August 11/12, 2023 -
Information Clearing House -
Arguably the single most egregious display
of war propaganda in the 21st century
occurred last year, when the entire western
political/media class began uniformly
bleating the word “unprovoked” in reference
to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On February 23 of last year, the day
before the invasion began, the New York
Times editorial board
wrote that “an unprovoked invasion of a
sovereign European state is an unprovoked
declaration of war on a scale, on a
continent and in a century when it was
thought to be no longer possible.”
After the war began, the Biden White
House released a statement titled “Remarks
by President Biden on Russia’s Unprovoked
and Unjustified Attack on Ukraine.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken
shared Biden’s statement on Twitter with
the comment “Russia’s premeditated,
unprovoked, and unjustified attack on
Ukraine blatantly disregards the lives of
innocent men, women, and children, Ukraine’s
sovereignty and territorial integrity, and
international law.”
Russia’s
premeditated, unprovoked, and
unjustified attack on Ukraine
blatantly disregards the lives of
innocent men, women, and children,
Ukraine’s sovereignty and
territorial integrity, and
international law. My thoughts are
with all Ukrainians. We remain
#UnitedWithUkraine.
https://t.co/QQsHtr71XC
In early March of last year, the New York
Times editorial board
wrote that western sanctions against
Russia in retaliation for the invasion “have
demonstrated that there are consequences for
unprovoked wars of aggression.”
In April of last year the New York Times
editorial board again repeated this slogan,
writing that Putin had “ordered an
unprovoked war to satisfy his ambitions of
empire and the destruction of a neighboring
nation.”
In May of last year the New York Times
editorial board
reiterated that “Ukraine deserves
support against Russia’s unprovoked
aggression.”
According to analyst Jeffrey Sachs, the
New York Times used the word unprovoked “no
fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14
opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven
guest op-eds.”
As Jeffrey
Sachs explains, the
#Ukraine war “was provoked by
the US in ways that leading US
diplomats anticipated for decades”,
yet Western media claim the war was
unprovoked. The NY Times has claimed
that the war was “unprovoked” at
least 26 times.https://t.co/ZV0Ty1p5Zs
#NATO
But it wasn’t just the Paper of Record
singing from the same hymnal as the US
government on Ukraine. The Guardian
editorial board
wrote that “Mr Putin’s unprovoked war
against a smaller, democratic neighbour has
resulted in 1.7 million people fleeing their
homes.” The LA Times editorial board
wrote that the “most conspicuous victims
of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine
are the people who will lose their lives in
defending their country against a brutal
(and nuclear-armed) neighbor.” The Chicago
Tribune editorial board
made reference to “Putin’s audacious,
unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” The
Financial Times editorial board
made reference to “Putin’s unprovoked
assault on Russia’s neighbour.” The
Washington Post editorial board
made reference to “Moscow’s disastrous,
unprovoked invasion”
and to “Russia’s unprovoked invasion” in
two separate pieces.
Everywhere you looked, that word was
being uncritically regurgitated by the
western press. CNN
saying “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of
Ukraine has devastated the country, killing
hundreds of civilians, sparking a
humanitarian disaster and resulting in a
wave of sanctions from the West.” Time
babbling about “Russia’s unprovoked
invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.” The New
Yorker
saying “Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s
unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” NBC News
saying “Russia’s unprovoked attack on
Ukraine began Thursday, after weeks of
buildup.” CNBC
talking about “Russia’s unprovoked
invasion of Ukraine.”
This is just me citing a few of the
basically limitless examples I can point to
of this war sloganeering throughout the mass
media. The western press uphold themselves
as impartial arbiters of truth, purporting
to be superior to the state media
propagandists of nations like Russia and
China, and claiming a legitimacy that
ordinary people using social media don’t
have. And yet here they are uncritically
parroting the talking points of the US
government and taking sides against Russia.
