The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 12: The Overall Types of Western Propaganda
In this part I discuss the overall “types” of propaganda which, as outlined in part 11, a) are issued from certain “sources” of propaganda, which b) use certain “manipulative means” of propaganda c) to create certain “intended effects” of propaganda that all lead to d) the general “purpose” of propaganda of manufacturing consent for the 1%. The types of propaganda will be ordered via their traditional functional labels.
14.0 Metapropaganda: Propaganda about Propaganda
The probably most fundamental type of propaganda on which the other types of propaganda rest and on which their success depends to a large degree is metapropaganda or propaganda about propaganda à la “It is only ever the other side (e.g. Russia) which uses propaganda and disinformation whereas we (e.g. the US and the Ukrainian regime) speak the truth and nothing but the truth.” I became more aware of the need to list metapropaganda before any other regular types of propaganda during the following Twitter conversation:
Once such metapropaganda is installed in the minds of people, the traditional “truthmakers” (a reference to the traditional correspondence theory of truth) are replaced by falsehood, disinformation, propaganda. And all evidence, facts and truths that are in contradiction with that propaganda — such as US elites using a massive propaganda, disinformation and censorship campaign about the Ukraine Russia USA conflict in order to manufacture consent for themselves and their agendas — will consequently be incorrectly rejected as in this case Russian falsehoods, disinformation or propaganda.
This is the perhaps most fundamental way of how the world and our understanding of it is turned on its head in a genuinely Orwellian fashion. The other and normal types of propaganda rest on that metapropaganda, and to get rid of them, we first need to become aware and then get rid of the underlying metapropaganda and absurd double standard that it is supposedly only ever the other side that uses propaganda and that the oh so very good and noble West and ‘heroic’ Ukrainian leadership would never lie to its population like that (they do).
14.1 Rewriting/Falsifying History, Including Nationalist Mythmaking and Lying by Omission
The for Orwell perhaps most frightening type of normal propaganda that I already discussed in part 6, section 8.1, is the false rewriting of history according to the dictates of the 1% — a perfidious means that also destroys the understanding of the present due to misleading historical trajectories. To once again briefly quote the respective passages from his “Looking Back on the Spanish War”:
I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
[…]
The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement. (Orwell 1943, ch. 4)
In his important 2011 book Why Leaders Lie, John Mearsheimer outlines that type of Orwellian rewriting of history under the label of “nationalist mythmaking”:
Nationalist mythmaking is when leaders tell lies, mainly to their own people, about their country’s past. In essence, they tell a story in which “we” are always right and “they” are always wrong. Elites do this by denying that their nation or ethnic group has done things it has actually done or by falsely claiming that it has done certain things it has not done. Of course, those elites tell a similar set of lies about rival groups. The purpose is to create a powerful sense of group identity among the broader population, because that is necessary for building and maintaining a viable nation-state, and for motivating people to fight wars for their homeland. These myths sometimes help states gain legitimacy with other states. (Mearsheimer 2011, ch. 2, 22)
Lying by omission is also one of the ways that the parasitic 1% attampt to falsify history. Here is one example: Omitting the devastating effects that US sanctions have on Venezuela and its people. This is done to create the false impressions that a) the Venezuelan anti-capitalist system is failing all by itself and that b) Venezuela would be so much better off under imperialist capitalism which is creating all these problems in the first place like the international mafia that it is:
In the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict, one such Orwellian lie about history is the the already refuted lie (see parts 3, 4, and 9) that there is supposedly no massive Banderite or Ukrainian neonazi problem:
There is also the fact that lies about the present become lies about the past, to the effect that, given enough time, any lie or falsehood told by the parasitic 1% ultimately becomes an Orwellian falsification and rewriting of history.
