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Difficult to give a better name to what is happening right now! After Covid-19, Ukraine. And after Ukraine... whatever! It does not matter anymore. It is a way of governing. But first as Dr Malone explains, we need to understand what we are dealing with!
Knowledge
of the theory and practical implementation of mass formation psychology
can and is being used by propagandists, governments and the World
Economic Forum to sway large groups of people to act for the benefit of
the propagandists’ objectives. Although a major crisis of some sort can
be extremely useful for propagandists to take advantage of (war,
hyperinflation or public health for example), these psychological
theories can and often are applied even without strong evidence of a
compelling crisis. For this to be effective, the leader just has to be
sufficiently compelling.
One current example involves the almost
global acceptance of mask use by the general population over the past
two years. Because Fauci and his acolytes at the CDC insisted that masks
work, public acceptance of a very intrusive element into people’s lives
was almost universal. Data demonstrating lack of effectiveness of masks
for preventing spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are largely irrelevant
and either rejected or unable for its existence to be acknowledged by
those who have become hypnotized by the mass formation process. Even the
logic of masking children was accepted without question despite the
clear and compelling evidence of harm.
Paul Joseph Goebbels was
the chief German propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then was promoted
to the Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was truly a
master and arguably the creator of the concept that the State can
control people by introducing propaganda into the news to enable the
State-based control of entire populations. Goebbels’ wicked brilliance
was to exploit racism as a tool to promote German nationalism to the
point of mobilizing and motivating Germany to engage in a globalized war
for political, military and economic dominance. His writings and
speeches on propaganda have been studied by leaders and governments ever
since, much as the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli continue to be a
cornerstone of modern interstate realpolitik. Examples of Goebbels’
insights include the following:
“There was no point in
seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be
converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will
always be "the man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude,
clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the
intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and
psychology.”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained
only for such time as the state can shield the people from the
political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus
becomes vitally important for The State to use all of its powers to
repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus
by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of The State.”
Goebbels
applied the theories behind what is now described by Dr. Mattias Desmet
as mass formation psychosis to practical politics within a
nation-state. Academic writings concerning the formation of a “mass” or
a crowd, otherwise known as mass formation, was an accepted discipline
during the time when Goebbels was developing his insights, with many
scholars including Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), Freud, McDougal, and
Canetti being leading intellectual contributors to his thinking.
Le
Bon, a French social psychologist, is often seen as the founder of the
study of crowd (group) psychology. Le Bon defined a crowd as a group of
individuals united by a common idea, belief, or ideology, and he
believed when an individual becomes part of a crowd, he/she undergoes a
profound psychological transformation. The individual ceases to think
independently and instead relies on the group synthesis of a set of
simplified ideas. According to this theory, crowd formation requires a
set of simplified ideas that the group incorporates, at which point an
individual who has become integrated into the group ceases to
psychologically exist as an independent mind and functionally becomes
hypnotized.
Le Bon maintained that a group typically forms around
an influential idea that unites a number of individuals, and this idea
then propels the group (or mass) to act towards a common goal. However,
he also concluded that these influential ideas are never created by
members of the crowd. Instead, they are most often given to the crowd by
a leader or set of leaders. According to Le Bon, in order for an idea
to unite and influence a crowd, it must first be dumbed down to the
level that the entire crowd can understand it. It must be easily
understood by all within the crowd.
Just to provide a current
example, a scientific discipline could develop a new type of vaccine as a
solution to a public health crisis. That complex research and resulting
technology may have required decades of effort. On average, the crowd
as a whole would be incapable of comprehending such complex theories or
technologies, so socially engineering acceptance of the vaccine (by a
crowd or mass) would require this new concept for vaccination to be
thoroughly simplified before the idea could become the focus of a
hypnotic, single minded belief in the solution (the new type of
vaccine). Le Bon proposed that this is where group leaders come in.
Under the Le Bon model, the leader of a crowd (for example, someone like
Fauci) will enable this process by distilling these complicated
concepts (or technologies) down to a small set of simplified ideas that
the crowd can accept, incorporate and act upon as their own. One of the
most important elements of this is the requirement for a “trusted
leader” to be accepted by the crowd. Once a crowd truly accepts a
leader, it is almost impossible for them to reject that leader, whether
or not the lies that he or she may tell are actually done with “noble”
intent or purpose.
Over the last two years, we have seen clear
evidence that both our government as well as those of Great Britain and
many other western democracies have learned and actively apply the
lessons of Gustave Le Bon and Joseph Goebbels quite well.
Going
back in time, in a book titled Propaganda and Persuasion, historians
Jowett & O'Donnell wrote about Hitler’s basic principles of
propaganda, which were based upon Goebbels work and advice. They are:
Hitler's Basic Principles
(abstracted from Jowett & O'Donnell (Propaganda and Persuasion)).
Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
Give only one side of the argument.
Continuously criticize your opponents.
Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.
In
looking back over the last two years, it is clear that each of these
core principles have been deployed against us, and in particular have
been deployed against “anti vaxxer” physicians, scientists and lawyers
who have been speaking out against the totalitarian practices of western
governments, CDC and WHO-approved narratives (which we now know were
actually yet more propaganda), discussing early treatment, or trying to
examine or explore the data concerning vaccine adverse events or the
logic of universal vaccination. So was my citing Nazi Germany as an
example of “Mass Formation Psychosis” during the Joe Rogan Experience podcast #1757
inappropriate? Seems to me it was absolutely appropriate. I was
actually being quite conservative by not going further with that
example.
Unfortunately, both national and world governmental
organizations have learned more than just the lessons of mass psychosis
and propaganda. World governments and large financial interests have
now united to produce harmonized propaganda through a wide variety of
media outlets, such as big tech, social media, and main stream media.
We have entered a new era of total thought control exerted on a global
scale, which is often referred to as psychological operations or
psy-ops.
Another article from Thierry Meyssan about Ukraine. I suspect he has some sources in the French Secret Services, otherwise he wouldn't know what he knows...
Again, the story is NOT what it seems. Ukraine is a tragedy, but beyond that, it is a war to the finish to control the world. It is simply not possible that China can do nothing much longer. They will have to move sooner or later.
At this stage, they must look with attention at the inefficiencies of the Russian army and how the West dominates the narrative. The risk for them is that Russia get cornered economically. Then it's either a nuclear war or they are next on the chopping block. They know, the Deep State knows. it's 11:59...
Here the ling to the article and other great articles about global geo-strategy. https://www.voltairenet.org/article215879.html
At dawn on February 24, Russian forces entered Ukraine en masse.
According to President Vladimir Putin, speaking on television at the
time, this special operation was the beginning of his country’s response
to "those who aspire to world domination" and who are advancing Nato’s
infrastructure to his country’s doorstep. During this long speech, he
summarized how NATO destroyed Yugoslavia without the authorization of
the United Nations Security Council, even bombing Belgrade in 1999. Then
he perused the destruction of the United States in the Middle East, in
Iraq, Libya and Syria. Only after this lengthy presentation did he
announce that he had sent his troops to Ukraine with the dual mission of
destroying the Nato-linked armed forces and ending the Nato armed
neo-Nazi groups.
