Tag: propaganda

How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine

In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”

Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of “progress,” of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as US forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies.”

Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies.

It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.

Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, “What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn’t notice?” He observed that Ukraine’s total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.

But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counteroffensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired US tank commander, wrote on Harvard’s Russia Matters website, “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.”

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How a Network of Nazi Propagandists Helped Lay the Groundwork for the War in Ukraine

“History isn’t what happened, but the stories of what happened and the lessons these stories include. The very selection of which histories to teach in a society shapes our view of how what is came to be and, in turn, what we understand as possible. This choice of which history to teach can never be ‘neutral’ or ‘objective.’ Those who choose, either following a set agenda or guided by hidden prejudices, serve their interests. Their interests could be to continue this world as it now stands or to make a new world.” – Howard Zinn

In the aftermath of the Second World War, many of the architects of the worst atrocities in history were rescued and protected by American intelligence. The overt role of Nazi scientists such as Wernher von Braun (who personally oversaw the torture and murder of slave laborers) in the United States space program and West German industry has been common knowledge for decades.

In recent years the end of the Cold War has brought revelations about the CIA’s “gladiators” such as Yaroslav Stetsko and Licio Gelli influencing the world’s political development by any means necessary. From Germany and Italy to Japan and South Korea, there is now a vast collection of evidence proving the existence of large, well-funded networks of fascist terrorists who did not hesitate to use violence to ensure compliance from the “free” people of the world.

However, what is less well known is that thousands of fascist-leaning and anti-communist academics were also rescued and nurtured by the U.S. to wage an ideological war against Communism. These revisionist historians spent decades laboring in the shadows of the academic press until the fall of the Soviet Union allowed them to return home and finally rewrite history to their liking. After decades of effort, we can now see the results of their work, the seeds planted 70 years ago are finally bearing their poisoned fruit.

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CIA Agent Cloaks Lockdown Propaganda in Concern for China

On January 24, 2023, Dr. Michael V. Callahan published an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled “The Indirect Ways the U.S. Can Help China Avoid Covid Catastrophe.”

If we assume this was written by a prominent doctor at a Harvard-affiliated hospital – an academic professional who bases his opinions on sound medical principles and scientific knowledge – it makes no sense at all. In fact, it is an embarrassment to the writer and the institution he represents.

If, however, we realize that this is just the latest in the quarantine-until-vaccine propaganda campaign of a CIA agent and top biosecurity cabal member, everything suddenly makes perfect sense. In fact, many of the points in the article map beautifully onto Robert Blumen’s helpful Covid propaganda grid.

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Why Does Humanity Still Tolerate the Tragedy of Wars in the 21st Century? 

Since the end of the Second World War (1939-1945), there have been many civil wars and several important regional military conflicts between two or more countries, but none has evolved into a general world war involving all the most heavily armed countries. The most serious regional wars were the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1955-1975), the Iraq War (2003-2011), the Syria War (2011- ), and the Ukraine War (2022- ).

Indeed, with no sign yet of peace in Ukraine, nine years after the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government, in February 2014, and nearly one year after the Russian military invasion, last February 24—and with a real danger that such a prolonged proxy conflict between great powers could escalate into a nuclear world war—it may be appropriate to search for reasons why, in this 21st Century, the world is still threatened with murderous and destructive wars.

There are basic tendencies in human nature, structural institutional failures and geopolitical factors for why this is the case.

Let us identify the most important causes, which can explain why wars of aggression and proxy wars are still taking place today.

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Top 20 Most Cringeworthy Zelensky PR Moments

The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised. The way the most powerful institutions in the western world have been throwing their puppet in everyone’s face to sell the empire’s proxy warfare puts Ronald McDonald to shame.

Here are 20 of the cringiest moments of establishment PR using Zelensky to market the McProxy War to the western world, in no particular order.

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