The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.
The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.
Psyops in the U.S. targeting the public used to be illegal, even though the way they got around it was to plant stories in the foreign press. But over the last five years beginning with Russiagate & now Ukraine, it is clear that U.S. public is fair game: https://t.co/gcEWoCZbkB
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.
So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most influential media outlets in the western world.
Another example of the Biden administration releasing a false narrative as part of its “information war”:
Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said.
The U.S. officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
On the empire’s claim last week that Putin is being misled by his advisors because they are afraid of telling him the truth, NBC reports that this assessment “wasn’t conclusive — based more on analysis than hard evidence.”
I’d actually made fun of this ridiculous CIA press release when it was uncritically published disguised as a breaking news report by The New York Times:
Breaking News: The most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world routinely passes off CIA press releases as "Breaking News". https://t.co/aBzhidbozv
We’d also had fun with State Department Spokesman Ned Price’s bizarre February impersonation of Alex Jones, where he wrongly claimed that Russia was about to release a “false flag” video using crisis actors to justify its invasion:
US Again Tries To Pass Off Government Assertions As Evidence
"This is the kind of evidence you can't see. The evidence is invisible."https://t.co/mEqIsS0cUS
Other US government lies discussed in the NBC report were less cute:
In another disclosure, U.S. officials said one reason not to provide Ukraine with MiG fighter jets is that intelligence showed Russia would view the move as escalatory.
That was true, but it was also true of Stinger missiles, which the Biden administration did provide, two U.S. officials said, adding that the administration declassified the MiG information to bolster the argument not to provide them to Ukraine.
So the Biden administration knew it was sending weapons to Ukraine that would be perceived by a nuclear superpower as a provocative escalation, sent them anyway, and then lied about it. Cool, cool, cool.
This NBC report confirms rumors we’ve been hearing for months. Professional war slut Max Boot said via The Council on Foreign Relations think tank in February that the Biden administration had ushered in “a new era of info ops” with intelligence releases designed not to tell the truth but to influence Putin’s decisions. Former MI6 chief John Sawers told The Atlantic Council think tank in February that the Biden administration’s “intelligence” releases were based more on a general vibe than actual intelligence, and were designed to manipulate rather than to inform.
Amazing interview with of the former MI6 chief with the Atlantic Council's @B_judah (the whole gang present) where the intel goon *admits* that many western "intel leaks" media outlets are dutifully conveying aren't real leaks but propaganda messages designed to undercut Putin. pic.twitter.com/UOzBxG5F5H
And in case you were wondering, no, NBC did not just publish a major leak by whistleblowers within the US government who are bravely exposing the lies of the powerful with the help of the free press. One of the article’s authors is Ken Dilanian, who in 2014 was revealed to have worked as a literal CIA asset while writing for The LA Times. If you see Dilanian’s name in a byline, you may be certain that you are reading exactly what the managers of the US empire want you to read.
So why are they telling us all this now? Is the US government not worried that it will lose the trust of the public by admitting that it is continuously lying about its most high-profile international conflict? And if this is an “information war” designed to “get inside Putin’s head” as NBC’s sources claim, wouldn’t openly reporting it through the mainstream press completely defeat the purpose?
Well, the answer to those questions is where it gets really creepy. I welcome everyone’s feedback and theories on the matter, but as near as I can figure the only reason the US government would release this story to the public is because they want the general public to know about it. And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will consent to being lied to.
To get a better sense of what I’m getting at, it helps to watch the televised version of this report in which Dilanian and NBC anchor Alison Morris enthuse about how brilliant and wonderful it is that the Biden administration is employing these psychological warfare tactics to mess with Putin’s mind:
The message an indoctrinated NBC viewer will get when watching this segment is, “Isn’t this awesome? Our president is pulling off all these cool 3D chess moves to beat Putin, and we’re kind of a part of it!”
Just as the smear campaign against Julian Assange trained mainstream liberals to defend the right of their government to keep dark secrets from them, we may now be looking at the stage of narrative control advancement where mainstream liberals are trained to defend the right of their government to lie to them.
The US is ramping up cold war aggressions against Russia and China in a desperate attempt to secure unipolar hegemony, and psychological warfare traditionally plays a major role in cold war maneuverings due to the inability to aggress in more overt ways against nuclear-armed foes. So now would definitely be the time to get the “thinkers” of America’s two mainstream political factions fanatically cheerleading their government’s psywar manipulations.
A casual glance around the internet at what mainstream liberals are saying about this NBC report shows that this is indeed what is happening. In liberal circles there does appear to be widespread acceptance of the world’s most powerful government using the world’s most powerful media institutions to lie to the public for strategic gains. If this continues to be accepted, it will make things a whole lot easier for the empire managers going forward.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Mobilizing a population to vilify and hate a targeted enemy is a tactic that leaders have used since before the dawn of human history, and it is being used to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin in the current conflict. If we want to join the march to war, we can join the hate fest. But if we want a more objective and honest assessment of events, we must rely upon facts that our government and its cheer-leading mainstream media are not anxious for us to view.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all things Russian are being punished. Russian athletes, including paraplegics, are barred from international sports competition. Century old Russian writers and musicians such as Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are being removed from book shelves and concerts. Even Russian bred cats are not exempt.
If such actions are justified, why was there no such banning of US athletes, musicians or writers after the US invasion of Iraq? Moreover, why are so few people outraged by the bombing and killing of 370,000 Yemeni people? Why are so few people outraged as thousands of Afghans starve because the United States is seizing Afghanistan’s national assets which were in western banks?
Why Ukraine?
There has been massive and widespread publicity about Ukraine. It is a simple Hollywood script: Ukraine is the angel, Russia is the devil, Zelensky is the hero and all good people will wear blue and yellow ribbons.
Maintaining this image requires propaganda to promote it, and censorship to prevent challengers debunking it.
This has required trashing some long held western traditions. By banning all Russian athletes from international competition, the International Olympic Committee and different athletic federations have violated the Olympic Charter which prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Censorship
The West prides itself on free speech yet censorship of alternative viewpoints is now widespread in Europe and North America. Russia Today and other Russian media outlets are being blocked on the internet as well as cable TV. Ironically, numerous programs on RT were hosted by Americans, for example journalist Chris Hedges and comedian Lee Camp. The US is silencing its own citizens.
Censorship or shadow banning is widespread on social media. On April 6, one of the best informed military analysts, Scott Ritter @realScottRitter, was suspended from Twitter. Why? Because he suggested that the victims of Bucha may have been murdered not by Russians, but rather by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and the US and UK may also be culpable.
The 2015 Netflix documentary titled “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” deals with the Maidan (Kiev central square) uprising of 2013-2014. It ignores the most essential elements of the events: the management provided by the US and the muscle provided by ultra-nationalists of the Right Sector and Azov Battalion. The attacks and killing of Ukrainian police are whitewashed away.
By contrast, the 2016 documentary “Ukraine on Fire“ provides the background and essential elements of the conflict. It is not available on Netflix and was banned from distribution on YouTube for some time.
Backed by US and UK intelligence agencies, Ukraine knows the importance of the information war. They make sensational accusations that receive uncritical media coverage. When the truth eventually comes out, it is ignored or buried on the back pages. Here are a few examples:
– In 2014, eleven civilians were killed in eastern Ukraine when an apartment was hit in rebel held territory. Ukraine tried to blame Russia even though no bombs were coming from Russia and the population is ethnically Russian.
– At the beginning of the current conflict, Ukrainian President Zelensky claimed that soldiers on Snake Island died heroically rather than surrender. Actually, all the soldiers surrendered.
– Ukraine and western media claim a maternity hospital in Mariupol was bombed by Russia. Evidence shows the hospital was taken over by Ukrainian military forces on March 7, two days before the bombing on March 9.
– The latest sensational accusations are regarding dead civilians in Bucha, north of Kiev. Again, there is much contrary evidence. The Russian soldiers left Bucha on March 31, the mayor of Bucha announced the town liberated with no mention of atrocities on March 31, the Azov battalion entered Bucha on April 1, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry published video of “Russian” atrocities on April 3.
In most cases, western media does not probe the accusations or use simple logic to ask if they make sense. However, in the case of Bucha story, the NY Times had to acknowledge they were “unable to independently verify the assertions by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.”
Self Censorship
In addition to actual censorship, there is widespread self-censorship. Instead of reading what the Russians are saying, western political “analysts” engage in outlandish amateur psychology and speculation. With no factual basis, they speculate about what Putin wants and his mental state.
This is convenient if one does not want to deal with the real issues and arguments.
Most western analysts and journalists are afraid or unwilling to read or listen to what the Russian leaders say. That is unfortunate because those speeches are more clear and direct than those from western politicians who rely on public relations, spin and platitudes.
Fabricating quotes
Ignorance of Russian foreign policy is such that Truthout online magazine recently published an article which contains a sensational but completely invented quote from Putin. It says,
Putin here is clear enough: “Ukraine has no national rights that Russians are bound to respect. Prepare for reunification, reabsorption, or some other euphemism for subaltern status with Mother Russia.”
Putin said no such thing and any moderately knowledgeable person would recognize this to be fake.
When I emailed the co-author, Carl Davidson, asking where the quotation came from, he admitted inventing it. This is significant because the statement goes to the core of what the conflict is about. Is Russia trying to absorb all of Ukraine? Do they intend to occupy Ukraine? Anyone who reads the speeches of Putin and Lavrov, such as here, here and here, knows they do not. Davidson’s fabricated quote suggests he has not read the speeches himself.
Ukraine in the Global Context
The article with the made-up quote contends that “Putin is part of a global right-wing authoritarian movements that seeks to ‘overthrow’ the 20th Century.” This analysis is close to that of the US Democratic Party, which sees the major global division being between “authoritarianism” vs “democracy”.
It is highly US-centered and partisan, with Putin somehow lumped with Trump. It is also self-serving, with US Democrats as the embodiment of “democracy”. It is completely contrary to a class analysis.
This faulty analysis has major contradictions. It is well known that Biden is unpopular. Biden’s latest approval rating is under 42%. It is less well known in the West that Putin is popular in Russia. Since the intervention in Ukraine his approval rating has increased to over 80%.
Also largely unknown in the West, most of the world does NOT support the Western analysis of the Ukraine conflict. Countries representing 59% of the global population abstained or voted against the condemnation of Russia at the UN General Assembly. These countries tend to see US exceptionalism and economic-military domination as a key problem. They do not think it helpful to demonize Russia and they urge negotiations and quick resolution to the Ukraine war.
History will hold the United States accountable for the consequences of an increasingly offensive military doctrine beyond NATO’s borders which threatens international peace, security and stability…. Russia has the right to defend itself.
South African President Ramaphosa blamed NATO saying:
The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.
The final settlement of the Ukraine crisis requires abandoning the Cold War mentality, abandoning the logic of ensuring one’s own security at the expense of others’ security, and abandoning the approach of seeking regional security by expanding military bloc.
Many western anti-war movements are critical of Russia’s invasion. Others, such as the US Peace Council, see the US and NATO as largely responsible. However, they all see the necessity of pressing to stop the war before it gets worse.
In contrast, the western military-industrial-media complex is fueling the war with propaganda, censorship, banning, demonization and more weapons. It appears they do not want a resolution to the conflict. Just as they supported NATO pushing up against Russia, knowing that it risked provoking Russia to the point of retaliation, they seem to be pushing for a protracted bloody conflict in Ukraine, knowing that it risks global conflagration. Yet they persist, while crying crocodile tears.
The Bucha ‘Russian’ atrocities propaganda onslaught may have worked well in the ‘west’ but it lacks evidence that Russia had anything to do with it.
The former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar calls it an outright fake:
An indignant Moscow has angrily demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday over the allegations of atrocities by Russian troops in areas around Kiev through the past month. Prima facie, this allegation is fake news but it can mould misperceptions by the time it gets exposed as disinformation.
A Tass report says: “The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that the Russian Armed Forces had left Bucha, located in the Kiev region, on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town. The ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs.”
Friendly reminder that it’s impossible to get a clear understanding of what’s going on in the world without accounting for the fact that very powerful people within your own society are actively working very hard to manipulate your understanding in their favor.
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Obviously believing unproven US or Ukrainian claims about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine is as dumb as believing unproven Russian claims about what’s happening there, and anyone advocating for direct NATO military intervention against Russia is an enemy of our species.
Advocating skepticism of unproven claims made during a war and saying nuclear superpowers should not attack one anothers’ military forces on the basis of those claims should literally be the least controversial position that anyone could possibly voice about anything.
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US military interventionism always makes things worse and never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. It’s stupid to have to keep saying this year after year. There’s nothing wrong in Ukraine that direct US military intervention couldn’t make much, much worse.
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It’s been universally understood since Stalin got the bomb that nuclear-armed powers must never go to war with each other, but everyone’s so insane now we’re seeing daily op-eds and news segments about how NATO could attack the Russian military in Ukraine without starting a nuclear war.
Nuclear superpowers must never go to war with each other. This is the single most existentially important thing for the human species to understand. It’s been understood for generations, and it didn’t magically stop being true because you saw a bunch of Ukrainian flags and some unconfirmed pictures of alleged war crimes.
