Tag: ukraine

The Echo-Chamber

Analyzing Coordinated Messaging in Western Foreign Policy & Media

The phenomenon of Western political leaders broadcasting near-identical statements on foreign policy is not a coincidence of shared ‘values’, but rather the result of a highly sophisticated and deliberate system of political synchronization. This commentary explores how “scripted policy” functions across various global flashpoints and how Western media outlets serve as a crucial amplification mechanism for these government narratives.

The table below illustrates a remarkable uniformity in response to an incident involving a supposed attempted assassination of Donald Trump in April 2026. Leaders from Germany, Estonia, France, the United Kingdom, and Greece all used the specific phrase “Political violence has no place in a democracy.”

LeaderKey Phrase UsedStrategic Intent
Friedrich Merz (Germany)“Violence has no place in a democracy.”Reaffirming the rule of law and democratic norms.
Kaja Kallas (Estonia)“Political violence has no place in a democracy.”Aligning with the “Free World” consensus.
Emmanuel Macron (France)“Violence has no place in democracy.”Projecting a unified Western front against instability.
Keir Starmer (UK)“Political violence in any form has no place…”Demonstrating continuity in UK-US relations.

This by no means unique linguistic alignment serves several strategic purposes. This synchronisation is not merely about the sentiment; it is about the signalling their total conformity to the agreed policy. By using identical phrasing, these leaders attempts to signal to both domestic and international audiences that the “Western Alliance” speaks with a single, ‘unbreakable’ voice.

The Ukraine: “As Long As It Takes” Mantra

Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the phrase “as long as it takes” has become the official linguistic mantra for NATO affiliated and G7 nations. This script was designed to project strategic patience and deter Russian calculations that Western support would eventually fatigue.

“We will continue to provide financial, humanitarian, military and diplomatic support and stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.” — G7 Leaders’ Communiqué

However, as domestic political pressures mount, particularly in the United States, the script has begun to fracture. President Biden’s shift to “as long as we can“ represents a rare “glitch” in the coordinated messaging, revealing the underlying tensions that the scripts are designed to hide.

In coordination with this Ukraine political message, Western media appear required to state as one that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was not just an invasion, but a ‘full-scale’ invasion.

Israel and Gaza: The “Right to Defend Itself” Premise

In the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the phrase “Israel has the right to defend itself” has served as the foundational premise for almost every official statement from Washington, London, Berlin, and Brussels. This specific wording is used to establish a legal and moral framework before any subsequent concerns about humanitarian issues or civilian casualties are addressed.

This attempt at legitimisation of Western policies by repetition is often managed through G7 Foreign Ministers’ statements, which serve as the “master script” for individual national press releases. This ensures that even when there are internal disagreements about the scale of military operations, the public-facing message remains monolithic.

Venezuela and Iran: The ‘Legitimacy‘ Script

In Venezuela and Iran, the messaging shifts from “defense” to “legitimacy.” The coordinated demand that “Maduro must step down” or the synchronized expressions of “solidarity with the brave people of Iran” are tools of diplomatic pressure.

  1. Venezuela: The recognition of Juan Guaidó in 2019 was a masterclass in scripted diplomacy, with over 50 nations releasing nearly identical statements of recognition within a 48-hour window.
  2. Iran: During the 2022 protests, Western foreign ministers utilized a shared vocabulary of “regime brutality” and “universal rights,” often timed to coincide with the rollout of coordinated sanctions packages.
  3. The Iran wars: Similarly, in the recent war by the US and Israel against Iran we are continually reminded that Iran’s government is a ‘regime’ (implying illegitimacy) whereas Israel (despite its brutal suppression of its Palestinian population) is a legitimate democracy.

The Media as an Echo Chamber: Manufacturing Consent

The effectiveness of these diplomatic scripts relies heavily on the uncritical repetition by major Western media outlets, reminiscent of the age-old dictum of propaganda- repeat the lies frequently enough and people will believe them.

Rather than acting as independent watchdogs providing balanced reporting from both sides so that its readership can fully understand the issues , ‘mainstream’ media organisations often function as “stenographers of state,” a phenomenon famously described by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman as “Manufacturing Consent.”

Mechanisms of Media Amplification

  • Headline Synchronization: Outlets like The New York Times, BBC, CNN, and Reuters frequently adopt the exact terminology used in government press releases. For instance, the phrase “unprovoked and unjustified” became a standard descriptor for the Ukraine invasion across nearly all mainstream Western news reports within hours of the first official statements.
  • Passive Voice and Framing: Media coverage often mirrors the diplomatic framing of allies. In the case of Gaza, reports frequently use passive voice when describing Palestinian casualties (e.g., “Palestinians died”) while using active voice for Israeli deaths, (e.g. Israeli “civilians were killed by the Iran proxy, Hamas’) effectively softening the impact of the government’s military policies.
  • The “Expert” Circuit: News programs often invite former government officials (political or military) or think-tank analysts who are themselves part of the diplomatic synchronization process. These “experts” reinforce the official talking points, creating a closed loop of information that excludes dissenting perspectives.
  • The “Source”: Where exactly do the original mantras for media and politicians come from? Who develops them?-(what agency and what personnel and what location?) How did the process to pre-agree on regurgitating the same phrases come into existence?
  • Nato’s ‘Cognitive Warfare” programme provides some insights into the process of manipulating the minds of the public to support what otherwise might have been a very unpopular war in Ukraine. The very fact that Western politicians and military have felt the need to manipulate Western public opinion in this way makes it clear that they themselves have significant reservations about the legitimacy of NATO’s and their own actions.

The Impact of Repetition

By constantly repeating these phrases, the media helps to normalize them, transforming a specific political position into an “obvious truth.” When the public hears “Israel has the right to defend itself” or “as long as it takes” repeated across every major news channel, it becomes difficult to question the underlying assumptions of those policies. This repetition creates a “truth-by-repetition” effect, where the volume and frequency of the message replace the need for critical analysis.

NATO’s Cognitive Warfare Programme (CWP) is a blueprint for large-scale perception management. Framed as a defense against authoritarian propaganda, the CWP weaponizes the same tools those same ‘authoritarian regime’s’ use: algorithmic amplification, behavioral microtargeting, and narrative laundering.

