Tag Archives: Ukraine-Russia war propaganda

Pentagon Wants To Return Special Ops Propagandists To Ukraine, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

As increasingly stupid ideas are contemplated by our rulers, like making war in Ukraine and the use of nuclear weapons, they have to amp up the propaganda to overcome people’s well-founded aversion to such ideas. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

An article by The Washington Post titled “Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine” contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future. 

“The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials,” writes the Post’s Wesley Morgan. “If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.”

Much further down in the article we learn the specifics of what those two top-secret programs were. One of them entailed US commandos sending Ukrainian operatives “on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east” to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course The Washington Post does not describe it as such.

“We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as “a person in the Special Operations community.”

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Tanks and Tragedy, by Michael Brenner

Posted on January 27, 2023 | 1 comment

Michael Brenner plows through the Ukraine bullshit. From Brenner at consortiumnews.com:

Amid the vacuum of creditable reporting by the mainstream media, Michael Brenner offers a briefing on the background of the neocon-inspired war in Ukraine and his view on the present strategic situation.  

On Dec. 21, 2022, NATO headquarters in Brussels joined other international landmarks in switching off its lights in solidarity with Ukraine. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Never in memory has it been so daunting to figure out what’s going on during a major international crisis as with the Ukraine affair.

That sad truth owes much to the total absence of truthful reporting and honest interpretative analysis by the MSM. We are served heavy portions of falsity, fantasy and farrago crudely mixed into a narrative whose relation to reality is tenuous.

The near universal swallowing of this confection is made possible by the abdication of responsibility — intellectual and political — by America’s political class, from Washington’s high and mighty down through the galaxy of un-think tanks and self-absorbed academia.

Now, the legion of scripters for this fictional story are working with renewed energy to incorporate a few fresh elements: President Joe Biden/NATO’s decision to send an eclectic array of armor to buttress Ukraine’s faltering forces; and the mounting evidence of crippling, incremental dismantling of its army by Russia’s superior military.

As always, that reaction turns out to be an exercise in avoidance behavior. The roughly 100 tanks slated to arrive in piecemeal fashion over the coming year will be a “game-changer.” Putin’s army is a proven “paper tiger.” “Democracy” is destined to prevail over despotic barbarism.

Or so we are told in stomach-churning doses of snake-oil. I guess that we all have ways of amusing ourselves.

A systematic refutation of this mythic construction is both superfluous and futile. It has been done over the past year by able, experienced and thoughtful analysts who actually know what they are talking about: Colonel Douglas Macgregor, professor Jeffrey Sachs, Colonel Scott Ritter and a handful of others who together are relegated to obscure websites and scorned by the MSM.

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Is This Winning? By George D. O’Neill, Jr.

Posted on December 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ukraine is not only losing its war with Russia badly, the country is being methodically decimated. From George D. O’Neill, Jr. at theamericanconservative.com:

Recently, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen carelessly revealed the devastating cost of the Ukraine war.

“It is estimated that more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 Ukrainian military personnel have died to date,” she said. The comment drew sharp backlash and the E.C. later deleted the comments from video recordings of the address. The censorship was left unexplained and demonstrated the confusion of the purveyors of the approved narrative.

If Von der Leyen’s estimate is true, that is nearly ten times the number of dead Ukrainian soldiers reported by the Ukrainian government. The E.C. president’s remark shows that even the strongest backers of this bloody and unnecessary war can no longer hide the truth: Ukraine is at risk of losing. 

The mainstream media and the Biden administration insist ad nauseam that Ukraine is winning against Russia. But the facts on the ground do not fit the narrative and the administration and media know it. The war hawks know their cynical Ukraine policy has not succeeded in driving Russia out of Ukraine. Tragically, the Ukrainians are the ones who suffer the immense cost of this foreign policy failure. Their nation is ruined for the sake and at the instigation of the globalist American empire.

As Ukraine loses its grip on heavily defended and important crossroads around the city of Bakhmut, the Western press has commenced a campaign to downplay the importance of the loss. Defense Express reports: “UK Defense Intelligence States [t]hat Bakhmut’s capture becomes primarily a symbolic, political objective for Russia.” Last week, the Financial Times published an article entitled: “Hell Just Hell: Ukraine and Russia’s war of attrition over Bakhmut.” As the subtitle of the piece reads, “Soldiers say fighting in and around eastern Donetsk city is reminiscent of first world war-style trench conflict

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A Bodyguard of Lies, by James Rickards

Posted on November 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

A nuclear exchange would not be kind to the value of financial assets. From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:

A Bodyguard of Lies

The all-important midterm elections are just one week away. I’ve said a lot about them, and will have more to say about them in the days to come.

But today, I want to talk about something even more important: truth vs. official lies. More specifically, I want to talk about truth and propaganda.

It’s said that truth is the first casualty of war. And Churchill once said that in wartime, truth is so precious that it needs to be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.

That’s why propaganda plays such a large role in modern warfare.

The fact is wars are conducted in part through lies and propaganda. For example, in the early days of World War I, the British cut the undersea communications cables that ran from Germany to the U.S.