Immediately all the member states of the Atlantic Alliance denounced
the occupation of Ukraine as comparable to that of Czechoslovakia during
the "Prague Spring" (1968). According to them, Vladimir Putin’s Russia
had adopted the Soviet Union’s "Brezhnev doctrine". Therefore, the free
world must punish the resurrected "Evil Empire" with "devastating
costs".
The interpretation of the Atlantic Alliance is aimed above all at
depriving Russia of its major argument: although Nato is not a
confederation of equals, but a hierarchical federation under Anglo-Saxon
command, Russia is doing the same. It refuses Ukraine the possibility
of choosing its destiny, just as the Soviets refused it to the
Czechoslovakians. It is true that Nato violates the principles of
sovereignty and equality of states stipulated in the UN Charter, but it
should not be dissolved, unless Russia is also dissolved.
Perhaps, but probably not.
President Putin’s speech was not directed against Ukraine, or even
against the United States, but explicitly against "those who aspire to
world domination", i.e. against the "Straussians" in the US power
structure. It was a real declaration of war against them.
On February 25, President Vladimir Putin called the Kiev leadership
"a clique of drug addicts and neo-Nazis". For the Atlantic media, these
words were those of a mental patient.
During the night of February 25-26, President Volodymyr Zelensky sent
a ceasefire proposal to Russia via the Chinese embassy in Kiev. The
Kremlin immediately responded by setting out its conditions:
arrest of all Nazis (Dmitro Yarosh and the Azov Battalion, etc.)
removal of all street names and
destruction of monuments glorifying Nazi collaborators during the Second
World War (Stepan Bandera, etc.),
laying down of weapons.
The Atlantic press ignored this event, while the rest of the world,
which knew about it, held its breath. The negotiation failed a few hours
later after Washington intervened. Only then would Western public
opinion be informed, but the Russian conditions would always be hidden
from them.
What is President Putin talking about? Who is he fighting against?
And what are the reasons that have made the Atlanticist press blind and
mute?
A brief history of the Straussians
Let us stop for a moment to consider this group, the Straussians,
about whom Westerners know little. They are individuals, all Jewish, but
by no means representative of either American Jews or of Jewish
communities worldwide. They were formed by the German philosopher Leo
Strauss, who took refuge in the United States during the rise of Nazism
and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
According to many accounts, he had formed a small group of faithful
students to whom he gave oral instruction. There is no written record of
this. He explained to them that the only way for the Jews not to fall
victim to a new genocide was to form their own dictatorship. He called
them Hoplites (the soldiers of Sparta) and sent them to disrupt
the courts of his rivals. Finally, he taught them discretion and praised
the "noble lie". Although he died in 1973, his student fraternity
continued.
The Straussians began forming a political group half a century ago,
in 1972. They were all members of Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson’s staff, including Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul
Wolfowitz. They worked closely with a group of Trotskyite journalists,
also Jewish, who had met at the City College of New York and edited the
magazine Commentary. Both groups were closely linked to the CIA,
but also, thanks to Perle’s father-in-law Albert Wohlstetter (the US
military strategist), to the Rand Corporation (the think tank of the
military-industrial complex). Many of these young people intermarried
until they formed a compact group of about 100 people.
Together they drafted and passed the "Jackson-Vanik Amendment" in the
midst of the Watergate crisis (1974), which forced the Soviet Union to
allow the emigration of its Jewish population to Israel under pain of
economic sanctions. This was their founding act.
In 1976, Paul Wolfowitz [1] was one of the architects of the "Team B" charged by President Gerald Ford with assessing the Soviet threat [2].
He issued a delirious report accusing the Soviet Union of preparing to
take over "global hegemony". The Cold War changed its nature: it was no
longer a question of isolating (containment) the USSR, it had to be
stopped in order to save the "free world".
The Straussians and the New York intellectuals, all of whom were on
the left, put themselves at the service of the right-wing president
Ronald Reagan. It is important to understand that these groups are
neither truly left nor right wing. Some members have switched five times
from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and back again. What
is important to them is to infiltrate power, whatever the ideology.
Elliott Abrams became an assistant to the Secretary of State. He led an
operation in Guatemala where he put a dictator in power and experimented
with Israeli Mossad officers on how to create reserves for the Mayan
Indians in order to eventually do the same thing in Israel with the
Palestinian Arabs (the Mayan Resistance earned Rigoberta Menchú her
Nobel Peace Prize). Then Elliott Abrams continued his exactions in El
Salvador and finally in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas with the
Iran-Contra affair. For their part, the New York intellectuals, now
called "Neoconservatives", created the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED) and the U.S. Institute of Peace, a mechanism that organized many
colored revolutions, starting with China with the attempted coup d’état
of Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang and the subsequent repression in Tiananmen
Square.
At the end of George H. Bush’s (the father’s) term of office, Paul
Wolfowitz, then number 3 in the Defense Department, drew up a document [3]
based on a strong idea: after the decomposition of the USSR, the United
States had to prevent the emergence of new rivals, starting with the
European Union. He concluded by advocating the possibility of taking
unilateral action, i.e. to put an end to the concerted action of the
United Nations. Wolfowitz was undoubtedly the designer of "Desert
Storm", the operation to destroy Iraq that allowed the United States to
change the rules of the game and organize a unilateral world. It was
during this time that Straussians valued the concepts of "regime change"
and "democracy promotion."
Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz entered the US
intelligence community through the Consortium for the Study of
Intelligence’s Working Group on Intelligence Reform. They criticized the
assumption that other governments think the same way as the US
government [4]. Then they criticized the lack of political leadership in intelligence, leaving it to wander into
unimportant issues instead of focusing on the essential ones.
Politicizing intelligence is what Wolfowitz had already done with the
B-team and what he would do again in 2002 with the Office of Special
Plans, inventing arguments for new wars against Iraq and Iran (Leo
Strauss’ "noble lie").
The Straussians were removed from power during Bill Clinton’s term.
They then entered the Washington think tanks. In 1992, William Kristol
and Robert Kagan (the husband of Victoria Nuland, widely quoted in the
previous articles) published an article in Foreign Affairs deploring
President Clinton’s timid foreign policy and calling for a renewal of
"benevolent global hegemony" [5].
The following year they founded the Project for a New American Century
(PNAC) at the American Enterprise Institute. Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky
and Paul Wolfowitz were members. All of Leo Strauss’s non-Jewish
admirers, including the Protestant Francis Fukuyama (the author of The End of History), immediately joined them.
In 1994, now an arms dealer, Richard Perle (a.k.a. "the Prince of
Darkness") became an advisor to the President and ex-Nazi Alija
Izetbegović in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was he who brought Osama Bin Laden
and his Arab Legion (the forerunner of Al Qaeda) from Afghanistan to
defend the country. Perle was even a member of the Bosnian delegation at
the signing of the Dayton Accords in Paris.
