Western Word Games

A major part of preparing a population for war is to create an extreme distinction between the official “enemy” and the official “allies”. Ever since Vladimir Putin reined in the Russian oligarchs and stopped the sale of a large chunk of Russian fossil fuel reserves by the oligarch Khodorkovsky to Exxon, he has been demonized. This demonization intensified after Putin’s speech to the 2007 Munich Security Conference in which he identified NATO as an aggressive force advancing toward Russia’s borders in contravention of commitments made before the unification of East and West Germany. Then again in 2008 after Russia’s successful defeat of a Georgian invasion. It escalated again to extreme levels after Russia’s successful short-circuiting of the US-driven regime change operation in Syria and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The US and Western publics have now had nearly two decades of ongoing propaganda to demonize both Vladimir Putin and his government.

Up until recently, US and Western media correctly typified Ukraine as an extremely corrupt oligarchy with a substantial Nazi element. All of this reporting has now been “memory holed” and Ukrainian President Zelensky has been turned into a “freedom fighter” protecting the plucky democracy-loving Ukrainians against the dastardly Russians. This echoes the 1980s Ronald Reagan treatment of the Contra terrorist scumbags that were murdering, raping and torturing Nicaraguans as “freedom fighters” on the same level as those that fought against the British in the US War of Independence. Or the 1990s treatment of the medieval monarchy of Kuwait that had been drilling cross-border to steal Iraqi oil as worthy of US support, helped by the “baby’s in incubators” falsification. Or the 2010s treatment of Al Qaeda etc. terrorist head-choppers as Syrian “moderate rebels”. With the right P.R. experts black can so easily become white. Or perhaps the right lying technical management, as with the OPCW management that was shown to have overridden their own on-the-ground experts’ advice to typify a probable false flag as a Syrian gas attack[i]. Of course, that never made it into the Western mainstream media, especially as it would have raised questions about the other OPCW “poisoning” (by a supposedly deadly “Novichok” nerve poison that seems to be a complete failure) and “gas attack” findings so well utilized to demonize the Russian and Syrian governments.

The US government has explicitly stated that it wants to turn Ukraine into a quagmire to weaken Russia, a new Afghanistan. For this to happen the Western arms must keep flowing to Ukraine, and therefore Ukraine must be seen as having a chance of winning. To the latter end, the Western media have completely misreported the reality on the ground. Ukraine is seen as winning the war with Russia, when in fact their military and supporting capabilities are being methodically ground down and destroyed. Only with the message “the Ukrainians can win if we keep arming them” can vast amounts of weapons be provided to the Ukraine. “Arm them so more of them can die while losing to the Russians” would not be a very good rallying cry for more arms supplies.

With senior US figures repeatedly trumpeting warnings of Russian “WMD” attacks (where have we heard that before?) the scene is possibly set for the OPCW courtiers to be used again to transform a false flag into a “Russian atrocity” to be used to galvanize Western publics into supporting direct intervention in Syria. A recent bill passed in the US Congress explicitly allows a direct US intervention in the case of such an attack. Here the misrepresentation of the Russians as “losing” works well, as it gives credence to a desperate Russia falling back on such weapons. In the case that the Russians are winning, as they actually are, such a use would be incredibly counter-productive and illogical for the Russians. Alex Christoforou, in his latest walkabout piece on Ukraine, noted the repeated use of the word “we” by US officials, as in “we are in this together” as another word game to manipulate Western minds into accepting more direct intervention[ii].

The information blackout in the West of oppositional media has been accomplished by the outright government banning of some media outlets together with an ongoing campaign of banning, shadow banning, and financial strangulation. The Consortium News site recently announced that Paypal had suspended their account, without providing the money in the account to them, a pattern which started with the Paypal suspension of the Wikileaks account[iii]. I find myself repeatedly having to use alternative search engines to find alternative media site stories, and those sites report extensive shadow banning. The move by companies such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter to downrate non “official” (i.e. those not blessed by Western states and NATO entities) sites creates an invisible censoring. This a war-like level of censorship designed to remove any possibility that the official discourses will be in danger of being disrupted by alternative media. As it becomes more and more difficult to hide the reality of Russian advances (and Russian economic stability against the slow melt-down of the European economies), the censorship will tighten more and the message of “we are in this together” will intensify.

The presidency of the UN Security Council changes monthly, and it has aided the West that the UK was the president in April.  It blocked an immediate UNSC session to discuss the Bucha massacre, which would have provided Russia with a chance to counter the Western propaganda on the matter. The US is the chair in May, then Albania (a solid Western ally) in June so there is a two-month window where the West can control the UNSC proceedings. In July it will be Brazil (a US ally usually but has refused to sanction Russia) and then China in August. The next two months may be interesting times ….

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[i]

https://thegrayzone.com/?s=opcw

[ii]

[iii] https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/29/paypal-blocks-multiple-alternative-media-figures-critical-of-us-empire-narratives/