Komunitas
lemmy.world
I’m sorry. The corporate assholes don’t deserve to pad their fat wallets based on your free labor, but it’s still absolutely the loss of something you love when you step away and it hurts. I’m still grieving losing Apollo and all of the goofy, weird ass little subs and brilliant human beings who made me laugh and cry every day on Reddit. It’s not been replaced in my life. It took millions of us almost 20 years to make that stupid website something incredible…I can’t deny that it was incredible at points. It’s gone, it’s just a website now and an app with ads every 3rd pixel just like the rest. There is still some good content and good people, just as there are on TikTok, Bookface, X and insta. The decent shit that is there, on all of the platforms, is overwhelmed by their horrible algorithm trying to sell you shit and increase engagement to monetize your every click.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Might? It already has. If shorts were simply a separate section of YouTube with all of its functionality, then that’s understandable. But as they stand, shorts are just YouTube with both reduced functionality (forced vertical aspect ratio, no seek bar, time limit) AND all of the existing flaws (bad recommendation algorithm, reposted content, etc. ) Unless you are some kind of tech contrarian hipster, I don’t think there is one thing that YouTube shorts does better than TikTok, or heck, Instagram Reels.
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pawb.social
If banning tik tok ends up galvanizing demand for healthcare reform I’m going to laugh my ass off
Komunitas
hexbear.net
One breadfruit tree produces hundreds of pounds of tasty, nutritious fruit within a few years of being planted. Apparently all they need is high temperatures, good soil, and plenty of water. That’s it. No maintenance. Capitalists don’t use them because there’s no way to profit from them. I think I learned about this from a random tiktok video. I remembered Herman Melville’s other book, Typee, a memoir about how he ran away from a ship in the South Pacific and lived among indigenous people for six months or a year or so and had the time of his life. He loved those people, and they lived on breadfruit. All they did (simplifying obviously) was hang out, swim, and eat breadfruit. And meanwhile, we are here breaking our backs and/or brains, paying more for groceries every week while wages stagnate, and none of it has to be like this. Of course people want a little variety in their diets, of course there’s already enough food for everyone, but with breadfruit alone we could provide basic nutrition to everyone for free or next to nothing with no questions asked. Food insecurity, starvation, food deserts, malnutrition, animal suffering, pollution, none of this needs to exist. It’s all there so that the Epsteinists can buy more yachts. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but I was just thinking about this. I’m not even sure I’ve tasted breadfruit.
Komunitas
feddit.de
Nothing has changed I don’t believe anything has changed neurologically or psychologally in the last decades. There have always been people who are more susceptible to consume “trashy” (provoking, easy to consume) media. Once it was low-quality newspapers (a german band once refered to them as “fear, hate, tits and the weather forecast”, which fits really well!), then it was trash TV, then mobile games, and now TikTok and stuff. Some people are just attracted to flashy stuff and can’t get enough dopamine. It’s just that the latter example is very new, and everything new is automatically bad, no matter what. There have always been young people who read books, create art, video game, listen or create music, have hobbies, and so on. BUT, something has changed: One word: attention economy. Capitalism realized, that especially in combination with ads, you can create A LOT of money by making easy to consume content. If a platform uses dark patterns (emotional or funny content, reinforcement, short content instead of longer stuff, flashy stuff, likes, endless scrolling, keeping you as long as possible in the app, etc.), it makes a lot more money with it’s users. Years of algorithms perfectionized manipulating you and your attention span with supernatural stimuli (as mentioned above). What to do with those informations? Notice, how boring Lemmy, RSS-feeds, and stuff like that are? After checking my posts for this day, I’m done and do something different, like cleaning the kitchen. Now, I’m on the toilet and don’t have anything else to do, and I have fun answering you :) That’s how our devices should work. I don’t wanna be a slave, I want to own my device, and not the other way around. Tbh, I’m grateful Reddit went downhill. A year ago I could never imagine nuking my account. I spent my whole teenage and now adult years (15 - now) on that shithole, was super addicted and couldn’t spend 2 minutes without checking my phone, even in meetings, dates, and so on. It was just as bad as vaping for me. I knew, that it was slowly killing every brain cell, but “loved” it too much. Thanks, u/spez ❤️ You killed Reddit for me and made my new “Reddit” (-> Lemmy, but with the same app) THAT boring for me I bought an e-reader now to read books instead😂
Komunitas
hexbear.net
I think I’ve asked this before a long time ago. One of my paranoid tinfoil hat theories is that I think cringe culture was pushed by algorithms and has now has become a convenient tool for the right to groom people into policing ‘otherness’ more harshly. I think it’s because it has that particular right-wing playbook stank to it and because I can smell that style of using shame to manipulate that right-wingers love from a mile away. Hell, this site came from a part of the left that was originally a reaction to that, using bullying but instead using it to punch back at the punchers, so to speak (although we’ve changed a little and good, it’s not needed anymore because everyone bullies chuds now). Cringe culture was big around 2016ish, while it mostly targeted blue hair liberals it often extended to making fun of whatever marginalized group you can think of. It was always there, of course, but not enough to actually be taken seriously unless you had high-school bully brain. Anyone that wasn’t a chud or too tech illiterate to curate their algorithm tended to lose interest. Fast forward to the 20s’ and now instead of targeting specific marginalized groups or political stuff, there is a more widespread sort of bullying towards any sort of ‘otherness’. Strong emotions, being passionate, being too quirky, looking out of place, being too young, being too old. Being too much of well, anything. Let’s just say it’s not a fun time to be neurodiverengent in particular. So we know from those files that Gamergate (and I think some Chan spaces?) were involved with promoting right-wing idiology. Well, sure is interesting that after people started posting about the Israel genocide on tiktok, the US freaked out and took control. And now we see a massive resurgence of cringe culture, again. Alongside with other right-wing garbage (think manosphere and so on) Of course, it’s always been there and is likely just a totally organic consequence of people growing up with social media and the digital panopticon. But notice how everything that is cringe fits neatly into what the right think the left is? I wouldn’t be surprised if we learn in a decade or so that all of this was at least taken advantage of by the right as a form of social policing, a way to undo all that pesky self acceptance and understanding the lgbtq community and other marginalised groups worked so hard to normalise. It’s a way to punish outgroups while getting under the libs “safe to make fun of” radar (and many leftists too, you are not immune!) Seems like a good way for the right to bring back that repressive order they love so much and make everyone afraid to step out of their assigned role again.
Komunitas
programming.dev
So TL:DR, chrome is like internet explorer was before firefox. It does some things outside the standard, and because it’s the modern day “default”. sites sloppily code to work with it, and other browsers are left carrying the bag because if tiktok doesn’t work on firefox, people will view that as a firefox problem. Even if firefox is the one actually following the standards when tiktok and chrome aren’t.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Meanwhile, American users are flocking to RedNote because authorities have worked themselves into a lather over privacy concerns about TikTok, while U.S. tech giants harvest user data with industrial efficiency. The difference? American data collection is done for profit, and Chinese data collection is done for control. Pick your poison. Hard to argue Zuck and Elon don’t want control either…
Komunitas
lemy.nl
De Amerikaanse popster Ariana Grande heeft bezwaar gemaakt tegen het gebruik van haar muziek bij een video over het strenge migratiebeleid van de regering-Trump. In die video, die door het Witte Huis is geplaatst op TikTok, […]
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lemmygrad.ml
Disclaimer: The author of this article is not a communist and is more critical toward Lenin and the early Bolshevik national policies than i would be. Some of the criticism is warranted, but only in hindsight, and much of the context is left out here – context which made the decisions that the Bolsheviks took at that time appear justified given the situation and the conditions they were facing. That being said, the article, while having certain biases, is historically accurate, and by far the greater part of it which focuses on German and Austro-Hungarian involvement and on later CIA Cold War machinations is spot on, at least in my opinion. If you prefer reading a more condensed version of this article, here is a thread summing it up: https://xcancel.com/rinalu_/status/2064558680398516467 Today, most people take nations for granted. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Russians, Germans and many others are commonly viewed as distinct national communities that have existed for centuries. The documentary record tells a more complicated story. In the nineteenth century, ideas of nationality became increasingly popular across Europe. Before that, people more often identified themselves by their religion, region, local community, or allegiance to a monarch and ruling dynasty than by belonging to a nation in the modern sense. As nationalist ideas spread, governments, intellectuals, political movements, and foreign powers began to participate in the process of defining who belonged to which nation, what language they should speak, what history they should remember, and even what they should call themselves. The lands of the former Rus’ became one of the most important arenas of this process. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, competing political forces sought to shape identities across these territories through schools, churches, newspapers, museums, universities, administrative institutions, and state policy. In the most consequential cases, these efforts were not local in origin. They were designed, financed, and directed by outside powers pursuing their own geopolitical objectives against Russia. This article examines how these processes unfolded from Austrian Galicia to German-occupied Ober Ost, from the First World War and Brest-Litovsk to Soviet korenizatsiya and Ukrainization. Drawing on official documents, memoirs, government correspondence, newspapers, census data, and contemporary accounts, it explores how language, education, historical narratives, and political institutions became instruments in the construction of new national identities across the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. Ukrainian nationalist delegation saluting Adolf Hitler during the German occupation of Ukraine in the Second World War. The image illustrates the cooperation that existed between segments of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and Nazi Germany during the early stages of the war, when some nationalist organizations viewed the German invasion of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to pursue the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. German Geopolitics and the Fragmentation of Russia Among the German states, new geopolitical concepts such as Mitteleuropa emerged, envisioning the creation of a German-centered continental empire united with Austro-Hungary and extending into territories of the Russian Empire.[1] This vision was closely connected to the Berlin-Baghdad-Basra railway project, which aimed to establish a direct corridor from Central Europe to the Near East under German leadership.[2] Map of the Berlin-Baghdad-Basra Railway project. The planned route would have linked Germany with the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Gulf, providing a direct overland corridor from Central Europe to the Middle East and reducing dependence on British-controlled sea routes. German ambitions extended far beyond securing the Baghdad Railway. By the early twentieth century, many German strategists had concluded that Russia’s rapid population growth, accelerating industrialization, expanding railway network, and ongoing military modernization would eventually shift the balance of power in Europe against Germany.[3] Rather than accommodate the rise of a stronger Russia, influential circles in Berlin increasingly sought to contain and weaken it. The fragmentation of the Russian Empire into a series of smaller national and regional entities was viewed by many German policymakers as a means of permanently weakening Russia and securing German predominance in Eastern Europe. German Randstaatenpolitik envisioned a belt of politically and economically dependent buffer states stretching from Finland and the Baltic lands to Poland and Ukraine.[4] By 1905, the German General Staff was already preparing for a large pan-European war. The main obstacle to German continental dominance was the simultaneous existence of France in the west and the Russian Empire in the east. Under these conditions, Chief of the German General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen developed the plan that bears his name. Its objective was not defense but the overturn of the existing European balance of power and its replacement with a German-dominated continental order.