In 1996, members of the PNAC (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith
and David Wurmser) wrote a study at the Institute for Advanced Strategic
and Political Studies (IASPS) for the new Israeli Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu. This report [6]
advocates the elimination of Yasser Arafat, the annexation of the
Palestinian territories, a war against Iraq and the transfer of
Palestinians there. It was inspired not only by the political theories
of Leo Strauss, but also by those of his friend, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the
founder of "revisionist Zionism", of whom Netanyahu’s father was the
private secretary.
The PNAC raised funds for the candidacy of George W. Bush (the son)
and published before his election its famous report "Rebuilding
America’s Defenses". It called for a Pearl Harbor-like catastrophe that
would throw the American people into a war for global hegemony. These
are exactly the words that PNAC Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
used on September 11, 2001.
«»
Thanks to the 9/11 attacks, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz installed
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in Donald Rumsfeld’s shadow. He played a role
comparable to that of Albert Wohlstetter during the Cold War. He imposed
the strategy of "endless war": the US armed forces should not win any
more wars, but start many of them and keep them going as long as
possible. The aim would be to destroy all the political structures of
the targeted states in order to ruin these populations and deprive them
of any means of defending themselves against the US [7]; a strategy that has been implemented for twenty years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen...
The alliance between the Strausians and the revisionist Zionists was
sealed at a major conference in Jerusalem in 2003, which Israeli
political figures from all sides unfortunately thought they should
attend [8].
It is therefore not surprising that Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s
wife, then ambassador to NATO) intervened to declare a ceasefire in
Lebanon in 2006, allowing the defeated Israeli army not to be pursued by
Hezbollah.
Some individuals, such as Bernard Lewis, have worked with all three
groups, the Straussians, the Neoconservatives and the Revisionist
Zionists. A former British intelligence officer, he acquired both U.S.
and Israeli citizenship, was an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu and a
member of the U.S. National Security Council. Lewis, who halfway through
his career assured that Islam is incompatible with terrorism and that
Arab terrorists are in fact Soviet agents, later changed his mind and
assured with the same aplomb that the religion preaches terrorism. He
invented the strategy of the "clash of civilizations" for the US
National Security Council. The idea was to use cultural differences to
mobilize Muslims against the Orthodox, a concept that was popularized by
his assistant at the Council, Samuel Huntington, except that Huntington
did not present it as a strategy, but as an inevitability that had to
be countered. Huntington began his career as an advisor to the South
African secret service during the aparteheid era, and later wrote a
book, The Soldier and the State [9],
arguing that the military (regular and mercenary) is a special caste,
the only one capable of understanding national security needs.
After the destruction of Iraq, the Straussians were the subject of all sorts of controversies [10].
Everyone is surprised that such a small group, supported by
neoconservative journalists, could have acquired such authority without
having been the subject of a public debate. The U.S. Congress appointed
an Iraq Study Group (the so-called "Baker-Hamilton Commission") to
evaluate its policy. It condemned, without naming it, the
Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy and deplored the hundreds of thousands of
deaths it had caused. But Rumsfeld resigned and the Pentagon inexorably
pursued this strategy, which it had never officially adopted.
In the Obama administration, the Straussians found their way into
Vice President Joe Biden’s cabinet. His National Security Advisor, Jacob
Sullivan, played a central role in organizing the operations against
Libya, Syria and Myanmar, while another of his advisors, Antony Blinken,
focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. It was he who led the
negotiations with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that resulted in the
arrest and imprisonment of key members of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s team in exchange for the nuclear deal.
Regime change in Kiev in 2014 was organized by the Straussians. Vice
President Biden is firmly committed to it. Victoria Nuland came to
support the neo-Nazi elements of the Right Sector and to supervise the
Israeli "Delta" commando [11]
in Maidan Square. A telephone intercept reveals her wish to "fuck the
European Union" (sic) in the tradition of the 1992 Wolfowitz report. But
the leaders of the European Union do not understand and protest only
weakly [12].
"Jake" Sullivan and Antony Blinken placed Vice President Biden’s son,
Hunter, on the board of one of the major gas companies, Burisma
Holdings, despite opposition from Secretary of State John Kerry. Hunter
Biden is unfortunately just a junkie, he would serve as a front for a
gigantic scam at the expense of the Ukrainian people. He would appoint,
under the supervision of Amos Hochstein, several of his stoner friends
to become other front men at the head of various companies and to
plunder Ukrainian gas. These are the people that President Vladimir
Putin called a "clique of drug addicts".
Sullivan and Blinken relied on mafia godfather Ihor Kolomoysky, the
country’s third largest fortune. Although he is Jewish, he financed the
heavyweights of the Right Sector, a neo-Nazi organization that works for
NATO and fought in Maidan Square during the "regime change". Kolomoïsky
took advantage of his connections to take power within the European
Jewish community, but his co-religionists rebelled and ejected him from
international associations. However, he managed to get the head of the
Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, appointed deputy secretary of the Ukrainian
National Security and Defence Council and to get himself appointed
governor of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Both men would be quickly
removed from any political function. It was their group that President
Vladimir Putin called a "clique of neo-Nazis."
In 2017, Antony Blinken founded WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm
that brought together former senior Obama administration officials and
many Straussians. The firm’s business is extremely low-key. It uses the
political connections of its employees to make money; what anywhere else
would be called corruption.
The Straussians are still the same as ever
Since Joe Biden returned to the White House, this time as President
of the United States, the Straussians have been running the show. "Jake"
Sullivan is National Security Advisor, while Antony Blinken is
Secretary of State with Victoria Nuland at his side. As I have reported
in previous articles, she went to Moscow in October 2021 and threatens
to crush Russia’s economy if it ded not comply. This was the beginning
of the current crisis.
Undersecretary of State Nuland resurrected Dmitro Yarosh and imposed
him on President Zelinsky, a television actor protected by Ihor
Kolomoysky. On November 2, 2021, he appointed him special advisor to the
head of the army, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The latter, a true
democrat, rebelled at first and finally accepted. When questioned by the
press about this astonishing duo, he refused to answer and mentioned a
question of national security. Yarosh gave his full support to the
"white führer", Colonel Andrey Biletsky, and his Azov Battalion. This
copy of the SS Das Reich division has been staffed since the summer of 2021 by American mercenaries formerly from Blackwater [13].
Having identified the Straussians, we must admit that Russia’s
ambition is understandable, even desirable. To rid the world of the
Straussians would be to do justice to the million or more deaths they
have caused and to save those they are about to kill. Whether this
intervention in Ukraine is the right way remains to be seen.
In any case, if the responsibility for the current events lies with
the Straussians, all those who let them act without flinching also have a
responsibility. Starting with Germany and France, who signed the Minsk
Agreements seven years ago and did nothing to ensure that they were
implemented, and then with the fifty or so states that signed the OSCE
declarations prohibiting the extension of Nato east of the Oder-Neisse
line and did nothing. Only Israel, which has just got rid of the
revisionist Zionists, has expressed a nuanced position on these events.
