In a recent conversation with a close friend we were talking about the insane firehose of fear-inducing narratives coming from the talking heads on TV, and she commented that, ‘it was all just a big distraction.’
I hear that a lot. It’s all just a big distraction.
Perhaps it’s true.
But a distraction from what, exactly?
I’m going to zoom all the way out for a few hundred words here. All the way out beyond the distraction from the economic and globalist reality bearing down on all of us. All the way out beyond the cultural revolution underpinning the agendas being pimped on us by mainstream media. All the way out beyond the technocratic, bio-fascist takeover coming from the world’s largest and most-overfunded organizations, like the WEF. All the way out, even, beyond the dehumanization and depopulation agenda becoming evermore clear to the layman in today’s post-Covid authoritarian world.
I’m going full spiritual here, because there’s something big that warrants your attention. Something which all the news, narratives and punditry never even skirt around, much less touch upon.
And that is the fact that you are so much more that what the material scientists and policy makers would have you believe. You’re being distracted from your connection to your higher self, to spirit itself.
It’s been a fascinating journey writing and publishing at Waking Times for over ten years. We’ve discussed in great detail the works of pioneering thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, and even brought renewed attention to the works of people like Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung and other intellectuals who’ve helped to walk us over the gap between science and spirit. The message that always stuck with me is that the true value of being human, as opposed to a mind-controlled robot, is their uniqueness, individuality and our unique human capacity experience wonder, mystery, and inspiration.
And we need inspiration right now. It’s the antidote to fear. And we need to wonder about the big picture. Your connection to your higher self and all the courage and humanity to be found within that. We need to wonder what we truly are, without all the dense commentary and negative social thought loops keeping us bound to the stupidity inherent in pop culture and group think.
What are you, truly?
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” ~Carl Sagan
Yeah, something like that.
The thing is, when you lose track of, or allow yourself to be distracted from, this reality, the walls of the world close in on you. You forget about the present moment and look at the future as a foe whose power comes from the failures of your past. You forget that you’re endowed with the power to create, as Paul Levy reminded us in a podcast I did with him. You forget that your natural state is independence and courage, and you forget that you always have instant access to access these qualities, should you desire to call them in.
When you’re distracted from the reality of your own sovereign standing as a unique and potentially powerful spiritual being, you’re unable to set your own sails according to your own life passions. You are rudderless in a sea of mediocrity and conformity, and thereby perpetually seek the false sense of security and safety that comes from thinking you’re part of a tribe. You self-sabotage and engage in all kinds of senseless self-destruction in order to numb the pain of denying your
Your connection to spirit is what gives your life meaning in a world where phoniness is front page news all day, everyday.
The reason why this connection matters is because you’re being put to the test. The test is whether or not you can keep yourself together through all of the bullshit we’re doggie-paddling around in, so that you can still manage to be effective in your own life rather than becoming food for the hostile beings that feed off fear and anxiety.
So, above all the information, data and reasoning required to find material truth in this world, you need to be connected to who you really are, and you need to know what’s right for you. Not what they say is right for you. These are distinctly different things. You need a connection to your spirit. Your higher self. You need access to the best part of your being.
The part of you that doesn’t need public consensus in order to make a decision regarding your personal health. That part of you that doesn’t check to see what everyone else is doing before declaring whatever it is you truly want out of this magical life. That part of you that wants to you be healthy, balanced and vital in a world of poison and pollution.
When you don’t know who or what you are, you look outward towards others to complete this complex puzzle. When you don’t know who you are, you deny your own inner wisdom. You concern yourself with things you have no power over. You live your life seeking approval, people pleasing and over-obligating yourself. When you don’t know who you are, you leave the door wide open for fear, self-doubt, worry, and overwhelm.
If it’s all a distraction, then it’s time you refocus and recover your energy and power from the rigid, thought-controlling social discredit system being built up around you. The only thing that can save any of us is if all us remember who we are.
“A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.” ~Lao Tzu
The world watched in varying states of mind as the Davos set enjoyed its annual turn on the world stage, supping on sumptuous Atlantic crab and fresh Iberian pork, sustainable Norweigian cod, and the best Italian coffee.
When not tucking into a lavish feast, they bandied about their ideas for how the world ought to exploited (the key euphemisms here are “sustainable,” “stakeholder,” and “impossible beef.”)
Some revile and protest the annual ruling class summit, but many millions more embrace it, even gaze admirably at the mandarins of the new world order as they flit across mobile screens and offer uplifting quotes to curious media attendees.
Indeed, few seem to care as the cabal of monied interests chat amiably about centrally managed digital currencies, consolidating global health authority in unelected bodies, collapsing the world economy, generating needless food shortages, unpopular fake meat, and other new market opportunities. Fewer still see the implicit threat of globalist agendas to the rule of sovereign states.
There is such little resistance largely because billions of people believe what they read and what they are told by the news media. A healthy dose of distrust would serve the global populace well, if only it could release itself from the grip of mainstream corporate news.
In this respect, it’s worth remembering two quotes from the incomparable muckraker Upton Sinclair–author of the startling expose The Jungle.
In his book The Brass Check, Sinclair betrays the great lie of modern media, namely that it is independent. This easy falsehood is widely accepted. Millions of Americans believe that the truly deceitful media are the ones that YouTube labels as “state-affiliated media,” a damning modifier that instantly discredits every outlet so identified.
But Sinclair reminds us that “[Media] represents private interests, not public interests.” He could have gone farther and said mainstream media represents the private interests of elite capital. Marx said that every state serves a particular class. So does corporate media.
Sinclair later writes that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
This second quote explains why so much of the MSM go along quite happily with the prescribed narrative from Washington. Their livelihoods depend on it. Occasionally a pious mainstream journalist will fiercely declare his independence from any malign editorial influence.
But as Michael Parenti responds,
“They like what you write because you write what they like.”
The principles of American exceptionalism are a prerequisite for any journalist hoping to earn a slot at a high-paying MSM outlet. They have long internalized the values of power. Put together, these quotes tell us that we are subjected to an official narrative that serves the interests of elite capital and is dutifully disseminated by a cabal of right-thinking stenographers.
The same elite interests that own the government own the media. Hence the narrative consistency.
ALTERNATE REALITY
Given that elite interests are largely out of step with the interests of the vast majority of Americans, we often find ourselves living in an alternate reality. The war in Ukraine is just the latest iteration. Most of the reality of the conflict has been obscured from view, sins of omission that ensure the public is largely misled. Fierce and ‘principled’ op-eds reinforce the bias. For instance, little attention is paid to:
Economic motivations underlying the conflict: arms sales for American defense contractors; oil and grain profits by crisis-oriented commodity monopolies; and broader agricultural profiteering by Monsanto and Dupont via a post-coup IMF agreement; the foreclosure of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from the Baltic Sea into Germany, which opens the door to western consortiums supplying the shortfall.
Ukrainian academic Olga Baysha gave a telling interview to The Gray Zone. She noted how Volodymyr Zelensky’s neoliberal policies were sold as “westernization” and “modernization” to the Ukrainian public. But these were camouflage for privatization, deregulation, and downsizing of the public sphere, all commonplace neoliberal prescriptions for wealth extraction by global corporations. To secure this narrative, Zelensky shuttered opposition media channels and political parties, including sanctions and repression before the final step.
Zelensky was following the post-coup government’s deployment of ultranationalist battalions to violently extinguish the anti-coup resistance in Donbas. That “anti-terrorist operation” was really the beginning of a civil war by Kiev against its own population, including tanks and artillery, gunships and warplanes. The subsequent Minsk peace agreements were likewise largely ignored by the aggressive Kiev action against the East.
All of these political and national conflicts seem to evolve from—and devolve into—imperial economic relations. West against East, with Ukraine as a battleground. War is a revenue stream in capitalism. War is a profit center for the elites that own the media; it is only carnage for the lower classes. This distinction is rarely made.
WHY SOCIAL MEDIA HAS ABDICATED ITS ROLE
What is relatively unique in the propaganda about the Ukraine war is the degree to which social media has advanced its repressive apparatus in line with state directives. Social media became a serious thorn in the side of state power and corporate media when it consistently exposed falsehoods about the 2016 election, Russiagate, and the pandemic.
Though much war propaganda has been uncovered by scrupulous independent journalists (with a working class bias), the success of the Ukrainian narrative has been stupendous. Social media is falling in line, censoring or discrediting wrongthink whenever it appears.
What Google and YouTube and others are doing at the behest of the federal government is as Brett Weinstein said of the pandemic narrative, “They are infantilizing a huge fraction of the population. They are making certain discussions off limits.” We must “…adhere to certain pre-digested conclusions and we pretend that they emerged from evidence, which they do not.”
What we need is rational discussion. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. One would expect Google and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter to know this. In fact, it is very likely they do know this. As the venerable linguist politico Noam Chomsky once derisively commented, there’s no point in speaking truth to power: they already know the truth, and don’t care.
What has happened is what happens to all new media in a corporate fascist state: it is threatened until it complies with the official narrative being disseminated by the government, which is effectively owned by elite capital. Congress may have a word with Justice, and Justice may on a quiet Tuesday open the preliminaries of an antitrust investigation.
Suddenly the bright horizons of the Silicon giants are considerably dimmed. It is similar with the news media. The MSM rely too heavily on the gossip and good favor of well-placed officials; they bend too easily to the unspoken preferences of the advertisers who line their coffers; they keel too readily at the unctuous general who cavils over the soft treatment of a geopolitical rival. These perverse incentives are nicely modeled in Manufacturing Consent.
