First, accuse Putin of plotting something he never intends to do. Second, tell the world you will strongly respond to the fabricated scenario. Third, tell the world when the fabricated scenario is to happen. Then, when the fabricated scenario never happens, that it is because you are so brilliant and strong you outmaneuvered and cowed the Russians. 1
Like me sitting in the back garden on a sunny afternoon with a few beers then claiming success at guarding the house from marauders when none turn up.
Below the line comment on yesterday’s post
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Washington Post in late January ... 2
… and again six days later:
Are you getting that sense of deja vu, of having heard it all before? That’s because you have. Not all the screenshots given below, collated by Moon of Alabama in ICH on February 13 – British Government Laundered Fake U.S. ‘Intelligence’ On Ukraine – will be from media familiar to you. Some will, but it matters little. We can be sure that, on or close to the days they appeared, most Western corporate media – from Guardian to Mail, Economist to Boston Globe – will have run similar.
How do I know? Because while those media have (and for market positioning must have) broad diversity of views on matters, including important ones, which do not go to the heart of ruling class interests, on matters which do there is little substantive difference between them. And as Herr Goering pointed out from the dock at Nuremberg, it is easy for the leaders to manufacture ‘consent’ for war; hot or cold. 3
Below then is a sample of how, on Ukraine as on so much else, corporate media of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ stripe have, in each of the past nine years, stoked our fear and loathing of the evil Russian empire and its satanic leader. While scanning the list of screenshots – maybe clicking on an image or two to view the stories – do keep a few things in mind:
- Hermann Goering’s words
- The case, made often on this site – e.g. in Ukraine: maps, history, duff reasoning – that Washington and Nato are the true aggressors here. (You may disagree, and take me to task on the claim, but do bear it in mind.)
- “We Have Evidence!” is not evidence
- Corporate media are systemically incapable of telling the truth on matters as vital to US imperialism (its internal fault-lines notwithstanding) as this crisis – on which said media, reduced to dutifully relaying what “intelligence sources” tell them, may as well be run from CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia
- Moscow can at a stroke bring Kiev to heel by turning off the energy supply 4
- The boy who cried “wolf” – and the boy who played with fire
*
New York Times, January 27 2022
BBC, April 2, 2021
United Press International, July 17, 2020
Defense One, June 12, 2019
New York Times, December 15, 2018
Military Times, September 13, 2017
Vox, September 1, 2016
Defense News, March 19, 2015
FP, July 30, 2014
Happy to field questions/dissenting views on the subject: why in God’s name would Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov, Sergey Shoigu et al want to INVADE UKRAINE?!?
* * *
- I share the view of that BTL comment, that Putin never did plan to invade Ukraine. Lack of motive aside, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out, Russia’s armed forces could neutralise any Kiev threat to Donbas’s de facto application of the Minsk Accord without setting foot in Eastern Ukraine. But these are the calculations of the rational. Ever since WW2 segued into Cold War 1 then (after a brief hiatus under the pliantly drunken Boris Yeltsin) Cold War 2, the nightmare scenario of nuclear war by miscalculation, by one round too many of ‘play chicken’, has haunted us. To really grasp this, however, we need to grow up and let in the disturbing truth that the adults in the room aren’t adults at all but for the most part venal mediocrities, with puffed egos and varying levels of sanity.
- Click on any image (Goering excepted) to view the news story at source.
- Himmler denounced the Nuremberg Trials as “victors’ justice”. Think Hiroshima and Nagasaki, RAF fire-bombing of Dresden and – if you’ll allow my anachronistic leap – the fact Blair and Bush, Campbell and Rumsfeld, live lives of luxury when their waging of aggressive war – what Nuremberg called the supreme international crime – based on lies should, were we to take such things at face value, have seen them in the dock at the Hague. Himmler’s words, like Goering’s, are not easily dismissed.
- That Kiev buys Russian gas via intermediary states takes nothing away from the fact that, energywise as much as militarywise, Moscow holds a strong set of cards. Yes, there would be retaliation, and Russia would be hurt, but the European states taking part would be hurt more.
https://thesaker.is/the-great-exodus-continues-while-russia-wraps-up-her-maneuvers/
Bloody typical!
You go to all that trouble & effort to promote & organise an invasion for someone; delivering all the carry out’s from the street corner weapons store to make sure everyone has plenty of ammo; sending out cover page splash invitations & wall to wall coverage across the entire media spectrum with time and date of the special event.
And no bugger turns up!
I bet there were not even any WMD’s in the vicinity.
In other news I hear the BBC has acquired sponsorship from the CIA and US State Departments to revive the popular children’s program ‘Jackanory’.
with the propogander war over the covid scam the powers think they can fool the populace into accepting a confrontation with Russia.