People say things like, “Putin believes he can rely on the nuclear threat to keep us from confronting him!” Yeah that’s how military strategy works, dipshit. He has a military strength that his enemies need to respect. That means you shouldn’t attack Russia, not that you should.
For years I’ve had idiot QAnon cultists telling me nuclear weapons are a hoax and they’re not real. Now all of a sudden my online notifications are full of shitlibs saying almost the same thing.
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Still hilarious that the United States of America thinks it has the moral authority to tell other nations how they should respond to a military invasion.
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Do you truly believe it’s a coincidence that mainstream Americans were made to despise Putin with a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that turned out to be pure bullshit in the years preceding an unrelated US proxy war against Putin? What would it mean if it wasn’t a coincidence?
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Looks like Jen Psaki’s making a major career move from spreading US government lies to spreading US government lies on cable news.
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If you look at the behavior of the US empire underneath all the narratives, two things become clear:
It plans to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world by halting the rise of China.
It can only accomplish this via actions that will massively disrupt the entire world.
The strongest argument for a multipolar world is that maintaining a unipolar one necessarily requires endless violence and continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship. It is literally unsustainable.
There’s no valid reason nations can’t just get along and collaborate toward the greater good of humanity without one of them trying to dominate all the others. The unipolarist impulse to rule the earth stops this peaceful and collaborative world from emerging. There is no “Pax Americana”. Unipolarism is the opposite of peace.
People try to argue that if the US wasn’t the unipolar world dominator then it would be China or someone else, because it’s “human nature” to want to take over the world. But there was never a unipolar world hegemon ever in human history until three decades ago; you can’t claim something that has only happened one single time is “human nature”.
Europeans set sail and conquered people around the world. China built a wall. Also the idea that China seeks to replace the US as global tyrant assumes that Beijing has been watching the US empire crush itself under its own weight and thinking “Ooh, yeah, that looks awesome. Let’s definitely do that.”
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It says so much about how propagandized people are and how insulated their ideological echo chambers have become that their first thought when encountering someone with a foreign policy opinion they disagree with is “I bet this person is a secret agent from a hostile government.”
I’m always like, really? That’s your go-to? That I’m saying what I’m saying because I’m an operative for a foreign intelligence agency? Can’t possibly just be that I just have different opinions about the world’s most powerful government than the ones you hear on TV? How distorted does the information landscape have to be that criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is something people view as weird and suspicious?
It really tells you how powerful the empire’s narrative domination is. Even leaving aside how normal criticizing the world’s largest power structure ought to be, how homogeneous has the information environment become where any divergence of opinion sticks out so much that it’s met with such intense shock that people think you’re a foreign agent?
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Russian perspectives need to be banned and Germans need to be jailed for supporting Putin and the news media need to push US government narratives and Silicon Valley algorithms need to aggressively boost those government narratives, because that’s what it takes to protect the western world from tyranny.
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Few people sincerely want the truth about the world. Most just want politicians and pundits to whisper reassuringly in their ear, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Your schoolteachers told you the truth about everything, and so did the news man. You are on the side of righteousness.”
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets. Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya. But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.
In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
“I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”
Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.
Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”
Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.
“We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”
“The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”
Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”
“Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.
A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine. I appreciate your engagement but, given the complexity of this, let’s keep it civil. I choose peace every time, until the things that we said would never again happen, happen.
When I called Velshi a fucking lunatic for expressing these views (to my mind the only sane response to such madness), he argued that going to war with Russia for Ukraine would not necessarily lead to nuclear war, claiming that “A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine.”
These are not sane or acceptable things for mainstream pundits to be telling people. Directly attacking the Russian military would indeed risk unleashing a chain of rapid escalations that could easily lead to full-scale nuclear war; there would be far too many small, moving parts for this to be anywhere remotely close to predictable or controllable. A no-fly zone over Ukraine would immediately put NATO powers in direct hot war with Russia, which is in fact completely different from shipping weapons to Ukrainian forces.
The fact that a nuclear superpower cannot be regarded in the same way as a nation without nukes has been basic, common sense orthodoxy for all major powers since Stalin got the bomb. This is not some kind of advanced esoteric understanding that you can only grasp if you’ve been studying this stuff for years; as far as I know children are still learning about the history of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction in grade school. This isn’t something you should have to explain to grown adults, much less influential mainstream news media pundits.
But it’s becoming more and more common. The line that we’re already in World War 3 and need to begin acting accordingly is showing up more and more often. The idea that NATO powers might be able to get away with attacking the Russian military in Ukraine without sparking a nuclear exchange is fast becoming its own genre of western foreign policy punditry, and that trend looks to accelerate with the latest (arguably pretty dubious) claims of Russian atrocities in this war.
Already we’ve got Velshi’s cries for World War 3 joined by the likes of Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov, who apparently spent so long training to beat a machine that he turned into one:
You’ve also got opinion makers in outlets like The New York Times telling people that “The United States and NATO should be less deferential to Mr. Putin’s attempt to wield the threat of nuclear weapons — not only for the sake of supporting Ukraine but also to ensure global geopolitical stability in the future.”
There’s also the galling White House press conferences in which ambitious reporters aggressively demand to know why the Biden administration isn’t doing more to escalate against Russia, as clear an illustration as you could ask for of the fact that the mainstream press are only allowed to be pushy and confrontational with US government officials when they’re demanding more bloodshed.
As we’ve discussed previously, even if these increasingly loud calls for hot war between nuclear superpowers don’t immediately succeed, what they do is push the Overton window of mainstream discourse all the way over toward the most warmongering extreme possible so that calls for more escalation seem moderate and calls for de-escalation look like extremist apologia for Vladimir Putin. In the very best-case scenario they leave people far more open to consenting to far more nuclear brinkmanship than any thinking person should ever consent to.
This is not okay. It is not okay for them to do this to us. It is not okay for them to normalize the idea of escalations that could easily end humankind. That is the most insane position that any person could possibly take. More insane than Nazism, or any other extremist ideology you could think of. Supporting actions that may lead to human extinction makes these people enemies of our entire species.
Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteers. If these omnicidal war sluts are so horny for “direct military involvement” against Russia, I wish they would just get on a plane and go do it themselves without trying to drag all of humanity into it with them.
You want direct military involvement? Fine. Go do it yourself. Be the direct military involvement you want to see in the world.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
A “newspaper of record” is a major newspaper with a large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative. In this country, that newspaper has been the New York Times. It is believed that librarians began to refer to The New York Times (NYT) as the “newspaper of record” in 1913 when it became the first U.S. newspaper to publish an index of the subjects covered in its pages. Regardless of how it became known as the authoritative source for editorial and news content, it is time that we stop calling the NYT the “newspaper of record” now, especially during this conflict in Ukraine.
If, hypothetically speaking, the US wanted to rule the world, it likely would have begun planning years ago to subvert the rise of China. Step One would have involved a plan to cripple the powers who support it, like Russia. They’d have begun propagandizing us for this years ago. Hypothetically speaking.
It’s a good thing this is a hypothetical scenario and the US has no plans of global domination, because otherwise by now we’d probably have been marinating in a virulent anti-Russia propaganda campaign for five or six years and would be brainwashed into cheerleading for Russia to be choked off from the global economy with the goal of toppling Moscow.
This hypothetical scenario could never happen in real life, because such a propaganda campaign would require western intelligence agencies to plant stories demonizing Russia in the western press for years, and our free press would never uncritically publish claims by spy agencies. That would be flat-out propaganda. The free press are full of hard-nosed muckraking journalists who shine the bold light of truth on government agencies to hold the powerful to account. They’d never act as willing proxies for government agencies working to manufacture consent for unipolarist geostrategic agendas.
And it’s a good thing, too. Can you imagine if the US and its allies and the entire western press were working together, wittingly or unwittingly, toward toppling powerful nuclear-armed nations in the way the USSR was toppled? Things would be getting very crazy and confrontational by now.
Thank God we live in a free society where government agencies are transparent and accountable, where military geostrategic objectives are rigorously checked by democratically elected officials, and journalists never face any consequences for telling the truth about these things.
Because we might be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon just to fulfill the unipolarist fantasies of a few powerful psychopaths if the situation I just laid out were anything but purely hypothetical.
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Fucking ridiculous that it’s 2022 and it’s still a shocking and controversial position to say your government and media are lying to you about a fucking war.
You know you’re living under an empire with the most sophisticated propaganda machine that’s ever existed when it can lie about literally every war it’s ever been involved in and then when you say they’re lying about the latest war people still act like you’re a paranoid lunatic.
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Someone who acts like it’s absurd to think the US may have played an underhanded role in starting a war is someone you can just ignore.
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Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for choosing to launch an invasion of Ukraine, the US empire is responsible for deliberately provoking that invasion with the goal of removing Putin.
It’s just amazing the mental gymnastics people will do to avoid confronting the basic, commonsense fact that the US could very easily have prevented this war with a little diplomacy and instead chose not to because the war advances its own goals.
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My take on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock is that we’re the closest we’ve been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis and it’s only continuing to escalate.
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Never forget that the real reason they hate John Mearsheimer is for being objectively, indisputably correct about how wrong they are.
Best advice to solve the Russia-Ukraine Conflict was given by John J. Mearsheimer in 2015 which nobody listened.
Shitlibs can forgive a lot of things. They can forgive you for being a Bushite warmonger. They can forgive you for having been a racist or homophobe. They can even forgive you for being an active Nazi. But the one thing they can never forgive is being right about their wrongness.
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Still blows my mind that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and escalating cold war tensions with Moscow which helped lead us to where we’re at now, and yet liberals spent that whole time calling him a Putin puppet.
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This war has outed a lot of closet empire supporters who got excited about Putin’s invasion because at long last now the US power alliance is The Good Guy, and now they’re spending their time screaming at those of us who’ve declined to play along with that infantile framing.
“Haha, now surely these disobedient lefties will fall in line and support our beneficent imperial leaders- Hey! What the hell do you all think you’re doing??”
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I keep getting people telling me I “just hate America,” which is silly in so many ways it’s hard to even know where to start. If they’re referring to the nation’s land and people, then no of course I don’t hate them. If they’re referring to its government or the oligarchic imperial power structure that runs it, then of course I do. It’s the single most murderous and destructive power structure on earth. Everyone should hate it.
It says so much about how propagandized people are that they think “You hate America!” is some kind of scathing accusation. The US empire has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions and shows no signs of stopping. It is normal and good to hate such things.
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The warning signs that our competition-based systems are unsustainable will get less and less subtle until we either move to collaboration-based systems or receive our final warning in the form of climate collapse or nuclear armageddon.
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Self-righteous spinal hatred, the inner Russophobic swine dog as well as lawlessness in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will harm the Western world itself and hasten its decline and fall
The term “inner swine dog” means, according to the English dictionary, “Malicious, hateful drive, which hides behind a person’s apparently friendly and tolerant exterior”.
This dog, which can belong to both elites and the masses, has been let loose in recent weeks among both high and low along the political spectrum. There no longer seems to be any limit to what can be said about Russians and Russia – even without a comparative perspective – and what can be done to isolate the country and its people economically, culturally, socially, financially and in the media. All with reference to Russia’s – foolishly over-reacting – invasion of Ukraine. The word ‘Putin’ explains everything as if by magic.
The contempt and hatred must have been latent deep in the collective unconscious for a very long time. It is probably largely a consequence of the so-called free media’s systematic, one-sided “threat assessments” over decades – again without comparative analysis with NATO’s behaviour and military overspending – and the omission of any perspective on what is Russia’s history, security needs or its perception of us.
To explain something has been distorted – by whom? – to be identical with defending. The conversation is dumbing down. The case – the ball – disappears and all that remains is the persona, categorization and positioning: “Putin Versteher,” “pro-Russian,” “anti-NATO,” “Putinist,” or “paid by the Kremlin.”
The role of the media in the hateful reaction
The media have played a very important part in setting the tone for the boundless hatred that is now spreading from the lowest instincts to concrete actions and reactive measures at the highest level of political decision-making.
Western mainstream media have simply announced – as a fact that did require documentation – that Russia was the enemy, a threat, and they’ve concealed the military-economic imbalance, downplayed or left completely untold the reprehensibility of US and other NATO countries’ wars, occupations, mass deaths, refugee creation, regime change – and failed attempts at it as in Syria – a collaboration with terrorists, the terrible human consequences of these wars and, for example, the ‘war on terror.’ The same goes for the suffocating sanctions against Iran’s innocent population of 85 million. And Israel’s bombings and nuclear weapons have long since ceased to be reported.
I, who follow these issues daily through a wide range of media, have been horrified every day for at least the past 20 years by the obvious way in which it is all being organised in the clear favour of the US and NATO countries. Western sources and news agencies have been used exclusively, experts paid by NATO governments have been brought in by state research institutes, and hardly any material has been published to shed light on Russia’s interests, ways of thinking or perceptions of what we in the NATO circle were doing.
A media glare has run for decades. Today, ordinary people react so violently and have little idea how much they have been seduced by constant, factually ignorant good/bad world images. By FOSI – Fake + Omission + Source Ignorance.
