Thursday, April 21, 2022

Anniversaries of Silence in the Media, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

Although I launched The Unz Review in late 2013, for the first couple of years I was preoccupied with political campaigns and software development work, and only wrote an occasional piece here and there. My only notable article was my lengthy expose of the true history of Sen. John McCain:

Then, during the summer of 2016 I was saddened to read of the passing of Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, a former top-ranking editor at the New York Times. He had sometimes been described as one of the greatest American war-correspondents of the twentieth century, and a few years earlier I had been proud to publish his astonishing expose of McCain’s central role in the Vietnam POW cover-up, a revelation that had completely transformed my own understanding of the issue.

One of the most distinguished journalists in America had spent years producing a stunning blockbuster, and the only reason it gained significant attention was because I had been willing to publish and later promote it. This bizarre situation greatly shaped my views on the reliability of the American media, and eventually became the central theme of one of my articles a couple of years later.

So in 2016 I wrote a long tribute to Schanberg and his remarkable work, arguing that the story he had broken had simply been too big for the American media to be willing to report, and I followed it up with a couple of additional columns.

This also prompted me to launch my American Pravda series, and over the next few weeks I produced a half-dozen more articles, notably including an account of the likely assassination of Gen. George Patton by the U.S. government and the accidental destruction of TWA Flight 800 by the American military. These pieces generated a considerable amount of attention, with several of them drawing hundreds of comments. But afterward I was diverted away by urgent software issues for most of the next two years.

In June 2018 I was finally able to return to my American Pravda series, and began to present some of the extremely controversial material I had uncovered over the previous few years of research and investigation, starting with a presentation of the Suvorov Hypothesis and the writings of British historian David Irving. During the nearly four years that followed, I added almost 350,000 words to the series, a series also conveniently collected together into a freely downloadable eBook.

My topics had ranged very widely, including the JFK assassination, the 9/11 attacks, World War II and the Holocaust, Mossad assassinations, the Covid outbreak and biowarfare, HIV/AIDS, and most recently the underlying causes of the Russia-Ukraine war. I think there are very few bodies of work anywhere on the Internet that contain so many different ultra-controversial topics. The descriptive subtitle of my series was “A Historical Counter-Narrative of the Last One Hundred Years.”

These pieces naturally provoked an enormous outpouring of commentary, totaling more than five million of words, and much of it was highly critical. But after carefully considering the responses I feel quite confident that the vast, vast majority of my ultra-controversial claims are correct, at least to the degree of uncertainty with which I had originally expressed them. And even if only 5% of my analysis were accurate, I think the pillars of America’s current world-framework would be severely shaken.

At the time I was producing all of this controversial material, I obviously recognized that my articles were hardly likely to receive the heavy media coverage many of my previous writings had enjoyed, nor would I be invited to summarize my conclusions in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, as had regularly happened in the past. But I was very pleased to later receive flattering notes by several leading mainstream academic scholars, who praised my pieces for the important revelations they provided.

My assumption had been that although my important conclusions would initially be avoided rather than absorbed and accepted, over time this would change. I felt that I had effectively investigated and compiled such an enormous quantity of solidly-documented material, much of it never previously considered, that it would become increasingly impossible to ignore, especially given the hundreds of journalists and academics on my regular distribution list. So while I thought it might take a few years, my information would inevitably and inexorably be properly considered and gradually incorporated into the historical record.

But perhaps I should not have been so sanguine. After all, a major step along my personal path of enlightenment had been my discovery of Schanberg’s POW research, and the media had totally ignored that for a quarter-century, without even a hint of his decades of research appearing in his long and glowing NYT obituary. So if one of our most celebrated Vietnam War journalists—whose story became the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields—could uncover the scandal of the century only to have it remain hidden, perhaps the establishment could hide anything.

And an even more unsettling example came to my attention just a few months ago. After reading the #1 Amazon bestseller by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. followed by a few weeks of careful investigation, I’d concluded that almost everything I’d always assumed I’d known about AIDS had probably been entirely wrong:

Unlike historical analysis, HIV/AIDS seemed a purely objective scientific issue, and Prof. Peter Duesberg ranked as one of the world’s foremost virologists. His shocking conclusions were later publicly endorsed by four Science Nobel Laureates, including both the researcher who had discovered the HIV virus and the renowned inventor of the PCR test. In the 1990s a noted Harvard professor had declared that the existing scientific scandal was far worse than the notorious Lysenko Affair of the Stalinist Russia, given the many hundreds of thousands of Americans who had died needless deaths as a consequence. Yet for thirty-five years these facts have remained hidden, and I only stumbled onto them quite by accident, as shocking a situation as I could possibly imagine.

I actually think that there is strong circumstantial evidence that the true facts surrounding HIV/AIDS are actually known or at least suspected within the journalistic community, but never publicly discussed. In late February, the Times published a long front-page hit-piece on Kennedy, attacking him on all sorts of different grounds. The writer, Adam Nagourney, was described as co-author of a history of the modern gay rights movement, and surely the AIDS epidemic would have constituted an absolutely central element of his research for that 2001 volume. But although the best-selling Kennedy book that prompted the article devoted nearly half its text to the incendiary claim that HIV/AIDS was merely a medical media hoax, Nagourney never even hinted at this controversy, strongly suggesting that he feared that Kennedy might well be correct and that certain doors should be kept firmly closed.

Discovering that four Science Nobel Laureates had been ignored for thirty-five years on an ultra-high-profile scientific matter completely punctured my remaining confidence that the truth will inevitably come out. If the media and political establishment could keep that hidden, what hope had my American Pravda series of breaking through in any reasonable time?

 

This was particularly relevant to my main recent investigative project. Exactly two years ago on April 21, 2020, I published a long article presenting my analysis on a topic of the most immediate relevancy, quite different from an alternative reconstruction of the JFK Assassination or the events of World War II.

According to our official statistics, the Covid epidemic has now killed a million Americans, and an unreleased report of the WHO estimates the worldwide body-count has reached some 15 million. Two years ago I set forth the strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the disease outbreak had been the blowback consequences of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), surely as explosive an accusation as could possibly be made.

Yet despite the extensive evidence I presented both in that piece and in the series of articles that followed, virtually all discussion of this disturbing scenario has been completely absent even from the alternative media.

For example, just a few weeks ago I was invited onto the audio podcast of a writer for a somewhat fringe publication with strong conspiratorial tendencies, and he expressed considerable surprise at my thesis, saying he hadn’t previously encountered the claim that Covid might be an American bioweapon.

Just days after my original article ran and began to attract enormous traffic, our entire website was banned by Facebook and had all its pages deranked by Google, greatly reducing the ability of my analysis to get into wider circulation.

I have been sharply critical of the American media for at least the last couple of decades. But if someone had predicted a few years ago that a million Americans would die apparently as the result of an American biowarfare attack but that both the mainstream and the alternative media would totally ignore that reality, I would not have believed it possible.

On the other hand, when someone stands almost alone in articulating important ideas, there may be strong interest in such unique material. Just before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in late February, I did three Rumble video interviews presenting my Covid theories, and these have now been viewed more than 300,000 times.

So perhaps at some point, the truth will indeed out.

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https://www.unz.com/runz/anniversaries-of-silence-in-the-media/

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