Elite capital may be loosely defined as those groups that are making enormous amounts of money off the status quo, even as many more millions are harmed by the same status quo. Elite capital used to be called “special interests.”
They are the rich and powerful billionaires who can be seen at Davos, on the boards and membership lists of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation; the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations; and in important think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation, Cato, Hoover, CSIS, and Center for American Progress, among a proliferation of others.
They are thus not a monolithic or discrete coalition of individuals, but rather intertwined interests that share a common desire to uphold the existing establishment, by force or fraud.
MASTERS OF MYTH
Our current experience—in which we are terrifically afraid of a mild seasonal respiratory virus and terrifically xenophobic toward Russians—is reminiscent of the heyday of the Bush administration, when the neoconservative believers were riding high on a surfeit of manufactured intelligence.
Abetted by the ghoulish founder of Blairism, who claimed kindly London burghers might be liquidated by Arab WMDs in just 45 minutes. From launch to impact. From Baghdad missile shed to Kensington glade in less than an hour. Around that frightful time, George Bush’s svengali Karl Rove, educated a stunned reporter about what reality truly meant at the Metropole, in the imperium itself,
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
That reality is what Henry Giroux called, “…the deadening unity and totalizing narratives that now marks dominant neoliberal and instrumental ideologies of the West.”
More than any moment in recent American history, we find ourselves under the spell of these reality makers, who have over the past five years produced a breathtaking array of crises that have utterly enthralled the population.
From the stunning election of a reeling madman, to chilling revelations of foreign influence, feckless investigations, failed impeachments, lethal pathogens launched from fog-draped bio labs in polluted Sino capitals, and finally to the good news of a redemptive election, only to be circumscribed by fatal new “variants” spread by pathologically stupid Trumpists.
And finally, the plague is swept from the marquee by Russian imperialism on the march in Europe. The masses automatically swap their masks for Ukrainian flags. The fear and anger remain, but are merely redirected.
WAGE SLAVERY AND PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS
The indoctrination of individuals into the doctrinal system of American exceptionalism is driven not only by media consolidation but also economic enslavement. First a couple of figures—as if we need more—from a John Steppling’s essay on his Aesthetic Resistance blog. He notes that in 1870 some 67 percent of Americans were self-employed, probably artisans or farmers of some kind.
Once industrial capitalism particularly in urban areas grew, that number plummeted. Today it stands at 6 percent. The point being that the independence of millions of Americans has been compromised. Now they work—millions of them—not for themselves but for vast faceless corporations.
Companies that are essentially fascist constructs, whose decisions are inscrutable to most employees, and which typically sweep the scythe of cost cutting through the ranks every few years, and increasingly turn to automated processes that are merely overseen by an incrementally deskilled workforce.
This alienation from our own work was not unaccompanied by attendent catastrophes. Alongside the vast migration of men and women into wage labor came first a rise and then a fierce destruction of union representation. That too stands at around 7 percent today, once as high as 35 percent in the early to mid 20th century, when there were socialists roaming the untamed streets and word of a Bolshevik Revolution rippled through bourgeois mansions.
The currents of the time were not overlooked by the managers of the economy. The bankers bought the papers. The president created a commission for public information. The business roundtable sketched anti-labor plot lines. Sigmund Freud’s nephew invented the dark arts of public relations.
A similar phenomenon occurred after the cultural explosion of the Sixties. The neoliberal rollback of the so-called welfare state on one hand (happily embraced by hippies as they tossed aside their tasseled suede for wide lapels and polyester pantsuits) and the co-optation of counterculture on the other.
As hippies reproduced, they found themselves suddenly needing the money on offer from the corporate monoliths they once defaced the logos of. No longer able to sustain themselves as village artisans or independent producers, they succumbed to the economic pressures and joined the rat race.
Madison Avenue, a Cyclopean beast capable of the most astonishing mimetic performances, quickly absorbed the counterculture and regurgitated rebellion as offbeat consumerism.
Everything became a style code. Facing down a lynch mob or jackbooted police cordon was replaced with wearing Chuck Conners sneakers, running marathons in ‘Just Do It’ Nikes, or donning a Coca-Cola tee shirt with a sardonic grin. At the radical end of the spectrum, burning draft cards were replaced with ‘buy nothing’ anti-consumer holidays.
Irony supplants resistance, a concession of the educated classes to the diminished prospects for revolution.
And so, having been alienated from their work, having had their counterculture killed, gutted, dressed, and stuffed, the average person has little recourse for independent thinking. At work, he is conditioned by a corporate culture that esteems ‘yes men’, pathologizes optimism, and encourages virtue signaling on behalf of the corporate charter, the values of which one is welcome to adopt as one’s own.
Away from the office, he encounters an ersatz ‘culture’ of media news and entertainment that reifies the values of the corporate state, which ostensibly include diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion. The news instantiates the tropes of the corporate news hour, which feature the sly demonization of other societies under the guise of national security and the banner of freedom.
Then entertainment reinforces them. One reads of new sanctions levied against a rogue regime in Caracas, and then watches a new action series on Netflix in which an earnest American thwarts a diabolical scheme by the brown Venezuelan with an unquenchable thirst for yanquee blood.
IDEOLOGIES AND SUB-IDEOLOGIES
But should one spy the troubling contradictions between our professed values of inclusion and our foreign policy of exclusion, there is nowhere to turn. Unless one knows about marginalized progressive websites, Noam Chomsky primers, or a nearby Communist Meet Up, one is left with the cardboard caricatures of corporate media, which go to great lengths to convince you those contradictions are all a misunderstanding—your own, to be sure.
Without ‘comrades’ to confirm your natural mistrust, it will tend to fade as the omnipresent corporate conditioning takes over.
Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, wrote that we are all conditioned by the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and repressed by Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs). He said we are ‘interpellated’ by the ISAs into the helpful groupthink that sustains the status quo. Perhaps to keep his readers from guzzling Drano, he did concede that ‘interventions’ were possible in which a sub-ideology breaks through a crack in the dominant ideology.
What this intervention produces, though, is indeterminate. A riotous uprising that is brutally put down by some frightful caudillo general? Whose leaders are liquidated in the bowels of some rusting soccer stadium held over from the Pan Am Games? Or perhaps the glorious, dreamed of Revolution (capital ‘R’) that guts the capitalist oligarchy, assumes its productive forces, and achieves a breathtaking synthesis of revolutionary theory and worker power? The pipe-puffing Althusser declined to say.
REALITY REPEATS ITSELF: AMOR FATI?
It is no surprise when we see such little resistance in the population to the supplying of $40 billion in lethal aid to Ukraine, or to aggressive authoritarian mandates of the government regarding the pandemic. For all of the aforementioned reasons, the dominant response is unquestioning compliance and even gratitude.
After all, having never been taught the past, or having deliberately compartmentalized those troubling histories, we digest the official narrative like a child accepts the spoonfuls of baby food from a doting mother. Tens of millions of doses of soma shoveled down the hatch at daybreak or dusk, or both, do their numbing best to aid and abet digestion of those sometimes thorny narratives, so thick with intrigue and, not occasionally, senselessness. The reward of the incurious is consensus.
Within the official narratives themselves, there is at least one constant: the demonization of the other. We can easily see parallels in the gross caricature of unvaccinated individuals as pathogenic threats in need of the needle and the demonization of Russians as barbaric hordes in need of European refinements.
These depictions are not far from the efforts of German National Socialists to segregate non-Aryans, mostly of Jewish origin, from the righteous population of pure-blood Volk. Yet one needn’t leave one’s own history to see this blatant segregationist behavior. The dark era of Jim Crow, and the modern version of the carceral state, evince the deep hostility of society for the other, those that differ in skin color, sex, gender, sexual preference, religion, ideology, economic model, or worldview.
Edward Said notes in Orientalism how the western Orientalist needed to whittle down Islam to the caricature of “tent and tribe” in order to fit it into his orderly cosmology, in which the rationalism of the European Enlightenment prevailed. Today the West performs the same reductionist act on Eurasia.
Reclining in his sumptuous country estate, the elitist Marquis tells Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities, “Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery…will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”
Like Sinclair, Charles Dickens historicized his novels, and it might be noted that the Marquis’ venerable roof would soon fall with the collapsing scenery of the French Revolution. Whenever we are sold those confident, end-of-history tales from the corridors of elite power—be it a French chateau or a chalet in the Swiss Alps—we’d do well to recall the timeless warning of every marketplace and bazaar: caveat emptor.
The antiwar community has fractured at a time when it most needs to speak with one voice to end the war in Ukraine. About all we can agree on is that the war is a terrible thing that needs to be stopped. Beyond that, reasonable people disagree about messaging, and unreasonable people demonize those who disagree. The result is that average Americans who don’t usually follow politics, let alone international affairs, form opinions based on emotional responses to what they hear in mainstream media rather than what may be most likely to promote peace. This is true despite the fact that most would say that peace is what they want.
The ability to influence American thinking through emotional appeals is what those with the power to manipulate the media count on to serve imperialism’s aims. If we can at least agree that how we frame our response is important, people who sincerely want to do something to end the war might be able to agree on what message would most effectively sway public opinion in a way that might influence our government to act in the interest of peace.
The most fundamental disagreement is over whether it’s necessary to call Russia out as solely or even primarily at fault for the war, or whether it is important to provide the context needed to understand the US role in creating the conditions that led it to decide that it had no choice but to respond to Ukrainian actions in Donbass with military force.