This is one of the lessons of this crisis: democratically governed
peoples are responsible for the decisions taken for a long time by their
leaders and maintained after alternations in power.
Thierry Meyssan is clearly pro-Russian, but there is so much anti-Russian propaganda in the West that I believe it is important to offer another side of the conflict in Ukraine.
Ukraine is still the victim, but not of Russia! It is the victim of the efforts of NATO to weaken and eventually dismember Russia as Thierry Meyssan explains.
Diplomacy would have consisted in accepting a neutral position for Ukraine including a trade agreement with Europe but certainly not intransigence on the "freedom" to join NATO.
The Americans must understand this so it is amazing to see how they keep pushing the Russians, knowing that eventually all these efforts consolidate the anti-Western axis of Russia, China and Iran. Other developing countries think no less but they just don't have the economic power to get their voice heard.
A few hours ago the Russian army conducted airstrikes against the
sector of the Ukrainian armed forces that is linked to NATO. In 3 hours,
the Russian army wiped out the entire Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses
and will continue its operation by next attacking the Azov battalion and
all the Nazi officials that the United States and the United Kingdom
introduced into the Ukrainian government.
This should be good news for everyone, but here, in France, this
operation is being portrayed as an invasion against Ukraine and as the
forthcoming arrival of the Russian bear in Paris. So don’t be fooled.
because there are very important elements that we are not being told.
Only those aspects referring directly to Ukraine are reported on, but
the general context is overlooked. And that context proves Russia
right, as I am going to explain to you.
In October, Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State, traveled to
Russia and, in Moscow, she threatened to crush the Russian economy and
demanded the resignation of President Vladimir Putin. But you never
heard about it. Look it up online. It is very easy to verify.
Later, [Victoria Nuland] went to Ukraine and ushered in Dimitro
Yarosh, a NATO agent renowned for having set up – in 2007– the great
Mariupol meeting [in Ukraine] bringing together European Nazi
organizations and jihadists from all parts to go to fight against Russia
in Chechnya. It was the same Dimitro Yarosh who – in 2014 – backed by
his troops from the Right Sector [Pravy Sektor], organized the Maidan
Square events and the “regime change” in Ukraine. He was later injured
and disappeared for a while. Now he’s back.
So [Victoria Nuland] installed Dimitro Yarosh as special adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army [1],
who is a perfectly democratic and normal man, but now he has been
flanked by this character [Dimitro Yarosh]. And now this character has
incorporated the Azov battalion – which is a truly Nazi group, with Nazi
insignia and everything and which is led by the “White Fuhrer”
[Andrey Biletsky] [2] – into the Ukrainian army.
This is news that should have come as a shock to all of us ... but the media in France never reported on it.
So the Russians planned their response.
In December, they sent the United States a draft proposal for a
treaty aiming to guarantee peace. Therein, the United States is urged to
respect International Law, as it was elaborated over time, first by the
government of France and the imperial government of the Russian Tsar –
in 1899, at the Hague Conference – and later formulated in the United
Nations Charter –in 1945– and by the Third World countries –in 1955,
with the Bandung Principles.
This treaty is obviously unacceptable to the United States because
for 70 years the United States has violated International Law on a daily
basis and pretends to substitute it with a set of rules of its own,
self-proclaiming, along with its allies, to stand for the “international
community”. Well... [those countries] are not even half of the world’s
population but they claim to run the world.
The Russians are calling first and foremost for NATO to withdraw from
the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which should never have
joined that bloc if the Potsdam Conference agreements had been respected
– in 1945, at the end of World War II – which stipulated that US forces
could only establish a presence west of the Oder-Neisse border, which
separates Poland and Germany. Later, at the time of Germany’s
reunification, France was very insistent that NATO should not expand to
the east and there was even a long debate as to whether NATO forces
would be allowed in the eastern part of Germany. – the former GDR– or be
concentrated in the western part – the then Federal Republic of
Germany.
Finally there was an agreement – was endorsed by France – providing
that the former East Germany would become part of NATO, within the
framework of the reunification, but that there would be no expansion of
NATO beyond.
And this was repeated several times, first within the OSCE – the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, born from the
Helsinki agreements – in which 57 states signed 2 declarations.
Fifty-seven States! All the States of the European continent and even
others since, for example, the United States and Canada are also
members!
Firstly, the OSCE recognized, in the 1999 Istanbul Declaration and in
the 2010 Astana Declaration, that each State is free to sign on to the
military alliance of its choice – France, for example, is a member of
the North Atlantic Treaty, allying herself to the United States.
But, secondly, it was also recognized that no State, absolutely no
State!, can guarantee its security to the detriment of the security of
others. And, from this point of view, joining NATO is illegal, yes
illegal! Because NATO is not a confederation, in which everyone has
equal status; it is a federation under the command of the United States
and the United Kingdom. making the other States vassals of the United
States and the United Kingdom.
And France, unfortunately, returned to NATO, with [President] Nicolas
Sarkozy, from which it had withdrawn under General de Gaulle, in 1966.
General de Gaulle had expelled from French territory all occupation
forces of the United States… that was the term he used, “occupation
forces of the United States”. It’s not me who says it! But we [the
French] have once again willingly embraced our vassalage to the United
States.
So, Russia has called for the withdrawal of NATO forces from the
entire territory of Central and Eastern Europe. They can still remain
signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty. That is not the problem.
And International Law will also have to be enforced in Western
Europe. International Law, inter alia, prohibits the installation of
nuclear weapons in countries that do not possess such weapons
themselves.
So, for example, what are there US [nuclear] weapons doing in Italy
or in the Netherlands? It is an outright violation of international law.
And that will have to end.
We must realize that the United States is no longer the world’s leading economic power. It is now China.
And it is no longer the first military power in the world. It is
Russia. During the war in Syria – a war that NATO forces lost – Russia
tested all kinds of new weapons that NATO cannot compete with. Only last
weekend Russia showed that it has the capability to nuclearly destroy
any target anywhere in the world without being intercepted because – as
demonstrated – it deploys hypersonic launchers from submarines, from
surface vessels, from bomber planes and mobile ground units. She can
fire those launchers and destroy anything she wants anywhere in the
world. It is impossible to deflect them because they move too fast. At
the moment there is no way they can be intercepted. In minutes she can
destroy whatever she wants and we should wonder that would happen if one
day Russia may have to use such weapons against the Pentagon, the White
House or the United States Congress.
I don’t say that as a provocation. What I am saying is that if Russia
were to do so, the United States would not have time to intercept them,
it would not even have time to use its own nuclear weapons.
Let’s take things seriously and respect International Law. It’s what
we all want. And it is in everyone’s interest. So bravo for what Russia
just did today!
This a very long but essential article about the sorry propaganda state of the News Media in the West. My take on this is that it is beyond repair. The ghost of Tomas de Torquemada, grand inquisitor of Spain, must be steering in his grave!