Concerning Ukraine, this for instance also includes the patently ridiculous falsehood and possible to probably lie by The Times that, in March 2022, “Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station last night in flight suits made in the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag, in what appeared to be a daring statement against the war”:
A particularly perverse rewriting of history occurred on May 8 and 9, 2022, the respective Victory Day over Nazi Germany by, ironically, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in collaboration with the Western propaganda outlet The Guardian when they claimed that “Ukraine will prevail as Europe did in 1945”, because those who prevailed were forces outside of Europe such as mainly the USSR military:
More critique and ridicule of Scholz’s Orwellian rewriting of history includes the following:
As yet another excellent piece of evidence that the Zelenskiy regime is indeed “nazi-infested,” we have nothing less the official Zelenskiy social media accounts as well as the Ukrainian War Ministry posting pictures of a Ukrainian soldier with a clearly visible Nazi symbol — the 3rd SS-Panzerdivision “Totenkopf” (“deadhead”) — on, insanely, the Victory Day against Nazi Germany!
Here is the full picture from the official Zelenskiy Instagram account (note that the addresses match):
Here is the picture from the Zelenskiy Telegram account posted by the formerly pro- and now anti-Zelenskiy journalist and Youtuber Anatoliy Shariy who appears to be on the assassination list of the Ukrainian neonazi regime (see part 9, section 11.3.3):
From the Twitter account of the Ukrainian War Ministry (all the incriminating posts which do not fit into the Western-Ukrainian propaganda narrative have been deleted now, by the way):
The British ‘Reich’ (“empire”) in turn, which already flirted with Nazism in the past due to not so different imperialist and racist ideologies,
…did its best to have its propagandists downplay the respective and highly incriminating evidence when it was presented on live television:
Some more British imperialist rewriting of history is contained in the following piecel by British War Minister Wallace who was previously caught offering a nuclear weapons programme to Ukraine (see part 7):
And there are many other things that are rewritten by the parasitic elites, such as the true legacy of Martin Luther King who was not only a civil rights leader and anti-segregationist, but also an anti-capitalist and anti-war activist — factors for which he likely was assassinated. But it is the latter two parts that get edited out by capitalist and pro-war Western parasitic elites who thereby turn every MLK day in January into a sickening ‘rewriting/erasing the true and full legacy of MLK day’-farce. Something similar applies to Malcolm X:
Lenin already understood this. From his The State and Revolution:
14.2 Nazi-Style Slandering and Guilt-Tripping (‘You are siding with the official enemy and exposing the country to danger’)
On the evening of April 18, 1946, the prison psychologist Gustave Gilbert spoke with the Nazi war criminal Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trials. In that conversation, Goering outlined another type of propaganda that “works the same way in any country” and that is still being used, perhaps most prominently in US Neo-McCarthyism but in principle against any contemporary anti-war activists or voices of reason who are thereby denounced as “isolationists”, “Assadists”, “Putinists”, “tools of Russia,” etc. To quote the passage from Gilbert’s important book Nuremberg Diary:
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.”
“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” (Gilbert 1961, ch. 12, 255–56)
One of the many US imperialists who used that type of Nazi propaganda is the former and late Clinton UN Ambassador (1993–1997) and Secretary of State (1997–2001) Madeleine Albright:
The person who confronted her that day was Jon Strange, a then 22-year-old “history substitute teacher in the Clevenland public schools” and “Punk Planet columnist”, according to Tweeters:
The by far most well-known case of Albright’s disgusting imperialist propaganda for which she will always be remembered in infamy occurred on May 12, 1996 on CBS though:
Interviewer: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than […] died in Hiroshima. And… *sighs and pauses* you know, is the price worth it?
Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Another thing that Albright said when supporting the imperialist war criminal Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential run:
For a befitting obituary, see Jon Schwarz’s article in The Intercept:
14.3 Propaganda via Fearmongering
Another classic type of propaganda that occurs in the wider context of divide and conquer and creating distractions is fearmongering à la ‘Be very afraid of that party over there while we take your stuff here.’
The perhaps most classic case of Western fearmongering is to take whatever official propaganda villain du jour — Saddam, Assad, Putin, etc. — and to equate him with Hitler, such as in the following ‘fan-fiction’ cover to an actually existing Time issue and title (Twitter correctly flagged this as “manipulated media” since the image never was a Time cover). The comment is by someone who no longer falls for that type of Western propaganda and who has understood that the hypocritical West has been and continues to be far far worse in this respect:
The Putin = Hitler comparisons or “Putler” contractions are particularly inappropriate when seen in a historical context, because it was the Soviet Union was the main force that defeated Hitler’s Nazi Germany and that incurred the highest losses of lives in doing so. Then there is obviously also Russia’s fight against Ukrainian Banderite neonazis and their Hitler-admiring ideology which makes the equation of Putin with Hitler even more Orwellian.
