Tag: perpetual war

False Predictions About Russia Invading Ukraine Are Making People Fear WW3

If you have been following the mainstream NATO member-state media over the past few weeks, you may be now fearing another world war. Here is why you should not be listening to these discredited mouth pieces for corporate governments in the West.

On the third of February, the White House indicated that “intelligence information” supposedly in their possession had indicated Russia would use crisis actors and staged videos to justify invading Ukraine. This information was eaten up almost uncritically by most Western media outlets. Even those reporting on it with a somewhat critical take still promoted the idea as valid. Matt Lee, a journalist for the Associated Press (AP), repeatedly called on White House spokesperson, Ned Price, for proof of the US government’s allegations during a press conference earlier this month. Needless to say, Price deflected and refused to provide any solid information other than the US accusation itself, which Matt Lee framed as getting into “Alex Jones territory”.

Since then, there have been numerous predictions about when Russia will invade Ukraine, in all of which Moscow is painted as being the irrational aggressor. Tabloid newspapers have gone with headlines like “ON THE BRINK Will there be World War 3?“, whilst others used unnamed  “intelligence sources” to conjure up headlines claiming “Russian invasion of Ukraine set for ‘3am tomorrow’ with missiles and tank attack“. It’s not only the “untrusted” tabloids, which interestingly have a lot of readers, that are conjuring up ridiculous claims and conspiracy theories, almost all the more ostensibly reputable news outlets like the New York Times, BBC and the Guardian have led their readers to believe that Putin is a madman ready to invade Ukraine at any moment. The United States government has stated that an invasion could occur “at any time.” What is interesting is that far before any talk of Russia-Ukraine tensions had surfaced, the Washington Post published a piece on the 3rd of December (2021), claiming that US intelligence sources believed Russia would invade Ukraine with 175,000 troops.

Despite all the fear-mongering of a sudden Russian offensive, all talk from Russia has indicated it wishes to solve the ongoing tensions through dialogue. Russian President, Vladimir Putin, states that his country does not seek war and that they would only engage in a war in self-defense, much to the dismay of Western journalists eager to warmonger and paint Moscow in a similar light to that of the reporting during the Cold War.

What is interesting is that anyone who would dare indicate that the White Helmets in Syria had some role in attempting to stage chemical weapons attacks, specifically the attacks used to justify Western military aggression, would still be laughed out of the room by corporate media in the West. Interestingly, Russia has frequently predicted the tactic of staging attacks to justify US military aggression itself in the past, which were instantly slapped aside as akin to “conspiracy theories”. Yet, when Washington alleges something very similar, without any indication that what they are saying could actually be true, we should believe them?

The United States itself has such a long history of false flag attacks, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident leading to US military intervention in Vietnam, that it has no position to sit and accuse others whilst refusing to accept skepticism towards its own propensity to commit such acts. The problem is that the conspiracy theories of Western governments, their intelligence agencies, and complicit mouthpieces in corporate media, lead to real devastating consequences.

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Now We’ve Done It: We Pissed Off The CIA

While the collapse of public trust in the mainstream media is nothing new, with Forbes recently reporting that “Fewer Americans than ever before trust the mainstream media“, it is only a much more recent phenomenon that members of the media’s highest echelons – such as the NYT’s Matthew Rosenberg – have started asking themselves and their (few remaining) readers the much more difficult question of why is public trust of media so low.

Unfortunately, instead of following up with some much needed top-to-bottom cleansing and fundamental reassessment of how the MSM pursues, analyzes and reports news, the media has simply fallen back to its traditional tactic of spewing baseless hit pieces against outlets they would rather see silenced and/or censored.

Most notably in recent weeks, this has been observed vis-a-vis Joe Rogan’s incredibly popular podcast which has emerged as one of the biggest competitors to traditional media.

This morning, it is Zero Hedge that has again been singled out for pursuing non-establishment groupthink.

Echoing a false allegation we have repeatedly heard before, early on Tuesday the Associated Press (of “how Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis” fame) writes that “U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies. The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence.”

Well, now we’ve done it – we’ve angered the CIA, and for what? For publishing views that challenge the conventional narrative, such as disputing that an invasion of Ukraine is actually “imminent” as the US State Department and its mainstream media conduits repeat day after day, or that the Covid virus was actually created in a Chinese lab, a view which has gained substantial prominence in recent months after it emerged that none other than the UK’s Jeremy Farrar (also known as the UK’s Doctor Fauci) played a pivotal role in stifling suggestions that this new virus might have come from a laboratory rather than emerged through natural zoonotic transmission from animals.

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The US Government Truly Believes The Entire Planet Is Its Property

The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”

The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.