The unbearable folly of irreversible, hasty decisions
Thus, government, politicians, scientists and the media – with the classic reservation of a few exceptions – are today completely at the mercy of emotion. Laws can be broken, special laws imposed, money taken from the world’s poor for Ukrainian refugees; the business world has suddenly become PR-politically correct with Ukraine flags and blue/yellow lights and immediate cessation of all activities in Russia.
The EU overnight has no resource problems with 2-3 million refugees from Ukraine, while in 2015 it could not cope with 1.5 million – mostly Muslims, and this is important – from the war zones the US and other NATO countries have ravaged for decades and many times worse than Russia has done at least until today in Ukraine. Germany decides – again without analysis – to immediately rearm up to US$ 112 billion per year. Russia’s is US$ 66 billion!
Countries and their political parties are throwing overboard their basic positions on militarism, bases, nuclear weapons and NATO.
In the frenzy of the dog pack, no one will risk appearing cautious, moderate or understanding when it comes to the underlying Russia-NATO conflicts. They denounce the violence – Russia’s but not that of others to nearly the same extent – and completely overlook the underlying conflicts, which are Russia and NATO and certainly not Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine is only the unfortunate war theatre of war.
More weapons and more rearmament – whatever the cost to our society in the slightly longer term, which no one is analysing – is the only answer needed. It has to be that fast. And we must stand together now – and we are standing together.
Perhaps not so well if what we can finally stand together on – in an otherwise thoroughly divided Western world without clear-eyed leadership – turns out the day after tomorrow to be a fundamentally wrong and self-destructive attitude.
God knows how such an intellectually low-brow move as raising military spending to 2% of GDP can be adopted by people we would like to think of as responsible politicians.
It is intellectual nonsense that military spending should increase if a country’s economy is doing well and decrease if it is not. A country’s military spending level should be decided in the light of a serious threat analysis – what possible threats have such a low probability and impact that we do not need to prepare for them? Which threats are so great that we cannot afford or are unable to guard against them? And which threats remain that we can both address and afford to build adequate defences against? And then you look in the treasury and prioritise between all the expenditures of a state.
The gods must therefore be the only ones who know how, for instance, the Danish government has calculated that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should be met on 2% of GDP and not on 1.8% or 4.4%. In fact, this sort of thing is nothing more than extremely expensive signalling politics of the lowest order, paid for by the taxpayers, who never protest against the madness because they are objects of ”fearology:” Putin, the bastard, will come and take you if you don’t pay up.
What such reasoning will cost societies on a 10-20 year horizon is guaranteed to not have been analysed before the decision was adopted.
And further:
Cultural events involving Russians are shut down in a row – exhibitions and concerts. The grotesque thing is that these measures also affect Russian artists who have explicitly denounced Russia’s invasion. In other words, they are being punished because they are Russian.
Ministers are urging scientists to stop ongoing research collaborations and certainly not to start new ones. Russian goods are removed from shops. Peace and other demonstrations go only to the Russian embassy, not to those of the NATO countries, which – extremely provocatively – have just expanded NATO and let all the wise warnings go to waste. And, as mentioned, waged wars on a scale that dwarfs Russia in comparison.
Facebook sees fit to allow hate speech against Russians – and only them, of course – as long as it’s within the context of the war in Ukraine.
I wonder how far Russians and the rest of us will be forced to suffer under this modern-day parallel to anti-Semitism: Russophobia?
I wonder where this collective psychosis, this mass hysteria with a single focus, will land us all in generations from now?
And I wonder if anyone in the Christian West will one day think of Luke: “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but do not notice the beam in your own eye? Hypocrite, first take the beam out of your own eye; then you will see clearly enough to take out the mote that is in your brother’s eye.” (Luke 6:41-42).
The slippery slope of lawlessness
There now seems to be an orgiastic heat of self-righteousness. The entire response – every single action in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine – has been decided in such a short time that there has been no time for any kind of impact assessment even 6 months ahead, let alone on a 6 year or 30-year horizon. Not within a national, European or global framework.
The G7 countries are freezing Russia’s US$ 400 billion debt. It’s pure theft. They are closing airspaces so that, for example, the Russian foreign minister cannot fly to meetings at the UN in Geneva. The EU/NATO world cuts off oil and gas imports from Russia and imposes countless sanctions on anything and anyone that can move in Russia: “We are coming to get you!” – President Biden said in his State of the Union address.
That’s not how you behave if you feel inferior or fearful of your opponent – the way you argue when you need to raise military spending.
And that’s documented very well by the former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen who says this about the prospect of war in Europe to Danish TV2 that – “Putin will be beaten to a pulp by NATO. Once NATO moves, it will be with enormous force. You have to remember that the investments we make in defence are ten times as big as Putin’s.”
And now the heavily over-armed must over-arm even more?
Thousands of Western companies operating in Russia are now facing possible nationalisation. Will Western governments and/or insurance companies compensate them after they have left? Just think of the cost to German business of this on a 10-20 year horizon – that is, at best, the time it will take until we can hope for a rapprochement with Russia after this.
The boomerangs will come back to us. Be sure of that. And when it happens so badly, the only response from any decision-maker will be: Well, it was and is all Putin’s fault!
But that doesn’t hold water by the West’s own standards.
NATO has provoked Russia with its expansion for 30 years and ignored dozens of warnings about where it was going. When solid, highly experienced American statesmen and intellectuals of a very different calibre than those in the West today – like George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer, Jack Matlock and William Perry – warned against NATO expansion and attempts to bring Ukraine into NATO, they were simply ignored.
It has broken the promises not to expand NATO an inch, made to Gorbachev in 1989-90. It has set up The Ballistic Missile Defence that deliberately undermines Russia’s ability to respond to a nuclear attack. It has waged war in Yugoslavia, treating both Russia and the UN and international law as almost inferior.
I am not the only one who predicted years ago that there would be a reaction. Nobody listened. Now Russia has reacted – over-reacted. I agree it is an overreaction and I have argued that Putin had other options than this invasion.
Proportionality, collective punishment and violation of freedom of expression
Here we are faced with a classic dilemma and responsibility: It is possible that A provokes B, but it is still B who chooses his way of reacting and must be held responsible for it.
It is precisely this reasoning about the responsibility of the provoked side for its reaction that must also apply to the reaction of the NATO/EU countries to Russia’s invasion.
And here there are two principles which normally apply in proper politics: a) the reaction must be proportionate to the attack or provocation, and: b) there must be no collective punishment of a people for an offence for which only one or a few are de facto and de jure responsible. This is an integral element in the Geneva Conventions. About collective punishment here.
It is undeniable that the suffering we see the innocent civilian population of Ukraine undergoing right now arouses great compassion and a desire to help. The question remains, however: Why have we not seen similar reactions of similar intense depth and breadth in some of the many and far worse wars since Vietnam? Why have we not seen any, even remotely, similar condemnation, similar sanctions, similar isolation of those who violate international law, including everything in the UN Declaration?
At the time of writing, the reaction against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine is particular, disproportionate and open-ended. A criminal is put in prison and serves a time commensurate with the crime. What has now been adopted in response to the invasion is open-ended.
If Russia were to agree to a ceasefire tomorrow and pull out of Ukraine, none of the many measures would be lifted.
Because this is not Realpolitik or proportionate logical sanctions policy: when you have done X, Y and Z, then we shall lift all our measures. They are disproportionate but also non-conditioned measures.
Now to the second illegality.
Doctors Without Borders defines collective punishment thus: ‘International law posits that no person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit. It ensures that the collective punishment of a group of persons for a crime committed by an individual is forbidden…This is one of the fundamental guarantees established by the Geneva Conventions and their protocols. This guarantee is applicable not only to protected persons but to all individuals, no matter what their status, or to what category of persons they belong…”
A group/people may never, whatever the circumstances, be punished for an act committed by one or a few. Morally, collective punishment is absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable.
It is all the more so when those who carry it out believe that they are facing a dictator. In a democracy, it might be argued that the people share responsibility for the actions of leaders because they have become leaders through free elections. The situation is quite different in what the same people call dictatorships, where the people cannot be held jointly responsible (I am not saying that Russia is a dictatorship; I am challenging the reasoning of those who think it is).
George Washington
And then there’s the third illegality.
The shutdown of Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik, social media accounts and whichever ones will now be affected in the future.
Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”
It must be clear that excluding Russian media and other information from expression in the media spaces accessible from the West violates paragraph 1. The same is true when you actively seek to prevent people in the West from freely seeking information about how Russian media treat Ukraine and other world issues.
Further, Article 20 of the Treaty states that:
Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.
Although it is difficult to judge when such things actually happen and should be condemned, the whole public discussion tends to violate at least the spirit of these international law provisions. And it cannot and should not be swept off the table by reference to Russia or others doing the same. We are responsible for our actions.
The West itself tramples on international human rights 24/7 at the moment.
Such fairly obvious ethical-legal dimensions are, of course, completely sidelined.
The inner swine dog froth at its mouth and in all its lying self-righteousness can’t get enough. Regardless of decency, the spirit and the letter of international law.
The boomerangs of hate – the self-destruction of the West
We, our children and grandchildren will pay dearly for this – the self-isolation and accelerated decline and final fall of the West. And perhaps nuclear war – deliberate or by technical and/or human error.
And it is, they want us to remember forever, all one person’s fault, Vladimir Putin. And him “we” need neither understand nor take into account. The amateur psychologists and editors are now queuing up in our media to have him diagnosed as insane. He suddenly went insane on 23 February 2022.
That way this hellishly complex conflict over decades with at least 50 parties can be reduced to issues of one person’s mental health. And it also follows that “we” bear no responsibility whatsoever for the fact that the world is now in the most existentially threatening situation since 1945. We are up against a Russian Hitler – ”Putler” – and now no trick is too small, no lie too big.
So where could this re-action to Russia’s invasion take us? Here a few heuristically chosen possible scenarios, which Western decision-makers have hardly given a thought:
• The longer the war lasts in Ukraine – and it lasts longer than it otherwise would because huge amounts of arms and ammunition being pumped in from the West – the greater the humanitarian disaster and then the reconstruction of a country that was already the poorest in Europe and heavily marked by corruption. Internal hatred in Ukraine is also likely to be many times more intense than before the invasion.
• The probably extensive infiltration of neo-Nazism into Ukraine’s politics and military security sector – arguably the largest anywhere – will not diminish once the war is over. These circles will demand a special status in future Ukraine because of their efforts in the resistance struggle. What role might they seek to play internationally – in, say, US-like movements and in European countries with, so far, less far-right extremism? Over the years, Nazism could spread precisely because its supporters are seen as heroes in the fight against Russia.
• Russia’s people, in the long run, will suffer so much because of our sanctions that the world may face a gigantic humanitarian disaster that it cannot bear on top of all the other problems of poverty, refugees and climate change, etc.. And someone will begin to realize and say: These poor, innocent people are victims of Western sanctions that were imposed without a time limit.
• While many are talking about which countries Putin will now try to conquer, I think this is a reasonably likely scenario. In the US view, there is now an excellent chance to tie Russia to the war in Ukraine and make it as long as possible by pumping weapons and everything else into Ukraine – but not participating in it directly. At the same time, the focus is now 100% on strangling the Russian economy and effectively collapsing the country like the old Soviet Union. I know too little about the Russian economy to say whether this is a possibility – but in Washington’s perspective, this is where the stakes are: drain Russia’s military strength in Ukraine and undermine its economic base at home. By contrast, I’m pretty sure China and others won’t let that happen. Regardless, the US can then calculate that millions of Russians will have to flee – including to Europe. And there the Atlantic consensus will end: the EU will blame the US for demanding that the EU impose these suffocating sanctions whose human consequences will only affect Europe, not the US.
• Far more nationalistic and militaristic people in the Kremlin depose Putin and re-arm, like Germany, to the double and bomb the NATO installations NATO will not discuss as provocative. In that case, there is a far greater than 50% risk of a nuclear war in Central Europe.
• This conflict will legitimise any increase in the US presence with heavy equipment as close to Russia’s border as possible. This is already being planned in US military circles. In practice, the US will impose itself militarily and politically on Europe to a perhaps unprecedented extent. Until that day, the United States will have militarised itself to death by seeking to wage two cold wars simultaneously – against Russia and China – with major elements of rearmament and militaristic policy. It is called over-extension and the economy, as in the old Soviet Union, will collapse under this burden. Why are the Americans betting so much on Europe? Because NATO’s main purpose – when you peel back all the rhetoric – is to ensure that a war with Russia is fought on European soil, not US soil.
• With the weapons and ammunition that NATO and EU countries are now pumping into and around Ukraine, there is already a de facto war between NATO/EU and Russia. Moreover, with the borders open to all manner of mercenaries and adventurers from around the world, one can safely expect more suffering than would otherwise be necessary. Terrorist groups of various kinds will also no doubt feel drawn; I imagine that the terrorist groups that Russia has helped to defeat in Syria will see Ukraine as a golden territory for revenge against Russians.
• Another scenario might be that Russia does reasonably well economically with a prolonged military presence in Ukraine, converts to a kind of war economy and expands cooperation with Iran, China and perhaps India. Others outside the West will see the same writing on the wall: it is futile to try to have a reasonably trusting relationship with the US, NATO and the EU after this. If they can do that to the Russians, what can they do to us? The US-led system with allies who have lost the ability to think and act independently of the US/NATO will become a periphery of the future world order as the years go by.