[6] The plan rested on one key assumption: that Russia would be slow to mobilize. Germany planned to knock France out of the war within weeks, then turn east. The plan would prove wrong on that assumption — and the consequences would force Germany to find other ways to deal with Russia. By the end of the nineteenth century, the “national question” had already become one of the central tools of this broader strategy. If Germany envisioned the fragmentation of the Russian Empire into smaller buffer states, Austro-Hungary was already experimenting with identical methods inside its own borderlands. The empire understood that language, religion, and identity could be used to divide as well as to unite. Nowhere would this policy become more consequential than in Galicia, a historical land of Rus’, where Vienna increasingly viewed the local Russian population as both a geopolitical danger and a potential instrument in the larger struggle against Russia itself. Galicia: From the World of Rus’ to the Habsburg Frontier Ukraine as a political project began in the late nineteenth century on territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose population largely identified as Russian and was commonly referred to as Rusyns. Before becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these lands had been incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For centuries, the local Russian population was subjected to sustained religious, cultural, and political persecution aimed at eroding its Orthodox and Russian identity and weakening its connection to the wider Russian world.[10] Although Polonization had a noticeable influence on parts of the Rusyn population, until 1848 the Rusyns themselves, along with Poles, Austrians, and other neighboring groups, generally regarded them as part of the broader Russian (Rus’) people. One example can be found in the educational materials prepared for the Rusyn population by Ivan Mohylnytsky, one of the pioneers of Rusyn education in Galicia. His Bukvar yazyka russkago (”Primer of the Russian Language”) explicitly identified the language as Russian.[17] At the same time, German-language publications and Austrian administrative documents often referred to the same language and population as Ruthenian, a Latin-derived term historically used for Rus’ and its people. Translation: “Grammar of the Ruthenian, or Little Russian Language in Galicia”. Austrian Empire, 1834. The self-identification of Galicia’s Rusyn population as part of the broader Russian people was not a matter of scholarly inference. It was stated openly, in print, by the Rusyns themselves. The first issue of Zoria Galitskaia (”Galician Dawn”), published in Lvov on May 15, 1848 by the Stauropegion Institute, opened with a direct address to its readership: “We, Galician Rusyns, belong to the great Russian people, which speaks one language and numbers 15 million, of whom one and a half million inhabit the Galician land.”[49] The newspaper was printed in Church Slavonic-inflected Russian script at the Stauropegion Institute — the same institution that Vienna would later work systematically to neutralize. In 1848, it spoke for a population that had no doubt about what it was. This enduring sense of belonging to the wider world of Rus’ increasingly concerned the authorities in Vienna. For the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this posed a serious problem, as strong pro-Russian sentiment and aspirations for cultural and political unity with Russia persisted among parts of the local population. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was an extraordinarily complex multinational state that included not only Germans and Hungarians, but also large Slavic populations such as Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, and Rusyns. As a result, the “Slavic Question” became one of the most sensitive geopolitical challenges facing the empire. Vienna feared both Slavic separatism and the growing influence of Russia, which had emerged as the largest sovereign Slavic power.[8] Ethnic composition of Austria-Hungary in 1910. The empire contained numerous Slavic populations, including Poles, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, and the Russian (Rusyn) population of Galicia. Fearing both Slavic separatism and the influence of Russia, Vienna increasingly turned to policies that sought to reshape local identities and redirect political loyalties toward the Habsburg state. Consequently, Austro-Hungarian policy increasingly focused on fragmenting the Slavic world and redirecting smaller Slavic groups away from Russia and toward loyalty to Vienna. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was annexed by Austro-Hungary in 1908, Benjamin Kállay sought to create a distinct Bosnian identity (Bošnjastvo) through state institutions and administrative policy, aiming to weaken competing Serbian and Croatian national loyalties and bind the population more closely to Vienna.[9] Two instruments were central to this restructuring in Galicia: religion and language. After the annexation of large parts of western Rus’ by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the local Russian Orthodox population became the target of policies aimed at bringing it into union with Rome. These efforts later continued under Austro-Hungarian rule. The Greek Catholic Church preserved many Eastern Christian rites while placing its clergy under the authority of the Vatican.[11] It served as a political mechanism that weakened traditional ties to the Orthodox world and gradually redirected sections of the population toward Polish and later Austro-Hungarian political influence. Language worked alongside religion. Polish political circles in Galicia maintained that “the Ruthenians were simply Poles of the Uniate rite” and that the language of Galicia’s Ruthenians was merely a dialect of Polish.[12] During the centuries of Polish rule, the Rusyn population faced increasing pressure to use Polish in public and administrative life, contributing to the gradual marginalization of the traditional Rus’ written language.[13] Similar policies continued under Austro-Hungarian rule. Vienna increasingly supported and funded those currents within Rusyn society that emphasized a separate identity distinct from Russia. One of the principal channels through which this policy operated was the Greek Catholic Church, which enjoyed state support and played a central role in education and cultural life. In 1816, a society of Greek Catholic priests associated with figures such as Ivan Mohylnytsky, Josyf Levytsky, and Josyp Lozynsky was established in Przemyśl and became an important intermediary between the Russian community and the Habsburg state. The organization promoted education among the population and produced textbooks in the local Rus’ language.[14] While many of its members continued to view the local population as part of the wider world of Rus’, their educational work helped lay the foundations for a separate Galician literary tradition. These publications also reflected substantial Polish linguistic influence. For example, Josyf Levytsky’s grammar frequently explained linguistic features through comparisons with Polish.[15] Contemporary Galician Russian activists repeatedly complained that schools operated primarily in Polish or German, that pupils were not taught Russian letters, and that government offices and official correspondence functioned almost exclusively in Polish or German, creating powerful incentives for linguistic and cultural assimilation.[16] The Russophile movement in Galicia had a distinctly popular character. Figures such as Ivan Naumovich worked not through state institutions but directly among the peasant population, promoting literacy, the Russian literary language, and Orthodox religious identity at the village level. This was a movement from below, rooted in the existing self-identification of the Rusyn peasantry. The Ukrainian project that would eventually displace it moved in the opposite direction: from above, through universities, administrative institutions, and state-funded cultural organizations. During the Revolutions of 1848, which shook Europe and threatened the stability of the Habsburg monarchy, Galicia’s Russian population became increasingly active in public and political life. In the same year, the Sobor Ruskykh Uchenykh (Council of Russian Scholars) convened in Lvov. Its participants discussed education, language policy, the reduction of Polish influence in the local language, and the future of Galicia’s Russian population. Institutions such as the Stauropegion Institute and the People’s House in Lvov later continued to promote these ideas, openly advocating the cultural unity of Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians while supporting the use of the Russian literary language. Vienna viewed these developments with growing concern. The authorities feared that the spread of the Russian literary language would strengthen Galicia’s cultural ties with the Russian Empire and weaken local loyalty to Austria. Resistance was particularly strong within the Polish administration of Galicia, which sought to preserve its dominant position in the province. One of the most influential representatives of this policy was Count Agenor Gołuchowski, the Polish governor of Galicia. Under his administration, efforts were made to separate the Rusyn population from the broader Russian cultural tradition and limit the influence of the Russian language. For the Polish political elite, the growth of a Russian-oriented movement in Galicia posed a double threat. It challenged both Polish dominance within the province and the broader Polish national project, which viewed Galicia as a future center of Polish political and cultural influence. As a result, many Polish officials regarded the spread of Russian literary language and identity among the Rusyn population as contrary to their own political interests. The Invention of Galicia Despite decades of religious, linguistic, and educational pressure, direct attempts to detach Galicia’s Rusyn population from the broader Russian cultural sphere produced only limited results. As a consequence, a more ambitious strategy gradually emerged. Rather than simply suppressing existing identities, imperial authorities increasingly sought to cultivate a new political and cultural space: Galicia itself. As historian Larry Wolff has noted, Galicia was largely an invented province of the Habsburg monarchy, and only then began to accumulate cultural meanings over the course of its provincial history in the context of the empire.[18] The very name illustrates the point. The Habsburgs took the Latinized form of Halych — a single medieval city — and rendered it as “Galicia,” a name that conveniently echoed the ancient Spanish region of Galicia on the Iberian Peninsula, lending an air of historical depth to what was in fact a freshly drawn administrative boundary. The territory itself had a name of its own: it was part of the historical lands of Rus’, and as late as 1253 its ruler Daniel of Galicia was crowned Rex Rusiae — King of Rus’ — by papal legates. The Habsburgs erased that name and replaced it with one borrowed from a local city and given a Latin form. Education, language, historical scholarship, and cultural organizations became central instruments in the construction of what followed. Even the figure of Taras Shevchenko, who today is often presented as a symbol of an already fully formed separate Ukrainian nation and an ancient independent Ukrainian language, in reality demonstrates just how late and artificially the modern Ukrainian national project began to take shape. Shevchenko died in 1861, during a period when a standardized Ukrainian language in its modern form simply did not yet exist. There was no unified literary norm, no standardized orthography, and no widely recognized Ukrainian nation separate from the broader Russian people. What is especially revealing is the very title of his famous textbook: not “Ukrainian Primer,” but Bukvar Yuzhnorusskiy (”South Russian Primer”).[19] Title page of Taras Shevchenko’s Bukvar Yuzhnorusskiy (“South Russian Primer”), 1861. At the time, Shevchenko did not call the language “Ukrainian” but “South Russian.” The publication illustrates how different the linguistic and national categories of the mid-nineteenth century were from those commonly projected backward today. Moreover, a significant portion of Shevchenko’s correspondence, diaries, and many of his writings were composed in the Russian literary language, which was the natural cultural and linguistic environment of the educated population of Malorossia in the nineteenth century. If a separate ancient Ukrainian nation with its own distinct language had already fully existed, one of its central symbols would not have published a “South Russian Primer” and written extensively in Russian. The policy deepened under Count Agenor Goluchowski, who served as Governor of Galicia from 1851 to 1859. As Monchalovsky documented, it was during his tenure that the Russian language was removed from schools and Russian public figures placed under police surveillance.[23] The 1859 Alphabet War, in which Austrian authorities attempted to replace the traditional Cyrillic script with a Polish-based Latin alphabet, met with widespread resistance from the Rusyn intelligentsia and ultimately failed. Direct suppression had reached its limits. The founding of the Ukrainophile newspaper Meta in Lvov in 1863 marked the shift toward a different strategy. Its first act was publishing “Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy” (“Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished”), a text consciously modeled on the Polish national anthem “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła” (”Poland Has Not Yet Perished”), establishing in print the ideological continuity between the Polish national movement and the emerging Ukrainophile press in Galicia.[27] By 1863, the project of constructing a separate Galician identity had acquired its own political infrastructure, its own press, and direct organizational ties to Polish nationalist interests. Exporting the Ukrainian Project Into Russia By this point, the Ukrainian project was no longer developing merely as a local Galician phenomenon. Austro-Hungarian and Polish political circles increasingly viewed it as a geopolitical instrument that could be projected directly into the Russian Empire itself. Vienna’s calculations were explicit: the Austrian government planned to use the Ukrainian movement to weaken Russia’s role as the Slavic arbiter of Europe while simultaneously creating a counterweight to Polish influence on the empire’s eastern frontier.