Doesn't it strike anyone as strange that the "leader" of this "freedom" movement in Iran is a US government employee and bosom buddy of the neocons? But hey, sure, it's totally legit… https://t.co/oPF7lf9Bvx pic.twitter.com/VPGFgaJDSU
— Ron Paul Institute (@RonPaulInstitut) September 25, 2022
Propaganda
“We can’t win against Vladimir Putin in any way because you cannot win against someone you cannot say ‘no’ to. Period. And we can’t say ‘no’ to Putin because we sold our soul for his oil and gas,” he said.
The popular commentator said he’d cut off energy supplies to the EU if he were the president of Russia
https://www.rt.com/news/563389-jordan-peterson-putin-ukraine/
Sept 23, 2022
FILE PHOTO. Jordan Peterson in Cambridge. © Chris Williamson / Getty Images
Popular conservative political commentator Jordan Peterson has tried to get into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s head and predict how Russia’s conflict with the West in Ukraine will unfold. Peterson said that if he were the Russian president he would leave the EU without energy supplies in the winter.
“I know what I’d do in his shoes,” he said on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show on Thursday. “I’d wait till the first cold snap and shut off the taps.”
Peterson was referring to supplies of Russian natural gas to EU nations. He argued that Moscow indirectly warned that a full shutdown would happen when Russian gas giant Gazprom started curtailing deliveries through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany, citing maintenance issues.
The political commentator declined to endorse a notion popular in the West that Putin resembles Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin in his thinking, calling the claim “foolish” and not backed by any actual evidence.
Putin “is a lot more like everybody else than anyone thinks,” Peterson argued. He added that “there is a bit of Hitler and Stalin in everyone,” before going into an explanation of how accepting government-imposed lies under pressure was part of human nature.
“The totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie. And people would certainly go along with that. We’ve seen this emerge with [the] cancel culture. It’s like ‘Lie! Or else!’,” he said.
He mocked the idea that Ukraine and its Western backers could “win” against Russia as “naïve.”
“I just don’t understand that. What do you mean we are going to win? What are we going to win exactly?” he demanded.
The Russian government, Peterson believes, would consider simply devastating Ukraine an acceptable outcome, if no better alternative can be achieved. And the West would not be able to stop it due to Russia’s role as a global supplier of energy, he argued.
“We can’t win against Vladimir Putin in any way because you cannot win against someone you cannot say ‘no’ to. Period. And we can’t say ‘no’ to Putin because we sold our soul for his oil and gas,” he said.
“And we did that to elevate our moral stature in relation to ‘saving the planet.’ And here we are, facing a very dire winter, hoisted on the petard of our very own foolishness and moral presumption,” he added.
Peterson was referring to the concern that humanity was facing an existential threat due to climate change, a threat that he believes to be exaggerated. The unintended consequences of the West’s conflict with Russia are a far more imminent and real threat to humans, he pointed out, as “the World Bank already estimated that we’ve put 350 million people into what they call ‘food insecurity’.”
“But the planet has too many people on it anyway, so, you know… It’s just poor people,” he added.
Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor who rose to international prominence over his commentaries on various contemporary issues, such as transgender acceptance policies in the West, the role of Christianity in cultures originating in Europe, and geopolitical conflicts. His YouTube channel has over 5.5 million subscribers.
Sept 18, 2022
The establishment wants you to drink up the fantasy the Monarchy embodies the “best of Britain”. It’s the opposite. It’s the enduring embodiment of the worst of Britain: inherited wealth + privilege, a rigid class system, structural racism, imperialism, and unaccountable power.
The Western media refuses to approach Zelensky with a critical lens, and the world is paying for it
Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perception Index ranked Ukraine 122nd out of 180 countries and is considered the second most corrupt in Europe. Russia comes in at 136th place.
Zelensky suffered a major political blow when the Pandora Papers leak occurred in 2021 to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents showed Zelensky had off-shore shell companies and is “rather similar to his predecessors,” The Guardian reported at the time.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-hero-comedian-president-zelensky/5793492
Global Research, September 14, 2022
Trends Journal 8 September 2022
Theme: Media Disinformation
In-depth Report: UKRAINE REPORT
***
Since the Ukraine War began in February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has achieved global popularity that has reached historic proportions.