As explained by the Zelenskiy ‘advisor’ or handler Oleksij Arestovych and as a general note, it is also possible to combine the types of propaganda, such as the aforementioned Nazi guilt-tripping with fearmongering:
Female interviewer: “What about the consciousness of Ukrainians, politicial manipulations? How do politicians manipulate us?
O. Arestovych: “[…] at first you make people afraid, and secondly you encourage them. Make them terribly afraid — then you show them the exit. Form the expectations around this exit: ‘You have to join here and here, and everything will be alright.’ […] you have to appeal to [collective] safety”
At the beginning, Arestovych also talks about enhancing fearmongering with Nazi-style guilt-tripping:
O. A.: “raise the alarm, then you draw out a sense of guilt — this is key”
One such example of guilttripping-enhanced fearmongering can be found here, in the claim the “Ukraine” is “the shield of Europe” — i.e. that Ukrainians are supposedly doing so much for Europe and that Europeans should feel afraid of Russia as well as guilty for not doing more for Ukraine:
Some replies:
Concerning “showing them the exit” after having stoked up people’s fear and guilt, Arestovych explains how that can also be used by demagogues to make people join a/their political or military group which is precisely what happened in Ukraine:
O. A.: “It’s the desire to identify to an important group. They must know that this group exists, the group will solve problems, and that they have something to do with it. This encourages a sense of pride and self-praise. ‘There is absolutely no better soldier than a Ukrainian soldier! We always win!’”
[…]
O. A.: “And lastly, you offer [a] reward”
Zelenskiy: “You will be given the title of Hero of Ukraine.”
That’s how you create ‘heros of Ukraine’ — i.e. useful idiots for the Western and Ukrainian 1% who will throw away their lives so that those parasitic power elites can profit from them.
14.4 Hate-/Villainmongering and Worship-/Heromongering
Another type of propaganda that often goes hand in hand with fearmongering is hatemongering. Orwell’s “Two Minutes (of) Hate” from his 1984 — described at length in chapter 1 of his book — is a classic literary example of the type of hatemongering that occurs in the real and increasingly Orwellian world:
Some key passages about and key themes from Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate are the following:
Key Theme 1: Focus on and creation of the national villain Goldstein; today, this is Putin:
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some hiding place in Oceania itself.
Key Theme 2: gaslighting very reasonable demands of Goldstein/Putin (e.g. NATO not expanding to Russia’s doorstep as per earlier Western promises)
He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of as
sembly, freedom of thought […]
Key Theme 3: Goldstein/Putin and his agents and saboteurs are everywhere and incredibly influential (Hillary Clinton, for instance, supposedly did not lose the 2016 election against Donald Trump mainly because she was a much-despised corporate hack and willing tool for the 1%. No, she supposedly lost because Putin and his agents hacked and otherwise influenced the US election)
But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed,
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.
Relatedly:
Key Theme 4: Exposing the very potent effects of emotional manipulation and group pressure
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the mad dening bleating voice that came from the screen. […]
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
Key Theme 5: Big Brother/the USA as the alleged solution to the problem that was created by Big Brother/the USA and their propaganda in the first place (this is essentially the old mafia trick and racket of creating a problem — e.g. smashing in windows — to which you then present yourself as the solution — e.g. ‘protection’)
But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
What this shows is that Orwellian propaganda does not only use (fear- and) hatemongering towards propagandistically created nation-villains, but, in a complementary fashion, likewise ‘adoration-, worship- or heromongering’ towards propagandistically created nation-heros.
And the ‘funny’ thing is that this was already largely explained by the former US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in his 1939 non-fiction book War, Peace and Change in passenges which the propagandized masses of today would largely dismiss as the ramblings of a crazy conspiracy theorist:
We have pointed to the essentially emotional nature of human beings, particularly in the mass. Upon this foundation is built that form of patriotism which personifies the nation as a living being endowed with heroic qualities, who lives bravely and dangerously in a world of inferior, and even villainous, other-nation personalities.