In the weeks leading up
to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible
dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were
baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even
considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily
involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on
the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on
the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and
the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany
it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in
history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions
spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous
possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.
Less than a week into
this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media's most beloved
members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American
soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would
directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which
disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that
the two countries with by far the planet's largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.
Kinzinger's fantasy
that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational
calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives
about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave
of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically
— and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was
not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before
Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution's Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia.” The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”
Having
the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an
indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober
reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when
“Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert Sunday, reminding the
world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after
complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but
it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.
There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not
to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I
discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that
arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven,
dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as
war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least
once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it
manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.
As
I examined in the first part of that video discussion, war propaganda
stimulates the most powerful aspects of our psyche, our subconscious,
our instinctive drives. It causes us, by design, to abandon reason. It
provokes a surge in tribalism, jingoism, moral righteousness and
emotionalism: all powerful drives embedded through millennia of
evolution. The more unity that emerges in support of an overarching
moral narrative, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to critically
evaluate it. The more closed the propaganda system is — either because
any dissent from it is excluded by brute censorship or so effectively
demonized through accusations of treason and disloyalty — the more
difficult it is for anyone, all of us, even to recognize one is in the middle of it.
When
critical faculties are deliberately turned off based on a belief that
absolute moral certainty has been attained, the parts of our brain armed
with the capacity of reason are disabled. That is why the leading
anti-Russia hawks such as former Obama Ambassador Michael McFaul and
others are demanding
that no “Putin propagandists” (meaning anyone who diverges from his
views of the conflict) even be permitted a platform, and why many are
angry that Facebook has not gone far enough by banning many Russian media outlets from advertising or being monetized. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), using the now-standard tactic of government officials dictating to social media companies which content they should and should not allow, announced on Saturday:
“I'm concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I
wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the
spread of Russian propaganda.” Suppressing any divergent views or at
least conditioning the population to ignore them as treasonous is how
propagandistic systems remain strong.
It is genuinely hard to
overstate how overwhelming the unity and consensus in U.S. political and
media circles is. It is as close to a unanimous and dissent-free
discourse as anything in memory, certainly since the days following
9/11. Marco Rubio sounds exactly like Bernie Sanders, and Lindsay Graham
has no even minimal divergence from Nancy Pelosi. Every word broadcast
on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict
perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon's messaging. And U.S. public
opinion has consequently undergone a radical and rapid change; while
recent polling had shown large majorities of Americans opposed to any
major U.S. role in Ukraine, a new Gallup poll
released on Friday found that “52% of Americans see the conflict
between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests”
with almost no partisan division (56% of Republicans and 61% of
Democrats), while “85% of Americans now view [Russia] unfavorably while
15% have a positive opinion of it.”
The
purpose of these points, and indeed of this article, is not to persuade
anyone that they have formed moral, geopolitical and strategic views
about Russia and Ukraine that are inaccurate. It is, instead, to
highlight what a radically closed and homogenized information system
most Americans are consuming. No matter how convinced one is of the
righteousness of one's views on any topic, there should still be a
wariness about how easily that righteousness can be exploited to ensure
that no dissent is considered or even heard, an awareness of how often
such overwhelming societal consensus is manipulated to lead one to
believe untrue claims and embrace horribly misguided responses.
To
believe that this is a conflict of pure Good versus pure Evil, that
Putin bears all blame for the conflict and the U.S., the West, and
Ukraine bear none, and that the only way to understand this conflict is
through the prism of war criminality and aggression only takes one so
far. Such beliefs have limited utility in deciding optimal U.S. behavior
and sorting truth from fiction even if they are entirely correct — just
as the belief that 9/11 was a moral atrocity and Saddam (or Gaddafi or
Assad) was a barbaric tyrant only took one so far. Even with those moral
convictions firmly in place, there are still a wide range of vital
geopolitical and factual questions that must be considered and freely
debated, including:
The severe dangers of unintended escalation with greater U.S. involvement and confrontation toward Russia;
The
mammoth instability and risks that would be created by collapsing the
Russian economy and/or forcing Putin from power, leaving the world's
largest or second-largest nuclear stockpile to a very uncertain fate;
The ongoing validity of Obama's long-standing view of Ukraine (echoed by Trump), which persisted even after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 following a referendum, that Ukraine is of vital interest only to Russia and not the U.S., and the U.S. should never risk war with Russia over it;
The
bizarre way in which it has become completely taboo and laughable to
suggest that NATO expansion to the Russian border and threats to offer
Ukraine membership is deeply and genuinely threatening not just to Putin
but all Russians, even though that warning has emanated for years from
top U.S. officials such as Biden's current CIA Director William Burns as well as scholars across the political spectrum, including the right-wing realist John Mearsheimer to the leftist Noam Chomsky.
The clearly valid questions regarding the actual U.S intentions concerning Ukraine: i.e.,
that a noble, selfless and benevolent American desire to protect a
fledgling democracy against a despotic aggressor may not be the
predominant goal. Perhaps it is instead to revitalize support for
American imperialism and intervention, as well as faith in and gratitude
for the U.S. security and military state (the Eurasia Group's Ian
Bremmer suggested this week
that this is the principal outcome in the West of the current
conflict). Or the goal is the elevation of Russia as a vital and grave
threat to the U.S. (the above polling data suggests this is already
happening) that will feed weapons purchases and defense and intelligence
budgets for years to come. Or one might see a desire to harm Russia as
vengeance for the perception that Putin helped defeat Hillary Clinton
and elected Donald Trump (that the U.S. is using Ukraine to “fight
Russia over there” was explicitly stated by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Or
perhaps the goal is not to “save and protect” Ukraine at all, but to
sacrifice it by turning it into a new Afghanistan, where the U.S. arms a
Ukrainian insurgency to ensure that Russia remains stuck in Ukraine
fighting and destroying it for years (this scenario was very
compellingly laid out in one of the best analyses of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, by Niccolo Soldo, which I cannot recommend highly enough).
Jeff
Rogg, historian of U.S. intelligence and an assistant professor in the
Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at the Citadel, wrote in TheLA Timesthat
the CIA has already been training, funding and arming a Ukrainian
insurgency, speculating that the model may be the CIA's backing of the
Mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan that morphed into Al Qaeda, with
the goal being “to weaken Russia over the course of a long insurgency
that will undoubtedly cost as many Ukrainian lives as Russian lives, if
not more."
Again, no matter how certain one is about
their moral conclusions about this war, these are urgent questions that
are not resolved or even necessarily informed by the moral and emotional
investment in a particular narrative. Yet when one is trapped inside a
system of a complete consensus upheld by a ceaseless wave of reinforcing
propaganda, and when any questioning or dissent at all is tantamount to
treason or “siding with the enemy,” there is no space for such
discussions to occur, especially within our minds. When one is
coerced — through emotional tactics and societal inventive — to adhere
only to one script, nothing that is outside of that script can be
entertained. And that is all by design.