Leaving aside
the substantive question of whether
the war was "unprovoked" or not,
it's enormously creepy that they're
all using the exact same word as
though it was programmed directly
into their brains
pic.twitter.com/64RqFaQSiw
The western media claim to report the
facts, but the way they’ve fallen in line
behind the “unprovoked” narrative reveals
that their actual job is to frame world
events in a way that serves the information
interests of their government. Which would
be bad enough if that narrative was just a
biased framing of a contentious issue, and
not the bald-faced lie that it actually is.
During an
interview last year with the Useful
Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky argued that the
reason we keep hearing the western press
using the word “unprovoked” in reference to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is because it
absolutely was provoked, and they
know it.
“Right now if you’re a respectable writer
and you want to write in the main journals,
you talk about the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the
unprovoked Russian invasion of
Ukraine,” Chomsky
said. “It’s a very interesting phrase;
it was never used before. You look back, you
look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked,
nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked
invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if
the term was ever used — if it was
it was very marginal. Now you look it up on
Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits.
Every article that comes out has to talk
about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”
“Why? Because they know perfectly well it
was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t
justify it, but it was massively provoked.”
Indeed, you can disagree with Russia’s
invasion or believe that Putin overreacted
to the situation, but what you can’t do is
legitimately claim that the invasion was
unprovoked. It’s just a
well–documented
fact that the US and its allies
provoked this war in a
whole host of ways, from NATO expansion
to backing regime change in Kyiv to playing
along with aggressions against Donbass
separatists to pouring weapons into Ukraine.
There’s also an
abundance of evidence that the US and
its allies sabotaged a peace deal between
Russia and Ukraine in the early weeks of the
war in order to keep this conflict going as
long as possible to hurt Russian interests.
The best advice to solve the
Russia-Ukraine Conflict was
given by John J. Mearsheimer in
2015 which nobody listened.
"The West is leading Ukraine
down the primrose path and the
end result is that Ukraine is
going to get wrecked"
pic.twitter.com/MW7ce4N6Km
We know that western actions provoked the
war in Ukraine because
many western foreign policy experts
spent years warning that western actions
would provoke a war in Ukraine. There’s
footage of John Mearsheimer back in 2015
urgently warning that “the west is leading
Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end
result is that Ukraine is going to get
wrecked.” And that’s exactly how it played
out.
The reason foreign policy “realists” like
Mearsheimer were able to correctly predict
the war in Ukraine is because they held at
the forefront of their analysis the fact
that great powers will never accept threats
from other great powers on their borders.
This is a key point to understanding the
major conflicts of the 2020s, not just
between the US and Russia but between the US
and China as well — and the US is the one
amassing the threats on the borders of its
enemies
in both instances.
“The thesis of the war being unprovoked
is very strategic,” foreign policy analyst
Max Abrams recently
tweeted in response to my commentary on
this subject. “It whitewashes the role of
NATO expansion, meddling in the Maidan
uprisings and siding with far right
extremists in the civil war. Not only does
it exonerate America but it helps vilify
Russia and sell the war as wholly good.”
The thesis of
the war being unprovoked is very
strategic. It whitewashes the role
of NATO expansion, meddling in the
Maidan uprisings & siding with far
right extremists in the civil war.
Not only does it exonerate America
but it helps vilify Russia & sell
the war as wholly good.
https://t.co/O8yCxw3ZPO
The reason the mass media have been
bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison
with regard to this war is because the mass
media
are propaganda organs of the US empire.
Their repetition of this war propaganda
slogan exploits a glitch in human cognition
known as
the illusory truth effect, which makes
it difficult for our minds to tell the
difference between the experience of hearing
something many times and the experience of
hearing something that’s true. Just
repeatedly inserting the word “unprovoked”
into Ukraine war commentary across the board
causes people to assume it must have been
launched without provocation, because the
illusory truth effect can circumvent reason
and logic to insert a narrative into the
collective consciousness of our
civilization.
The fact that all mass media outlets
began doing this in unison, against all
journalistic training and ethics, shows you
just how united the mass media are in
service of the US empire. When the need to
push a narrative is particularly urgent, the
facade of journalistic impartiality and
independence drops away, and we see the true
face of the most sophisticated propaganda
machine that has ever existed.
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