NATO’s CWP doesn’t just counter lies; it engineers consent by drowning out dissent under the banner of “strategic truth.

NATO condemns Russian/Chinese disinformation while running classified PSYOPS that manipulate global audiences.

Echo-Chamber Escalation NATO’s AI-driven propaganda tools (e.g., deepfake-enabled “fact checks”) may well be being repurposed to silence dissidents as “foreign agents.”

NATO’s CWP therefore isn’t just a foreign problem—it’s a warning. When institutions normalize cognitive manipulation, every power structure follows suit; they’re part of a global infowar arms race where truth is collateral damage.

What Can You Do?

Follow NATO’s critics (not just its PR).

Archive evidence of narrative shifts over time

Demand transparency—from both NATO and others

“The battlefield is your mind, and the war is already live.” —Anonymous CWP whistleblower

Conclusion

The use of identical statements in Western foreign policy, amplified by a compliant media, is thankfully a double-edged sword. Whilst its intention is to project unity and strength, it can also create a perception of insincerity, lack of nuance and manipulation.

These scripts and their media echo chambers are designed as the “glue” of an increasingly fragile and fractured Western alliance.

But when every leader and every news anchor says exactly the same thing, the message begins to sound less like a principled coordinated stand and more like a pre-recorded propaganda broadcast.

Links

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/big-data/articles/10.3389/fdata.2024.1452129/full

The Western Media Farce of a Ukraine “Peace”

As of mid -March 2025, Western mainstream media speak as one, saying ‘Putin’ doesn’t want a ceasefire, he wants to continue the war’.

However Putin and the Russian Federation are simply reiterating the conditions for peace they have made for the past 3 years; which would be of course be of no surprise to NATO or to Western media- but they pretend they are. MSM seem to imply that Russia should simply say ‘yes’ to a temporary ceasefire while Ukraine is then rearmed by Europe and the US after its devastating defeat in the Kursk salient and along the line of combat in Eastern Ukraine, continues to plan to be part of NATO and continues to conduct war crimes against Russian-speakers- both within Eastern Ukraine and also recently in the now liberated Russian Kursk salient.

Russia’s conditions thus include the elimination of the well-documented persecution and murder of Russian speakers in Ukraine, (which naturally means the elimination of the Bandera-cult extremists who have attempted to implement their ethnically ‘pure’-Ukraine fiction.) Ukraine is, and has always been over the past 500 years, with its constantly shifting borders, a place where multiple ethnicities have always lived: Romanians, Hungarians, Russians, Jews, Gypsies and Poles.

Strangely the well-documented evidence of Kiev’s assaults on its civilian population in Eastern Ukraine (and particularly the thousands of civilian deaths from shelling in Donetsk City since 2014) never make the Western press.

And while we hear, as we should, about the deaths of Ukrainian civilians at Russian hands, we hear nothing about the missile strikes on civilians in Russia by Ukraine, many of which do not appear to be ‘accidental’ .

Russia has consistently demanded that Ukraine return to its neutral status that it legislatively agreed to when it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia has consequently also demanded that Ukraine no longer be massively armed by the West so that it can no longer threaten Russia’s borders.

The fiction by European powers that they can be ‘peacekeepers” on the ground in Ukraine is simply ridiculous. Countries that have aggressively supplied and targeted the other side in a war cannot subsequently become ‘peacekeepers’- they are co-belligerents, and remain so until the war completely ends. A co-belligerent therefore cannot ever be a ‘peace-keeper’ – this is just a simplistic ruse by the Europe to create a backdoor opportunity for Ukraine to become part of NATO and for the Ukraine to continue its fight with Russia. What is also never mentioned in MSM is that Europe does not have the military capacity-either in war-machines or troops, to be a significant threat to Russia. European ‘peacekeepers’ would therefore become a trip-wire for the US to become directly involved militarily if European troops were attacked in Ukraine.

The neocon and very influential in Washington ‘thinktank’: the Atlantic Council has naturally accused Russia of using the NATO issue as an excuse to keep fighting- somehow ignoring the fact that one of Russia’s stated key reasons for starting the war was precisely because of the NATO threat.

We are continually told by Western media that Putin cannot be trusted to make a deal- yet it is indisputably the West who have lied and cheated their way through the Minsk 1 and 2 peace agreements to enable Ukraine to keep fighting, and scuppered the peace agreement agreed to by Ukraine with Russia in Istanbul in 2022.

We are told that the US pouring millions into Ukraine before the Maidan coup in 2014 , and US politicians like Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy  and US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland explicitly supporting the nationalist extremists on the Maidan, is all a myth. We are also told falsely that the deposed President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych was a corrupt dictator, when in fact he was democratically elected; (although indeed corrupt , like EVERY other Ukrainian president since independence).

Such evidence online in Western media’s reports and analysis is strangely hard to come by. Western media have demonstrated that they do not exist to provide bi-partisan evidence to allow people to make up their own minds about the history and current situation in Ukraine, they exist to ensure that the NATO narrative is the only narrative to be heard.

Plainly the ‘needs’ of Western politicians and businesses (and even University ‘analysts’) to explain this ‘unprovoked’ war by Russia in as simplistic and dishonest way as possible to ensure their financial gains and power, outweigh the needs of Western populations to be accurately informed of the realities of this awful war.

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Links

https://www.publicinternationallawandpolicygroup.org/lawyering-justice-blog/2024/12/17/the-istanbul-communique-a-blueprint-for-ukraines-capitulation-1

https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/conflict-ukraines-donbas-visual-explainer

https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea

Duplicity Unmasked -2024 and beyond..

2024 was a year when the total duplicity of the Western world and its media was exposed about the state of the world for all the world to see

2024 was a year when the total duplicity of the Western world and its media was exposed about the state of the world for all the world to see -the political machinations and the true state of the environmental crisis…

For the last 70 years and more, the West’s politicians and its media have talked about their fight for freedom justice and democracy against a corrupt and evil non-West. Israel’s genocidal war has changed all of that. The West’s unequivocal ‘moral’ and military backing of the mass-murder in Gaza has exposed the high moral talk as just that- bullshit.

And it is not as if this wasn’t evident 50 years ago with the West’s genocide in Korea, then Iraq, or Libya to name just a few- but Gaza has exposed the true horror of what the West stands for in bloodstained clarity.