The most frequent comparison is Winston Churchill, the British imperialist who squared off against Adolf Hitler during WWII. Yes, Churchill with a murderous track record, but adored by the Western propagandists who cover up his long history of atrocities. (See: Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes (London: Verso, 2022).
And Zelensky, worshiped by the West and trumped up as a hero, shares elements of lies and deceit that mirror the Churchill narrative.
Clown Show
Across the spectrum – from comedians, actors, Presstitutes, politicians, and presidents – Zelensky has been praised as a world leader of the first degree.
Former President George W. Bush called him “the Winston Churchill” of our time. Ben Stiller, the “Tropic Thunder” actor, met Zelensky in June and gushed, “You’re my hero!”
The Hollywood Reporter said Stiller was “beaming” during the visit.
But before Russia’s 24 February invasion, Zelensky was perhaps best known in the U.S. as the little-known leader who was on the other line of former President Donald Trump’s infamous phone call asking him to investigate Joe Biden and the former vice president’s troubled son Hunter. The call resulted in an impeachment inquiry that eventually led to Trump’s impeachment.
Zelensky, a law-degree-carrying comedian who played the Ukrainian president on a TV show, ran for office in 2019 and vowed to work to clean up the crony capitalism and corruption in Kyiv. The show was called “Servant of the People.”
Like Trump, who was a reality show champion, Zelensky used the momentum of a popular sitcom to kick-start a political career. This role was very specific: He was an outsider who would clean up Kyiv. And why not? His TV show was so popular that his political party took on the name. (Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perception Index ranked Ukraine 122nd out of 180 countries and is considered the second most corrupt in Europe. Russia comes in at 136th place.)
One of the platforms of Zelensky’s campaign was peace with Russia. As reported by Radio Free Europe “one of his two main promises was to bring the war to an end, a goal that polls have shown Ukrainians want to see accomplished more than anything.”
Playing the poll numbers which showed that the number two concern on the list of Ukrainians was to stamp out the corruption that ravaged the nation, Zelensky, promising “victory over corruption,” said he would be the candidate to wipe it out.
The act worked and Zelensky, who was 41 in the spring of 2019, carried 73 percent of the vote.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
But Zelensky’s effort to negotiate for peace and clean up Kyiv’s corruption was seen by many to have failed, and it turned out that Zelensky was part of the problem all along.
Forbes wrote in 2021, “Life has become art. But for many Ukraine watchers and foreign investors – they want their money back. This Servant of the People real-life movie version is not like the TV series. This is a flop.”
On the war front, Zelensky saddled up with hardline Russophobes in the country who protested any concessions.
The president agreed that an election should be held in the Donbas region, but only under Ukrainian standards and with no Russian troops on the ground. At that time, Moscow denied any troop presence.
How Corrupt Is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky?
Zelensky previously agreed to the Steinmeier formula that would allow local elections to be held even before these troops leave the area. But he did not implement the provisions to end the deadly conflict. Instead, military battles between Kyiv and the separatist Donbas region escalated, with a reported 14,000 to 15,000 people killed.
There were some signs that tensions between the countries were easing – including prisoner exchanges – but in October 2021, Ukraine deployed an armed drone to the region that got tensions high again.
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Moscow’s recognition of the separatist region just before Moscow’s 24 February invasion.
Putin said the purpose of the operation was to protect people in Donbas who “have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.”
Days before the invasion, Putin met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and told reporters after the meeting: “Naturally, the issue of European security was also discussed in the context of the situation around a settlement of the conflict in Ukraine.”
“As you know, the Kyiv authorities are refusing to abide by the Minsk Agreements and the 2015 arrangements, as well as the agreements reached at later summits in the Normandy format…There is no progress on such important issues as constitutional reform, amnesty, local election or the special legal status of Donbas… Opportunities for restoring the country’s territorial integrity via a direct dialogue with Donetsk and Lugansk continue to be ignored, like before. Ukraine is systematically violating human rights on a large scale and continues to endorse discrimination against Russian speakers at the legislative level.”
Sources told The Kyiv Independent that France and Germany urged Ukraine to comply with the Russian “spin” of the agreement to prevent war. The report said French President Emmanuel Macron asked Zelensky to talk with the separatists in the region, and Zelensky said no. Scholz also urged Kyiv to offer occupied territories in the Donbass some autonomy.