Given that our goal is to influence public opinion, it’s understandable that most peace groups have opted to follow the lead of politicians and mainstream commentators and preface every statement with a condemnation of Russia. After all, since they believe these accusations are justified, they fear being seen as supportive of Russia if they only focus on what the US has done that promotes war and what it hasn’t done that might have prevented it. Some peace groups go so far as to ignore clear US provocations as unimportant. Since it was Russia that invaded, they believe that their proper job is to wave Ukrainian flags and protest Russia’s actions, despite the reality that this will have no beneficial effect on the course of the war.
Other peace activists feel that either approach absolves the US of responsibility for creating conditions that led to the conflict. Believing the US actually initiated the conflict, they argue that dating its onset as February 24 is not only misleading, but false. They see the conflict as having started long before the Russian invasion and argue that knowing what choices Putin had is relevant to assigning blame.
The truth is thatwe don’t have to agree on who is at fault if we don’t make that an issue.As a psychotherapist with training in family therapy, I know from experience that focusing on who is responsible for a problem almost never leads to a satisfactory solution. And from a practical standpoint, placing sole blame on Russia is counterproductive not only because it splits the antiwar movement, but because to much of the public it provides a justification for an aggressive US response. Avoiding a conflict over whether Russia should be characterized as the sole aggressor is why many want to limit the message to demanding that the US 1) stop arming Ukraine, 2) declare it will never support Ukraine joining NATO, and 3) push Ukraine to negotiate without preconditions.
From a family therapy perspective, trying to keep the discussion focused on a solution would certainly be the approach to take if the US actually wanted to end the conflict. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The effect of sending increasingly lethal weapons and imposing sanctions that primarily harm civilians is to prolong the war and increase casualties of both soldiers and civilians on both sides.
Recent reports indicate that the effort to help a depleted Ukrainian military drive Russia out of Donbass is futile. However, this approach is very profitable for a weapons industry that generously funds the elections of members of Congress willing to serve its interests, which is no doubt why any debate about how the US should proceed assumes that it will involve continuing a strategy that has proven to result in arming extremists when used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And yes, there are extremists with significant influence in Ukraine despite media denials.
Clearly, the focus on providing weapons has redirected the public’s attention from the question of how to end the war to how best to punish Russia, regardless of how US strategy affect Ukrainian civilians. This is not by accident, but by design. That’s why it is necessary to challenge the distortions, omissions and outright lies that are used to influence public opinion to conform with the goals of American imperialism. Unfortunately, the inability to agree on the facts is what has led to the stark divisions among those wanting to do something to make the war to end. That is we have to put aside our pride and listen to each other to understand why a minority firmly believes that the consensus opinion of the majority is based on misplaced trust in mainstream media.
Most Americans think they are informed if they read mainstream media and watch a variety of TV news sources. Antiwar activists know differently, because we know we have been lied into war repeatedly, at least from Vietnam through Syria. Unfortunately, like the general public, many peace proponents have no idea how information that challenges the government’s narrative is being systematically suppressed in unprecedented ways.
It’s always been true that truth is the first casualty of war. In today’s hybrid warfare, it is more critical than ever to control the information domain. The way news is presented by government officials and approved media frames the way most people think about US foreign policy. This is why the idea of sending ever more powerful weapons to prolong a military conflict that cannot be won is never challenged. While the ultimate outcome of Russia’s invasion cannot be predicted with certainty, the one thing we know for sure is that providing increasingly lethal weaponry will lead to more death on both sides and do nothing to promote stability in the region.
Of course, there is much more that could be said about the tremendous amount of disinformation in the mainstream media regarding Ukraine. While much of it is relevant to understanding the situation, it is far beyond the scope of this essay. I can only recommend that those who are inclined to believe what they read or hear in government-approved media look at any of the credible alternative sources that present evidence of critical facts that are being withheld from them.
A good way to find them is to look at the list of websites that Prop or Not, a shadowy group that claims to be the arbiter of “reliable sources,” claims should not be trusted. Interspersed among many dubious websites listed are some of the most informative sources of information contradicting the mainstream narrative. These are sites with authors that include prominent investigative journalists and veterans of the CIA, NSA, State Department, high ranking White House positions and military intelligence. They cite their sources, which gives their articles far more credibility than the mostly anonymous sources favored by the New York Times and Washington Post when reporting on many of the same stories.
I urge anyone interested in finding a common message to present to the public to read the statement released by the US Peace Council.
In the history of civilization, Politics has more often than not, been a matter reduceable to the question of “whose side are you on?”
Granted it is not an easy affair to discern what most-nearly approaches truth in the fog of “the present.” Hindsight is 20/20 they say, although that is also not entirely true, for the interpretation of history is just another battlefield, albeit in much slower motion.
In a world of increased division, where we are told there is only black or white, the best we mere “civilians” can hope for is to not get hit by the crossfire. However, that is becoming increasingly harder to do.
It is not a matter of holding “opinion” any longer, it is about upholding a “conviction,” not earned with your own personal scrutiny and research, but by your “faith” in such a conviction and the authorities who shape it.
Increasingly, it does not truly matter what the “facts” are, but the question of “whose side are you on?”
If that is what “reality” has been reduced to by those forces controlling the state, then any enemy to those forces controlling that state will be a villain, regardless of their actions, regardless of their ideology; and any ally to those forces controlling that state will be a hero, regardless of their actions, regardless of their ideology.
And thus, in our shaped reality of today, what makes a “Hero” or a “Villain” will be determined by the simple question “whose side are you on?”
If this is troubling to you, I suggest we do a little exercise together. Let us dare to discern the “facts” for ourselves. Only then, will we cease being mere cheerleaders for a team; only then, can we qualify ourselves to ask in all honest sincerity, “whose side are we truly on?”
Are Nazis Now the New “Good Guys”?
There is a bit of mixed messaging that has been going on, especially in the last few weeks. Are there significant numbers of Nazis in Ukraine and are these “bad” or “good” Nazis in the context that they are fighting the Russian “invaders”?
In one breath we hear the counter, how can there be Nazis in Ukraine when there is a Jewish President calling the shots? In another breath we hear Facebook is now allowing users to praise the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion while they are fighting Russians. In yet another breath we hear, well its complicated, Ukrainian Nationalism should be considered at the forefront of any debate, even if it overlaps with Nazi ideology.
On Feb. 27, 2022, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland held a scarf bearing the slogan “Slava Ukraini,” meaning “Glory to Ukraine,” with the “Blood and Soil” colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) (who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and massacred thousands of Jews and Poles).
According to Freeland’s press secretary, this was just another case of a “classic KGB disinformation smear… accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians of being far right extremists or fascists or Nazis,” which is a confusing statement on multiple levels.
It is not clear how this is a case of “Russian disinformation,” since the picture is indeed authentic, Freeland does not deny this. And she is indeed holding a “Blood and Soil” emblem, which originated with the Nazis, clear for everyone to see. Lastly, it is confusing as to why the Canadian government seems to be unaware that the KGB no longer exists. Are they also under the impression that the Soviet Union still exists?
Not irrelevant in all of this is the fact that Freeland’s grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper during WWII in Galicia and that she is indeed aware of this and apparently unapologetic. Whenever she is questioned about this, she does not deny anything, but simply blames such a focus of inquiry on Russian disinformation with the intent to “destabilize Western democracies.” That is, it is not a question of what is one’s historical or ideological background, but a question of “whose side are you on?”
Interestingly, it was the Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” who reported this story, titled “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,” thus, not a Russian publication last time I checked. And upon whom did they base such information? None other than Freeland’s own uncle, John-Paul Himka, who is now professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
According to the Globe and Mail, Freeland was aware for more than two decades that her grandfather Michael Chomiak, was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper that vilified Jews and supported the Nazi cause.
“Krakivski Visti [Krakow News] was set up in 1940 by the German army and supervised by German intelligence officer Emil Gassert. Its printing presses and offices were confiscated by the Germans from a Jewish publisher, who was later murdered at the Belzec concentration camp.
The article titled ‘Kravivski Visti and the Jews, 1943: A contribution of Ukrainian Jewish Relations during the Second World War’ was written by Ms. Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, now professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
In the foreword to the article, Prof. Himka credits Ms. Freeland for ‘pointing out problems and clarifications.’ Ms. Freeland has never acknowledged that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator and suggested on Monday that the allegation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
In 1996, Prof. Himka wrote about Mr. Chomiak’s work for Kravivski Visti, a Ukrainian-language newspaper based in Krakow that often published anti-Jewish diatribes including ‘certain passages in some of the articles that expressed approval of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.’” [emphasis added]
Oddly, Freeland helped to edit and clarify Prof. Himka’s article discussing her grandfather as the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper, however, refused to acknowledge her grandfather’s role publicly and accused any reference to this as part of a “Russian disinformation campaign.” According to this topsy-turvy logic, Freeland’s uncle, Prof. Himka is part of this “Russian disinformation campaign,” and she is guilty of providing assistance to this “Russian disinformation campaign,” all to ruin her political career and “destabilize Western democracies.”
Freeland also told her uncle, Prof. Himka, which is included in his article, that according to her father, her grandfather Michael Chomiak was also working to some extent with the anti-Nazi resistance. However, Prof. Himka was unable to verify this information, which he described as “fragmentary and one-sided.”
This past April, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova delivered an explosive response to Chrystia Freeland’s recent obnoxious efforts to ban Russia from all international organizations and financial institutions, revealing the real sort of work Freeland’s grandfather was in the business of. You can read the full speech here.
