Tag Archives: propaganda

PRIGOZHIN’S FOLLY

Posted on by
Reply

By Seymour Hersh

Source: Mint Press News

The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.
The focus slipped from Ukraine’s failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin’s threat to Putin’s control. As one headline in the Times put it, “Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: “Putin looked into the abyss Saturday—and blinked.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”

Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”

At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?

We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.

Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.

So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:

“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by anti-Russian extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.

“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.

“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.

“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.

“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”

There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.

The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country. of Russian occupation.

The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.

Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.

Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.

The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.

If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.

It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.

15 Questions That Are More Useful Than “What Presidential Candidate Should Americans Vote For?”

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

People keep asking me to weigh in on the US presidential race and its candidates, which is what always happens whenever there’s a US presidential race on because media saturation makes it so central in the minds of Americans it’s often the main issue they want to talk about, even if they’re fairly aware.

I really don’t have anything to say about who Americans should vote for, other to repeat what I’ve said already about the fact that you can’t vote your way out of a mess you never voted yourself into in the first place.

But what I can do instead is offer my American friends some questions to ask that would probably be much more helpful to them and their nation than the question “Which presidential candidate should we vote for?”

Here are 15 such questions:

1. Why does nothing change no matter who we vote for?

2. Why does US foreign policy always continue along the same trajectory regardless of the president’s party or platform?

3. What keeps our voting population split right down the middle into two political factions of equal size, with neither side ever gaining enough of a majority to democratically change society in any meaningful way?

4. Why does the stalemate described in #3 always seem to benefit the rich, the powerful, and the war-horny?

5. Why is it that the most consequential US government policies like plutocratic influence, privatization, globalization, ecocidal capitalism and nuclear brinkmanship are never on the ballot? Why do these things keep happening, against our interests, without our ever voting for them or electing anyone who campaigned on the pledge to enact them?

6. If our federal government’s behavior never changes no matter who we elect, could it be that there are other bodies involved in government policy-setting whom we did not elect, and who remain in positions of influence regardless of the comings and goings of our official elected government?

7. If the above is the case, then who is it? Who’s really calling the shots in this country?

8. Could it be that everything we’ve been told about our country, our government, our political processes and our world is untrue?

9. If so, what are the implications of the fact that our schools and our media have been feeding us lies since we were small?

10. What forces would be responsible for keeping all these lies flowing throughout our society? What might keep an ostensibly free press spinning more or less the same lies throughout the western world day after day, year after year, generation after generation?

11. Is it possible that our entire electoral system is a sham designed to give the public the illusion of control so that they’ll let oligarchs and empire managers run the country undisturbed?

12. If the electoral system is a sham, then how do we enact the changes we so desperately need?

13. Is it possible that there are other ways to effect change in the United States which don’t involve casting a pretend vote in a fake election?

14. Could it be that those other means of forcing change are precisely what the charade of casting pretend votes in fake elections is meant to divert us from?

15. Should we perhaps spend less energy bickering about who should get sworn into the White House a year and a half from now, and more energy examining other possible avenues toward advancing meaningful change?

How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned?

Posted on by
1

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It seems there are many reasons to get shadow-banned, but unfortunately we’re never told what “crime” we committed nor are we given a chance to defend ourselves from the “indictment” in whatever “court” found us “guilty.” As in a nightmarish tale right out of Kafka, the powers making the charges, declaring the verdict “guilty as charged” and imposing the penalty are completely obscured.

Those found “guilty” discover their secret “conviction” and “sentence” when their livelihood is destroyed (i.e. they’re demonetized) and their online presence suddenly diminishes or vanishes.

I call this being sent to Digital Siberia. As with the real gulag, most of those convicted in the secret digital Star Chamber are innocent of any real crime; their “crime” was challenging the approved narratives.

Which leads to my question: why was little old marginalized-blogger me shadow-banned? Those responsible are under no obligation to reveal my “crime,” the evidence used against me, or offer me an opportunity to defend myself against the charges, much less file an appeal.

My astonishment at being shadow-banned (everyone in Digital Siberia claims to be innocent, heh) is based on my relatively restrained online presence, as I stick to the journalistic standards I learned as a free-lancer for mainstream print media: source data, excerpts and charts from mainstream / institutional sources and raise the questions / build the thesis on those links / data.

I avoid conspiracy-related topics (not my interest, not my expertise) and hot-button ideological / political cleavages (us vs. them is also not my interest). My go-to source for charts and data is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, IRS, etc., and respected non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Pew Research Center, RAND, investment banks, etc.

