On October 20, CNN actively and deliberately discouraged people from leaving Kherson, dismissing Russian evacuation efforts as “hysteria.” Of course as everyone who’s paid attention to the news knows by now, Kherson is occupied by Ukrainian militants and embroiled in an intense artillery duel. On November 28, CNN condemned the Russian artillery strikes, claiming “now they’re killing the civilians they once vowed to protect.” Really. Did CNN reporters just intentionally prevent people from leaving an active war zone, hoping those people would later be killed so CNN could make money off their deaths? And this is far from the only media flip-flop lately.
I’m old enough to remember the ye old year 2021 BC, when western journalists speculated that Russia was planning to assassinate Elon Musk, the billionaire champion of democracy. Just a year later, Musk was added to Ukraine’s kill list and Joe Biden vowed to investigate him for being an enemy agent. How the mighty have fallen.
CNN and just about every other mainstream news network in the West is crowing about the brave protesters against China’s Zero-COVID policies. The same news networks who condemned Canadian, American, and French COVID protesters as extremists and nazis. The same news outlets who applauded those protesters being brutalized by police, locked out of their bank accounts, and fired from their jobs.
Ultimately, the liberal “rules-based world order” advocates one set of ideas for their enemies, and the opposite ideas for themselves. Protests in a “bad” country like Russia, China, or Iran are good. Protests in a “good” country are bad and need to be suppressed by any means necessary. Very simply, the “good” countries in the rules-based world order need unity above all else, and dissent must be crushed. The world order’s enemies are to be destroyed, fragmented into weak ethno-states that can be easily manipulated.
I wrote this in an earlier post about LGBT laws in Russia and protests in Iran. The LGBT movement, separatism, religious extremism, and ethnic hatred are all tools of the rules-based world order to weaken and destroy their enemies. That’s why, unfortunately, it is dangerous and probably unproductive to be a protester in these “authoritarian” countries. A protester in Russia, Iran, or China probably has honest and commendable goals, but he will inevitably be used as a pawn by foreign agents who want to completely destroy the country and plunge it into endless civil war and genocide. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, I’m just taking mainstream news reports at face value. Our leaders and journalists are hysterical about Russian spies using protests to destroy America because that’s what we’re constantly trying to do to them.
Musk was a hero against Russia yesterday, and a spy working for Russia today. We were at war with East Asia yesterday and today we’re at war with Eurasia. There’s no acknowledgement of these flip flops, and there’s not even an attempt to erase public knowledge of the contradiction. And this, perhaps, is the key point George Orwell was wrong about. 1984 depicts a government that has to go to extreme lengths to cover up their lies, even placing incinerators in every building and legally obligating people to destroy all old documents and newspapers so they never notice previous contradictions. But in real life, there’s no need for that. Orwell was just giving human beings too much credit.
Ian Kummer
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orwell gave SOME people too much credit. even when talking about the majority of news consumers who believe nonsense it’s still a minority within the west where many if not most people simply DON’T CARE. of course, that’s been conveniently engineered over decades and centuries by keeping feudalism in place so that the riff raff are too busy paying rent and overdosing on fentanyl to pay attention but the fact remains: the average resident of a NE DC hood doesn’t give two sh_ts about ukraine or china. ditto for a single mother in the south working at a biker bar to get her kids medical treatment and so on and so on…
never mind the consistent polls showing that even active consumers of these products are losing “faith” in the handful of outlets crapping out corporate hasbara all day.
one more note: i know there’s a tendency to paint all covid protests and their respective shutdowns as “derp poor protesters and their freedoms derrrr” but i can say – as a (technically) canadian who despises all 3 major parties (that’s right, US…we have THREE!) the trucker protests were objectively made up of stupid alberta f_cktards and even the (literal) 90% of vaccinated truckers in the country who just shut the f_ck up and went to work hated them.
i heard from people i knew in DC and other US cities throughout the pandemic and the resounding message was “wow, you guys have it sweet up there”. canada had its problems (listening to the Patrick Bateman Class about “acceptable deaths”, etc.) but we still have the bare bones of an actual government and it did a passable job. these stupid (and, sorry to burst the bubble of all the glenn greenwalds out there, racist as sh_t) whining bitches weren’t Valiant Protestors For Democracy any more than the maidan snipers were or the iranian cop killers are. they’re inbred alberta pricks. period.
Ian that was a very thoughtful piece. The west continue to believe every new chapter in the narrative we are fed. It matters not at all that the chapters that came before have been found to be lacking any serious credibility and the creators know liars.
A juggler/magician, things, things, sparkly things where do they come from, where do they go? Few people want to look beyond that, into the dark. Monsters lurk in the dark.
Thanks for putting a dent in the narrative.