Besides
9/11 and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Americans have been
subjected to numerous spates of war propaganda, including in 2011 when
then-President Obama finally agreed
to order the U.S. to participate in a France/UK-led NATO regime change
operation in Libya, as well as throughout the Obama and early Trump
years when the CIA was fighting a clandestine and ultimately failed
regime change war in Syria, on the same side as Al-Qaeda, to overthrow
Bashar al-Assad. In both instances, government/media disinformation and
emotional manipulation were pervasive, as it is in every war. But those
episodes were not even in the same universe of intensity and ubiquity as
what is happening now and what happened after 9/11 — and that matters a
great deal for understanding why so many are vulnerable to the
machinations of war propaganda without even realizing they are affected
by it.
One realization I had for the first time during Russiagate
was that history may endlessly repeat itself, but those who have not
lived through any such history or paid attention to it previously will
not know about it and thus remain most susceptible to revisionism or
other tactics of deceit. When Russiagate was first elevated as a major
2016 campaign issue — through a Clinton campaign commercial
filled with dark and sinister music and innuendo masquerading as
“questions” about the relationship between Trump and the Kremlin — I had
assumed when writing about it for the first time
that most Americans, especially those on the left taught to believe
that McCarthyism was one of the darkest moments for civil liberties,
would instantly understand how aggressively the CIA and FBI disseminate
disinformation, how servile corporate media outlets are to those
security state agencies, how neocons are always found at the center of
such manipulative tactics, and how potent this sort of propaganda is:
creating a foreign villain said to be of unparalleled evil or at least
evil not seen since Hitler, and then claiming that one's political
adversaries are enthralled or captive to them. We have witnessed
countless identical cycles throughout U.S history.
But I also
quickly realized that millions of Americans — either due to age or
previous political indifference — began paying attention to politics for
the first time in 2016 due to fear of Trump, and thus knew little to
nothing about anything that preceded it. Such people had no defenses
against the propaganda narrative and deceitful tactics because, for
them, it was all new. They had never experienced it before and thus had
no concept of who they were applauding and how such official
government/media disinformation campaigns are constructed. Each
generation is thus easily programmed and exploited by the same
propaganda systems, no matter how discredited they were previously.
Although such episodes are common,
one has to travel back to the period of 2001-03, following the 9/11
attack on U.S. soil, and through the invasion of Iraq in order to find
an event that competes with the current moment in terms of emotional
intensity and lockstep messaging throughout the West. Comparing that
historical episode to now is striking, because the narrative themes
deployed then are identical to those now; the very same people who led
the construction of that narrative and accompanying rhetorical tactics
are the ones playing a similar role now; and the reaction that these
themes trigger are virtually indistinguishable.
Many who lived
through the enduring trauma and mass rage of 9/11 as an adult need no
reminder of what it was like and what it consisted of. But millions of
Americans now focused on Ukraine did not live through that. And for many
who did, they have, with the passage of two decades, revised or now
misremember many of the important details of what took place. It is thus
worthwhile to recall the broad strokes of what we were conditioned to
believe to see how closely it tracks the consensus framework now.
Both
the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq were cast as clear Manichean
battles: one of absolute Good fighting absolute Evil. That framework was
largely justified through its companion prism: the subsequent War on
Terror and specific wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) represented the
forces of freedom and democracy (the U.S. and its allies) defending
itself against despotism and mad, primitive barbarism. We were attacked
not because of decades of intervention and aggression in their part of
the world but because they hated us for our freedom. That was all one needed to know: it was a war between enlightened democrats and psychotic savages.
As
a result no nuance was permitted. How can there be room for nuance or
even questioning when such clear moral lines emerge? A binary framework
was thus imposed: “Either you are with us or you are with the
terrorists,” decreed
President George W. Bush in his speech to the Joint Session of Congress
on September 20, 2001. Anyone questioning or disputing any part of the
narrative or any of the U.S. policies championed in its name stood automatically accused
of treason or being on the side of The Terrorists. David Frum, fresh
off his job as a White House speechwriter penning Bush's war speeches,
in which Bush proclaimed the U.S. was facing an “Axis of Evil,” published a 2003 article in National Review about
right-wing opponents of the invasion of Iraq aptly titled: “Unpatriotic
Conservatives.” Go look how cheaply and easily people were accused of
being on the side of The Terrorists or traitors for the slightest
deviation from the dominant narrative.
Like
all effective propaganda, the consensus assertions about 9/11 and Iraq
had a touchstone to the truth. Indeed, some of the fundamental moral
claims were true. The civilian-targeting 9/11 attack was a moral
atrocity, and the Taliban and Saddam really were barbaric despots
(including when the U.S. had previously supported and funded
them). But those moral claims only took one so far: specifically, they
did not take one very far at all. Many who enthusiastically embraced
those moral propositions ended up also embracing numerous falsehoods
emanating from the U.S. Government and loyal media outlets, as well as
supporting countless responses that were both morally unjustified and
strategically unwise. Polls at the start of the Iraq War showed large majorities in favor of and believing outright falsehoods (such as that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attack), while polls years later revealed
a “huge majority” views the invasion as a mistake. Similarly, it is now
commonplace to hear once-unquestioned policies — from mass NSA spying,
to lawless detention, to empowering the CIA to torture, to placing blind
faith in claims from intelligence agencies — be declared major mistakes
by those who most vocally cheerlead those positions in the early years
of the War on Terror.
In other words, correctly apprehending key
moral dimensions to the conflict provided no immunity against being
propagandized and misled. If anything, the contrary was true: it was
precisely that moral zeal that enabled so many people to get so carried
away, to be so vulnerable to having their (often-valid) emotions of rage
and moral revulsion misdirected into believing falsehoods and cheering
for moral atrocities in the name of vengeance or righteous justice. That
moral righteousness crowded out the capacity to reason and think
critically and unified huge numbers of Americans into herd behavior and
group-think that led them to many conclusions which, two decades later,
they recognize as wrong.
It should not be difficult, even for
those who did not live through those events but who can now look back at
what happened, to see the overwhelming similarities between then and
now. The role of bin Laden and Saddam — as unhinged, mentally unwell,
unrepentant mass murderers and despots, the personification of pure evil
— is now occupied by Putin. “Putin is evil. Every American watching
what’s happening in Ukraine should know that,” instructed
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of the author of the virtually
identical 9/11 and Iraq morality scripts. Conversely, the U.S. and its
allies are the blame-free, morally upright spreaders of freedom,
defenders of democracy and faithfully adhering to a rules-based
international order.
This exact framework remains in place; only
the parties have changed. Now, anyone questioning this narrative in
whole or in part, or disputing any of the factual claims being made by
the West, or questioning the wisdom or justice of the role the U.S. is
playing, is instantly deemed not “on the side of the terrorists" but "on the side of Russia”:
either for corrupt monetary reasons or long-hidden and hard-to-explain
ideological sympathy for the Kremlin. “There is no excuse for praising
or appeasing Putin,” announced
Rep. Cheney, by which — like her father before her and McFaul now — she
means anyone deviating in any way from the full panoply of U.S.
assertions and responses. Wyoming's vintage neocon also instantly
applied this accusatory treason matrix to former President Trump, arguing that he “aids our enemies” and his “interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America."