The creation of this nation-hero personality meets a fundamental and natural human need. Most of us lead lives which are lacking in drama, excitement and adventure. We seek, through imagination, that which is lacking in reality. We read romances and see plays or movies which portray some hero or heroine in dramatic action, with whose exploits we tend to identify ourselves. This normal human trait has been capitalized to an extraordinary degree in the dramatization of the “nation-hero” and “nation-villain.”
One’s own nation-hero constitutes a personification with which each member of the national group can feel an identification and which has more elements of reality and permanence than the hero of novel or drama.
In order to build up the desired personification, history, in each nation, is written and taught in the manner of the dime novel. Emphasis is placed on dramatic episodes — war and adventure — which stir the imagination and arouse admiration and hero worship. In order to secure a maximum of emotional excitement, one or more other nations are cast in the role of “villains.” One’s own hero, always in the right, is in constant peril from such other nations. (Dulles 1939, ch. VI, 57–58)
If the nation-hero and nation-villain portrayals are readily accepted because they respond to a basic human craving, this is not to say that they are self-created or self-operating concepts. There must be those who set the stage and arrange the lines of the drama.
There have been times when responsibility in this respect could be attributed to business and financial interests which, from behind the scenes, were able to sway government and press. […]
The authors and stage-hands today are primarily those who compose the group authority. They lend themselves to this task of melodrama partly in good faith in order to create greater national unity and effectiveness and partly out of a desire, more or less conscious, thereby to enhance and perpetuate their own power. (Dulles 1939, ch. VI, 61–62)
And that type of Orwellian hatemongering and worshipmongering propaganda is exactly what we are being served today in the West/Oceania:
Behold Big Brother Zelenskiy…
…aka Saint Zelenskiy(!)…
…together with Even Bigger Brother Biden:
Also mind the fine print (i.e. the price of $100 for these pieces or artifacts of blatant Western propaganda):
This type of worshipmongering of course also comes with the usual flagwaving or flaghumping:
A similar propagandistic hatemongering and adorationmongering in the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict is also applied to the respective armed forces. What we are supposed to believe, according to such Western-Ukrainian propaganda, is that good Ukrainian petlovers are fighting evil and perverted Russian pet-eaters…
…or, as another stereotype, that evil Russian male mercenaries from the Wagner Group are fighting good female volunteers (omg, protect the women!):
What is glossed over that way is the existence of some perhaps not that good female Neonazi fighters among the Ukrainian forces who just might have committed war crimes like other Ukrainian neonazis in the previous years and since the 2014 US-backed coup:
The Western propaganda outlet AP told a different story of “Taira/Tyra” just being a medic with a camera, and while her medical skills might be real, the whole story is highly reminiscent of Western-backed White Helmets propaganda from Syria and of the usual script from Western propaganda playbooks:
An uglier aspect of anti-Russian hatemongering is the racist attribution of collective guilt to all Russians:
The following is, fittingly for German Green party warmongering, a contribution from Sergej Sumlenny, the 2015–2021 leader of the Green Heinrich-Böll-Foundation in Kiew:
An even worse aspect of anti-Russian hatemongering that is also essential for warmongering (see sect. 14.5) is dehumanization such as the following by the US trans-person Sarah Ashton-Cirilo who ran for a political office in Nevada:
It is indeed interesting to note how the US state affiliated medium Twitter allowed this and other clear hatespeech of Ashton-Cirilo almost as if it were an official US propaganda outlet that is fine with hatespeech as long as it is the right kind of hatespeech:
A Polina Pomorenko explains:
Also note the following:
Another piece of adoration- and hatemongering propaganda that is fine with the US state affiliated medium Twitter:
Even more examples of US propagandists regurgitating anything from the Ukrainians as long as the purpose of US-Ukrainian hatemongering against Russians is served include the following:
What is particularly troubling is the involvement of yet another member of the neocon warmongering Kagan clan in this hatemongering propaganda:
And what a surprise, the hatemongering and “unverified” propaganda about alleged Russian rapists collapsed soon afterwards — but not before having its desired effect on large parts of the general population in the West due to Western mainstream media’s uncritical reporting and manufacturing of consent:
A Ukrainian government official frequently cited as a source by western news media for her allegations of atrocities committed by Russian troops has been fired by the Ukrainian parliament, in part because of the unevidenced nature of those claims.
