Major bid to capture South African civil society

By Phillip Dexter

In 2018 the New York Times shared the Pulitzer Prize with the Washington Post for its coverage of Russiagate, the claim that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US election to Donald Trump as a result of Russian intervention in support of Trump.

In 2023 it all came crashing down as the Columbia Journalism Review, a highly respected publication, published a four part analysis of the US media’s coverage of the 2016 US elections. Its conclusions were devastating, particularly for the New York Times.

The articles showed, with painstaking care, that reporting on allegations of Russian interference in the election frequently went beyond the available evidence, often relying heavily and uncritically on unverified sources, including government officials and intelligence agents. It showed that allegations from anonymous sources had been reported as fact, as had unverified speculation. It also showed that the media was not willing to engage in an open and rigorous process of self-reflection and correction.

The analysis published in the Columbia Journalism Review was a major scandal for American journalism and showed, in particular, the ease with which intelligence agents had been able to spin the media narrative in the New York Times and other publications.

Many were shocked. I was not. The year before I had found myself in the middle of a bizarre media storm in the Daily Maverick. New Frame, a rival online publication to the Daily Maverick with a left slant, had recently closed down after four years of operation. There was nothing surprising about this. The media in South Africa has been in deep crisis for years and closures and retrenchments are common.

However the Daily Maverick went into full conspiracy theory mode alleging that New Frame had been a Russian and Chinese propaganda operation. New Frame had never published a single article that could be described as pro-Russia or pro-China. Its crimes, it seems, was that it had a black funder who had once been in the Black Panther Party and that it had been critical of the West. There also seemed to be considerable old fashioned jealousy at play.

To my astonishment I found my name drawn into the frenzied and, frankly, unhinged reporting in the Daily Maverick. My only connection with New Frame was that I had once had a short meeting with two of the editors to let them know about a Pan-African socialist thinktank I was starting and to enquire about the process of submitting opinion pieces to the publication. We had never got around to submitting any work for consideration but my name was also dragged through the mud as New Frame was smeared. It was a truly bizarre experience.

The claim that New Frame was really a Chinese propaganda project did not originate from New Frame’s readers or from its journalists. It had its origins in an article in a Washington based magazine called New Lines. New Lines is a project of the New Lines Institute which is funded by the US Government. Its leaders and other staff include various people with US military and intelligence backgrounds as well as someone with a background in Israeli intelligence.

The Daily Maverick had been as badly played by intelligence or intelligence adjacent sources as the New York Times. I was stunned to find myself drawn into an attack on a publication in which I had no role or association. But I was not shocked at the desire to paint all critics of the West as agents of Russian and Chinese propaganda projects. This has been happening for some time and the Daily Maverick had become openly and crudely aligned to the West. In fact it was no exaggeration to say that it had become a propaganda operation for the West with Greg Mills and Ray Hartley of the Brenthurst Foundation leading the charge. Mills is embedded in NATO and his foundation, funded by the Oppenheimer Family, is, via its board, embedded with the US and UK military.

The ongoing attempts to smear anyone who is a critic of the West as a patsy for Russia or China expanded to include Iran when the South African government took Israel to the International Court of Justice. Suddenly our government, and some critics of Israel, were accused of being in the pay of Iran. Of course no evidence was given for this claim, which was repeatedly stated as fact by certain writers.

This project of smearing critics of the West and Israel is also being carried out in the universities. The recent scandal about the paper co-authored by Herman Wasserman from Stellenbosch University is illustrative. Wasserman and his collaborators asserted that the idea that the war in Ukraine was provoked in part by the expansion of NATO is Russian ‘disinformation’ and concluded that Africans who hold this view are victims of Russian propaganda.

As a searing devastation of Wasserman and his co-authors in Business Day pointed out this is utterly ludicrous as many of the leading academics and journalists in the West, including senior people in the US state, hold this view. It is outrageous to misrepresent people who hold considered and well informed views counter to the official positions of the West as dupes of ‘Russian propaganda’.

The thriving ‘disinformation studies’ industry in the universities never studies US or Israeli propaganda. It is only focused on Russia and China, and, in the case of the paper by Wasserman and his co-authors is little more than conspiracy theory dressed up as ‘research’. The same is true of various ‘fact checking’ organisations around the world, many of which are funded by the US government.

But the media and the universities are not the only terrains of ideological combat in the New Cold War. The NGO sector is also a central terrain of contestation. The Brenthurst Foundation has been the most brazen of the South African NGOs when it comes to propagandising for the West. In fact it goes beyond propagandising and veers into organising.

In June last year the Brenthurst Foundation held a conference in Poland that bought together political players backed by the West around the world, a number of them people being pushed by US regime change projects. The then Daily Maverick editor, Branko Brkic, not only attended the conference as a delegate but actually signed on to its declaration! This should have been a scandal that rocked our media to the core and immediately ended Brkic’s career as an editor. The fact that it wasn’t a scandal shows just how normalised Western domination and propaganda have become.

But things are about to get worse. In an important article in the Sunday Times Ronnie Kasrils blew the whistle on a massive civil society conference to be held in Johannesburg later this month. The conference is to be held by the World Movement for Democracy, a project of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

By the early 1980s, the CIA’s extensive involvement in foreign coups and regime changes had drawn widespread criticism, forcing the US to rethink its approach to exerting influence abroad. In response, the NED was established as a seemingly benign tool for advancing US interests, positioned as a promoter of democracy and civil society. As Allen Weinstein, a key founder of the NED, candidly admitted: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."

The NED has since funnelled funding and support into political movements and opposition groups aligned to US foreign policy goals across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. It has been directly involved in successful regime change operations, against democratically elected governments in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti and elsewhere. The NED also played an all too effective role in shaping the transition from apartheid in a neoliberal direction.

The NED funded Johannesburg conference will be a major attempt to win South African civil society over to the West. Pressure is mounting for NGOs to pull out of this conference and many have already done so.

We need our media organisations, universities and NGOs to remain independent in the New Cold War and to serve the interests of our people. They must not become proxies of the West or any other powerful states competing for influence in the New Cold War.

* Phillip Dexter is a member of the ANC and SACP. He writes in his personal capacity.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.