Kyiv has been opposed to the deal because it claims that the agreement would grant these territories “full amnesty for all combatants, the right to appoint their own prosecutors and judges and to develop their own political and economic ties with Russia.”
Corruption Club
On the corruption front, Zelensky’s top objection was the billions that Ukrainian oligarchs kept in shell companies overseas to avoid taxes. Critics say these offshore businesses are intended to be vehicles to avoid paying taxes to Ukraine.
Zelensky suffered a major political blow when the Pandora Papers leak occurred in 2021 to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents showed Zelensky had off-shore shell companies and is “rather similar to his predecessors,” The Guardian reported at the time.
It turns out that Zelensky and his close associates maintained their own network of these offshore companies, according to the papers.
These companies were set up in 2012, long before he ran for president. Zelensky’s offshore companies were in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize. His partners were given plumb jobs in the executive branch of his government.
Zelensky’s office said at the time that the use of these companies was intended to protect him from pro-Russian forces, Al Jazeera reported.
The report said two of the offshore companies belonged to Zelensky’s partners and used to purchase “three lavish properties in central London.” These papers said Zelensky transferred his stake in one of his offshore companies to a top aide and former business partner, Sergiy Shefir, just before he was elected.
Zelensky’s office said these companies were created to protect the group’s incomes from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was considered pro-Russian.
The Al Jazeera report said that Zelensky’s office did not respond to evidence that his wife has continued to receive dividends from an offshore company.
Ukraine, by far, had the most politicians named in the Pandora Papers leak at 38. Russia came in second with 19.
Iryna Gerashchenko, a lawmaker from ex-president Petro Poroshenko’s party, claimed Zelesnky committed tax evasion.
“He and his accomplices took funds offshore without paying any taxes to the Ukrainian budget,” she tweeted.
Zelensky defeated the billionaire in 2019.
Ihor Kolomoysky
Zelensky’s relationship with Ihor Kolomoysky, the Ukrainian oligarch, has also been scrutinized after reports emerged of a secret payment of $41 million to Zelensky’s off-shore media company called Kvartal 95.
Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s head prosecutor, told reporters in 2021 that the revelations came as “no surprise” for law-enforcement agencies in the country, bykvu.com reported. She questioned the veracity of the report.
Kolomoysky was a major supporter of Zelensky’s bid for president.
On 20 July, Ukrainska Pravda first reported that Kolomoysky’s citizenship had been revoked over his dual citizenship. Kolomoysky holds citizenships in Israel, Cyprus, and Ukraine.
The Kyiv Independent reported that Kolomoysky has holdings in oil, metallurgy, mass media, and banking companies. He once reportedly joked that Ukrainian law bars dual citizenship, “but doesn’t say anything about triple citizenship.”
The Pandora Papers suggested that Zelensky was involved with money laundering from Kolomoysky’s PrivatBank that helped the comedian buy an apartment in London.
Zelensky also has a 15-room villa in Italy that he failed to disclose in his public asset declaration while running for office in 2019.
The Italian newspaper Il Tirreno recently reported that the villa, which is still owned by Zelensky, was rented out to a woman from the former USSR who now lives in London. The report noted that the woman likely rented the villa through a third party, but it is notable because Kyiv is calling on the EU to ban Russian tourists.
Zelesnky’s office referred The Trends Journal to a statement from the Italian property management company, San Tommaso SRL. The company denied the report that the property was rented out to a woman from the Russian Federation.
Zelensky The Draft-Dodger
During the 2019 campaign, Zelensky’s history of draft-dodging became a focal point that former President Petro Poroshenko tried to scrutinize. On April 13, 2019, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry took to Facebook to confirm that Zelensky ignored four draft notices on 15 April 2015, 23 June 2014, 15 August 2014, and 10 October 2015. “Citizen Zelensky V.O. did not arrive at the military commissariat at his call,” the post read.
The Defense Ministry and Zelensky’s office did not respond to emails seeking comment from The Trends Journal. Zelensky has been criticized since the start of the invasion for not allowing fighting-aged men to leave the country and using the strategy of issuing military summonses at gas stations and other public areas.
The New York Times reported that young men in Ukraine are required to do military service “unless they fall into an exempt category, like being enrolled in a university, having a disability or having at least three children.”
