Tag: perpetual war

Reuters Uses Image of Men with Paintball Guns for Ukraine Story

Reuters made a questionable cover photo selection in an article about the conflict in Ukraine. For a recent news story on a reported Ukrainian assault in the Sumy region, the outlet went with a picture of soldiers armed with paintball guns.

The photo shows several military gear-clad men crouched in a defensive position with weapons. A close examination of the photo reveals that the men are armed with paintball guns. As would be expected, many Twitter users found the notion of insurgents fighting off a hostile foreign invasion with paintball guns to be absurd. A barrage of ridicule ensued.

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NY Times Blasted For Writing Ukrainian Fighters “Evacuated”, Didn’t Surrender At Azovstal

The “paper of record” managed to completely avoid the reality that some 300 Azov militants surrendered – instead opting to suggest that somehow Ukraine’s forces decided to wind down their “combat mission”. The headline also emphasized they were “being evacuated”.

But then awkwardly, the very first sentence of the Monday Times report indicated after they laid down their arms, the fighters were taken into Russian custody and transferred to pro-Kremlin territory (specifically to Novoazovsk – in the Donestsk People’s Republic). So again, they were “evacuated” by their Russian enemies who’ve captured them.

“Hundreds of Ukrainian fighters were taken by bus to Russian controlled territory,” the NYT report said. “Ukraine’s president said the combat mission in the city was over, capping some of the longest, fiercest resistance.”

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MSNBC ‘military analyst’ posts video game clip claiming it’s Ukraine war footage

On Monday, retired four-star general and MSNBC “military analyst” Barry R. McCaffrey posted a clip of video game footage to Twitter. Alongside it he claimed it was a display of strength from Ukraine’s air defense. It’s actually footage from a video game.

The clip in question came from YouTube’s “shorts” section, and is titled “Russian MiG-29’s Get Shot Down By Air Defense System | Arma 3 #Shorts #Airdefense #Arma3.”

ARMA 3 is an open world military tactical shooter game for PC published in September 2013.

What’s captured on video is two in-game jets being shot down by an air defense system set up on the ground. McCaffrey’s tweet was deleted at some point after Benny Johnson pointed out the glaring mistake.

“Why is Left-Wing corporate media allowed to spread “misinformation” about a war, while they advocate for Censorship of Conservatives and Fact Checking of Memes?” he added.

“Russian aircraft getting nailed by UKR missile defense. Russians are losing large numbers of attack aircraft. UKR air defense becoming formidable,” McCaffrey had originally tweeted.

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Pentagon-Funded Think Tank Simulates War With China On NBC

NBC’s Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.

CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes is the de facto Taiwanese embassy in the US.

The war game simulates a conflict over Taiwan which we are informed is set in the year 2027, in which China launches strikes on the US military in order to open the way to an invasion of the island. We are not told why there needs to be a specific year inserted into mainstream American consciousness about when we can expect such a conflict, but then we are also not told why NBC is platforming a war machine think tank’s simulation of a military conflict with China at all.

It happens that the Center for a New American Security was the home of the man assigned by the Biden administration to lead the Pentagon task force responsible for re-evaluating the administration’s posture toward China. That man, Ely Ratner, is on record saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. Ratner is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration.

It also happens that the Center for a New American Security has openly boasted about the great many of its other “experts and alumni” who have assumed senior leadership positions within the Biden administration.

It also happens that CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war games segment and was at one time a heavy favorite to become Biden’s Pentagon chief, wrote a Foreign Affairs op-ed in 2020 arguing that the US needed to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

It also happens that CNAS CEO Richard Fontaine has been featured all over the mass media pushing empire narratives about Russia and China, telling Bloomberg just the other day that the war in Ukraine could serve the empire’s long-term interests against China.

“The war in Ukraine could end up being bad for the pivot in the short-term, but good in the long-term,” Fontaine said. “If Russia emerges from this conflict as a weakened version of itself and Germany makes good on its defense spending pledges, both trends could allow the US to focus more on the Indo-Pacific in the long run.”