The Western world’s response to Russia’s invasion has shown that the only thing that can unite it is confrontation and hate – it has not been able to unite around the financial crisis, NATO’s future and burden-sharing, the 2015 refugees or the Corona, all of which could have brought us closer together and working together for our own good and the good of humanity. More hatred brings satisfaction, inward solidarity and strengthen the sense of shared values. And so who will be the next object of hate?
• Very simply: China – even more so than hitherto. We have just seen the beginning of the US-led and -funded Cold War against China so far. The West will accuse China of not siding closely enough with the West against Russia (and China won’t, though it is certainly very unhappy with Russia over the invasion). So the future ice-cold war in the world could be between the declining Occident and the rising Orient, to simplify. The West’s gigantic rearmament in “response” to Russia’s invasion will of course drain its civilian economy – all militarisation is harmful to everyone but the arms industries – and cause the West’s economic strength to be eroded over time even more and faster by the rearmament’s mad waste of resources.
• Humanity, as we know, desperately needs constructive cooperation if we shall succeed in solving the problems of inequality, climate and the environment here in the 11th hour, create technological progress and new infrastructure for the good of all, create a new green global economy, reduce militarism and abolish nuclear weapons…etc. All this – all this – will be made impossible by the West’s destructive energy, cold war philosophy, conversion to a kind of war economy, and total lack of positive Realpolitik vision in even a 20-year horizon.
The intellectual laziness, the contempt for ‘the others’ as a kind of Untermenschen, the spine-hatred and the cocktail of self-righteousness are bound to harm the Russian people. But the longer this ‘policy’ is pursued, the more damaging it will become for the West itself. China and the others need not lift a finger, one by one the fruits of history will fall into its basket and the US system will crumble.
But I know that such reasoning has not one chance in a thousand of being heard in these – fateful – hours and days. Unbearable as it is, I have felt that it should be said as I have done here.
On March 2 of this year the UN General Assembly met in an Emergency Session to pass a non-binding resolution condemning Russia’s February 24 intervention in Ukraine.1 141 countries voted for the resolution, 5 voted against, 35 abstained, and 12 did not vote. (Reported: Guardian, Al Jazeera, iNews.)
In the absence of any reliable opinion poll of the world’s 7.9 billion people, this vote may indicate that the majority of humanity sympathizes with Russia in Ukraine. The statistics presented below show that only 41% of the world’s people live in countries that joined the US in voting for the UN resolution.
This lopsided vote is even more striking if you consider the demographics. Populations represented by governments that did not vote for the resolution are much more likely to include the world’s poorest nations, nations with younger populations, “nations of color,” nations of the Global South, and nations in the periphery of the world economic system.
To put it another way, although the war is nominally a conflict between two developed and ethnically white nations, Russia and Ukraine, this UN vote suggests the war may be viewed by much of the world as a fight over the global political and economic system that institutionalizes the imperial hierarchy, the distribution of nations between rich and poor, and global white supremacy.
The UN Vote by Population
Of the world’s 7,934,000,000 people, 59% live in countries that did not support the resolution and only 41% live in countries that did.2 But that last figure drops to 34% outside of the immediate belligerents and their allies: Ukraine, US, and NATO countries, and on the other side, Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, and Tajikistan (all the countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization).
41% or 34% amounts to a resounding, humiliating defeat for the US on this non-binding UN resolution. Instead it is reported in the west as a US victory and an “overwhelming” worldwide condemnation of Russia.
The UN Vote and GDP Per Capita
All the countries in the top third of the GDP per capita (nominal) rankings, including Japan and all the countries of Western Europe and North America, voted for the resolution, Venezuela being the only country in the top third that did not.
Of the countries that did not vote for the resolution, most are ranked the poorest in the world, and almost none came above the approximate midpoint rank of 98. The exceptions were: Venezuela (58), Russia (68), Equatorial Guinea (73), Kazakhstan (75), China (76) Cuba (82), Turkmenistan (92), South Africa (95), Belarus (97).3
Another way to show the wealth divide in the UN vote is by distinguishing core and peripheral countries. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately to the core countries: “The countries of the world can be divided into two major world regions: the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery.’ The core includes major world powers and the countries that contain much of the wealth of the planet. The periphery has those countries that are not reaping the benefits of global wealth and globalization.” (Colin Stief, ThoughtCo.com, 1/21/20)
The countries usually considered in the core are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
The difference here is stark. Every single core country voted for the resolution and every country that did not is either in the periphery or in some cases, like Russia or China, in the semi-periphery.
The UN Vote and Median Age
All the countries ranked in the top third of median age rankings, from Monaco (51.1 years) to Iceland (36.5 years), voted for the resolution, with the following exceptions: China (37.4), Russia (39.6), Belarus (40), Cuba (41.5).
Of the twenty entries with the lowest median ages (15.4 to 18.9), only half voted for the resolution.
The UN Vote and “Countries of Color”
Of the 7,934,000,000 people in the world, 1,136,160,000 live in what are usually recognized as “white countries” (consistently or not) with about 14% of the world’s population. Yet “white countries,” by population, represent about 30% of the total vote in favor of the resolution. This “white vote” accounts for every one of the core countries (except Singapore and Japan). Compare: 97% of the population in the countries that did not vote for the resolution live in “countries of color.” Only Russia, Belarus and Armenia (which did not vote for the resolution) have dominant populations classed as “white.”
Therefore “white countries” are overrepresented in the group that voted for the resolution (30% vs. 14%), and underrepresented in the group that did not (3% vs. 14%).
Before the Intervention
What follows is a brief sketch of events leading to the February 24 Russian intervention that prompted the UN resolution. It is a history seldom mentioned in the mainstream media, though it is easily found in selected alternative and now-suppressed media. It is presented here as a possible, partial explanation of why the UN resolution had so little support measured by population.
US/NATO has directed aggression toward Russia for decades, advancing NATO forces ever closer to Russia’s western border, ringing Russia with military bases, placing nuclear weapons at ever closer range, and breaching and discarding treaties meant to lessen the likelihood of nuclear war. The US even let it be known, through its planning documents and policy statements, that it considered Ukraine a battlefield on which Ukrainian and Russian lives might be sacrificed in order to destabilize, decapitate and eventually dismember Russia just as it did Yugoslavia. Russia has long pointed out the existential security threat it sees in Ukrainian territory, and it has made persistent, peaceful, yet fruitless efforts over decades to resolve the problem. (See Monthly Review’s excellent editors’ note.)
Recent history includes the 2014 US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, followed by a war of the central government against those in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk resisting the coup government and its policies. Those policies include a ban on the Russian language, the native tongue of the region and a significant part of the country (ironically, including President Zelensky).
By the end of 2021 the war had taken 14,000 lives, four-fifths of them members of the resistance or civilian Russian speakers targeted by the government. Through years of negotiations Russia tried and failed to keep the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside a united Ukraine. After signing the Minsk agreements that would do just that, Ukraine, under tight US control, refused to comply even with step one: to talk with the rebellion’s representatives.
As to why the intervention happend now, Vyacheslav Tetekin, Central Committee member of Russia’s largest opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, explains:
Starting from December, 2021 Russia had been receiving information about NATO’s plans to deploy troops and missile bases in Ukraine. Simultaneously an onslaught on the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republics (LPR) was being prepared. About a week before the start of Russia’s operation the plan was uncovered of an offensive that envisaged strikes by long-range artillery, multiple rocket launchers, combat aircraft, to be followed by an invasion of Ukrainian troops and Nazi battalions. It was planned to cut off Donbas from the border with Russia, encircle and besiege Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities and then carry out a sweeping “security cleanup” with imprisonment and killing of thousands of defenders of Donbas and their supporters. The plan was developed in cooperation with NATO. The invasion was scheduled to begin in early March. Russia’s action pre-empted Kiev and NATO, which enabled it to seize strategic initiative and effectively save thousands of lives in the two republics.
All this may have informed the world’s overwhelming rejection of the US-backed UN resolution condemning Russia, which western media perversely considers a US victory simply because the resolution passed. Never mind that it passed in a voting system where Liechtenstein’s vote carries the same weight as China’s.
The Global South also knows from bitter experience that unlike the West, neither Russia nor it’s close partner China habitually engage in bombings, invasions, destabilization campaigns, color revolutions, coups and assassinations against the countries and governments of the Global South. On the contrary, both countries have assisted the development and military defense of such countries, as in Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and elsewhere.
Conclusion
Just as the imperial core of North America, Europe and Japan does not represent the world in their population numbers, demographics, wealth, or power, neither does the imperial core speak for the world on crucial issues of war, peace, justice, and international law. Indeed the Global South has already spoken to the Global North so many times, in so many ways, with patience, persistence and eloquence, to little avail. Since we in the North have not been able to hear the words, perhaps we can listen to the cry of the numbers.
The resolution “Deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter.” (Article 2 (4) reads: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”) The resolution also “[d]eplores the 21 February 2022 decision by the Russian Federation related to the status of certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine as a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and inconsistent with the principles of the Charter.” Beyond Russia, the resolution “[d]eplores the involvement of Belarus in this unlawful use of force against Ukraine, and calls upon it to abide by its international obligations.”
The population of countries voting for the UN resolution is 3,289,310,000. The population of countries voting against the resolution, abstaining, or not voting is 4,644,694,000. (Against: 202,209,000; abstaining: 4,140,546,000; not voting: 301,939,000.)
Here are the countries that did not vote for the resolution, with their GDP per capita rankings (the lower the number the higher the rank). 5 countries voted against the resolution: Russia 68, Belarus 97, North Korea 154, Eritrea 178, Syria 147. 35 countries abstained: Algeria 119, Angola 128, Armenia 115, Bangladesh 155, Bolivia 126, Burundi 197, Central African Republic 193, China 76, Congo 143, Cuba 82, El Salvador 121, Equatorial Guinea 73, India 150, Iran 105, Iraq 103, Kazakhstan 75, Kyrgyzstan 166, Laos 140, Madagascar 190, Mali 174, Mongolia 118, Mozambique 192, Namibia 102, Nicaragua 148, Pakistan 162, Senegal 160, South Africa 95, South Sudan 168, Sri Lanka 120, Sudan 171, Tajikistan 177, Tanzania 169, Uganda 187, Vietnam 138, Zimbabwe 144. 12 countries did not vote: Azerbaijan 110, Burkina Faso 184, Cameroon 158, Eswatini 117, Ethiopia 170, Guinea 175, Guinea-Bissau 179, Morocco 130, Togo 185, Turkmenistan 92, Uzbekistan 159, Venezuela 58.
In a highly symbolic move expressing solidarity with Ukraine, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled together to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15.
The three leaders took hours-long train trip on their journey from the west Ukrainian city of Lviv to the capital Kyiv, allegedly “endangering their lives” due to security risks involved in traveling within a war zone, though there was no risk to their lives as such because they had requested prior permission for the official visit from the Kremlin, which was graciously granted keeping in view diplomatic conventions.
Accompanying the trio of premiers was a “special guest” of the Ukraine government, Jaroslaw Kaczynski—the deputy prime minister of Poland, the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party to which the president and prime minister of Poland belong and the infamous “puppet master” who hires and fires government executives and ministers on a whim.
In response to a Twitter thread I made about the mounting evidence that the Ukraine war was deliberately provoked by the US empire to orchestrate regime change in Moscow, a former Obama administration State Department spokesperson has called on his followers to investigate my funding.
In a since-deleted Twitter post, Ian Kelly, who has held various White House positions under the Obama and Trump administrations including a year as State Department spokesperson under Hillary Clinton, posted the request “Somebody please follow her money” as a quote tweet to my aforementioned thread.
I drew attention to his post immediately, because holy shit what the actual fuck.
Is this account real? Is a former US State Department spokesman actually soliciting people to investigate my finances because I said the US instigated this war to advance pre-existing agendas? https://t.co/K4Ac35Hk8D
Kelly responded “Yep” when I asked if his unverified account actually belonged to a prominent White House diplomat.
When I asked him what precisely is wrong with him, he responded with the image of a Ukrainian flag. That response as of this writing is still up on Twitter, while his other two posts have been deleted.
Apparently sensing that he may have bit off more than he could chew, Kelly then blocked my account.
And yes this is indeed the Twitter account of “Ambassador Kelly”, who according to Wikipedia now teaches two courses at Northwestern University: “The Fall of the USSR and the Rise of Russia” and “Controlling the Russian Narrative, from Stalin to Putin”. His account has ten thousand followers and has existed since 2010, during which time its handle has been mentioned on the social media platform by prominent neoconservative narrative managers like Bill Kristol and Anne Applebaum as well as mainstream journalists, think tanks and other former US officials.
Here’s our boy with the lady herself:
Oh, what could have been, and could still be. Secretary Clinton hosts a symposium on The #FutureOfDiplomacy at Georgetown. Lots of HRC alums and future diplomats. pic.twitter.com/gulVYVbG0W
And I guess I should state for the record that there is nothing nefarious about my funding. I am an entirely reader-supported writer and I have never (as far as I know) received any money from the Kremlin or from any other foreign government. I’m literally just an Australian woman who says her opinions and observations on the internet with the help of her American husband and the financial support of patrons who enjoy those writings. You might not agree with those opinions, but that doesn’t mean I’m being paid by Vladimir Putin to voice them.
