Syria’s tragedy: why states must protect their information space from the US

Podcasting a few hours after I’d posted on the fall of Assad, Brian Berletic moved from an incisive thirty-five minute exposition on what happened, to a more general observation:

Although the multipolar world grows economically, even militarily; surpassing the US and collective West in so many ways, it still has not addressed collective and internal security. Russia and China have protected their information spaces well but have neglected to help allies and potential partners protect their own information space. ¹ If your information space is undefended, the United States can not only monopolize it. They can use it to turn a nation’s population against its own best interest, just as they have in Ukraine

The US spends millions and millions of dollars every year, gathering more people who work to expand US reach in a targeted country, until it reaches critical mass, with a large segment of the population willing to vote in a US-backed opposition party into power to make institutional changes within that country. Before you know it, political capture has taken place.

And if voting cannot create an outcome favorable to US interests, they overthrow whatever government is in their way, as in Ukraine in 2014. Now they have convinced Ukrainians to ignore their best interests, which would be neutrality; working with the west and  Russia – their largest trading partner until the US convinced them to commit National Suicide.

Now they have succeeded in convincing many people in Syria to do the same.

Podcast below, at 21:13-23:30 (lightly edited)

This goes for the West too. How else could Australia have so acted against interests vis a vis its biggest trade partner, China? Why else would Europe have been so economically suicidal as to double down, long after its gamble had manifestly and catastrophically failed, on the US war to weaken Russia in Ukraine? ²

To add insult and irony to injury, our lovely media – from Guardian and Der Spiegel to El Pais and Economist – berate Moscow and Beijing for such “authoritarian” measures as blocking Google, FB and other corporate social media. The latter’s algorithms and secretive rules on what is/is not acceptable do favour empire narratives – just not so blatantly as to jeopardise the illusion of fair and unfettered exchange.

(Not that you’d call banning RT and Sputnik subtle. Ditto denial of access, other than in heavily curated soundbites, to the views of Putin, Xi or other leaders obstructive of empire. Who needs subtle with a population too far gone to ask for such a thing, or even notice its absence?)

China and Russia have every reason to view such hegemon-friendly platforms with the utmost suspicion. Ditto a deep-pocketed ability to have armies of keyboard warriors flood social media with empire talking points while denouncing adversaries for doing similar. ^{3 4}

On a different note, before closing Brian reiterates a point he has consistently made since it all kicked off on October 7 last year. Just yesterday Caitlin Johnstone opined that:

Many pundits on my end of the commentary spectrum had been calling [US] proxy wars self-defeating and framing them as the desperate flailings of a dying empire which will only accelerate its demise, but now here we are watching the empire score a victory it’s been chasing for years, with the western/Israeli stranglehold on the middle east growing tighter than ever.

Brian is more specific. At 32:04 to 32:40 he says:

Last year I warned that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was a trap … that Hamas is not a legitimate resistance organization [but] was deliberately creating a pretext for Israel to flatten Gaza and create conditions across the region for a wider war that has now consumed Syria and is poised to consume Lebanon, Iraq and possibly Iran.

I’d love to say he’s just plain wrong, but don’t think I can. As a warrior for truth must, he neither denies nor downplays Syria’s tragedy, which is ours too, nor sinks in the slough of despond.

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1. No small impediment – I don’t say an insuperable one – to China and Russia helping an ideologically colonised world win back its information space is that, courtesy of two successive empires, English is the global lingua franca.
2. “Why else would Europe be so economically suicidal?”  It’s more accurate to ask this of Europe’s leaders, which directs us to an unsaid subset of Brian’s wider point. When she was asked recently why Europe’s compradors leaders had prioritised US interests over those of the people and businesses they supposedly represent, the political economist Radhika Desai replied that we were speaking of men and women who:

   … have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, von der Leyen and Annalena Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that the people Washington has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.

   Radhika, a Marxist, subtly invites us to consider class. Many otherwise excellent pundits, too well informed to ignore, speak of a nation’s interests as though these were somehow irreducible and indivisible. But in understanding questions as seemingly separate as the Ukraine acceleration of Europe’s decline, and whether “Israel rules the USA” (spoiler alert: it doesn’t) we will inevitably go astray if we fail to distinguish class and national interests. Not least because that failure guarantees another: inability to know imperialism when it smacks us on the nose.

3. Some may recall how, in that February interview, Tucker Carlson responded to Putin’s setting out of the case, for saying NATO sought for years to trigger his country’s SMO in Ukraine, by asking why Russia had not tried harder to get this message out to the world. The RF leader replied in effect that since America wins hands down on the propaganda front, precisely because of its information dominance, his government had opted to focus on winning the real war.
4. US ideological colonisation of the planet is not confined to overtly political discourse, be it in traditional or social media. Hollywood and Netflix do their bit, as do rock idols, Coca Cola and MacDonalds.