Newsweek reports:
A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, removed Lyudmila Denisova, the parliament’s commissioner for human rights, from her post, according to Ukrainska Pravda. No new appointment has been made to fill the role.
The move to dismiss Denisova came after outrage about the wording used in public reports about alleged sexual assaults committed by Russians, as well as the alleged dissemination in those reports of unverified information. Despite accusations from Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes or sexual assaults during the invasion.
As it happens, Newsweek is one of the many western outlets who have uncritically cited Denisova’s unevidenced claims in their reporting of events in Ukraine. She was the “Ukraine official” in Newsweek’s incendiary April headline “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official,” an article whose entire first half featured unevidenced claims by Denisova.
[…]
Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, The Sun, Metro, The Daily Mirror and Yahoo News all published reports on the same story, and the one and only source for all of them was a post made by Denisova on a Ukrainian government website which contained no evidence and concluded with a call for more weapons and sanctions against Russia from the western world.
Returning to Putin, the focus of organized propagandistic hate, the old and from a historical perspective very stupid Hitler comparisons did not go far enough for some.
It is a trope that has surprisingly long roots and goes at least as far back as only a decade after the end of the Second World War. When the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, purchased arms from Communist Czechoslovakia in 1955, much to chagrin of the US, The New York Times — an always reliable mouthpiece of the US establishment — began to refer to him as ‘Hitler on the Nile’.[1] This label became even more widespread after the anti-imperialist Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, and a host of British and French politicians, including the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, repeatedly compared him to Hitler in order to pre-emptively justify their and Israel’s disastrous joint invasion of Egypt that took place later that year. Without offering any evidence, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, even went so far as to declare that vehicles of Egyptian military officers were decorated with the swastika — a claim that was then reported uncritically by the press in both Israel and the US.
According to cognitively or morally insane propagandists such as the extremist and consequently fired Obama ambassor to Ukraine Michael McFaul who uncritically and in seeming agreement quoted a journalist, Putin is now supposedly even worse than Hitler — a hatemongering lie that was sold in combination with the falsification of history (sect. 14.1). The respective footage and transcript:
McFaul: “One of the Russian journalists said ‘You know, there is one difference between Hitler, when he was coming in, and Putin. Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans, he didn’t kill German-speaking people.’ […] He [Putin] slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate.”
Jimmy Dore’s retort:
“So I guess, uh, the gays and the Jehovas witnesses and the communists and any other German who wasn’t pro-Nazi, I guess they weren’t really German, according to him. And it’s pretty convenient how that works, right? If Hitler killed someone, they weren’t German. That’s basically what he’s saying. That’s very handy. Kind of like in Afghanistan where we classified legal combattants as any male over the age of 15 so we could blow them up with killer robots indiscriminately.” (2:53–3:19)
Aaron Maté chimes in on McFaul:
“He’s been a huge proponent of the policy of using Ukraine as cannon fodder in […] a proxy war with Russia that drastically escalated when the Obama administration […] backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014. And then he was the kind of person who was begging Obama to send Ukraine more weapons — ironically to arm nazis who Michael McFaul is also now whitewashing. So Michael McFaul not only whitewashes neo-nazis in Ukraine, but the original nazis too.” (4:16–4:44)
From another insane old white man Western propagandist who just so happens to be a “senior fellow” at the NATO lobbying institute Atlantic Council: “Putin appears far worse than Hitler”:
Lloyd Blankfein, the Jewish(!) longterm CEO of Goldman-Sachs, could also be observed rewriting history in favor of Hitler to fit the desired hatemongering propaganda narrative in a move that would get others banned or cancelled:
14.5 Propaganda via Warmongering
There is yet another fluid transition from all the aforementioned types of propaganda to the type of propaganda that is generally known as warmongering. As usual, the biggest propagandists and worst warmongers are the 1%-owned mainstream media whose main purpose is to manufacture consent for the 1% and their agendas. And this also includes manufacturing consent for wars which are very profitable for the 1%:
From Smedley Butler’s 1935 anti-war classic War Is A Racket:
WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. (Butler 2013 [1935], ch. 1, 25–26)
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. (ibid., ch. 3, 41)
One such clear-cut example of warmongering for the profits of the 1% is the following:
Lautman’s claims are all false, in particular that “Ukrainians are being murdered for ‘democratic values’ that the West stands for.” The West’s leadership values centrally consist of imperialism, hypocrisy and double standards, whereas the Ukrainian leadership values centrally consist of far-right Banderite nationalism and suicidal subservience to the US empire, among others, and it is due to those Western and Ukrainian ‘values’ that Ukrainians are dying unnecessarily. If the US empire did not have such a strong presence in Ukraine and without Banderite nationalism spreading throughout Ukraine, Russia would never have invaded and Ukraine would not have got wrecked.