Then there is the strange case of NATO tweeting in celebration of international women’s day, this past March 8, a picture of a female Ukrainian soldier wearing the Black Sun symbol which is tied to Nazi occultism, and Satanism. NATO wrote in their post “All women and girls must live free and equal,” sending a very mixed message. NATO also ended up taking down their picture of the Black Sun symbol.
The timing of Freeland and NATO’s twitter posts are most strange. It also begs the question, why post something at all if you are just going to delete it? Is this just a matter of not being aware of such things, or is it a matter of certain groupings getting increasingly bolder and unapologetic as to where their true allegiance lies? Has Chrystia Freeland or NATO undergone any real questioning or backlash for such public displays? Not really.
Fact Checking the “Fact-Checkers” on Ukraine
Before we go through the situation of Ukraine today, I wanted to share with you a very relevant story of how the CIA buys News.
Udo Ulfkotte was a well-known German journalist and author of numerous books. He worked for 25 years as a journalist, 17 of which were for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), including his role as editor. In his 2014 book “Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys News,” Ulfkotte goes over how the CIA along with German Intelligence (BND) were guilty of bribing journalists to write articles that either spun the truth or were completely fictitious in order to promote a pro-western, pro-NATO bent, and that he was one of those bought journalists.
In an interview, Ulfkotte describes how he finally built up the nerve to publish the book, after years of it collecting dust, in response to the erupting 2014 crisis in Ukraine stating:
“I felt that the right time had come to finish it and publish it, because I am deeply worried about the Ukrainian crisis and the possible devastating consequences for all of Europe and all of us…I am not at all pro-Russia, but it is clear that many journalists blindly follow and publish whatever the NATO press office provides. And this type of information and reports are completely one-sided”. [emphasis added]
In another interview Ulfkotte stated:
“it is clear as daylight that the agents of various Services were in the central offices of the FAZ, the place where I worked for 17 years. The articles appeared under my name several times, but they were not my intellectual product. I was once approached by someone from German Intelligence and the CIA, who told me that I should write about Gaddafi and report how he was trying to secretly build a chemical weapons factory in Libya. I had no information on any of this, but they showed me various documents, I just had to put my name on the article. Do you think this can be called journalism? I don’t think so.”
Ulfkotte has publicly stated:
“I am ashamed of it. The people I worked for knew from the get-go everything I did. And the truth must come out. It’s not just about FAZ, this is the whole system that’s corrupt all the way.” [emphasis added]
Udo Ulfkotte has since passed away. He died January 2017, found dead in his home, it is said by a heart attack. His body was quickly after cremated, thus preventing any possibility of an autopsy from occurring. His book has been made pretty much impossible to find available for purchase at this point.
Today’s situation concerning media reporting on Ukraine does not seem to be any different, if anything, it is much much worse.
To bolster support for the Ukrainian military, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.
Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”
“Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare. According to the industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a Ukraine-based public relations firm…
According to the anonymous figure, more than 150 public relations firms have joined the propaganda blitz.
The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.”
Thus, Ingham who has been a member of the UK government and continues to have very high-level connections within the British government, is playing a leading role in shaping how the Ukraine war is being represented.
Dan Cohen provides a thorough explanation of how these “PR firms” have been responsible for reporting and spreading fabricated news and that even when such reports are found conclusively to be untrue, they continue to use them nonetheless. These PR tools include propaganda graphics, which are created in order to encourage radicalisation and promotion of ultra-nationalist identity; using xenophobic and racist language (not just to Russians), outright praise of Ukrainian neo-Nazis as heroes, the idolisation of Nazi affiliated Unit-B leader Stefan Bandera, and the encouragement of violent acts against other individuals (see Cohen’s article for examples).
If you have ever wondered who is behind the omnipotent “fact-checkers”, in the case of StopFake who have self-described themselves as such, they are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) aka the fully-rogue department of the CIA, the Atlantic Council, the International Renaissance Foundation (funded by Open Society Foundation’s billionaire George Soros), the British Embassy in Ukraine, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the German Marshall Fund, among others.
StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “curb the flow of Russian propaganda” but was found to be employing multiple figures closely tied to violent neo-Nazis. This has, however, not deterred Facebook from continuing to work with StopFake.
At the end of the day, it does not seem to matter how many times these arbiters of truth are found to be wrong, for US officials have already admitted that they are literally just lying to the public about what is going on in Ukraine.
Josh Cohen for the Atlantic Council writes [links are from the original article]:
“It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country…”
Josh Cohen continues [links are from the original article]:
“Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.”
After the March 8 2018 attacks against International Women’s Day marchers, Amnesty International wrote “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”
Josh Cohen writes:
“To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.” [emphasis added]
However, we heard it, straight from Yevhen Karas’s mouth, the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi group C14, what determines who holds power in Ukraine has never really been about polls and elections.
Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine's neo-Nazi terror gang C14's speech from Kiev earlier this month. Straight from the horses' mouth, he dispels the many narratives pushed by the left, the mainstream media and the State Department. pic.twitter.com/VWJqWPUGUp
As the famous “f*ck the EU” tape revealed to the dumbfounded world, the Ukrainian people don’t actually have a say in who runs their government. After the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” where Ukrainians literally died for “democracy,” the US went on to “influence” the roster of the newly formed Ukrainian government, specifically around members of Svoboda and Pravyi Sector (Right Sector) who held five senior roles in the new government, including the post of deputy prime minister.
But neo-Nazis have not just been receiving western support in the political sphere.
Just this past October, as a reaction to her failed diplomatic visit to Russia, Victoria Nuland, according to French journalist Thierry Meyssan, went ahead and “imposed” Dmytro Yarosh onto President Zelensky. On Nov. 2, 2021, President Zelensky appointed Dmytro Yarosh (leader of the neo-Nazi affiliated ultra-nationalist paramilitary group Right Sector 2013-2015) as Adviser to the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
This is the very same Dmytro Yarosh who has been on Interpol’s “wanted list” since 2014.
Neo-Nazis have also received ongoing training by the CIA, British SAS (Special Air Service) as well as other NATO countries such as Canada since at least 2014. This training has continued despite Russia’s entry into Ukraine, which has been confirmed by The Times, Ottawa Citizen, CTV News, and Radio Canada.
The Canadian government has attempted to deny any knowledge of training neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine and have made the claim that they are not responsible for verifying who they are in fact training, but that this is the responsibility of the Ukrainian government. However, such claims of ignorance fell through when the very neo-Nazis they were training went ahead and posted pictures on their social media accounts, showcasing their neo-Nazis badges identifying them as such, plain for everyone to see.
US and Canadian military officers meet uniformed members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion during a November 2017 multinational training session in Ukraine.
On the same day as the untoward NATO tweet on International Women’s Day of a Ukrainian soldier with the Nazi Black Sun occult symbol, photographs appeared on NEXTA’s twitter feed showing the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion receiving training by instructors from “NATO countries” on how to use NLAW grenade launchers.
A shipment of NLAW grenade launchers and instructors from #NATO countries arrived in #Kharkiv. The Azov regiment was the first to learn about new weaponry pic.twitter.com/CCzjN40rW7
UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the House of Commons on March 9 that “as of today, we have delivered 3,615 NLAWs [to Ukrainian forces] and continue to deliver more. We will shortly be starting the delivery of a small consignment of anti-tank Javelin missiles as well.”
For a full list of all the weapons sent to Ukraine since 2014 by all involved countries, refer here.
For those especially adamant that neo-Nazis are not “officially” a part of the Ukrainian army, you should be informed that the Azov Battalion is part of Ukraine’s National Guard, and thus, yes it is officially part of Ukraine’s military.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov Battalion’s first commander and later a National Corps parliamentarian previously led the neo-Nazi paramilitary organisation “Patriot of Ukraine,” and once stated in 2010 that it was the Ukrainian nation’s mission to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”
“The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.”
The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.
NATO has recently gone so far as to make a short film honoring the Baltic Nazi collaborators the “Forest Brothers.” The NATO film lionises the “Forest Brothers,” former Waffen SS fighters who voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis, as anti-communist heroes.
This is the story of the Forest Brothers who fought the Soviet army for their homelands after WWII pic.twitter.com/4JcfuJPmeO
Dovid Katz, a leading historian and anti-Nazi investigator condemned the NATO film for rewriting history:
“By going beyond turning a blind eye to the worship of pro-Hitler forces in Eastern Europe…[NATO] is crossing the line right into offering its moral legitimization of Nazi forces such as the Latvian Waffen SS.” [emphasis added]
David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist and reliable voice of the US intelligence apparatus, noted that even prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “the United States and NATO allies [were] ready to provide weapons and training for a long battle of resistance.”
This is the very same David Ignatius who was once President of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (aka specialists in color revolutions), who arrogantly stated in a 1991 interview that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA…The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection”.
I guess the NED has had a change of heart on “openness is its own protection.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov for Covert Action Magazine writes in an article titled “National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine” [links from the original article]:
The archived webpage captured February 25, 2022 from 14:53 shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows “No results found” for Ukraine. As of right now, there are still “No results found” for Ukraine…
Who will suffer the most in this plan for a long battle of resistance? The Ukrainian people.
If Putin’s top reason for going into Ukraine is to “denazify” the country, and the CIA, NATO and co. are persistently “nazifying” the political and military components of Ukraine, you can see how this is making a situation for peace in Ukraine impossible, and that it is the CIA and NATO that are to blame for this.