[22] The goal was not simply the preservation of regional dialects or traditions, but the gradual construction of a separate identity capable of weakening the unity of the broader Russian people from within. The practical expansion of the movement into the Russian Empire had begun in 1861, when the journal “Osnova” was launched with the goal of popularizing Ukrainophile ideas, though it was shut down already in 1862 due to financial difficulties. The growing radicalism among certain Ukrainian and Polish intellectual circles, many of whom openly promoted separatist ideas and maintained ideological connections with Austro-Hungarian political interests, eventually led the Russian government to impose restrictions on Ukrainian-language publications inside the empire. Concerned by the spread of South Russian separatist ideas disguised as peasant educational and literary activity, and increasingly viewing the movement as politically connected to foreign anti-Russian interests, the Russian government issued the Valuev Circular in 1863. The decree restricted the promotion of separatist and identity-based propaganda through educational and religious publications in the Little Russian dialect, while still allowing works of fiction and literature. The circular stated: “With regard to the printing of books in the Little Russian language, instructions should be issued through the censorship authorities so that only works belonging to the sphere of belles-lettres may be permitted for publication in this language; while the publication of books in the Little Russian language concerning religious subjects, educational materials, and generally books intended for the elementary reading of the people should be suspended…” By the 1870s, many of these restrictions were already being inconsistently enforced or had largely ceased to function in practice. The Valuev Circular was followed in 1876 by the Ems Ukaz, which expanded restrictions on the publication, importation, and public use of certain Ukrainian-language materials. Russian authorities increasingly viewed the Ukrainophile movement not as a purely literary phenomenon but as one connected to political separatism and influenced by developments in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. Austro-Hungarian propagandists immediately began spreading the narrative that the Russian Empire had “banned the Ukrainian language.” In reality, both the Valuev Circular and the Ems Ukaz were directed against educational, religious, and political activities associated with the emerging separatist movement, not against all use of the language. Works of fiction and belles-lettres continued to be permitted throughout. The Ems Ukaz had an unintended consequence that Austrian and Polish strategists were quick to exploit. By restricting Ukrainophile activity inside the empire, Russia effectively transferred the organizational center of the Ukrainian movement to Galicia, where Austrian constitutional freedoms allowed what was forbidden in St. Petersburg. The financial record of 1881 documents how deliberately this opportunity was seized. Prince Czartoryski pledged 14,000 guilders and Prince Sapieha 6,000 guilders to relocate Panteleimon Kulish and his proposed newspaper Hutor to Lvov, while Galician Polish landowners offered to pay subscriptions for their Russian villages. The purpose was stated openly: to make Lvov the organizational center of the Ukrainian movement.[44] Kulish ultimately refused and left Galicia, but the logic of the project did not depend on any single individual. By the 1880s and 1890s, Austro-Hungarian authorities intensified efforts to construct a separate Ukrainian literary language deliberately distanced from Russian. The writing system known as Kulishivka, developed by Panteleimon Kulish on the phonetic principle of “write as you hear,” was imposed by Austrian authorities in schools across Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia from 1892. Several traditional letters shared with Russian were removed from the alphabet, including “ы,” “э,” and “ъ,” while new characters such as “є,” “ї,” and the apostrophe were introduced. The orthographic barrier between Galician writing and the Russian literary language was now institutional. The New Era agreement of 1890, coordinated in advance with Governor Badeni and Metropolitan Sembratovich and announced by Yulian Romanchuk at the Galician Diet on November 25, completed the political framework. Its core declaration, that Rusyns were a separate people distinct from both Poles and Russians, was the programmatic charter of an administratively engineered identity.[45] The consequences were immediate: Russian-language books were confiscated from the Lvov Theological Seminary, Russian student organizations were closed, and priests who refused the programme were stripped of their positions.[45] A crucial turning point came in 1894, when Mykhailo Hrushevsky was appointed to the newly established chair of history at the University of Lemberg — a state institution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, funded and administered by Vienna. His appointment was not incidental: the chair itself was created by the Habsburg authorities as part of the broader institutional infrastructure through which a distinct Ukrainian identity was to be cultivated and propagated. He hoped to teach Ukrainian history to Galician Rusyn students whom he already envisioned as the Ukrainians of the twentieth century, and viewed Galicia as the foundation from which that project would grow.[20] In 1898, he began publishing his monumental ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, advancing the idea that Ukrainians constituted a distinct historical nation separate from Russians and that Ukraine-Rus’ was the primary successor of ancient Rus’.[21] Through this reinterpretation of history, Hrushevsky provided the Ukrainian project with the historical legitimacy that administrative pressure and linguistic reform alone could not supply. By the end of the nineteenth century, Galicia had become one of the principal centers promoting the idea of the unification of Ukrainian lands as part of a broader geopolitical strategy aimed at weakening Russia from within. As Paul Robert Magocsi, one of the foremost Western academic specialists on Galicia, has documented, by the turn of the twentieth century Ukrainian activists in both empires came to regard Galicia as ‘a Piedmont from which a future independent state on all-Ukrainian territory would grow.’[26] That this project was always intended to reach beyond Galicia into Russia itself was made explicit by the movement’s own participants. As early as 1910, a candidate of the Ukrainian party in Galicia publicly called upon Galicians to “organize an uprising of Little Russians in Russia, to break a window in the great prison of peoples” — the language of a geopolitical operation, not a cultural movement. Austrian and German authorities provided substantial material support to Ukrainian-oriented publications and organizations. The Vienna journal “Ukrainische Rundschau” received 12,000 German marks in 1909 alone, while the Chernivtsi newspaper “Bukovyna” was allocated 24,000 Austrian crowns.[27] A special analytical department on Ukrainian affairs was organized within the German Foreign Ministry, while Austrian authorities in Galicia simultaneously engaged in identifying and suppressing pro-Russian elements among the population. Prior to 1914, Austrian strategic planning treated Galicia not merely as a defensive borderland but as the intended core of a future Ukrainian political entity extending into the Malorossian territories of the Russian Empire. In his memoirs, Max Ronge describes the activities of the Bund zur Befreiung der Ukraine, which operated under Austrian patronage with the explicit aim of detaching Malorossia from Russia. Ronge’s own assessment was candid: despite its ambitions, “die damalige Ukraine überhaupt nicht befreien lassen wollte” — the Ukraine of that time had no desire to be liberated at all.[25] The Piedmont model suffered from a fundamental weakness. The population it was designed to mobilize did not recognize itself in the identity Galicia was meant to project eastward. As Vergun observed in 1915, Galicia’s importance to Vienna lay precisely in its potential to serve as a wedge between the Russian population and its historical identity— a role the Ukrainian movement had been cultivated to perform over several decades.[48] The Militarization of the Ukrainian Movement Simultaneously, Galicia became the center of a growing network of youth, cultural, and paramilitary organizations that combined national education with physical and military training. Among the most influential were the Sokil movement, the scouting organization Plast, and the Sich societies, whose members participated in military drills and patriotic instruction. These were not spontaneous civic associations. They operated within an institutional framework actively supported by Austrian authorities, and their ideological content was inseparable from the broader project of constructing an anti-Russian Ukrainian identity. The history that was rewritten in the universities, the language that was reformed in the schools, and the political program that was cultivated in the press: all of it found its organizational expression in these formations. Centurion Y. Budzynovsky with the staff of his company, Austria-Hungary, c. 1915. On the eve of the First World War, these organizations provided much of the personnel and ideological foundation for the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, the volunteer formation that entered Austro-Hungarian service in 1914.[28] Directly before the outbreak of the war, during celebrations dedicated to Taras Shevchenko organized by the Sich movement, approximately 12,000 armed and trained participants were assembled. Many would later volunteer for service on the Russian front as part of the Austro-Hungarian Ukrainian Sich Riflemen Legion, created specifically for the coming conflict with Russia. The scale of this mobilization was not accidental. It was the result of decades of educational, linguistic, historical, and organizational work carried out under Austrian patronage, which gradually transformed Galicia into the principal center of the Ukrainian national movement. The significance of these developments extended far beyond the First World War itself. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Galicia had been transformed into a fully developed ideological and organizational center of the Ukrainian national movement.[29] A new generation had grown up within a political and linguistic environment shaped by decades of educational reform, nationalist activism, and historical reinterpretation. It was from this milieu that the future leaders and ideologues of twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalism would emerge. One figure illustrates this continuity with particular clarity. Stepan Bandera was born in 1909 in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, not in Russia, not in Ukraine as it would later be defined, but in the very province that had spent decades serving as the primary laboratory for the construction of an anti-Russian identity. By the time of his birth, Galicia already possessed a fully developed infrastructure of Ukrainian nationalist activity built with direct Austrian and Polish support as an instrument against Russia. He did not create this world. He was produced by it. The ideological and organizational continuity between the Austro-Hungarian Galician project of the late nineteenth century and the radical Ukrainian nationalism of the mid-twentieth century, including its collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, was direct and unbroken. OUN leaflet distributed in 1941 during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The document calls for the creation of an independent Ukrainian state under the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), proclaims Stepan Bandera the leader of the movement, and advocates an armed nationalist revolution. It identifies Moscow, Poland, Hungarians, and Jews as enemies of the Ukrainian people and explicitly calls upon readers to “destroy them” (“Нищ їх!”). The leaflet presents the OUN as the sole legitimate representative of the Ukrainian nation and calls for the transfer of political, economic, educational, and administrative institutions into the hands of a future Ukrainian nationalist state. Talerhof and the War Against Russian Identity Russian culture in Galicia did not disappear under sustained political pressure. By the end of the 19th century, Russian cultural and educational societies, political organizations, 17 Russian-language newspapers, and approximately 50 Russian-language journals were operating in the region. The Rusyn population continued to identify as Russian in the broad cultural and historical sense that had defined their self-understanding for generations. The response from Austro-Hungarian authorities and their Ukrainian political clients was systematic delegitimization. All Russophiles were branded “Muscovites” and “agents of Moscow,” accused of operating on Tsarist subsidy. Orthodox clergy and Russophile intellectuals became targets of continuous denunciation, frequently initiated by Uniate clergy themselves. These denunciations escalated into direct physical violence against Orthodox priests and peasants who refused conversion to the Union or Roman Catholicism. Among the figures caught in this campaign was Hryhoriy Hunkevych (1849–1924), Greek Catholic priest and member of the Austrian parliament, who converted to Orthodoxy and was subsequently arrested by Austrian authorities as a consequence of that conversion. The repression that followed was not improvised. The Austro-Hungarian authorities established two internment facilities constructed specifically for Rusyns who refused identification with the Ukrainian national project being imposed from above. Talerhof, in Styria, functioned as a mass internment camp drawing from every layer of Galician and Bukovinian society: peasants, villagers, craftsmen, lower clergy, teachers, and community organizers — anyone whose Russian identity or Orthodox faith marked them as a political threat. Theresienstadt (Terezín), in Bohemia, held the intelligentsia, senior clergy, and political figures of the Russophile movement, among them Dmitry