Corruption Rampant
The European Court of Auditors released a special report in September that found “grand corruption and state capture” were still widespread in the country despite 20 years of European Union efforts to intervene and help in its reform agenda.
“The EU has long been aware of the connections between oligarchs, high-level officials, politicians, the judiciary, and state-owned enterprises. However, it has not developed a real strategy for targeting grand corruption,” the auditors said in a statement.
Up until the Russian invasion, the EU has been the largest donor to Ukraine. The European Commission has committed around €5.6 billion to macro-financial assistance programs and €2.2 billion to assistance programs since 2014, the statement said. The Commission also guarantees European Investment Bank loans of €4.4 billion.
Juhan Parts, the member of the European Courts of Auditors responsible for the report “despite varied support the EU has offered to Ukraine, oligarchs and vested interests continue to undermine the rule of law in Ukraine and to threaten the country’s development.”
Freedom House’s 2022 report lists Ukraine as “partly free,” with a score of 61 out of a possible 100.
*
Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seen earlier this year. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service)
The original source of this article is Trends Journal
Copyright © Gerald Celente, Trends Journal, 2022
From the Brits:
These types are not journalists and are denigrating the integrity of real journalists, the very few that remain in North America. How can these types sit there and spew what they know is propaganda garbage from their masters? Paycheques, that’s all. It’s all mind control based on fear and doom if you do not submit to the elites’ plan. Lou
Are we not sick of these sold-out media bobbing heads and ignorant politicos?
An investigation has exposed a vast coordinated network online
On August 4, for example, Amnesty International published a report on Ukrainian troops basing forces and weaponry in residential areas, including schools and hospitals, which both endangers civilians and constitutes a war crime. Three days later, CBS broadcast a documentary showing that just 30% of the vast Western arm shipments to Kiev actually reach the frontline, the rest disappearing or being sold on the black market.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide have published a landmark paper on the activities of bot accounts on Twitter related to the conflict in Ukraine. These Australian findings are truly staggering – of 5.2 million tweets on the social media network from February 23 to March 8, between 60 to 80% were shared by fake accounts. What’s more, 90% of those posts were pro-Ukraine.
No wonder Elon Musk retreated from his Twitter deal, it’s all bots! Lou
https://www.rt.com/news/562509-ukrainian-bots-in-twitter/
By Slobodan Kolomoets
Sept 10, 2022
© NurPhoto via Getty Images
Researchers at the University of Adelaide have published a landmark paper on the activities of bot accounts on Twitter related to the conflict in Ukraine. These Australian findings are truly staggering – of 5.2 million tweets on the social media network from February 23 to March 8, between 60 to 80% were shared by fake accounts. What’s more, 90% of those posts were pro-Ukraine.
In particular, these accounts pushed the hashtags #IStandWithUkraine, #IStandWithZelenskyy, and #ISupportUkraine, and myths like the ‘Ghost of Kiev’, a fictional Ukrainian fighter pilot who is farcically alleged to have taken down 40 Russian jets within hours of the military operation commencing.
Significant spikes in activity were recorded at key points in the initial stages of the fighting, such as Russia’s capture of Kherson on March 2, and the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant on March 4.
The accounts identified were overwhelmingly English language, leading the researchers to conclude these fake users sought to “drive more disruption in English-speaking countries” and “influence a variety of user groups.” Despite the significant focus on English, Ukrainian bots also employed the Russian language to “cause more disruption” in the country.
The accounts were successful in their objective of stimulating discussions and trends around particular topics, kickstarting and increasing online discussion around a number of subjects, including the question of whether Ukrainians should flee the country. The researchers recorded “significant flows” of information from Ukrainian bots to non-bot accounts.
The study is the first analysis of social media content related to the conflict and covers a very small time period – just two weeks. It is almost inevitable that the level of pro-Kiev sentiment expressed by users – troll and organic alike – will have increased even further beyond the 90% recorded during this timeframe. Numerous commentators have drawn attention to the weaponization of Twitter, Facebook, et al in support of the Western proxy war in Ukraine.
One need only spend a few minutes scrolling major social media networks to identify a profusion of anonymous, recently registered users pumping out pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO, and pro-war propaganda, and attacking anyone critical of ascendant Western narratives. It is, in the words of writer Caitlin Johnstone, “the most aggressively trolled war of all time.”