And in Ukraine, the West’s portrait of the war has gone from simply being inaccurate and simplistic to downright lies. Somehow we are led to believe that Russia will accept a ceasefire and freeze the fighting because President Trump says so- despite the years of lies to the Russians from the West about signed peace agreements and non expansion of NATO etc. e.g. The BBC’s ridiculous propagandist in Moscow, Steven Rosenberg , reinterprets facts to pretend that Russia’s economy is struggling and that 80% of the Russian public don’t support the war.

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/ce327we7w7zo

But even though all the evidence points to Russia pushing the Ukrainian forces back by tens of kilometers each day -despite the many billions in Western arms Kiev has received in the past 3 years -Western politicians and military commanders are convinced that Russia is desperate to end the war on any terms. And thus Western politicians and and media continue to pretend that the Russians are somehow primitive, almost sub-human beings, quite unlike those Western sophisticates in the capital of Europe and US. Sadly Ukrainians bought into that well-manufactured European myth, which resulted in the death and injury of more than half a million Ukrainian men to date. And if the reality does not square with our beliefs, we’ll bend reality to suit our beliefs.

In Syria we are told that the ex-Al Qaeda leaders of the new ‘democratic’ Syria are now the good guys, and we can forget all about their head-chopping adventures of the past.

And of course we simply don’t hear in the West how the French brutal colonial military are being pushed out of their African ex-colonial states one by one -as new African leaders expose French exploitation of their countries.(Gabon, Senegal, Cote d,Ivoire, Niger to name a few….)

But by far the biggest brutal silence and lie is the fact that we can continue to pretend its ‘business as usual” with our hedonist consumer lifestyles as the world’s climate continues its ever more rapid descent into total unpredictability and chaos. Our century and a half of ‘normality’-of endless consumerism and abundance in the West, is on its way out-yet the world’s media and politicians continue to pretend everything is just fine– current conditions are just a minor glitch in humanity’s onward march of progress to….. somewhere.

What to me is most disturbing in all of this debacle for the West’s populations and then for the rest of humanity’s global populations, is the total lack of compassion, humanity or kindness in any of the decisions that caused both the rise of the West as brutal and exploitative colonial powers, and its inevitable fall through ideological rigidity and pure stupidity: this insane insistence on making money at any cost to one’s soul and one’s humanity and now for our very survivability on this planet.

When did humanity lose its way? I suspect it arose when man decided he was above all other living things-that those ‘others’ were simply to be exploited for his benefit, rather than co-inhabitants on this planet with equal rights and deserving of equal respect and kindness. Rather than relying on our inate ‘knowledge’ that we must respect all living things to be fully human, we have fabricated ideologies (thought-games) that constructed, and continue to construct, mythologies and rationales for our brutality and savagery against other humans and other species. Those who descend into those mind-games, have indeed lost their souls

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Links

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/12/a-year-to-soon-be-forgotten-.html#comments

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/74/12/812/7808595?login=false

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/ukraine-sitrep.html#more

http://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-scientific-pain-of-climate-change-shifting-narratives-of-acceptance-and-avoidance-in-climatology/

A Letter to New Zealand’s Defence Minister

Kia ora  Mr Henare

I note with interest your and the Labour Party’s unequivocal support for the current government in Kiev on your recent visit to Ukraine.

https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/20/defence-minister-peeni-henare-visits-ukraine-meets-counterpart/
Concurrently and interconnectedly  I note New Zealand’s decision to vote against  the annual  UN resolution   ‘COMBATING GLORIFICATION OF NAZISM”.

https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/p/52-countries-vote-against-un-resolution

FROM https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/p/52-countries-vote-against-un-resolution

These two  interconnected decisions make clear New Zealand’s position to  support the Kiev government, a regime which  is  unequivocally militarily and politically supported by neonazi groups like the Azov and Aidar battalions  and political  groups like the Right Sector, and which  for 8  years has been  shelling and  killing  more than 10,000  innocent Ukrainian people in  the Donbas simply because they  want to  speak  their native language, Russian (note that these figures are  confirmed by the Organisation for Security in  Europe (OSCE)

New Zealand equipment and targeting information is undoubtedly also being used by the Kiev military to  continue to fire missiles at Donetsk City and its civilian  infrastructure.

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to be unequivocally condemned, a path to peace must be negotiated which dispassionately  examines the reasons for this war  and Western  governments’ refusal  to  honour the Minsk  agreements signed by  Kiev, which would have  meant the Russian  invasion would never have happened.

While previous Labour administrations like David Lange’s and Norman Kirk’s had the moral  courage to  push back  against  the NATO white mans’ club, which continue to drone murder,  torture and initiate wars against those who do not wish  to ‘compulsorily share’ their resources with the Western  world, this Ardern government has cemented its relationship  as a NATO ‘ally’  and a key member of the Five Eyes group and continues to  enthusiastically  facilitate those illegal and immoral  activities. 

One would have that thought that those who have been victims of white man’s colonialism would have  taken some courage and   initiative to  distance New Zealand from  these activities of the white man’s club. New Zealand  is, and will increasingly become a pariah  state in the South  and East while it maintains it enthusiastic support for  NATO and the current ‘international  rule based order’,  which  every  non  Western  state recognises as code for the right for the US and its allies to do  whatever it wishes , including sanctions, targetted killings and  extreme violence against  whole populations. 
Does not the current Labour government have the courage to  push back  against  this ever expanding and dangerous war  that  NATO is fuelling at  the expense of likely  hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, and demand that  each  side sit down to negotiate firstly a cease-fire and then a peace agreement which  is endorsed at the UN?

I sincerely  hope that  this Labour Government does belatedly recognise that New Zealand’s international and defense policies and actions  are currently not on  the moral side of rectitude.

Postscript 6th November 2022

The Telegram channel Rybar made the following post on 5th November.

#Ukrainian #Nazi group, within Azov Movement, Karpatska Sich, translated to Ukrainian the New Zealand shooter Manifesto that inspired the #Buffalo White Supremacist shooter.

The Ukrainian-language translation of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, flanked by a sticker for Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Karpatska Sich.