Markov and Vladimir Dudykevych, both serving members of the Austrian parliament, and Maxim Sandovich, an Orthodox priest subsequently executed by Austrian military authorities in September 1914. Survivor accounts and the documentary record compiled in the Talerhof Almanac describe conditions that contemporaries called a hell on earth. According to Sulyak, cited by Melnychuk, no fewer than 20,000 Galicians and Bukovinians passed through Talerhof’s internment alone. Together, the two facilities were the institutional expression of a political conclusion the Habsburg administration had reached: that Russian identity in Galicia could not be argued away and would have to be physically destroyed. Talerhof Cemetery “Under the Pines,” 1917. Source: Album of photographs from the concentration camp for war-arrested Russian Galicians and Bukovinians in Talerhof, Styria, 1914-1917. Published by the Talerhof Committee, Lvov, 1923. Piłsudski and Prometheism Here another extremely important figure appears, without whom it is impossible to understand how the idea of fragmenting Russia evolved from an Austro-Hungarian and German strategy into a full-fledged Polish state program. This figure was Józef Piłsudski, who today is presented as the “father of Polish independence,” although in reality he became one of the earliest twentieth-century politicians to actively seek cooperation with Russia’s foreign rivals in support of separatist and nationalist movements inside the Russian Empire. Although Piłsudski was born in the Russian Empire, his political and military career increasingly developed within Austro-Hungarian Galicia. By the years immediately preceding the First World War, his rifle organizations operated with the knowledge and support of Austro-Hungarian military authorities, who viewed Polish nationalist forces as a potentially useful instrument in a future conflict with Russia. Moreover, photographs of Piłsudski together with representatives of Austro-Hungarian military and intelligence circles have survived, circles within which he was effectively building his future anti-Russian structures. It was precisely on Austro-Hungarian territory that Piłsudski organized rifle associations and the future Polish Legions, which, with the outbreak of the First World War, would be deployed against the Russian Empire. Austro-Hungarian intelligence officer Gustav Iszkowski (with a cane), Józef Piłsudski, and other Polish activists, c. 1914. Already during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, Piłsudski traveled to Tokyo as a representative of the Polish Socialist Party. There, he sought cooperation with Japanese authorities against the Russian Empire. In a memorandum presented to Japanese officials, he argued that the political objective of the PPS was the breakup of the Russian Empire into separate states and territories and proposed cooperation between Polish revolutionaries and Japan against Russia.[56] In practice, this implied support for nationalist and separatist movements within the empire. The discussions included intelligence activities, sabotage operations, and support for anti-Russian movements within the empire. Piłsudski described Poland as a potential ally capable of creating serious difficulties for Russia in the midst of the war.[30] In other words, while Russia was fighting in the Far East, a Polish revolutionary was traveling to Russia’s military enemy and effectively proposing that the national question be used as a weapon against the Russian Empire itself. One detail appears almost symbolic. Piłsudski’s route to Japan passed through New York and San Francisco. Formally, this may simply have been a convenient route across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Yet the geography of the trip itself reveals the scale of the geopolitical game. A Polish revolutionary from the Austro-Hungarian political environment traveled through the Anglo-American world to Japan in the middle of a war in order to propose a plan for weakening Russia from within. Later, this logic would become known as “Prometheism,” a program aimed at supporting national movements inside Russia, and later inside the USSR, in order to detach Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Crimea, the Volga region, and other territories from the Russian center. His “Prometheism” rested on a core principle: Russia should not exist as a single great power. It had to be dismantled into manageable national fragments, while Poland would become the center of a new geopolitical order between Germany and Russia. That is why, for Piłsudski, the Ukrainian, Belarusian, Caucasian, and other “national questions” were never humanitarian causes, but geopolitical weapons. Thus, Polish, Ukrainian, and other nationalist projects on the western borderlands of Russia were not developing separately from one another, but inside a single geopolitical logic. Piłsudski in 1904 had no Polish state behind him. He was a stateless revolutionary operating from Austro-Hungarian territory, proposing to Japan the same fragmentation of Russia that German strategists were simultaneously theorizing as Randstaatenpolitik and Mitteleuropa. The national question — Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, Caucasian — was in each case an instrument for the same objective: the permanent dismemberment of Russia as a unified great power. […] CIA and the Ukrainian Project: A Cold War Inheritance The project did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany or the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. It changed hands. In 1953, the CIA launched Project AERODYNAMIC, approved by the Director of Central Intelligence on January 30, 1953, and expanded under Allen Dulles, who directed the CIA from 1953 to 1961. The stated purpose, in the agency’s own words, was “the exploitation and expansion of the Anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes.”[57] The organizations being utilized were the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and their affiliated structures in Western Europe and the United States — the direct organizational descendants of the Austro-Hungarian Galician project, which had collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The budget for fiscal year 1953 was $95,900. The operational tasks listed in the declassified documents included financial assistance to OUN-affiliated structures, support for sabotage and guerrilla warfare capabilities, agent infiltration into the Ukrainian SSR, and the establishment of a Ukrainian information bureau to be run “under CIA control” so that “the Ukrainian emigration will take a stand against the USSR which would be more consistent with American Foreign Policy.” The agency also planned a political cadre school for Ukrainian emigre youth, with a curriculum that included military science, underground techniques, and psychological warfare. Funding was to be presented to recipients as coming from “various private sources in the U.S. who are interested in the Ukrainian National Movement.” The project was not a one-time Cold War improvisation. Declassified CIA documents show it ran continuously for over four decades under successive code names: AERODYNAMIC, then QRDYNAMIC, then QRPLUMB. A CIA synopsis covering the period 1946 to 1987 describes the same organizational core — Ukrainian emigre activists with direct roots in the OUN-UPA underground — operating without interruption through sabotage support, clandestine radio broadcasting, publications, and personal contact operations inside the Soviet Ukrainian SSR.[58] The individual who stood at the center of this operation was Mykola Lebed, a wartime leader of OUN-B. In 1949, the CIA smuggled him into the United States and arranged his citizenship, despite the fact that U.S. officials had themselves described him as having a “Gestapo background.” He was never prosecuted. Under Project AERODYNAMIC, Lebed directed the Prolog Research Corporation — the CIA front organization based in New York and Munich that conducted what a classified 1968 memorandum to the Director of Central Intelligence described as “political, propaganda and intelligence activity directed against the Soviet Ukraine.” Budget for fiscal year 1969: $188,000, channeled through a Swiss bank account and presented externally as coming from unnamed private sources.[59] The nine core collaborators of the Prolog operation were, in the CIA’s own words, “ex-members of the Ukrainian underground” who had worked together for over twenty-five years. Just as Operation Paperclip recycled Nazi scientists and the Gehlen Organization recycled Nazi intelligence networks, Project AERODYNAMIC recycled the ideological and organizational infrastructure of wartime Ukrainian nationalism and put it to work as a Cold War asset. The German Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, was aware of the Prolog operation throughout. The operation also pioneered the use of the famine of 1932-33 as a geopolitical instrument. QRPLUMB published a book titled Famine in Ukraine 1932-33, produced and infiltrated into the Soviet Union the documentary film The Harvest of Despair, and used the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 as an additional propaganda vehicle, coordinating its response with Baltic dissident groups in an effort to tie Chernobyl to a similar nuclear plant in Lithuania. A CIA activity report from July 1988 confirms the operation was still running at full capacity, infiltrating camcorders to dissident groups inside Ukraine and developing new infiltration channels through Finland.[61] The operation did not end with the Cold War. In 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established as a publicly funded organization taking over much of what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades. Its first president, Allen Weinstein, acknowledged as much in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[62] The NED today funds Globsec directly — €168,098 according to the Slovak Financial Administration’s public register.[54] The operation became the establishment. From Galicia to “Decolonization” The idea of fragmenting Russia along national, linguistic, and regional lines never disappeared. The actors changed, the slogans changed, the institutional frameworks changed. The underlying logic did not. Austria-Hungary cultivated the Ukrainian project in Galicia as a geopolitical instrument against Russia. Germany during the First World War constructed buffer states on the ruins of the Russian Empire. Piłsudski promoted “Prometheism” as a doctrine for dismantling Russia through nationalist movements. The early Soviet policy of korenizatsiya continued many of the same nation-building mechanisms under a different ideological banner. And today, the same project reappears under the language of “decolonization,” “regionalization,” and the “post-Russian space.” The financial architecture behind this contemporary iteration is documented in public records. The Slovak analytical center Globsec, whose annual forums have featured French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, received £52,005 in 2023 and £225,000in 2024 from the British foundation New Generation Europe Foundation (NGEF), according to the UK register of legal entities.[43] The same Globsec financial statements, filed with the Slovak Financial Administration’s register of non-profit organizations, record direct funding from the Foundation to Promote Open Society (€1,182,355), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)(€168,098), and the Taipei Representative Office in Bratislava (€200,000).[54] NGEF is directed by the daughter of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos, whose foundation provided NGEF with $10 million in 2024. In autumn 2025, Khodorkovsky publicly declared himself a leader of the Russian opposition and endorsed the “decolonization” of Russia. Shortly thereafter, Globsec published an analytical report titled Building a True Russian Federation, prepared with NGEF support and authored by the president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, an organization openly advocating the separation of Buryatia from Russia.[55] The document trail is straightforward. Money flows from Khodorkovsky’s foundation through NGEF to Globsec. Globsec produces analytical reports on the territorial reorganization of Russia, including a report prepared with direct support from a foundation connected to Khodorkovsky and authored by the president of an organization openly calling for the separation of Buryatia from Russia. These activities were financed through publicly registered entities and hosted on the platforms of the Western foreign policy establishment. The Return of the Fragmentation Narrative A century ago, Piłsudski traveled to Russia’s enemies with a memorandum proposing the dismantlement of the Russian Empire through nationalist movements. Austria-Hungary built a Ukrainian identity in Galicia as an instrument against the broader Russian world. Germany constructed buffer states on the territory of the former Russian Empire and, in General Hoffmann’s own words, “created Ukraine” as a strategic necessity. The continuity across these episodes is not coincidental. The fragmentation of Russia into externally manageable national units has been a persistent objective of successive European great powers for more than a century, pursued through whatever institutional and ideological instruments the era made available: Habsburg administrative engineering, German military occupation, Wilsonian self-determination, Cold War nationalism, and now the language of decolonization and post-imperial transformation. The history documented in this article does not support the interpretation of the current conflict as a spontaneous national awakening or a straightforward dispute between two neighboring states. The Ukrainian national project in Galicia was built as a geopolitical instrument from the outset. The borders of the Ukrainian SSR were drawn by a Soviet state implementing a constitutional architecture Lenin insisted upon against Stalin’s objections. The ideological traditions of Galician nationalism were cultivated under Habsburg and German patronage, suppressed under Soviet rule, and revived after 1991. And the analytical infrastructure now openly discussing the territorial reorganization of Russia is financed through the same Western foreign policy channels that have pursued the weakening of Russia as a strategic objective since the age of Mitteleuropa. The documents speak for themselves.