Given my adherence to journalistic standards, I wonder: how did someone like me get shadow-banned?

The standard cause (or excuse) for being overtly banned is “distributing misinformation.” This charge is never specific; something you posted “violates our community standards,” or equivalent broad-brush language.

Shadow-banning is even more pernicious because you’re not even notified that your visibility to others has been restricted or dropped to zero. You see your post, but nobody else does.

What are the precise standards for declaring a link or statement as “misinformation?” As the twitter files revealed, what qualifies as “misinformation” is constantly shifting as a sprawling ecosystem of censors share information and blacklists. This report is well worth reading: The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know (Zero Hedge).

Not only do we not know what qualifies as “misinformation,” we also don’t know what Big Tech algorithms are flagging and what their response is to whatever’s been flagged. My colleague Nate Hagens, who is equally scrupulous about using authoritative sources, posted this comment last year:

“It’s both funny and scary. It was explained to me today that the new Facebook/Meta algorithm downrates users who have cookies w evidence of visiting non-mainstream news sources/blogs. Even when one uses proxy servers and incognito mode, if you frequent e.g. Aljazeera or other news sites instead of CNN or FOX the algorithms categorizes your FB content (even if it’s a chicken soup recipe) as ‘non-mainstream’.
Big brother is watching (and not even thinking).
Those ideas/voices outside the status quo aren’t on equal footing- and the status quo (material growth/cultural values) is what’s leading us down the current path, without a map or plan.”

The systems that shadow-ban us are completely opaque. Who’s to say that a knowledgeable human reviews who’s been banned or shadow-banned? Given the scale of these Big Tech platforms and Search Engines, is that even possible?

It’s well known that YouTube constantly changes its ranking algorithms so they are harder to game, i.e. manipulate to advance one’s visibility.

It’s also known that simply posting a link to a site flagged as “misinformation” is enough to get your post excommunicated and your site flagged in unknown ways with unknown consequences.

What I do know is that Of Two Minds was publicly identified as “Russian Propaganda” by a bogus organization with no supporting data, PropOrNot in 2016. This front’s blacklist was prominently promoted by the Washington Post on page one in 2016, more or less giving it the authority of a major MSM outlet.

One might ask how a respected, trusted newspaper could publish a list from a shadowy front without specifying the exact links that were identified as “Russian Propaganda.” Standard journalistic protocol requires listing sources, not just publishing unverified blacklists.

Clearly, the Washington Post should have, at a minimum, demanded a list of links from each site on the blacklist that were labeled as “Russian Propaganda” so the Post journalists could check for themselves. At a minimum, the Post should have included inks as examples of “Russian Propaganda” for each site on the list. They did neither, a catastrophic failure of the most fundamental journalistic standards. Yet no one in the media other than those wrongfully blacklisted even noted or questioned this abject failure.

In effect, the real propaganda was the unsourced, un-investigated blacklist on the front page of the Washington Post.

How did I get on a list of “Russian Propaganda” when I never wrote about Russia or anything related to Russia?

There are two plausible possibilities. One is “guilt by association.” I’ve been interviewed by Max Keiser since 2011, and Max and his partner Stacy Herbert posted their videos on RT (Russia Today) and an Iranian media outlet. Needless to say, these sources were flagged, as was anyone associated with them. So perhaps merely having a link to an interview I did with Max and Stacy was enough to get me shadow-banned. (Shout-out to Max and Stacy in El Salvador.)

Alternatively, perhaps questioning the coronation of Queen Hillary in any way also got me on the blacklist.

Once on the blacklist, then the damage was already done, as the network of censors share blacklists without verifying the “crime”–a shadowy “crime” without any indictment, hearing or recourse, right out of Kafka.

Shadow-banning manifests in a number of ways. Readers reported that they couldn’t re-tweet any of my tweets. Another reader said the Department of Commerce wouldn’t load a page from my site, declaring it “dangerous,” perhaps with the implication that it was a platform for computer viruses and worms–laughable because there is nothing interactive on my sites and thus no potential source for viruses other than links to legitimate sources and adverts served by Investing Channel.

Users of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have probably noticed that your feed is populated by the same “friends” or “folks you follow.” In other words, the feed you’re presented with is curated by algorithms which sort and display posts / tweets / search results according to parameters that are invisible to users and regulators.

