I’ve been writing for years on the criminality of the elites which, behind a chimera of democracy, rule the western world. And about the systemic inability of corporate media to tell the truth on matters those elites need us kept in the dark about. But even I have been shocked by the extent of the sustained disinformation campaign, a propaganda blitz of induced ignorance and acute amnesia, waged by the entire gamut of those media on what is happening in Ukraine and why.
Of just how far those media will go to maintain a grotesquely skewed narrative.
(I liken it to the proverbial visiting Martian, asking what our hospitals are for, being taken to an operating theatre to witness an amputation. Back on Mars she tells her friends that Earth has buildings called hospitals, which exist to sever the limbs of wayward earthlings.)
People, many of them friends, who “discovered” Ukraine six weeks ago now pour out childish sagacities on Facebook: reflecting, in their painfully limited understanding, every hallmark of opinion moulded in the interests of power.
Just yesterday I saw a long FB comment berating Putin – an essential of propaganda blitzes being to reduce the decision making of an advanced civilisation to the evil scheming of one man, the latest in a long line of “new Hitlers” – for taking the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and thus, said the clueless comment, putting the world at risk of nuclear war.
Really? Would they rather the fascists of the Azov Battalion or C14 had gotten there first?
These newly indignant (eight years of horrifying civil war, and thirty of Russia making modest demands which would have averted the current tragedy, having passed them by) present the most acute case I’ve seen in nigh on seventy years on the planet of manufactured opinion.
Which brings me to Oliver Stone’s spellbinding 2016 documentary, Ukraine on Fire. It’s been pulled by Youtube but 1 you can buy it on Amazon. That’s worthy in that it helps the film makers recoup their costs, but it shrinks the numbers of people who will see it. Alternatively, since Stone has moved it to Vimeo, you can download it there for free.
Do hurry though. Who knows when this window will be slammed shut? And if you opt for the top resolution – which I urge you to do, for so visually splendid a film – allow time, depending on band-width, for the 3.2 GB download.
Though it predates current events by six years, expect to arrive at a radically different view of what is happening now and why.
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