Komunitas
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As a writer, podcaster, and columnist for TRNN, Adam Johnson has been one of the fiercest, sharpest, and most consistent critics of legacy and Western media’s roles in laundering, obscuring, justifying, and manufacturing consent for crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza genocide by Israel and with the full support of the United States. But critique is not enough anymore; to ensure that these horrific crimes don’t continue, we need accountability for the political actors and media organizations that made it happen, or helped. At a live event hosted by Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Johnson about his new book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, and about how to hold media organizations accountable for their roles in manufacturing the conditions for genocide. Guests: Adam Johnson is a writer, media critic, co-host of the podcast Citations Needed, and a columnist for TRNN. He is the author of the book How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza**. Credits: Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible. Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. As a writer, podcaster and a columnist for us here at The Real News, Adam Johnson has been one of the fiercest, sharpest and most consistent critics of legacy in Western media’s roles in laundering, obscuring, justifying and manufacturing consent for crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza genocide by Israel with the full support of the United States. Crimes committed in our name and with our tax dollars and the media cannot be let off the hook for its despicable role in all of this. As Adam writes in his new book, How to Sell a Genocide, the media’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza, “It took deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors, editors, reporters, bookers, producers, and TV personalities who decided early on in the so- called Israel-Hamas war that defending the powerful and spinning a fictional narrative to soothe Western liberal audiences was more important than speaking plain truths than defending a dispossessed people from a holy asymmetric campaign carried out by Israel with the full backing of the US to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinians of Gaza.” Listen, critique is not enough anymore. If we are going to ensure that these horrific crimes don’t continue, then we need accountability for the political actors and the media organizations that made it happen or helped. We need a reckoning, but we’re not going to get one if we don’t fight for it. And Adam’s new book, in my opinion, gives us the data and the receipts and the analysis that we need to fight better and to actually win. I cannot recommend it enough and I am so proud to call Adam a friend and a colleague. He is a vital member of the Real News team and he has done a vital service to all of us in writing this book. So go check it out yourself and let us know what you think and let me know what you think about this conversation that I had with Adam Johnson about his new book at a live event at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse here in Baltimore on May 23rd. Well, again, welcome, welcome everyone. Thank you so much to Red Emmas for hosting this important discussion tonight about Brother Adam Johnson’s vital new book, How to Sell a Genocide, The Media’s Complicity and the Destruction of Gaza Out Now with Pluto Press. It is an invaluable read and I cannot stress enough the duty that we have to know what’s in this book. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it to just chuck my buddy up. Adam, I’ve gotten the pleasure and honor of growing up with you over the past 10 or so years in the media ecosystem, the left media ecosystem, and then get to know you, get to be friends with you, get to work together. I wanted to say first that I know we joke a lot that what are we doing? We’re just podcasters. We’re not that out there doing the real work, but I wanted to thank you for doing the work that you do at Citations Needed and Everywhere Else. Thank you for writing this book because even if you on your side through the microphone don’t see it or you on your phone tweeting at people and Dunking on people don’t see it, so often you and Nima, especially through citations needed, but now with this all your writing, you give us so many of us the language that we’re looking for to articulate what we’re feeling and sensing, but don’t have the time to process and don’t have the ability to find those words. And in this book, you have given us a tremendous amount of necessary ammunition to focus what we have known and sensed but not been able to fully articulate. And so I wanted to first acknowledge that. Second, I wanted to acknowledge here at the top that of course both of us as journalists here in the United States, a media critic journalist, however Adam wants to identify himself, we of course must have a moment of silence to honor those of our journalists and media making colleagues who have been slaughtered in this genocide and who continue to be slaughtered in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran. So can you please join me in just a quick moment of silence to honor our fallen comrades and to thank them for their invaluable sacrifice. Okay. Thank you all so much. All right, brother out. Like I said, your podcast and my podcast started around the same time. We got into this game around 10 or so years ago and we’ve gotten to working with each other. We publish your invaluable column at the real news now and for a few years now and you guys should absolutely read it. So I wanted to start there and ask if you could talk about how you got into media criticism and why. But then let’s talk about that growth process and let’s talk about what it was like to be a media critic as a genocide was unfolding in Gaza and what about all of that propelled you to move beyond podcasting and article writing into writing this book? Adam Johnson: Well, thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me here. Right Emma’s is of course a write a passage. You’re not really a leftling writer if you don’t come here. So I’m glad to be here. It’s huge, but it’s a very well organized operation, so thank you. Yeah, so I don’t talk about myself a lot, mostly because I don’t know, I feel like it’s genuinely quite boring, but I’ve always been interested in language and how language can shape our reality and my entry point into the left such as it was, the immortal science, whatever you wish to call it, I was late to the game. I mean, I was basically 29, 30 years old when I started exploring those ideas and media was a way I was like the entry point into that. And I’ve always thought media criticism is an entry point into asking bigger questions. It’s a gateway drug. The podcast is meant to be a gateway drug. I’m like in the school yard pedaling left wing ideology like, “Come here kid, listen to citations needed.” It’s sort of vaguely liberal coded, but it’s not. So my goal is to be on one of those Glen Beck chalkboards. And so that’s how I, as an entry point into asking bigger questions because I think once one erodes the artifice of media, which we kind of imperfectly refer to as small L liberal media or center left media or mainstream media, I think it’s a gateway to ask bigger questions because once the artifice begins to crumble, I think you sort of ask yourself, well, okay, if this kind of officialdom, if the thing that is these very important people behind desks and these kind of prestigious institutions are basically full of shit, then you have to ask yourself, what do we build as an alternative to that? And then in some senses, the whole institute, because this book is fundamentally a book about the hypocrisy and the enforcement status of so- called liberal institutions and liberalism. And that’s why chapter seven is basically about that and how Gaza and the liberal response to Gaza and the liberal promotion of genocide, I should say elite liberal promotion of genocide was fundamentally a liberal project for that first year we were documenting. Obviously they were partnered and helped by the right and Republicans in Fox News, but fundamentally would not have been possible without liberal buy-in. And so obviously it very much falls into the wheelhouse of the Citations Deeded Podcast, which obviously critiques the ways in which liberals promote reactionary ideas and indeed work to launder reactionary ideas and make them seem palatable. And so it was a natural fit. And then obviously I had been writing ferociously from the beginning of it because as anyone who knows anything about Gaza knew precisely what was going to happen, it was very clear that on October 8th, when Tony Blinken tweeted out a call for a ceasefire and then subsequently deleted it a couple hours later that this was going to be at best killing an arbitrarily high number of Palestinians in the figures and at worst a genocide. And of course it largely was a genocide and of course they ended up killing almost certainly over six figures. And so from the beginning, you and I were writing about it and you were letting me use obviously your platform to write about it and write media criticism about it. Much of the book is, not much, but some percentage of the book is readapting writing I did for y’all. So thank you for that because there was not a ton of outlets who were willing to do that, especially in a kind of existential way. And then once we started going, it was like, well, we need to quantifiably show this. So it’s a very data driven book, which is something I hadn’t previously had the time to do and that was central to how we did the book because I didn’t want to just assert it or cherry pick headlines. I wanted to quantitatively show and establish bias and then from there in double standards and from there we can ask bigger questions once one accepts the premise of that, what is the implications of that? Because it’s a book much like citations needed. It’s a book for liberals. It’s not a book for the left who obviously by definition agrees with me, although I want them to be able to use the data and research and arguments in their daily lives. But it’s a book that is supposed to take someone who’s vaguely liberal or vaguely liberal left or progressive and senses something was wrong and then slowly and meticulously walk them to the water that there’s a larger critique of Zionism and US imperialism and that the media operates as an organ of those institutions not as any kind of neutral or objective, certainly not a counter or an adversary to those institutions. And so again, I’m pedaling the drugs trying to get people addicted. First one’s always free and that’s kind of the way I approached the book. Now obviously the title’s provocative, but the word genocide I believe is more or less mainstream now. And you can’t get around that word because to do so is genocide denial. It’s something like I think 60 or 70% of Democrats, depending on the poll, believe it’s a genocide. So that itself is no longer even that provocative. What I believe is maybe more novel and useful to liberals in liberal left adjacent types is the concept that they were sold to genocide, that it wasn’t this bumbling accident that kind of happened or this one-off dictator who forced people to do it, but actually had ideological and narrative antecedents that were being pushed by so- called liberal media. So by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC were the primary targets of my inquiry and criticism. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and that tees up kind of like my next question because that was awesome, it was thoughtful. I really appreciated that answer, but I also know the entire time you were screaming and ripping your hair out and like these fucking people look at the lies that I know because Adam would be pitching me. He’s like, “Hey, I got to write about this. ” I was like, “All right, go for it. ” And I knew so much was going through your mind and so much like the rest of us. We were seeing these sort of double standards. We were sort of seeing the kind of dual realities on the TV and on our phones, but again, it needed to go beyond just that sort of sense and needing to quantify and needing to name. And so I wanted to sort of unleash the attack dog, Adam Johnson we all know and love a second. Let’s name some names here. Who are the worst offenders and why? Adam Johnson: Yeah. And I want to preface this by saying that that is the next stage of this project where I’m doing basically taking the 10 worst and we’re naming names and going to try to reach out to them and do more aggressive targeted criticism with like maybe in parallel campaignse because I do think when you criticize the media or the New York Times, it can be a little bit abstract, that which is owned by everyone is cared for by no one to paraphrase libertarians, but I think in some senses you can be too abstract. So the book does name names in retrospect as I’m rereading it, I felt like I probably should have made that more central, a little bit more ad hominem, a little more personal. And that’s kind of the next stage because we need to have accountability. And in parallel, I know others who I’ve spoken to are working on a project to hold Democrats accountable because now as you know, I’m a little bit off topic here, but indulge me. You have Tony Blinken who covered up war crimes at the State Department. He’s now at Center for American Progress just down the road in DC. Obviously John Finer is at Center for American Progress, which if anyone knows