It’s easy to send flagged accounts to Digital Siberia, and trouble-free to leave them there until the trouble-maker goes broke.

It’s impossible to chart the extent of the shadow-banning, or who’s doing it, sharing blacklists, etc. This entire ecosystem of censorship is invisible. Recall that in the Soviet gulag, having an “anti-Soviet dream” was enough to get you a tenner (10-year sentence) in the gulag. Here, posting a flagged link will get you a tenner in Digital Siberia.

When Your Own Government Confirms It Paid Censors To Silence You…

In today’s zeitgeist, merely mentioning the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab resulted in an instant ban in 2020. How could the possibility that it escaped from a nearby lab dedicated to viral research be labeled as “disinformation” when the facts were not yet known?

The answer is of course that the lab-escape theory was “politically sensitive” and therefore verboten.

You see the problem: what’s deemed “politically sensitive” changes with the wind, and so the boundaries of what qualifies as “misinformation” have no visible or definable edge. Virtually anything consequential can suddenly become “politically sensitive” and then declared “misinformation.” When the guidelines of what’s a “crime” and the processes of “conviction” are all opaque, and there is no hearing or recourse to being “convicted” of a shadow-“crime,” we’ve truly entered a Kafkaesque world.

How did someone like me get shadow-banned? There is no way to know, and that’s a problem for our society and our ability to solve the polycrisis we now face.

I joke that what got me shadow-banned was using Federal Reserve charts. Perhaps that’s not that far from reality.

A Credible Explanation of How Kakhovka Dam Was Blown Up

Posted on by
1

By Eric Zuesse 

Source: Dissident Voice

Though Western ‘news’ media have gotten their ‘explanation’ of this event from Ukraine’s Government, it never made sense that Russia would have wanted to flood, harm, and weaken, the entire western half of the territory that Russia now controls in the former Ukraine, including in Crimea (which was getting its water-supply from that dam).

The anonymous author of the “Moon of Alabama” website has a long and almost flawless record of accurately exposing realities that mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media had been hiding, and the latest such is his June 13 “Did Russia Destroy The Nova Kakhovka Dam?” His report there turns upside-down and inside-out the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ that the dam had been bombed not by a missile, but by an explosive device which had been placed there by saboteurs whom Ukraine’s Government assumes were from Russia. U.S.-Government-approved ‘news’-media accept and amplify that assumption, but “MoA” does not.

First, he quotes the New York Times and other U.S. Government mouthpieces presenting the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of the blow-up; and then he rips it apart by noting the extremely relevant (but in U.S.-and-occupied lands ignored) fact, that on May 12, Britain had supplied to Ukraine its “Storm Shadow” missiles that are designed to have a two-stage bombing-operation: first, a normal surface bomb, but then after it a fuse-ignited ground-penetrating bomb to explode deeper inside even a fortified and hardened underground target such as that dam was apparently blown up.

The British-supplied Storm Shadow weapon is perfect for this type of destruction — exploding from deep underground, instead of from the surface. And whereas Russia doesn’t have any Storm Shadows, Ukraine definitely does — ever since May 12.

The present news-report about U.S.-and-allied lies is being simultaneously submitted for publication by all of the standard U.S.-Government mouthpiece propaganda-media, just in case any of them might finally want to go beyond their standard U.S.-Government-approved sources.

Ever since at least late 2022, Russia has been warning that Ukraine’s government wants to blow up that dam. For example, on 1 November 2022, Reuters headlined “Russia announces wider evacuation of occupied southern Ukraine,” and reported that,

“Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,” Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.

“Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,” he said. “The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.”

Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called “dirty bomb” to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province. Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine. …

Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.

Even U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media occasionally report relevant facts when they find them useful to mention in a ‘news’-report that has an anti-Russian “spin.”

So: we know that Russia’s Government was trying to protect the residents in that region against this attack, but U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have unquestioningly accepted the Ukrainian government’s accusation that Russia’s Government did it. And, now, an extremely likely explanation has finally been provided, which implicates both Ukraine’s government and UK’s Government as having done it.

Your Efforts Make A Difference, And We Can Win This Thing

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

We can win this thing and create a healthy, harmonious world, and the work each of us does to help bring this about makes a real difference. The more I observe and learn about human behavior, the more convinced of this I become.

Let me explain.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. This is true whether you’re talking about positive behavioral changes in an individual or in a collective.