Unsurprisingly though, the Western media – which remains overwhelmingly committed to not publishing any negative information about Ukraine whatsoever – has universally ignored the bombshell findings of this academic paper. You can only imagine the blanket coverage if the findings were related to Russia.
The hesitancy of corporate news outlets to report on matters that do not reflect positively on Kiev is nonetheless somewhat understandable, as on the vanishingly rare occasions this has happened, the backlash has been savage.
On August 4, for example, Amnesty International published a report on Ukrainian troops basing forces and weaponry in residential areas, including schools and hospitals, which both endangers civilians and constitutes a war crime. Three days later, CBS broadcast a documentary showing that just 30% of the vast Western arms shipments to Kiev actually reach the frontline, the rest disappearing or being sold on the black market.
Such was the incendiary response to these reports on social media, Amnesty was successfully bullied into apologizing for any “anger and distress” its disclosures caused – CBS went one further and pulled its documentary from the web. The academic study would tend to suggest that much of this counterblast was in fact attributable to automated accounts and deliberately intended to create the false impression that condemnation of both organizations was omnipresent.
The University of Adelaide paper also raises obvious questions about the true nature of something called NAFO – the ‘North Atlantic Fellas Organization’ – which was a leading force in the online counterblast against Amnesty and CBS. NAFO has a history of harassing pro-Russian voices and mass reporting accounts until they are temporarily or permanently suspended. Many prominent officials have praised the group, and it has received positive profiles in The Economist, Politico, and the Washington Post.
As is so often the case, dubious tactics and conduct of which Russia is widely accused cease to be villainous when it’s Western countries and their allies doing it. One might reasonably ask whether the entire mainstream media controversy over Kremlin bots on social media was just a smokescreen for far larger and more effective operations much closer to home.
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Harold Pinter
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pilger-silencing-lambs-how-propaganda-works
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, SEP 11, 2022
Authored by John Pilger via ConsortiumNews.com,
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, and better connected.
Leni Riefenstahl, center, filming with two assistants, 1936. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Or do we in the West live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American-owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
Harold Pinter Broke the Silence
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke the silence.
“U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is
“best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.
“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”
Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during 1934 rally in Nuremberg. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are —not that U.S. President Joe Biden’s theft of $7 billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.
At its summit in Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spain’s Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez on June 28 in Madrid. (NATO)
It says: “NATO’s enlargement has been a historic success.”
I read that in disbelief.
The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.
Dec. 7, 2015: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.
NATO on Hitler’s Borderline
Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.
On the same day, Russia invaded — an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken.” America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.
Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.
In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and “think-tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested these “pests” be “eradicated.”
Andriy Beletsky, commanding officer of the special Ukrainian neo-Nazi police regiment Azov, with volunteers in 2014. (My News24, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission is not new. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were given knighthoods for their compliance. In 1917, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
Julian Assange in 2014. (David G Silvers, Wikimedia Commons)
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for The Guardian, The New York Times, and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange — the U.N. rapporteur on torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
* * *
John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ZeroHedge or Consortium News.
One way of dealing with the psychological discomfort of this situation is to try and distance yourself emotionally from the plight of humanity and say, “Fine, screw it. Let humanity plunge into dystopia and armageddon. The sooner it happens, the better. We deserve it.”
And that’s what we’re dealing with here. A heritage of trauma stretching back into an unfathomably vast expanse of time, incarnating in the current form of some eight billion homo sapiens. If you zoom out and look at the big picture with this understanding, it’s difficult to find real guilt anywhere, in anyone. Even in the most abusive and traumatizing among us.
We’re all ultimately doing the best we can while riding the momentum of a chain of events far beyond our control which stretches backward through time all the way to the Big Bang.
Whenever I talk about the way our species is sliding toward annihilation via nuclear armageddon or environmental disaster I always get a few people saying something along the lines of, “Good, humans are horrible. The planet will be better off without us.”
This attitude generally seems to be born of frustration. People learn about what’s happening to our world and begin to see how easy it would be to change course if not for the greed and megalomania of our rulers, as well as the obedience of the rank-and-file public and its credulous acceptance of the propaganda that keeps them accepting status quo systems, and they get frustrated. Frustrated with a humanity that just won’t come to its senses, even with all the evidence right there to be seen.
