Gordon is a moron gaslighter for NATO

Guardian, July 9 2024

Let’s start with the hypocrisy. Gordon Brown, in Tuesday’s Guardian, wants Vladimir Putin in the dock for war crimes. This from a senior member of a government whose lies led Britain into an illegal war which turned Iraq into a charnel house and unleashed decades of sectarian terror – having already backed its Washington handlers’ years of illegal sanctions that killed, says the UN, half a million infants.

A man who accused Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of ‘antisemitism’ to enable his replacement by a human rights lawyer who defends the illegal collective punishment of Gaza. ^{1 2}

Then there’s the personalisation. Of all the wars fought on this sorry planet, the one in Ukraine is by his reckoning not of the West’s doing:

There are other ways – explored more fully here – of showing the West provoked the Ukraine war, but this is the most graphic

It isn’t even Russia’s war. No, it’s Putin’s! On the absurdity thereof I wrote four days ago that:

One consequence of media-inculcated ignorance is that the place is seen as a mix of banana republic, “gas station with nukes” and kleptocracy; the personal fiefdom of Vladimir Putin.

One aspect of that  being the rarity of Westerners who grasp – since the complexity of so vast an entity is at odds with so one-dimensional a picture – that Russia is a federation, its Regions enjoying levels of autonomy akin to those of Florida or Queensland.

(Though in truth this does not do justice to the Russian Federation’s far greater levels of ethnic diversity than those of a genocidally cleansed USA or Australia.)

Putin was recently re-elected by a far more convincing margin than Starmer’s ³ but that’s a little too much inconvenient nuance for Gordon and a newspaper whose liberal values, on all that most affects the agendas of power, have an uncanny way of aligning with those agendas.

Worst of all there’s the danger. As the inevitability of Ukraine’s defeat is now admitted by some at least of our systemically corrupt media, the risk of false flag attacks rises for two reasons:

• Drowning men clutch at straws. Zelensky, in one of several parallels between his plight and Netanyahu’s, sees his one chance of snatching victory from defeat as direct NATO entry. One huge or a string of smaller false flag ops might provide the casus belli.  But anyone paying attention knows that, even at full strength, NATO – its arsenals depleted, its arms manufacturing capacity way behind Russia’s, its forces more used to policing the global south than confronting a peer adversary, far less one as battle-hardened as Russia – would lose a conventional war of attrition.
• The West’s elites have suffered a huge blow to their project of shoring up a dying empire by provoking then crushing one of its two most formidable obstacles. Overseeing this disaster are weak, vain, greedy fools – Biden and Blinken, BoJo and Baerbock, Macron, Stoltenberg, and VdL – men and women perfectly capable of convincing themselves and their stenographers in the narrative management trade that the risk of nuclear war is, to borrow Madeleine Albright’s response to those murdered Iraqi infants, a price worth paying …

So was Monday’s Kiev hospital strike, in a wave of attacks killing 36 Ukrainian civilians, a false flag by Ukrainian and/or NATO dirty tricks specialists to justify an upped ante? One which, with NATO unable to prevail in a conventional war, has every chance of going nuclear?

I don’t know, you don’t and Gordon doesn’t either. But here’s an Associated Press (AP) article from Tuesday by one Melissa Goldin, a self anointed ‘fact checker’. (I’ve written elsewhere on these – here and at greater length here.) She begins:

Posts falsely blame Ukraine for a missile strike on Kyiv children’s hospital

CLAIM: Ukraine is responsible for a missile strike that hit the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv on Monday.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Ukraine’s Security Service wrote in a statement on Telegram that it found wreckage from a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile at the hospital. ⁴ The Russian Defense Ministry claimed without evidence in a Telegram post that images from Kyiv showed the damage was caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile …

I know many of you pride yourselves on critical thinking. So here’s a question. Given that this extract poses a claim by source X, then ‘debunks’ it on the ground that source Y says it’s false – and neither are disinterested parties – does this ‘fact-checker’ at any point use verifiable facts to resolve such a he said/she said?

Top tactics for top tacticians of critical thinking – “we have evidence” is not evidence …

* * *

1. Whataboutery? Here’s what I think of that charge, which has risen to prominence just as awareness grows of empire’s crimes.
2. For a concise take on media coverage of Ukraine and Gaza, using that Kiev hospital hit as a start point, see this piece yesterday, July 10, by ex Guardian columnist Jonathan Cook – Why the media’s job is to groom us.
3. Some argue that RF voters had limited choice. But they had the choice of abstaining, yet voted in far higher numbers –  87.28% of a 77.44% turnout – than the 33.7% of 60% who gave Starmer’s Labour a 172  seat majority over all other parties combined. Note also the choice Americans will have in November. Even if demented Biden is ditched, since when has there been any choice other than between two billionaire backed representatives of an oligarchy?
4. Says Goldin: “Ukraine’s Security Service …found wreckage from a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile at the hospital …”  Contrast this with Scott Ritter’s point in a video featured in the next post. At 20:41 he says:

   … the longer the Ukrainians take to collect forensic data at the site the more likely it is they’re picking up KH 101 parts from other places … they should have come in quick with a chain of custody: videotape the whole thing, pick up the pieces, seal and keep them under custody then unlock them in front of the media so there can be no question that each piece came from this site. It’s too late now for Ukraine.