what that is, it’s a ostensibly progressive think tank that’s basically the government in waiting for the next Democratic administration. John Feiner and Jake Sullivan, who also covered up war crimes and sold weapons to a country that knew was committing genocide, have a cheeky little foreign policy podcast on Fox. So what we’re working on with that is what we’re trying to come up with a branding for, but it’s going to be the Genocide 10 or the Genocide 20 where you’re basically pressuring organizations to remove these people from polite society, which of course is a bar that’s below the mantle of the earth. I mean, it’s the lowest bar possible, but right now everyone’s just vibing through it. Progressives and liberals in Congress are doing events now with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. So really it’s a project fundamentally about accountability. And the reason why that is, and again, it’s going to be an upward battle, but I do think that you can build pressure, especially as every four years when Democrats have to act like they care what progressives or liberals think or even liberals, to be honest, that there needs to be a sense that these people need to be non-grada at the very least. So obviously you would refer them to the ICC for criminal arrest and prosecution for their role and complicity and genocide along with some of these media organs we can talk about. But at the very least, they need to be removed from polite society. And so fundamentally it just becomes a book about accountability because there’s not much else you can do. And the conclusion I say I’m like the drummer boy and the drummer boy Christmas song. “What is he doing? Plays the drums. That’s all he can do. All I can do is media criticism. And I think like everyone else, as this was unfolding, you felt completely helpless. But I think the lesson you can take away from this and the lesson that Palestinian organizers and BDS organizers always tell you is that you can always contest in the way you can and the spaces you can. Whether you’re a tech worker, you can go on strike or boycott or try to … There’s always something you can do and it’s like, this is the only thing I’m able to do. I don’t have any other skillset or talent. I just know how to do media criticism. So that’s what I did and I tried to do it to the best of my ability. That’s a very convoluted way of answering your question, but I think what you’re talking about is, what you allude to is the idea of accountability. So who are the worst? The worst were Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough are featured heavily in this book as just outright genocidal propagandists, outwardly lying, smearing anyone opposing the war. Obviously New York Times, Patrick Kingsley, others, editors at the New York Times were probably certain writers who laundered Israeli intelligence over and over again, which we can get into. Those were the primary offenders. Actually, one of the things I try to do in the book and all the subsequent interviews I’ve done is I try not to flatten the difference that there are some that are worse than others. The New York Times is meaningfully worse than the Washington Post. Washington Post is not good, but they didn’t engage in what I would consider outright genocide incitement. The New York Times would constantly intervene right when there was some pressure to push Biden for a ceasefire with the most obvious lies and bullshit. I’ll give you an example if you’ll indulge me. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I was going to say, keep rolling and let’s talk about some of the worst offenses. If we could give in an ode to citations needed, give me your top three worst tropes or your top three most eye-popping stats from this book. Adam Johnson: Maybe let’s start at the beginning then if you’ll indulge me. So very quickly, the idea of a ceasefire needed to be removed from the realm of capital V capital S very seriousness, right? It had to be considered a far left fringe position, despite the fact that every other mowing the lawn episode, which is what Israel calls it when they kill civilians in Gaza as a part of collective punishment, had had a ceasefire. 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, obviously 2009 cast led. But very early on when again, Blinken sends out the tweet and subsequently deletes it, it’s very clear a decision is made that they’re going for it all. They’re going for full-blown ethnic cleansing genocidal acts and at worst from their perspective, killing an arbitrarily high number of Palestinians as medieval reconpense and collective punishment to humiliate them so they will self-deport or leave because Palestinians are a fundamentally inconvenient people to the national methos and mythology of Zionism and anyone who knew anything about Gaza knew that was going to happen. So within the first few days, you get this what I call isisification of Hamas in the first chapter, which is Hamas cannot have any secular grievances or political causes. They have to be mindless Jihadist cartoons who are just mindless anti-Semites, which as far as … Biden says they had the ancient hatred of Jews, which again, bad luck that the people who drove them off their land happened to have that as their national religion, out of all the gin joints and all the towns and all the world. But the idea that you would provide context was anathema. And so this was disciplined and enforced in a very documented way. First up was MSNBC. So on the morning of October 7th, Ali Valshi is running the desk at MSNBC and he brings in Iman Moihadine who had lived in Gaza for two years. He was by far the most qualified person to talk about it. And so live on air as the attack is unfolding and we’re kind of getting information trickling in, they do what all journalists are supposed to do. They begin to provide context. They don’t cheer it on. They’re not for it. They’re not like saying, isn’t Hamas great? They’re saying talking about the Nakba, the dispossession, how 75% of the people in Gaza are refugees who were kicked out of their homes and what is today Israel. They’re talking about protective edge in 2014, putting them on a diet, the siege, the lack of being able to travel, all that. All hell breaks loose. We reported this from two internal sources at MSNBC, which as I’m sure you would imagine was much easier to get sources in than say the New York Times, because a lot of people were ashamed of their role in this and were happy to talk. And this was later vaguely confirmed by the New York Times as well, but they bring in, they being Comcast, it’s the first and since last time they ever directly intervene in MSNBC’s coverage. They bring in Rashida Jones and Caesar Conde, who are the head of MSNBC and NBC News respectively and they say,” Never do that again. “That was terrorism apology. You’re not allowed to provide context for what happened on October 7th and indeed history has to start on October 7th. Nothing can precede it, right? It’s like the big bang. There’s nothing that precedes it. It’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole. It’s ontologically impossible. And that was reflected in the coverage. Then on March 9th, there’s a company-wide call at MSNBC according to our two of our sources where they bring in Martin Fletcher, who’s the longtime NBC news correspondent who has since retired and he had family who were injured on October 7th. He himself had served in the IDF and he jumps on a conference call with all of MSNBC and NBC News and gives the playbook. He says,” Palestinians aren’t real. They weren’t a people until 1967. They’re invented by Arab nations. Jews are the real Palestinians. These are direct quotes, more or less. And Israel left greenhouses in Gaza. You’re kind of typical really racist anti-Palestinian vomit. And that becomes the official line in MSNBC. And if they say, if you have any questions, you go to Martin Fletcher because he’s the longtime NBC correspondent. CNN does something quite similar where Mark Thompson issues a memo on October 26th where he affirms an existing policy, which was probably more informal saying, you cannot mention the suffering of Palestinians or these Palestinian death counts without prefacing it with October 7th. So that way it has to be framed by definition as defensive and you can’t talk about anything that basically comes before it. And so you would have a story, you were allowed to say, “Isn’t it sad this Palestinian died or there was this explosion that killed 15 people, but you always have to say as a military response to October 7th.” And so these policies very initially make it so you cannot provide context. Context is anathema. It is not allowed because it’s viewed as Hamas propaganda or terrorism apologea. And this therefore reduces, and of course you have the parallel atrocity of propaganda with the beheaded babies on October 11th. A story completely invented out of whole cloth that’s spread by everyone from Nick Robertson at CNN to Sarah Sidner who says it live on CNN where she says, “The Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office has confirmed that there were several beheaded babies at the Kabutsum.” Now the Prime Minister can’t confirm his own racist propaganda. That’s absurd, but that was the editorial standard. You could basically say whatever you wanted about Palestinians. And then once the story was … And then of course Biden says he saw video of it, which he of course did not because it never happened and slowly tweets are deleted, people kind of issue very opaque apologies, but very early on they had to be this cartoon ISIS-like entity because you had to make a ceasefire impossible. And this was affirmed by progressives in Congress who refused to call for a ceasefire for months. Obviously Rokana, Elizabeth Warren, I think most cynically and most, I think high leverage was Bernie Sanders who went on CNN and CBS News in November and December of 2023 respectively and said, “I don’t know how you have a ceasefire with a group like Maas who seeks Israel’s destruction.” Now nevermind, of course, that Israel seeks Palestinians destructions. Nevermind that a call for a ceasefire is not a moral endorsement of an organization. It’s just a call for a ceasefire. And this was affirmed by CIP, Matt Duss, who was like supposedly the far left progressive poll of so- called progressive foreign policy. He goes on democracy now and says, “Bernie Sanders has a good point. I’m paraphrasing, but something to that effect.” He basically affirms the logic of that. So it’s a far left position, a radical pie in the sky. You get a dozen articles in the Atlantic saying a ceasefire is impossible. Meanwhile, we’re getting 300 day dead, 500 dead a day. They kill almost 6,000 people in the first 11 days. They’re averaging about 550 dead people a day, 30% of whom are children. And you could not talk about a ceasefire mainstream media. There was no mention of it in New York Times. The New York Times editorial board and Washington Post editorial board supported. Everyone is in this stories about how it’s eight billion, nine elevens or some kind of fatuous nonsense like that. And it’s immediately indexed in this kind of war on terror civilization versus this vague Asiatic ward who again are presented as this cartoon villain with no political grievances. And that right there cements creates the inevitability of genocide because if you have to defeat Hamas, you by definition cannot do that. They are a gorilla force, an indigenous guerrilla force. Unlike ISIS, they’re not who are foreign mercenaries. They are of Gaza. They live in Gaza. They are Palestinians in Gaza and they support hovers between 40 and 55% in Gaza. It’s a litle higher in the West Bank, but they’re Palestinians, like all grill military movements that are national liberation movements, again, whether you like them or not, doesn’t matter. They’re not going to just surrender. And this is something Tony Blinken himself affirms behind closed doors in January of 2024 when Andrea Mitchell reports that Blinken tells Nanyahu that Hamas cannot be defeated militarily. Now, a reporter worked their salt would say, “Well, wait a second, then why are we arming and funding this extensively military operation?” But this is the kind of Orwellian inverse reality we operated in for several months where everything is a contradiction. And then of course, which we can get into, and I’ll maybe let you interject here so I’m not droning on, but then you get into the ceasefire redefinition in late February, early March of 2024 where ceasefire is polling at about 75% Democrats don’t even bother at that point defending the genocide on first principles or as such. Then they move into the helpless Biden fuming Biden. We’re actually working on a ceasefire. Okay, what’s your definition of ceasefire? And then you hear their definition and it’s simply reasserting terms of capitulation, reasserting demands of surrender by Hamas, which of course has not been the definition of ceasefire for 5,000 years of human warfare. Ceasefires, both sides ceasefire and you come to a political solution, not I win and you surrender. That’s just you winning. But then that becomes the oralian definition that’s broadly adopted by the media. And this goes on for months and months and months and months and months. It was based on a fundamental contradiction and the only people who ever pointed it out were people like left wing critics on like, “This doesn’t make any sense.” And so that’s all documented in the book. Basically with the argument is that within the first few weeks really, the White House doesn’t even defend it as such. They simply try to move it into the non-sequitur by