The New Zealand shooter Manifesto that inspired the #Buffalo shooter is a “must read” for all #NeoNazis and White Supremacists worldwide.
Here a group of #Ukrainian #Nazis from Karpatska Sich holding copies of the book translated to Ukrainian by the Nazi elitist group inside #Azov movement.

Neo Nazi Polish/Ukrainian group Karpatska Sich made a hateful video regarding the Pride marches in the EU the year.

(Note also the ‘sieg heil’ Nazi salutes)

Follow:
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses

In other words, the New Zealand government’s military is funding, training and likely imbedded with neonazis in Ukraine who are directly implicated in the New Zealand mosque shooting in Christchurch in 2019, which the same NZ government has roundly condemned as a terrorist act.

New Zealand is supporting terrorism.

Western media and the Quest for War

The bizarre orchestrated western media response to Hu’s exit from the PRC’s national Congress meeting in Beijing is noteworthy. Apparently a frail 79 year old man being gently escorted out the CCP Congress shows-the-utter-ruthlessness-of-xi-jinpings-quest-for-absolute-power!

Exactly how that is the case is not made clear, and why he would be so publicly supposedly removed from office is unexplained, but apparently any opportunity to demean and deride the Chinese Communist party by the West is a good opportunity. But why should that be so?

The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong based and not China state media) reported that ‘The episode was not reported in Chinese state media but in its evening newscast on Saturday night state broadcaster CCTV included a shot of the former president voting at the closing ceremony before his exit’. Clearly Mr Hu Jintao had not been sent off to the concentration camps or eaten by sharks at the behest of President Xi Jinping, like other more fanciful stories concocted by South Korean ‘intelligence’ officials about North Koreans who buck the Party line –but mysteriously reappear larger than life later after suffering a hideous death!

We are told that Xi Jinping is ‘ruthlessly’ consolidating his power by appointing more of his supporters to his decision-making circle, (something of course that Western politicians never ever do!) after the Chinese Communist Party Congress (representing its 96.71 million members) were somehow intimidated into once again electing the dictator Xi Jingping for a third consecutive term!

And we are told by Western media that China has a ‘very aggressive’ foreign policy. Strangely this view is not reflected by most of the nations of the South, many of whom have benefitted enormously from China’s technical expertise and support for their infrastructure development – in sharp contrast to the predatory practices of the United States and its IMF and World Bank proxies, of dismantling economically vulnerable states for the benefit of American corporations.

The Chinese ‘threat’ therefore is that the long-standing predatory actions of the United States and its Western white allies (what the West likes to call the ‘rule-based order) are under threat.

Even in little old New Zealand China’s economic overtures to small Pacific Island nations are seen as a heinous threat to New Zealand agricultural businesses’ accessing cheap (often under minimum wage) Pacific Island farm labour. The crime of China providing the infrastructure drinkable water to villages in the Cook Islands (whose population are technically New Zealand citizens!!) was recently outlined in detail on New Zealand’s state television and radio

Attempts by the United States to try and ensure Chinese businesses are unable to access state of the art semi-conductors for their electronic equipment is just one more example of ‘rule-based order’ Western nations trying to ensure their continued capacity to loot the countries of the South .

The pretence is that these actions by the US are designed to impede China’s military aggressive actions. They are in fact designed to ensure China stays a subservient power to the US, economically and militarily. Charles Freeman (ex US diplomat) states it bluntly: ‘This is the equivalent of smoking pot in a hot tub and fantasizing about tripping up competitors in track events, while they are out training and trying out new equipment. It’s conceivable that China will stumble and fall, enabling us effortlessly to “win the future,” but it is imbecilic to count on this. Delusional complacency and reliance on dumb luck or divine intervention will not enable us to outperform China or any other rising power.

And as Counterpunch notes: ‘Biden and the Post are talking about a country [China] that has not used military force outside its borders for more than 40 years, and has only one military facility [Djibouti] outside its zone of influence.’. Contrast that with the West’s brutal wars in the last 40 years in Iraq, Syria, and Libya- let alone its unwavering support for Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinian people or the U.S.’s 750 plus military bases across the world.

Pelosi’s bizarre flight to Taiwan recently to stir up the Republic of China or ROC (colloquially known as ‘Taiwan’) into buying lots more American military equipment they didn’t know they needed, is just one more of many examples of attempts by the US to provoke mainland China so it can be further labelled in the Western (white) media as an aggressive dictatorship and thus not to be trusted. It is after all only the Western white media (and now Zelensky’s PR team) who speak “the truth”!!!

A not dissimilar strategy has been successfully used by the US and its white allies against the Russians by arming Ukraine to the teeth with NATO weapons and supporting Kiev in shelling and killing 10,000 Ukrainian Russian speaking civilians in the Donbass since 2014. The killings, the US supported Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014, the savagery of the neonazi battalions in the Donbass and Kiev’s secret service, the SBU, simply no longer exist!- they are supposedly wiped clean from our memories.

It would seem that those of us in the West are, not so slowly, being brainwashed by a Western media in lock-step with Western corporate ‘interests’ and their politicians, to believe that China and Russia are the evil ones against whom we must fight to the bitter end to maintain our ‘right’ to plunder the rest of the non-white world as we see fit.

And all the while, Gaia will have the last laugh on those petty human squabbles.

The South China Morning Post ( Hong Kong based and not state media ) reported that ‘The episode was not reported in Chinese state media but in its evening newscast on Saturday night state broadcaster CCTV included a shot of the former president voting at the closing ceremony before his exit’.

Postscript

An erudite and sane perspective on the Ukraine war and international relations by Robert Falk (below)

[Prefatory Note: This is the third iteration of an essay on the evolution of the Ukraine War, the earlier two versions published online in Transcend Media Service (TMS) and CounterPunch. The essential argument remains: war-mongering geopolitics in the nuclear age imperils species survival and suppresses the necessity for emergency action to restore sustainable forms of ecological habitability to planet earth.]

