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There’s substantial evidence that what the MSM is reporting about the invasion of Ukraine is not accurate. Let’s look at that evidence.
Ukraine looks calm on security cameras while mainstream media is showing a brutal war.
NO_EYES_ON_ME February 27th, 2022
Go to odysee.com to watch this video.
Photos from 2018 used for Ukraine War News
NO_EYES_ON_ME February 27th, 2022
https://odysee.com/@NO_EYES_ON_ME:2/Recycling-News-ukraine:6
THE BIGGEST LIE ABOUT RUSSIA & UKRAINE!.mp4
Ziggy
Jose Flor-OzFlor February 27th, 2022
https://odysee.com/@OzFlor:7/V53:1
FAKE VIDEOS about Ukraine everywhere now – MSM is getting desperate to keep up the narrative
February 27th, 2022 275 views
Robert Self @Robert-Self
NY Nadia isn’t fooled by all the war mongering.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Os57Pwd678U?feature=share
Did you know?
ALL AMERICA’S WARS BEGIN WITH FALSE FLAGS
This D.C. think tank jerk off blatantly admitted all of America’s wars have traditionally begun with false flag events, and they know they will need another one to get the war with Iran started that they’ve been working on for so long.
This video is a few years old now, but it’s more relevant today with what’s going on in the Middle East than ever. They don’t teach you this in school, kids, but whatever happens over there, just realize how absolutely manufactured all of it is.
Truthstream Can Be Found Here:
Website: http://TruthstreamMedia.com
The movie “Wag the Dog” describes how a war can be faked.
Distract the public-justify the war machine – Wag the Dog (1997)
126,955 views Oct 30, 2016
Joe Black 231 subscribers
Distracting the public, justifying the war machine.
Wag the Dog (1997) premiered 17 December 1997
– 1 month before Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal broke.
– 9 months before missiles were launched in Operation Infinite Reach 70 hours after Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal grand jury testimony.
To watch the entire movie for free go to:
https://cineb.net/watch-movie/watch-wag-the-dog-free-13279.2520369
But what do they want to distract us from? Maybe the ever increasing injury and death toll from the Covid-19 clot shot or the imminent global financial collapse.
The Biden administration’s rational for the US to declare war on Russia is that Ukraine is a democracy and therefore must be defended. But Tucker Carson doesn’t think it is a democracy.
Tucker’s take: ‘Ukraine isn’t a democracy. It’s a State Department client state.’
February 24, 2022 | Frank Webster | Print Article
https://air.tv/?v=PZ_JEXGEQJ2CiyIvtCSCTw
(Video: Fox News)
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Wednesday launched into a critique of the Biden regime’s habit of scolding Americans for not marching in lock-step with its vision for the country.
Namely, the host said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that current policy in America makes it evident that “Ukraine’s borders are sacred- unlike her own – and if we’re good people, we’ll recognize that and not ask any questions.”
“It’s not an argument. It’s a lecture,” he added.
Carlson described what he perceives as a lack of subtlety coming from Washington when it comes to questioning the priorities of the U.S. government.
“Shut up, prole! Take the shot! Surrender that civil liberty! Pledge allegiance to Ukraine, or else you’re a dangerous tool of Vladimir Putin,” he mocked.
Although Democrats currently control both the legislature and the executive branches of the federal government, Carlson said Republicans must share the blame when it comes to U.S. failures in domestic policy, as all eyes at the leadership level are seemingly trained on the shiny object of conflict in Europe rather than on America.
“You’ll note that not a single Republican leader has stood up to point out how insane all of this is, and how completely divorced it is from anything that American voters actually care about,” he remarked.
He joked, “You listen to Mitch McConnell – the leader of Republicans in the Senate – you would think what the average, say, welder back in his home state of Kentucky really wants, more than a pay raise, or an affordable vacation, or decent schools for his children, what he really wants is an end to Russian aggression against the brave people of Eastern Ukraine.”
As Americans continue to face hikes in the price of consumer goods and services – particularly fuel – Carlson pointed to the arrogance of the protected class, which includes the media, and their demands that Americans straighten up and accept the sacrifices inherent in “defending our values.” Sacrifices, he says, that will not be felt by them but by regular Americans.
He spoke also of the oft-heard notion of spreading democracy throughout the world, but that Ukraine, he says, is actually not a democracy in the literal sense.
If you subvert the meaning of a word as fundamental as “democracy,” maybe you can tamper with the way we live here in the United States, just spitballing for a second. So Ukraine, to be technical, is not a democracy. Democracies don’t arrest political opponents and they don’t shutdown opposition media, both of which Ukraine has done. And by the way, Ukraine is a pure client state of the United States State Department — again, that’s fine. We are not mad about that, go ahead and run Ukraine if you want if you think you can do a better job than Ukraine is, just don’t tell us it’s democracy.
“In fact, Ukraine is not a democracy”
And Talsi Gabbard agrees with Carson
American politician Talsi Gabbard accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of suppressing free media and political repression against the opposition.
FEB 12, 2022
American politician Talsi Gabbard has accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of suppressing free media and political repressions against the opposition. Gabbard stated bluntly that “In fact, Ukraine is not a democracy.” The politician stated this on her Twitter, where she posted a video with accusations against Zelensky.
“The warmongers are telling us that we must defend Ukraine because it is a ‘democracy’. But they lie. In fact, Ukraine is not a democracy. In order to consolidate his power, the Ukrainian president shut down three television channels that criticized him, imprisoned the head of the opposition party that came second in the elections, and arrested and imprisoned its leaders (i.e., did exactly what we blame Putin) – and all this with US support.”
Speaking about the fact that Zelensky closed three TV channels, the American politician means 112 Ukraine, NewsOne and ZIK. And by the words about the leader of the opposition party, whom Zelensky put in jail, he means Viktor Medvedchuk (in fact, he is under house arrest).
For understanding, Talsi Gabbard is a famous American politician. Veteran of the war in Iraq, member of the military mission in Kuwait. US Army Major.
From 2013 to 2021, this congresswoman represented the state of Hawaii in Congress. From 2013 to 2016, Talsi Gabbard was vice president of the Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the US Democratic Party.
#8212; accusations that Zelensky is building a dictatorship in Ukraine are heard from the West more and more often and louder. Moreover, the two main arguments are the ban on TV channels (today 5 TV channels have been banned – UkrLive and First Independent have been added) and repressions against Medvedchuk.
Tens of thousands publications over the past year wrote about the ban on opposition TV channels and political repression. We can recall the most famous publications – the Independent (“You can’t let authoritarianism take root”), Forbes (“Ukraine 2021: The Crisis Continues”) and the most recent article – The Washington Post (“Six reasons why Russia quarrels with Ukrainian leader Zelensky” ).
Therefore, accusations of dictatorship will continue to be heard against Zelensky – accumulating like a snowball.
VASYLKYVSKY MYKOLA BLOGGER, JOURNALIST, WRITER
This is completely insane!
Ukraine – Ukraine Is Bombing Its Own People – Western Journalists – Ukraina – Ukrainci Bombarduji Sve spoluobcany – Nechteji o tom moc mluvit – Zapadni reporterka – spot
There are very few people that I admire more than Glenn Greenwald. Below an excerpt of his biography from wikipedia and his excellent article about the intense war propaganda about Ukraine.
Glenn Edward Greenwald[1] (born March 6, 1967) is an American journalist, author, and lawyer.In June 2013, while at The Guardian, he began publishing a series of reports detailing previously unknown information about American and British global surveillance programs based on classified documents provided by Edward Snowden. His work contributed to The Guardian’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize win, and he won the 2013 George Polk Award along with three other reporters, including Laura Poitras. In 2014, Greenwald, Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill launched The Intercept, for which he was co-founding editor until he resigned in October 2020. Greenwald subsequently started publishing on Substack, an online newsletter-based journalism platform.[4]Greenwald wrote the book Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Brazil as a follow up to No Place to Hide. It was published by Haymarket Books in April 2021.
War Propaganda About Ukraine Becoming More Militaristic, Authoritarian, and Reckless
Glenn Greenwald February 27th, 2022
Every useful or pleasing claim about the war, no matter how unverified or subsequently debunked, rapidly spreads, while dissenters are vilified as traitors or Kremlin agents.
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 1: (L-R) Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice-chair of the select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) listen during a committee meeting on Capitol Hill on December 1, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.
Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media’s most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet’s largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.
Kinzinger’s fantasy that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically — and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia.” The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”
Having the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when “Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert, reminding the world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.
There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.
As I examined in the first part of that video discussion, war propaganda stimulates the most powerful aspects of our psyche, our subconscious, our instinctive drives. It causes us, by design, to abandon reason. It provokes a surge in tribalism, jingoism, moral righteousness and emotionalism: all powerful drives embedded through millennia of evolution. The more unity that emerges in support of an overarching moral narrative, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to critically evaluate it. The more closed the propaganda system is — either because any dissent from it is excluded by brute censorship or so effectively demonized through accusations of treason and disloyalty — the more difficult it is for anyone, all of us, even to recognize one is in the middle of it.
When critical faculties are deliberately turned off based on a belief that absolute moral certainty has been attained, the parts of our brain armed with the capacity of reason are disabled. That is why the leading anti-Russia hawks such as former Obama Ambassador Michael McFaul and others are demanding that no “Putin propagandists” (meaning anyone who diverges from his views of the conflict) even be permitted a platform, and why many are angry that Facebook has not gone far enough by banning many Russian media outlets from advertising or being monetized. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), using the now-standard tactic of government officials dictating to social media companies which content they should and should not allow, announced on Saturday: “I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda.” Suppressing any divergent views or at least conditioning the population to ignore them as treasonous is how propagandistic systems remain strong.