playing up this idea that Biden is either helpless, which again, the media assisted these laundering operations or that he’s very mad. He was always sort of vaguely upset all the time. It’s what I call the asymptotic break with Netanyahu. I can read you some examples if you’ll indulge me. I know I’ve been rambling here for a bit, but I do think these are very illustrative. Maximillian Alvarez: Bro, people literally came out in the rain to listen to you talk. Adam Johnson: There’s talking and then there’s talking. But sorry, I’m going to make sure I get … So this is, I think, critical and this is when you get these, I think, fairly sophisticated liberal interventions of inventing reality, which I think was one of the reasons people felt like they were going insane at the time because it was all premised on a contradiction. So you had this idea of the helpless Biden, which I’ll skip and get to the fuming Biden. So this was a media trope. There’s literally dozens of these articles, but I documented the top 10 and then we did a source analysis. So 94% of the sourcing for these stories are White House aids and very quickly one can realize why they would be painting this narrative because they themselves know it’s indefensible. They themselves want to go in and out of liberal and progressive circles. So the decision is made to distance the White House in some kind of narrative or abstract sense while painting them as working towards a ceasefire or some peaceful resolution, sufficiently removing them from the genocide that they themselves are arming, supporting and diplomatically providing cover for. So you have November of 2023, it begins in earnest with NBC news. The gap between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government over Gaza future is widening. Ooh, it’s widening. CNN, December of 2023, unprecedented tensions, unprecedented. Watch out. Between White House and Netanyahu as Biden feels political price for standing with Israel. Axios, our friend Barack Rive, who we can get into January of 2024. Biden, running out of patience with Bibi as Gaza war, it’s a hundred days. Washington Post the next month, Biden moving closer than ever to a breach with Netanyahu over a war in Gaza. CNN March of 2024, how a brief exchange and a call explains the strained Biden Netanyahu relationship associated press, Biden cajoles Netanyahu with top talk. Ooh. Politico, March of 2024, from I love you to asshole how Joe gave up on BB after decades of building a close personal friendship with Netanyahu, Joe Biden has had it with the Israeli Prime Minister and he’s hitting him hard and it may be working spoiler. He did not hit him hard and it did not work. So there’s this alternate reality where Biden, who’s the most powerful person on earth, is somehow unable to get a country the size of New Jersey who’s 75% of their weapons company in the United States, 100% of their weapons arms reshipments come from the United States, cannot operate militarily for more than a week or two without support from the United States because obviously because of a tax in Yemen and Lebanon and elsewhere is bumbling, simply just a dottering old man who’s working really hard for a ceasefire for fucking ostensibly for nine months and he just darn it Chucks can’t get one. And what we later learned, which I think is important is that Israeli prime minister at the time, Michael Hertzog, tells Israeli media in April of 2025 that Biden quote, “Never asked for a ceasefire not once.” He never asked for a ceasefire. And we know that because there wasn’t a ceasefire and he’s the most powerful person in the world. So there was this alternate reality that had to be painted where he was working for a ceasefire, but really what he was working for was, “Hey, Nanyahu, I’m not going to use any leverage, but would you mind?” And so the analogy I use is it’s like LA Dodgers, I know you’re an LA Dodgers fan, Dave Roberts right before the World Series saying, “I’m going to bench Shohei Otani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freedman and all my all stars, and we’re going to put in the AAA baseball team, but I’m tirelessly working to win the World Series.” I don’t think anyone would find that to be credible. He would be committed and people would think he’d lost his mind, but Biden repeatedly said, “I’m not going to condition military support, but I’m working for … ” That’s literally the only leverage that would do that. And everybody knew this at the time and there was precedent for it in 2021, Biden pressured Netanyahu to stop. And so it all got sort of mystified. Aaron David Miller shows up, he’s one of these Biden Hacks, one of these pro- Israel hacks who shows up and says, “Well, Biden couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. ” And then every time he shows up in the New York Times or Foreign Policy Magazine or Washington Post to kind of give this pat line about how Biden, because you had in parallel with fuming, you had helpless. So he was also helpless. He would always end it by saying, “But even if he could, he wouldn’t.” And you’re like, “Wait, what? ” So he doesn’t want to, because they’d say, “Oh, but he’s a hardcore supporter of Israel.” And it’s like, yeah, that’s the point. And so this was obviously crazy making for a lot of people who were reading this thing, pointing out that it didn’t make any sense and had all these contradictions and was based on the analogy I give is it’s like theater 101, the difference between a sketch and a plot is a sketch. A plot moves forward, it has beats, things change. A sketch is the same gag three or four times that you get out in under four minutes. This was a sketch.This went on for 10 months. You had these articles, literally over a hundred of these articles, you can find them. And you would think an editor worked their salt after the 70th fuming Biden story would raise their hands and say, “Wait, is Biden changing any policy?” No, but he’s generally mad. Okay. Well, how is that a story? Because these were curated by the White House. All the sources are Biden aids or phone calls they know are recorded. It’s obviously- Maximillian Alvarez: Biden pops can of spinach and like Shakesphist at Netanyahu. Adam Johnson: And that’s why they have to use these meaningless puffy language about unprecedented about to. So you have this asymptotic break that always approaches zero but mysteriously never gets to zero. And then they do what they were trying to do, which is wait it out. And this is a book about buying time and about liberal hand waving and time wasting and pseudo savvy negotiations. It was about maintaining the status quo and buying time. And the reason why you buy time as any good public relations person will tell you is because you cannot defend the actual thing that’s happening. And that was the theme that we saw over and over and over again. And mainstream media just laundered that obvious self-serving bullshit over and over and over again. Maximillian Alvarez: Well put. And obviously the whole while you’ve got this historical rupture that is occurring in large part because of media and our relationship to media, right? The disconnect between this reality obscuring power serving, genocide enabling, like all of that is being undercut by the innocence destroying images that we’ve all been bombarded with on our phones, not just the younger generation, but yeah, of course a lot more in the younger generation, which is why right now TikTok fucking sucks. You know why? Because in 24, Biden and the Democrats answer to like, what are we going to do about the public turning on us about because we’re selling a genocide that they’re not buying, we’re going to take over the fucking platform that they’re seeing it on. Adam Johnson: Well, they forced to sell to the Ellison family who are the single biggest donors of the IDF. Maximillian Alvarez: Which is, there you go. So that’s what we got. Thank Biden for that too. But I wanted to kind of ask a question here, Adam, about the why. There are a lot of potential whys here, right? But it’s obviously something we all need to be empowered with to talk with clarity but nuance about because as all of this is unfolding, regular people who are trying to make sense of the horrific reality that they’re seeing and the lies that they’re being told or the obscuring that’s being done in front of them, if they’re not getting the answers that they’re looking for, a lot of horrible ideas and conspiracies fester. A lot of hatreds and prejudices emerge. It is no coincidence that there has been rises in antisemitism while this is all happening because people are being told if you are opposed to this, you’re against all Jews. And so a lot of people are saying, “Well, I’m opposed to that. ” So I don’t know what to tell you, but I don’t want to see a child be cut in half, blown to bits, crying over- That’s obviously because Adam Johnson: You’re a racist. Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. So the point being is that amidst all of that crap, there are very real truths here about CNN’s like Jerusalem Bureau, everything basically being reviewed and rubber stamped by the IDF. But that itself is not the whole of the explanation, right? It’s not just a sort of like Israel is telling all these newsrooms what to do, but I wanted to ask if you could sort of help us navigate the why this is being done and where it’s coming from. I’ll put it Adam Johnson: In these terms. And this is where I think a dialectical criticism is useful because the book is not called How to Sell Genocide because I’m trying to be provocative. It is a genocide was decided in Washington and in Tel Aviv and in the halls of power and then liberals are fundamentally a broker between the ruling class and the plebs, right? They come in and say, “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of it. I’m going to sell what you got and meanwhile I’m going to tell them I’m going to sell them what you got.” So this is fundamentally about a decision was made, then it had to be sold and it’s an unseemly business, but once that decision’s made, what other option is there? You think they’re going to criticize, I mean, you think they’re going to criticize the genocide? You think they’re going to suddenly start putting their support behind Palestine? No. So everyone, again, eventually around the margins, you have some pushback, but fundamentally on a structural level, the US media, whether it’s Vietnam or Iraq, is liberal, imperialist at its core, that’s its primary function. If the New York Times didn’t help sell the genocide, then there would be no New York Times. That is their social function. By definition, that’s what they exist to do. And so the decision was made and it was bipartisan and the worst place to be in the world is on the business end of a bipartisan consensus in Washington because what is the mechanism of pushback? There isn’t one. What a bunch of crusty leftists in a bookstore somewhere, they don’t get shut. You have no power didn’t fucking matter. And though by the way, you have to vote for us anyway because something, something Trump, right? And they knew that and this is under … Which I understand is that the engine that drives this is elite immunity. When Barack Obama says, “We’re not going to prosecute torture under Bush. We have to move forward, look forward, not backwards.” When we, again, prosecute nobody for Vietnam except for some half-ass reforms, that’s a cycle of elite immunity. And every decision that was made by Tony Blinken and John Feiner in the fateful days in October and November of 2023, they knew they could just bypass it. No future administration’s going to hold them accountable. Certainly Republicans aren’t going to hold Cabo because they agree. And so they were banking on that. They were banking on Israel committing a very two, three month mass expulsion, genocide, getting their recompense and then vibing past it to the presidential election and extorting people with the specter of Trump, albeit a real specter, but nevertheless, that was part of the plan. So there’s a cycle of elite immunity that makes it so, who’s going to hold these people accountable? Again, Tony Blinken has the most cushy job right now in liberal politics and he knew that was going to happen. So what’s the pressure, what’s the mechanism to actually push back on this from their perspective? Well, the primary fulcrum of rebellion was college campuses, which is why you had to have this campus anti-Semitism narrative, which was a complete fiction, a complete concoction of these Zionist crime bully groups like the ADL, because that was the one space where there was genuine momentum to create both the spectacle and energy and moral narratives to push back against the genocide, which is why you saw, again, I dedicated an entire chapter to it. I think it’s chapter eight, why you saw these high profile kangaroo trials in Congress where they would bring the president of Harvard and Princeton up. There’s a really clever thing the ADL does where they create what I call meta scandals where it’s all smoke and no fire, kind of like a version what they did to Jeremy Corbin. They would ask the president of Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they would say, “Do you condemn the term globalize the Intifada?” And they would say, “Well, no, because that just means struggle and it’s a little more complex than that. ” Obviously we would not allow speech that intimidated any group of people, but we don’t condemn that phrase. And then literally the headline the Washington Post is university presidents refuse to condemn calls for genocide of Jewish students. And the average person reads that and says there were calls on