Since February 2007 when Vladimir Putin addressed a security conference in Munich which the entire political elite of the western world attended he has been a marked man. Prior to this speech where Putin explained Russia would not be a slave to western domination he was wined and dined in the West. Up to this time the western leaders clearly considered him to be a malleable who would not stand in the way of western agencies dominating in Russia. His speech in Munich disabused them of this idea.
Since Putin’s Munich speech until the present day Putin has been vilified by western politicians and pundits alike, accused of almost every crime imaginable. The character assassination attempts have poured out, arriving from every political and media quarter in the West and have been very successful. The reputation of Vladimir Putin in the West has been driven well into the negative to such an extent that many believe Putin even outranks the reputation for evil of even Adolf Hitler.
The fact is that Vladimir Putin is an eminently capable and intelligent man who, as regards most people and particularly politicians, is extremely law-abiding, even when there would be advantage to him in deviating from that stance. If you wince and even laugh at this description it only goes to show just how effective the perpetual character-assassination attacks against him have been since 2007. Putin studied law and there are innumerable reports, even among U.S. state department officials, that his reputation for honesty as a bureaucrat working in St Petersburg long before Yeltsin saw him as presidential material, was as the most honest to be found.
Of course Putin is not talking of himself when he calls the collective west the ‘Empire of Lies’. He is talking of the entire approach to Russia and the myriad fabrications and downright lies, deceptions and examples of devious behaviour that Russia has met with over the last several decades. It can be argued with merit that virtually nothing said about Russia over these decades has been truthful. If we take the Minsk Agreements as an example, both Angela Merkel and ex-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko have both said in recent times that Russia’s attempt through Minsk to find a peaceful path to the Ukrainian problem was set up as a sham, a charade with which to dupe Russia, giving Ukraine time to re-arm.
Minsk in 2015 was followed by the political and media circus surrounding Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond whereby Russia was used as a weapon with which to attack and potentially oust him from office. Ultimately, ‘Russiagate’ as it came to be called, proved to be what the Americans call a ‘Nothingburger’. Every device possible was used to make the fabricated charges stick. The name of Russia was dragged through the mud while that of Vladimir Putin was emphasised and re-emphasised time and time again as a Machiavellian evil influence on almost every aspect of North American life.
More recently, when every attempt by Putin and Russia to find a way to avoid conflict over NATO expansion and Ukrainian attacks on the Russian-speaking civilian population of eastern Ukraine which had been continuous since 2014, a military operation was begun to achieve the goals set by Minsk and further to make NATO give up its ambition to include Ukraine in its alliance. As was the case previously when almost no reporting of Ukrainian shelling of civilians, a daily and nightly occurrence from 2014 to February 2022, western media continued in its 100% bias against Russia. Russia was daily accused of every negative aspect possible regarding an action it has been relentlessly provoked into taking.
One of the most egregious lies told and repeatedly told is that Russia’s action was ‘unprovoked’. Arguably there has never in living memory been a more proved action than Russia’s on February 24th 2022. Putin and Russia had gone every possible extra mile to avoid taking the step it did that day. However, every suggestion made by Putin and Russia was rejected out of hand while western leaders did everything possible to pull the wool over Russian eyes and deny Putin and the Russians any way out but the one that was so reluctantly taken on that day.
Whether the truth first became the first casualty of ‘The War on Terror’ enabling the USA to do things it had rejected as unethical and immoral such as engaging in torture, kidnapping (rendition) and imprisonment without trial (Guantanamo incarceration) and this led inevitably to the broad use of propaganda, psychological and black operations (PsyOps/BlackOps) is a matter only of conjecture. However, when standards of integrity begin to slip there is inevitably a descent into the telling of lies, via semantic camouflaging (torture became ‘enhanced interrogation techniques, kidnapping became rendition and treatment of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention was ruled out by redefining prisoners as ‘Enemy Combatants’). The slippery slope to ever more lies became unavoidable by this point.
For all the reasons above and the continuing totally one-sided and utterly biased portrayal of the situation in Ukraine perhaps you see now why Putin has used the phrase ‘The Empire of Lies’ to describe the political degeneracy that runs and drives the West down to ever-lower levels of trustworthiness, deception and the kind of distortion of the facts commonly only seen in the most totalitarian of states.
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