It is genuinely hard to overstate how overwhelming the unity and consensus in U.S. political and media circles is. It is as close to a unanimous and dissent-free discourse as anything in memory, certainly since the days following 9/11. Marco Rubio sounds exactly like Bernie Sanders, and Lindsay Graham has no even minimal divergence from Nancy Pelosi. Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging. And U.S. public opinion has consequently undergone a radical and rapid change; while recent polling had shown large majorities of Americans opposed to any major U.S. role in Ukraine, a new Gallup poll released on Friday found that “52% of Americans see the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests” with almost no partisan division (56% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats), while “85% of Americans now view [Russia] unfavorably while 15% have a positive opinion of it.”
The purpose of these points, and indeed of this article, is not to persuade anyone that they have formed moral, geopolitical and strategic views about Russia and Ukraine that are inaccurate. It is, instead, to highlight what a radically closed and homogenized information system most Americans are consuming. No matter how convinced one is of the righteousness of one’s views on any topic, there should still be a wariness about how easily that righteousness can be exploited to ensure that no dissent is considered or even heard, an awareness of how often such overwhelming societal consensus is manipulated to lead one to believe untrue claims and embrace horribly misguided responses.
To believe that this is a conflict of pure Good versus pure Evil, that Putin bears all blame for the conflict and the U.S., the West, and Ukraine bear none, and that the only way to understand this conflict is through the prism of war criminality and aggression only takes one so far. Such beliefs have limited utility in deciding optimal U.S. behavior and sorting truth from fiction even if they are entirely correct — just as the belief that 9/11 was a moral atrocity and Saddam (or Gaddafi or Assad) was a barbaric tyrant only took one so far. Even with those moral convictions firmly in place, there are still a wide range of vital geopolitical and factual questions that must be considered and freely debated, including:
- The severe dangers of unintended escalation with greater U.S. involvement and confrontation toward Russia;
- The mammoth instability and risks that would be created by collapsing the Russian economy and/or forcing Putin from power, leaving the world’s largest or second-largest nuclear stockpile to a very uncertain fate;
- The ongoing validity of Obama’s long-standing view of Ukraine (echoed by Trump), which persisted even after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 following a referendum, that Ukraine is of vital interest only to Russia and not the U.S., and the U.S. should never risk war with Russia over it;
- The bizarre way in which it has become completely taboo and laughable to suggest that NATO expansion to the Russian border and threats to offer Ukraine membership is deeply and genuinely threatening not just to Putin but all Russians, even though that warning has emanated for years from top U.S. officials such as Biden’s current CIA Director William Burns as well as scholars across the political spectrum, including the right-wing realist John Mearsheimer and the leftist Noam Chomsky.
- The clearly valid questions regarding actual U.S intentions concerning Ukraine i.e. that a noble, selfless and benevolent American desire to protect a fledgling democracy against a despotic aggressor may not be the predominant goal. Perhaps it is instead to revitalize support for American imperialism and intervention, as well as faith in and gratitude for the U.S. security and military state (the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer suggested this week that this is the principal outcome in the West of the current conflict). Or the goal may be the re-elevation of Russia as a vital and grave threat to the U.S. (the above polling data suggests this is already happening) that will feed weapons purchases and defense and intelligence budgets for years to come. Or one might see a desire to harm Russia, as vengeance for the perception that Putin helped defeat Hillary Clinton and elected Donald Trump (that the U.S. is using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” was explicitly stated by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)).
Or perhaps the goal is not to “save and protect” Ukraine at all, but to sacrifice it by turning that country into a new Afghanistan, where the U.S. arms a Ukrainian insurgency to ensure that Russia remains stuck in Ukraine fighting and destroying it for years (this scenario was very compellingly laid out in one of the best analyses of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, by Niccolo Soldo, which I cannot recommend highly enough).
Jeff Rogg, historian of U.S. intelligence and an assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at the Citadel, wrote in The LA Timesthis week that the CIA has already been training, funding and arming a Ukrainian insurgency, speculating that the model may be the CIA’s backing of the Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan that morphed into Al Qaeda, with the goal being “to weaken Russia over the course of a long insurgency that will undoubtedly cost as many Ukrainian lives as Russian lives, if not more.”
Again, no matter how certain one is about their moral conclusions about this war, these are urgent questions that are not resolved or even necessarily informed by the moral and emotional investment in a particular narrative. Yet when one is trapped inside a system of a complete consensus upheld by a ceaseless wave of reinforcing propaganda, and when any questioning or dissent at all is tantamount to treason or “siding with the enemy,” there is no space for such discussions to occur, especially within our minds. When one is coerced — through emotional tactics and societal inventive — to adhere only to one script, nothing that is outside of that script can be entertained. And that is all by design.
Besides 9/11 and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Americans have been subjected to numerous spates of war propaganda, including in 2011 when then-President Obama finally agreed to order the U.S. to participate in a France/UK-led NATO regime change operation in Libya, as well as throughout the Obama and early Trump years when the CIA was fighting a clandestine and ultimately failed regime change war in Syria, on the same side as Al-Qaeda, to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. In both instances, government/media disinformation and emotional manipulation were pervasive, as it is in every war. But those episodes were not even in the same universe of intensity and ubiquity as what is happening now and what happened after 9/11 — and that matters a great deal for understanding why so many are vulnerable to the machinations of war propaganda without even realizing they are affected by it.
One realization I had for the first time during Russiagate was that history may endlessly repeat itself, but those who have not lived through any such history or paid attention to it previously will not know about it and thus remain most susceptible to revisionism or other tactics of deceit. When Russiagate was first unveiled as a major 2016 campaign theme — through a Clinton campaign commercial filled with dark and sinister music and innuendo masquerading as “questions” about the relationship between Trump and the Kremlin — I had assumed when writing about it for the first time that most Americans, especially those on the left taught to believe that McCarthyism was one of the darkest moments for civil liberties, would instantly understand how aggressively the CIA and FBI disseminate disinformation, how servile corporate media outlets are to those security state agencies, how neocons are always found at the center of such manipulative tactics, and how potent this sort of propaganda is. The common theme is creating a foreign villain said to be of unparalleled evil or at least evil not seen since Hitler, then accusing one’s political adversaries of being enthralled by or captive to them. We have witnessed countless identical cycles throughout U.S history.
But I also quickly realized that millions of Americans — either due to age or previous political indifference — began paying attention to politics for the first time in 2016 due to fear of Trump, and thus knew little to nothing about anything that preceded it. Such people had no defenses against the propaganda narrative and deceitful tactics because, for them, it was all new. They had never experienced it before and thus had no concept of who they were applauding and how such official government/media disinformation campaigns are constructed. Each generation is thus easily programmed and exploited by the same propaganda systems, no matter how discredited they were previously.
Although such episodes are common, one has to travel back to the period of 2001-03, following the 9/11 attack on U.S. soil, and through the invasion of Iraq, in order to find an event that competes with the current moment in terms of emotional intensity and lockstep messaging throughout the West. Comparing that historical episode to now is striking, because the narrative themes deployed then are identical to those now; the very same people who led the construction of that narrative and accompanying rhetorical tactics are the ones playing a similar role now; and the reaction that these themes trigger are virtually indistinguishable.
Many who lived through the enduring trauma and mass rage of 9/11 as an adult need no reminder of what it was like and what it consisted of. But millions of Americans now focused on Ukraine did not live through that. And for many who did, they have, with the passage of two decades, revised or now misremember many of the important details of what took place. It is thus worthwhile to recall the broad strokes of what we were conditioned to believe to see how closely it tracks the consensus framework now.
Both the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq were cast as clear Manichean battles: one of absolute Good fighting absolute Evil. That framework was largely justified through its companion prism: the subsequent War on Terror and specific wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) represented the forces of freedom and democracy (the U.S. and its allies) defending itself against despotism and mad, primitive barbarism. We were attacked not because of decades of intervention and aggression in their part of the world but because they hated us for our freedom. That was all one needed to know: it was a war between enlightened democrats and psychotic savages.
As a result, no nuance was permitted. How can there be room for nuance or even questioning when such clear moral lines emerge? A binary framework was thus imposed: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” decreed President George W. Bush in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Anyone questioning or disputing any part of the narrative or any of the U.S. policies championed in its name stood automatically accused of treason or being on the side of The Terrorists. David Frum, fresh off his job as a White House speechwriter penning Bush’s war speeches, in which Bush proclaimed the U.S. was facing an “Axis of Evil,” published a 2003 article in National Review about right-wing opponents of the invasion of Iraq, aptly titled: “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Go look how cheaply and easily people were accused of being on the side of The Terrorists or traitors for the slightest deviation from the dominant narrative.
Like all effective propaganda, the consensus assertions about 9/11 and Iraq had a touchstone to the truth. Indeed, some of the fundamental moral claims were true. The civilian-targeting 9/11 attack was a moral atrocity, and the Taliban and Saddam really were barbaric despots (including when the U.S. had previously supported and funded them). But those moral claims only took one so far: specifically, they did not take one very far at all. Many who enthusiastically embraced those moral propositions ended up also embracing numerous falsehoods emanating from the U.S. Government and loyal media outlets, as well as supporting countless responses that were both morally unjustified and strategically unwise. Polls at the start of the Iraq War showed large majorities in favor of and believing outright falsehoods (such as that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attack), while polls years later revealed a “huge majority” which now views the invasion as a mistake. Similarly, it is now commonplace to hear once-unquestioned policies — from mass NSA spying, to lawless detention, to empowering the CIA to torture, to placing blind faith in claims from intelligence agencies — be declared major mistakes by those who most vocally cheerlead those positions in the early years of the War on Terror.
