No citizen journalist, who values their life, should go anywhere near Ukraine’s Nazi psychotics, Declan Hayes writes.
After first citing the Armenian Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking to gain historical context, this article examines the recent Ukrainian arrest of citizen journalist Gonzalo Lira López and the smear campaigns against Patrick Lancaster and Graham Philips to explore the role of citizen journalists in NATO’s ongoing wars, Ukraine’s included. In concluding by examining the matrix NATO uses to weaponize their work, the article allows readers to evaluate the charges NATO lays against this website and its other citizen journalist targets in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria and domestically as well.
Armenian Holocaust
When I spoke in Damascus at the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Holocaust, I made the important point that, of all the political leaders who gathered in Yerevan to commemorate the event, only Russia’s President Putin had a right to be there because, Russia and the citizens of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine apart, few others did anything of substance to help the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks the Ottomans and their Kurdish enforcers slaughtered.
Those genocides are historical facts and the testimony of the citizen journalists who helped expose those monstrous crimes may be researched by starting at this link from Wikipedia, which is a website I return to later when assailing NATO’s critique.
It is likewise a fact that Japan put Nanking to the sword. Although the evidence of Nazi Party member John Rabe and other citizen journalists to this war crime were ignored until Iris Chang‘s best-seller appeared, Chang’s work, despite its many minor flaws, was a great piece of citizen journalism that would not have been necessary had NATO’s journalists and academics done the jobs they are paid to do; the same applies to the vicious attacks on the good people of Liverpool, discussed later.
Arab Also Rans
The wars of the Arab Spring have thrown up a multitude of truly repugnant citizen journalists, who NATO have encouraged to exploit gaps in the market for their own warped ends. One such specimen is Georgetown educated Matthew van Dyke, who developed a side hustle training pro NATO mercenaries to fight in the wars of the Arab Spring he knew nothing about. Darrell Lamont Phelps, who uses the nom de guerre Bilal Abdul Kareem, is another dubious American, who is embedded himself with Idlib’s criminals, after being evacuated from Aleppo, where he likewise had no right to be.
Although I regard van Dyke and Phelps, along with Lauren Booth, a sister in law of war criminal Tony Blair, who makes propaganda videos with Phelps, as war criminals, NATO takes a much more benign view of them and their kind, in Ukraine as much as in Syria.
Brits in Mariupol
Graham Phillips is an English citizen journalist earning his crust on the Russian side of the Ukrainian lines, where he got a scoop interviewing fellow Englishman Aiden Aslin, who Russian aligned forces captured in Mariupol. Although there were elements of Phillips’ interviewing style that grated, the Daily Mail and other extremist NATO media outlets claimed Phillips had broken the Geneva Convention by asking Aslin anything beyond his name, rank and serial number. Though it is good to see hard line NATO outlets show such compassion, it is in marked contrast to their apathy towards the torture and murder of captured Russians by Aslin’s Ukrainian employees and Syrians by Phelps’ Saudi employees before that.
Whatever about off camera, Phillips’ scoop was certainly not torture of the kind synonymous with how NATO treats its prisoners. And nor, to me at least, was it a major scoop. It was a small snapshot into how people like Aslin think and, as such, it was a worthwhile but by no means a particularly significant contribution to our knowledge. If Phillips’ channel has a Patreon or similar account, it would be worth chucking him a dollar or two, for folk who are that way inclined. Other than that, the interview was of no greater consequence.
Gonzalo Lira López
That bring us to the more important case of Gonzalo Lira López, a 54-year-old Chilean-American citizen journalist who had been reporting from Kharkiv since the start of the current Ukrainian war, up to Good Friday, 15 April 2022 when he was arrested, and widely presumed to have been tortured and murdered, before being released on 22 April.
Gonzalo was showing what he saw and making comments for viewers to make their own minds up on who were Ukraine’s white hats and who were its black hats. Although I had seen some of his previous videos, his work was not of major import to me, as I distil my views from a variety of other, weightier sources and experiences.
Although the Daily Beast maligned López by traducing his previous work, López’ relevance is that, as he was “our man on the spot,” he could ask if anyone had been raped and speaks English. Before the Nazis hijacked his twitter account, López began his last tweet “You want to learn the truth about the Zelensky regime? Google these names: Vlodymyr Struk, Denis Kireev, Mikhail & Aleksander Kononovich, Nestor Shufrych, Yan Taksyur, Dmitri Djangirov, Elena Berezhnaya.” The tweet finished with this sombre message: “If you haven’t heard from me in 12 hours or more, put my name on this list.” As Ukrainian Nazis and American citizen journalists allied to them wrongly claimed Gonzalo Lira was captured, tortured and executed by Sergei ‘Chili’ Velichko from the special unit Azov-affiliated Kraken unit, which are also implicated in violating the Geneva Convention by shooting Russian prisoners, we now move on to their handiwork.