There are many inside Western mainstream media who are singing in the wormongering choir:
Behold some other examples and the respective double standards between the West’s wars and Putin’s war in Ukraine:
As per “both systems/institutions and individuals”, it is also individual MSM reporters and commentators that are massively responsible for manufacturing consent for war, such as MSNBC’s Brian Williams:
This time, a more notable manufacturer of consent for war in Ukraine is the other MSNBC US imperialist tool Malcolm Nance who previously served in the US Navy and who has done a photo-op about how he is allegedly fighting in Ukraine now at the tender age of 61. Comments from actual journalists reveal how seriously this war propagandistic garbage from Nance should be taken:
Among others, Nance’s lie consisted in claiming that “Jill Stein has a show on Russia Today.” Glenn Greenwald already exposed that and other lies and propaganda of Malcolm Nance and Joy Ann Reid back in July 2018 in an article titled “MSNBC Does Not Merely Permit Fabrications Against Democratic Party Critics. It Encourages and Rewards Them”:
Two other likely ‘MSNBCIA’ lies were spotted: The location and Nance just going there for a propagandistic and warmongering foto-op and not for actual fighting:
It also needs to be considered whether Nance is even in Ukraine or whether the above warmongering footage was taken in some US woods.
Aside from warmongering from right-wingers, conservatives and liberal-centrist-extremists such as Nance, there is also warmongering from fake leftists such as Keir Starmer supporter and Jeremy Corbyn backstabber Paul Mason who is as much of a fake as Cenk Uyghur and Ana Kasparian from TYT (The Young Turks):
… a claim that is highly Orwellian since wars are always wars by the 1% against the 99% and hence wars against the working class.
A possible to highly likely explanation for Paul Mason’s pseudo-leftist pro-war antics and other strange behaviors is that he is secretly collaborating with intelligence agencies against the left and that he is what could be called a class traitor (see part 13b for the quotes):
Relatedly and even though the following does not quite constitute warmongering, there is also the rehabilitation or whitewashing of war criminals. Ellen Degeneres, for instance, did that on her MSNBC show with the Iraq war criminal George Bush jr. — a factor that contributed to her show getting cancelled in 2022:
The following is a brilliant visual reminder of and allusion to what Ellen Degeneres did:
Of course, warmongering is also done by the other sources of propaganda (see part 11) such as politicians, a circumstance that can partially be explained by the closeness of the US federal ‘government’/regime to ‘defense’/war contractors. Here are some examples for the Democrats:
Another factor for why even politicians outside of the US empire engage in warmongering the USA’s official enemies is that many other countries such as Australia are effective vassal states of the USA:
One main reason why Australia has, so to speak, been barking up the wrong tree is that the USA and also Britain orchestrated a coup against the too independent Australian Gough Whitlam government in 1975 from which Australia did not recover yet:
Of course, there are also the US loyalists and war criminals from the former British empire who engage in predictable warmongering in the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict:
Then there are is also some high-ranking former military personell which now officially works in think tanks or consulting and lobbying firms for those who profit from wars who engage in predictable warmongering:
It is no different with ‘former’ agents from the CIA or other such coup-implementing agencies of empire:
This warmongering is garnished with the usual diversitywashing or intersectional imperialism that I already discussed in the conclusion of part 4 and more properly in part 11, so I will just repeat one particularly striking example here as a reminder:
The effects of such warmongering include the following:
One such ‘serious adult’ engaging in ‘serious adult’ conversation:
From a former Facebook friend of mine before I unfriended her right after her “Happy birthday, Azov!” propaganda re-post which included a totally insane reference to Azov as “warriors of light” (“Krieger des Lichts”) and which concluded with the equally insane claim that the author of that work of propagandistic drivel is a “genius”:
Warmongering makes Western thinking and discourse about the Ukraine Russia USA conflict so degenerate that even Trump, who proposed a diplomatic solution, makes more sense than the average deluded and warmongering liberal:
When the effects of warmongering disappear, realizations such as the following can set it:
It is also worth noting that there were protests against, ironically, Red (i.e. social-democrat) and Green party Ukraine warmongering in Germany on the 1st of May:
From a car dealer in Pankow: “Bombs on Dresden, Berlin or Hamburg. Have you forgotten everything[?]. On German territory, tanks roll towards Russia. The USA topple us into World War 3 with our government. Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”
Another absurdity in our Orwellian times:
And yes, lest we forget, there is of course also insane warmongering against China (note how few likes this MSM insanity from the official account has as well as the quote to likes ratio which is superbad):
Anti-war journalists Caitlin Johnstone, Dave DeCamp and Jimmy Dore analyzed (compare the number of likes):
14.6 Nuclear Fear-, Hate- and Warmongering
The most dangerous because potentially human civilization ending type of propaganda is the nuclear fear-, hate- and warmongering from, ironically, the US empire which is the only military force to have used nuclear weapons, including against tens of thousands of civilians, when it dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and, three days later and even more unnecessarily, on Nagasaki:
Some more replies to the NYT article:
And yes, it is of course also the ‘peace dove’ Zelenskiy who uses nuclear fearmongering just as outlined by his propaganda advisor Arestovych (see section 14.3) to try scare others into supporting the US puppet state Ukraine in the US proxy war against Russia:
Jake Tapper (0:39–0:50): “The director of the CIA warned that he’s worried that Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon in this fight. Are you worried?”
Zelenskiy (0:52–1:39): “Not only me. I think all of the world, all the countries have to be worried. […] For them, life of the people is nothing. […] not be afraid, be ready.”
But it gets even worse. Siri, show me examples of Western “nuclear brinkmanship” that may very lead to a nuclear Holocaust if implemented:
From a German Die Zeit warmonger:
Siri, show me how establishment psychopaths that think that we can save the planet with nuclear war (the article is from 2011):
Nuclear war is a bad thing.
Right?
Scientists from NASA and a number of other institutions have recently been modeling the effects of a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, or 0.03 percent of the world’s current nuclear arsenal, according to National Geographic. The research suggests five million metric tons of black carbon would be swept up into the lowest portion of the atmosphere.
The result, according to NASA climate models, could actually be global cooling.
From National Geographic:
In NASA climate models, this carbon then absorbed solar heat and, like a hot-air balloon, quickly lofted even higher, where the soot would take much longer to clear from the sky.
While the global cooling caused by superpower-on-superpower war could be catastrophic (hence the term “nuclear winter”) a small scale war could have an impact on the world climate, says National Geographic. Models suggest that though the world is currently in a warming trend, small-scale war could lower global temperatures 2.25 degrees F for two-to-three years following war.
The aforementioned Ukrainian nutcase Sergej Sumlenny even made a specific case for an effective nuclear war against Russia:
Even a Ukraine-supporting German politician replied to Sumlenny as follows:
Quick question:
Twitter’s inofficial reply:
Conclusion
So much for analysis of the main overall types of propaganda that the West’s 1% use in the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict in order to manufacture consent for their agendas: 0) metapropaganda, 1) the Orwellian rewriting or falsifcation of history, 2) nazi/Goering-style slandering and guilt-tripping, 3) fearmongering, 4) the combination of hate-/villainmongering and worship-/heromongering, 5) warmongering and 6) nuclear fear-, hate- and warmongering.
[continue to part 13]
