The “new” war in Ukraine has been a non-stop toy commercial. It’s not enough for corporate news outlets to simply say Russia is losing and Ukraine is winning, every success story has to be tied to a product. Drones, missiles, starlink satellites, and more. It’s like four months of saying it’s good to give cocaine and cigarettes to babies. Sure, the tobacco industry is willing to lie about the supposed benefits of their products, surely the weapons industry wouldn’t do that, right?
So, this is what “real” war in the 21st Century looks like, but we don’t actually get to see it. Western audiences live in a mirrored box with our own propaganda reflected back on us. We live in a very carefully constructed false reality. All of the news reports and sponsored fund-raising posts on social media portray the war as an arcade-style video game featuring Ukrainians doing “hit and run” tactics, which is just silly. Both sides have to hold territory, I mean come on.
So, are Ukrainians winning? Or are they losing and asking literal children to borrow their toy helicopters? If you believe the propaganda… both?
If Ukrainians are doing so well, why did Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisors, just ask for 5,000 units of vehicles and guns?
For context, 90 howitzers is a division’s worth of guns, so it’s hard to imagine how Ukraine could find a use for 1,000 guns unless they had lost just about everything that they started with, and also lost most or all of what we’ve sent them so far.
Russian press releases, photos, news conferences, and social media are what one would typically expect, it’s “normal” propaganda. Everything from the Ukrainian MoD and NATO is so divorced from reality it’s not even useful. This propaganda is meant to confuse and isolate the audience and can never educate, not even by accident. It’s intended to not educate.
Really, at the end of the day, Ukraine is the battlefield in an asymmetric war between Russia and NATO. I call the war an “asymmetric” one because the Russians are fighting right next to their own borders, and that comes with many benefits. They have short supply lines, they can easily rotate troops and equipment, and it’s easy to maintain an appropriately high sense of urgency to their population. But at the same time, the war has become less urgent and more routine. There is no war mobilization, no draft, and no sign that there’s going to be one. It’s a “war of the willing” fought by contract soldiers while the rest of the Russian population goes about their day-to-day lives.
Meanwhile, the opposite is true for NATO. All military aid has to be sent across Europe, and a considerable distance across Ukraine itself (not even the Black Sea is an option). Let’s also not forget that Ukraine is one of the most corrupt regions on Earth, which is bad for money and weapons reaching their actual intended purposes. It’s also not a war that can become truly “routine” like it is in Russia, or like Iraq and Afghanistan were for Americans. The Kiev government has apparently given up trying to collect taxes, and their ports are closed, but their soldiers and government workers still have to be paid, and their debts have to be honored. The only way to keep Ukraine in the fight is for Team Biden to continue pouring tens of billions of dollars into their economy, and much of that is going to be stolen.
COVID propaganda relied on keeping people passive, and wasn’t really a call to action. But war is a call to action and requires people to make significant sacrifices. Are Americans and Europeans going to be content with being on the edge of economic ruin while our governments funnel obscene amounts of (often borrowed) money to Ukrainians? Maybe, but I think our war effort is going to collapse long before the Russians start to get uncomfortable.
Ian Kummer
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Good article. Your initial comments remind me of similar analysis by Jim Garrison who uncovered some uncomfortable truths while investigating the JFK assassination:
“Not only has the press failed to perceive reality and communicate any part of it to the peope but the government — which is really to say the warfare oriented conglomerate, which now constitutes the hidden nucleus of power in America — has elaborate machinery to continue to maintain the insulation of the people from reality…”
“…Similarly the news magazines of the country are in the service not of the people but of the military hardware advertisers — most of whose millions in advertising is concentrated in the “news” magazines. Their presentations of any foreign relations issue or any question of military requirements for years have been colored by the necessity that their conclusions be harmonious with the interests of the war machine. Nor of the television networks. They exist by virtue of government sanction and no serious or objective examination of current war projects — or related assassinations — will be seen for long on the television screen.”