By “expansion of consciousness” I mean an increase in awareness — someone or a group of someones becoming more aware of something than they previously were:

  • Someone gaining a new perspective on the forces within themselves which drive them to seek out dysfunctional relationships.
  • An addict becoming more conscious of the inner dynamics that compel them to use.
  • A victim of abuse realizing that abuse is happening, and that a better life is possible, and that they deserve it.
  • A community becoming aware that their clergy have been sexually abusing children.
  • The US civil rights movement making Americans more aware of the injustice and destructiveness of racism.
  • Increased literacy and a greater ability to distribute the written word giving society a greater hunger for freedom and democracy and less tolerance for overt tyranny.
  • Etc.

Conditions don’t get better until the forces which give rise to them are clearly seen and understood. This movement from the darkness of unconsciousness into the light of awareness can create the illusion that things are getting worse, because they turn up so much ugliness.

After the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, his mother made the decision to hold an open-casket funeral to expose the world to the cruelty that black Americans were being subjected to by showing his mutilated body to the public. In that moment it looked like the world was being made more ugly, because an ugliness that had previously gone unseen by many people was being published in papers across the country. But it was later said that “The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy.”

Similarly, the dawn of the internet has turned up a tremendous amount of ugliness and cruelty that had previously gone unseen and unknown to most people. This can lead to the mistaken impression that the internet itself is making people more cruel and ugly than they previously were, but it isn’t. It’s just turning up humanity’s longstanding inner demons that had previously functioned solely in the dark.

It looks ugly, it moves in a sloppy, clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble, but human consciousness is undeniably expanding. We’re getting so much better at sharing ideas and information with each other that we’ve arguably changed more as a species in the last thirty years than we did in the previous thirty centuries. We might outwardly look similar to the way we looked in our grandparents’ time, but billions of human brains connected to each other through the internet is something that is wildly unprecedented in the entire history of our species. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

So humanity is indisputably becoming more conscious, as awkward and sloppy as our situation looks right now. We’re becoming more and more aware of the problems our species faces, and our rulers are having to do more and more work to pull the wool over our eyes and keep us marching in a way that is convenient to them.

Police brutality. The abuses of Israeli apartheid. The agony of poverty. The ravages of ecocide. The ways we’ve been deceived and manipulated by the mass media. People are becoming more and more aware of these things than they used to be, because the truth about them is suddenly vastly more visible now than it previously was.

And what’s exciting is that we all have the ability to participate in, and facilitate, this expansion of consciousness. We each have the ability to help humanity become more conscious in our own small way, thereby bringing us that much closer to a positive shift in our collective behavior.

Anything you can do to help make humanity a little more aware of the abusive nature of the systems which drive the problems we now face makes a difference, even if it’s a difference as small as making one single person a little bit more aware of one specific aspect of the tyranny we’re being subjected to. It doesn’t make a huge difference, but it does make a difference. And as long as it makes the slightest bit of difference, it is worth doing, because a lot of slight differences adds up to a massive difference. And there are a whole lot of people who have the ability to do this.

What this means is that we each have the ability to directly and meaningfully participate in the creation of a healthy world, because we are each able to directly and meaningfully advance the only factor that ever leads to positive changes in human behavior. We can do this through the new technologies which have expanded humanity’s ability to share ideas and information like videos, blogs, podcasts, tweets and memes, and we can do this through older means like holding demonstrations, creating art, distributing literature, writing messages on walls, and just having conversations.

Anything you can do to help people become more aware of injustice, abuses, propaganda and tyranny, whether in your own community or in the world, makes a difference. Does this mean you will single-handedly save the day like the protagonist in a Hollywood movie? No. That’s not how real change happens, and it never has been. Real change is the result of sustained efforts of many, many people whose individual actions could never achieve much on their own.

I think the protagonist-driven storytelling models humanity uses in its legends, folk tales, novels and films often plays an unwholesome role in distorting people’s expectations about the efficaciousness of their own individual actions. Those storytelling models are designed to appeal to the human ego, which gets a tremendous amount of energy and attention in this particular slice of spacetime, but they are not accurate representations of the way real change actually happens in real life. In real life, change happens because a great many people put their shoulders up against the change that was needed and shoved in the required direction.

So that’s what we can all do: we can all lean our shoulders into the expansion of human consciousness and shove. Spread awareness of what’s going on in the world, make people more aware that we’re all being deceived and manipulated at mass scale, and help people to see that a better world is possible. The more people open their eyes to what’s happening, the more shoulders there are to help join in our collective shove toward consciousness.