And it’s very strange how often I have to explain this to grown adults. This shockingly high-propaganda, high-censorship new media environment we’ve been in since the start of this war is making everyone bat shit insane.
The source of my funding is linked directly at the top of my Twitter page, and at the bottom of every article I write. My Patreon account is on the most transparent settings allowed by the platform. I wrote an article last year explaining the interesting way I’ve been able to make a living doing what I do titled “My Experiments With Hacking Capitalism“, which in my humble opinion contains a lot of useful information for all content creators who oppose the oligarchic empire. I’m actually pretty cool if I do say so myself.
My Experiments With Hacking Capitalism
"I just realized I've never really written about how I make a living doing what I do, which is odd because it's easily the most interesting aspect of my weird little operation here."https://t.co/cUZpMv99em
It’s really not sane that I should have to say any of these things, though. People shouldn’t have to defend themselves from HUAC-style witch hunts for criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. Every single day now I’m getting dozens of people in my online notifications calling me a Kremlin operative because these maniacal accusations have been so aggressively normalized in the anti-Russia hysteria that the general public has had drummed into their consciousness since 2016.
The fact that political insiders from the most powerful empire in history are beginning to feel comfortable just publishing baseless accusations like this about random strangers on the internet says a lot about how crazy these mass-scale imperial cold war psyops are making everyone.
Oh, and about my claim that the evidence was mounting about the Ukraine invasion being used for regime change? Subsequent comments from the US president have since made that case much more compelling than it already was. Perhaps “Ambassador Kelly” would like him investigated as well.
There's nothing "inarticulate" about Biden's rhetoric here: he's admitting in blunt terms that the US has used Ukraine to foment regime change in Russia, and no amount of desperate spin can hide it. This also explains why his admin sabotaged diplomacy pre-invasion and since. https://t.co/wLeejkidur
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Before serving as a fixer and reporter for the BBC in Ukraine, Orysia Khimiak handled PR for a start-up called Reface which created what the Washington Post called a “reality distorting app” now serving as “a kind of Ukrainian war-messaging tool.”
According to her Linkedin profile, Khimiak was the director of PR for Reface until October 2021. While working that job, Khimiak says she built “long-term relationships with editors and media representatives.” She has also overseen a PR course for the Kiev-based Projector Institute, whose website currently greets visitors with the slogan, “Glory to Ukraine. We Will Win.”
China, the sole world supporter of what analysts termed a “bizarre” motion from Russia in the United Nations Security Council, has ordered schools to back the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while at the same time suspending talks on potential energy investments in Russia by state-owned Sinopec.
“In order to improve the comprehensive analysis and research capabilities of ideological and political teachers on current affairs hot topics, so they can accurately take a principled stance and calibrate the situation in Ukraine and effectively guide students … Zhejiang University’s School of Marxism will hold a collective lesson preparation seminar,” aMarch 24directive from the university’s propaganda department said.
The seminar was aimed at “full-time and part-time teachers of ideological and political courses,” said the notice.
Meanwhile, a similar document was posted and signed by the provincial education department in the eastern province Shandong, including such topics as “political corruption in Ukraine,” “how Nazis killed 14,000 people in Ukraine and eastern Russia,” and “how the United States started the Russia-Ukraine tragedy.”
The topics were largely in line with both Russian and Chinese state media output on the war, which is being blamed on eastward expansion by NATO, rather than on the Russian decision to invade, and which includes allegations that the U.S. was researching biological weapons in a network of laboratories across Ukraine. Washington has dismissed the reports as disinformation.
The Shandong document gave the following summary of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official line on the war in Ukraine.
“Since 2014 [the Ukraine government] implemented a series of irrational foreign policies, incited hatred of Russia, started producing weapons of mass destruction, and sought to join NATO,” the document said.
Teachers are also expected to espouse — and teach — the view that “five eastward expansions of NATO has compressed Russia’s strategic space and backed the country into a corner.”
“The United States has provided Ukraine with U.S.$2.7 billion in militarized aid … which has intensified tensions between Russia and Ukraine,” the Shandong document said. “The U.S. provoked Russia into launching a war.”
“Putin threw one punch to avoid a hundred more,” it said.
Following a meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping in February, the bilateral relationship was described by China’s vice foreign minister Le Yucheng as “constantly rising to new levels, with no upper limit.”
Students view a display showing the Chinese Communist Party’s official line on the war in Ukraine being taught in schools in China. The lectures follow Russian and Chinese state media output on the war, which is being blamed on eastward expansion by NATO, rather than on the Russian decision to invade, and contains what critics say is significant disinformation. Credit: Chinese netizen.
Bogus Russian motion
China’ ideological campaign at home came as Beijing voted for a draft resolution by Russia tabled at the United Nations Security Council calling attention to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine but failing to mention its role as the invading power. The motion was defeated after receiving only two votes: Russia’s and China’s.
Analysts said the motion was an attempt by Russia to absolve itself of responsibility for the war, while China said there was a need to form a consensus on humanitarian grounds despite political differences.
“Russia’s move was aimed at shedding its moral responsibility and to ask for the rest of the world to endorse its invasion of Ukraine,” Shih told RFA. “What’s bizarre is that it turns the situation into a war between two parties who don’t want ordinary people to suffer the destruction brought by war, so are calling on others to help out the refugees and ordinary people.”
“It will be harder to confront Russia if it plays the role of rescuer,” he said.
Shih said the presence of Russia, which holds the power of veto on the security council, would make it impossible for the U.N. to send peacekeeping forces into Ukraine.
“[Also], if other countries carry out humanitarian aid on its behalf, that will help Russia towards a military defeat of Ukraine,” Shih said. “So nobody was going to agree to that.”
One the other hand, Russia was able to veto motions by France and other countries condemning the invasion. “It won’t recognize itself as the aggressor here,” he said.
Beijing’s goodwill towards the Kremlin only seems to extend so far, however.
China’s state-run Sinopec Group has suspended talks for a major petrochemical investment and a gas marketing venture in Russia, Reuters reported onFriday.
“The move by Asia’s biggest oil refiner to hit the brakes on a potentially half-billion-dollar investment in a gas chemical plant and a venture to market Russian gas in China highlights the risks, even to Russia’s most important diplomatic partner, of unexpectedly heavy Western-led sanctions,” the agency reported.
A women (C) holds her baby in a Ukrainian flag as people protest to mark the one-month mark of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on a street in Hong Kong, March 24, 2022. Credit: AFP
Taking Russia backwards
Beijing has repeatedly opposed international sanctions against Russia and refused to term Russia’s war as an invasion or its actions in Ukraine.
But the CCP is keen to protect its own economy from their economic impact nonetheless.
The report came after U.S. President Joe Biden said onThursdaythat China knows its economic future is tied to the West, after warnings from Washington that Beijing could regret siding with Russia.
Chinese political commentator Chen Pokong said Xi is planning to seek a third term in office at the CCP Party Congress later this year, comparing his extension of time in power to that of Putin.
“Putin’s extended re-elections, indefinite re-elections and long-term rule have taught the rest of the world a painful lesson and taken Russian backwards and brought war and danger to the rest of the world,” Chen wrote in a commentary aired on RFA.
“Any leader who is obsessed with power and seeks to rule for a long time or for life, regardless of their excuse, will, without exception, bring harm and disaster to their country and people, and quite possibly on the whole of humanity,” he said.
“Deep down in their hearts, dictators only care about their own power, fame and fortune, and not about the safety or well-being of the people, let alone the interests of humanity,” Chen wrote.
Chieh Chung, a research fellow at the National Policy Foundation on the democratic island of Taiwan, said the big question was whether China would provide military assistance to Russia.
“I don’t think Russia lacks conventional ammunition; their problem now is that they can’t warehouse these materials and send them to the front line,” Chieh told RFA.
“If China wants to give Russia military assistance, it won’t be in the form of major weapon’s systems,” he said, adding that much of China’s weaponry is homegrown and incompatible with Russian systems, as well as being easily identifiable.
Electronic components or parts are more likely, as they can’t easily be categorized into purely military or civilian in nature.
Former Soviet-era military officer Aqil Rustamzade has predicted that the Russian military will soon run out of electronic components, leaving it potentially unable even to hit any targets within weeks.
Taiwan has now placed an export ban, in line with international sanctions, on its GPS systems that are currently being used by the Russian army, and which Russia can’t produce by itself, he said, predicting that stocks are likely to run out soon.
Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hwang Chun-mei, Hsia Hsiao-hwa and Fong Tak Ho.
The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war. President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.” But pressure on the White House from Congress and the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.
Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries. The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.
Images of burnt flesh from napalm bombs, wounded and dead soldiers, scenes of U.S. soldiers burning the simple huts of Vietnamese villages, eventually turned the public against the war in Vietnam and produced the dreaded affliction, from the ruling class point of view, known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” This collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made it impossible for the public to support any foreign military involvement for years.
It took the rulers almost three decades to finally cure the public of this affliction. But the rulers were careful.
The brutal reality of what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq was whitewashed. That is why the images now being brought to the public by the corporate media are so shocking. It has been more than two generations since the U.S. public was exposed to the horrific images of war.
In the 1960s the rulers inadvertently allowed themselves to be undermined by the new television technology that brought the awful reality of imperialist war into the homes of the public. Now, the ruling class operating through its corporate media propaganda arms has been effectively using Ukraine war propaganda, not to increase Anti-war sentiment but to stimulate support for more war!
Incredibly also, the propagandists are pushing a line that essentially says that in the name of “freedom” and supporting Ukraine, the U.S. public should shoulder the sacrifice of higher fuel and food prices. This is on top of the inflation that workers and consumers were already being subjected to coming out of the capitalist covid scandal that devastated millions of workers and the lower stratums of the petit bourgeoisie.
But the war, and now the unfair shouldering of all of the costs of the capitalist crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the impact of covid by the working classes in the U.S., amounts to a capitalist tax. It is levied by the oligarchy on workers to subsidize the defense of the interests of big capital and the conditions that have produced obscene profits, even in the midst of the covid crisis and now, the Ukraine war.
These policies are criminal. While the U.S. continues to pretend that it champions human rights around the world, the failure of the state to protect the fundamental human rights of the citizens and residents in the U.S. is obvious to all, but spoken about by the few, except the Chinese government.
For those who might think that the Chinese criticism of the U.S. is only being driven by politics, and it might be, just a cursory, objective examination of the U.S. state policies over just the last few years reveals a shocking record of systematic human rights abuses that promise to become even more acute as a consequence of the manufactured U.S./NATO war in Ukraine.
The Ongoing Human Rights Crisis
The U.S. working class, and Black working class in particular, never recovered from the economic crisis of 2008 before it was once again ravaged in 2020 with the global capitalist crisis exacerbated by covid. On the heels of those two shocks, today millions of workers are experiencing a permanent state of precarity with evictions, the continued loss of medical coverage, unaffordable housing and food costs, and a capitalist-initiated inflation. The rulers are operating under the belief that with the daily bombardment of war images, U.S. workers and the poor will embrace rising costs of gas and even more increases in the cost of food.
Doesn’t the state have any responsibility to ensure that the economic human rights of the people are fulfilled? No, because liberal human rights practice separates fundamental human rights – such as the right to health, food, housing, education, a means to subsist at an acceptable level of material culture, leisure, and life-long social security – from democratic discourse on what constitutes the human rights responsibility of the state and the interests it must uphold in order to be legitimate.
The non-recognition of the indivisibility of human rights that values economic human rights to an equal level as civil and political rights, exposed the moral and political contradictions of the liberal human rights framework. The massive economic displacements with hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths among the population in the United States, with a disproportionate rate of sickness and hospitalization among non-white workers and the poor in the U.S., were never condemned as violations of human rights.
War and Economic Deprivation the Systemic Contradictions of the Western colonial/capitalist Project
The war being waged against global humanity by the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination is a hybrid war that utilizes all the tools it has at its disposal – sanctions, mass incarceration, coups, drugs, disinformation, culture, subversion, murder, and direct military engagement to further white power. The Eurocentrism and “White Lives Matters More Movement” represented by the coverage of the war in Ukraine stripped away any pretense to the supposed liberal commitment to global humanity. The white-washing of the danger of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and state and the white ethno-nationalism that the conflict generated across the Western world demonstrated, once again, how “racialism” and the commitment to the fiction of white supremacy continues to trump class and class struggle and the ability to build a multi-national, class based anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist opposition in the North.
It is primarily workers from Russia, the Donbas and Ukraine who are dying. But as in the run-up to the first imperialist war in Europe, known as World War One, workers with the encouragement of their national bourgeoisie, are lining up behind their rulers to support the capitalist redivision taking place, a redivision that can only be completed by war as long as capitalism and capitalist competition continues. Yet, instead of “progressives and radicals” joining forces to resist the mobilization to war, they are finding creative ways to align themselves with the interests of their ruling classes in support of the colonial/capitalist project.
In the meantime, the people of Afghanistan are starving, with thousands of babies now dying of malnutrition because the U.S. stole their nation’s assets. Estimates suggest that unless reversed, more people there will die from U.S./EU imposed sanctions than died during the twenty year long war. And the impact of the war in Ukraine with the loss of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia resulting not only in rising food prices globally but in some places like East Africa, resulting in death from famine.