“There has been no change of any kind in the power base in Washington. There have been seeming changes but the warfare machine and it’s extensive intelligence tentacles, domestic as well as foreign, remain untouched. Congress is free to debate concerning daylight savings time and the President is free to re-paint the rooms of the White House any color he chooses but there is not likely to be any diminution in the power of the warrior chieftains and their allies in the government.”
“The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman,for the military hardware manufacturers and to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace. He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists…”
“…The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the superstate against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening. All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated… all factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed. The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted. Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house…”
“…In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.”
–Jim Garrison 1969”
Hi Billy Bob, a pleasure as always. It’s amazing how little has changed since 1969, and also so much. The military industrial complex has gotten even more absurd since Vietnam, and totally divorced from producing results.
There are 3 fronts in this war: the propaganda war; the economic war; and the military war.
The Ukraine, probably merely as a front for the Western governments running the proxy war, has been winning the propaganda war hands down — at least until recently. The Ukraine still gets massive amounts of positive coverage in the official media, but there are cracks in the facade.
The economic war being waged against Russia by non-Ukrainian governments has backfired big time. The impact on Westerners, especially Europeans, is significant and going to get worse. The impact on certain other countries dependent on food imports, such as Egypt, could approach Holodomor territory — creating a great moral quandary for the West.
The military war is going in Russia’s favor — albeit at a grindingly slow pace. Indeed, the question which has to be asked is whether Russia is deliberately slow-walking the fighting? Perhaps Russia has realized that the general population in the West is losing interest in the Ukraine as the Kiev forces slowly retreat. Americans, especially, do not like losers. Maybe a deliberately slow grind will cause more problems for the West, leading to the break-up of NATO as the US realizes it can’t afford it and the Europeans realize they don’t want it? Ending the threat of an aggressive NATO on its borders is probably as important to Russia as ending the Kiev government’s assault on the Donbas.
The great risk, of course, is that foolish actions by irresponsible Western governments could so easily lead to rapid escalation of the fighting beyond the borders of the Ukraine, which would in turn inevitably lead to global thermonuclear war. And no-one in authority in the West seems to recognize that existential risk. The absence of genuine Western pressure for a negotiated peace is very telling.
I agree and it’s not one giant puppetmaster pulling the strings, but rather an army of journalists and bloggers who are mostly in the private sector so have to make money. They’re telling a grand story, so have to keep up the suspense so their readers don’t get bored. Also, if there’s a huge bit of news, even if it looks bad for the Ukies, those bloggers still have to report on it, because they DO have some sense of credibility they have to maintain. They’re classic ambulance chasers.
Lot’s of things at the start looked rehearsed and prepared. Like those textbooks for kids telling that Russia is bad. They appeared within days after the start of the mil operation!
Doing it fast would mean steamrolling Ukraine with something very heavy. I do believe it is better to end any war faster, but I don’t think many Russians are ready to sacrifice too many Ukrainians. And from the government’s view, it’s the future, our future, with Ukraine. Too much bad blood already.
I agree with this.
One addition though. Russia is losing the propaganda war in the west. But only there. Within Russia, opinion seems solidly behind the government. Outside of the broadly defined west, governments are not buying the western message and populations are not typically following the west either.
None of that gets reported though by western corporate media. People really do think that the west equals the world!
One other telling example:
Recently William Arkin published in Newsweek his article claiming that Ukraine is winning the war: “Putin Is Losing the War. Don’t Be Fooled by What Happened in Severodonetsk.”
A blogger calmly pointed out that in fact the reverse is happening. He referred to an argument by Larry. C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst, who a couple of months ago wrote an essay with the thesis stated in the title: “The Ukrainian Army Has Been Defeated. What’s Left is Mop-Up.” Now, the blogger said, the Ukrainian army is being annihilated, not defeated.
Within an hour the post was deleted.
Hi Kaz, I heard of that silly Newsweek article, but not the blogger you reference. Who was he and how was the post deleted???
You brought up Larry Johnson and I thought I would do you the favor of sharing this timely link with you. You can watch live as two if the most brilliant analysts available to the general public, air out their differences. It starts in about 40 minutes:
https://youtu.be/4r4lTvmuapY
“I thought I would do you the favor of sharing this timely link with you.”