You can also understand how Ukraine’s entry into NATO was unacceptable merely by its geographic location (the distance between Ukraine’s border and Moscow is 450 km), however, add in the fact that NATO is involved in the promotion of neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine and that now both Sweden and Finland have also expressed a desire to join NATO (with no referendum since democracy is officially dead in Cold War 2.0) and we have ourselves a real sh*t storm.
However, this is not just a threat to Russia. The reality of the situation is that Ukraine has been in a civil war these past 8 years, though the western media refuses to acknowledge this very important fact.
“People who take at face value the Western media coverage would have a very distorted perception of the Ukraine conflict and its origin… They omit or deny that there is a civil war in Donbas even though the majority of scholars who [have] published or presented concerning this conflict in Western academic venues classify it as a civil war with Russian military intervention. The Western media also omitted that recent ‘unity marches’ in Kharkiv and Kyiv and a staged training of civilians, including a grandmother, were organized and led by the far right, in particular, the Neo-Nazi Azov [Battalion].”
Robert Parry from Consortium News writes [link is from original article]:
“On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs…In other words, the neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of anti-Yanukovych protests…have now been organized as shock troops dispatched to kill ethnic Russians in the east [of Ukraine] – and they are operating so openly that they hoist a Swastika-like neo-Nazi flag over one conquered village with a population of about 10,000.
Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.” [emphasis added]
In the above image which outlines the population distribution of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians within Ukraine, you can understand how an ultra-nationalist view that identifies as solely ethnic Ukrainian would be a catalyst for a civil war.
The people of Donbass have understandably asked for independence from Ukraine, yet the Ukrainian government has refused to allow this nor intervene for a peaceful resolution. What does this mean? The war can only end when one side is fully dead.
Not only is it publicly known that the US and NATO have been funding and training neo-Nazis, but they have also been supplying a massive supply of arms (as previously mentioned). It got to such a point where in 2018, Congress had to ban the United States from sending further arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis, specifically mentioning the Azov Battalion. For some reason this ban was to only last for three years thus it is apparently fair game now?
But you may say, what about Russia’s crimes against the Ukrainian people, aren’t they far worse than even vicious neo-Nazis? Namely the bombing of the Mariupol theater and the Bucha massacre. Thorough journalistic investigations have already been done on the former, which can be found here, that conclusively shows the bombing of the Mariupol theater was a false-flag.
As for the Bucha massacre, there has been no evidence presented as of yet that conclusively proves who committed this atrocity, there have only been assertions. Recall that the chemical attacks in Syria were also full of assertions, to which investigative journalist Seymour Hersch wrote a report titled “Whose Sarin,” which conclusively proved that the popular assertions being pushed by the Obama government in their attempt to incriminate the Syrian government, were in fact false. Rather, it was pointing to the fact that the actual terrorists were the ones using sarin on the Syrian civilians, who were receiving American and co. funding and arms.
Unfortunately, time is of the essence in investigating crimes such as these, and despite the outcries of the inhumanity of such events, there is always heavy foot-dragging if not outright dismissal over an official and neutral investigation of such crime scenes. Why is this?
Instead, the response to this was for the UN to suspend Russia from its human rights body. Thus, not only denying an official investigation, but denying Russia a voice in responding to the matter.
The disturbing elephant in the room in all of this, is that the Azov Battalion has already been found guilty of similar atrocities against its own Ukrainian people, which has been thoroughly investigated by Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy and which can be found here (warning there is graphic content).
The Azov Battalion has also been found guilty of purposefully putting Ukrainian citizens in jeopardy by positioning their artillery and military in residential areas and buildings, including daycares and hospitals, to which even the Washington Post had to acknowledge in their misleadingly titled article “Russia has killed civilians in Ukraine. Kyiv’s defense tactics add to the danger.”
However, these are not simply “defense tactics,” they are blatant war crimes that are recognised as such by international law. These war crimes are publicly acknowledged to be going on, causing the deaths of a significant number of Ukrainians. Just to be clear here, during times of war, to which the Washington Post also acknowledges, Ukrainian soldiers and weaponry are legitimate targets for the Russian military. It is not Russia that is committing the war crime here, it is the Ukrainian government. They have literally been caught using their own people as human shields.
Does this still sound like a patriotic nationalist movement for the welfare and sovereignty of the Ukrainian people?
According to an interview with Scott Ritter, former US Marine Intelligence Officer, the Russian military have made it clear that they are using “Syrian tactics” in Ukraine.
Scott Ritter explains, the Russian military’s tactic in Syria was:
“…to surround urban areas where these jihadists had been gathered, terrorizing the population, surround them and give them the opportunity to evacuate on buses with their security guaranteed by Russian military police. A soft approach that protected civilians, that protected civilian areas.”
It was this tactic that allowed the Russians along with the Syrian army to defeat ISIS and other terrorist affiliates. Today they only occupy the Idlib province. These terrorists who remain would not have been possible without Turkish support. This initiative to rid Syria of ISIS was something that the United States has clearly never been interested in supporting.
In the image on the left the red and largely the blue represent the region controlled by terrorists, or as Obama liked to call them “moderate rebels” in the year 2017, in the image to the right the purple and grey represent the region controlled by terrorists in the year 2021. The green is the United States and co.’s illegal presence in the country.
Interestingly, when the Russians entered Syria to combat the terrorists at the behest of the Syrian government, this was also called a “Russian invasion” by certain quarters of western media. However, it was not the Russians who bombed Syrian cities to the ground, that was the good ol’ US of A.
In the same interview, Scott Ritter stated that these very terrorists who have been stationed in Idlib are now being brought into Ukraine:
“…[Zelensky] has opened the door for illegal warriors, the mercenaries from Europe…the exploiters of conflict…[and] they brought in the jihadists…they brought in the people..[who] ostensibly want to kill Russians…It’s a poison pill…now we are going to have these jihadists, who are being armed by the way with javelin missiles and stinger missiles. Imagine what happens when a bunch of bloodthirsty jihadists take these weapons into Europe. Would you like to be the German Chancellor driving on a highway knowing that up in the hills could be a jihadist hit-team armed with javelins?…This is literally the worst kind of decision-making ever to put that much weaponry into Ukraine in an uncontrolled fashion. Even before the jihadist came in you were giving it to neo-Nazis who can’t surrender. They can’t surrender because they will be killed, rightfully so. So what do desperate people do when they can’t surrender and they don’t die? They run away with the weaponry they have. They’ll be burying it, making caches, falling back on it, continuing the futile resistance and in their anger to the West they’ll lash out at the West…that is how global terrorism is born.”
How is this in the best interest of anyone’s welfare in Europe, let alone Ukraine? It isn’t.
Many have been especially confused as to how Ukraine can have such a serious neo-Nazi problem, when they have a Jewish President.
There is something you should know about the position of “President” of Ukraine since 2014, in a country where neo-Nazis have been made more confident than the mafia ever was, that they literally cannot be touched since they have the direct backing and protection of the United States and NATO.
When President Poroshenko (June 2014 – May 2019) negotiated the Minsk agreements in September 2014, he agreed, with Germany and France, to the special autonomous status of Donetsk and Lugansk, and that under this special condition, they would stay part of Ukraine.
According to an interview[1] with Scott Ritter, this was unacceptable to the neo-Nazis who threatened Poroshenko’s life, if such a thing were to be implemented.
The Minsk agreements were never put into action. Instead, Ukraine entered a civil war that has gone on for 8 years and continues to this day. The Minsk agreements were officially expired on February 21st, 2022, the same day that the State Duma of Russia passed a bill officially recognizing Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. This ultimate rejection by the Ukrainian government was a clear indication that their war against Donbass would be escalated.
The situation with President Zelensky is no different.
In October 2019, President Zelensky (who assumed office in May 2019), had a recorded face-to-face confrontation with the militants from the Azov Battalion, who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation.”
“’Listen, Denys [Yantar], I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.
‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.
‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.”
The Kyiv Post continues in their article, that this reaction by President Zelensky received a strong backlash from certain quarters of Ukraine:
“Andriy Biletsky, head of National Corps and the Azov Battalion, threatened Zelensky on his YouTube channel that more veterans would head to Zolote if the president tried to evict them from the town. ‘There will be thousands there instead of several dozen,’ he said…
Singer Sofia Fedyna, who is a lawmaker with the European Solidarity party of former President Petro Poroshenko, which has 27 seats in parliament, was particularly aggressive in her response. She issued physical threats against Zelensky.
‘Mr. President thinks he is immortal,’ she said in a video shared on Facebook. ‘A grenade may explode there, by chance. And it would be the nicest if this happened during Moscow’s shelling when someone comes to the front line wearing a white or blue shirt.’
Zelensky has previously visited the front line dressed in civilian clothing, rather than military fatigues.”
Thus, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion publicly threatened Zelensky if he were to intervene on attempting to negotiate peace and end Ukraine’s civil war.
However, this is not the full story.
President Zelensky is also backed by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who sponsored Zelensky’s rise to presidency, not just with his presidential campaign, but also in the tv show “Servant of the People,” that Zelensky literally “play-acted” as President for three seasons, which ran from November 16th, 2015 to March 28th, 2019. Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine less than two months after the last episode, on May 20th, 2019.
Former President Poroshenko even publicly called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet” during the presidential campaign.[2]
“For years, Zelensky’s company has produced shows for Kolomoisky’s biggest TV channel, 1 + 1. In 2019, Kolomoisky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign. After, Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoisky kept up his relationship with the president, nominating over 30 lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party, and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.”
Since Zelensky’s presidency, Kolomoisky has been able to secure control over a significant portion of Ukraine’s energy sector, including Ukrnafta and Centrenergo, as well as Burisma Holdings.
