American Herald Tribune – by David Macilwain
While trying to sort out the degree to which the Coronavirus Pandemic is being exploited by some actors to their advantage, or may even have been initiated and cultivated by them as some sort of “9/11 2.01”, there is an accumulation of evidence for this last and worst conclusion in what appears to be a disinformation pandemic.
Not only are there new disinformation initiatives on various fronts, – Syria, Ukraine, China, Iran, and of course Russia, but there appears to be a parallel push against independent sources and investigators intended to pre-empt their reaction to these “initiatives”. I wrote recently about an article published in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald which presumed to describe and “explain” conspiracy theories, and so to neutralize their power and credibility. Unfortunately this is easy to do, as there are a plethora of truly ridiculous ideas with hordes of gullible followers.
By holding up these daft ideas – like the “faked moon landings” – or technically impenetrable ones like the 5G-Coronavirus connection – attention is drawn away from the real conspiracies, such as 9/11, the White Helmets operation or the Skripal hoax, – and now questions about the Coronavirus pandemic’s origins.
Considering where the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic really began is a subject for vital and legitimate enquiry, but most speculation about it has an element of “conspiracy” involved. Calling it “the Wuhan Virus” is not a simple statement of fact, as the fact is very much disputed and almost certainly wrong, so the description implies some degree of deception by Chinese authorities. There is at least as much circumstantial evidence that the chimaeric virus originated in a bio-weapons lab in the US, but calling it the “Fort Detrick Virus” makes one a “conspiracy theorist” of the bad kind.
Thus it was that several academics from the UK’s notorious Organisation for Propaganda Studies – notorious for their detailed technical and apolitical investigation into Syrian chemical weapons claims – were recently called out for allegedly subscribing to the “Coronavirus bio weapon” conspiracy theory. Not that they had; Tim Hayward had merely retweeted an article which considered such a theory – because he presumably thought it worth considering, as we all should. Piers Robinson’s guilt was merely for appearing on Russian state channels RT and Sputnik, and “whitewashing the Syrian and Russian regimes”.
Read the rest here: https://ahtribune.com/world/europe/uk/4072-disinformation-pandemic.html