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Tag: perpetual war
WORTHY VS. UNWORTHY VICTIMS: STUDY REVEALS MEDIA’S SELECTIVE COVERAGE OF NAVALNY AND LIRA
Anew MintPress News study of media coverage of the deaths of American journalist and commentator Gonzalo Lira and Russian political leader Alexey Navalny has found that the establishment U.S. press overwhelmingly ignored the former and focussed on the latter. The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News and CNN collectively ran 731 segments on Navalny between February 16 and February 22, compared to just one on Lira since his death on January 12, perhaps because one was a Western-backed figure who died at the hands of an official enemy state, while the other was a pro-Russian voice who met their end at the hands of the Ukrainian government.
ROUND-THE-CLOCK COVERAGE VS RADIO SILENCE
MintPress conducted a quantitative analysis of the media coverage of two political figures who recently died in prison: Alexey Navalny and Gonzalo Lira. Both were controversial characters and critics of the governments that imprisoned them. Both died under suspicious circumstances (their families both maintain they were effectively murdered). And both died in the past six weeks, Navalny in February and Lira in January. A crucial difference in their stories, however, is that Navalny perished in an Arctic penal colony after being arrested in Russia (an enemy state), while Lira’s life ended in a Ukrainian prison, abandoned by the pro-Kiev government in Washington, D.C.
The study compared the coverage of Navalny and Lira’s death in five leading outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News, and CNN. These outlets were chosen for their reach and influence and, together, could be said to reasonably represent the corporate media spectrum as a whole. The data was compiled using the Dow Jones Factiva news database and searches on the websites of the news organizations. This study takes no position on the matter of Navalny, Lira, or the Russia-Ukraine war.
Is Nato heading for nuclear war?
On Monday, Europe crossed yet another red line in its ever-escalating, no-longer-so-proxy war against Russia. In a hastily arranged meeting of European leaders in Paris — a response to significant Russian breakthroughs on the Ukrainian frontline over the past few weeks — Emmanuel Macron shattered one of the few taboos left in Western circles by saying that sending Nato troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out. “We must do everything necessary to prevent Russia from winning the war,” he declared, adding that France could even take such action without the consent of other EU members because “each country is sovereign and its armed forces are sovereign”.
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with Nato allies, whom the French president hadn’t even bothered to warn beforehand. This was probably designed to maximise the statement’s impact: Macron is prone to attention-grabbing pronouncements that are never actually acted upon, often as a way of deflecting attention away from domestic problems.
This time, though, Macron overplayed his hand. His statement was so obviously unhinged that it fuelled a sizeable backlash in France, where half of the population opposes providing more aid to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen accused Macron of playing with the lives of French children, while radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it “madness”. Outside of France, meanwhile, practically all Nato members rebutted Macron’s suggestion and ruled out sending ground troops to Ukraine, while Putin himself yesterday warned such a move could spark a major escalation.
But how long will Nato leaders maintain this stance? After all, Macron is right about one thing: Nato countries have crossed virtually all the red lines they had given themselves at the start of the conflict. “Many people who say ‘Never, never’ today were the same people who said ‘Never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles’ two years ago,” he said. In this sense, the whole troops-on-the-ground debate is little more than a distraction from the fact that we are, of course, already engaged in a de facto war against Russia — troops on the ground or not. Besides, it’s an open secret that Western special forces are already present in Ukraine — including British troops.
U.S. Blocks UN Resolution That Blames Israel for Gaza Massacre at Food Convoy
The Biden administration, once again, proved that there is no crime too severe that Israel can commit against Palestinians that would result in public condemnation or a policy change.
Just a day after over 100 Palestinians were killed at a Gaza food convoy — including many with gunshot wounds — the U.S. blocked consideration of a UN Security Council resolution blaming Israel for the deaths, The Jerusalem Post reported.
The report read:
The Associated Press reported that 14 of the 15 members of the Security Council favored approving the resolution, drafted by Algeria, but that the United States, one of five permanent members of the council with veto power, blocked it, seeking more information about the incident. The text of the draft resolution was not available.
The White House’s position is that is waiting for the result of investigations because Israel claimed that many of those killed died in a stampede near the convoy.
United States Intel Warns About Israel Invading Lebanon in Upcoming Months
According to sources from the American intelligence community, Israel is reportedly flirting with the idea of launching a military incursion into southern Lebanon in the spring or at the start of summer should diplomatic efforts to keep Lebanon off the border fail.
“We are operating in the assumption that an Israeli military operation is in the coming months,” an anonymous US official said to CNN on February 29, 2024.
