Tag Archives: Ukraine-Russia war propaganda

How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The US Win A Propaganda War Against Putin? By Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on April 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

They could pretend that Covid propaganda was for our own good, but how can banning accounts and analysis that go against the prevailing Ukraine narrative be of even pretend value. Getting different opinions about Ukraine poses no discernible threat to anyone’s health or safety. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

There’s a very important question that we all need to be asking ourselves at this point in history, and that question is as follows: how much are we as a society willing to sacrifice so that the US government can win a propaganda war against Vladimir Putin?

Let me explain.

One severely under-discussed aspect of the latest round of escalations in Silicon Valley censorship which began at the start of the Ukraine war is the fact that it’s an entirely unprecedented order of censorship protocol. While it might look similar to all the other waves of social media purges and new categories of banned content that we’ve been experiencing since it became mainstream doctrine after the 2016 US election that tech platforms need to strictly regulate online speech, the justifications for it have taken a drastic deviation from established patterns.

What sets this new censorship escalation apart from its predecessors is that this time nobody’s pretending that it’s being done in the interests of the people. With the censorship of racists the argument was that they were inciting hate crimes and racial harassment. With the censorship of Alex Jones and QAnon the argument was that they were inciting violence. With the censorship of Covid skeptics the argument was that they were promoting misinformation that could be deadly. Even with the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story it was argued that there was a need to protect election integrity from disinformation of potentially foreign origin.

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Ukraine: A new battle in the old war of the “New Normal”, by Michael Lesher

Posted on April 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

Covid and now Ukraine are intended to pinpoint who can and cannot be fooled by the propaganda barrages. Generally those who believe one believe the other. From Michael Lesher at off-guardian.org:

In one sense, I don’t have much to say about the newest chapter in the eight-year-old American war against the people of Ukraine – nothing that you can’t learn from an array of sources as politically diverse as George Galloway and Peter Hitchens, Tariq Ali and John Mearsheimer.

After all, the facts really aren’t complicated. Russia’s recent invasion, far from being “unprovoked” (as shamelessly claimed in mainstream media), follows eight years of the US-backed Ukrainian regime’s deadly shelling of ethnic Russians near the border of Russia itself, in fighting that has killed more than 13,000 civilians in territory Vladimir Putin’s administration pledged to protect long ago.

And that carnage had a fairly obvious cause, too: it was precipitated by the US-supported coup that toppled Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, ostensibly because of human rights abuses but more fundamentally because that government had refused to convert the former Soviet republic into a vassal state of NATO.

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“The Russians” commit yet another “atrocity”, by The Saker

Posted on April 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

Never let facts get in the way of propaganda, especially when that’s what people want to believe. From The Saker at thesaker.is:

The big news today is that those evil Russkies have fired a Tochka-U missile with a cluster warhead at the city of Kramatorsk, killing scores of innocent civilians.  The “entire civilized world” is disgusted and immediately announced even MORE sanctions, MORE condemnation and MORE anti-Russian virtue signalling.

Minor problem: Russia does not have Tochka-U missiles, which are 30 year old Soviet missiles which have been far surpassed by modern Russian missiles (of which Russia has plenty enough).  How do we know that it was  Tochka-U which was used?

Because of the tail section which separates from the warhеard during the flight.  Here it is:

No Russian tactical missile in service with such a tail section, and only the Ukrainian Tochka-U have.

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Ukraine War! What Is It Good For? Propaganda, by Iain Davis

Posted on April 8, 2022 | Leave a comment

If propaganda were bullets and bombs Ukraine would be in Moscow by now. From Iain Davis at off-guardian.org:

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been presented to us, in the West, as unprovoked and unjustified.

We have not been told about Russia’s legitimate security concerns in the face of NATO expansionism. Nor has Ukraine’s significant Nazi problem been honestly reported, with some Western propagandist even promoting them.

The Russian government claims that its recognition and defence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) are born from “compassion” for the people who have been under siege for eight years. However, Russia also needs the new republics as satellite states, providing a foothold for its own national security as it opposes NATO’s advance.

It should be noted that Russia’s military actions, in trying to oust Nazis from their strongholds in Mariupol, Kharkiv and elsewhere, has led to the near destruction of many cities and towns in Eastern Ukraine. As of the 19th March the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCR) estimate that 847 civilians were killed in three weeks, primarily as a result of shelling.

