Anti War: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon Feb 21 15:29:07 PST 2022


War Or Images Of War?

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/02/20/war-or-images-of-war/

Experienced foreign policy analysts such as Ray McGovern, Scott
Ritter, and Pepe Escobar, while agreeing that the Biden administration
is clearly guilty of provoking Russia over Ukraine, are divided over
whether it will lead to war. All agree that Russia has no intention of
invading Ukraine and that it is clearly justified in demanding safe
borders by insisting US/NATO withdraw troops and missiles from the
countries surrounding it, stop NATO’s "open door" policy, stop putting
nuclear weapons in Europe, etc.

Clearly such demands are consonant with the US’s own historical
demands for safe borders, evidenced most clearly in the Cuban Missile
Crisis of October 1962 when the world nearly suffered a nuclear war
over Soviet missiles in Cuba. And equally obvious is the fact that the
American posture today is hypocritical in the extreme and can only be
accepted by propagandists and those ignorant of history.
Image: Associated Press

The Biden administration must assume that most people are ignoramuses
and that its obvious belligerence and blatant propaganda will pass as
some sort of defense of freedom, even when the US engineered a
Ukrainian coup d’état in 2014 in support of Neo-Nazis when Biden was
President Obama’s vice-president. But that was nearly eight years ago,
which is an eternity in a country of amnesiacs.

Whether this US persistent aggression is a propaganda charade or not,
it is a most dangerous game. In December 2021, Russia claimed that the
US was preparing a false flag event to provoke a Russian response.
This was dismissed or ignored by the western media as absurd.
Recently, however, the Biden administration has been pounding the
message that it is Russia that is preparing a false flag event to
blame on Ukraine in order to justify a Russian invasion.

The western press, led by The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, and
the Washington Post – stenographers for the CIA, British intelligence,
and the Pentagon – have become more hysterical by the day pushing this
lie without any evidence whatsoever. It is sardonically comical. If
evidence doesn’t exist, it can be manufactured, such as weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq, etc. It’s easy as pie. To call these media
the Yellow Press is an understatement.

When Russia accuses the US of using "information terrorism," it is of
course correct. For we are living in an MKULTRA mind control operation
with multiple facets. Ukraine, Covid, economic warfare, etc. – a
hydra-headed monster whose goal is total control of regular people,
who are treated as morons incapable of reason and the most basic
logic. Toward confirming and strengthening this premise, the media
provide a daily menu of mixed and contradictory messages meant to
confuse, confound, and mess with people’s sense of their own ability
to understand the world.

If the public is to be convinced that the Russians have started a war,
it will be attempted not so much through words as through images, as
Gustave Le Bon predicted long ago in his book, The Crowd: A Study of
the Popular Mind. In analyzing the "crowd mind" in 1895, he was
addressing the anxiety the middle class was feeling because of popular
unrest. The fear of popular unrest, such as the truckers Freedom
Convoy in Canada and the Yellow Vests in France, is today a major
factor in the propaganda war waged by the elite press. Call it class
warfare.

    This is how opinion-makers marshal support for war. They frame
opposition to American involvement in war as treason.
pic.twitter.com/dpjOSPgtjU
    — Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) February 21, 2022

Le Bon argued that the crowd thinks in images, not words, and it is
through images that the rulers can control them. Freud agreed with his
basic premise that people in groups occupied an "hypnotic state,"
while adding that this was also true for individuals who craved
illusions. Pessimistic as it was, Le Bon’s point about the crowd
thinking in images – "The image itself immediately calls up a series
of other images, having no logical connection to the first" – was
picked up by all the influential propagandists, including the American
father of the euphemistically named "public relations," Edward
Bernays. Today it is all about images, still and moving ones.

Thus, one can expect to see the media using photos and film to create
an emotional response in the population to convince it that Russia,
not the US is the villain in this standoff. Yet again, it may not be a
standoff, for it is possible that the Biden administration is really
intent on war because they have become completely untethered from
reality and think such a war is winnable. Perhaps they think they can
entice Russia to take their bait and do something that can be spun as
an "invasion" of Ukraine. This would run counter to Russia’s
long-standing, patient diplomatic efforts to resolve these matters and
to convince the US/NATO that the unipolar era is over and now that it
is a multipolar world there must be an end to the encircling of Russia
with US/NATO troops and weapons.

We shall see. I don’t know whether there will be a major war or not,
but I know how it will be managed. I’ll give you six guesses, as does
The New York Times with its newly acquired word game, Wordle.  The
Grey Lady also knows the answer. It’s not "censor," for that’s six not
five letters and they’ve censored the words already. It’s not "slave,"
for they have prohibited that word since some people might find it
offensive or get the idea that censorship is used to create slaves to
the lie. It is, as required, five letters and begins with the letter
"I".

Try to picture it. It’s easy if you try.


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list