And Chris Hedges’ beautiful but savage indictment of all war

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/my-war-never-ends?

http://www.defenddemocracy.press/us-chip-war-version-2-decoupling-from-china-or-declaring-war/

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Links

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/300719559/the-photo-that-shows-the-utter-ruthlessness-of-xi-jinpings-quest-for-absolute-power?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3196899/former-chinese-president-hu-jintaos-congress-exit-break-communist-party-script

US breaks ice, Russia thaws
Outcompeting China to “Win the Future”

NATO: The White Supremacists’ Club

On June 26th Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s current prime minister, admitted in a TV interview, that New Zealand had been a NATO ‘partner’ -not member (as Ukraine also is) for the past 10 years. The interview was undertaken while Ardern was travelling to make a brief presentation to a NATO meeting in Spain, currently discussing how they can mitigate the Western disaster in Ukraine where Russian and Ukrainian ‘separatists’ are bulldozing through the remnants of Kiev’s army in the Donbass .

As Murray Horton notes ‘The message from Washington is clear – be in our “club” and we’ll make it worth your while’.

New Zealand has thus made it clear that it, along with NATO members, is de facto at war with Russia, along with the rest of the Western world. Apart from the U.S. occupied colonies of Japan (50,000 U.S. troops) and South Korea (23,000 U.S. troops), no other non Western countries have subscribed to trying to defeat Russia in Ukraine through the use of arms shipments to Kiev’s troops, or tactical guidance on the ground and satellite and in-air drone and manned aircraft surveillance of Russian forces. However New Zealand has also admitted to providing Kiev with artillery training and actively monitoring radio and other ‘chatter’ from Russian and their allies’ troops.

Given the admission from Ardern that New Zealand has been a NATO partner for the past 10 years, and has also been part of the Five Eyes alliance since 1956, we are thus a co-conspirator to the Minsk 1 and 2 subterfuges of 2014 and 2015 by Western nations in their pretense to the Donbass residents that a Ukrainian semi-autonomous region for the Russian speakers there was going to happen, and Kiev would stop bombarding Donetsk and Lugansk. New Zealand is also party to the provision of military equipment to the Kiev ‘regime’ (certainly not a ‘democracy’ now that almost all political parties other than Zelensky’s have been banned) which have been used to deliberately target civilian populations in Donetsk city in the past few months.

However if one were to believe Western and New Zealand media, Russia is shelling its own allies in the Donbass!- or as some Kiev residents have liked to call it over the years- the ‘Bombass’.

But let us not over-estimate the intelligence of our (Western) world leaders either!…

For New Zealand to pretend it is not at war with Russia is absurd. New Zealand is aiding its Western ‘allies’ to ensure that as many Ukrainians die for nothing in a war that could easily have been avoided if the West had insisted that Kiev abide by the Minsk agreements it signed in 2014 and not re-armed Kiev and its neonazi groups.

And let us not forget the colossal destruction this war is wreaking on the environment and the staggering amount of human resources wasted building weapons that could have been used to plant trees, and build a sustainable world….Or forget the increasing probability of a ‘hot’ war between Western white countries and China and Russia, which would likely then lead us all to nuclear armageddon.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1540853710720475137

Once, Ardern’s Labour Party had the courage to ban nuclear armed warships from New Zealand’s shores, to confront France in its contamination of numerous Pacific Island’s with nuclear bomb tests, and to press for a nuclear free South Pacific. But no longer. Ardern and her party (despite the spin from local policy New Zealand people that New Zealand has its own foreign policy) have completely sold out to the U.S., the U.K. and their white supremacist NATO minions, to the great enthusiasm of all of Australia’s main political parties. And we hear no word from the NZ government or the media about the U.S. latest military base in the south pacific, because of course U.S. bases are not a threat to anyone!

Recently the U.S. orchestrated yet another Pacific military alliance between the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK., strangely titled ‘Partners in the Blue Pacific’ whose purpose is to operate, the U.S. says “according to principles of Pacific regionalism, sovereignty, transparency, accountability, and most of all, [will be] led and guided by the Pacific islands.”. (Strangely those Pacific Island nations are not actually party to this agreement! )

This comes on top of the other new Indo-Pacific military ‘white folks’ agreement signed between Australia the United States and the U.K.; entitled AUKUS, which is intended to break the Pacific nuclear free agreement signed by most Pacific Island nations.

China has recently had the temerity to sign economic and security deals (not military bases) with a number of pacific island countries. If you believed NZ and Australian media and government lurid pronouncements, the ‘red peril’ is once again on the march to take away our democracy and freedom!

Presumably it’s the freedom to colonise vulnerable south pacific countries, to threaten and blackmail governments in the region, and to exploit Pacific Island communities using their cheap labour – dastardly Chinese stuff to try and limit us “good white folks'” exploitative opportunities in the Pacific !

Denis Argall notes from an Australian perspective that ‘the United States is entering into a period of instability at home and overreach abroad. The US’s declared intent to use the Ukraine war to diminish Russia is neither healthy nor attainable. The US provocation of war with China is contrary to our interests as well as common sense’.

And as Murray Horton succinctly notes from a New Zealand perspective; ‘NZ is in the white Western world’s self-proclaimed elite intelligence club, namely Five Eyes. Which proved to be absolutely useless in seeing what was going on in Afghanistan, a country which had been an adventure playground for Western spies for 20 years. So, why is New Zealand in Five Eyes, what use is it to us (or anyone else, for that matter)? Time for NZ to get out, time for Five Eyes to become four eyes.’

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Links

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-global-power-shift-isnt-west-to.html

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/06/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-s-europe-trip-to-include-attending-nato-summit-meeting-with-boris-johnson-pushing-for-trade-deal-with-eu.html

NZ BECOMES FURTHER ENMESHED IN US EMPIRE The Politics & Economics Of Five Eyes By Murray Horton (Page 5)

Understanding the NY Times Article on the CIA in Ukraine
New clear ways for the Pacific- Address historic nuclear injustices in the Pacific
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/07/australias-newly-elected-labor-prime-minister-anthony-albanese-rushed-to-meet-with-joe-biden-in-tokyo-after-his-election-victory-to-fortify/
The United States- the Pacific bully
Opposition political parties banned in Ukraine and ‘unified information policy’ imposed

New Zealand and the War in Ukraine

In response to the New Zealand government’s decision to send troops to Europe to support NATO, I drafted the following letter to the editor of my local paper

Dear Sir

I would appreciate if you could publish the following letter

‘Supporting’ Ukraine

While any invasion of another country is deplorable and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to be condemned, one needs to remember that prior to this invasion, more than 10,000 Russian speaking Ukrainians have been killed by the Kiev government in the Donbass since 2014; predominantly by neo-nazi groups like the Azov Battalion- the very same neonazi group that Brenton Tarrant , the Christchurch mosque shooter, was an ardent adherent of.