In the U.S. where we witness the most abysmal record of covid failure on the planet, the virus will continue to ravage the population, with a disproportionate number who get sick and die being the poorest and those furthest from whiteness.
The lackeys of capital playing the role of democratic representatives claim that there is no money to bring a modicum of relief to workers represented in the mildly reformist package known as Build Back Better. Yet, the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that the wars waged by the United States in this century have cost $8 trillion and counting, with another $8 trillion that will be spent over the next ten years on the military budget if costs remain constant from the $778 billion just allocated.
No rational human being desires war and conflict. The horrors of war that the public are finally being exposed to because it was brought to Europe again, the most violent continent on the planet, should call into question all of the brutal and unjustified wars that the U.S. and its flunky allies waged throughout the global South over the last seventy years. Unfortunately, because of the hierarchy of the value of human beings, the images of war in Ukraine are not translating into a rejection of war, but instead a rejection of war in Europe and on white Europeans.
This means that the wars will continue and we must fight, often alone, because as Bob Marley said in his song “War”:
Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned
Everywhere is war
Me say war
You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross.
The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away from it. Because if you don’t compartmentalize away from it, the implications of this are very frightening. It means pretty much everything you’ve been told your whole life about the government, about your nation, about the news media, and about the way the world works, has been a lie.
But that is the basic reality. If you’ve already seen this, you won’t experience cognitive dissonance when you observe it in the unprecedented imperial narrative management campaign we’re seeing with Ukraine. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll likely experience a lot of cognitive dissonance if you try to square your gut feeling that you’re being propagandized about Ukraine with your belief that your favorite politicians and news sources always tell you the objective truth. And you will compartmentalize accordingly.
That’s just how we’re wired. Our minds are wired to select for cognitive ease and forcefully reject information which challenges our present worldview. Pushing past the cognitive discomfort and facing reality is the only way to come to real understanding.
If this picture was printed out and framed, and then used as a bludgeon to bash you in the face whenever you looked at an electronic screen, it would feel how all this Ukraine war propaganda feels when you haven’t swallowed the official narrative.
People get outraged when I say we are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine, but this fact is not seriously in dispute. The mass media have been relatively straightforward about it, though of course they fail to mention their own role in the propaganda campaign.
It seems like those who are new to the concept think that “propaganda” means making up fictional stories whole cloth, so they mistakenly assume that this is a claim that Russia never invaded and Ukrainians aren’t dying and suffering. But all it really means is that the narrative framing is manipulated. They’re not lying that there’s a war, they’re just manipulating the way people think about the war. How it’s happening, who’s to blame for it, whose agendas are served by getting it started and keeping it going, etc.
No good liar lies all the time. The best liars very seldom tell full-blown lies, always preferring to lie by omission, by distortion, by half-truth, by disproportionate focus, and by uncritically reporting other people’s lies in a way that suggests they’re true.
It’s all moving so fast now. Censorship and propaganda, the two arms of imperial narrative control, are escalating like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The doors on information control are being slammed and bolted shut all around the world as fast as the empire managers can get away with it.
And of course Australia is on the front line of this war against mental sovereignty:
And it’s because of all this intrusive perception management that we’re somehow simultaneously the closest we’ve been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet still collectively focused more on talking about sports and celebrity gossip as though everything is fine and normal.
This is something we could actually oppose, if enough of us had enough unpolluted information about what’s happening. This threat is not some inevitable force of nature that is happening to us, it’s something that is being done to us. By people. People with names and government offices.
If the nukes do start flying and we find ourselves in our final moments, will we really feel okay about having done nothing about it? About failing to mobilize in favor of de-escalation and detente? About being the first species in history to go extinct due to psychological compartmentalization and a reluctance to annoy government officials?
The only thing sadder than watching the world die would be watching it die without having done anything to try to save it.
The saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism is directly related to people’s inability to imagine anything other than increasingly aggressive escalations between nuclear powers in the competition-based systems we live under. People literally cannot imagine any deviation from this power struggle between nations, even if continuing along this trajectory means our complete annihilation.
And it really doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no good reason nations can’t cooperate with each other for the good of everyone without trying to dominate each other. There’s no good reason we can’t move from competition-based models of domination to collaboration-based models of human thriving.
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If the US empire truly believed its own role in this war was just, it wouldn't be unleashing unprecedented levels of censorship, blacking out Russian media, and propagandizing like it's already World War 3. https://t.co/BAbsGOFFyS
Michael Parenti said years ago that the ultimate neocon plan (which today has become simply the mainstream orthodoxy on US foreign policy) is a confrontation with disobedient governments, the ultimate target being China, to ensure the supremacy of American global capitalism. There’s no good reason this needs to happen. There’s no good reason the defensive Russia-China tandem described years ago by Gilbert Doctorow needs to be targeted in the way it’s currently being targeted by this war that was deliberately provoked by western powers.
They are lying to you. They are lying when they say they tried to prevent this war. They are lying when they say de-escalation is impossible. They are lying when they say World War 3 is inevitable, or is upon us already. Peace and detente are very possible. All that would need to happen is the dropping away of this notion that this planet of ours needs to be dominated by a single power structure. That’s all we’d need for the threat of nuclear armageddon to go away. That’s all we’d need to ensure humanity’s progress into the future.
We can simply move from endless escalation to diplomacy, from diplomacy to de-escalation, from de-escalation to detente, from detente to true peace, and from true peace to collaboration and human thriving. The only thing stopping that from happening is this insane drive to dominate.
Don’t believe the liars.
________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite a couple of over-used therefore recognizable labels, a genocidal holocaust that has burned, bombed, shot, stabbed, smothered and shattered bodies, reducing humans to unrecognizable bloody pulp by the hundreds of millions.
The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.
The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.
This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.
While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.
While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?
A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.
A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.
This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.
Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.
A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.
The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.
With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.
This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.
So what does President Joe Biden want the sanctions imposed on Russia to do? Think back to the 1990s and what the US-NATO imposed no-fly zone and sanctions did to the people of Iraq? The results were almost 1 million Iraqis dead, according to the website GlobalIssues.org.
Over at truthout.org, Jake Batinga reported that President Joe Biden strongly supported those sanctions as a US Senator and recently has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan:
Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances.
Batinga also notes that:
More Afghans are poised to die from US sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and US military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, US establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.
The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the US has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.
In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports. These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians.
BRIC’s Made of Straw
The BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China have been in the news lately and for good reason. There is talk, and talk is cheap, of course, of China and Russia creating an alternative payment system to the US dollar dominated international payments system SWIFT.
Already Russia has joined China’s Cross Border Interbank Payment System as an alternative to SWIFT, along with joining China’s UnionPay credit card system which serves as an alternative to Visa and Master Card who, along with dozens of other Western country businesses (Europe, USA plus Japan and South Korea), bolted Russia’s marketplace after its military operation got started in Ukraine in late February.
India apparently is trading with Russia in a rupee, ruble swap but that seems ad hoc, at best. And there is news of Saudi Arabia cutting a deal with China to use the yuan as an exchange currency. Brazil has enough internal problems to deal with: crime, disease, Amazon deforestation.
Chinese leaders must realize that if Russia falters in Ukraine which means it is unable to liberate the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, gain international recognition of Crimea—and maintain territorial gains made on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas—and/or President Putin is removed from office and Russia destabilizes, the United States will chop up Russia into separate republics, steal its resources and cancel the billions in deals signed with China for oil, gas, and grains
The United States will bring the NATO military alliance to China’s doorstep and likely put on show trials in the International Criminal Court arguing that Putin and his general staff are war criminals, which would be utter nonsense given US policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.
China is trying to placate the US because it still fears US economic and military power. Its party officials probably figure that they can keep building up the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic nuclear capability and when there is enough firepower, will be able to challenge US dominance in the Pacific. But how?
The PLA forces have no modern combat experience to speak of and their plan seems to be; well, no plan at all. They are faced with the combined forces of the USA that are building new aircraft carriers, submarines and long distance B-21 bombers, along with upgrading all three legs of its nuclear TRIAD.
Which brings us back to Russia and the economic support it needs so that Biden’s sanctions don’t end up killing a million Russians. Because that is what Biden intends and his track record on supporting sanctions is disturbingly clear. When China looks at what the USA-NATO have done to the Russian economy, they are looking at their own future.
Hypocrisy
Joe Scalice at the World Socialist Website notes the hypocrisy of the USA-NATO and the compliant MSM Western media:
The wars of aggression of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump contained the accumulated evil of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the drone bombing of children at play, villages leveled by precision missiles and refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Baghdad crumbled beneath the shock and awe of unstinting US bombing; Fallujah burned with white phosphorus.
The American mass media is complicit in these crimes. They never challenged the government’s assertions, but trumpeted its pretexts. They whipped up a war-frenzy in the public. Pundits who now denounce Putin were ferocious in demanding that the United States bomb civilians.
Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1999 of the bombing of Serbia under Clinton, “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted… [W]e will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [Biden supported bombing Belgrade]
Biden labels Putin a war criminal in the midst of a new media hysteria. Never referring to the actions of the United States, never pausing for breath, the media pumps out the fuel for an ever-expanding war. Hubris and hypocrisy stamp every statement from Washington with an audacity perhaps unique in world history. Its hands bathed in blood up to the elbows, US empire gestures at its enemies and cries war crimes.
Tactics
Indeed, the media has capitulated to the war propaganda narrative of the Biden Administration. The US MSM relies almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources for its error filled reporting. If you are reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, you aren’t getting the full story. Pro-Russia sites like Southfront, Newsfront, War Gonzo and others tell a different story. For example, the Retroville Mall destruction on March 21 was reported in the West as a wanton and random attack on a shopping place. In fact, the below-building parking lot was home to Ukrainian military vehicles clearly shown by a set of photos that appeared on Newsfront. Residential buildings are clearly being used by the Ukrainian forces to hide their weapons or launch anti-tank attacks from apartment building roofs or top floor apartments. That’s a tactic that makes sense. The Russians know that.
You’ve got to look at all the news sources, even the ones you don’t want to view, in order to be informed about this conflict.
We’re risking a very fast, very radioactive third world war defending the “democracy” of a regime who just banned eleven opposition parties.
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Liberals explaining why it’s fine to eliminate opposition parties when they become inconvenient is just liberals telling you who they really are.
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One reason you always hear about the genocidal depravity of Adolf Hitler but not King Leopold II is because Hitler did imperialism to white people. Keep that in mind as you watch the disparity between coverage of Ukraine and coverage of other recent military invasions.
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This is the message desktop Twitter users are receiving at the top right of their screen as of this writing:
We talk a lot about Silicon Valley’s role in facilitating US government censorship, but we should probably talk a lot more about its role in facilitating US government propaganda as well. We have two different words for censorship and propaganda, but in reality they’re just different aspects of the same one thing: narrative control. Propaganda is the positive aspect of imperial narrative control (adding communications), censorship the negative (removing communications).
Whoever controls the world’s dominant narratives controls the world itself. Narrative management constructs like Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the oligarchic “news” media play an even greater role in upholding the US-centralized empire than the US military.
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The US and all its imperial member states are strangling Russia’s economy in response to a war they provoked because Putin threatens US unipolar planetary domination and there are still right wingers whispering “I bet there’s a hidden conspiracy to create a one world government.”
Yes there’s an agenda to unite the world under a single power structure, but it’s the one leftist anti-imperialists have long warned about. And it’s not hidden at all; it’s evidenced in public information like the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and just by simple naked-eye observations of the movements of military equipment and resources.
Our world’s problems are systemic. Pretending our problems are due to specific individuals like Klaus Schwab is tempting for people who are ideologically invested in existing systems like capitalism and US supremacy, because then you just need to get rid of those few bad apples. Really though we’re looking at the way our power-serving systems inevitably allow power to consolidate and reinforce itself and gradually work toward bending all humanity to its will. This will continue happening until we change those systems, if we don’t nuke ourselves into oblivion first.
This is all being driven by one particular power structure’s self-appointed role as global ruler. The US-centralized empire’s foreign policy behavior is essentially a nonstop war on disobedience, continuously working to absorb nations into its blob and destroy those who refuse.
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If you mentally mute the “why” narratives about what’s happening and just look objectively at what’s happening, what you’ll see is a single dominant power structure controlling the majority of the world’s resources, wealth and information and punishing any nations who disobey it. What this tells you is that there’s a power structure doing whatever it has to do to shore up more and more control over the world, and then we’re fed narratives about why that needed to happen (Saddam needs to go because blah blah, NATO needs to expand because blah blah, etc).
Really underneath the narrative spin it’s just a giant tyrant doing tyrannical things. Heinlein said “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” This applies to empires and their narrative control mechanisms just as much as to individuals.
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People talk about “blaming the US for everything” like it’s some kind of outlandish and paranoid position to say that a unipolarist planetary hegemon probably plays some role in major conflicts of immense geostrategic consequence. They seriously have a hard time believing that the most powerful empire in the history of civilization could be involved in manipulating all major conflicts which directly affect its agenda of global domination.
