Aleppo: WTF is Going On?!

In the Nov. 11, 1758 edition of The Idler magazine, if you ever happen upon one, you’ll see this timeless line: “…among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.”

In other words, “The first casualty when war comes,” Senator Hiram Johnson said to the Senate in 1918, “is truth.”

The fog of war, as you know, is thick in Aleppo.

I’ve personally talked to people who’ve helped refugees in Europe who said, indeed, Syrians were mostly running away from the regime’s brutality.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to those who say, no, they are running away from bombings of external forces and most people love Assad. The whole chemical attack thing was a false flag.

Still others say they are running away from all of it — the proxy war — and nobody is innocent.

Some flee because they’ve lost everything. Others flee because they’ve been sold on living in the Western world, where the streets are paved with gold and they won’t have to work to live like a king.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media says one thing and journalists who travel to Aleppo say something completely different.

Then, you have activists like him…

And her…

And him (an American)…

And him…

All apparent victims of the Syrian Arab Army, all releasing their videos at the same time, and saying the same thing (that pro-Assad forces are mowing people down indiscriminately), in what appears to be a coordinated PR campaign. (Is it? We’ll get to that in a moment.)

Yeah, it’s confusing.

But, for balance, let’s talk about the side of the story that’s not getting much airtime in the Western world. (Much of this information is likely not new to you, but let’s start from the top anyway.)

According to two journalists who’ve been on the ground in west Aleppo — one Canadian journalist by the name of Eva Bartlett, and another British journalist, Vanessa Beeley — the corporate media is lying to you. And many of the “journalists” peddling these lies often have no clue they’re doing so.

Both Bartlett and Beeley claim that the pro-Assad Syrian Army has been completely misrepresented and it is actually foreign terrorists who are wreaking havoc on the Syrian people, not the Syrian government.

Moreover, according to them, the Free Syrian Army — the “pro-democracy” Syrian rebels who have vowed to take down Assad — make up a small minority of the rebellion. Most of the rebels are actually splintered factions being funded by external forces. We’ll get to that, too, in a moment.

First, it’s important to discover where, exactly, the mainstream media is getting their information. According to Eva Bartlett, it comes from a small handful of far from impartial sources. On top of a revolving series of unnamed and named activists:

“These [media] organizations are relying on Syrian Observatory For Human Rights, which is based in Coventry, UK, which is one man. They’re relying on compromised groups like the White Helmets, which, let’s talk about the White Helmets. The White Helmets were founded in 2013 by a British  ex-military officer. They have been funded to the tune of $100 million by the US, the UK, Europe and other States. They report to be rescuing civilians in eastern Aleppo, in Idlib, yet, no one in eastern Aleppo has heard of them. And I say no one bearing in mind that now 95% of these areas in eastern Aleppo are liberated.”

Go to every Western mainstream media source and you’ll see that the White Helmets are painted as this neutral humanitarian force. Heroes without capes.

They call themselves “nonaligned” and “independent.”

Yet, says Bartlett, “they can be found carrying guns and standing on the dead bodies of Syrian soldiers. And their video footage actually contains children that have been recycled in different reports.”

“They are not credible,” Bartlett says. “The SOHR is not credible. ‘Unnamed activists’ are not credible. Once or twice maybe, but every time, not credible.”

As far as sources on the ground go, Bartlett says, the mainstream media simply doesn’t have any.

“And,” she goes on, “as for the agenda of corporate media?” “It is the agenda of regime change. How can the New York Times, I was reading it this morning, or how can Democracy Now, which I was reading the other day, maintain until this day this is a civil war in Syria? How can they maintain until this day that the protests were unarmed and nonviolent until say 2012. That is absolutely not true.

“How can they maintain that the Syrian government is attacking civilians in Aleppo, when every person coming out of these areas occupied by terrorists is saying the opposite?”

According to Bartlett, the vast majority of Syrians don’t see Assad, who was democratically elected into office in 2014, as the problem. (For neutrality’s sake, I will say this: Bartlett has only been shuttled around government strongholds of Syria by the regime, so bias is not only a possibility, it’s a surety.)

Regime change, she says, “is the agenda. If [the media] had told the truth about Syria from the beginning, we wouldn’t be here now. We wouldn’t have seen so many people killed.”

Disturbingly, this story sounds familiar.

In October of 1999,  journalist John Pilger, in his own words, “stood in a ward of dying children in Baghdad with Denis Halliday, who the previous year had resigned as assistant secretary general of the United Nations. [Halliday] said: ‘We are waging a war through the United Nations on the people of Iraq. We’re targeting civilians. Worse, we’re targeting children . . . What is this all about?’”

Then, in 2003, fresh off of the heels of the invasion, journalist Pilger interviewed American journalist Charles Lewis. “What,” Pilger asked, “if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

Had the journalists done their jobs, Lewis replied, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq.”