Ultimately what we’re looking at is humanity’s journey toward becoming a conscious species. One that’s no longer driven by unconscious animal impulses and the flailings of illusory egoic constructs in our psyches, and is instead driven by a lucid perception of reality and a desire for the greater good of all beings.

We can all play a role in this achievement, both by expanding our own consciousness as far as it can go by bringing clarity to our own minds, our own worldviews and our own inner processes, and by helping others to become more aware of the world around them. It won’t often unfold in a way that is elegant and linear and egoically pleasing, but it will unfold. And if it unfolds enough, positive change becomes inevitable.

Ukraine Stays with the West But Russia Is Winning and Has the Receipts

Posted on by
Reply

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A delegation of African leaders travelled to Ukraine and Russia to help broker peace. But the collective west insists on prolonging the conflict.

The war in Ukraine grinds on and the Ukrainian army is being destroyed by Russia with great loss of life. One would think that Ukraine would be grateful for any and all peace efforts, but it is being used as a proxy by the United States and its NATO allies, the collective west. The seeds of this catastrophe began long before Russia’s special military operation. The European Union and NATO nations brought anti-Russian right-wing forces to power in 2014 in a coup against the elected Ukrainian president. If not for them there would be no war at all.

Their degree of culpability became clear recently when a delegation of African leaders traveled to Ukraine and Russia as part of a peacemaking initiative. The party included heads of state of Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, Comoros, Uganda, Republic of Congo, and South Africa. Comoros President Azali Assoumani is the current chair of the African Union. The group was greeted in Kiev by air raid sirens used to create the appearance that a Russian missile attack was underway. President Zelensky was barely polite, thanking South African president Cyril Ramaphosa and others for coming but letting them know that everything was Russia’s fault and that he had no interest whatsoever in peace talks. 

Not only is Ukraine a de facto U.S. colony which lives and dies by Washington’s whims, but it is also a deeply racist country. Much of its population is still attached to Nazi ideology and the politics of World War II collaborator Stephan Bandera. 

Nazi salutes, swastikas and other insignias are common there. So much so that the New York Times recently felt obliged to wonder in feigned innocence why these symbols are worn openly. The simple and obvious answer is that Ukraine is full of Nazis. Any likelihood that the same people would listen to Africans were indeed slim. 

Ukraine was joined in racial superiority theater by Poland. Media and security staff accompanying the presidents were delayed there and the delegation had to travel without them. When the manufactured drama was no longer needed the delegation arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia and met with president Vladimir Putin who had a surprise of his own. 

Putin listened politely to the 10-point plan and then interrupted with a surprise of his own. He not only reminded them the conflict began in 2014 but pointed out that Russia has been ready for peace ever since Turkey brokered negotiations with Ukraine in April 2022. Ukraine was on the verge of signing an agreement until its collective west friends, the US and UK in particular, scuttled the plan. 

The Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Guarantees of Security of Ukraine offered security guarantees for Ukraine in exchange for a commitment to remain neutral, meaning that NATO membership would be off the table. Putin pointed out that as soon as Russian forces left Kiev the agreement was thrown into “the dustbin.” Just as in the case of the Minsk Agreements, the collective west offered treachery instead of peace.

The African leaders have their own self-interest which sent them to Russia. Their nations’ supplies of grain and fertilizer have been disrupted by the western sanctions and restrictions on trade with Russia. Earlier agreements on this trade have worked against Africans, as Putin pointed out, “These European neo-colonial powers, technically the US, have once again deceived the international community and the Africa countries in need: 31.7 million tonnes were exported and only three percent reached Africa’s needy countries. Is this not deception?”

It is all to the good that the international community works together to end this war, but the west is only interested in escalating and Ukraine pays the price. The collective west excels in creating propaganda and bullying its allies. The rest of the world is working to escape U.S. and NATO domination as Ukrainians die in large numbers.

Ukraine’s love of Nazi symbolism reveals why that country is content to turn its population into cannon fodder. Meanwhile western insistence on escalation brings the entire world to the brink. Yet there is still no honest discussion about how the war began, or how the Nordstream pipeline exploded. Russia is still painted as the villain and the people of this country go into another presidential election year in the dark.

Russia is not just winning on the battlefield. Nation after nation has declared an intention to use currencies other than the dollar for trade or to join the BRICS. But the collective west cannot accept defeat. The threat they represent to the world cannot be underestimated.