A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC) found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Kolomoisky.
Recall the Joe and Hunter Biden scandal over Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company. The Bidens ties with Kolomoisky and the situation of Ukraine today is not a coincidence.
In 2016, Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank from Kolomoisky and his business partner, Gennadiy Boholiubov. A U.S. Justice Department civil forfeiture complaint from December 2020, said the two men “embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars.” [emphasis added]
There is also the matter of the Pandora Papers, which has confirmed that Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky was funneling millions of dollars in concealed assets offshore. Zelensky was also implicated in this. And what this of course also means, is that the City of London is tied into all of this.
Kolomoisky has a notorious history of being a literal “raider” of Ukrainian companies, as confirmed by Harper’s Magazine, and Forbes.
“Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky fostered strong reputations as corporate raiders in the mid-2000s, becoming notorious for a series of hostile takeovers. Hostile takeovers Ukrainian style, that is, which often included the active involvement of Privat’s quasi-military teams.”
Kolomoisky, who is Jewish, is also a funder of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion since it was formed in 2014, which has been confirmed by Reuters, Newsweek, and Aljazeera.
He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions and has personally deployed them to protect his financial interests.
In other words, Kolomoisky is funding the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who have been fighting Eastern Ukrainians for these past 8 years, and thus has been directly fueling the civil war in Ukraine. One of the reasons for this, is that Donbass is a region with many natural resources, especially for the energy sector, to which Kolomoisky would very much like to be in possession of. This could only occur with the extermination or occupation of the people of Donbass.
Interestingly, this past Victory Day (May 8th), First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky’s interview was cut short on Sky News when he brought up that Zelen
After years of civil war, the city of Mariupol has now been liberated. Do you think the people in the West will ever hear about this?
Where do We go from Here?
Well, let me put it this way. The United States and NATO know they cannot defeat Russia or China in a direct war, hence all of these proxy wars these past several years under the guise of “War on Terror.” As David Ignatius honestly expressed, their desire is for a long-drawn war. This is because they believe that they can bankrupt Russia and/or set the stage for internal unrest and eventual coup. However, things are clearly not going as planned.
What has been greatly underestimated in this situation is 1) China’s solid alliance with Russia, 2) that Russia is the most resource abundant country in the world to which Europe is dependant on, and 3) the economic brilliance of Sergey Glazyev.
Russia’s rouble has also not tanked as expected. In fact, it has actually grown stronger than ever.
“Keynesians in the West have misread this situation. They think that the Russian economy is weak and will be destabilised by sanctions. That is not true. Furthermore, they would argue that a currency strengthened by insisting that oil and natural gas are paid for in roubles will push the Russian economy into a depression. But that is only a statistical effect and does not capture true economic progress or the lack of it, which cannot be measured. The fact is that the shops in Russia are well stocked, and fuel is freely available, which is not necessarily the case in the West.
The advantages for Russia are that as the West’s currencies sink into crisis, the rouble will be protected. Russia will not suffer from the West’s currency crisis, she will still get inflation compensation in commodity prices, and her interest rates will decline while those in the West are soaring. Her balance of trade surplus is already hitting new records.”
It is the West who has miscalculated in all of this, and it is their economy that will utterly tank from this “long-drawn” war these oligarchs have been having wet dreams about for God knows how many years.
We have done this to ourselves. And if we truly want to correct the matter, we should first have the respect to admit the truth in our complicity to much of the world’s woes during this Cold War period. Those of us who have lived in abundance, in comfort, and security, should take the first step to speak out and say no more to the rest of the world living in starved war-torn agony.
We must stop caring for ourselves first at the expense of all else. We must start caring for others first and foremost and acknowledge the crimes that have been committed in our name. Only then can we truly have the humility to see that the solution has been in front of our face the whole time.
If we fail in this, the western world will not be able to sustain itself for much longer economically. And when it falls, what sort of people do you think you will be surrounded by after all these years of supporting fascism under your very nose?
The author can be reached at cynthiachung.substack.com
While elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it was rapidly accelerated with the dawn of human civilization 7,000 years later. Since that time, ‘ordinary’ human beings like you and me have fought an unending sequence of battles to defend ourselves against these ongoing efforts by elites to kill or control us and capture the bulk of Earth’s resources for their own use.
We have had to fight off elites in a vast range of contexts: Pharaohs and Emperors politically, the Popes and other Vatican officials religiously, the City of London Corporation and other financial elites economically, monarchs and political elites nationally, and now a Global Elite that exercises enormous control technologically, economically, politically, militarily and otherwise over the entire world. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.
But there is a profound difference between all of the battles in earlier eras and the one we are in now.
If we lose this battle, there will be no subsequent battle. The Long War against humanity will have been lost, once and for all.
Why? Because this battle is for everything that it means to be human – human identity, human freedom, human rights, privacy, dignity, free will and anything else that makes life worth living – and for control of the Earth and all its resources.
And while it is true that no human has any of these elements in anything like its entirety – who would claim to be fully ‘free’ in this world? – and many humans still lack all of these elements in any meaningful form, it is nevertheless true that the totalitarian nature of the program being imposed on us will transform the very concept of ‘human’ in a way that has only been conceived in the past 100 years or so and not previously attempted. Moreover, if successful, any ‘free will’ that humans might still possess will be utterly eliminated.
How is this Happening? The Deep Level
Despite the unending efforts of those people aware enough to perceive the true depth of this conflict, elites have been able to use a long series of techniques to ensure that the vast bulk of ‘ordinary’ people either do not perceive the conflict or waste their dissent by expressing it within frameworks designed and controlled by elites for that precise purpose. By doing this, it appears that dissent is ‘allowed’ and valued when, in fact, it is simply dissipated.
A second way in which elites have been able to distract us from where the real power in society lies is by convincing us that we have ‘legal recourse’ against injustice, including against elites who kill and exploit us. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.
A third way in which elites retain control over societies is by designing compulsory education systems that ensure that whatever unique emotional, intellectual, sensory and physical potential a child has at birth is either utterly eliminated within a few years of that birth or channeled to serve elite will. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
And, of course, elites control populations by using extensive propaganda – marketed variously as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’ – to ensure the passive submission of the bulk of the population to elite directives.
In short, an unending sequence of violence – ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – is used to terrorize the individual throughout childhood and adolescence into submissive obedience. This violence ensures that only a rare individual survives with any sense of ‘Self’, with the capacity to critique society and resist violence and exploitation strategically. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
So here we are in 2022, deeply engaged in the final battle to defend humanity, with most of the population unaware of what is happening and the bulk of those who are aware dissipating their dissent through elite-controlled channels.
Hence, as the World Economic Forum puts it so clearly in one of its promotional videos: By 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.’ See ‘8 predictions for the world in 2030’.
And that could well become true for the simple reason that key measures of the transformation taking place are shifting wealth from those with less to those who will shortly own everything, including you, as Dr Joseph Mercola points out – see ‘Who Will Eventually Own Everything, Including You?’ – and the technologies that will destroy your volition will also remove any concept of happiness.
In short, a transhuman slave needs nothing and experiences only those emotions that are programmed. A transhuman slave, whether as worker, soldier or consumer, will simply perform its programmed tasks until it is no longer functional and is ‘decommissioned’.
A human being without free will cannot resist because they do not know that they are enslaved.
Every day, while most people content themselves with trying to get on with living some version of the life that they experienced prior to 2020, another detail is mapped out and another measure is taken by compliant politicians in one or more countries around the world to destroy everything we have ever known. And the noose is ever-tightening.
Let me offer you just a taste of what else is happening, beyond what is ordinarily discussed as part of the ‘Great Reset’, as elements of the Global Elite’s agenda, about which you are not being consulted or even given thoughtful critiques to consider in government and corporate media.
The World Health Organization: International Health Regulations & the Pandemic Treaty
The World Health Organization continues to promote its initiative to create a ‘Pandemic Treaty’. Using wonderful-sounding words such as ‘to build a more robust global health architecture that will protect future generations’, the Treaty sounds like something we have all been dreaming about. See ‘Global leaders unite in urgent call for international pandemic treaty’.
But like all elite initiatives of this nature, the devil is in the detail and, often enough, hidden in plain sight. Rather than offer a detailed critique here, you can consider several fine critiques by thoughtful scholars in the following articles or videos:
Kit Knightly: The ‘Pandemic Treaty’ would ‘hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria. This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.’ See ‘“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government’.
But it would be unwise to ascribe too much significance to these latest, ongoing encroachments on national sovereignty. As explained above, the Global Elite has long exercised control over national governments (as well as international organizations) and the ongoing formalization of this process through the various measures outlined immediately above are simply the latest (health) details in this long-standing process.
Consequently, rather than focusing our resistance on these latest details by, yet again, falling for the trap of lobbying elite agents, as suggested by organizations such as the World Council for Health – see ‘#StopTheWHO: How You Can Take a Stand Against International Health Regulation Amendments’ – it is superior strategy to focus our resistance on the entire elite agenda by undermining elite power at its source.
World Government Summit
The World Government Summit was held in Dubai on 29-30 March 2022. See ‘World Government Summit 2022’. The event was sponsored and hosted by the United Arab Emirates, that bastion of ruthless dictatorship and human rights abuses – see ‘United Arab Emirates 2021’ – and brought together ‘thought leaders, global experts and decision makers from around the globe to share and contribute to the development of tools, policies, and models that are essential in shaping future governments.’ See ‘World Government Summit 2022’.