In other words, correctly apprehending key moral dimensions to the conflict provided no immunity against being propagandized and misled. If anything, the contrary was true: it was precisely that moral zeal that enabled so many people to get so carried away, to be so vulnerable to having their (often-valid) emotions of rage and moral revulsion misdirected into believing falsehoods and cheering for moral atrocities in the name of vengeance or righteous justice. That moral righteousness crowded out the capacity to reason and think critically and unified huge numbers of Americans into herd behavior and group-think that led them to many conclusions which, two decades later, they recognize as wrong.
It should not be difficult, even for those who did not live through those events but who can now look back at what happened, to see the overwhelming similarities between then and now. The role of bin Laden and Saddam — as unhinged, mentally unwell, unrepentant mass murderers and despots, the personification of pure evil — is now occupied by Putin. “Putin is evil. Every American watching what’s happening in Ukraine should know that,” instructed Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of the author of the virtually identical 9/11 and Iraq morality scripts. Conversely, the U.S. and its allies are the blame-free, morally upright spreaders of freedom, defenders of democracy and faithfully adhering to a rules-based international order.
This exact framework remains in place; only the parties have changed. Now, anyone questioning this narrative in whole or in part, or disputing any of the factual claims being made by the West, or questioning the wisdom or justice of the role the U.S. is playing, is instantly deemed not “on the side of the terrorists” but “on the side of Russia”: either for corrupt monetary reasons or long-hidden and hard-to-explain ideological sympathy for the Kremlin. “There is no excuse for praising or appeasing Putin,” announced Rep. Cheney, by which — like her father before her and McFaul now — she means anyone deviating in any way from the full panoply of U.S. assertions and responses. Wyoming’s vintage neocon also instantly applied this accusatory treason matrix to former President Trump, arguing that he “aids our enemies” and his “interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America.”
Everyone watching this week-long mauling of dissenters understood the messaging and incentives: either get on board or stay silent lest you be similarly vilified. And that, in turn, meant there were fewer and fewer people willing to publicly question prevailing narratives, which made it in turn far more difficult for anyone else to separate themselves from unified group-think.
One instrument of propaganda that did not exist in 2003 but most certainly does now is social media, and it is hard to overstate how much it is exacerbating all of these pathologies of propaganda. The endless flood of morally righteous messaging, the hunting down of and subsequent mass-attacks on heretics, the barrage of pleasing-but-false stories of bravery and treachery, leave one close to helpless to sort truth from fiction, emotionally manipulative fairy tales from critically scrutinized confirmation. It is hardly novel to observe that social media fosters group-think and in-group dynamics more than virtually any other prior innovation, and it is unsurprising that it has intensified all of these processes.
Another new factor separating the aftermath of 9/11 from the current moment is Russiagate. Starting in mid-2016, the Washington political and media class was obsessed with convincing Americans to view Russia as a grave threat to them and their lives. They created a climate in Washington in which any attempts to forge better relations with the Kremlin or even to open dialogue with Russian diplomats and even just ordinary Russian nationals was depicted as inherently suspect if not criminal. All of that primed American political culture to burst with contempt and rage toward Russia, and once they invaded Ukraine, virtually no effort was needed to direct that long-brewing hostility into an uncontrolled quest for vengeance and destruction.
That is why it is anything but surprising that incredibly dangerous proposals like the one by Rep. Kizinger for deployment of the U.S. military to Ukraine have emerged so quickly. This orgy in high dudgeon of war propaganda, moral righteousness, and a constant flow of disinformation produces a form of collective hysteria and moral panic. In his 1931 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley perfectly described what happens to humans and our reasoning process when we are subsumed by crowd sentiments and dynamics:
Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called “herd-poisoning.” Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.
We have seen similar outbreaks many times over the last couple of decades, but nothing produces it more assuredly than war sentiments and the tribal loyalties that accompany them. And nothing exacerbates it like the day-long doom scrolling through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which so much of the world is currently doing. Social media platforms, by design, enable one to block out all unpleasant information or dissident voices and only feed off content and claims that validate what they wish to believe.
Kinzinger’s call for a US-imposed no-fly zone is far from the only unhinged assertion or claim spewing forth from the U.S. opinion-shaping class. We are also witnessing a radical increase in familiar authoritarian proposals coming from U.S. politicians. Two other members of Congress who are most beloved by the media, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), suggested that all Russians should be immediately deported from the U.S., including Russian students studying at American universities. The rationale is similar to the one that drove FDR’s notorious World War II internment of all people of Japanese descent — citizens or immigrants — in camps: namely, in times of war, all people who come from the villain or enemy country deserve punishment or should be regarded as suspect. A Washington Post columnist, Henry Olsen, proposed banning all Russia athletes from entering the U.S.: “No Russian NHL, football, or tennis players so long as the war and claims on Ukrainian territory exist.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), long a vocal advocate of requiring congressional approval for the deployment by the president of military forces to war zones, argued on Friday that Biden’s troop movements to Eastern Europe constitute war decisions that constitutionally necessitate Congressional approval. “President Biden’s unilateral deployment of our Armed Forces to the European theater, where we now know they are in imminent hostilities, triggers the War Powers Act, necessitating that the President report to Congress within 48 hours,” he said. Sen. Lee added: “The Constitution requires that Congress must vote to authorize any use of our Armed Forces in conflict.”
For this simple and basic invocation of Constitutional principles, Lee was widely vilified as a traitor and Russian agent. “Are you running for Senator of Moscow? Because that’s where you belong,” one Democratic Congressional candidate, the self-declared socialist and leftist Joey Palimeno (D-GA), rhetorically asked. Now-perennial independent candidate Evan McMullin, formerly a CIA operative in Syria, dubbed Lee “Moscow Mike” for having raised this constitutional point, claiming he did so not out of conviction but “to distract from the fact that he traveled to Russia and brazenly appeased Vladimir Putin for his own political gain.”
Other than calling Lee a paid Russian agent and traitor, the primary response was the invocation of Bush/Cheney’s broad Article II executive power theories to insist that the president has the unfettered right to order troop deployments except to an active war zone — as if the possibility of engaging Russian forces was not a primary motive for these deployments. Indeed, the Pentagon itself said the troop deployments were to ensure the troops “will be ready if called upon to participate in the NATO Response Force” and that “some of those U.S. personnel may also be called upon to participate in any unilateral actions the U.S. may undertake.” Even if one disagrees with Lee’s broad view of the War Powers Act and the need for Congress to approve any decisions by the president that may embroil the country in a dangerous war, that Lee is a Kremlin agent and a traitor to his country merely for advocating a role for Congress in these highly consequential decisions reflects how intolerant and dissent-prohibiting the climate has already become.
Disinformation and utter hoaxes are now being aggressively spread as well. Both Rep. Kinzinger and Rep. Swalwell ratified and spread the story of the so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” a Ukrainian fighter pilot said to have single-handedly shot down six Russian planes. Tales and memes commemorating his heroism viralized on social media, ultimately ratified by these members of Congress and other prominent voices. The problem? It is a complete hoax and scam, concocted through a combination of deep fake videos based on images from a popular video game. Yet to date, few who have spread this fraud have retracted it, while censorship-happy Big Tech corporations have permitted most of these fraudulent posts to remain without a disinformation label on it. We are absolutely at the point — even as demands escalate for systematic censorship by Big Tech of any so-called “pro-Russian” voices — where disinformation and fake news are considered noble provided they advance a pro-Ukrainian narrative.
Western media outlets have also fully embraced their role as war propagandists. They affirm any story provided it advances pro-Ukrainian propaganda without having the slightest idea whether it is true. A charming and inspiring story about a small group of Ukrainian soldiers guarding an installation in a Black Sea island went wildly viral on Saturday and ultimately was affirmed as truth by multiple major Western news outlets. A Russian warship demanded they surrender and, instead, they responded by replying: “fuck you, Russian warship,” their heroic last words before dying while fighting. Ukraine said “it will posthumously honor a group of Ukrainian border guards who were killed defending a tiny island in the Black Sea during a multi-pronged Russian invasion.” Yet there is no evidence at all that they died; the Russian government claims they surrendered, and the Ukrainian military subsequently acknowledged the same possibility.
Obviously, neither the Russian nor Ukrainian versions should be accepted as true without evidence, but the original, pleasing Ukrainian version should not either. The same is true of:
- the equally inspiring story that the Ukrainian military shot down two Russian Il-76s transport planes (no evidence);
- a Russian tank purposely and randomly ran over a civilian car (the video suggests a possible accident and, more importantly, subsequent news accounts acknowledged: “it wasn’t immediately clear if the armored vehicle was Russian or Ukrainian hardware, or when this crash took place”);
- a mega-viral thread from a member of the EU Parliament claiming Russian oligarchs and Putin were screaming at each other in a bunker in desperation (pronounced “likely disinfo” by the US-intel-friendly and vehemently anti-Russia site Bellingcat);
- a gratifying story that Turkey told Ukraine that it informed Russia it was barred from using Turkish straits to enter the Black Sea (Turkey denied telling this to President Zelensky and said they could not and would not do that, then on Sunday said they had determined these events constitute a “war” such that they may have the power them to ban both Ukraine and Russia, but had not yet decided to so);
- a thrilling photo of Zelensky in body armor on the front lines against Russia (it was from months ago), and,
- claims that Russia targeted a civilian apartment building with a missile (it appears at least possible that the missile was a misguided Ukrainian air defense weapon).