Everyone
watching this week-long mauling of dissenters understood the messaging
and incentives: either get on board or stay silent lest you be similarly
vilified. And that, in turn, meant there were fewer and fewer people
willing to publicly question prevailing narratives, which made it in
turn far more difficult for anyone else to separate themselves from
unified group-think.
One instrument of propaganda that did not
exist in 2003 but most certainly does now is social media, and it is
hard to overstate how much it is exacerbating all of these pathologies
of propaganda. The endless flood of morally righteous messaging, the
hunting down of and subsequent mass-attacks on heretics, the barrage of
pleasing-but-false stories of bravery and treachery, leave one close to
helpless to sort truth from fiction, emotionally manipulative fairy
tales from critically scrutinized confirmation. It is hardly novel to
observe that social media fosters group-think and in-group dynamics more
than virtually any other prior innovation, and it is unsurprising that
it has intensified all of these processes.
Another new factor
separating the aftermath of 9/11 from the current moment is Russiagate.
Starting in mid-2016, the Washington political and media class was
obsessed with convincing Americans to view Russia as a grave threat to
them and their lives. They created a climate in Washington in which any
attempts to forge better relations with the Kremlin or even to open
dialogue with Russian diplomats and even just ordinary Russian nationals
was depicted as inherently suspect if not criminal. All of that primed
American political culture to burst with contempt and rage toward
Russia, and once they invaded Ukraine, virtually no effort was needed to
direct that long-brewing hostility into an uncontrolled quest for
vengeance and destruction.
That is why it is anything
but surprising that incredibly dangerous proposals like the one by Rep.
Kizinger for deployment of the U.S. military to Ukraine have emerged so
quickly. This orgy in high dungeon of war propaganda, moral
righteousness, and a constant flow of disinformation produces a form of
collective hysteria and moral panic. In his 1931 novel Brave New World,
Aldous Huxley perfectly described what happens to humans and our
reasoning process when we are subsumed by crowd sentiments and dynamics:
Groups
are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who
form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable
of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled
in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for
moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they
cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very
excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective
responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm
and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had
swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of
what I have called "herd-poisoning." Like alcohol, herd-poison is an
active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from
responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic,
animal mindlessness.
We have seen similar outbreaks
many times over the last couple of decades, but nothing produces it more
assuredly than war sentiments and the tribal loyalties that accompany
them. And nothing exacerbates it like the day-long doom scrolling
through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which so much of the world is
currently doing. Social media platforms, by design, enable one to block
out all unpleasant information or dissident voices and only feed off
content and claims that validate what they wish to believe.
Kinzinger's
call for a US-imposed no-fly zone is far from the only unhinged
assertion or claim spewing forth from the U.S. opinion-shaping class. We
are also witnessing a radical increase in familiar authoritarian
proposals coming from U.S. politicians. Two other members of Congress
who are most beloved by the media, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Rep.
Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), suggested
that all Russians should be immediately deported from the U.S.,
including Russian students studying at American universities. The
rationale is similar to the one that drove FDR's notorious World War II
internment of all people of Japanese descent — citizens or immigrants —
in camps: namely, in times of war, all people who come from the villain
or enemy country deserve punishment or should be regarded as suspect. A Washington Post columnist, Henry Olsen, proposed
banning all Russia athletes from entering the U.S.: “No Russian NHL,
football, or tennis players so long as the war and claims on Ukrainian
territory exist.”
Sen.
Mike Lee (R-UT), long a vocal advocate of requiring congressional
approval for the deployment by the president of military forces to war
zones, argued on Friday
that Biden's troop movements to Eastern Europe constitute war decisions
that constitutionally necessitate Congressional approval. “President
Biden’s unilateral deployment of our Armed Forces to the European
theater, where we now know they are in imminent hostilities, triggers
the War Powers Act, necessitating that the President report to Congress
within 48 hours,” he said. Sen. Lee added: “The Constitution requires
that Congress must vote to authorize any use of our Armed Forces in
conflict.”
For this simple and basic invocation of Constitutional
principles, Lee was widely vilified as a traitor and Russian agent. “Are
you running for Senator of Moscow? Because that’s where you belong,”
one Democratic Congressional candidate, the self-declared socialist and
leftist Joey Palimeno (D-GA), rhetorically asked. Now-perennial independent candidate Evan McMullin, formerly a CIA operative in Syria, dubbed Lee
“Moscow Mike” for having raised this constitutional point, claiming he
did so not out of conviction but “to distract from the fact that he
traveled to Russia and brazenly appeased Vladimir Putin for his own
political gain.”
Other than calling Lee a paid Russian agent and traitor,
the primary response was the invocation of Bush/Cheney's broad Article
II executive power theories to insist that the president has the
unfettered right to order troop deployments except to an active war zone
— as if the possibility of engaging Russian forces was not a primary
motive for these deployments. Indeed, the Pentagon itself said
the troop deployments were to ensure the troops “will be ready if
called upon to participate in the NATO Response Force” and that “some of
those U.S. personnel may also be called upon to participate in any
unilateral actions the U.S. may undertake." Even if one disagrees with
Lee's broad view of the War Powers Act and the need for Congress to
approve any decisions by the president that may embroil the country in a
dangerous war, that Lee is a Kremlin agent and a traitor to his country merely
for advocating a role for Congress in these highly consequential
decisions reflects how intolerant and dissent-prohibiting the climate
has already become.
Disinformation and utter hoaxes are now being aggressively spread as well. Both Rep. Kinzinger and Rep. Swalwell ratified and spread
the story of the so-called "Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot
said to have single-handedly shot down six Russian planes. Tales and
memes commemorating his heroism viralized on social media, ultimately
ratified by these members of Congress and other prominent voices. The
problem? It is a complete hoax and scam,
concocted through a combination of deep fake videos based on images
from a popular video game. Yet to date, few who have spread this fraud
have retracted it, while censorship-happy Big Tech corporations have
permitted most of these fraudulent posts to remain without a
disinformation label on it. We are absolutely at the point — even as
demands escalate for systematic censorship by Big Tech of any so-called
“pro-Russian” voices — where disinformation and fake news are considered
noble provided they advance a pro-Ukrainian narrative.
Western
media outlets have also fully embraced their role as war propagandists.
They affirm any story provided it advances pro-Ukrainian propaganda
without having the slightest idea whether it is true. A charming and
inspiring story about a small group of Ukrainian soldiers guarding an
installation in a Black Sea island went wildly viral on Saturday and
ultimately was affirmed as truth by multiple major
Western news outlets. A Russian warship demanded they surrender and,
instead, they responded by replying: “fuck you, Russian warship,” their
heroic last words before dying while fighting. Ukraine said
“it will posthumously honour a group of Ukrainian border guards who
were killed defending a tiny island in the Black Sea during a multi-pronged Russian invasion.” Yet there is no evidence at all that they died; the Russian government claims they surrendered, and the Ukrainian military subsequently acknowledged the same possibility.
