bombarded by the army of the régime [12]. In reality, although the area was indeed beseiged, it had not been bombarded, because 72 Syrian soldiers were themselves surrounded in a supermarket. The jihadists blew up the houses of Christians in order to cause damage that they would blame on the Syrian Arab Republic. Tyres were burned on the rooftops so that witnesse would see the plumes of thick black smoke. France24 and Al-Jazeera paid «citizen journalists», as on-site correspondants, who witnessed a Revolutionary Tribunal. The bodies of 150 martyrs, whom the Tribunal had condemned to have their throats cut in public, were displayed on-screen as the victims of the alleged bombing [13]. On site, a celebrated Franco-Israeli-US writer, Jonathan Littell, declared that the «revolution» was a beautiful thing. At last there were images and a witness testimonial to the «cruelty of the régime».
InCoStrat
In 2013, the United Kingdom created InCoStrat, a communications company in the service of the jihadist groups. It designed logos, made video clips by portable telephone, and printed brochures for a hundred of these groups, thus giving the impression of a popular uprising against the Republic. For example, together with the SAS, it made a spectacle of the most important group, Jaysh al-Islam (Army of Islam). Saudi Arabia supplied the tanks which were delivered from Jordan. Uniforms were made in Spain [by the Fascist origings company Corte Inglés, now 10% shares hold by Qatar group] and distributed to the jihadists for an officer promotion ceremony. All this was choerographed and filmed by professionals in order to give the impression that the army was organised like regular forces and was capable of rivaling with the Syrian Arab Army [14]. The idea was planted that this really was a civil war, and yet the images only showed a few hundred extras, most of whom were foreigners.