But we are way past the point where anyone cares about what is or is not factually true, including corporate outlets. Any war propaganda — videos, photos, unverified social media posts — that is designed to tug on Western heartstrings for Ukrainians or appear to cast them as brave and noble resistance fighters, or Russians as barbaric but failing mass murderers, gets mindlessly spread all over without the slightest concern for whether it is true. To be on social media or to read coverage from Western news outlets is to place yourself into a relentless vortex of single-minded, dissent-free war propaganda. Indeed, some of the above-referenced stories may turn out to be true, but spreading them before there is any evidence of them is beyond reckless, especially for media outlets whose role is supposed to be the opposite of propagandists.
None of this means the views you may have formed about the war in Ukraine are right or wrong. It is of course possible that the Western consensus is the overwhelmingly accurate one and that the moral framework that has been embraced is the correct prism for understanding this conflict. All sides in war wield propaganda, and that certainly includes the Russians and their allies as well. This article is not intended to urge the adoption of one viewpoint or the other.
It is, instead, intended to urge the recognition of what the effects of being immersed in one-sided, intense and highly emotionalized war propaganda are — effects on your thinking, your reasoning, your willingness to endorse claims or support policies, your comfort with having dissent either banished or inherently legitimized. Precisely because this propaganda has been cultivated over centuries to so powerfully and adeptly manipulate our most visceral reactions, it is something to be resisted even if — perhaps especially if — it is coming from the side or viewpoint you support.
Of course the arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp will profit immensely from the war in Ukraine. But I agree with Bruce Springstein. At the beginning of this video he talks about the Vietnam war, 1955 to 1975, that was responsible for the deaths of 1,353,000 people.
Bruce Springsteen – War
1,743,646 views Sep 24, 2010
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing Say it again, war
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, come on
War is something that I despise
For it means destruction of innocent lives
And thousands words in mothers’ cry
When their son’s go out to fight to give their lives
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Say it again, war
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
War
It ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker
War
Friend only to the undertaker
War is the enemy of all mankind
The thought of war it just blows my mind
Handed down from generation to generation
Induction, destruction, who wants to die?
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Say it again, war
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
War
It ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker
War
Friend only to an undertaker
War has shattered many young men’s dreams
Made them disabled bitter and mean
Life is too precious to be fighting wars each day
War can’t give life it can only take it away
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Say it again, war
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Peace, love and understanding it all
There must be some place for these things today
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord there’s gotta be another way that’s better than
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Say it again, war
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, come on now
War
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Say it again, war
What is it good for? Nothing
I’m talkin’ about war
Are the Russian people in favor of the war on Ukraine? Will they benefit in any way?
Russians ‘Not Happy’ About Plunging Currency As Ukraine Sanctions Bite
1,956,891 views Mar 1, 2022
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Russian consumers are facing higher prices and fewer imported goods after Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine sent their currency, the ruble, plummeting. People in the Russian cities of Tomsk and Kaliningrad told RFE/RL they were bracing for a drop in living standards.Originally published at – https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-ruble…
‘Everything is going to hell’: Western sanctions cause economic chaos in Russia
FRANCE 24 3,203,420 views Mar 3, 2022
Hundreds of anti-war protesters took to the streets of the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on February 26 to denounce their country’s military invasion of Ukraine. Chanting “no to war,” many of the protesters said they were ashamed of their nation and several were detained by police.
Originally published at – https://www.rferl.org/a/yekaterinburg…
Even Russian soldiers don’t want to fight their brother in Ukraine
#UATV #UATV_English #UkraineNews
Captive Russian soldiers tell how they ended up in Ukraine and what orders they had
4,070,415 views Mar 2, 2022
UATV English 186K subscribers
“We were not told anything. They just told us to march ahead” The commander told us that we were told we are going to drills”, “We were deceived and being used as cannon fodder.” A Russian soldier who became captive in Ukraine tells how they ended up here.
Yanis Varoufakis and Russel Brand on the Ukrainian Crisis |«Under the Skin»
9,846 views Mar 5, 2022
James Corbett has written an article that describes the Ukraine situation using different historical lenses in an effort to determine who really is the good guy and who really is the bad guy in this conflict. His conclusion will surprise you. But first who is he?
James Corbett is an anarcho-voluntaryist libertarian, agorist, and humanist.[2] Raised in Canada, James Corbett graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Calgary and an M.Phil in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin.
The Corbett Report is a podcast which James Corbett began in 2007 and has seen hundreds of episodes. The Corbett Report has been described as “an independent, listener-supported alternative news source” featuring “podcasts, interviews, articles and videos about breaking news and important issues from 9/11 Truth and false flag terror to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more.” Wikispooks
The Ukraine Crisis: What You Need to Know
The Corbett Report
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
February 27, 2022
https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/the-ukraine-crisis-what-you-need?utm_source=url
Excerpts
You’ve no doubt heard the story of the crisis in Ukraine by now. But, as we’ve been told all our lives, there are two sides to every story. So, which side of the story have you heard?
There’s the MSM/establishment/dinosaur media side of the story. Let’s call it the “Team NATO” narrative. In this version of events, the bloodthirsty insane psychopathic literally Hitler leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, woke up a few weeks ago and suddenly decided to invade the free, peaceful nation of Ukraine for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON WHATSOEVER!
And then there’s the “alternative” media side of the story. Let’s call it the “Team BRICS” narrative. In this version of the story, the valiant defender of human liberty, Vladimir Putin, is fighting to protect the free peoples of the world from the globalists and their sinister machinations.
(BRICS is the acronym coined to associate five major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The BRICS members are known for their significant influence on regional affairs.)
As I say, you’ve doubtless heard one or another of these stories by now. Or, if you’re really paying attention, you might have heard both. But I’m here to tell you today that you’ve been lied to your whole life. There aren’t two sides to every story. There are at least three, maybe more.
Now, you know me. Here at The Corbett Report, I like to go deeper than the simplistic, binary narratives you get in the establishment press or in much of the so-called alternative press. So let’s dive deeper today and look at the third side of the Ukraine crisis story.
2D Chess is for Losers
There’s nothing more satisfying than a good guy/bad guy narrative. We have so internalized this form of storytelling that for many it is almost impossible not to see the world in these terms. Two people are fighting. One of them is a bad guy. Therefore, the other one is a good guy.
The problem comes when we try to map that simplistic, binary, black-and-white storyline on to real-world events. What “guy” are you talking about? Do you still believe that Putin is Russia? That’s as absurd as saying that Biden is NATO (or even the US). And can we jump from NATO bad to BRICS good that easily?
Well, if you’ve been listening to me over the last decade and a half you will know that it’s not that easy. The BRICS are controlled opposition. Putin and Xi are both tyrannical thugs. The Chinese government and the Russian government both love controlling their citizens every thought and speech and action, and their supposed opposition to the globalist empire is a smoke-and-mirrors distraction hiding the fact that they are absolutely on-board with the ultimate agenda of world control.
Or are you the type of person who watches the clip of Schwab bragging about all the cabinets the World Economic Forum has “penetrated” around the world without noticing that the second person he lists in his stable of WEF acolytes is Vladimir Putin?
Are you the type of person who conveniently forgets how to read when Xi and Putin release documents extolling the creation of the New World Order that call on all states “to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture” and declare that “In order to to accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” states will have to “take practical steps in key areas of cooperation” like “vaccines and epidemics control, financing for development, climate change, sustainable development, including green development, industrialization, digital economy, and infrastructure connectivity”?
Are you the type of person who constantly forgets that Vladimir Putin is close personal friends with Henry Kissinger?
Are you the type of person who believes that the Russian COVID vaccine is the good kind of vaccine and the Russian vaccine passports are the good kind of vaccine passports and the Russian COVID clown show is the good kind of COVID clown show?
Are you the type of person who believes that preemptive invasions of foreign countries are good when they’re done by the good guys for good reasons and that the people who die in such operations are just collateral damage (who probably deserved to die anyway)?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not that type of person. The sad truth for those who are still waiting for the White Hat on the White Horse to deliver them their fix of Hopium is that Putin is an “anti-globalist crusader” in the exact same way as Donald “Fill the Swamp” Trump is an “anti-globalist crusader,” which is to say, not at all. Because if you are still waiting on the sealed indictments and the watermarked ballots and Vladimir the Great to upset the globalist apple cart, you have yet to understand the nature of the globalist system.
Conclusion
The uncomfortable truth, as always, is that the war has not just begun. It’s been going on for generations. And it’s not a war of nation against nation, or even valiant “anti-globalist crusaders” like WEF-connected, biosecurity-promoting, false flag-perpetrating, political opponent-assassinating Vladimir Putin against the global control structure. It is a global war against you. To the extent that wars are being waged between the elitists they are only being waged to determine which group of elitists get to rule over you and in what way.
