A couple of years ago I wrote about my experiences at a Canadian academic conference on “disinformation” and how a Disinformation Industrial Complex (DIC) was being constructed to trash, restrict and even get banned anyone who dares stray from the establishment narrative provided by the mainstream media. A response to the internet serving to democratize information with the inevitable collapse in the legitimacy and reach of the mainstream media. I have also recently written about the extensive Western disinformation campaigns to sell the establishment narrative that supports the hegemonic culture used to help control the population, including the use of both fake “left” and fake “right” front groups, influencers, journalists, academics and content creators.
Recently I attended a presentation and panel on disinformation/misinformation which showed how this state and oligarch-driven project has become integrated at an international level, and has become much more formalized. The main speaker was Siim Kumpas, a Russia-hating Estonian who is the Leader of the Policy, Strategy & Partnerships Team at the Information Integrity & Countering Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI) Division, which is part of the European External Action Service headed by the Russia-hating Estonian Kaja Kallas. Why not just call it the “EU Ministry of Truth”. He has an MA in Communications from the University of Tartu, Estonia (2013) and previously worked within the Estonian government when Kallas was Estonian PM. He gave a very bland presentation on what represented an EU-level effort to tell European citizens what to believe and what not to believe.
He referenced the DISARM Foundation, whose stated goal is to “identify and respond to malign information influence operations” which can help coordinate “whole society responses to malign influence operators”. It is funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. The former states its main aims as remembering the holocaust, fighting “anti-semitism” and “strengthening” democracy; i.e. countering anyone who criticizes the Zionist regime. The latter was founded by the US centi-millionaire founder of Craigslist and supports cybersecurity and promoting the “truth”. He is from a Jewish family and has supported the Zionist disinformation operation the Anti Defamation League that equates any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism. So perhaps the DISARM Foundation’s real goal is to identify and respond to the wrong people’s “malign” information influence operations; e.g. not the EU and Western state governments, not the Israeli and Ukrainian governments, and their security services, and not the oligarch and state controlled Western mainstream media.
He also mentioned EUvsDISINFO produced by the East Stratcom Task Force which is part of the EU diplomatic service headed up by Kaja Kallas; specifically set up to counter “Russian Disinformation”, i.e. anything that countered Ukrainian and Western lies. One of the lead articles on their website is about Georgia and its struggle to regain its sovereignty, which is of course presented as a pro-Russia activity and makes absolutely no mention of the massive Western colour-revolution attempt to overthrow the elected government of that country as it voted on legislation to limit Western disinformation and political manipulation within Georgia.
He also earnestly told the audience that the EU Digital Services Act is in no way an attack on free speech, but is in fact meant to protect it together with our democracy. This reminded me of the focus of 1984 on the debasement of language, where a statement could mean its complete opposite; war is peace and censorship is protecting free speech. In the same way that banning the leading candidate for president in Romania was “protecting democracy”.
The whole event had been organized by the Ukrainian Halyna Padalko, who has received scholarships from the Ukrainian government and is also doing a fellowship at the NATO Centre for Strategic Communications and has completed an internship at the European Parliament. The panel members included Aengus Bridgman, 2024 PhD from McGill University, who is the Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) of McGill & Toronto universities and is “one of Canada’s leading experts on misinformation, digital activism, and the politics of digital media”. MEO is also the coordinating body of the Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN) which is “committed to fortifying and fostering resilience within Canada’s unique information ecosystem. The CDMRN was founded with a C$5.5. million grant from the Canadian government as part of its initiative to fight “foreign disinformation”; but not the widespread disinformation spread by the Canadian government itself and the state media. Nor foreign-owned media such as the National Post, or the Canadian oligarch-owned Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.
Another panel member was Estonian Marcus Kolga, another Russia hater, and the founder and director of DisinfoWatch, together with being a Fellow at the McDonald-Laurier Institute, the Conference on Defence Associations (CDA) Institute whose mission is to “advance informed debate on national security issues”, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. The McDonald-Laurier Institute institute is a right-wing neoliberal think tank and receives funding from Canadian oil and gas interests, the US Koch Foundation, and from the US Atlas Network; i.e. a foreign funded influence organization in Canada. It funds DisinfoWatch. The CDA Institute is basically a pressure group for the Canadian security services, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights is a “unique international consortium of parliamentarians, scholars, jurists, human rights defenders, NGOs, and students”; i.e. a foreign influence network. It regularly spreads and supports Israeli and Zionist propaganda.
And another panel member was Jennifer Irish, Director of the Information Integrity Lab (another 1984 style title) at the University of Ottawa. She had a 35-year career in the Canadian foreign service and federal government and was part of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Community. A lifelong Canadian state security operative put in charge of an organization supposedly tasked with keeping the integrity of the information within society; you could not make this stuff up.
The panel referred to Vatnik Soup as a good source on people and organizations spreading “disinformation”. This source claims that The Heritage Foundation, Jill Stein, Victor Orban, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, TikTok, Julian Assange, Rand Paul, John Mearsheimer, Sahra Wagenknecht, Pope Francis, the AfD, Dimitri Lascaris, Roger Waters, Caitlin Johnstone, Jeffrey Sachs, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Diesen, Vanessa Beeley, Robert Fico, Jimmy Dore, Clare Daley, and even Noam Chomsky are all Russian apologists and propagandists! The author of of Vatnik Soup is Pekka Kallioniemi, a non-resident research fellow at International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) in guess where - Estonia! For Mr. Kallioniemi you must be a propagandist if you do not share his obvious extreme anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian views.
Marcus Kolga truly let the cat out of the bag when he was asked what could be done to combat foreign “disinformation” and stated that perhaps the regular perusal of the Economist and Globe and Mail, two bastions of Western establishment propaganda, would help to show the “truth” from “trusted” journalists. That’s the whole point, they want the citizenry to go back to just reading and viewing establishment propaganda and not have access to, or be brainwashed into not trusting, other sources that provide a critique of the establishment view. Truly a collective Ministry of Truth for our modern times, built by national security states, establishment-funded think tanks, and complicit careerist and Russia-hating (and also China-hating) academics, journalists and researchers; with help from the Zionist regime and its supporters.
Below Aaron Mate covers the US state funded entities tasked with delegitimizing anything, from either ends of the political spectrum, that counters the establishment narrative or points out the flaws or lies that form part of that narrative - such as Newsguard and the UK-based Global Disinformation Index . Heavily managed through the Biden-era US State Department project called the Global Engagement Centre lead by Nina Jankowicz. She is of Polish ethnicity, graduated from a women’s liberal arts college with a double-major in Russian and political science in 2011, and spent a year working with the Ukrainian foreign ministry in 2017 as a Fulbright Scholar. Joining the large group of Eastern European background, Russia-hating liberal scholars in this area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayf_OMDRHBw&t=9s
This is the soft end of the collective Ministry of Truth. The harder end includes the harassing of independent journalists and researchers, their jailing and even murder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmY_bniRT2U&t=3s
He who controls the narrative controls society. And Western governments and their oligarch backers are determined to control the narrative, whatever it takes.