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The Subtleties of Anti-Russia Leftist Rhetoric

While the so-called liberal and conservative corporate mainstream media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Russia and Ukraine that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media.

A woman I know and who knows my sociological analyses of propaganda contacted me to tell me there was an excellent article about the war in Ukraine at The Intercept, an on-line publication funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar I have long considered a leading example of much deceptive reporting wherein truth is mixed with falsehoods to convey a “liberal” narrative that fundamentally supports the ruling elites while seeming to oppose them.

This, of course, is nothing new since it’s been the modus operandi of all corporate media in their own ideological and disingenuous ways, such as The New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. for a very long time.

Nevertheless, out of respect for her judgment and knowing how deeply she feels for all suffering people, I read the article.  Written by Alice Speri, its title sounded ambiguous – “The Left in Europe Confronts NATO’s Resurgence After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” – until I saw the subtitle that begins with these words: “Russia’s brutal invasion complicates…” 

But I read on.

By the fourth paragraph, it became clear where this article was going.  Speri writes that “In Ukraine, by contrast [with Iraq], it was Russia that had staged an illegal, unprovoked invasion, and U.S.-led support to Ukraine was understood by many as crucial to stave off even worse atrocities than those the Russian military had already committed.” [my emphasis]

While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.

There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed. It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocative.

And there is this [my emphasis]:

The uncertain response of Europe’s peace activists is both a reflection of a brutal, unprovoked invasion that stunned the world and of an anti-war movement that has grown smaller and more marginalized over the years. The left in both Europe and the U.S. have struggled to respond to a wave of support for Ukraine that is at cross purposes with a decades long effort to untangle Europe from a U.S.-led military alliance.

In other words, the article, couched in anti-war rhetoric, was anti-Russia propaganda.  When I told my friend my analysis, she refused to discuss it and got angry with me, as if I therefore were a proponent of war  I have found this is a common response.

This got me thinking again about why people so often miss the untruths lying within articles that are in many parts truthful and accurate.  I notice this constantly.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.

Few do notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly schooled people.

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US troops smuggle 70 oil tankers out of Syria

US occupation forces have reportedly continued looting Syrian oil from the northern Al-Jazeera region of Syria’s Hasakah governate, as a US-military convoy of around 70 oil tankers made their way towards Iraq through the illegal Al-Waleed border crossing on 14 May.

According to local sources in the Al-Yarubiyah countryside, the convoy was accompanied by an additional 15 trucks carrying military equipment bound for Iraq, as well as six armored vehicles.

This comes just one day after 46 US vehicles were reportedly transferred out of Syria through the same border crossing.

US troops and their proxy in northern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), are in control of most of the oil fields in Hasakah and Deir Ezzor and have been regularly smuggling Syrian oil out of the country to sell it abroad.

Dozens of similar US convoys have been reported over the last year and a half. On 18 December 2021, nearly one hundred oil tankers were smuggled into northern Iraq through the same illegal crossing.

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Nazis Are Actually Fine Now, According to the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League

If you happened to be alive during the years of 2016 to 2020, you can probably recall the routine issuance of frantic bulletins that “Nazis” were suddenly on the march in the US. Not just that some ludicrous, ragtag group of self-identified Nazis could be occasionally spotted in the wild — which had always been a somewhat regular, albeit freakish occurrence. Rather, the idea was that full-bore ideological “Nazism” had surged as a genuinely formidable political force, and everyone needed to be extremely terrified of this.