The British wanted to control the flow of information and issue what we call today “misinformation.” And so they created inflammatory accounts of German atrocities to sway public opinion, like German soldiers skewering Belgian babies on bayonets.

While there will always be individual acts of atrocity in wartime, these reports were largely propaganda.

Here in the U.S. itself, President Wilson had special police forces who arrested anyone reporting negative news on the progress of the war. Sound familiar?

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Biden Administration Again Plants False Nuclear Scare Stories, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on November 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

It is difficult to believe Russia would use a nuclear weapon. It is quite plausible to believe the U.S. or its British or Ukrainian puppets would use a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb and blame it on Russia. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

Last month I dissected the fear mongering the Biden administration released over alleged Russian nuclear threads:

[The report] quotes Biden as saying: “[Putin] is not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is you might say is significantly underperforming.”Fact is that Putin has not talked about the “potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.” Not. At. All.
…
All the war mongering talk and reports about Russia’s alleged threat of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine is totally unfounded. That ‘western’ media suddenly engage in it shows that it is part of a well directed propaganda campaign.

I speculated that the intent of the campaign was to prepare for some false flag incident in Ukraine.

Two weeks later the Russian secret services found out that Ukraine was preparing a ‘dirty bomb’ which would spread radioactive substances with the help of chemical explosives. Such bombs are not a meaningful military threat but have a high ‘scare’ value. If it would use one of those the Ukraine would surely blame Russia for launching such a bomb.

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The Official Narrative On Ukraine, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on October 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

The official narrative is so simple-minded it could have been written by a second grader. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.

The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.

Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.

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Conditioned for War with Russia, by Ray McGovern

Posted on September 24, 2022 | Leave a comment

Only a tiny pool of Americans understands that there’s a Russian side to the story concerning the war with Ukraine. From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

Ray McGovern reviews key pieces of background  that — thanks to the media — few Americans know about the widest war in 77 years that is now on our doorstep.

Jan. 16, 2017: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveling to Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)

Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden — I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.

Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons.

Corporate leaders and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the U.S. cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”

The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former national intelligence director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former national intelligence officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

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Antiwar Criticism and the Formation of Collective Opinion, by Finn Andreen

Posted on September 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

The weak-minded masses far outnumber the beleaguered minority who think for themselves. The religiously embrace the required opinions and viciously attack the minority. We saw it with Covid and vaccines, we’re seeing it again with the Ukraine-Russia war. From Finn Andreen at mises.org:

There are themes in the West that are difficult to question without running the risk of receiving sharp criticism. For the following themes, for example, there is a position considered “correct” by Western collective opinion: “Welfare State,” “climate policy,” “multicultural society,” or “covid-19 vaccination.” It is implied that the “acceptable” position to each one of these themes can and should be adopted without any prior critical analysis at the individual level.

The list of these themes is not static; new ones rise to prominence in society, while others become less important over time. In recent years two new themes have emerged: “authoritarian Russia” and “communist China,” which is not surprising considering that Washington, and thus, by extension. the West, has decided to treat these two nations as strategic enemies. A recent study shows, for example, that in a very short time the percentage of Americans with a negative view of China increased dramatically, from 46 percent to 67 percent. This is not a coincidence, but the result of a media communication strategy.

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Brandon shifts the narrative on Banderastan, by The Saker (Andrei)

Posted on August 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

Losing the war in Ukraine, the U.S. government has to find something else  to talk about, or talk about the old stuff in a different way. From The Saker (Andrei) at thesaker.is:

President “Biden” (i.e. the “collective” Biden, not the actual Bradon) penned an interesting article for the NYT entitled “President Biden: What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine“.  The entire things is behind a paywall, and it is not really worth reposting it here.  But I do want to comment on a few of “Biden’s” theses.

First, I will ignore the obnoxious habit of calling the USA “America”, when just Canada and Brazil alone are  almost as big as the USA.  Furthermore, the USA is only 9,833,520 km2 (3,796,742 sq mi) while the total area of the Americas is 42,549,000 km2 (16,428,000 sq mi).  Finally, there are 35 countries in the Americas but, fine, okay, if saying “‘Murica” evokes imagines of Captain America and waving (Chinese made) flags – then fine.  Let’s look at a few key sentences:

“America’s goal is straightforward: We want to see a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression (…)  We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia. As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow“

Now that is a HUGE change.  In Russian, there is this expression of “changing shoes while in mid jump” (переобуться в прыжке) which refers to situation when a person suddenly make a full and instantaneous 180 after pompously insisting on a goal which is now dropped.

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War in Europe and the Rise of Raw Propaganda, by John Pilger

Posted on June 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

The only defense against propaganda is thinking for yourself. From John Pilger at lewrockwell.com:

Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain

On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.

But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”. He was referring to independent journalists and whistle blowers, the honest mavericks to whom media organisations once gave space, often with pride. The space has been abolished.

The war hysteria that has rolled in like a tidal wave in recent weeks and months is the most striking example. Known by its jargon, “shaping the narrative”, much if not most of it is pure propaganda.

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