Doing the Grayzone hustle

I’ve watched Blumenthal and his cronies go about their sordid business so many times that the method has become depressingly familiar. In parts one and two we took a in-depth look at this strategy, which principally boils down to obfuscation, denial and de-humanization, or more plainly written; lies.

Their history of lies is why no one who works at Grayzone can get published in any even remotely reputable media outlet.

Their blood campaign began with a laughable cartoon-villain description of the refugees I had been talking to for months. Anyone criticizing the Maduro government wasn’t a three-dimensional individual with complex opinions and history. They were rather dismissed as a monolithic caricature that bore no semblance to reality — a false and grotesque caricature of villainy.

Worms. Racists. Facists. Right-wing extremists. Filth. Rich white oppressors. Thugs. Just as they had done in half a dozen countries before, they de-humanized and denied agency to people of color in the global south.

They quickly followed with blatant denial of easily verified facts. Blumenthal led the charge with a widely-mocked video in a luxury shopping mall, claiming that the thousands of media and UN reports describing a broken medical system and millions of dangerously malnourished people were merely the lies of “war-mongers.”

“It is the duty of the thinking man not to be on the side of the executioner,” wrote Albert Camus. Lamentably, Grayzone provides the executioner with his hood as he swings the axe.

Even leftist journalists within Venezuela who had supported Chavez, like Clifton Ross, pointed out the utter duplicity of Max “disproving” an economic and health disaster by going shopping for Gucci in the richest neighborhood of Caracas.

These bizarre antics were of course amplified by the Venezuelan government, their state-owned news network TeleSur and Grayzone’s Russian media sponsors.

They started re-writing Venezuelan Ministry of Information press releases and peddling them as Grayzone stories. In a move that Goebbels himself would have been proud of, Max and Anya filed a series of stories about Maduro’s overwhelming popularity, despite most polls putting his approval rating at less than 15%.

Some of the stories they hyped would prove laughably false, not an uncommon occurrence from a government ministry that in the past claimed ongoing electrical outages pre-dating the crisis were caused by “hungry parrots who ate the electrical cables”, that “Capitalism ended life on Mars” and that “Trump had dropped an EMP bomb on Maracaibo”.

But Grayzone, and especially Parampil, were unconcerned with being caught in lies. As per their Modus Operandi, they simply moved on to the next ridiculous claim or denial.

As the crisis wore on, Parampil often crowed that the UN did not recognize the opposition government, but rather Nicolas Maduro. She and Max even held a press conference on behalf of the VZ government at a side-event that coincided with a UN meeting in Geneva — an action common for PR firms and lobbyists, but rather eyebrow-raising for “independent journalists”.

But, much like it did on Syria, their opinion on the UN as arbiter of what should be would undergo a head-spinning reversal when the the body published a report on human rights abuses by Maduro’s government.

And they were rewarded by Maduro with personal gifts for their efforts.

“Journalists” from Mintpress and Grayzone, being rewarded for their PR campaign by President Nicolas Maduro, who presented them with a replica sword of Simon Bolivar and gave them sweet kisses (Twitter account of the President of Venezuela)

Death Squads, torture, political prisoners and censorship

Many articles can and have been written about the UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet’s absolutely damning report from July of 2019, which is worth reading in it’s entirety. It confirmed hundreds of independent reports by a dozen media agencies over years, and came as something of media bombshell in Spanish-language media.

The report detailed nearly 7000 extra-judicial murders at the hands of secret police who covered up the assassinations, systematic torture and sexual violence against political prisoners, arbitrary detention, press censorship, food insecurity used as a political weapon and widespread physical and economic violence against indigenous people in Venezuela.

Those accusations are just the ones that made the headlines. The report goes on to detail massive food shortages, economic and social suffering, widespread collapse of the medical system and dispels the governments absurd lies about having an independent press or any semblance of democracy.

Bachelet’s report was all the more surprising considering she was a leftist president of Chile whose father was killed by the fascism of Pinochet, a victim of state torture at the hands of a brutal right-wing government and a “friend of Chavez” in her own words. Most analysts expected the report to be a rather anodyne show of useless finger-wagging, which no doubt was also Maduro’s expectation when he invited her to the country.

Turns out someone who had been imprisoned by a dictatorship recognized one when she saw it in person.

Grayzone was not pleased.

So Anya enlisted the help of Alfred de Zayas, an ex UN reporter known for a checkered history of holocaust denial and support for Venezuela, to “debunk” the report in a a long-winded screed for Grayzone. Her “analysis” consisted mostly of complaining that the UN didn’t investigate a case of a brutal murder from years before that she loves misrepresenting.

Zayas was not involved in the Bachelet UN investigation. At all.

While her hastily drafted word-salad may be virtually unintelligible, just one of the hundreds of misrepresentations she has crafted, and certainly is not convincing, it does illustrate succinctly the most dangerous aspect of what Grayzone does.

They do damage.

Though they wrap themselves in the garments of anti-imperialism, they are anything but. They take the side of Empires that oppress. Empires that censor and lie. Empires that brutally murder. They are counter-revolutionaries in the purest sense of the term. And they write from a place of privilege their victims can only imagine.

They rationalize mass-arrests and the brutal oppression of media while clouding the fog of conflict with obfuscation, spin and outright lies. When authoritarian governments are faced with a rebellion of the masses, Grayzone provides the cover to stomp them into the dust.

They claim to be peace activists — they are anything but. As they shout their propaganda from under a white flag, they provide cover to the worst sorts of violence.

“It is the duty of the thinking man not to be on the side of the executioner,” wrote Albert Camus. Grayzone provides the executioner with his hood as he swings the axe.

Its the most cynical form of information warfare, and their digital smokescreen is not only endagering public trust in a free press, without which democracy can not exist, it is endangering people’s lives.