• memfree@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    The U.S. admission followed a June 14 Reuters investigation that revealed how the Pentagon launched a secret psychological operation to discredit Chinese vaccines and other COVID aid in 2020 and 2021, at the height of the pandemic. As a result of the Reuters investigation, the Philippine Senate Foreign Relations Committee launched a hearing into the matter and sought a response from the U.S.

    According to the June 25 document, Pentagon officials concluded its anti-vax campaign was “misaligned with our priorities.” It says the U.S. military told Filipino officials that operatives “ceased COVID-related messaging related to COVID-19 origins and COVID-19 vaccines in August 2021.”

    … so Trump?

    I imagine Biden had a lot of fires to put out once he became President in January 2021, but it would have been nice if this scheme ended sooner.

      • memfree@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        No, but I think he likes to order the military around and might give a rambling ‘order’ like, ‘China bad. China vaccines bad. Why send good vaccines to those sh-thole countries for free?’ – and then in so many words telling the Pentagon to make them all f-off and die.

          • memfree@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            lol!

            Edit: ok, I laughed, but I wanna be clear: not at you. I don’t think any of it SHOULD work like that, but in my imagination, I can visualize it happening, and some of the crap that went down what with the National Weather Service agreeing with a sharpie edit to their map… I just can’t exclude the idea that such craziness could have happened.

            – but I totally admit I was just riffing on a concept

            • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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              4 months ago

              DOD psyops have been deployed against China and their neighbors for decades, is all I’m saying. The presidents just step into and out of the stream of already existing behavior

              • memfree@lemmy.ml
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                4 months ago

                yeah yeah yeah, and not just there and not just the U.S. DoD. I think we all understand that psyops are a common military tactic. We can’t even be assuaged by the idea that the U.S. government isn’t ‘allowed’ to run such campaigns on its own citizens because: why would they even worry about that when they can just ask a dark-money PAC or the media to do it for them?

                • davel@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  not just the U.S.

                  This is of course true, but the massive scale of US interventionism compared to that of other countries can’t be papered over. The US has been the mob boss of the imperial core since the end of WWII.

                  We can’t even be assuaged by the idea that the U.S. government isn’t ‘allowed’ to run such campaigns on its own citizens

                  And yet it does, often in collusion with corporate media.

    • LarkinDePark@lemmygrad.ml
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      4 months ago

      It really doesn’t matter who’s president of the USA. Last time the democratic process threatened the democracy we were told we had to support Biden, because he was the lesser evil. Turned out supporting him supported genocide.

    • davel@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      … so Trump?

      It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump wasn’t even in the loop. The US military-intelligence-propaganda-industrial complex does shenanigans like this on the regular. The deep state is real, it’s just not anything like what far-right grifters say it is.