Now more than ever it is important for those of us who have escaped the mainstream narrative “Team NATO” trap to reject the “alternative” narrative “Team BRICS” trap and redeclare our personal sovereignty. A choice between the two wings of the same bird of prey is no choice at all. Or, to put it in a more familiar way: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
So, let’s keep the real background of these events in mind as we watch this military spectacle play out on our computer screens and let’s avoid getting caught up in cheerleading for the army of one branch or another of the global elitist class.
Having said all of that, let’s bring some levity to the end of this very serious discussion. I present to you the following Moment of Zen from everyone’s favorite American establishment ghoul, John “Skull & Bones” Kerry:
That’s right, the climate billionaires are upset that the military-industrial billionaires are hogging the propaganda spotlight that should be shining on their pet “existential threat.” Clearly the Ukrainians should be more worried about the centimetres of global sea level rise, which the Nostradamuses at the UN warn will be inundating us a century from now if we don’t appease the weather gods.
You can’t make this stuff up. Who would even try?
If you think that the Ukraine army is just defending Ukrainians you better watch this video.
Ukraine – Ukraine Is Bombing Its Own People – Western Journalists – Ukraina – Ukrainci Bombarduji Sve spoluobcany – Nechteji o tom moc mluvit – Zapadni reporterka – spot
Here’s a whole lot of truth delivered by the master of sarcasm, J.P.Sears.
Ukraine and Russia: What the Media Wants You To Think!
377,720 views Mar 2, 2022
A Double Dose of the Bitter Truth
The people of Ukraine have been given weapons and moral support from many countries in the world and this encourages them to fight on. Men from other nations are joining in this war. But Ukraine can’t win this war against Russia. Russia dominates the air space. Even if a large number of Russian soldiers are killed, surrender or desert Putin can order the bombing of Kiev and flatten it in a few hours. Zelenskyy should have surrendered as soon as the Russians crossed the border. But that’s not in the script he was given.
The second bitter truth is that there are very few good guys in the upper eschelons of power in politics, media, business or finance. They have all been trained at the London School of Economics, the World Economic Forum or the dark lodges of Freemasonry to be obedient sociopaths. There are no nations defending democracy. Even Trump and Bolsonaro are part of the controlled opposition. 194 nations signed UN Agenda 21 which stipulates that every nation will reduce their population by 95%. What’s not stated in Agenda 21 is that they will use famine, war and vaccines that cause still births, sterilization and death from blood clots, cancer or autoimmune deficiency.
To win a war you first know your enemy and its tactics, strengthens and weakness. Your enemy is the government of your country. Its tactics are censorship, crisis creation, divide and rule, deception to create fear and a pretense of acting for the good of the people. Its strength is its partners in business, mass media, social media and finance and great wealth. Its weakness is that it needs the cooperation of most of the people to succeed in killing off 95% of the population. To win this war we must engage in non-compliance and civil disobediance.
Here’s summary of Agenda 21.
WHAT IS AGENDA 21? DEPOPULATION OF 95% OF THE WORLD BY 2030
https://globalpossibilities.org/what-is-agenda-21-
Most people are unaware that one of the greatest threats to their freedom may be a United Nations program which plans to depopulate 95% of the world.
The name of this plan is Agenda 21, and it was developed by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development, as part of a sustainability policy.
According to the United Nations website, Agenda 21 is a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, government, and major groups, in every area in which humans have impact on the environment”.
In a nutshell, the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of private property owners.
It is assumed that people are not good stewards of their land and the government will do a better job if they are in control.
Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by the governing body.
Moreover, people should be rounded up off the land and packed into human settlements, or islands of human habitation, close to employment centers and transportation. Another program, called the Wildlands Project spells out how most of the land is to be set aside for non-humans.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò agrees that the war in Ukraine will serve to advance the agenda of the globalists. (This rather long article is worth reading. Here is a short excerpt.)
Abp. Viganò: Globalists have fomented war in Ukraine to establish the tyranny of the New World Order
Final Considerations
There is great concern that the destinies of the peoples of the world is in the hands of an elite that is not accountable to anyone for its decisions, that does not recognize any authority above itself, and that in order to pursue its own interests does not hesitate to jeopardize security, the economy, and the very lives of billions of people, with the complicity of politicians in their service and the mainstream media. The falsification of facts, the grotesque adulterations of reality, and the partisanship with which the news is spread stand alongside the censorship of dissenting voices and leads to forms of ethnic persecution against Russian citizens, who are discriminated against precisely in the countries that say they are democratic and respectful of fundamental rights.
I earnestly hope that my appeal for the establishment of an Anti-Globalist Alliance that unites the peoples of the world in opposition against the tyranny of the New World Order will be accepted by those who have at heart the common good, peace between nations, concord among all peoples, freedom for all citizens and the future of the new generations. And even before that, may my words – along with those of many intellectually honest people – contribute to bringing to light the complicity and corruption of those who use lies and fraud to justify their crimes, even in these moments of great apprehension about the war in Ukraine.
May the strong listen to us, so as not to become weak in injustice. May the powerful listen to us, if they want their power not to be destruction but support for the peoples and protection for tranquility in order and work (Pius XII, Radio message to Heads of State and Peoples of the World in Imminent Danger of War, August 24, 1939).
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop,
Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America
March 6, 2022
Alex Newman on point in his accessment of the war in Ukraine.
What’s Really Up With Ukraine? Deep State Seeking New World Order Mar 7, 2022
The New American Video 36.3K subscribers
You can find this video at 🇺🇸 The New American: http://www.thenewamerican.com/
The Ukraine-Russia conflict is being engineered and weaponized to radically advance the globalist agenda for a New World Order, The New American magazine’s Alex Newman explains in this episode of Behind The Deep State. First, Alex points out that we are witnessing the long-planned shift from a “unipolar” world order with the United States as the sole superpower to a “multipolar” world order where the U.S. government is one among many, including Russia and China. Then, Alex highlights how globalists have known that war is critical to advancing their agenda, and have made this known in official documents. Finally, Alex shows how Putin, a good friend of Henry Kissinger and “Young Global Leader” with the World Economic Forum, is and has been serving the agenda of regionalizing and then globalizing governance.
🇺🇸 The New American: http://www.thenewamerican.com/
The Russian people don’t want this war. Most of the people in the world don’t want this war. Let’s put Putin, Zelenskyy, Biden, Trudeau, Johnson and all the war mongers in a huge jail and let them fight it out among themselves.
Simple Song of Freedom – Don Graham
2,452 views Apr 20, 2017 Sandy Graham22
Update May 23, 2022
Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government Caitlin JohnstoneMay 21(This article contains reports about child rape which might be intense for some people.)Listen to a reading of this article:❖The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what’s happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie. “A one-year-old boy died after being raped by two Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday,” reads a report by Business Insider which was subsequently picked up by Yahoo News. “The accusation is one of the most horrific from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but is not unique.” At the end of the fourth paragraph we get to the disclaimer that every critical thinker should look for when reading such stories in the mainstream press:“Insider could find no independent evidence for the claim.” A growing number of accusations that Russian soldiers are raping the youngest and most vulnerable war victims is the latest disturbing twist in a modern war defined by archaic brutalityhttps://t.co/fFFkGLmg7M— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) May 20, 2022 In its trademark style, The Daily Beast ran the same story in a much more flamboyant and click-friendly fashion.”The dead boy is among dozens of alleged child rape victims which include two 10-year-old boys, triplets aged 9, a 2-year-old girl raped by two Russian soldiers, and a 9-month-old baby who was penetrated with a candlestick in front of its mother, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights,” The Daily Beast writes.The one and only source for this latest spate of “the Russians are raping babies to death” stories is a statement on a Ukrainian government website by Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. The brief statement contains no evidence of any kind, and its English translation concludes as follows:I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during the Russian military invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of genocide of the Ukrainian people. I call on our partners around the world to increase sanctions pressure on russia, to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons, to join the investigation of rashist crimes in our country! The enemy must be stopped and all those involved in the atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to justice! This is what passes for journalism in the western world today. Reporting completely unfounded allegations against US enemies based solely on assertions by a government official demanding more weapons and sanctions against those enemies and making claims that sound like they came from an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia bit. The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything about Russia, without any evidence at all, and the western mainstream press will report it as an actual news story. pic.twitter.com/BYESIPwe1x— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 21, 2022 We cannot say definitively that these rapes never happened. We also cannot say definitively that the Australian government isn’t warehousing extraterrestrial aircraft in an underground bunker in Canberra, but we don’t treat that like it’s an established fact and publish mainstream news reports about it just because we can’t prove it’s false. That’s not how the burden of proof works.Obviously the rape of children is a very real and very serious matter, and obviously rape is one of the many horrors which can be inflicted upon people in the lawless environment of war. But to turn strategically convenient government assertions about such matters into a news story based on no evidence whatsoever is not just journalistic malpractice but actual atrocity propaganda.As we discussed previously, the US and its proxies have an established history of using atrocity propaganda, as in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the infamous 1990 Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War.Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English childrenand throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.Atrocity propaganda frequently involves children, because children cannot be construed as combatants or non-innocents, and generally involves the most horrific allegations the propagandists can possibly get away with at that point in history. It creates a useful appeal to emotion which bypasses people’s logical faculties and gets them accepting the propaganda based not on facts and evidence but on how it makes them feel. Before writing this, the members of the @nytimesEditorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what’s happening in Ukraine: https://t.co/upsYpUmuyIhttps://t.co/UeCbCDTLfr— Andrea Chalupa (@AndreaChalupa) May 20, 2022 And the atrocity propaganda is functioning exactly as it’s meant to. Do a search on social media for this bogus story that’s been forcibly injected into public discourse and you’ll find countless individuals expressing their outrage at the evil baby-raping Russians. Democratic Party operative Andrea Chalupa, known for her controversial collusion with the Ukrainian government to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, can be seen citing the aforementioned Daily Beast article on Twitter to angrily admonish the New York Times editorial board for expressing a rare word of caution about US involvement in the war. “Before writing this, the members of the New York Times Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what’s happening in Ukraine,” Chalupa tweeted. See that? How a completely unevidenced government assertion was turned into an official-looking news story, and how that official-looking news story was then cited as though it’s an objective fact that Russian soldiers are running around raping babies to death in Ukraine? And how it’s done to help manufacture consent for a geostrategically crucial proxy war, and to bludgeon those who express any amount of caution about these world-threatening escalations?That’s atrocity propaganda doing exactly what it is meant to do.Now on top of all the other reasons we’re being given why the US and its allies need to send Ukraine more and more war machinery of higher and higher destructive capability, they also need to do so because the Russians are just raping babies to death willy nilly over there. Which just so happens to work out nicely for the US-centralized empire’s goals of unipolar domination, for the Ukrainian regime, and for the military-industrial complex. “Newsweek has not independently verified the claim.” https://t.co/LdnZ8rLdRz— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) May 21, 2022And that wasn’t even the extent of obscene mass media atrocity propaganda conducted on behalf of Ukrainian officials for the day. Newsweek has a new article out titled “Russians Targeting Kids’ Beds, Rooms With Explosives: Ukrainian Bomb Team,” which informs us that “The leader of a Ukrainian bomb squad has said that Russian forces are targeting children by placing explosive devices inside their rooms and under their beds.”Then at the end of the second paragraph we again find that magical phrase:“Newsweek has not independently verified the claim. “The Newsweek report is based on part of an embarrassing ABC News Australia puff piece about a Ukrainian team which is allegedly responsible for removing landmines in areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces. The puff piece refers to the team as a “unit of brave de-miners” while calling Russian forces “barbaric”.ABC uncritically reports all the nefarious ways the evil Russians have been planting explosives with the goal of killing Ukrainian civilians, including setting mines in children’s beds and teddy bears and placing them under fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Way down toward the bottom of the article we see the magical phrase again:“The ABC has not been able to independently verify these reports, but they back up allegations made by Ukraine’s President.”Ahh, so what you’re being told by Ukrainian forces “backs up” what you’ve been told by the president of Ukraine. Doesn’t get any more rock solid than that, does it? Great journalism there, fellas.The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie? Why not tell whatever lie you need to tell in order to advance your own interests and agendas? It would be pretty silly of them not to take advantage of the opening they’re being given.The CIA Post is going full Babies on Bayonets already. Putin is going to round up and torture all the gays! https://t.co/OJspZdz37P pic.twitter.com/qPyhpHD1gp— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) February 21, 2022 The mass media have been cranking out atrocity propaganda about what’s happening in Ukraine since before the invasion even started, like when they reported in February that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing when it invades. Funny how we just completely stopped hearing about that one.And this is all happening at the same time the western political/media class continues to shriek about the dangers of “disinformation” and the urgent need to strictly regulate its circulation on the internet, even after US officials came right out and admitted that they’ve been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. I guarantee you none of these completely evidence-free claims will be subject to censorship by the “fact checkers” of social media platforms.The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. We are being deceived and confused into consenting to agendas that could very easily lead to nuclear armageddon, and if we ever raise our voices in objection to this we are branded Putin propagandists and disinformation agents.It’s getting very, very bad. Turn around, people. Wrong way.______________ |
Update Feb 7, 2023
The West Blocks Efforts to End the War in Ukraine
| Caitlin JohnstoneMore Evidence That The West Sabotaged Peace In UkraineCaitlin JohnstoneFeb 6Listen to a reading of this article:❖Days after the war in Ukraine began it was reported by The New York Times that “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia.” In a recent interview, Bennett made some very interesting comments about what happened during those negotiations in the early days of the war.In a new article titled “Former Israeli PM Bennett Says US ‘Blocked’ His Attempts at a Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort….But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”Former Israeli PM Bennett Says US ‘Blocked’ His Attempts at a Russia-Ukraine Peace Deal Bennett says the US and its Western allies decided to ‘keep striking Putin’ and not negotiate by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Russia #Ukraine #diplomacy #Israel #Bennetthttps://t.co/GBBkzbvwxG pic.twitter.com/CQK0BYGxcj— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 5, 2023Bennett says the concessions each side was prepared to make included the renunciation of future NATO membership for Ukraine, and on Russia’s end dropping the goals of “denazification” and Ukrainian disarmament. As DeCamp notes, this matches up with an Axios report from early March that “According to Israeli officials, Putin’s proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”Bennett is about as unsavory a character as exists in the world today, but Israel’s complicated relationship with this war lends itself to the occasional release of information not fully in alignment with the official imperial line. And his comments here only add to a pile of information that’s been coming out for months which says the same thing, not just regarding the sabotage of peace talks in March but in April as well.In May of last year Ukrainian media reported that then-British prime minister Boris Johnson had flown to Kyiv the previous month to pass on the message on behalf of the western empire that “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”In April of last year, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that “there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker.” Shortly thereafter, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the goal in Ukraine is “to see Russia weakened.”מאז שסיימתי את תפקידי כראש ממשלה לא התראיינתי. עכשיו זה קורה. אבל בתקופה סוערת ובעידן של סרטונים קצרצרים ופאנלים צעקניים, נעניתי לבקשה של חנוך דאום לקיים שיחה קצת אחרת. שיחה מקיפה וכנה של כמעט חמש שעות, על הכל. מוזמנים לצפות >> https://t.co/JTkpi3EBjh— Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) February 4, 2023A September Foreign Affairs report by Fiona Hill asserts that in April of last year a peace deal had been in the works between Moscow and Kyiv, which would presumably have been the agreement that Johnson et al were able to sabotage:According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.In March of last year Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson reported that sources in the US and UK governments had told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow. Ferguson wrote that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.” I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.All this taken together heavily substantiates the claim made by Vladimir Putin this past September that Russia and Ukraine had been on the cusp of peace shortly after the start of the war, but western powers ordered Kyiv to “wreck” the negotitations.”After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals,” Putin said. “These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.”In his Sept. 21 speech, Putin said that Ukraine and Russia were close to a “peace settlement,” but that Kiev’s NATO backers intervened to “undermine” it. Amid bellicose nuclear threats, this widely overlooked claim could offer a new off-ramp to peace. https://t.co/kEjUX6Ihh4 pic.twitter.com/qEttgevUk1— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 25, 2022Month after month it’s been reported that US diplomats have been steadfastly refusing to engage in diplomacy with Russia to help bring an end to this war, an inexcusable rejection that would only make sense if the US wants this war to continue. And comments from US officials continually make it clear that this is the case.In March of last year President Biden himself acknowledged what the real game is here with an open call for regime change, saying of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Statements from the Biden administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire.US officials are becoming more and more open about the fact that they see this war as something that serves their strategic objectives, which would of course contradict the official narrative that the western empire did not want this war and the infantile fictionthat Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked”. Recent examples of this would include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s speech ahead of Zelensky’s visit to Washington in December.”President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”In May of last year Congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Twitter that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”Indeed, a report by the empire-funded Center for European Policy Analysis titled “It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia” asserts that the “US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment.”Continuing our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it is not only that. It is also a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests. pic.twitter.com/zlWoAVz3Kk— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) December 24, 2022In May of last year US Senator Joe Manchin said at the World Economic Forum that he opposes any kind of peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, preferring instead to use the conflict to hurt Russian interests and hopefully remove Putin.”I am totally committed, as one person, to seeing Ukraine to the end with a win, not basically with some kind of a treaty; I don’t think that is where we are and where we should be,” Manchin said.”I mean basically moving Putin back to Russia and hopefully getting rid of Putin,” Manchin added when asked what he meant by a win for Ukraine.”I believe strongly that I have never seen, and the people I talk strategically have never seen, an opportunity more than this, to do what needs to be done,” Manchin later added.Then you’ve got US officials telling the press that they plan to use this war to hurt Russia’s fossil fuel interests, “with the long-term goal of destroying the country’s central role in the global energy economy” according to The New York Times. You’ve also got the fact that the US State Department can’t stop talking about how great it is that Russia’s Nord Stream Pipelines were sabotaged in September of last year, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the Nord Stream bombing “offers tremendous strategic opportunity” and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland saying the Biden administration is “very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”The US empire is getting everything it wants out of this proxy war. That’s why it knowingly provoked this war, that’s why it repeatedly sabotaged the outbreak of peace after the war broke out, and that’s why this proxy war has no exit strategy. The empire is getting everything it wants from this war, so why wouldn’t it do everything in its power to obstruct peace? I mean, besides the obvious unforgivable depravity of it all, of course. The empire has always been fine with cracking a few hundred thousand human eggs in order to cook the imperial omelette. It is unfathomably, unforgivably evil, though, and it should outrage everyone. |
Update July 24, 2023.
James Corbett points out that the Ukrainians are just the lastest pawn in the game for global supremacy. Other pawns that have been used and then betrayed are the Afghans, the Balcochis, the Kurds, and the Libyans.
Your Guide to the Grand Chessboard’s Pawns
| THE CORBETT REPORTJUL 17 |
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
July 16, 2023
The observation that the great geopolitical struggle between nations is akin to a grand game of chess is hardly a novel one.