“Not necessarily imminently in the next few weeks but perhaps later this spring. An Israeli military operation is a distinct possibility,” the official stated.
“I think what Israel is doing is they are raising this threat in the hope that there will be a negotiated agreement. Some Israeli officials suggest that it is more of an effort at creating a threat that they can utilize. Others speak of it more as a military necessity that’s going to happen.”
Another American official indicated that there are factions of the Israeli government that are in favor of launching a ground operation in southern Lebanon, but others who are against such a measure. The second official added that any Israeli incursion into Lebanon could lead to an escalation that will get out of control.
Per CNN, there is also a strong chance that the present Israeli aerial bombing campaign against Lebanon could broaden.
This bombing campaign could reach “much further north into populated areas of Lebanon and eventually grow to a ground component as well,” a third source connected to US intelligence informed the outlet.
Israel has recently ramped up its attacks on Lebanon. As a response, Hezbollah militants have expanded their target range and launched rocket attacks deeper into northern Israel.
Authorities in the US and France have been advocating for a de-escalation proposal with respect to Lebanon since the start of February. The main demand of the western proposal is a withdrawal of Hezbollah from the southern border region.
According to a report by The Cradle, the proposal does not feature any Israeli concessions to Lebanon, such as withdrawing forces from areas that have been occupied for decades. Instead, Israel will be pushed to carry out small-scale withdrawals of its reservist forces from the border area.
On top of that, the proposed deal features an ambiguous border demarcation agreement. Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib recently described this proposal as a “partial” solution.
FROM MEMES TO DOXXING: UNMASKING NATO’S INFORMATION WARFARE STRATEGY
In November 2023, NATO’s “Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats” published a disturbing ‘working paper,’ “Humour in online information warfare: Case study on Russia’s war on Ukraine.” It received no mainstream attention. Yet, the contents offer unprecedented insight into the military alliance’s insidious weaponization of social media to distort public perceptions and manufacture consent for war. They also raise grave questions about online “trolling” of dissident voices over the past decade and beyond.
The working paper ostensibly “considers instances of humour put to effective use to counter disinformation and propaganda in online spaces, using Russia’s war on Ukraine.” It concludes, “humour-based responses…in the information space and in the physical domain have been found to deliver multiple clear benefits” for Ukraine and NATO.
Avowedly a “practical review seeking to identify examples of best practice from both government and civil society” for wider future application, the paper recommends Western states, militaries, and security and intelligence services master the art of online ridicule under the aegis of “counter-disinformation.”
It contends, “humour…reaches the parts that other countermeasures – like fact-checking or media user education – cannot.” Mass deployment of memes, moreover, “has the advantage of exploiting social media platform algorithms” and addressing “audiences that are not inclined to consume ‘boring’ products.”
As we shall see, the true value in weaponizing “humour” for NATO is distorting the battlefield reality in Ukraine – and future theaters of Western proxy conflict – for public consumption. Meanwhile, any social media user deviating from NATO-endorsed narratives can be subjected to intensive harassment, discrediting them and their message “among a wide sector of online audiences,” if not scaring them away from digital information spaces entirely. The working paper advocates the creation of an army of “private citizens” for the purpose.
Macron Doubles Down on Remarks About NATO Sending Troops to Ukraine
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday stood behind his comments about NATO not ruling out sending troops to Ukraine despite the uproar it caused and the warning it drew from Russia.
“These are sufficiently serious issues; every one of the words that I say on this issue is weighed, thought through, and measured,” Macron told reporters.
Following a meeting of European leaders on the Ukrainian proxy war on Monday, Macron said, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”
His comments appeared to confirm a warning from Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, an opponent of NATO support for Ukraine, who said earlier that some NATO members were considering sending troops to Ukraine on a “bilateral basis.”
Macron’s comments caused many NATO members to refute the idea that they’re considering sending combat troops to Ukraine, although it’s an open secret that there are a small number of NATO special operations forces already in the country.
One NATO country that backed up Macron is Lithuania, the Baltic nation that borders Kaliningrad and has an active duty military that only consists of only about 15,000 troops.
Scholz’s Slip Of The Tongue Spilled The Beans On Ukraine’s Worst-Kept Secret
The worst-kept secret of this proxy war is that it’s already a hot NATO-Russian war but an undeclared and limited one where both sides still abide by informal “rules of engagement”.
