Three Illuminating Quotes About The War
In Ukraine
By Caitlin Johnstone
July 16, 2022:
Information Clearing House-- " Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges
have lent their expertise to the subject of
the war in Ukraine with some recent comments
that help bring some much-needed clarity to
an often confusing and always contentious
issue. Here they are:
“I’ve spent my
career working in the mainstream, and I’ve
covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting
wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly
consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of
manipulative jingoism as this one.”
~ John Pilger
This comment comes from
a
recent interview with the legendary
Australian journalist by the South China
Morning Post, and it says so much about the
information ecosystem we now find ourselves
floundering around trying to understand
things in.
From the earliest days of the invasion it
was clear that the western world was being
smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike
anything we’ve ever seen before. In the
first full month of the conflict, American
network TV stations gave
more coverage to the war in Ukraine than
any other war that the US has been directly
involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam.
Literal
Iraq war architects were some of the
first pundits sought out for analysis of the
conflict by the mainstream press, and
calls for insane escalations against
Russia succeeded in
pushing the Overton window of acceptable
debate in the direction of warmongering
extremism and away from support for
diplomatic solutions.
Reader financed- No
Advertising - No Government Grants -
No Algorithm - This
Is Independent
And this was all easily piped into
mainstream consciousness because
the way had been lubricated by years of
Russia hysterica resulting from the mass
scale psychological operation known as
Russiagate. America’s most dangerous
confrontation in generations just so happens
to have been preceded by years of
media-generated panic about that very same
country, despite the Ukraine invasion having
ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the
conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had
infiltrated the highest levels of the US
government. Heckin’ heck of a coincidence
right there, buddy boy.
“It’s quite interesting that in American
discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer
to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion
of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will
find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of
course, it was provoked. Otherwise they
wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an
unprovoked invasion.”
~ Noam Chomsky
This quote, from an
interview last month with Ramzy Baroud,
is self-evidently true and should be pointed
out more often.
People don’t go adding the same
gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to
something over and over again unless they’re
trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If
your neighbor always referred to his wife as
“my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d
immediately become suspicious because that’s
not how normal people talk about normal
things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the
Holocaust that totally happened,” we just
say the words, because their basic nature is
not seriously in dispute and we’ve got
nothing invested in manipulating or
obfuscating people’s understanding about
them.
The need of the political/media class to
continually bleat this phrase “unprovoked
invasion” over and over again is itself a
confession that they know they’re not
telling the whole truth. It’s the imperial
propaganda version of this classic tweet:
My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
Chomsky outlines many of the provocations the
US/NATO power structure engaged in prior to the
conflict, which many western analysts
spent years warning was coming as a result
of the provocative actions that were already
being taken by the empire. The invasion
could easily have been prevented with a
little diplomacy and some low-cost, high-reward
concessions ike honoring the Minsk agreements
and providing assurances of neutrality for
Ukraine, but they chose provocation and
escalation instead. Add to that the
exponentially increased shelling of the
Donbas by Kyiv immediately prior to the invasion
and you can understand why empire spinmeisters
are working so hard to push the “unprovoked”
line.
None of this is to say that Russia is
blameless in this war; if I provoke someone into
punching somebody they are still morally
responsible for having thrown the punch, but I
am also responsible for having provoked it.
Russia is responsible for its actions, and the
US/NATO/Ukraine power structure is responsible
for its actions. Putin is responsible for
invading, the western empire is responsible for
provoking that invasion. Not complicated.
In the same interview Chomsky also says that
“censorship in the United States has reached
such a level beyond anything in my lifetime”
regarding this war. That assessment plus
Pilger’s testimony about war propaganda unlike
anything he’s ever seen shows that
imperial narrative management is at an
all-time high, which wouldn’t be happening
unless the empire
had some major agendas it wanted to roll out
in the coming years.
“At no time, including the Cuban missile
crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of
nuclear war.”
~ Chris Hedges
Echoing the urgent warnings that Stephen
Cohen was
making at the end of his life, a
new article by Hedges outlines the
profoundly dangerous games the empire is playing
with a nuclear superpower in its continually
escalating proxy war against Moscow.
The observations by Pilger and Chomsky about
how much effort is going in to manipulating
people’s understanding of this war make sense
when you realize that the agendas the empire is
trying to roll out against Russia now and then
China later down the road stand not only to
throw the world into
poverty and starvation, but to
wipe us off the face of this planet.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no
good reason the world’s most powerful government
needs to risk the life of everyone on earth in a
bid to secure planetary domination. It is
possible for all nations and peoples to simply
get along and collaborate toward the common good
together. All that would need to happen is for
these agendas of total hegemony to be abandoned.
Unfortunately the managers of empire don’t
seem to have any plans to abandon their goal of
global conquest anytime soon, so we the ordinary
people of this world may end up having to
force the issue with them at some point in
the interests of our very survival.
This is a hell of a time to be alive, but man
they’ve been keeping it interesting.
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