After all, Khosrau II, the ancient Sasanian king, saw the connection over 1400 years ago: “If a ruler does not understand chess, how can he rule over a kingdom?”
Or take Leo Tolstoy’s conclusion, “War is like a game of chess.”
And who in The Corbett Report audience could forget Zbigniew Brzezinski’s infamous 1998 tome, The Grand Chessboard, in which he identified the Eurasian landmass as “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played”?
That geopolitical strife has been so often analogized to a game of chess should hardly be surprising. After all, chess itself derives from an Indian strategy board game, chaturanga, whose pieces were modeled on the ranks of the ancient Indian army. In fact, the first modern war game was a type of chess game played on a purpose-built board made of 1,666 squares.
Given this age-old metaphor, who could doubt that the powers-that-shouldn’t-be really do imagine themselves as grandmasters, moving people around like chess pieces in order to conquer this or that square on the grand chessboard? And, keeping to the logic of this twisted metaphor, it follows that if geopolitics really is a game of chess, then the people at the bottom of the power pyramid are merely pieces on that board, pawns to be sacrificed as part of a gambit in a larger battle for control of the global chessboard.
Today I will tell the story of these pawns on the chessboard and how they have been used, abused and discarded by the would-be rulers of the world.
Afghans
There is perhaps no better exemplar of the chess/politics analogy than the country of Afghanistan. Conveniently situated on the main land route between Iran, Central Asia and India, Afghanistan has long been recognized as a key square on the geopolitical chessboard. For millennia, the Afghans have found themselves in the crosshairs of empires, from the Macedonians to the Mongols, the Seleucids to the Sikhs, and many others besides.
In the 19th century, British strategists came to covet this particular square of the chessboard, recognizing its utility as a buffer between the Russian Empire and the crown jewel of the British Empire: India. Britain’s interest in Afghanistan led to a century-long covert proxy war in the country that pitted the Brits against the Russians in a struggle for control of that buffer nation. Known as The Great Game, this struggle resulted in not one, not two, but three wars between the British Empire and the Emirate of Afghanistan. (Spoiler: it didn’t end well for the British.)
In the late 20th century, Afghanistan once again became a key battleground. This time the fighting erupted when its Soviet-backed government tried to implement a series of land and social reforms in line with their Marxist-Leninist principles, provoking a reaction from the country’s conservative elements and Islamic hardliners. The US government under Jimmy Carter, hoping to draw the Soviets into a protracted guerrilla conflict like the one the Americans had faced in Vietnam, swooped in to begin covertly assisting and funding the mujahideen.
As we all know by now, that tactic was remarkably effective. The Soviet-Afghan War raged for a decade, and, by the time the dust settled, the mighty Red Army was forced to withdraw in humiliation.
The grandmasters in Washington did not get to celebrate their victory for long, however. The very same Taliban freedom fighters who had been lauded by Ronald Reagan and encouraged by Zbigniew Brzezinski—and (oh, by the way) had been covertly funded by the CIA—were now vile terrorists, unfit to occupy the square of the chessboard they had helped conquer. And so began another decade-long struggle between the by-now-demonized Taliban and the US-sponsored Northern Alliance.
With the rise of Osama bin Laden and the events of 9/11, Uncle Sam finally had the perfect excuse to move his own forces into the region and take the Afghan square on the chessboard by military force. . . . And we all saw how well that turned out.
These events have been written about and examined by many commentators and historians, but what many of these histories fail to take into account are the real pawns in this game: the Afghans themselves.
One of the most telling moments of the whole invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was when a poll of Afghans revealed that 92% of the nation’s young men had never even heard of 9/11 and that they had no idea of NATO’s professed reason for bombing and occupying their country. As it turns out, the Afghan people were forced to pay with their lives in a game they didn’t even know they were playing.
Balochis
Another good example of the grand chessboard metaphor in action can be found in Balochistan (or Baluchistan, depending on which Anglicization you’re relying on).
A rugged, arid, sparsely populated region straddling Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Balochistan might seem at first glance like the last place on earth to attract the attention of the would-be world conquerors. And yet it has become a geopolitical hot spot in the past decade.
To understand why this is so, we have to examine this region’s placement on the grand chessboard. You see, Balochistan is home to Gwadar, a port city in southwest Pakistan that provides access to the Arabian Sea. As the China Pakistan Investment Corporation explains on its website:
It [Gwadar] is close to key oil shipping lanes such as the Strait of Hormuz and is the closest warm water seaport to the landlocked Central Asian Republics. As a port and growing city on the Arabian Sea, Gwadar is therefore of interest to many countries in the vicinity, but it is the involvement of China that has really driven investors into this area of Pakistan.
Indeed, interest in Gwadar (and, by extension, the rest of Balochistan) exploded in 2013, when the China Overseas Ports Holding Company—a highly mysterious state-owned investment company based in Hong Kong—acquired Gwadar port from the Pakistani government. The otherwise unassuming port city is being primed to play a key role in Beijing’s wildly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, affording China’s landlocked western provinces a trade route to Central Asia, Africa and the oil-rich Middle East.
However, at the exact same time that China began courting Pakistan for access to Balochistan, Uncle Sam just happened to spontaneously develop an interest in the poor, put-upon Baloch people. You see, Balochistan may be sparsely populated, but it is populated. It is the traditional homeland of the Baloch, a Western Iranic ethnic group with a nascent nationalist movement that is struggling for independence from the Pakistani and Iranian governments.
These insurgents are either terrorists or freedom fighters, depending on whom you ask, but if you ask an American government official these days, they’ll no doubt call them brave freedom fighters. Take, as a representative example, Dana Rohrbacher, the US congressman who introduced a resolution in the House in 2012 declaring “the sense of Congress that the people of Baluchistan, currently divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country.”
In April of 2012, Rohrbacher took to the pages of The Washington Post to explain “Why I support Balochistan.” He expressed his heartfelt concern over the “horrific violations of human rights by Pakistan security forces in Baluchistan” and—oh yeah, by the way—his worry that this geostrategic chess square will fall into the wrong (read: ChiCom) hands:
Baluchistan is Pakistan’s largest province in area and lies in the south, near Iran and Afghanistan. It is replete with natural resources and treated like a colonial possession. Its natural gas, gold, uranium and copper are exploited for the benefit of the ruling elite in Islamabad; meanwhile, the Baluch people remain desperately poor. The province includes the port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea, which China has been developing and may turn into a naval base. The Baluch have been dispossessed of land and fishing as a result, while construction jobs and land grants have gone to Pakistanis from other provinces.
Who knew that US Congress critters were kept awake at night fretting over the plight of poor Balochi fishermen?
As it turns out, US support for the Balcoch people is not confined to helping fishermen ply their trade. It also involves support for Jundallah—a Sunni terror group that has killed hundreds of Iranian citizens in a series of suicide bombings, ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations—and a CIA program involving “heavy recruitment of local people as agents (each being paid $500 a month) in Balochistan.”
Of course, Balochi Fever seems to have died down on Capitol Hill in recent years as the nexus of China-US conflict has shifted away from Gwadar. It’s no surprise, then, that the poor Baloch fishermen have been left high and dry by their erstwhile allies in Washington. They were, as it turns out, mere pawns to be used in the grand geopolitical chess game.
Still, being discarded by the US after enjoying a short time in the geopolitical spotlight isn’t the worst thing that could happen. Just ask the Kurds.
Kurds
There’s an interesting feature in the game of geopolitical chess. Sometimes the pawns on the board are available for either the white team or the black team to use. If they can be convinced that it’s in their interests, the pawns will paint themselves with one or the other team’s colours and attempt to capture a square on the grand chessboard for their new king. And then (if history is anything to go by) they will either be abandoned or betrayed or completely destroyed by their newly adopted team.
There is no better example of this phenomenon than the Kurds.
The Kurds, for those who don’t know, are a distinct Iranian ethnic group with their own language and culture. They inhabit the geographical region of Kurdistan, a mountainous area straddling southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and northern Syria. Unfortunately for the Kurds, Kurdistan is not its own country. This means the Kurdish people have been—barring some aborted attempts at Kurdish kingdoms, Republics and Soviet administrative units in the chaotic post-WWI period—without a state of their own for centuries.
Long desirous of autonomy, the Kurds have seldom had comfortable relations with the various governments ruling over their diaspora. The Turks, for example, refused to even acknowledge their existence, referring to them as “mountain Turks” until 1991.
In Iraq, meanwhile, the fight for Kurdish self-rule began escalating in the 1960s and continued escalating—with only brief periods of respite—through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. This round of struggle culminated in a genocidal anti-Kurdish campaign by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government employing ground offensives, aerial bombing, systematic destruction of settlements, mass deportation, firing squads, and chemical attacks (with chemical weapons provided by the US and Britain and Germany and France, of course). The campaign resulted in the death of 182,000 Kurds. It included the infamous chemical attack on Halabja on March 16, 1988, that killed 5,000 and injured 10,000 more.
Given this history, it is no surprise that the Kurds heeded then-President George H. W. Bush’s infamous call in the final days of the Gulf War for “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Taking his pronouncement as an implicit guarantee that the US military—already routing Saddam’s forces in the Gulf War that did not take place—would back them up, the Kurds painted themselves in the American team colours and marched as dutiful pawns onto the chessboard . . . only to be brutally slaughtered by Iraqi helicopters, long-range artillery, and armored ground forces. The Bush Administration watched the slaughter take place, refusing to aid the very insurgency they themselves had encouraged.