We should all be aware that truth is the first casualty of war, but the level of war hysteria and blatantly distorted propaganda we are seeing across the Western world about this tragedy in Ukraine, is extremely alarming- our media now howls for World War Three.

Our prime minister talks about how New Zealand supports the “rule based international order”; the U.S. imposed version of how they believe the world should be; not United Nation’s rules.

It is time to step back from the brink of a massive, potentially nuclear, war which would involve China Russia and its allies, and the Western camp.

Saner heads need to prevail; we need peace and an effective response to the imminent climate catastrophe unfolding, not this foolish provocation by New Zealand.

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Links

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/04/russia-invasion-new-zealand-dispatches-50-troops-to-europe-to-assist-with-logistics-of-moving-weapons-into-ukraine.html

Ukraine and the NeoNazis

The conflict in Ukraine grinds on. The recent talks in Istanbul between Ukrainian Kiev representatives and the Russians indicated some small steps to a peaceful settlement.

However the largest stumbling block in the long-term (aside from further American military involvement in Ukraine after the war ends), is the de-nazification of Ukraine.

While Western media frequently displayed concern prior to 2014 of neo-nazi elements in Ukraine, we are now told that nazis are a figment in the imagination of the Russians- an excuse to invade Ukraine. However the history and evidence of neonazis in Ukraine is unequivocal, dating back to the Ukrainian nationalist movements of the late 19th century, where pride in a Ukrainian state was tied to Ukrainian slavic racial identity- unique (and vastly superior) to either Russians or Poles, and most certainly Jews and Gypsies.

The now ‘Hero of Ukraine’ Stepan Bandera is one of many extreme Ukrainian nationalists who espoused the fantasy of genetic superiority of ‘true’ Ukrainians.

The superiority of one or other of the ‘white’ races was an accepted and normative view of many Western populations and governments after Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species” was published in 1859. What else could explain the ease with which European and American forces could over-run, terrorise, enslave and loot countries in Asia, Africa and South America, if it was not that those races were ‘inferior’?

The Empires of Britain, Belgium, France, Holland and Germany and the United States’ colonies, were proof enough of the ‘white’ man’s superiority! A superiority, they reasoned that was timeless. The ‘science’ of eugenics allowed Western citizens to indulge in a fantasy world that explained and validated their brutality of other countries’ citizens.

The German physician and anthropologist Alfred Ploetz first laid out the major assumptions and definition of “racial hygiene” in his book, entitled “Foundations of a Eugenics” in 1895.

Many clinicians in the United States particularly became passionate eugenicists- eager to ensure that only the ‘purest’ survived. The film “Black Stork” of 1917 epitomises the eugenicist approach.

The current American view of the United States as the ‘exceptional nation’ continues to embody much of these bizarre prejudices.

As Samuel Phillips Huntingdon noted in his “The Clash of Civilizations (1996)“; The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values of religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted), but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ book of 1925 simply piggy-backed on the flawed concepts of eugenics- creating an elaborate fantasy about the genetic superiority of the ‘genius’ Aryan race, of which the Germanic tribes were the ultimate and lesser ‘races’ could be exterminated.

In turn, Ukrainian nationalists seized on the ‘principles’ of eugenics and later the racial aspects of National Socialism (Nazism) as a way to ‘purify” Ukraine from the inferior ‘invader’ races; the Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Russians. The Ukrainian nationalist groups,; the OUN-B led by Stepan Bandera ( established in 1929) , and others vacillated between enthusiastically supporting the Nazis in their brutal occupation of Ukraine , and trying to create a Ukrainian state free of both the German Nazis, communists, Jews and Russian speakers.

While Stepan Bandera and many of the other Ukrainian nationalists were eliminated by the Soviet Union after the second world war, their dream of a ‘pure’ Ukraine lived on- largely in Canada in the significant Ukrainian diaspora there, and in the United States.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992, new opportunities for the Banderites and other Ukrainian nationalists arose, supported through discreet channels in the United States, British and likely Canadian intelligence communities as a way to undermine and dismantle Russia; (which continued to be seen as a potential threat to Western interests, despite no longer being communist).

Endemic corruption throughout Ukraine facilitated and funded the growth of violent neo-nazi militarized groups, like the Azov and Aidar battalions and the Right Sector political party.

Once the United States had enabled the Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014 and eliminated any possibility of Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians having a political voice in Ukraine, those extreme nationalist groups were able to consolidate their power, and their para-military groups were formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military’s structure.

The Azov and Aidar battalions particularly were thus able to access the vast amount of NATO weaponry pouring into the country after 2014. (Note that while Ukraine is not, and likely never will be , a NATO ‘member’, it is formally recognised as a NATO ‘ally’, and its military structures and weaponry are completely aligned with NATO structures).

While extreme nationalist parties have not been able to grab a significant proportion of the people’s votes in Ukrainian elections, their influence on the internal mechanics of the ruling political party, Zelensky’s “Servant of the People”, has been considerable. The Jewish and Russian-speaking Zelensky was voted in as Ukrainian President in 2019 on a platform of ending the war in Eastern Ukraine (the Donbass), but promptly had to reverse his position under threat from nationalist leaders.

The Ukrainian Army war (predominantly via the neo-nazi battalions) against the separatist Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine- (the Donbass), thus dragged on for 8 years after 2014 ,with the loss of 14,000 lives- mainly Russian speakers in the Donbass.

As the war with Russia too drags on, more and more stories and videos are surfacing of the savagery and brutality of those neo-nazi groups and the much feared government ‘Security Service of Ukraine’ (the SBU), in Eastern Ukraine.

The neo-nazi Banderite theology after all, states that morality is not something to take into account when addressing the needs of the state. The goal of a ‘pure’ Ukrainian state takes all precedence over morality, and the ‘cockroach’ Russian speakers can therefore be brutalised and eliminated with impunity, as they are not ‘pure ‘ Ukrainians, if indeed they are really human at all.

Such sadistic and thuggish views have become endemic in Ukrainian society; particularly, but not exclusively in the Western regions of Ukraine. 8 years of white supremacist propaganda have done their work on the population.