campus to genocide Jewish students. There of course was no calls. We had our fact checker look for weeks. There was no such call. It did not exist. It never happened. But the way you do it is you gen up these false scandals and everyone runs for the fucking hills. And this is, if you can check out Steve Thrasher’s book, this is all explained in his book, the overseer class, which came out last week. I just did an event with him in Chicago and he was kicked out of his teaching job, his 10-year trek job at Northwestern and he now is looking for work and has to freelance because he tried to protect his students on the campus of Northwestern and was beaten by a cop and made a villain by Republicans in Congress and later sold out by all of his supposed friends, several of whom are anti-apartheid scholars and James Baldwin scholars. Excellent book, please read it. And we can talk about the crisis of liberalism because Gaza exposed the vacuousness and uselessness of liberal and liberal institutions. But I’m sorry, I digress. I was talking about the weaponization of the antisemitism charge and how effective it was, but that’s discussed in detail and you can look at the data of … I’m going to mind if I read some data here to sort of cement this a little bit and- Read some data maybe. Making these claims. Yeah, here it is. So the mentions of antisemitism versus Islamophobia. So after the antisemitism scandals, which there were dozens on all these campuses, these universities and state legislators would force studies to document this. So even taking the ADLs juiced up stats, which literally say free Palestine is a basically a hate crime, even if you accept that, they were always roughly comparable to episodes of Islamophobia. Yet this was not reflected in the media. So the New York Times made reference to antisemitism on college campuses in our hundred day survey period 412 times and made mention of Islamophobia in and of itself five times and 31 they would mention both. There was sometimes it was like liberal box checking. These are all liberal box joking. Washington Post mentioned antisemitism 197 times and Islamophobia or anti-Arab hatred one time AP News 154 versus four, Politico 370 versus three for a grand total of 1,865 mentions to about 32 mentions of Islamophobia. So the narrative was entirely one way and I’ll give you another example of this asymmetry and this double standard. I’ll give you one example in Chicago. So DePaul University, there was two students who were active members of the IDF who were on the corner every day doing this like debate me thing, I’m going to defend Israel, defend the idea. They have big Israeli flag and they were there every day. Again, after human rights watch and the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International all confirmed and found that Israel was committing genocide. So they were supporting a genocide, right? Some guy takes it into his own hands and punches him in the face. And what’s the headline the next day in local media? Jewish student attacked an anti-Semitic hate crime. Now it’s possible as an anti-Semitic hate crime, but that would be the worst coincidence ever because the guy was actively engaging in active, visible, pro- Israel activity, but then what the story becomes is about ethnic hatred. Meanwhile, you had two major incidences, one at UCLA where these pro- Israel vigilantes came in with clubs and beat people, pro- Palestine and Palestinian protestors on campus again, attacked them with wrenches causing severe injury. And then you had the chemical attacks in Columbia in late 2023. Now, no one ever referred to that as anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism. So any attacks or counter protests of pro- Israel students was always framed in the mobius sectarian terms whereas any attack on Palestinians was purely put in secular ideological terms and that double standard is quantifiable. You can show it and there’s no reason why that should be the case. There’s no legitimate editorial reason why there should be that asymmetry. And this book is about pointing out and quantifying and showing those asymmetries and then going up to editors and saying, “Why did you do this? ” Because we went to the New York Times and said, “Why do you use the word slaughter for the killing of Israelis 140 times, but you never use it for the killing of Palestinians? How is it that Israel killed 20,000 children?” Again, the numbers probably double that, but they killed 20,000 children and somehow managed to never commit a slaughter or a massacre not once. Doesn’t that feel statistically unlikely? And they say, “Oh, it’s different.” Well, why is it different? It just is. But why? Because it has to be, because my entire ideology falls apart if it’s not. So that’s why they create these ontological nonsensical concepts like terrorism. There’s those sort of buzzwords because they’re meant to shut your brain off and to not do critical thinking. And so that asymmetry is, again, extremely quantifiable beyond a reasonable doubt and our numbers are conservative. We didn’t even include opinion columns. That’s how conservative we were. So if you include opinion columns, it’s probably 100% worse. And so that was what people were up against and there was very sophisticated turnkey mechanisms to use basically liberalism against itself. So anti-hate rules on campus or Title IX or other federal legislation against discrimination was turnkey used against Palestinians, pro- Palestine protestors because to stand up for Palestine was per se, somehow a form of racism. This is why groups like the ADL have ingratiated themselves into anti-racist spaces for so long because they need to use that to defend the left blank of Zionism and Israel, which they’ve done to tremendous effect. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, we could be talking about this for two more hours and I would love to, but I wanted to just sort of talk about accountability and what that looks like and what this book empowers us to do to get it. Because I think we must acknowledge that for three plus years we tried. Not everyone can say that. I imagine if you’re all here, you did. I know and can quantify how much we tried at the real news hundreds of interviews or documentary reports or like original work on the genocide in Gaza Adam column after column interviewed like podcasts, like we post, do what people in Gaza have been asking us to do. Just like, please get our stories out there. Please don’t let people forget about us. Please do something to stop this. And for the rest of our lives, we’re all going to have to be haunted with the reality that we didn’t. Adam Johnson: Yeah. Well, one thing is for Israel and the US we’re banking on is that people would grow numb to it. And I think that to some extent that was a correct assumption Maximillian Alvarez: That in itself could lead to a very big discussion about why, because I actually think it goes beyond Gaza and it wasn’t lost on me as I was reporting from East Palestine, Ohio around the same time the train in that Ohio town derailed in 2023. And when I was there trying to get their stories up, I noticed that the algorithms they saw the name, a lot of the stories aren’t getting out there. So I’m trying to explain to these Trump voting white working class people who have been poisoned why the internet is suppressing their stories. And so there’s a lot here and again, our goal is not to explain everything in Adam’s book. You got to go read the book and I promise you won’t be disappointed. You’ll be infuriated, but you’ll be empowered by it. But again, the fact is that from algorithmic suppression and platform specific suppression and all these goddamn Trump loving oligarchs owning the media platforms as well as gobbling up the media companies and whether from CBS to HBO to TikTok. So we got a lot on our plate here and a lot to deal with, but I wanted to ask Adam like, what accountability looks like here because we name names we have thanks to you in this book and everyone who contributed to it, the ammunition that we need to hold people accountable. But I guess I wanted to ask how we do that. Adam Joh
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Monika Silva-Koniuszek had denounced land deals, nepotism and influence peddling. On Monday, Monika Silva-Koniuszek, a Polish-born environmental defender, was found dead in Santa Elena province on Ecuador’s coast. The following day, Interior Minister John Reimberg stated that Silva-Koniuszek appeared to have died by suicide, according to the initial evidence gathered at her home. However, the official acknowledged that the autopsy results will determine with certainty what occurred. On social media, however, human rights defenders have alleged that she was murdered, arguing that sufficient background exists to sustain that hypothesis. For at least a year, Silva-Koniuszek had been denouncing the irregular sale of more than 700 hectares in the Capaes area, where the land was sold without a public auction in 2022 by then-Mayor Otto Vera Palacios for US$6.2 million. The case gained prominence because the transaction allegedly involved the administration of La Libertad Mayor Francisco Tamariz. In April, Silva-Koniuszek also denounced the existence of an alleged network of nepotism and influence peddling involving Comptroller General Mauricio Torres, whom she accused of acting as a “wall” to prevent anti-corruption investigations. Esto publicó Mónika Silva el pasado mes de marzo en su cuenta de TikTok. Que no caiga jamás en el olvido. pic.twitter.com/IB3N73nZiy — Cristian Murillo (@socialholico) June 9, 2026 The text reads, “Monika Silva posted this on her TikTok account in March. May it never be forgotten.” A few weeks before her death, the environmental activist warned that she had been threatened and held authorities responsible should anything happen to her. “On Wednesday, March 4, while I was at the Santa Elena Judicial Council, I received two warnings about a planned contract killing against me. I hold the Ecuadorian state responsible not only for failing to prevent this potential disaster, but also for potentially facilitating it,” she said. Ecuador: Judge Rules Against Glas’s Habeas Corpus Bid as Defense Warns of Severe Malnutrition “It is not easy to kill me. And I do not say that out of arrogance or madness — quite the opposite. For years I have explained to the thousands of citizens who support me, pray for me and worry about me that what keeps me alive is my lack of fixed schedules, a life in constant movement, and the protection provided by my own community.” “The only way to locate me and know my ‘schedules and movements’ is through a surveillance system. This surveillance system has existed since Nov. 21 and was installed just 22 hours after Robinson’s death,” Silva-Koniuszek stated, referring to the 2025 killing of communicator Robinson del Pezo, who was shot to death in Santa Elena province as a result of his reports on land trafficking and political corruption. (teleSUR) From Orinoco Tribune via This RSS Feed.
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“Warum fühlen sich soziale Netzwerke heute so kaputt an — und gibt es eine echte Alternative zu Instagram, TikTok, YouTube und X? In diesem Video geht es um Algorithmen, Abhängigkeit, Creator-Druck und das Fediverse: ein offenes Netz aus Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, Pixelfed und mehr. Ich zeige, warum eigene Server mehr digitale Unabhängigkeit versprechen, wo das System noch scheitert und was es wirklich kostet, Social Media wieder selbst zu besitzen.”
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lemmy.blahaj.zone
You aren’t imagining it, they add various types of gum and additives to slow melting rates of real ice cream, and a lot of ice cream is straight up fake - “frozen dairy dessert” is a euphemism for fake ice cream often padded out with cheaper ingredients like vegetable oils. https://www.foodandwine.com/drumstick-ice-cream-doesnt-melt-tiktok-8635415 Honestly now-a-days one of the few ways we are going to protect ourselves is to rely on the ingredients list our governments mandate and familiarize ourselves with what products are actually what they claim they are, whether they contain anything questionable, and what euphemisms they use to hide undesirable ingredients. (Hydrogenated Oil == ~~Trans~~ Saturated Fat, Natural Sweeteners == Sugar, Corn Syrup == cheap substitute for sugar) For those of us in the US (yes I know this is world - sorry) we can only hope the brain worm dead bear boy doesn’t gut the FDA as badly as he promises, or companies are going to start adding all sorts of fun stuff to our food. Educate yourself and your friends about “the poison squad”, fascinating story of the kinds of crazy shit they used to put in food. Copper sulfate in canned peas and such.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo. While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era. Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.
Komunitas
sopuli.xyz
TikTok is Chinese spyware. Chrome is American spyware. Anyone in their right mind should stop using both.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I hate Tik Tok and also hate copyright disputes but can’t help but smile when these big corporations have arguments over money and people start taking sides, like Tik Tok or Universal cares about any of their customers.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Era uma… se não me engano era psicóloga. Ela se mudou do Brasil para a Espanha, mas gravava em português e gravava sobre temas diversos, como a romantização da magreza extrema, vendo vídeos do TikTok sobre e depois comentando a respeito.