Brussels is gearing up for a global propaganda war. The bluster with which the EU introduced the new name for its censorship bodes ill. It’s no longer about truth or lies, but rather about the intentions that are assumed of those who report facts.
In future, it will no longer be enough for the EU to censor and silence undesirable alternative media only in its own area of responsibility. In the future, the EU also wants to fight unwelcome opinions and competing media in the rest of the world.
To this end, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has announced that he intends to use alleged “disinformation experts” in EU offices around the world. Their task would be fighting Russian and Chinese spreaders of alleged “fake news”.
Borrell announced the deployment of official censors to this end: “All our delegations will be equipped with experts in countering disinformation in many parts of the world so that our voice is better heard.”
A particular thorn in the side of the EU is the Russian and Chinese media and their multipliers, for example on platforms such as Telegram.
More international solidarity with allies is also required here, said Borrell. “We need to address this issue politically at the highest level.” The EU and like-minded partners should create their own way of sharing data and analysis of foreign disinformation campaigns, but also work more with authorities around the world to ban competing voices.
Borrell did not give any specific information about what this should look like in the future and how the EU broadcasters should act against “fake news”. So far, the EU has not come up with anything other than censorship when it comes to unwanted competition but that could be difficult in foreign countries.
From the point of view of Borrell and the EU authorities there is no reason whatsoever to doubt the official narrative, and every expressed doubt will now be given a new label: “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference”, abbreviated FIMI.
The unelected preach ‘democracy’
The EU Commission is not a democratic structure, its members are appointed, not elected, and most of them lack any understanding of democracy. EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell could virtually serve as Exhibit A.
Not long ago, Ursula von der Leyen deleted her mobile phone communication with Pfizer about the purchase of millions of doses of a pharmaceutical preparation and while it raises the suspicion of corruption, this could be presented as FIMI simply because it was also reported by a Russian broadcaster.
Borrell’s grasp of the English language is at least as bad as that of Ursula von der Leyen’s. Yet both insist on proposing these far-reaching measures in English, no longer an EU language. Do they understand the subtleties of their proposal?
Ignoring facts
The Chinese state media, according to the EU report, “have reinforced selected pro-Kremlin conspiracy narratives, for example about alleged US military biorepositories in Ukraine”.
This is a clear example of how to dispose of truth or factual information as a criterion. These labs are not only found as budget items listed in the US defence budget (a document over which the Kremlin presumably exercises no control), but individual collaborations, such as the research projects of the Bernhard Nocht Institute or the Friedrich Löffler Institute with these Ukrainian labs, can also be found on their websites, as well as the financier of these projects, the German Ministry of Defence.
It must therefore be stated that these laboratories existed, that they were financed from the military budget and that the research was carried out on behalf of the military, and not only on behalf of the US. Nevertheless, the EU has declared the very existence of the labs to be a “conspiracy narrative”.
In connection with protests under the title #StopKillingDonbass, the EU report stated that it was “falsely claimed that the Armed Forces of Ukraine and ‘paramilitary units of neo-Nazis’ were committing atrocities against civilians, including children” while the Soros NGO Human Rights Watch recently actually admitted that Ukraine had distributed butterfly mines in Donetsk, an outlawed munition in residential areas.
According to their rationale, any “disinformation” accusation by FIMI does not have to take into account whether the statement is true, but only that it contradicts the EU narrative.
Therefore, the report noted: “The information disseminated by these networks does not have to be provably false or misleading to constitute a FIMI incident, which FIMI applies more broadly than the classic definition of disinformation.”