‘It’s February 16, 2019, in Ukraine, and the stairs of the “Horodok” shopping mall in Kyiv — on a street named after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera — have been lit up with a giant swastika. Nobody seems to react! Incredible !’

Or perhaps this…

Not only has the Ukrainian population been propagandized into accepting Nazi ideology as ‘normal’ and acceptable in the face of the Russian threat, but Western media has, since the beginning of the war, been simultaneously pumping out denials of the existence of Nazis in Ukraine whilst showing videos of them in the war!

As a New Zealander, I am ashamed to note that our government is circulating neo-nazi media stories and videos on its state funded media, while decrying the mass shooting of Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019 by an Australian white supremacist who had explicit connections with the Azov Battalion.

And so, as Westerners, we are astonished as to why the Russians would invade Ukraine, when the Ukrainians are just trying to live peaceful lives with the help of the West and NATO! ( which ‘clearly’ is not a threat to Russia , (despite arming all its neighbours to the teeth with weaponry!)

The level of hostility to all things Russian, along with a complete unwillingness to show a Russian perspective about the war in Western media, would indicate that the white Western world is at war with Russia in all but name.

Putin therefore must be depicted as a cartoon mad-man character whose lust for power has resulted in his deranged invasion of little Ukraine.

This does not mean that we should not condemn the Russian invasion in the strongest possible terms- we most certainly should.

But instead of attempting to re-arm the Ukrainians and prolong a dreadful war where millions have been displaced and thousands killed and wounded, we need to acknowledge the enormous threat that a re-energised nazi movement has; not just for Ukraine and Russia, and as Germany once again, re-arms, but for the world, and remove the possibility of a Nazi party ever coming to power again in the world.

We owe that to our children!

We are all humanly equal in this world; we may not all have the same experiences and opportunities in life- but we are indubitably equal and all worthy of kindness, love and respect.

Postscript:

An in-depth damning report from Jacques Baud: a former colonel of the Swiss General Staff, an ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries, trained in the American and British intelligence services, and a Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations. Jacques Baud details the explicit complicity of NATO members in the Kiev government’s war using the Neonazis paramilitaries against Russian speakers in the Donbass since 2014, and their deliberate intent to provoke Russia into military action in Ukraine.

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Links

https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/545134d251854fef65000001

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mein-Kampf

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html

https://www.academia.edu/12951527/The_Fascist_Kernel_of_Ukrainian_Genocidal_Nationalism

(SBU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_detention_centers_of_SBU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/eastern-front

https://www.globalmilitarynews.com/2022/03/17/under-the-wolfsangel-the-uncomfortably-truthful-reality-about-extreme-ideas-in-neo-nazi-ukrainian-politics/

The Military Situation In The Ukraine
Far-Right Group Made Its Home in Ukraine’s Major Western Military Training Hub

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-lobby-group-adl-rehabilitates-hitlers-accomplices-ukraine/35021

Tragicomedy

If it weren’t for the fact that people are dying in Ukraine and livelihoods and other living things destroyed, and potentially many more may die in other countries , this would be a comedy

Tyler Durden and CJ Hopkins at Zerohedge outline just some of the absurdities in their beautifully satirical and comprehensive analysis of the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In my ‘neck of the woods’ in New Zealand I am entertained each evening by the propaganda from TVNZ1 -one of our government funded TV channels. In their extensive coverage of the tragedy in Ukraine they somehow fail to mention:

  • That any neo-Nazis actually exist in Ukraine ( despite showing several propaganda videos of Ukrainian military with Nazi insignia). Ironically Brenton Tarrant , the New Zealand Christchurch mosque shooter, had close links to the Ukrainian neo-nazi Azov Battalion, an organisation the New Zealand government in supporting the fascist salute of ‘Slava Ukraini!’ or ‘Glory to Ukraine’, would like us to forget.
  • That the Kiev government has been fighting a war with Eastern Ukrainians that they call ‘terrorists’ (or if you’re a neo-nazi, ‘cockroaches’) for 8 years with over 13,000 deaths with active support from NATO; and that Ukrainian shelling of civilian infrastructure in the Donbass is ongoing.
  • That British, American and German military ‘advisors’ have been training and providing ‘defensive’ weapons to these rabidly anti-Russian groups for those 8 years (and more) (note that there is militarily no such thing as a defensive weapon-anything that makes you safer in war also makes you more capable of fighting offensively)
  • That civilian casualty figures for the 12 days of war so far are astoundingly low ( 407 in 12 days), in comparison with say America’s ‘shock and awe’ terror campaign in Iraq ( 6,700 deaths in the first 3 weeks)– but noting that every death is a tragedy.
  • That all the while this hellish Ukraine war is going on, the Americans and the British are actively supporting a decidedly more hellish genocide in Yemen by the Saudis and other gulf states.
  • That the Russian Army and separatists from the Donbass have now encircled in a ‘cauldron’ the majority of the Ukrainian army in the East.
  • That the Russians claim to have found evidence of a number of American sponsored Ukrainian biolabs producing germ warfare agents, which the Americans both confess to and deny!
  • That the Russians claim to have found documental evidence of the Ukrainian Army’s intent to destroy the Donbass separatists in an offensive starting 25h February.
  • That the maternity hospital in Mariupal had been publicly identified by the Russians as having been turned into a Ukrainian military base 3 days before the shelling by the Russians of the building.
  • That the Western media’s constant pressure on the Americans and their European allies to implement Zelinsky’s plan for a NATO ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine would result in shooting war that could easily end in nuclear war. (It would be like America having dog-fights and missile strikes over Canada or Mexico)

I guess TVNZ and the rest of the Western media are just trying to protect me from Russian propaganda- so I really feel quite relieved that I don’t need to know about any of this! Let’s keep it simple after all….