Neocon Warmonger Advocates Nukes to Nazis in Ukraine

Posted on by
2

Violent Russian-hating Nazis wouldn’t nuke Moscow, would they?

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Maybe you may remember Michael Rubin. He worked with Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a neocon pro-war outfit set-up in the Pentagon by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The OSP’s objective was to create a series of false pretenses to invade Iraq in 2003.

According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer, the Office of Special Plans represented a “subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.”

Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney used the OSP to publicize “hot garbage” from a cast of dubious characters produced by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, including “Curveball” (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German intelligence asset pretending to be an Iraqi chemical engineer).

The lies that killed over a million Iraqis were dismissed as “intelligence failures” and swept under the rug. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Rubin, and other neocons were never held responsible for the massive war crimes they perpetuated.

On June 9, Rubin, a “senior fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute (and former “fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations), penned “Can Biden Deter a Russia Nuclear Attack on Ukraine? Yes, if He Gives Ukraine Tactical Nukes.”

Rubin demands the nazified post-coup government of Ukraine receive nukes. Rubin believes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (exchanging Soviet-era nukes deployed to Ukraine in exchange for sovereignty) was a monumental error. “The simple fact is this: United States maintains nuclear weapons because they are an effective deterrent against other nuclear states. Ukraine should have the same right,” Rubin writes.

Rubin and his neocon co-conspirators are not interested in “an effective deterrent” in Ukraine; they are interested in destroying the Russian state, the same as they destroyed the Iraqi state. However, Iraq, despite neocon lies, never had nuclear weapons (and the chemical weapons they did possess were supplied US corporations). Russia controls the largest arsenal of nukes in the world.

The non-proliferation mafia might howl with outrage, but the West must gear its nuclear policy toward reality, not wishful thinking or an empty façade of a treaty regimen by which revisionist states no longer abide.

Please read between the lines. According to this entitled “senior fellow,” the neocon “reality” envisions nuclear war as the most effective way to overthrow Putin and dismember the Russian Federation. Rubin, of course, does not call directly for nuclear war. However, his demand that Ukraine be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons will result in precisely that outcome. Imagine Ukraine’s Azov Battalion neo-nazis using nukes to target the Kremlin instead of hit-or-miss drones.

Rubin’s clarion call for nuclear destruction was crossposted on 19FortyFive, a “center-right” website that has produced neocon propaganda subsequently picked up by The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Hill, Reuters, and Voice of America (CIA propaganda), among others. It should be noted that 19FortyFive was until very recently a “regional defense publication.”

With the Ukrainian counter-offensive underway, the threat that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons is increasingly a likelihood. It would be unfair to blame Kyiv. There is no moral equivalence. Russia invaded Ukraine; not the other way around. So long as Ukraine was on the verge of victory, Putin would arrive at this point of nuclear retaliation.

Nonsense. Zelenskyy’s “counter-offensive” has thus far failed miserably, a fact even the war propaganda media is obliged to admit. Thus, Russia does not need to use nuclear weapons. Rubin, however, is able to make his bogus claim thanks to the fiction of Russian desperation over defeat, a false narrative telegraphed daily by a mendacious and cynically fantasist corporate propaganda media.

As should be expected, Rubin completely ignores the fact Russia went into eastern Ukraine to prevent the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of ethnic Russians. For the neocons, responsible for massive war crimes in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya), human life is expendable. Disease, malnutrition, infant mortality, DU-produced cancer—these are the preferred tools for regime change and the destruction of targeted societies resistant to neoliberal serfdom.

Rubin believes the prospect of USG nukes handed over to Russian-hating neo-nazi ultranationalists in Ukraine will save the day and prevent military action “not only against Ukraine but also against Moldova and the Baltic States,” a claim that is utter BS.

Meanwhile, more rational Americans, while small in number, are increasingly concerned about the escalatory behavior of the USG, under the sway of vicious and murderous neocons, which will put an end to not only civilization but all life on planet Earth.

Schrödinger’s War – And Orwell’s

Posted on by
Reply

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Source: The Automatic Earth

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 tried to explain the (consequences of the) uncertainty principle, defined by Werner Heisenberg as a core theme of Albert Einstein’s view of quantum mechanics, to … Albert Einstein. The latter must have been thrilled. Even though he did not like the uncertainty principle (God does not play dice). The thought experiment became known as “Schrödinger’s cat”. Since you cannot know both a particle’s position and its speed -and that’s just one example-, you have to assume all possible outcomes are valid (superposition). Only when you “look” does one particular outcome become the “reality”. It’s all part of the subatomic “world”

Wikipedia: “In Schrödinger’s original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. a Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation implies that, after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.”