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It’s Obvious Who Gains From Bucha Massacre But There’s Hardly Any Media Left To Say It, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on April 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Media” in the title means mainstream media. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

The Western media narrative has no competitor. The media foghorns can blare all they want without hardly a dissenting voice tolerated, let alone heard.

The apparent mass murder of civilians in Bucha and other locations in Ukraine has enraged Western public opinion against Russia.

Russia is facing mounting accusations of genocide and its president Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials are condemned as war criminals to be prosecuted in international tribunals similar to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders.

Western media are blaring like foghorns while Russian media and other independent outlets are banned or stifled by the toxic anti-Russia political climate. In this grossly imbalanced situation, propaganda is amplified manyfold. There is a sense that the wholesale shutdown of media prior to the latest alleged massacres in Ukraine is all part of the orchestration.

When the Kiev regime and Western media warn of more massacres to follow in Ukraine that is a sinister prediction.

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The US Bubble of Pretend, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on April 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

Many Americans prefer easy lies to hard truths. From Patrick Lawrence consortiumnews.com:

The lack of objective, principled coverage of the war in Ukraine is a degenerate state of affairs. The one thing worse is the extent to which it’s perfectly fine with most Americans.

Ukrainian government photo of soldiers during battle in Mariupol on March 15. (CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately.

Let me try that another way: The government-supervised New York Times and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.

So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission — most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.

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And What About Those Biolabs? By Philip Giraldi

Posted on March 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

If you really want to get up a good hate for Russia, just forget everything that happened prior to its invasion of Ukraine and ignore the revelations concerning the biolabs in Ukraine. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

The semi-official United States government plus media lie machine knows that constructing a plausible reason to bomb the crap out of someone all depends on where you begin your narrative. If you keep starting your accusations at a point where the target has done something bad, all you have to do is repeat yourself over and over again to drown out any alternative backstory that surfaces. And if you really want to demolish all contrary views, all you have to do is liken the targeted foreign leader to Adolph Hitler and keep repeating. That tactic was used with Saddam Hussein of Iraq and is now being employed against Vladimir Putin of Russia and it always works.

In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia the trick has been to tie everything to the invasion by Putin’s armed forces over four weeks ago, an undoubted act of aggression. Once you establish that as your launching point, preceding developments are rendered moot. Who cares about US promises not to expand the NATO alliance eastwards after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991? And there is also Washington’s role in regime change in Ukraine in 2014? Or even the relentless demonization of Russia linked to the 2016 US presidential election followed by any unwillingness by Washington to negotiate even the most reasonable of Putin’s demands? Fuggedabout it! And also forget about considering whether or not the US has any national interest in going to war over Ukraine. Only Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard seem inclined to challenge the basic premise, which is to raise the question “Since Russia does not threaten us why are we doing this? Do we really want a possible nuclear war over Ukraine?”

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Beware the Ides of March… Russia Defeated and Putin Assassinated? By Finian Cunningham

Posted on March 16, 2022 | 1 comment

It seems like most of the “news” from Ukraine is being written by Hollywood scriptwriters, and there’s only a passing resemblance to any conceivable reality. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

By the end of this month, as the Western media messaging goes, Russia will be defeated by the NATO-backed Ukrainian rag-tag of NeoNazi brigades.

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine takes war to a new level of information warfare. Over the past three weeks, Western mainstream media has unleashed a tsunami of false information and distortion that has swept many people off their feet in disarray.

Appropriately, if not actually intended, on March 15 – the Ides of March no less – we had front pages blaring that Russia’s troops were facing defeat in two weeks. The NATO-backed Kiev regime forces “had Russian troops on the run”, or so we were told.

On the same date – famous for ominous predictions – Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky was reported by Western media as urging Russian soldiers to surrender such was, it was implied, the futile no-win situation for them.

So make a note of that. By the end of this month, as the Western media messaging goes, Russia will be defeated by the NATO-backed Ukrainian rag-tag of NeoNazi brigades. Not only that but as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and American social media corporations have intimated Russian President Vladimir Putin may be assassinated.