Michael John Cirillo
Although few NATO outlets expressed any interest in Gonzalo’s fate or in bringing the Kraken terrorists to justice, citizen journalist Michael John Cirillo, an American transsexual who uses the nom de guerre Sarah Ashton Cirillo, is, for us, an important exception to this blanket rule.
Cirillo makes his citizen journalist crust filing copy for NATO media from Ukraine, selling tacky merchandise, scoring NATO book deals “about her time on the frontline” and helping the Azov and Kraken thugs locate Gonzalo and his type. Like van Dyke and Phelps, Cirillo, who has his own seedy back story, sees himself as a citizen player as well as a citizen journalist, much in the style of van Dyke, Phelps and other NATO aligned assets.
Although Cirillo keeps LGBT Nation informed of how tolerant Ukraine’s Nazis are, but Wikipedia tells us that Ukraine is not LGBT-friendly, that contradiction is not my primary criticism. Cirillo is mixing with some very dangerous and unhinged people, the same sort of people Phelps hangs out with in Syria and the very same people who abducted Gonzalo. My source for saying that is not NATO’s Wikipedia but Ukraine’s own Nazi sources admitting to killing each other over their spoils of war.
My takeaway message is that no citizen journalist, who values their life, should go anywhere near these Nazi psychotics, just as they should not go anywhere near any other type of organized crime gang; the Ukrainian Nazis’ more recent murder of Valery Kuleshov, another dissident citizen journalist, reinforces that belief. But NATO won’t highlight Kuleshov. Importantly, for what follows, I deduce that from the evidence and not from reading Wikipedia or any other NATO excuse for a credible source.
NATO’s Take
NATO is instead concerned that “4 well-known pro-Kremlin disinfo outlets – SouthFront, NewsFront, InfoRos & Strategic Culture Foundation – have been used as reference points in at least 625 Wikipedia articles” and those four give us “a glimpse into Wikipedia’s vulnerability to information manipulation”.
In between lambasting these four “unreliable” sources, this EU funded entity then goes on to explain what makes a reliable source by referring us to, of all things, Wikipedia’s relevant page. Even though the EU repeatedly cites Wikipedia to bolster its own Russophobic hate campaign, Wikipedia is not a credible source and nor is it the proper benchmark to determine what makes a credible source. Wikipedia’s strength is in giving us a quick idea on what the European External Action Service, the Wikipedia-dependent EU funded group behind this racist Russophobia, is; for more authoritative detail, we have to delve elsewhere.
Although EUvsDisinfo “was established in 2015 to better forecast, address, and respond to the Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns affecting the European Union, its Member States, and countries in the shared neighbourhood,” it might be best putting its own house in order first. It could do this by dissociating itself from the Russian based Conflict Intelligence Team who, from the Wikipedia page they link to, seems to be NATO aligned citizen journalist fifth columnists in Russia. They could also dissociate themselves from Wikipedia editors like Philip Cross, who landed into the financial cross hairs of George Galloway because of his biased, unconscionable and orchestrated editing practices.
EuvsDisinfo, it it wants to have any credibility, could call for worldwide sanctions to be imposed on Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp because of their disgusting smear campaigns against the people of Liverpool, spear-headed by Kelvin MacKenzie, their resident Hibernophobic Islamophobic racist. Although citizen journalists and the good people of Liverpool often get it right where the EU-NATO-Murdoch matrix deliberately get it wrong, the main take away is that NATO and the Wikipedia type sources they depend on are not credible sources for those who seek truth and not lop sided propaganda.
NATO’s long and ignoble history of fibbing continues in Ukraine where citizen journalists not on Team NATO’s payroll are maligned and assassinated, where fully fledged Nazi psychopaths are portrayed as heroes, where Nazi breaches of the Geneva Convention are ignored and where the same lies regarding the Nazis’ human shields in Mariupol that were used to justify Phelps’ cronies in Aleppo and East Ghouta are being wheeled out to promote Cirillo’s Nazi chums in Ukraine.
NATO jailed Muhammad Ali and murdered Martin Luther King Jnr for opposing their genocide campaign in Vietnam. NATO have Julian Assange imprisoned with very dangerous Nazi and ISIS terrorists for exposing NATO murdering citizen journalists in Iraq. NATO’s proxies continue to murder citizen journalists in Ukraine today.
Gonzalo Lira can consider himself lucky to be alive as of the time of writing. He should evacuate Ukraine at the earliest opportunity and seek safe refuge wherever he can. Cirillo, Booth, van Dyke, Phelps and similar types need have no such concerns as citizen journalist of their stripe are every inch the NATO attack dog as are Philip Cross’ Wikipedia or the Azov and Kraken knuckle draggers charged with bringing misery and death to Ukraine.