That frustration often turns to disgust as people discover that not only do others fail to see what they see, but they actively avoid looking at it even if you point it out to them. You can lay out the evidence for the corruption and unsustainability of status quo politics and the omnicidal, ecocidal depravity of oligarchic imperialism — lay it out right under their noses — and they’ll make up excuses to turn away.
One way of dealing with the psychological discomfort of this situation is to try and distance yourself emotionally from the plight of humanity and say, “Fine, screw it. Let humanity plunge into dystopia and armageddon. The sooner it happens, the better. We deserve it.”
And I understand the sentiment, but to me saying humanity deserves destruction sounds a lot like saying a drug addict deserves to overdose.
A heroin addict isn’t fully in control of their actions; if they were they would simply quit, because they know from both public knowledge and firsthand observation that it’s a destructive habit. Addiction is described — at least by anyone whose mind is worth a damn — not as a personal choice, but as a disease. Just as would be the case with any other disease, addiction is a condition over which they do not have control, because it has taken over their operating system against their will in some way.
Humanity as a whole is on much the same boat. We have a condition which makes us behave in a self-destructive way, and on paper we could technically all just collectively change course, even if a few oligarchs and empire managers tried to stop us. But we don’t, because we’re not in control.
Those with a substance abuse problem use because they don’t know how to feel okay without the substance, and if they ever overcome their addiction they will eventually discover that this was because there were unconscious forces within them which made the experience of sober life intolerable. Forces like psychological tendencies born of trauma, deprivation or dysfunction earlier in life, tendencies which might manifest as experiences like depression, anxiety or self-loathing which can become too difficult to tolerate without their substance of preference.
Human behavior likewise is driven by unconscious forces on the collective level, but instead of early childhood trauma we’re talking about our entire evolutionary history, as well as the history of civilization.
It’s a ridiculous situation, if you think about it. The story of life on this planet has been about organisms trying to avoid being eaten long enough to reproduce, and our species stumbled out of that horrifying predicament with all the same fear responses and stress hormones and now all of a sudden you find yourself sitting in a cubicle with your heart racing as though you’re running from a saber-toothed tiger because you overhear Janice from accounting gossiping about you.
The eat-or-be-eaten dynamic came crashing headlong through the dawn of a new species with a rapidly-evolved cerebral cortex and the sudden capacity for abstract thought, and all that fear and stress kept marching forward from generation to generation entangling itself with this added new element of thought, language and storytelling. This gave rise to societal constructs like religion, government, hierarchy and family power structures, all largely born of the primitive, fear-based desire to control and dominate which we carried with us from our evolutionary ancestors who lived in trees to hide from predators.
Parents who were traumatized by their parents passed their trauma on to their own children because their trauma made them behave in a traumatized way, and those children passed their own trauma on to their children too. On top of this small-scale generational trauma we added things like wars, slavery, tyranny, colonization and genocides which traumatized entire populations, and that trauma would be passed on from generation to generation as well.
And then we showed up. We, the people who are currently alive. That’s what we were born into. That’s the wave we rode in on. And that wave is still going.
And we wonder why everyone’s so dysfunctional and self-destructive.
We never really had a chance to build a healthy world. Our ancestors went from running away from monsters with sharp fangs to burning witches and heretics to fighting world wars to giving birth to us, and that wave of fear and chaos carried forward right into our own psyches and into the psyches of everyone else on this planet without skipping a beat. If you look at where we came from and how we got here, it’s amazing we’re even as functional as we are.
And that’s what we’re dealing with here. A heritage of trauma stretching back into an unfathomably vast expanse of time, incarnating in the current form of some eight billion homo sapiens. If you zoom out and look at the big picture with this understanding, it’s difficult to find real guilt anywhere, in anyone. Even in the most abusive and traumatizing among us.
Certainly, it is in our collective interest to immobilize anyone whose tendencies are dangerously destructive. And certainly establishing culpability and accountability for misdeeds is going to be an important part of expanding human consciousness and creating a healthy world, because we have to understand how and why things are going wrong before we can fix our problems. But even the most destructive among us are simply carrying forward the heritage of trauma which has been reverberating from generation to generation from the deepest recesses of prehistoric life.
