What I would portray as an attack on the minds of western populations on the Ukraine war has been two-pronged and has been ongoing since 2014, and even now shows hardly any sign of ending.
- Reflect nothing positive about the other side. Zero. Report only positive facts if at all possible regarding our side.
- Maintain blinkers at all times and exercise wishful thinking at every juncture to maintain morale.
From winter 2013 to now this is virtually all I have seen from the western news media and political elites. Neither has any stomach for reflecting actuality. The modus operandi is to keep one side of the equation constantly mind, screen, print-redacted while talking among themselves about how Ukraine, will, is and can win.
The calculation seems to be that it is far better to do this and then only gradually find things have gone awry and Russia is winning/has won, than spoil everyone’s day and damage morale by reflecting how things truly are.
Perhaps those in this ‘war mode’ type of thinking are correct to do things this way. Who likes to hear bad news? Almost no one, especially when there is very, very near nothing you can do to change things. Only a very small minority among us have a burning desire to know the whole truth. They say ignorance is bliss. Well, maybe so. But there is a side to that ignorance which, for the last almost three years, has had consequences that fall very short of being blissful.
It could be argued that the Ukrainians had a chance at the beginning. While Zelensky and co. had been thoroughly spooked by the surge of Russian troops into Ukraine including very near to the capital and had sent a delegation to engage in peace talks, Boris Johnson arrived in Kiev with a join message from the western powers. That message was that the regime should abandon those peace talks and that if it did so the West would back it with all the financial and military support it would need and provide it all the way to the certain victory it would then win. As we know, Zelensky took the offer, abandoned the peace talks and proceeded to wage war against Russia confident he had the West’s full backing.
Foolishly in retrospect, Russia had withdrawn its troops from the vicinity of Kiev as a goodwill gesture when peace talks began. Those troops were there only to intimidate Zelensky and co. into fulfilling Ukraine’s obligations as agreed in the UN-ratified Minsk Accords. So, with Zelensky’s team having initialled a working document the Russians decided on this reciprocal gesture. A big mistake as things turned out. It appears that Putin and his closest advisers had not calculated on the western powers caring enough about the Donbass region to be willing to wage war over it. Hadn’t Merkel, Hollande, Macron, Poroshenko and Zelensky all agreed via the Minsk Accords that they were the only peaceful way forward and wasn’t Russia entitled to force the issue when Zelensky, after six years of the process with an agreed, UN-ratified outcome suddenly said he was no longer interested in it?
Anyway, war it was. Not chosen by Russia. Except extremely reluctantly and even then halting within a couple of months to stop and try to agree to peace. Russia never wanted things to turn out this way. The idea was to see the Russian-speaking majority in the Donbass free of the shelling they were under and had, by 2022, been under for eight solid years. Zelensky’s shrug of the shoulders and goodbye to all that regarding the Minsk Accords, so hard won over the previous six plus years, and then a couple of weeks before Russia invaded saying he had a mind to regain Ukraine’s nuclear status, did it for Putin it seems. Having NATO on Russia’s doorstep would be intolerable causing endless disquiet and without doubt campaigns designed to disrupt, destabilise, divide and fragment Russia from close quarters. What do you think Russia saw in the encroachment of NATO, a NATO that relatively recently bombed the hell out of Libya and that during the Cold War had been the Soviet Union’s biggest threat? Not to mention that the Cold War mentality within not only NATO but the entire military-intelligence-political infrastructure of the West could hardly be trusted to have melted away when that war was supposedly over?
But none of the above plays any part in the narratives heard from official sources in the West. Instead we heard the same phrase repeated over and over, “Russia made an unprovoked attack on Ukraine”. Unprovoked? Yeah, right. Putin, the evil Putin, just woke up one morning, mind filled with his latest dream of a resurrected Soviet Union, back in all its glory, immediately reached for a map and focused his demonic eyes on Ukraine. Again, yeah right. But this kind of image works well, as George W. Bush found out after 9/11 in creating a believable, simplistic narrative, “They’re jealous of our freedoms”. How many new Hitlers has this methodology created over the years? You know their names. No need to mention them again here. This while the automatic opposite is conferred on us, the spotless heroes, the guys with the ‘right stuff’, modern day real life honest-to-goodness heroes who wouldn’t normally hurt a fly, believe in democracy, freedom and human rights and never do anything wrong on purpose. Ever.