The concoction of Shakespeare and Julius Caesar as a way to portray the conflict in Ukraine finds a handy cipher in the form of Ukraine’s Zelensky, the man who formerly was a comedy actor before he became president in 2019. Zelensky last week addressed the British House of Parliament by video to standing ovations, with stirring words channeling the famous English Bard and also wartime hero Winston Churchill. It was political theater written by Zelensky’s handlers in the CIA and MI6.

The actor-politician is pretty convincing too. He has played up his purported Jewish ancestry and Holocaust relatives as a way to undermine Russia’s claims of Neo-Nazi paramilitaries over-running Ukraine. Russia’s information on the Azov Battalion and other fascist formations is corroborated and well-documented by independent sources.

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When History Begins – Russia, Ukraine, and the US, by Sheldon Richman

Posted on March 7, 2022 | 2 comments

As soon as Russian invaded Ukraine all history concerning those two countries was completely erased for most Americans, replaced by Russia bad, Ukraine good. From Sheldon Richmond at antiwar.com:

Contrary to what hypocritical U.S. rulers and their loyal mass media suggest, two propositions can both be – and indeed are – true:

  1. that Russia has grossly, brutally, and criminally mishandled the situation it has faced with respect to Ukraine, and
  2. that the US government since the late 1990s has been entirely responsible for imposing that situation on Russia.

If you want the fine details, you can do no better than to watch my Libertarian Institute colleague Scott Horton’s excellent cataloging of the irresponsible misdeeds of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joseph Biden in this recent lecture. If, after absorbing this shocking record of indisputable facts, you are seething at what the US government has done to squander a historic chance for good relations with Russia, you will be fully justified – and then some. (See also this 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer, the respected “realist” foreign policy analyst at the University of Chicago.)

To appreciate what bipartisan US foreign policy has wrought, think about 1989 when the undreamt-of virtually bloodless dismantling of the Soviet empire began. At that point humanity was on the verge of a new chapter in which the world’s largest nuclear superpowers would no longer confront each other, holding everyone hostage. Think about that, and then learn how the US government blew it deliberately, despite all the warnings that the consequences would be dire.

How so? By kicking the Russian people in the teeth repeatedly in all kinds of ways when they were reeling from seven decades of communism. If the US government’s intent had been to destroy the chance for this historic turn, it couldn’t have done a better job.

Americans have a funny way of thinking that history began the day of the latest crisis. The politicians and media feed this bad habit. So if Russia invades Ukraine, the only explanation is that he’s power-mad, if not just plain mad. The idea that the US might have set the stage isn’t allowed to be entertained. With social-media magnates sucking up to the power elite, this is serious stuff.

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After Setting ‘The Science’ Corporate Press Seeks to Set ‘The History’ on Ukraine, by Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter

Posted on March 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

There will be an official version of everything and anyone who questions or disputes it will be imprisoned or executed. That’s how totalitarianism works. From Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter at libertarianinstitute.org:

The mainstream narrative has shifted. For the past two years, all respectable humans socially distanced, masked up and ‘got vaxxed and boosted.’ However, White House Covid czar Anthony Fauci is slowly being exposed as a false prophet. Lockdowns provided little protection against Covid but threw tens of millions into extreme poverty, and Biden’s first year in office produced similar results as Trump’s last – despite the vaccines being increasingly pushed on Americans under his watch.

As the Covid regime ruptures under the tires of big rig truckers, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has offered a perfect distraction, an opportunity to redirect Americans’ fears and hatred elsewhere. After years of open contempt for the ‘vaccine-hesitant’ and parents unwilling to mask their children outdoors, a fresh target for public opprobrium has emerged in the form of Putin, who – didn’t you hear? – is the ‘New Hitler’ with monomaniacal visions of conquest for all of Europe.

With origins in the Cold War, Americans’ distrust for everything Russia has been steadily inflamed over the past decade by a deluge of hostile media coverage, ramped into overdrive by Moscow’s military action last week. Pent-up rage toward ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘Covid deniers,’ then, has been easily pivoted to those challenging the ‘official’ line on Russia, with mainstream political figures from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton likening such dissent to treason.

The media is abandoning ‘The Science of Covid’ for ‘The History of Russian Aggression’ and regaling readers and viewers with a highly selective accounting of events. Putin is said to be the black hat who invades other countries at will, backs strongmen dictators who abuse their own people and undermines democracies worldwide with an army of hackers, bots and trolls.

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