Principally responsible for the alleged outbreak of pro-Nazi fervor, or so the prevailing theory went, was Donald Trump. He had either tacitly or deliberately fueled the Nazis’ rise, because associating himself with Nazis would definitely be a huge boon to his electoral fortunes. MSNBC anchor Joy Reid encapsulated this view when she warned in 2017 that “resurgent Neo-Nazism” had gripped the US under Trump’s rule. Reams of academic articles were published on the subject, wondering whether Trump was the new “American Führer”; it was a commonly-held belief that “Literal Nazis” had taken power. (As opposed to figurative Nazis). Evidence for the theory ranged from the individual emotional turmoil experienced by journalists, to Twitter trolls with cartoon frogs as their profile pictures, to allusive suggestions — including by former apparatchiks of the National Security State — that the existence of immigrant detention centers was proof a Nazi regime had seized the reins of state.

This fearful narrative was propelled by episodes which may now appear somewhat farcical in hindsight, but at the time were taken deadly seriously. One example was an alleged spate of anti-semitic hate crimes that occurred in 2017 — a series of “bomb threat” phone calls were placed to Jewish Community Centers. Even before any details had surfaced about the identity of the suspects, an outfit called the “Anne Frank Center” hysterically attributed personal responsibility for the incidents to Trump. Fans of dark humor were no doubt thrilled when it later emerged that the bomb threats had in fact been called in by a teenager in Israel, as well as a deranged former Intercept journalist — and not some MAGA-hat guy sitting in a corrugated shack in the backwoods of Arkansas. (The “Anne Frank Center” was being run at the time by a hardcore partisan Democratic operative in New Jersey, whom I personally met years ago when he was running a pro-LGBT group. Let’s just say the individual is a tad… excitable. Still, this individual’s bombastic anti-Trump screeds were credulously portrayed by media outlets as carrying the solemn moral weight of the fabled Holocaust victim.)

And so the ever-present specter of Actual Nazis running rampant, taking their direction from Führer Trump, loomed large over the American political scene. This understandably generated lots of fear and stress, most of which tended to be conveniently funneled into boosting the political prospects of Democrats. Even figures as milquetoast as former Maryland governor and 2016 presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, hardly anyone’s idea of an envelope-pushing thinker, proclaimed that the conditions in the US circa 2017 were reminiscent of the conditions in Germany circa 1933. Thus, all responsible citizens were obligated to heed the call for unshakeable “Resistance.” O’Malley typified the trend whereby standard-fare Democrats became incredibly radicalized in their style of rhetoric, even if their policy prescriptions remained relatively static. Always top of the agenda for ambitious liberals was to compete amongst themselves for who could express their Trump-related anxieties in the most apocalyptic terms. Which, of course, included the belief that Trump was governing on behalf of Nazis and/or was himself a Nazi.

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The Bizarre, Unanimous Dem Support for the $40b War Package to Raytheon and CIA: “For Ukraine”

After Joe Biden announced his extraordinary request for $33 billion more for the war in Ukraine — on top of the $14 billion the U.S. has already spent just ten weeks into this war — congressional leaders of both parties immediately decided the amount was insufficient. They arbitrarily increased the amount by $7 billion to a total of $40 billion, then fast-tracked the bill for immediate approval. As we reported on Tuesday night, the House overwhelmingly voted to approve the bill by a vote of 388-57. All fifty-seven NO votes came from Republican House members. Except for two missing members, all House Democrats — every last one, including all six members of the revolutionary, subversive Squad — voted for this gigantic war package, one of the largest the U.S. has spent at once in decades.

While a small portion of these funds will go to humanitarian aid for Ukraine, the vast majority will go into the coffers of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and the usual suspects. Some of it will go to the CIA for unspecified reasons. The extreme speed with which this was all approved means there is little to no oversight over how the funds will be spent, who will profit and how much, and what the effects will be for Ukraine and the world.

To put this $54 billion amount in perspective, it is (a) larger than the average annual amount that the U.S. spent on its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion), (b) close to the overall amount Russia spends on its entire military for the year ($69 billion), (c) close to 7% of the overall U.S. military budget, by far the largest in the world ($778 billion), and (d) certain to be far, far higher — easily into the hundreds of billions of dollars and likely the trillion dollar level — given that U.S. officials insist that this war will last not months but years, and that it will stand with Ukraine until the bitter end.

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