But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.

It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.

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Biden Promises ‘Widespread Human Suffering’ in Wake of a Russian Invasion

As American diplomats scurry to flee Ukraine, President Joe Biden said Russia is poised to spread misery throughout the country if it follows up its massive troop buildup with an invasion.

Biden spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin for an hour on Saturday. Earlier Saturday, the State Department announced that most U.S. diplomatic personnel are being pulled out of Ukraine, which is currently encircled by about 130,000 Russian troops.

The call focused on “Russia’s escalating military buildup on the borders of Ukraine,” according to a White House readout.

“President Biden was clear that, if Russia undertakes a further invasion of Ukraine, the United States together with our Allies and partners will respond decisively and impose swift and severe costs on Russia.

“President Biden reiterated that a further Russian invasion of Ukraine would produce widespread human suffering and diminish Russia’s standing.

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Tulsi Gabbard Says Biden Administration Wants Russia to Invade Ukraine

Former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard has said President Joe Biden‘s administration wants Russia to invade Ukraine so that they can impose “draconian” sanctions on the country.

Gabbard, a Democrat who represented Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021, told Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson on Friday that Biden could avoid a war by guaranteeing Ukraine would never join the NATO military alliance.

The U.S. warned on Friday that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen in the coming days and advised U.S. citizens to leave, while the Russian government has consistently denied it intends to attack.

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Another Banner Year For The Military-Industrial Complex

Twenty twenty-one was another banner year for the military-industrial complex, as Congress signed off on a near-record $778 billion in spending for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy. That was $25 billion more than the Pentagon had even asked for.

It can’t be emphasized enough just how many taxpayer dollars are now being showered on the Pentagon. That department’s astronomical budget adds up, for instance, to more than four times the cost of the most recent version of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which sparked such horrified opposition from Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other alleged fiscal conservatives. Naturally, they didn’t blink when it came to lavishing ever more taxpayer dollars on the military-industrial complex.

Opposing Build Back Better while throwing so much more money at the Pentagon marks the ultimate in budgetary and national-security hypocrisy. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that, if current trends continue, the Pentagon could receive a monumental $7.3 trillion-plus over the next decade, more than was spent during the peak decade of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when there were up to 190,000 American troops in those two countries alone. Sadly, but all too predictably, President Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops and contractors from Afghanistan hasn’t generated even the slightest peace dividend. Instead, any savings from that war are already being plowed into programs to counter China, official Washington’s budget-justifying threat of choice (even if outshone for the moment by the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine). And all of this despite the fact that the United States already spends three times as much as China on its military.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste—from vast overcharges for spare parts to weapons that don’t work at unaffordable prices to forever wars with immense human and economic consequences. Simply put, the current level of Pentagon spending is both unnecessary and irrational.

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Proposal: Just Run All Western News Media Directly Out Of CIA Headquarters

I think it would be a lot more efficient and straightforward if all English-language news media were just run directly out of CIA headquarters by agency officials in Langley, Virginia. This way news reporters could eliminate the middleman and drop the undignified charade of presenting unproven assertions by western intelligence agencies as “scoops” that they picked up from “sources”.

I mean, right now the mass media are churning out stories about “intelligence” which says Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine very soon, citing government officials and anonymous sources. We are never shown the “intelligence”, and we are never shown any evidence of its veracity; we’re simply told what opaque and unaccountable government agencies want us to believe about a foreign government. We’re not even reminded by the publishers of these CIA press releases that western intelligence agencies have a very extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, and we’re certainly not informed that Kyiv appears to be ramping up aggressions in eastern Ukraine.

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‘Nothing More Grotesque Than a Media Pushing for War,’ Says Edward Snowden

Exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden on Friday joined global critics who are decrying news outlets for encouraging war with their coverage of rising tensions between the United States and Russia—where he has lived since 2013—over Ukraine.

“There is nothing more grotesque than a media pushing for war,” Snowden tweeted.

After a flood of responses—some highlighting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has stationed over 100,000 troops near his country’s border with Ukraine and is conducting military exercises in Belarus—Snowden doubled down on his anti-war message.

“When you see snide quote-tweets of this from the boot-licking think-tank crowd, look at the ratio and remember that even if they’re loud, they are in the minority,” he said. “Being pro-war is not smart, cool, or sophisticated, and their performative outrage doesn’t change that.”

Snowden is far from alone in blasting a media march toward war that has been compared to the lead-up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“Here we go again,” Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, wrote in a Friday fundraising email. “With talk of war in Ukraine rising to a fever pitch, U.S. media outlets are once again beating the drums.”

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