As I’m trying to explain this, I very much have to wonder if I get it right. And I always thought that follows the uncertainty principle too: I can understand it and not understand it both at the same time. A physicist might fare a bit better, but it won’t come easy.

This is what I was thinking of with regards to the war in Ukraine. Before the fighting started, all possible outcomes seemed equally possible. If you did not look too closely at numbers of soldiers and weaponry, that is. But once it did start (when Schrödinger’s box was opened), it became clear very rapidly that Ukraine had no chance of winning. So why are we still acting as if the box remains closed? Because that way we get to spend billions more on armory, and we get western people to support Zelensky and his neo-nazis as those same people suffer from high prices for everything. Any outcome is still possible!

Take the Kakhovka dam narrative, or Nord Stream or any of the numerous other examples. When both sides accuse each other of perpetrating a certain event, Schrödinger’s box remains closed. Which is exactly what our politicians and arms makers desire. They don’t want us to know that they’ve been beaten by Russia, because you would no longer support their policies and their arms purchases. They want “superposition”. They can’t very well declare victory -though they try-, but they don’t need to either. They need uncertainty. Politicians, arms makers and media. They all profit from keeping you in the dark.

The best comment on Kakhovka I’ve seen perhaps comes from @CheburekiMan on Twitter: “Restoring water flow to the North Crimean Canal was top priority for Russia, the very first act of the SMO. Before Kiev shut off the flow in 2014, the canal was supplying 85% of Crimea’s water. So much depended on it, from crops to industry to drinking water, that’s how important it is. Now the pro-Ukraine bleating sheep want people to believe that Russia would wreck the dam, empty the reservoir and cause serious harm to its own people by running the canal dry. It’s so bonkers that one has to seriously consider such ideas are the result of brain damage, or perhaps fetal alcohol syndrome.”

Where Orwell comes in is in the terminology. Where “War equals Peace”. The EU pays its member states for the second hand weapons they “donate” to Kiev, through something called the European Peace Fund (aka Facility). Mass weapons deliveries that get huge numbers of people killed, are labeled “Peace”. Zelensky touts a plan labeled a Peace Plan, which demands Russia give back all territories, pay war reparations, deliver Putin et al to some international criminal court etc. The chance of that happening is of course zero, but as long as Schrödinger’s box remains closed, anything is possible. Still, it is a War Plan, not a Peace Plan.

Similarly, Zelensky and his international backers are organizing a Peace Summit, where everybody is invited except Russia. That makes it a War Summit. The suggestion made to westerners is that this is a globally supported initiative, but it is only a small part of the world population (10%?) that supports it. NATO+Japan+Australia. Did I leave anyone out? New Zealand? Ha ha ha, I read that Jacinda Ardern was made a dame. If you know a better illustration of how deep we’ve sunk, I’m game.

All the rest of the world is much more interested in the economic developments that involve BRICS+. 31 and counting nations have expressed interest in joining. And they’re not going to risk their potential role in that over a local fight far away that they know is long decided. US/NATO, in provoking this war, have lost not only the fight, but much more importantly, their economic power. Recently, the G7 were talking about what they were going to do in Central Asia. Which is basically all the “-Stans” left over after the Soviet Union dissolved. But the G7 is not going to do anything, it has no power there anymore. All these countries want to join the BRICS+. Why would you join a waning power if you have a shot at joining a power in its ascendancy, that all your neighbors are also joining?

The same attitude is prevalent in Africa, South America, East Asia, etc. Full of countries that remember how they were treated through the years by first Europe and then the US. The world has changed beyond recognition since the start of Russia’s SMO, and the “globalist west” is the only “region” that doesn’t recognize this. The USD won’t be replaced tomorrow as the reserve currency, but it doesn’t have to be. The process goes step by step, and is unstoppable. Hemingway’s famous words about how you go bankrupt (first gradually, then suddenly) have us on the wrong foot here. We only look at the “suddenly” part when it comes to the reserve currency, and ignore all the “gradually” steps. And then one day we will wake up and everything’s changed.

The rest of the world sees Schrödinger’s box as open. Only the west thinks that it’s still closed, and all possible outcomes are still viable.