Mind you, though the reports are conflicting, as few as 151,000 and as many as 1 million Iraqis died as a result. Not to mention, of course, the 5,000 American soldiers who sacrificed their lives for “the cause.” This is something real journalism may well have stopped in its tracks.

(This is a statement corroborated by Dan Rather, David Rose of the Observer, and, said Pilger, “senior journalists and producers in the BBS, who wished to remain anonymous…”)

“In other words,” Pilger went on, “had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.”

Now, we ask, are mainstream journalists doing their jobs in Syria? Or are they simply unquestioningly peddling a false narrative? It’s an important question, one everyone would be asking if we truly learned anything from Iraq.

In Western mainstream media we see one single narrative: Essentially, a genocide is taking place led by Assad forces and assisted by Russia and Iran. The trio, they say, are going from city to city, killing the Syrian people in what appears to be a maniacal rampage, taking no prisoners and shooting down any civilian who tries to escape the rebel-held areas. Aleppo’s rebels, it is said, are the heroes who fight back to try to save what’s left of Syria and the dignity of her people.

The other side, of which Eva Bartlett stands, says that this is not a civil war, as the media claims, but a war on Syria from mostly external factions, mostly funded by NATO States and Gulf States. Russia’s intervention, this side claims, is justified. Syria, a sovereign nation, is being torn apart limb-by-limb by foreign-funded factions and mercenaries, led by the West and joined by Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Journalist Vanessa Beeley, who has also been on the ground in western Aleppo, is in the latter camp.

“What we’re seeing here,” Beeley said in a recent interview with Mint Press News, “in my opinion, is Aleppo representing a microcosm of what is happening in Syria. We see 75% of the population of west Aleppo, 1.5 million civilians in the west government-held area of Aleppo being completely marginalized, dehumanized, ignored in Western media, ignored by the UN, ignored by the humanitarian organizations, and ignored liberally in the West. Despite the fact that they have been under attack for those four years, from the NATO and Gulf State-funded terrorist factions embedded in East Aleppo, using hell cannon [and] various manners of missile launchers to launch mortars, missiles, explosives bullets — those came pretty close to us when we were in west Aleppo — which have completely eviscerated children, torn limbs from people, amputated limbs from children, destroyed lives and destroyed entire families for the last four years.

“Again, whereas the voices of the 25% — the minority —  in east Aleppo, the majority of which are actually foreign militants, armed militants, and terrorist factions, their voices, not the voices of the Syrian civilians whose voices have also not been heard in east Aleppo until now, until their liberation. But the voices of the militant factions are the voices that have been amplified by our governments and our media, and this, as I say, is a reflection of what is going on in Syria.

“The majority voice of the Syrian people who support the Syrian government, the Syrian state and the Syrian army, are against any forms of sectarian divisions that are being imposed upon them externally. Their voices are being muted, ignored, marginalized, while the voices of the minority, those who violently oppose the Syrian government, are being amplified. And we know now that the majority of the armed factions inside Syria are actually mercenaries funded by the Gulf States and NATO states.

“The ‘moderate rebels’ that existed in the beginning, the Free Syrian Army, we know now they are such a tiny percentage. So, again, there’s very little amplification of the real, Syrian voices speaking out for the real Syrian voices speaking out for the real Syrian army, and the real Syrian state.

“One thing,” Beeley goes on, “that I would really like to counter here: There have been what I would consider truly obscene and grotesque reports from Western media, completely unverified, the UN has produced reports saying that they are unverified, but still nevertheless running with them, of the Syrian-Arab army executing, massacring, raping even in some cases in some reports, the civilians in east Aleppo.

“This is grotesque. And I will explain why: The Syrian-Arab Army soldiers that we actually met inside east Aleppo in Hanahou, in the Old City, in all the various areas… that we visited… many of them are actually coming home. Many of them are actually returning to their own homes in east Aleppo where they grew up, where they went to school, where they had their friends and their families around them.

“To even suggest this of the soldiers of the national army, it’s not as if it’s Assad’s army. This is the national army of Syria. They are the sons, the brothers, the uncles, the daughters of the families of Syria. To even imagine that these people who I saw in tears to be able to actually see their families again, to see their homes again in the liberated areas, would execute their own families, their own children, their own brothers, their own sisters, their own fathers, their own mothers, is one of the most grotesque propaganda forms of reporting I’ve actually ever seen.  And the fact that the UN and the Western media are basing these reports on spurious sources such as, for example, the primarily British-funded White Helmets who were trained, as we know, by a British ex-military mercenary, set up in 2013 not in Syria but in Turkey, and embedded in Nusra-held and al-Qaeda held, ISIS-held areas across Syria but particularly in East Aleppo. Much of the accounts of Syria that have come out in the last five years have come from their reports.