Obviously,
neither the Russian nor Ukrainian versions should be accepted as true
without evidence, but the original, pleasing Ukrainian version should
not either. The same is true of:
the equally inspiring story that the Ukrainian military shot down two Russian Il-76s transport plains (no evidence);
a
Russian tank purposely and randomly ran over a civilian car (the video
suggests a possible accident and, more importantly, subsequent news accountsacknowledged: “it wasn’t immediately clear if the armored vehicle was Russian or Ukrainian hardware, or when this crash took place”);
a mega-viral thread
from a member of the EU Parliament claiming Russian oligarchs and Putin
were screaming at each other in a bunker in desperation (pronounced “likely disinfo” by the US-intel-friendly and vehemently anti-Russia site Bellingcat);
But we are way past
the point where anyone cares about what is or is not factually true,
including corporate outlets. Any war propaganda — videos, photos,
unverified social media posts — that is designed to tug on Western
heartstrings for Ukrainians or appear to cast them as brave and noble
resistance fighters, or Russians as barbaric but failing mass murderers
gets mindlessly spread all over without the slightest concern for
whether it is true. To be on social media or to read coverage from
Western news outlets is to place yourself into a relentless vortex or
single-minded, dissent-free war propaganda. Indeed, some of the
above-referenced stories may turn out to be true, but spreading them
before there is any evidence of them is beyond reckless, especially for
media outlets whose role is supposed to be the opposite of
propagandists.
None of this means the views you may have formed
about the war in Ukraine are right or wrong. It is of course possible
that the Western consensus is the overwhelmingly accurate one and that
the moral framework that has been embraced is the correct prism for
understanding this conflict. All sides in war wield propaganda, and that
certainly includes the Russians and their allies as well. This article
is not intended to urge the adoption of one viewpoint or the other.
It
is, instead, intended to urge the recognition of what the effects of
being immersed in one-sided, intense and highly emotionalized war
propaganda are — effects on your thinking, your reasoning, your
willingness to endorse claims or support policies, your comfort with
having dissent either banished or inherently legitimized. Precisely
because this propaganda has been cultivated over centuries to so
powerfully and adeptly manipulate our most visceral reactions, it is
something to be resisted even if — perhaps especially if — it is coming
from the side or viewpoint you support.
Zelensky has proven to be the unlikely Braveheart of Ukraine against the Russian invaders, but who will be our Braveheart to defend our freedom against the stealth encroachment of our not so benevolent leaders?
More than science, it is our society which is dying and almost everything it stands for. Outrage for Kiev (rightfully) but not for Baghdad? For Syria but not for Saudi Arabia? Not to worry, very soon, we will all do our share against global warming by not being able to afford gas and electricity.
To my opinion, we are heading straight into a second Middle Age. A Middle Age 2.0, more technological but just as doctrinaire and narrow minded as the first one. Where the pontiffs of a new religion will decide what is "true" as they did for Covid. The virus crisis was just the appetizer. Now, with the wars coming, the main dish will be served. And yes, unfortunately: Science is dead! But with canons in the background and empty bellies, who will care?
I think so. I asked to give a talk about COVID at
MIT, but they couldn’t find a faculty member to sponsor it. Apparently
they don’t allow viewpoints that challenge the mainstream narrative.
Twenty four years ago (in 1998), I donated $2.5M to MIT. They named the auditorium in the EECS building named in my honor: the Kirsch Auditorium, Room 32-123.
I’ve never asked to speak in the auditorium until now.
I wanted to give a talk at MIT about what the science is telling us
about the COVID vaccines and mask wearing and how science is being
censored.
Am I a misinformation superspreader? Or is MIT one by publishing their article?
Read my rebuttal
and decide for yourself who is telling the truth. There were 652
comments, nearly all of them suggesting I sue MIT for defamation.
They couldn’t find a member of the MIT faculty who was willing to
sponsor me to give a talk that would examine the possibility that MIT
made a serious mistake that jeopardizes the lives of students, staff,
and faculty
MIT requires a faculty sponsor for all talks and they said they couldn’t find one willing to sponsor my talk.
Therefore, students will not have the opportunity to consider that
there may be an alternate hypothesis that better fits the evidence on
the table.
I had always believed that MIT was above politics, but it is clear I was mistaken in that belief.
Science is about objectively looking at the data and making hypotheses that fit the data
My claim is important and relevant to everyone at MIT. I claim that MIT made a serious mistake in mandating vaccines for students, staff, and faculty.
As Robert Malone has often said, “where there is risk, there must be
choice.” The evidence couldn’t be more clear that the COVID vaccines are
the most deadly vaccines in human history.
Shouldn’t this be a topic of great interest and relevance?
Or does science dictate that anyone with opposing views must be silenced and not given a platform to speak?
I have a message to the MIT faculty: you are on the wrong side of history.
There is ample evidence on the table now from credible sources that cannot be explained if the vaccines are safe.
This is why nobody will debate us. I even offered $1M to incentivize people to show up at the debate table. No takers. So I raised it to a “name your price” offer. Still no takers.
The MIT faculty doesn’t want to hear any of it. They will not let the MIT students hear any of it either.
The safety and efficacy of the vaccines shall not be questioned. The MIT faculty will not allow it.
That’s not how science is supposed to work.
Is there a single member of the MIT faculty who is the least bit
curious that there might be another side of the narrative that is being
unfairly suppressed?
Why doesn’t anyone want to know the answer to these questions?
There are many important questions that any critical thinker would have that need to be explored:
Why did all these people suddenly go “rogue” at the same time and adopt the same position on the evidence?
If the vaccines are safe and effective, why do the manufacturers need liability protection?
How does MIT explain over 200,000 excess deaths in the VAERS system? If it wasn’t the vaccine, what caused the spike?
How can there be 4 myocarditis cases at the Monte Vista Christian School
after the vaccines rolled out? There are fewer than 400 vaccinated
teenage boys at that school so that’s a rate of 1 in 100 which is more
than 50 times higher than what the CDC claims.
Why won’t the CDC compute the underreporting factor in VAERS? Did
MIT do this before mandating the vaccine? What URF did MIT calculate and
why was this never disclosed?
What’s in the vials? Why isn’t anyone allowed to analyze what’s in them? Is the gene sequencing the same in all the vials?
![Kai von Fintel on Twitter: "The audience for Paul Kiparsky's keynote at #NELS50 is gathering. https://t.co/4Iaa8JXj4P" / Twitter](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff7fe6ace-350b-4afe-93cd-50f40aa44405_1200x900.jpeg "Kai von Fintel on Twitter: "The audience for Paul Kiparsky's keynote at #NELS50 is gathering. https://t.co/4Iaa8JXj4P" / Twitter")