You did. Thanks. I have watched other videos with Larry, but not this one.
Great article. Thanks.
Fully agree. Russian propaganda is anchored in the real world. But western propaganda is just a made up, make believe, virtual world.
Worrying times. Hannah Arendt argued that completely distorted propaganda to separate the masses from reality was a crucial component of creating totalitarianism in the mid 20th century. The masses were then more comfortable with the fantasy world than the real one.
This seems to be a wider trend in the west nowadays, beyond the Ukraine conflict. The lies just do not get called out in the public square. So called leaders are consumed with their ideology not reality.
!-!-!-!-!
USA citizen Linda Oporto Al Kharun was named as organizer of biological experiments on uninformed or mentally handicapped people ni Ukraine, by Ru MoD
Rus: https://function.mil.ru/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12425495@egNews
Rus: https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1121100
Eng: https://oopstop.com/in-ukraine-at-least-since-2011-experiments-have-been-conducted-in-psychiatric-clinics-in-kharkov/
Maybe the same person or maybe just a random person unlucky to have the same name (however Google seems to not know any other person sharing the name) https://www.peekyou.com/_alharoun
re: Ukraine “we need XYZ equipment” …
Those numbers are similar to the amounts that have been destroyed, in 3.5 months, per RF MoD (adjusting mentally for the wider categorizations used in the RF figures). Ukraine will probably get enough hardware to cause plenty of trouble. Prolonging the conflict is still the NATO strategy, as far as I can tell – that group of officials is on autopilot.
I do think there’s a real chance that the US and global business class will pull the plug on the whole charade, but it might be a while. Maybe Ukraine will run out of true believers first. Maybe the West continues to self-destruct its industry and China eats it.
Most Western reporting, and probably all of the critical decision-making audiences, still digested neither how large scale the fighting is, and how serious the side effects are of the West’s economic warfare policies.
Wait a second — you mean a “long” war where “money” (and weapons/aid, but that all just comes from the “money” anyway) is the *only thing* we’re sending over??
Then it sounds to me like the perfect laundering operation just got even more perfect — after all, what is a couple billion dollars to a government willing to flippantly print trillions out of thin air anyway??
Yes it’s a money-laundering scheme that’s even more corrupt and transparently evil than 20+ years in Afghanistan. I don’t think it’s 4 dimensional chess either. It’s just a military industrial complex that does NOT serve the interests of the state, and that’s why we consistently lose wars.
…and that is one more reason for Russia to have it long. Why stop western government from bleeding western economics dry?…
Meanwhile, today’s event south of Lysychansk… i can only praise Krich Li again, who outlined overall operation plan months ago, albeit was understandably non-exact about timetable and some particular sequences.
April 22: https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1099202
May 10: map №3 https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1106474
May 20: https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1110895
Regarding covid, the Ukraine conflict has sent me down rabbit holes that make me frequently come across commentators who have interesting things to say that completely buck the propaganda narrative about the war in Ukraine, but whenever covid comes up they all seem to go full retard.
I’ve got news for you: at least a million Americans are fucking dead. Probably significantly more than that. The global death toll is something like 15 million. It’s looking like at minimum about 10% of all people who get infected, regardless of the severity of their symptoms (many may never even realize they were ever infected in the first place) will come away with long covid that very well may simply never go away. This has not been a minor or over-hyped plague. We’re going to be living with the fallout of it for decades.
The US, and the West in general, *never* took covid seriously. Oh, you think what we laughably called lock-downs were too much? They weren’t even a fraction of what needed to be done.
And that’s not even getting to the fact that it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s running rampant right now, infecting hundreds of thousands and killing hundreds daily. The Biden administration wants to pretend that it’s on the way out, but it isn’t. It’s getting worse by the day. Our leaders of fucking psychopaths who have contrived to kill a million of us and have given up even pretending to continue to fight a still rampaging illness, yet some of you people are convinced that there was never a real serious plague to begin with and that it was propaganda hype. Fucking wild.