_____________________________________________

Links

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/hopkins-revenge-putin-nazis

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/facebook-allows-calls-violence-against-russians-over-ukraine-invasion

https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-the-transnational-network-that-nobody-is-talking-about/

https://www.academia.edu/12951527/The_Fascist_Kernel_of_Ukrainian_Genocidal_Nationalism

https://multipolarista.com/2022/03/10/nato-arming-training-nazis-ukraine-azov/

The Russia/West Propaganda War

‘The first casualty when war comes is truth’. Hiram W Johnson (1917)

As this horrendous war in Ukraine unfolds, we see the Western media carefully following their politicians’ lines. ‘There is no Nazi problem in Ukraine’, ‘NATO is not a threat to Russia’, “Putin is a madman dictator’ etc etc…

Curiously, as I have noted in a previous blog, these memes were becoming increasingly strident even before Russia recognised the 2 Donbass republics, even in my little country of New Zealand (part of ‘Five Eyes’) we are apparently an enthusiastic supporter of the (neo)- nazi Azov Battalion in the Ukraine and their propaganda videos, should you want to believe our government funded TVNZ ‘news’.

But perhaps the most obscene media article I have seen is this recent Guardian article by a Mr Jason Stanley who states ‘no democratic country is free of far-right nationalist groups, including the United States’, in downplaying the risks of Nazis in Ukraine. What Mr Stanley deliberately omits to say is that Ukraine is the only country in the world where Nazi battalions are an integral part of their army, and whose battalions have been actively involved in killing as many Eastern Ukrainian Russian speakers in the Donbass as possible (13,000 at the last count) – with the full support of the Ukrainian government in Kiev. Let us also not forget the post-Maidan coup Kiev government’s enthusiastic sanctifying of Stepan Bandera, the white (Ukrainian Slav) supremacist and killer of ‘Asiatic’ Russian Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, the LGBTIQ community, Communists and Jews, both during and after the second world war (with support for his OUN-B group and its successors from the Americans).

Mr Stanley’s customary caricature of Putin as the ‘global leader of the far right’ is, to be polite, somewhat strange. Putin is certainly a nationalist, an anti-communist, a Russian Orthodox believer and a fervent conservative (none of those Putin attributes particularly endear him to me; as do most politicians’ ‘values’ in the West or East!), but ‘far right’? -no.

The decision by European countries to constrain Russian economic interest in Europe and beyond is an entirely valid response to Russia’s aggression, but the decision to suppress access to Russian government media like RT and Sputnik in the West indicates a strong wish to ensure the views of only one side of the war are circulated to Western populations; a series of views that are indisputably half-truths in many cases and often lies (e.g. the 4 years of ‘Russia-gate’ fabrications), as noted above. Such repressive actions lead the public to believe right is completely on our side and no compromise is possible with the evil aggressor. A recipe for a third world war, or worse.

However, as Chris Hedges so aptly says, ‘to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.’

And that is not to say that the Russian government and its media are the epitome of truth. The Russian government and its media unequivocally stated that no Ukrainian invasion was planned, while they were preparing for just such an invasion.

Reports from websites that are Russian supporters are as likely to provide a slanted or untrue version of events on the ground in Ukraine as the Western media. Part of that false view can be attributed to the ‘fog of war’ – journalists rely on narratives from people in the war-zone with their own agendas, or from people who are simply making things up to suit their audience. And then there are the journalists in the West, and no doubt in the East as well, who are paid by their various ‘intelligence’ agencies to provide that ‘special’ messaging for a gullible public.

Emotive videos of Ukrainian women filling bottles with petrol to make Molotov cocktails, of a man supposedly holding back a Russian tank, or of an armoured personnel carrier (Russian or more likely Ukrainian) deliberately running over a car, the Snake Island defenders who died but are now resurrected etc etc are all designed to dull our intellectual acuity and make us react with anger and fear rather than a calm consideration of the facts, and make mediation between the warring factions impossible.

The current fad to sanction Russian cats, deprive Russian paralympians of competing, remove access to Russian authors or composers or remove Russian media from the Western world is bizarre. Perhaps a glimpse into this madness can be seen in a recent CNN article by one Oliver Darcy where the Russian website RT is blasted for actually giving a Russian point of view to the Russian invasion! How dastardly is that! We of course should know that there is only one viewpoint to be had on this deadly event, and that is the American official line! Knowledge of any other viewpoint is therefor treasonable an un-American!

We should also note the ‘extraordinary’ levels of white racism that pervade Western media- they imply how shocking that this war could have happened to European, well-dressed educated white people who look just like us!, not those people of darker skins in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Be warned! The populations of Arab, African, South American and Asian countries who have endured so much pointless war by the U.S. and its allies over the past 50 years are taking due note of the total hypocrisy and racism of Western media.

As Moon of Alabama notes: Historian Anne Morelli has summarized Arthur Ponsonby’s classic book Falsehood in War-Time as this:

  1. We do not want war.
  2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
  3. The enemy is inherently evil and resembles the devil.
  4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interests.
  5. The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; our mishaps are involuntary.
  6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
  7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
  8. Recognized artists and intellectuals back our cause.
  9. Our cause is sacred.
  10. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

On the Russian side we hear of the Ukrainian government military using illegal phosphorous shells near Kyev, or prisoners released from jails given automatic weapons, of Azov battalion units using Eastern Ukrainians as human shields in the Donbass – fact or fiction? We may never know.

The increasing practice in both West and East to use legislation to designate foreign media companies as ‘foreign agents’ also exacerbates the considerable risk for governments and their publics to misinterpret, deliberately or otherwise, the intent of a ‘foreign’ government, and thereby increase the risk of war.

After talking to a very frightened and distraught friend in Ukraine over the weekend, I know that the internet is up and running there, that water and electricity are (at least so far) not being destroyed, unlike the terror attacks by the Americans in Korea, Vietnam, Libya and Iraq (to name just a few) that deliberately destroyed all infrastructure (a ‘shock and awe’ war-crime).

This terror and destruction needs to stop -now. Russia needs to negotiate in good faith with the Kiev government; withdraw its troops and compensate for lives lost and destruction caused. In turn, Kiev and NATO need to recognise the very real fears by Russia about the likely destruction of Russia by NATO. A neutral Ukraine (as Austria was during the cold war) is the only solution. A neutral Ukraine will not only be of benefit to Russia, but also Ukraine, its neighbours, and the wider world.

We instead need to mobilise globally now to ‘fight’ catastrophic climate change and species loss . The intensely environmentally destructiveness of armies and wars of aggression need to be replaced with deliberate processes to safely reduce global consumption of commodities, to plant billions of hectares of trees that can grow in perpetuity and restore natural eco-systems – to create a sustainable planet.