They’re like, “Come on. The US empire can’t have a villainous role in EVERY major international conflict.” If that were true there wouldn’t be a US empire. You don’t become a unipolar planetary hegemon by being nice, you do it by forcefully tilting all global happenings toward your benefit.
You can’t take all of the control and none of the responsibility. It’s like a domineering narcissist who tyrannizes his family having a pity party when someone gets upset at him. “Oh right, it’s ALWAYS Dad’s fault. I’m ALWAYS the bad guy.” I mean, yeah, kinda. Duh.
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Russell Brand @rustyrockets reads from my article "International Law Is A Meaningless Concept When It Only Applies To US Enemies".https://t.co/Ma5AmF8Edr
If you’re so upset about “westsplaining” then maybe tell the western empire to stop “westspreading”.
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Liberals don’t even really believe it’s legitimate to ban opposition parties during a war. That thought never once occurred to them before today. They just assume it must be the right thing to do because their holy Ukrainian sex god did it.
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Liberals have spent five years defending the right of the powerful to keep secrets and tell lies. Now there’s a war and they get mad if you say the powerful are keeping secrets and telling lies. What’d you all think censorship, glorifying the CIA, persecuting Assange etc was about?
Liberals were brought up to think of themselves as skeptical, sophisticated progressives who believe in peace, democracy and the freedom of the press, and somehow they wound up arguing against all three of them without any critical thought. What an extraordinary thing to behold.
If a friend told me that they were going to keep secrets from me and sometimes lie but for my own good, they wouldn’t be my friend for long. I certainly wouldn’t absorb everything they said with nary a hint of skepticism. And yet this is the state of the western liberal today.
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Being a “contrarian” in the face of bat shit insanity is a good thing, actually.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.
The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”
A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.
If you use Twitter and engage with the subject of the war in Ukraine, you’ve probably noticed a verified account called The Kyiv Independent pop up while you’re scrolling through your feed which puts out highly biased content in favor of the Zelensky regime and the western powers which support it.
If you’re using a desktop browser, it will usually look like this:
Do you see the gray text in the top left-hand corner of the image which says “War in Ukraine”? That’s a Twitter “Topic” that the page’s algorithm has recommended to me without my having subscribed to it, where posts from The Kyiv Independent feature prominently. This Topic is being aggressively pushed on Twitter users around the world, showing up over and over again in their feed until they adjust their settings to remove it.
As Pedro Gonzales recently documented in Human Events, The Kyiv “Independent” was slapped together a few months ago with what the Committee to Protect Journalists called “an emergency grant from the European Endowment for Democracy.”
The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to advance US interests. A page on an NED website says that “All EU member states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of the European Parliament and civil society experts.”
So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.
The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian government also put $200,000 toward Kyiv Independent’s funding. The outlet is being so loudly amplified by Twitter that not only has its Twitter account secured nearly two million followers since its creation in November, but one of its reporters (who calls the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms“) has gained a million followers since the start of the Russian invasion.
Knew there was something off about this guy. Here's "Kyiv Independent" reporter @IAPonomarenko, who has gained almost a million followers in less than two weeks, declaring himself "brothers in arms" with the notorious, openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion pic.twitter.com/8BuC3hsSaj
Do you see how sophisticated just that one tiny component of the US-centralized empire‘s propaganda campaign is? How many seemingly disparate and unrelated elements it has? Multiple countries, NGOs, an ostensibly independent social media platform, an ostensibly independent news outlet. It’s very difficult to see how any of it connects at all if you don’t know where to look. And almost nobody knows where to look.
This highly advanced perception management operation is happening all around the world about any issue the empire has a vested interest in. As anti-imperialist author and podcaster Justin Podur recently put it, “The US Empire is based on the mastery of storytelling. Making reality through propaganda.”
Truly, one of the most under-appreciated and overwhelmingly powerful forces on this earth is the US imperial propaganda machine. The ability to manipulate public thought, not just within the United States but across vast swaths of nations, has allowed it to manufacture international consensus for whatever agendas it wishes to advance in a way that eclipses the collective organizing power of official international bodies like the United Nations.
We’re seeing it today in the way unprecedented acts of economic warfare are being used to attack the economy of Russia with the goal of fomenting unrest and toppling Moscow. There was nothing inherent in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which called for this specific response from all the specific nations who have chosen to participate in it, but that’s what ended up happening, and because of the power of the imperial propaganda machine the public has gone right along with it, even as it sends their fuel and grocery bills through the roof.
A big fuss gets made about the power of the US war machine, despite the fact that it tends to fail at the rather important task of winning wars. This is partly because the empire often doesn’t benefit from those wars ending quickly and partly because it’s hard to win wars when your entire military juggernaut is built entirely around generating the maximum amount of profit possible.
Where the real fuss ought to be made is the truly jaw-dropping power of the US propaganda machine. So subtle and sophisticated that even relatively intelligent and well-informed people fail to see the strings that are pulling at their mind, but so powerful it shapes the world.
The propaganda campaign on Syria taught me that Western media isn’t simply biased, but knowingly & systematically creates an alternative reality in support of the US narrative to an extent that I had hugely underestimated. Many of the same tactics are being used now with Ukraine.
In the book Inventing Reality, published all the way back in 1986, Michael Parenti makes the following observation:
For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news media. How we view issues, indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it labor unions, peace protesters, the Soviet Union, uprisings in Latin America, elections, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know of things except as they are depicted in the news.
Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They are still setting the agenda, defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or reject. The media exert a subtle, persistent influence in defining the scope of respectable political discourse, channeling public attention in directions that are essentially supportive of the existing politico-economic system.
This was long before Twitter, before Google, before Mark Zuckerberg, before Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act allowing for news media to be bought up and consolidated under just a few oligarchic megacorporations. And yet the exact same dynamic we see before us today was already in play, even back then. It’s just gotten a lot more complex.
You know what’s funny about this mad push to censor speech in the name of fighting “Russian propaganda” is that the people who are pushing it are indirectly admitting to a very important truth that they normally try not to draw too much attention to: the fact that it’s very possible to use media to manipulate the way people think, act, and vote at mass scale. The part that they don’t admit is that they themselves are far and away the very worst offenders in that area.
The status quo worldview requires two entirely contradictory positions to be held simultaneously: that Russian propaganda has a corrupting influence on public thought, but that orders of magnitude more wealthy and powerful oligarchic media institutions do not.
This is not sustainable. People are already struggling to keep their heads above water with the constant white-noise torrent of psychological abuse they’re being subjected to day after day. We’re on our way to finding out just how much mass-scale psychological manipulation the human brain can tolerate before it snaps if we don’t find some way to change our collective relationship with mental narrative first.
Or who knows? Maybe a healthy relationship with mental narrative lies on the other side of that snap.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the US is pouring weapons into a foreign nation to defend freedom and democracy.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe serious military conflicts consist of Good Guys fighting Bad Guys like a children’s cartoon show.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe a war is being fought between an evil monster who is the same as Hitler and a virtuous sexy comedian of surpassing bravery and wisdom.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the same western media institutions who’ve lied about every war are now telling the truth about this one.
It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe we’re seeing an unprecedented wave of censorship because the European Union, Silicon Valley megacorporations, and TV service providers want to protect everyone from “disinformation”.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe a government the US doesn’t like is behaving aggressively for no other reason than because its leader is evil and hates freedom.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe Ukraine is just a scrappy little underdog acting completely independently of the dictates of the largest power structure on this planet.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the globe-spanning power structure centralized around the United States is merely a passive witness to this war and not a key player in creating its emergence.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the US empire is ever the innocent little flower it pretends to be.
Russia's biggest state-controlled bank is to be hit with sanctions within days as ministers ratchet up Britain’s economic response to the bloodshed in Ukraine https://t.co/tMJ8noEXVM
It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe that governments who’d have every incentive to lie to the public about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine are simply choosing not to do so.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the politicians who’ve demonstrated ice cold indifference to their own citizens dying of poverty and disease care passionately about the plight of the Ukrainian people.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the most powerful and murderous government in the world is orchestrating the economic collapse of a nation it has long targeted for destruction in order to defend Ukrainians.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the “anti-war” position is to support pouring weapons into a foreign country and cold war brinkmanship that could lead to World War 3 while shouting down anyone who advocates de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe anything which doesn’t align with what the TV tells you about this war is “Russian propaganda”.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe anyone who disputes the TV narrative about this war is defending Putin or thinks he is awesome.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and accuse people who disagree with you of working for a foreign government.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and find it strange and outlandish when someone criticizes the most powerful empire that has ever existed for its role in starting a war.
It's quite sad that grown adults genuinely believe the Ukraine crisis is about the west's noble and valiant struggle to defend Ukraine's freedom, democracy and sovereignty against the delusional megalomania of Vladimir Putin. This just sounds like a comic book plot
It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and not understand that starvation sanctions are acts of war deliberately designed to hurt civilians.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and be fine with only knowing one side of the story.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still not know that extremely powerful people have a vested interest in manipulating your understanding of what’s going on in the world and are doing so constantly with varying degrees of success.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and view a narrative being pushed in perfect unison by all the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world with anything other than white hot skepticism.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still believe your government is on the side of truth, justice and righteousness.
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It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 without reflecting on the possibility that things are not as they seem.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Sometimes I can only stop and stare in awe at the power of the US propaganda machine. Almost the entire global north has been paced into perfect alignment with cold war agendas geared toward securing US unipolar dominance by an unprecedented propaganda and censorship campaign.
There’s nothing intrinsic in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which says the nation must be strangled to death by unheard-of levels of economic warfare from Washington-loyal governments. A huge international consensus needed to be manufactured for that specific response, and the public needed to go along with it. Just absolutely incredible.
By securing control of global narratives via Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and plutocratic “news” outlets, the US empire has effectively supplanted the UN and international law in its ability to get whole groups of nations moving in a certain way with the consent of the governed. The human species is being led around like a dog on a leash by a collective mind control system of unparalleled and unprecedented sophistication that hardly anyone even notices. Imperial propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society.
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What is the functional difference between state media broadcasters uncritically reporting what the government tells them to report and western news media outlets which always uncritically report “scoops” that are fed to them by government officials?
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American mass media reporters are only allowed to forcefully interrogate US officials when demanding to know why they still haven't started another major war. https://t.co/WAoyi4Wrpb
The fawning hero worship of Zelensky is the most embarrassing and self-debasing thing liberals have done since those pink pussy hats.
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War is without exception the very worst thing in the world. The most insane, the most traumatizing, the most self-destructive, the least sustainable. All of the parties involved in this war should have done everything possible to avoid it, and any who claim they did so are lying.
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The hawks from the first cold war claimed the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated their brinkmanship, which meant all those nuclear close calls we had during that period were worth it, but it turns out all that happened was a short break before resuming the insane nuclear brinkmanship.
We see now that this is set up to go on for a very, very long time. This completely invalidates the belief that these “great power competition” games of nuclear chicken are sane and worthwhile, because if you keep rolling the dice on nuclear war day after day and year after year, eventually they’re going to come up snake eyes. The only sane choice on the table is therefore to move into a cooperative, friendly relationship with these powers, because facts in evidence show very clearly that trying to dominate and subvert each other will keep going and going until it eventually results in a nuclear conflict.
We came close to wiping ourselves out many times during the last cold war; very close in some cases (look up Vasili Arkhipov). And now we’re back at the most dangerous levels of nuclear brinkmanship since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is unsustainable.
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All this talk about setting up a no-fly zone where the air force of a nuclear superpower is conducting operations reminds me how glad I am that Hillary Clinton lost. pic.twitter.com/3MTK5xYDYH
It says so much about the madness of our species that half the controversies surrounding this war exist because we made up a rule that killing people with chemical and biological weapons is illegal but killing them with bullets and military explosives is perfectly fine.
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If you have a problem with someone highlighting the culpability of the most powerful government on earth in giving rise to this war, it’s because imperial propaganda has turned you into a power-worshipping bootlicker.
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“Aha I see you’ve been speaking critically of the most powerful government on earth. That looks very strange and suspicious to me. Perhaps you are a secret agent working for a foreign government. I am very intelligent.”
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Empire loyalists hold that the US empire may stage coups and threaten foreign nations in ways it would never allow itself to be threatened, and that if those nations retaliate against those actions the empire bears no responsibility whatsoever.
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There’s a common unexamined assumption that the US can’t possibly have a villainous role in every major world conflict, that sometimes it’s just other governments being evil and that’s it. But there really is one uniquely evil asshole on the world stage who fucks with everything.
Few people have trouble believing there’s a uniquely evil tyrant in the world. They just have a hard time accepting that it’s their own government.
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The Russophobic campaign straddles the entire western political spectrum, and it is fully endorsed by western liberals and cultural elites. The political credulity of the majority of the populations of the US and Western Europe has always been shocking to me. Ever since I arrived in the US to attend university in 1982, I could not believe how gullible my American peers of all races were in their unshakable belief that whatever their government or corporate media said, especially about other countries, was the absolute truth.
Oh, you can pull a million images and a million news briefs from the Internet to illustrate the powerful and their stupidity and their absolute disdain for the rest of us.