Think about a mistake you’ve made in the past. A really bad one, one that makes you cringe whenever you think about it. You wouldn’t make that mistake in the same way again, would you? Of course not, because you now know things you didn’t know back then. You are conscious now of things you previously were not. Depending on how conscious you are now in relation to how conscious you were then you might repeat similar mistakes in similar ways, but you wouldn’t intentionally repeat the exact same error if you had a do-over. In that small way, your consciousness has expanded.
That’s all negative human behavior ultimately is: mistakes that were made due to a lack of consciousness. A lack of empathy, a lack of serenity, a lack of information, a lack of insight, a lack of knowledge that there are better choices, a lack of perception on what’s really going on in the world, a lack of clarity on the ways propaganda manipulates us into serving the interests of the powerful — these are all just different kinds of unconsciousness. Different ways that one can fail to accurately perceive reality.
In this churning, chaotic tidal wave of evolutionary trauma that we were all born into, the only thing we really have any amount of real control over is whether we mindlessly repeat our conditioning patterns or start bringing consciousness to them. But even that is greatly limited by how much consciousness we have access to at the time; many people are just barely treading water psychologically and don’t often have the space to pause and bring clarity to their own inner processes. A lot of people are just stumbling blindly along, and it’s not ultimately their fault any more than the blindness of an actual blind person.
So we’re all innocent, in the end. Again, we must of course push to bring consciousness to the parts of humanity that have taken a wrong turn — to the war criminals and plutocrats and managers of empire, and all other abusers and the abusive systems which elevate them. But underneath that fierce burst of light there can also be a deep compassion and understanding born of a lucid seeing of how we got here in the first place.
We’re all ultimately doing the best we can while riding the momentum of a chain of events far beyond our control which stretches backward through time all the way to the Big Bang. Everyone is playing with a lousy hand which was dealt to them by the churning tumult of evolution and history while grappling with the puzzle of mortality on a tiny blue world of unfathomable beauty that is hurtling through a universe that none of us understand.
Let’s be tender with each other.
________________
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This is good Russian war propaganda. Reminds me of the circulating meme showing a stressed-out European trying to decide which red button to press, one is “Sanction Russia” and the other is “Freeze this winter.”
By the way, this video is taken from the post below.
https://www.newstarget.com/2022-08-31-corporate-media-attacking-vitamin-d-natural-remedies.html
08/31/2022
Fake news giant Forbes has published a propaganda piece declaring vitamin D to be “worthless” and even “dangerous” for humans.
Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and the article’s author, argues that people need to “Stop Taking Vitamin D Already!” – this being the title of his piece.
Salzberg is so against vitamin D that he added it to his top five list of vitamins that people should never take, making it a top six list of “useless vitamin supplements,” as he calls them (the other five are vitamin C; vitamin A and beta carotene; vitamin E; vitamin B6 (pyridoxine); and multivitamins).
Even though upwards of 75 percent of the American population is deficient in vitamin D, Salzberg argues that people should avoid it like the plague because a paper published in The Lancet supposedly found that it “did not help to prevent heart disease, weight gain, mood disorders, multiple sclerosis, and metabolic disorders, all of which had been linked to lower vitamin D.”
Since vitamin D has gained a lot of traction due to the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) – check out the evidence showing that vitamin D works against infectious diseases – Salzberg and others like him are trying to nip it in the bud and scare people away from taking it.
“The only prophylactics the corporate media ever apparently want to promote are masks and vaccines – tools of social control and biomedical profiteering, respectively,” writes Ben Bartee for The Daily Bell.
“Johns Hopkins is the undisputed Heart of COVID-19 Darkness – the progenitor of lockdown policies and the most-cited authority for the corporate media and government to justify mask and vaccine mandates.”
Forbes, Steven Salzberg and Johns Hopkins University are mouthpieces for Big Pharma
While it may be true that vitamin D supplements are not the most optimal form of intake – natural sunlight, without sunscreen, is your best option – Salzberg is of the persuasion that the vitamin is useless and even harmful, which is laughable.
Johns Hopkins, it turns out, is Big Pharma central. The school touts the “benefits” of nanobot “theragrippers” that latch onto the intestines like parasites in order to deliver pharmaceuticals to the bloodstream, all while denigrating natural vitamins.
It is no surprise, in other words, that Salzberg is writing hit pieces against natural vitamins on behalf of Johns Hopkins, which is an enemy of natural remedies and health freedom, which don’t make Big Pharma any money.