War Mode
War mode is where you and your allies never do anything wrong and your enemy is constantly doing wrong for totally evil reasons and is so very bad, unrecoverably and irredeemably so that everyone should castigate, oppose him and never have anything whatsoever to do with him. It’s just as the Bible says, good and evil, light and dark, black and white, right and wrong… and nothing in between. This makes things nice and simple for those folks who want an easy answer to settle any confusion and then get right back to being blissfully ignorant. After perhaps giving their blessing to kill all those bad folks and make things better as soon as possible, will you? And oh yes, that Saint Zelensky and those pure as the driven snow Ukrainians, here’s a bunch of my hard-won currency for those poor vulnerable souls who are being cruelly victimised by those barbaric and Hell-bound Russians!
The Consequences
So, TV news, magazines, newspapers and books all tell the same story. Putin and his minions are all evil and here is the (evidence-free) storyline to prove it. Ukraine is winning. The Russian troops are badly trained, badly led, are dying in their thousands daily let down by a diminishing number of shells and artillery. More storylines depict valiant Ukrainian troops pushing the “meat wave” Russian attacks back and look at this burning tank and listen to how it’s all going wrong for the Russians. Except it wasn’t and hasn’t been for a long time now. Yet this can’t be said, remember? In ‘war mode’ you mustn’t mention the enemy’s gains. Keep those blinkers on tight. All is well. As in Afghanistan where reports up the line were always given a positive spin somehow or other… for twenty years or so until the truth could no longer be concealed, and then the panic-driven imperative was just to get the hell out of there.
The consequences for Ukraine of all the wishful thinking, deception, blatant mis- and disinformation, and blatant distortion of reality and war-mode morale-motivating was that ever more Ukrainians (and Russians) would die needlessly. By early 2023 at the very latest it had become clear that neither was the Russian economy imploding nor were its trading partners ostracising it. No Maidan II had taken place to oust the “evil” Putin. In fact his popularity was higher than ever, especially since the war was going well and Russia’s economic growth figures were excellent. At that point, whether it was toward the end of 2022 or sometime in 2023, that was when the western powers had to act to halt their project and deliver the extremely bad news to Zelensky that their calculations had been all wrong and that Russia was clearly NOT going to be beaten, no matter what they did now. But no, that was an uncomfortable thought. Anathema. Better to double down and hope something unexpected turns up. That unexpected thing never did turn up, no matter what “game changing” weapon they provided and no matter how many billions were provided.
So, the dying has gone on, the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands, the horrendous injury to many more. Without anything approaching real hope or realistic expectations. In Ukraine quite old men were sent, hardly trained to die as cannon-fodder on the front lines. Even in at least one case a young man with Down Syndrome. Women also have not been spared. And in recent times medics, pilots and air defence technicians. For a good six months Zelensky’s thugs in uniform have been dragging people bodily off the streets to be dragooned into the army given a few weeks training then sent to their deaths. (No son or daughter of the wealthier, or more elite members of western Ukraine society can be seen at the front, a point that has begun to rankle among those who have been.) Desertions are becoming ever more frequent and who can blame them? It’s not so easy, nor is it at all a guaranteed route back to family and friends. Death squads whose task is to capture and shoot such people and indeed those who refuse orders, even if those orders are suicidal, are never far away. These are composed of the ultrnationalists, often bearing swastika tattoos. No excuses are accepted by such as those.
War is a racket as Smedley D. Butler said and wrote. And never was there such an unconscionably callous, cynical and dishonest racket as this one. Western populations were treated to ‘The Mushroom Syndrome’ (Kept in the dark and fed a load of shit.) and a Ukrainian population treated as sheep to the slaughter… all for the sake of what? The unrelenting ambition of the western powers to remain top dogs and do whatever they deemed necessary to undermine those who might rival them in terms of power and influence. The full horror of what has happened and that is continuing to happen will not dawn on western populations for a while yet. But that day is coming. Nothing now can stop it. But meanwhile the mushrooms will continue to be fed in their dark domain. Even while Saint Zelensky behinds to lose his sheen and shows evidence of tarnish here and there, even when seen through Ukrainian eyes. The day of revelation is coming. Its arrival is certain. But the blissfully ignorant needn’t worry too much. A story of Ukrainian winning and saving Europe from Russia by preserving Ukraine will be spun, even when Russia never had the ambition of taking anything more than Crimea at first and even after, a few Russian-speaking regions of the east. But that WILL be the story. The Russians were defeated. They were unable to take the whole of Ukraine for themselves. We won. Zelensky won. The West won. Even Biden won. Ukraine survived. All is well.
We have made it safe for you to go back to your blissful sleep.
Goodnight and sleep well… while you can.
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