“Now, when I spoke to civilians inside of East Aleppo, many of them had neither heard of or seen the White Helmets. But others were more disturbingly telling me, which is what we have suspected, that they were not a civil defense but they were working entirely with the terrorist factions, the majority with Nusra Front or with ISIS… This is not the neutral humanitarian organization… And not forgetting that our government who are funding the White Helmets to the tune of over $150 million have also a declared interest in regime-change in Syria.

“So,” she says, “what we are seeing now is a breaking down of the propaganda and the lies that have underpinned the illegal NATO state and Gulf state intervention via proxy terrorist military against the war that is being waged in Syria, that is being shown, exposed, to be the criminal intervention into a sovereign nation that it really is.”

While we receive reports of Syrians dancing in the streets because, according to some, the pro-Assad Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has made immense progress in liberating Aleppo from the “rebels,” we also see a few activists making videos claiming the SAA are gunning people down in the streets.

What is propaganda and what is not?

First, to see why it might be credible that Syrians would be dancing in the streets after being liberated by “moderate rebels,” one needs only to take another look at Nassim Taleb’s chart of the difference between the regime and the MRs.

Click here to expand.

To be sure, Taleb is far from pro-Assad. His father’s operatives, he writes, “blew up my house in Amioun when my grandfather, then MP, voted for Bashir. In Skin in the Game I discuss this as “acting against one’s interest” (the opposite of conflict of interest). So as a scientist and a humanist, I have been setting my grudge aside in considering the far, far, far, greater cancer of Salafism or Islamofascism.”

And as for the anti-Assad activists…

All of them have the same story: “Because the SAA, led by Assad and helped by Russia and Iran is committing genocide here, this is the last time you will see me alive.”

The activists, it appears, some of them at least, are trapped in a rebel stronghold surrounded by government forces. That little green area is where one activist, American Bilal Abdul Kareem, has been posting videos from.

And then there’s Lina Shamy…

Editor-in-Chief of investigative watchdog journalism organization MintPress News, Mnar Muhawesh said this about Shamy:

“If you look at her page… she is indeed a Syrian activist that is a major supporter and media collaborator for the Free Syrian Army — an armed opposition group that was formed, funded, armed and trained by the so called “Friends of Syria coalition” in 2011 (which I have written extensively about) — the coalition was founded by NATO states including the US, UK, France, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others.

“This is the “pro-democracy” opposition group the CIA and State Department under Hillary Clinton’s command helped form to topple the Assad government after their mission was complete in Libya. to topple Ghaddafi. While I do believe that many Syrians who sincerely wanted change within the government were manipulated and used by the CIA into creating the FSA to foment a sectarian civil war there — it’s people like Lina Shamy who are purposely or unknowingly spreading misinformation about the crisis in Syria to ignite international support for a no-fly zone or an all out invasion of Syria that supports regime change. The CIA and the coalition of nations that are arming these rebels don’t care about the Syrian people — they have sunk this country into chaos for their own economic interests. I feel bad for Lina and any other Syrian who are being used by these proxy nations or believe that a revolution is real when fighters sold out to foreign nations. Her FB page: https://www.facebook.com/blacky.rose.7…”

Journalist Dilly Hussain, in a heated argument with Eva Bartlett on Russia Today challenges all of the claims that Assad is merely trying to save Syria from external factions, claiming these narratives echo “state propaganda.”

According to Hussain, local “activists tweeting” on the ground say different and, for one, Russia is far from a savior. Russian-backed missions of the Syrian Arab Army have also largely and blindly targeted civilians

“It’s all good and well Russia trying to play the hero now,” Hussain countered, “after bombing innocent people, hundreds of thousands of people from the air, providing air support to the regime, and now all of a sudden it’s trying to play mediator.

“I’ll take what the UN says with a pinch of salt, just like I’ll take what America, Britain, France says with a pinch of salt. The people who’ve really suffered here are the civilians within Syria who are being bombarded, being used by external powers, for the country to be played as a wider chess game. That’s essentially what’s happened.

“I don’t want your viewers to misconstrue my criticisms of Russia as support for America or Britain. Everyone has used Syria as a chess game.”

It is our belief that not a single “dog” in this fight is a complete angel.

The truth, just as it did in Iraq, will eventually come to light. And no matter what it is, no matter who is “most to blame” for this monstrosity, I suspect the American people aren’t going to like that truth one bit.

Hopefully, for our future’s sake, America doesn’t just stick its head back in the sand when this truth comes to light. Otherwise, history will continue to repeat itself once again… until there’s nothing left to destroy.

Fiat lux,

Chris Campbell
Managing editor, Laissez Faire Today

P.S. Have something to say? Say it! [email protected].

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