She laughs when asked about refugees, this time, from Ukraine. She is laughing about being in either the west or east flank in Poland. She doesn’t know for sure. This is the blunt end of a hammer. They all may be woke and full of civet-feces coffee and gourmet bacon-laced canopies, but they are still blunt ends of the stick. Look, she’s a multimillionaire, so they have a million and one excuses to go with their greenbacks. (Here, one source, RT, banned, on her “gaffs”!)
They all are — those old policy makers, those politicians, those diplomats — mulimillionaires. They are the blunt end of the protection rackets for the super rich and billionaire class. However, even multimillionaires can, with a pronouncement, a flip of the hand, jigger of the computer mouse, they can say, “We deem all Russian things off limits.” Imagine the power, and then those countries like China, so-called all powerful, accepting some of the sanctions, for now. USA is one tough hombre.
This is serious stuff — read Whitney’s, “Twice in a Century: Russia Faces a War of Annihilation”!
So, then, the $5.5 a gallon for gasoline. Again, the multimillionaires, the Greta “I Am Aspergers” Thornberg’s, they can all applaud the hurt locker their leaders are unleashing on the common folk (Russians), and we know Greta’s parents are, well, they are Swedish millionaires (with a small “m”). Actors! Whew!
Wheat prices, doubling? Electricity, doubling? Food shortages and food tripling? That is, doubling and tripling of the price of these items. When you are a multimillionaire like Biden or Harris, Nuland or Kagen (even DoD Generals are millionaires), and when your pay is a taxpayer-dredged paycheck, and when you have an all-expenses-paid suite of benefits, and when you have insider trader information, and when you have full-spectrum health care, and when you have accountants, CPAs, financial advisors in the backrooms assisting you, this doubling of foodstuffs, this dollar or two/three more for a gallon of gasoline, well, that’s a laughing matter. . . for THEM. I’ve heard many a multimillionaire Mainstream Media Press Hoaxes telling you and telling me and telling all those home health workers and slave wage workers that we have to suck it up, that is, this is the small small price to pay in order to liberate (send billions in terrorist-headed small and large arms) Ukraine for capitalism, well, they call it PayDay Democracy with a big “d” for Dollar. When you are making these funny jokes and imbecilic comments, as we hear from Harris on down the line of Georgetown-Harvard-Stanford-Yale grads, and yet there still will be no pitchforks and gallows for you, and, alas, that small price to pay for mainstreet USA and pensioner USA, well, well, they can still have a very fine and fun life in their multimillionaire dollar homes . . . . It is the sacrifice they take, letting us know, we should sacrifice, and yet we will consume their junk, gobble up their celebrity feces, wait with bated breath for their words and deeds to be announced on MDM, as they continue with their fun lives, no matter if the gallon goes to $5 or $7 or $10 a gallon.
But, then, think of granny. Think of her meds going up-up-up! The foodstuffs going up-up-up. And if she has a leak under her sink, or if she has a puddle of mud outside the door along the pathway out gushing into her basement . . . and if she has a car that needs some new used tires and spark plugs . . . and if she needs to visit friends once in a while one-way in that vehicle, say, 120 miles one way (she lives in a rural abode) . . . and if she has a cat that needs teeth pulled . . . and if she dares thinks about seeing an ailing sister across the country via a plane, oh, well, let’s laugh at the pain she is now under. You know how much a plane ticket is? That’s the laughing break-point for granny. From podunk town Oregon to Virginia, or Florida: do the math on what a Roundtrip ticket sets granny back. But then these left/right politicians and woke/woodern corporate leaders can say, “Suck it up. It’s only $5 a gallon for gas. Look what those blonde and blue eyed ones in the Ukraine are suffering. Suck it up for a Ukraine refugee” (recall: eat all those spuds and green beans cuz a kid in China is starving . . . .!)
Let’s have a great laughing circle jerk as sanctions kill, and lies and mass incompetence murder people, and massive war profiteering wounds both humanity and townships, and where massive Covid-19 profiteering creates lingering death and long-term mental instability. As massive stock trading on those futures and those offensive weapons companies grow grow grow, while the Kamala Harrises of the world, really, get into the cackling mood on any number of topics for which she knows nothing, we are the sufferers. All those multimillionaire laughing hyenas, and I see Hillary and Bill are at it again with their continuing criminal enterprise, the Clinton Foundation!
Let’s hear about Elon Musk’s latest creepy surrogate childbirth. Let’s hear about this $1 million here and that $20 million there shoved down some redneck university football coach’s mouth while the college students are under another load of debt.
Let’s laugh it all off, the reality of this war, or that incursion, this sanction/that sanction, or that weaponized economic movement toward more of the gilded laughing class, that Hyena Laughing Multimillionaire Chorus. We can have Stephen Colbert help us laugh. Where’s Jon Leibowitz Stewart and Sean Penn when we need them? We need their multimillionaire advice, ASAP, and their laughs! “It’s only a few bucks more for a gallon of gas . . . deal with it,” old Colbert chortled.
Imagine, all those months and years The Putin warned against all that EU-Nato-UK-USA aggressive shit coming to Russia’s borders. All those times he petitioned, nyet, nyet, nyet!
Shifting now to make an analogy — Now, interestingly, I have been involved in a SWAT killing, that is, one of our clients — homeless veteran — had a suicidal moment alone, in his truck, with a handgun. Roads cordoned off. Everything around the Portland Salvation Army’s facility lock-downed. News at Six and Headlines at Ten there. Massive police armed presence. Armored trucks and gun turret vehicle, and then, of course, all guns drawn and three nifty SEAL trained snipers.
They gave him two and a half hours to get his shit together, and then, bam, 13 shots, seven to the body. He was handcuffed and lived. He was by himself. Suicide Not By Cops.
Another two-hour standoff. And, then, bullets to the head. Imagine that. I have been around cops most of my life, and I was a city and rural reporter, newspapers, that is, and covered the cop beats — local, feds, military, county. I have interviewed FBI, and I have been in some K9 units for both city and military cops. The bottom line is — there is absolutely a one in a million chance someone who threatens cops in a standoff in his car yelling “bomb, bomb, bomb” has a bomb. Absolutely Zero chance, really. Lots of TV shows and Netflix series, aside.
So, Putin gives the world, the EU, the UK-USA-Five Eyes, Nato, what, a month, a year, several years, eight years warning about needing those missiles and other weapons off of Ukraine’s soil?
Nothing like the Monroe Doctrine, which states that there shall be no military or no nothing allowed in the Western Hemisphere, err, in the US’s Neighborhood; i.e., backyard!
That old soft shoe — survival of the fittest or most riches or best placed bribes. That loving spoonful, here, all those pensioners, all those with multiple chronic illnesses, all those people in housing that is falling apart, all those loans hobbling folk. Choices between medications, or food. This is the country, man, USA, this is it for the epitome of exceptionalism.
Those $57 billion in loans the other laughing hyena, Zelensky the Comic, that’s what he wants forgiven. Laughing, while demanding more weaponry, more billions. That’s the jig is up game when you are a testing lab (country) for GMOs, drugs, and, well, bioweapons.
It’s funny stuff, the billions he has in Costa Rica (maybe) and the mansion in Florida ($28 million valued). These are laughing matters, and VP Harris is just one in a long line of laughers in the multimillionaire category; or for those in the billionaire’s “mile high screw the hundreds of millions of us club,” the laughing is incredible, cowboy hats and all!
Again, granny and the kiddos. When I was working as a reporter in Southern Arizona, I did a couple of pieces on the O’Malley Clan — a group of people, many in the same family, who would take their panel trucks and pick-up trucks and go to trailer parks and low income housing tracts and get old people to pay for roofing, for gutter work, for all sorts of things that the O’Malley Clan said needed fixing. Then, up on the roof, and a five gallon white can of paint later, leaky roof fixed. A cool $800 cash for a $75 five gallon of roof sealant. This is the style of the American who sees PT Barnum as a god, that sucker born every second, man oh man, that god.
Of course, States Attorney General had some squads trying to break up those O’Malley rings, but imagine, now 42 years later, and the amount of pure scam, pure fraud, pure bilking, pure rip-off, pure lying and chronic cheating that have cascaded into the American culture.
The amount of multiple millions stolen from granny and from kiddo is out the roof, out of the sky. And those Laughing Politicians and All Those Amazing Celebrities, all of them, just rah-rahing the sanctions, the price of oil going up up up, all the strain and weathering on common people who can’t afford what’s going on in their Circle Jerks.
The blame is on capitalism, on predatory and casino capitalism. The Gilded Agers, the deep state, all those Eichmann’s making money with the blood of granny and kiddo on their hands.
The laughing all the way to their offshore banks — and then, well, DeltaCron will be coming to a neighborhood around Halloween.
Those bioweapons, man:
Every day, every moment of these scams, these false flags, this depravity of Empire USA, all of those things, shit, it is, as McGovern and Mearsheimer and Matlock say, this is not a done deal, MSM.
Those chickens have come home to roost and roost and crap and crap:
A revealing Portside article of Feb. 14 describes how 36 American states either have or are seeking to pass laws that censor the teaching of both local and national history so as to tell a traditional, Eurocentric story. This effort seeks to deny the demonstrable facts about the role racism has played in shaping social and economic development since the nation’s inception. Against this trend, 17 U.S. states have moved to officially expand their history and social studies curriculum to make it more racially and class inclusive.
We should state clearly that the teaching of such a culturally approved official history has always been pursued in the United States, and is indeed not just an American tactic. It is a ubiquitous practice in much of the world. As public education evolved in the American colonies during the 19th century, it had specific goals: (1) to make the young as literate and skilled as necessary for an evolving capitalist economy and (2) to teach political loyalty. If in this effort there was any reference to or concern for “the truth,” it was allegedly to be represented by the daily repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. — Lawrence Davidson
[ The “En L’An 2000,” or “Life in Year 2000” by Jean-Marc Côté depicts the futuristic culturization of humanity. (Françoise Foliot , Wikimédia France, Paris, CC BY-SA 4.0) ]
But, again, it’s the old lady down the lane. The man and child living in their RV, and it is the person just trying to live out a life with few things having no one willing to come out and saw up the downed tree and patch the hole in the side of the house. Little homes with roof bids at $20,000!
Those lovely places, Israel, now Ukraine, where money is stuffed, again, down those Hyenas’ mouths while the land here is more and more susceptible to waves, winds, rising oceans, inundation.
Pacific Northwest coastal communities are at risk from earthquakes, including “The Really Big One”, tsunamis, sea level rise, landslides, erosion, and increased precipitation. Stretching from Cape Mendocino, California through Oregon and Washington to Vancouver Island, Canada, these Cascadia communities are calling for “a coordinated research agenda among universities, governmental agencies, NGOs, and others” to help them achieve resilience to these coastal hazards. (Event, March 16)
Yet, here we are, the war, the Putin, after how many years stating that EU-UK-USA-Five Eyes-Nato to stand down.
Pity the Nation
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them…
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
I see the same template in play again today when it comes to the difficult topic of Russia. Like every issue of importance, the Russian-Ukraine conflict has two sides to its story. The humanitarian tragedy that has befallen the citizens of Ukraine is perhaps the greatest argument one can offer up in opposition to the Russian military incursion. But was there surely a viable diplomatic off ramp available which could have avoided this horrific situation?
To examine that question, however, one must be able and willing to engage in a fact-based discussion of Russian motives. The main problem with this approach is that the narrative which would emerge is not convenient for those who espouse the Western dogma of “Putinism,” based as it is on the irrational proclivities and geopolitical appetite of one man — Vladimir Putin.
The issue of NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian national security is dismissed with the throw-away notion that NATO is a defensive alliance and as such could pose no threat to Russia or its leader. The issue of the presence of the cancer of neo-Nazi ideology in the heart of the Ukrainian government and national identity is countered with the “fact” that Ukraine’s current president is himself a Jew. The eight-year suffering of the Russian-speaking citizens of the Donbass, who lived and died under the incessant bombardment brought on by the Ukrainian military, is simply ignored as if it never happened. (Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.)
Wow! A picture says a million words from 100 million misinformed people:
Max Blumenthal on Twitter: “Larry Summers – who presided over the demolition and plundering of Russia’s economy in the 1990’s and pushed policies that led to the US financial crash – says Americans need to suffer higher gas & food prices and inflation ‘as the price of fighting tyranny.’”
A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations.
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.
In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.
“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” (source)
This seems like the poster plastered around town, no, or is Word Press now in the employ of the censors? Maybe we can put a question mark behind, “8 Real Threats to Humanity?” Does that work better?
Two weeks have passed since the start of the war in Ukraine. Peoples Dispatch has written extensively about the role of NATO, and the United States more centrally, in setting the stage for the current war in Ukraine. But despite the centrality of NATO in creating this conflict, the people of NATO countries have been bombarded with news media that places the sole blame on Russia.
The results of this constant propaganda on the people of NATO countries are apparent. In Canada, a Russian community center, with no ties to the Russian government, was vandalized with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. In Wales, the Cardiff Philharmonic banned Tchaikovsky from future performances. And in the United States, a country with an ugly history of war-related hysteria and racism, anti-Russian Sentiment has grown to Cold War levels.
Russia's biggest state-controlled bank is to be hit with sanctions within days as ministers ratchet up Britain’s economic response to the bloodshed in Ukraine 