‘The World Government Summit community is an opportunity for thought-leaders from the public and private sectors to join forces with world-renowned experts to design a better life for citizens across the world. Through Memberships and Partnerships, the Summit brings together change makers to shape a better future for humanity.’ See ‘World Government Summit: Community’.
It is reassuring to know that the WGS felt that the views of constituencies of ‘ordinary’ people – women, indigenous peoples, working people, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, farmers, non-white peoples, religious people… – were not required and that the ‘world renowned experts’ were quite capable of designing ‘a better life for citizens across the world’ without even consulting us. Surely, after all, these high profile people fully understand the daily struggles of those who battle to survive, have a different worldview or are just simply not white, wealthy and ‘well-connected’.
In any case, as the host country’s long record reminds us, human rights are to be eviscerated in the world that is now being introduced, which is why those attending the Summit were obviously very supportive of the UAE’s ruthless approach to human rights.
As Derrick Broze noted in his thoughtful critique of this gathering: ‘Anyone with a functioning brain should… pay attention to this little known gathering of globalist Technocrats… [who] imagine a world where the tyrannical technological systems are invisible and the average person has zero recourse for preventing exclusion or punishment based on their social credit score.’ See ‘While You Were Distracted by Will Smith, the International Elitists Met at The World Government Summit’.
The Great Narrative
The Great Narrative was a forum sponsored by the World Economic Forum from 10-13 November 2021. According to the WEF: It was ‘a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.’ The gathering involved ‘Top thinkers from a variety of geographies and disciplines – including futurists, scientists and philosophers – [to] contribute fresh ideas for the future.’ See ‘The Great Narrative’.
Again, perhaps like me, you find it difficult to identify with the people at this gathering. I wonder if they could see things from your perspective? Or mine?
The good news is that Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, authors of the original book on Covid-19: The Great Reset, also wrote a book about The Great Narrative: For a Better Future. So at least you can read what they are doing to you and plan to do to you. As long as you can read between the lines.
But, again, Derrick Broze has been kind enough to offer a thoughtful critique:
Authoritarians use great narratives to legitimize their own power, and they do this by claiming to have knowledge and understanding that speaks to a universal truth…. With this understanding, the WEF’s call for a ‘Great Narrative’ should be seen for what it truly is – an attempt to displace all other visions of the future of humankind by placing the WEF and their partners at the heart of a narrative which paints them as the heroes of our time. This fits perfectly with the Technocratic philosophy employed by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. He envisions a future where ‘public-private partnerships’ of government and private business and so-called philanthropies use their wealth, influence, and power to design the future they believe is best for humanity. In actuality, the Technocrat philosophy merges with a Transhumanist mindset that sees humanity as limited, flawed, and in need of augmentation by technology in order to accelerate what Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution…. Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores. See ‘The Great Narrative and The Metaverse, Part 1: A Dystopian Vision of the Future’.
Sound like the sort of world that will be good for you?
Defeating the Global Elite’s Agenda
As you ponder the enormity of this elite project, I hope it will encourage you to deeply consider what meaningful resistance in this context will entail. We cannot succeed if we beg elite agents, including politicians, to fix it for us. In the last 18 months, five presidents who resisted the elite-driven narrative have been assassinated to remind us of that.
So resisting it effectively and, ultimately, defeating its agenda, will require focused, strategic action that undermines the power of the Elite to implement its plan.
If you are interested in being part of this strategy, you can read how to do so on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’website which offers further analysis, resources and a list of 29 strategic goals for doing so.
This includes campaigning to cause all sectors of society to refuse to develop and make available, or to purchase/use, technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing) because these technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and/or human privacy. See ‘Strategic Goals related to resisting the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism’.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
Notably, these latter actions avoid certain problems. Because they involve actions by people dispersed throughout the population, rather than people concentrated in one location (as with rallies), they are extremely difficult to interrupt. Hence, they virtually eliminate the risk of violent repression.
If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link available from the website).
Conclusion
The insane Global Elite has launched the final stage of a long-planned program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslave those left alive. They have agents (including international organizations such as the UN and WHO, politicians, medical personnel, government and corporate media) throughout society playing a part in implementing this program on their behalf.
If we are to defeat this program we must mobilize sufficient thoughtful and courageous people to act strategically to undermine the power of the Global Elite to inflict this program upon us. This can be done as described above.
As you ponder your involvement, remember this. If we do not fight successfully now to defend our humanity, no human being will have the opportunity to fight in future. It is ‘now or never’ for us all.
In that sense, this is the final battle.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
US President Joe Biden speaks about the conflict in Ukraine during a visit to the Lockheed Martins Pike County Operations facility on May 3, 2022 (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
Tens of billions, soon to be much more, are flying out of U.S. coffers to Ukraine as Americans suffer, showing who runs the U.S. Government, and for whose benefit.
From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Biden White House has repeatedly announced large and seemingly random amounts of money that it intends to send to fuel the war in Ukraine. The latest such dispatch, pursuant to an initial $3.5 billion fund authorized by Congress early on, was announced on Friday; “Biden says U.S. will send $1.3 billion in additional military and economic support to Ukraine,” read the CNBC headline. This was preceded by a series of new lavish spending packages for the war, unveiled every two to three weeks, starting on the third day of the war:
Feb. 26: “Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine”: Reuters;
Mar. 16: “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine”: The New York Times;
Mar. 30: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”: NBC News;
Apr. 12: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say”: Reuters;
May 6: “Biden announces new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine”: Reuters.
Those amounts by themselves are in excess of $3 billion; by the end of April, the total U.S. expenditure on the war in Ukraine was close to $14 billion, drawn from the additional $13.5 billion Congress authorized in mid-March. While some of that is earmarked for economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, most of it will go into the coffers of the weapons industry — including Raytheon, on whose Board of Directors the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, sat immediately before being chosen by Biden to run the Pentagon. As CNN put it: “about $6.5 billion, roughly half of the aid package, will go to the US Department of Defense so it can deploy troops to the region and send defense equipment to Ukraine.”
As enormous as those sums already are, they were dwarfed by the Biden administration’s announcement on April 28 that it “is asking Congress for $33 billion in funding to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than double the $14 billion in support authorized so far.” The White House itself acknowledges that the vast majority of that new spending package will go to the purchase of weaponry and other military assets: “$20.4 billion in additional security and military assistance for Ukraine and for U.S. efforts to strengthen European security in cooperation with our NATO allies and other partners in the region.”
It is difficult to put into context how enormous these expenditures are — particularly since the war is only ten weeks old, and U.S. officials predict/hope that this war will last not months but years. That ensures that the ultimate amounts will be significantly higher still.
The amounts allocated thus far — the new Biden request of $33 billion combined with the $14 billion already spent — already exceed the average annual amount the U.S. spent for its own war in Afghanistan ($46 billion). In the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan which ended just eight months ago, there was at least some pretense of a self-defense rationale given the claim that the Taliban had harbored Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attack. Now the U.S. will spend more than that annual average after just ten weeks of a war in Ukraine that nobody claims has any remote connection to American self-defense.
Even more amazingly, the total amount spent by the U.S. on the Russia/Ukraine war in less than three months is close toRussia’s total military budget for the entire year($65.9 billion). While Washington depicts Russia as some sort of grave and existential menace to the U.S., the reality is that the U.S. spends more than ten times on its military what Russia spends on its military each year; indeed, the U.S. spends three times more than the second-highest military spender, China, and more than the next twelve countries combined.
But as gargantuan as Biden’s already-spent and newly requested sums are — for a ten-week war in which the U.S. claims not to be a belligerent — it was apparently woefully inadequate in the eyes of the bipartisan establishment in Congress, who is ostensibly elected to serve the needs and interests of American citizens, not Ukrainians. Leaders of both parties instantly decreed that Biden’s $33 billion request was not enough. They thus raised it to $40 billion — a more than 20% increase over the White House’s request — and are now working together to create an accelerated procedure to ensure immediate passage and disbursement of these weapons and funds to the war zone in Ukraine. “Time is of the essence – and we cannot afford to wait,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a letter to House members, adding: “This package, which builds on the robust support already secured by Congress, will be pivotal in helping Ukraine defend not only its nation but democracy for the world.” (See update below).
We have long ago left the realm of debating why it is in the interest of American citizens to pour our country’s resources into this war, to say nothing of risking a direct war and possibly catastrophic nuclear escalation with Russia, the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, with the US close behind. Indeed, one could argue that the U.S. government entered this war and rapidly escalated its involvement without this critical question — which should be fundamental to any policy decision of the U.S. government — being asked at all.
This omission — a failure to address how the interests of ordinary Americans are served by the U.S. government’s escalating role in this conflict — is particularly glaring given the steadfast and oft-stated view of former President Barack Obama that Ukraine is and always will be of vital interest to Russia, but is not of vital interest to the U.S. For that reason, Obama repeatedly resisted bipartisan demands that he send lethal arms to Ukraine, a step he was deeply reluctant to take due to his belief that the U.S. should not provoke Moscow over an interest as remote as Ukraine (ironically, Trump — who was accused by the U.S. media for years of being a Kremlin asset, controlled by Putin through blackmail — did send lethal arms to Ukraine despite how provocative doing so was to Russia).
While it is extremely difficult to isolate any benefit to ordinary American citizens from all of this, it requires no effort to see that there is a tiny group of Americans who do benefit greatly from this massive expenditure of funds. That is the industry of weapons manufacturers. So fortunate are they that the White House has met with them on several occasions to urge them to expand their capacity to produce sophisticated weapons so that the U.S. government can buy them in massive quantities:
Top U.S. defense officials will meet with the chief executives of the eight largest U.S. defense contractors to discuss industry’s capacity to meet Ukraine’s weapons needs if the war with Russia continues for years.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks told reporters Tuesday she plans to participate in a classified roundtable with defense CEOs on Wednesday to discuss “what can we do to help them, what do they need to generate supply”….