What Salzberg conveniently failed to address in his hit piece is the fact that vitamin D deficiency is linked to a host of health problems, not the least of which include chronic fatigue, muscle twitching, confusion, nausea, weakness, constipation, paresthesia and poor appetite.
A lack of vitamin D also makes a person more prone to developing an infectious disease, as well as multiple sclerosis, autoimmune rheumatic diseases (ARD), cancer, osteoporosis, arthralgia, myalgia and type 1 diabetes.
“But that’s all golden for Big Pharma,” Bartee further writes. “They’ve got vaccines for acute infections and drugs to hook you on for life to treat chronic illnesses.”
“They’ll drain you of your life savings as you slowly die, all the while never getting to the root cause of your illness – which, in many cases, might well be a vitamin D deficiency. Cured patients don’t pad Pfizer’s bottom line.”
In the year 2022, it is simply astounding that any media outlet, no matter how corrupted, would be so foolish as to publish anti-vitamin D propaganda. The cat is long out of the bag, and Forbes, Salzberg and Johns Hopkins are unsuccessfully trying to stuff it back in.
The latest news about natural remedies for optimal health can be found at Cures.news.
Sources for this article include:
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/westerners-think-they-are-free-thinking
Westerners Think They Are Free-Thinking Individualists And It’s Effing Adorable
Listen to a reading of this article:
The Times has published an article titled “Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears,” subtitled “The singer’s uncompromising individuality makes her a serious threat to the mass imposition of cultural conformity through censorship,” and its contents are exactly as horrifyingly idiotic as you would imagine.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the article by Ben Macintyre, because if I had to read them then so do you:
A woman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, jets of flame shot 100ft into the air, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.
For there is nothing so wildly individualistic, so defiant of convention, so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York City.
Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw meat-wearing, bisexual feminist who sings of liberty, drugs, addiction, mental health and the absolute right to self-expression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way. Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both an extreme fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, from the point of view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.
Macintyre goes on to explain that Lady Gaga was banned from China in 2016 for meeting with the Dalai Lama (who just between us is known to have collected a massive paycheck from the CIA for decades), which makes her a serious threat whose bold defiance and bisexual feminist individualism give Xi Jinping screaming night terrors.
“Lady Gaga poses a threat less for her political views, her visit to the Dalai Lama, and her support for LGBTQ rights than through her determination to be, and encourage others to be, entirely different,” Macintyre concludes. “Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.”
I seriously cannot believe this article was published. Like, anywhere. I would have been surprised to see it picked up by even the most obscure clickbait blog in the seediest backwaters of the internet, much less by a prominent 237 year-old British newspaper.
But from where I sit right now, the funniest thing about it is the way the article portrays the western world as this bastion of free thought and individuality. Just that one fact alone eclipses the absurdity of the fact that the article’s author thinks the perfect symbol of this freedom is Lady Gaga strutting around in a meat dress.
I mean, just the fact that we are ingesting anti-China propaganda to facilitate the long-term strategic agendas of the US-centralized empire while reading in the Murdoch press about how free and unique we are compared to the Chinese shows you how bizarre this claim is.
In an authoritarian regime, you do what the powerful want you to do. In a Free Democracy™️, you do what you like, and it’s only by pure coincidence that what you like just so happens to always align perfectly with what the powerful want you to do.
The more you understand about the brainwashing effects of domestic propaganda in the west, the more adorable it is when you see westerners talking about themselves as free-thinking individualists living in a free society in contrast with the citizens of nations like China. A civilization whose inhabitants are continuously indoctrinated with power-serving belief systems from childhood until their dying breath is not individualist, is not free, and is not thinking. Its inhabitants only think this is so, and they think this is so because they’ve been programmed to.
Freedom of thought and freedom of speech only exist on the fringes of western society, in such small numbers that they make no difference. The mainstream population whose numbers could be used to effect revolutionary change are herded into political factions which are designed to prop up status quo power at every turn and corresponding media echo chambers which keep them from providing any meaningful resistance to the machine.
As a whole we are marching in perfect accordance with the will of our masters: voting how they like, thinking how they like, speaking how they like, working how they like, shopping how they like, and living how they like. It is only the power-serving narratives put in our minds by our education systems and our media which tell us we are free. And it is only those power-serving narratives which have trained us to look down our noses at people in nations like China.
Tales from the Conspiratum 
