The cases of Carol Cadwalladr and Paul Mason reveal how readily celebrated media figures are recruited to the intelligence services’ covert information war against other journalists.
Image and caption – Mint Press.

We’re splitting this selection of readings into two parts. The first deals with the backstabbing from some elements on the left, the second is about our favourite theme, geopolitical analysis.

Here are two key readings. The first deals with what, with a few honourable exceptions, is the collapse of the anti-war left. It makes for depressing reading but we have to acknowledge where we are before we can move forward. The second deals with the willingness of so called leftists such as Paul Mason to willingly take on the dirty work of the state by denigrating and attempting to shut down genuinely critical anti-war journalists.

A Lemming Leading the Lemmings: Slavoj Zizek and the Terminal Collapse of the Anti-War Left – Jonathan Cook | Mint Press | June 23, 2022

Have you noticed how every major foreign policy crisis since the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has peeled off another layer of the left into joining the pro-NATO, pro-war camp?

It is now hard to remember that many millions marched in the U.S. and Europe against the attack on Iraq. It sometimes feels like there is no one left who is not cheerleading the next wave of profits for the West’s military-industrial complex (usually referred to as the “defense industry” by those very same profiteers).

British “Watchdog” Journalists Unmasked as Lap Dogs for the Security State – Jonathan Cook | Mint Press | June 21, 2022

Events of the past few days suggest British journalism – the so-called Fourth Estate – is not what it purports to be: a watchdog monitoring the centers of state power. It is quite the opposite.

The pretensions of the establishment media took a severe battering this month as the defamation trial of Guardian columnist Carole Cadwalladr reached its conclusion and the hacked emails of Paul Mason, a long-time stalwart of the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian, were published online.

Both of these celebrated journalists have found themselves outed as recruits – in their differing ways – to a covert information war being waged by Western intelligence agencies.