This would not be the first nor the last time that the Kurds would be so cynically used, abused, led on, betrayed and abandoned by Uncle Sam. In fact, in a 2019 article on the subject researcher Jon Schwarz identified eight separate times that the US had betrayed the Kurds, including a secret 1970s agreement between Henry Kissinger and the Shah of Iran to arm the Iraqi Kurds just enough for them to help bleed Saddam’s government but notenough for them to actually win independence.
Another incident in this ignominious history of treachery involved the neocons cynically using the Kurds as a convenient excuse for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Of all the traitorous acts in US/Kurdish history, this one was particularly galling. Arch-neocon Bill Kristol (aided by unlikely bedfellow Christopher Hitchens) took to C-SPAN in 2003 to assure the viewers that the US would not betray the Kurds this time (“We will not. We will not!”), only to publish an article in his Weekly Standard propaganda rag four years later explaining why it was absolutely necessary to betray the Kurds.
There is much more to the story, but you get the idea by now. The Kurds serve as perhaps the best single example of why no one should trust any king promising to support the pawns in their quest to capture a key square on the grand chessboard. It is a lie. The king will turn around and sacrifice his loyal pawns at his earliest opportunity.
Libyans
Remember when neoliberal warmongers like Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice and Samantha Power began ringing the alarm bell about the “massacre” that Muammar Gaddafi and his Viagra-fueled rape troops were about to commit against the poor Libyan people? And remember when Obama and Sarkozy and Cameron heeded that call, bravely sending in the NATO love bombers to blow the country to smithereens? And remember when Clinton, cackling at the news that Gaddafi had been found cowering in a drain pipe before being sodomized with a knife and brutally murdered, proudly proclaimed: “We came, we saw, he died!”?
Of course you do.
Now, do you remember after the obliteration of the country, when those same warmongers abruptly changed course from bloodletting to nation-building? When they flooded Libya with aid and support, helping the new government to rebuild the nation’s shattered infrastructure? When they demonstrated through their compassion that the entire intervention had indeed been waged out of love for the Libyan people?
Of course you don’t, because that never happened.
Instead, they stood by as Libya descended into utter chaos. They watched as four million Libyans struggled to find potable water after the NATO war criminals deliberately destroyed the nation’s water supply. They ignored the political chaos as the country descended into a bloody and protracted civil war. They shrugged in apathy as literal slave markets began operating in the streets of Tripoli.
Actually, it’s worse than that. They probably didn’t even bother to watch. After all, by the time they had achieved their objective in Libya and Gaddafi had been killed, the warmongers’ attention had already turned to the next square of the chessboard to be conquered: Syria. And—wouldn’t you know—they found that were more poor, put-upon citizens to “save” with love bombs over there, too.
Of course, before the bombs even started falling the truth had been obvious to anyone even passingly familiar with the history of the geopolitical chess game. The Libyans were yet more pawns on the board, expendable pieces to be sacrificed in the service of the hawks’ geostrategic goals. The neoliberal R2P warmongers never gave a damn about the Libyan people, and, once the NATO king had secured that square of the board, the Libyan pawns were duly discarded like yesterday’s newspaper.
I wonder when some intrepid journalist will ask Hillary or Susan or Samantha how much they care about the Libyan people now?
Ukrainians (and Russians)
Picture a Ukrainian nationalist watching his blue-and-yellow flag being waved all around the world (even here in Japan, as I can personally attest) or seeing his capital city Kiev’s cause being championed in the dinosaur media or hearing politicians around the globe talking about the bravery of the Ukrainian people. It’s easy to imagine that Ukrainian taking heart and thinking, “Finally! People the world over are recognizing the value of our glorious nation!”
. . . Of course, only an ignoramus who has spent the last several decades studiously avoiding the lessons of the Afghans and the Balochis and the Kurds and the Libyans (and countless others) could possibly fall for such a ruse. Newsflash for any Ukrainians in the crowd: the West doesn’t care about you. They just want you to lay down your life for their grand chess game like a good little pawn.
Lest there be any doubt about this, just listen to the hawks themselves. Lindsay Graham, for instance, openly admits that he’s excited to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian:
I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.
Yeah, let’s you guys and you other guys fight!
And who can forget when Britain stepped in to scuttle a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine that had been inked way back in April 2022? The deal was done and ready to be signed . . . but in swooped Boris Johnson with his marching orders from his paymasters. And now, tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians (and who knows how many Russians) later, here we are, still mired in a brutal and bloody conflict that shows no sign of abating.
Granted, Zelensky is not the brightest bulb in the box, but perhaps it is beginning to dawn on the failed-comedian-turned-cosplaying-president (or, more importantly, on the Ukrainian people themselves) that Ukraine is not being set up to win a war with Russia, but merely to fight it. Maybe they are finally beginning to realize that the never-ending will they/won’t they NATO membership shenanigans is merely a ploy to threaten Russia with the prospect of the West taking the Ukrainian square on the grand chessboard. The Ukrainians might even be on the verge of understanding that they are only useful to their NATO paymasters as long as they’re willing to shed blood for the NATO cause.
But it’s not just the Ukrainians who may be starting to comprehend the true nature of their role in this chess game. The Russian people, too, could be becoming aware that they are simply pawns being exploited in the grand battle for supremacy between the “Great Powers.”
Once again, the grandmasters aren’t hiding their intention to use people as mere pawns in their struggle. CIA director William J. Burns confirmed earlier this month that the Western powers are hoping to employ the Russian people to attack NATO’s opponent in the Kremlin.
Disaffection with the [Ukraine] war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA—at our core a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste.
Meanwhile, Russian patriots are loudly ringing the alarm bell about their own mis-leaders in the Kremlin. From the biometric control grid to the digital currency nightmare to the COVID insanity, the Russian government has been pushing all the same measures of totalitarian control on its population as the Ukrainian government is pushing on its own, and now the Kremlin is asking Sergei Sixpack and Sacha Soccermom to sacrifice their sons to the Ukrainian meatgrinder and throwing people in prison for calling the conflict a “war” instead of a “military operation.”
Yes, the Ukrainians and the Russians are waking up to the reality of grand chess geopolitics. But here’s the million-ruble question: is the people’s growing awareness of this game enough to convince them to stop taking on the role of dutiful pawns on the grand chessboard?
The Game Isn’t Over . . .
Are you starting to get the picture? We the people don’t matter at all to these cold-blooded psychopaths. The only thing that matters is their geopolitical power plays and their (chess) game of thrones. Our only utility is in helping them to win their game. We Afghans, Libyans, Balochis, Ukrainians, Russians, Westerners, and Canadians living in Japan are little more than expendable pawns to be moved about and tossed aside by the would-be grandmasters of the global chessboard.
There are many, many more examples of this “pawns on the chessboard phenomenon,” of course, from the Uyghurs to the Kosovars to the Kuomintang. (Feel free to add to the list in the comments below!) But it’s important to understand that, in each case, the would-be world rulers latch onto a people’s liberation movement (or an outright terrorist movement), fund, equip, train and promote that group’s supporters and then unleash them on the grandmasters’ enemies, all in service of grander geopolitical aims—aims of which these sacrificial pawns are but dimly aware. As soon as the conflict is finished and the battle for that square of the chessboard is concluded, the pawns are then discarded.
It’s understandable why those who consider themselves to be grandmasters of the global chessboard rely on this same tired tactic over and over throughout history: because it works. It’s extremely unlikely that a ragtag band of “freedom fighters” is going to ask questions when a great power comes along and funds their movement, supplies them with arms and gives them a good chance of achieving their goal. It’s even less likely that the great powers, parasites that they are, will stop using this tactic for taking over key squares on the grand chessboard.
After all, funding an insurgent movement in an enemy country requires relatively little investment and often yields big results. Why wouldn’t the grandmasters use this stratagem as often as possible? Yes, it does tarnish their reputation when they inevitably end up abandoning or betraying the groups they once supported, but that’s never stopped the next group of sacrificial pawns from falling for the same trick, so why bother changing tactics?
But therein lies the rub. Imagine if the people in the various liberation movements and popular struggles around the world stopped believing in the lies of the great powers. Imagine if they actually learned the lesson of history and began to beware Greeks (and others) bearing gifts. Imagine if they refused to play the game of global geopolitics. What would happen then?
In other words: suppose the kings started a chess game but no pawns showed up?
Well, believe it or not, there are signs that this age-old ploy of empires isbeginning to wear thin and that the pawns are beginning to wake up to the game. But is it too little too late?
Next week in this column I will explore this revolt of the pawns and explain what it means for the future of the grand chess game. Stay tuned . . .
What are your thoughts on this topic? I would love to hear from you. You marvelous, independent thinking, system busters who are lovers of truth and freedom. I consider all of you to be members of the planetary liberation community. If you scroll way down past the donation block and the tags you will find an opportunity to leave a comment. I’m very interested in your opinion. And don’t forget to subscribe.
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2 replies on “Is The War in Ukraine A False Flag Event?”
This was a very enlightening article and though a lot of information to digest from what is really going on in this war between Russia and Ukraine, revealing the truth from the start of events to our current times that have taken place over time throughout history.
Thank you for all the info. In writing this article!
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[…] https://planetaryliberation.community/2022/02/28/the-war-in-ukraine-another-false-flag-event/comment… Busted: Ukrainian Fake News Fails, Hilarious and Sad […]
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