“We will discuss industry proposals to accelerate production of existing systems and develop new, modernized capabilities critical to the Department’s ongoing security assistance to Ukraine and long-term readiness of U.S. and ally/partner forces,” the official added.
On May 3, Biden visited a Lockheed Martin facility (see lead photo) and “praised the… plant that manufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles, saying their work was critical to the Ukrainian war effort and to the defense of democracy itself.”
Indeed, by transferring so much military equipment to Ukraine, the U.S. has depleted its own stockpiles, necessitating their replenishment with mass government purchases. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to marvel at the great fortune of this industry, having lost their primary weapons market just eight months ago when the U.S. war in Afghanistan finally ended, only to now be gifted with an even greater and more lucrative opportunity to sell their weapons by virtue of the protracted and always-escalating U.S. role in Ukraine. Raytheon, the primary manufacturer of Javelins along with Lockheed, has been particularly fortunate that its large stockpile, no longer needed for Afghanistan, is now being ordered in larger-than-ever quantities by its former Board member, now running the Pentagon, for shipment to Ukraine. Their stock prices have bulged nicely since the start of the war:
But how does any of this benefit the vast majority of Americans? Does that even matter? As of 2020, almost 30 million Americans are without any health insurance. Over the weekend, USA Today warned of “the ongoing infant formula shortage,” in which “nearly 40% of popular baby formula brands were sold out at retailers across the U.S. during the week starting April 24.” So many Americans are unable to afford college for their children that close to a majority are delaying plans or eliminating them all together. Meanwhile, “monthly poverty remained elevated in February 2022, with a 14.4 percent poverty rate for the total US population….Overall, 6 million more individuals were in poverty in February relative to December.” The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau found that “approximately 42.5 million Americans [are] living below the poverty line.” Americans with diabetes often struggle to buy life-saving insulin. And on and on and on.
Now, if the U.S. were invaded or otherwise attacked by another country, or its vital interests were directly threatened, one would of course expect the U.S. government to expend large sums in order to protect and defend the national security of the country and its citizens. But can anyone advance a cogent argument, let alone a persuasive one, that Americans are somehow endangered by the war in Ukraine? Clearly, they are far more endangered by the U.S. response to the war in Ukraine than the war itself; after all, a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has long been ranked by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as one of the two greatest threats facing humanity.
One would usually expect the American left, or whatever passes it for these days, to be indignant about the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars for weapons while ordinary Americans suffer. But the American left, such that it exists, is barely visible when it comes to debates over the war in Ukraine, while American liberals stand in virtual unity with the establishment wing of the Republican Party behind the Biden administration in support for the escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine. A few stray voices (such as Noam Chomsky) have joined large parts of the international left in urging a diplomatic solution in lieu of war and criticizing Biden for insufficient efforts to forge one, but the U.S. left and American liberals are almost entirely silent if not supportive.
That has left the traditionally left-wing argument about war opposition to the populist right. “You can’t find baby formula in the United States right now but Congress is voting today to send $40 billion to Ukraine,” said Donald Trump, Jr. on Tuesday, echoing what one would expect to hear from the 2016 version of Bernie Sanders or the pre-victory AOC. “In the America LAST $40 BILLION Ukraine FIRST bill that we are voting on tonight, there is authorization for funds to be given to the CIA for who knows what and who knows how much? But NO BABY FORMULA for American mothers!” explained Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Christian Walker, the conservative influencer and son of GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, today observed: “Biden should go apply to be the President of Ukraine since he clearly cares more about them than the U.S.” Chomsky himself caused controversy last week when he said that there is only one statesman of any stature in the West urging a diplomatic solution “and his name is Donald J. Trump.”
Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it.
Meanwhile, the only place where dissent is heard over the Biden administration’s war policy is on the 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. programs on Fox News, hosted, respectively, by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who routinely demand to know how ordinary Americans are benefiting from this increasing U.S. involvement. On CNN, NBC, and in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, there is virtually lockstep unity in favor of the U.S. role in this war; the only question that is permitted, as usual, is whether the U.S. is doing enough or whether it should do more.
That the U.S. has no legitimate role to play in this war, or that its escalating involvement comes at the expense of American citizens, the people they are supposed to be serving, provokes immediate accusations that one is spreading Russian propaganda and is a Kremlin agent. That is therefore an anti-war view that is all but prohibited in those corporate liberal media venues. Meanwhile, mainstream Democratic House members, such as Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), are now openly talking about the war in Ukraine as if it is the U.S.’s own:
Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other’s throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer.
One can believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is profoundly unjust and has produced horrific outcomes while still questioning what legitimate interests the U.S. has in participating in this war to this extent. Even if one fervently believes that helping Ukrainians fight Russia is a moral good, surely the U.S. government should be prioritizing the ability of its own citizens to live above the poverty line, have health insurance, send their kids to college, and buy insulin and baby formula.
There are always horrific wars raging, typically with a clear aggressor, but that does not mean that the U.S. can or should assume responsibility for the war absent its own vital interests and the interests of its citizens being directly at stake. In what conceivable sense are American citizens benefiting from this enormous expenditure of their resources and the increasing energy and attention being devoted by their leaders to Ukraine rather than to their lives and the multi-pronged deprivations that define them?
CORRECTION (May 10, 2022, 20:47 pm ET):This article was edited shortly after publication to reflect that Russia’s total annual military budget is $65.9 billion, not $65.9 million.
UPDATE (May 10, 2022, 22:39 pm ET): Shortly after publication of this article, the $40 billion package for the war in Ukraine passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 368-57. According to CNN: “All 57 votes in opposition were from Republicans.”
The best way to combat disinformation is with more and better information. Censorship isn’t the answer.
The Biden administration has reached a different conclusion, creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Homeland Security. This “board” is headed by Nina Jankowicz, an unelected official and an apparent partisan hack. One example: she dismissed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story as a “fairy tale” involving a “laptop repair shop”; it’s now been confirmed that Hunter’s laptop was real, and so too was that repair shop.
Democrats, of course, don’t have exclusive rights to censorship. Republicans always seem to be calling for books to be banned or education to be policed. But the real problem is much larger than partisan hackery and bickering. Efforts at censorship are all around us, couched as a way of protecting us from harmful lies and other forms of disinformation. Yet, as the comedian Jimmy Dore points out, the government isn’t that concerned about protecting you from lies; it is, however, deeply concerned with denying you access to certain truths, truths that undermine governmental authority and the dominant narrative.
As a retired U.S. military officer and as a historian, the most insidious lies and disinformation I’ve encountered have come from the government. Consider the lies revealed by Daniel Ellsberg and his leak of the Pentagon Papers. Consider the war crimes revealed by Chelsea Manning, aided by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Consider the lies revealed in the recent Afghan War Papers. Consider the lies about the presence of WMD in Iraq, lies that were used to justify the disastrous Iraq War. The government, in short, is a center of lies and disinformation, which is precisely why we need an adversarial media, one that is willing to ferret out truth. Instead, we’re being offered a governmental Ministry of Truth in the form of a “Disinformation Governance Board.”
All things being equal, a democratic society thrives best when speech is as free as possible, trusting in the people to sort fact from fiction, and sound theories from blatant propaganda. And there’s the rub: trusting in the people. Because the government doesn’t trust us (remember Hillary Clinton’s comment about all those irredeemable deplorables), even as the government is often at pains to mislead and misinform us. As maverick journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone said, all governments lie. It’s truly nonsensical, then, to allow the government to police what is true and what is “disinformation.”
But don’t we need some censorship in the name of safety or security or mental health or whatever? Sorry: censorship is rarely about safety, and it most certainly doesn’t serve the needs of the vulnerable. Instead, it serves the needs of the powerful, those who already possess the loudest megaphones in the public square.
But doesn’t someone like Donald Trump deserve to be censored because he spreads disinformation? Which is the bigger problem: Trump or censorship? I happen to think Trump is a divisive con man, but it was a bad precedent for Twitter to have banned him from tweeting. The bigger problem wasn’t Trump’s tweets but the media’s obsessive coverage of them in pursuit of ratings. The way to combat a blowhard like Trump is to ignore him, and to correct him when needed. To combat his lies with the truth. We don’t need a governmental Ministry of Truth to police the tweets of a former president. Not when the government is often the biggest liar.
The solution isn’t censorship but an active, engaged, and informed citizenry, assisted by a fourth estate, the press, that is truly independent and adversarial to power. But the weakening of education in America, combined with a fourth estate that is deeply compromised by the powerful and often in bed with the government, means that these democratic checks on power are less and less effective. Hence calls for quick yet dangerous “solutions” like censorship, where the censors (governmental boards, private corporations) are opaque and almost completely unaccountable to the people.
Unless your goal is to give the already powerful a monopoly on speech, censorship is not the answer.
British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.
In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.
UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”
On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.” The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.
It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.
While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation.
This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”
In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.
Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”
InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”
An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”
It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politiciansin both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.
The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI
In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”
According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”
Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”
In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”
Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”
Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.
Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.
The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:
Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.
In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.
Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg
The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed.
Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabondby this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.
Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging).
The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.”
Those phases are:
Before a vaccine is available
The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
The vaccine is widely available
Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
After the Crash 