German Chancellor Scholz’s innuendo that France and the UK have clandestinely deployed troops to Ukraine to assist with “target control” against Russian forces prompted a harsh reaction from the British, but his slip of the tongue simply spilled the beans on this proxy war’s worst-kept secret. No honest observer believed the prior denials about Western troops in that country since their Ukrainian counterparts couldn’t realistically be trained to operate such modern-day arms in such a short time.
His inadvertent revelation, which was shared to explain why Germany won’t send long-range Taurus missiles to that country since it doesn’t want to follow the others’ lead by clandestinely deploying troops there, came shortly after French President Macron’s relatedly scandalous claim. He said that NATO countries debated whether to conventionally intervene in Ukraine when many of their leaders met in Paris on Monday though no consensus had been reached on this ultra-sensitive question.
Although practically every one of his peers denied that anything of the sort was discussed, the Financial Times then quoted an unnamed senior European defense official who bluntly confirmed that “Everyone knows there are western special forces in Ukraine — they’ve just not acknowledged it officially.” Such claims were hitherto dismissed as “Russian conspiracy theories” but now they predictably turned out to be statements of “conspiracy fact” to the surprise of only the most dishonest and naive observers.
The Ukrainian Conflict has always been a NATO proxy war on Russia that was waged by hybrid means through that former Soviet Republic, with this latest development removing any “plausible deniability” about that after the words that just came from the mouth of the EU’s de facto leader. This prompts a re-evaluation of the way in which the unprecedented NATO-Russian security dilemma there has been managed up until this point.
President Putin famously said the following on 24 February 2022 about those who’d like to interfere with the special operation: “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.”
As Above, So Below? Are Cosmic Forces at Work on Earth?
When we think of wars, revolutions, populist uprisings, outbreaks of mass hysteria and other sudden social and political eruptions – even a popstar’s popularity or the latest fashion trend – we usually believe that at bottom there is some logical, rational explanation for them, even if we do not yet possess it. We are confident that we can understand these things through economics, psychology, race relations, religion, or as a reaction to ‘modernity’ or to some other factor that we can reason about, analyse, come to decisions on and take steps to alter and improve.
Although the evidence sadly seems to suggest otherwise, we believe that ultimately we can learn how to control the factors that lead to these explosions. We can, if not eliminate the more catastrophic events like wars, at least minimise the disruptions they cause. In short, we believe we control our fate – or will be able to sometime soon. That is the whole modern project: man applying his intellect and will in order to make a better world, working to control events rather than be controlled by them, and steering history toward progress. We are not there yet, but it is just a matter of time.
But what if there are factors at work in these massive human events that are beyond our control? What if they are not a product of solely rational, calculable forces but are triggered by natural causes, even cosmic ones? What if the power behind these upheavals doesn’t come from the earth below but from up above, in outer space, from the moon, the stars, the planets and the sun?
We know that for a great part of human history that is exactly what many people believed. Until the advent of what we know as science in the early seventeenth century, the belief that the stars ordered our destiny was commonly accepted. Astrology, the art of foreseeing the turn of events on earth by charting the movements of the stars in the heavens, had for millennia guided emperors and kings the world over. In ancient China, India, and the Middle East, in classical Greece and Rome and throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the belief that “everything in the… cosmos was inextricably connected to everything else, no matter how great or how small” was as much common knowledge as the supposed Big Bang is today.1
And that this arrangement was hierarchical, with changes in the heavens portending those on earth, was also accepted. It was generally agreed that the earth and everything on it was open to forces coming from beyond and that the wise men of antiquity understood these forces and benefited by them.
Transgender Space Force Colonel Says Using Pronouns in Emails Will Help Win Wars
During a speech to the U.S. Air Force, transgender Space Force Col. Bree Fram demanded everyone use pronouns in their emails as a way to enhance “winning war fighting strategies”.
Yes, really.
“All too often, I hear leaders talk about providing everyone with dignity and respect like it’s an aspirational goal, that ‘s not good enough,” said Fram.
“Dignity and respect is the bare minimum, it’s the floor of where we can be, we must set our sights higher and focus on intentional inclusivity, because there are still far too many people out there, not just LGBTQ individuals, that feel marginalized, shut out or discriminated against,” he added.
“So for all of you out there, I ask you to set out your symbols of pride, share your pronouns in your email, particularly if you’re a person who doesn’t think they need to, initiate difficult conversations about racial and gender barriers, and share a bit of your vulnerability in a way that draws others in.”
“You all have the power to take intentionally inclusive action to ensure the multiple perspectives that we know make us stronger as we devise winning war fighting strategies get heard.”
Respondents ox X weren’t really too convinced that dignifying transgender pronouns will help win wars.
Hellbound and Down 
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