I don't know why everyone's so hard on Putin these days. I mean, the Russian president is so kind and considerate that he waited until ex-spy Sergei Skripal had been strategically irrelevant for many years before poisoning him, and did so in a way that both failed to kill the target and strongly indicated that Russia was responsible for the attack. While other nations use highly trained killers to assassinate critical targets and make it look like a suicide, the Kremlin had the decency to use an attack that was simultaneously both ineffectual and the forensic equivalent of issuing a press release on RT saying "Yeah we totally poisoned that guy" for no conceivable benefit to itself.
You can't buy that kind of charity from other western regime change targets. This is why Australians don't like Brits; they're such ungrateful whingers.
The furor over the alleged Skripal poisoning has fit snugly into the pattern we've come to expect in the western empire's continual campaign to psyop the public into believing that escalations with a nuclear superpower are in their best interests. We're seeing the typical lack of evidence for the accusation, the typical one-sided reporting from all mass media outlets collaborating to weave the illusion of unanimous agreement about the accusation, and the typical escalation in cold war tensions as diplomats are thrown out, communications cut off, and European Union collaboration sought for tougher action against the Russian Federation.
As always, the official story is riddled with gaping plot holes. As always, anyone urging caution in plunging into new cold war escalations is branded a Kremlin collaborator, with Jeremy Corbyn seeing his image superimposed on the BBC over a red-colored Kremlin skyline wearing clothing selected (and arguably photoshopped) to look as Soviet-like as possible.
The foot is on the gas, pushing the pedal to the metal toward dangerous and ever-increasing escalations, and anyone who makes a move for the emergency brake gets slapped down.
As we discussed recently, the US-centralized empire is rapidly approaching post-primacy and needs to act fast to move some major chess pieces into place so it can prevent the rise of a multipolar world. The goal is to quickly manufacture a global coalition to cut Russia out of the global stage, and this new dance with the UK and the EU is just the latest step toward that direction. Not even the most psychopathic imperialists want a hot conflict with Russia if they can avoid it, but they will gamble with all our lives very close to the edge in an extremely dangerous cold war, because that's what the empire needs to do to survive.
Even the Council on Foreign Relations, easily the closest thing you're ever going to get to the voice of the empire, is now openly admitting that the "United States is currently in a second Cold War with Russia.” Wikipedia currently defines the term cold war as "a state of conflict between nations that does not involve direct military action but is pursued primarily through economic and political actions, propaganda, acts of espionage or proxy wars waged by surrogates," and that is exactly what we are seeing today. Intelligence agencies, think tanks and the mass media are all working together to advance economic and political agendas using propaganda, acts of espionage and proxy wars to try and shove Russia out of the way without engaging it in direct military action.
In 1917 a Republican Senator named Hiram W Johnson coined the phrase, "The first casualty when war comes is truth," meaning that wartime is always accompanied by lies and deception. Today, the fifteenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, is surely a reminder of that fact. In cold war, which relies so heavily on propaganda, espionage, and manipulating the opinions of the public to advance global economic and political actions, this is even more true.
The people who control the international alliances which comprise the western empire are liars and killers, as evidenced by its actions in Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, and Syria . In a cold war, we can expect them to tell more lies, not less. Don't give them the benefit of the doubt.
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https://steemit.com/politics/@varja/why-it-was-necessary-to-poison-people
truth is the opposite of propaganda. the truth is inconvenient, propaganda makes money.
Hey, thanks (from another Australian - although I live OS) for making your writing available on steemit. Cheers.
She's the best Aussie journo going around - balanced, smart, rational.
Yeah - I've only been on the platform for a while. I understand the blockchain aspects - but wading through all the junk is pretty tedious!
Couldn’t agree more . Good point .
So they went from hating Russians, to loving ex-Russian double agent spies who spy for the west...interesting concept. They seem very confused, deliberately confused.
The establishment are in a tricky situation now, backtrack a few decades ago the West had almost succeeded in destroying any threat of Russia being a free nation, Putin wasn't factored in. Russia was done as far as they were concerned and it was time to start the dismantlement of the US as there was no need for a strong US once the only credible threat to their agenda seemed eliminated.
Jump back to 2018 and we have the US crumbling from within, poverty and substance abuse is wreaking havoc, infrastructure is collapsing, economy is kept afloat with junk and the US dollar is being increasingly abandoned. I believe this is all going to plan but what isn't is the fact of a resurgent Russia, asserting it's authority not only in it's near abroad but also across the Middle East, as well as displaying a new range of hefty weapons upgrades. Couple this with the rise of China which is happening much faster than the establishment anticipated, with China now making inroads in the reserve currency sphere which no one suspected they would truly be capable of until much later, as sick as the Dollar is.
The grand plan of destroying nation states and forcing them to become reliant of a global body controlled by a few criminal tapeworm bankster psychopaths is unravelling, as well with the emergence of Bitcoin they are on defence from all angles. Going forward we are going to see what comes out of the West is increasingly erratic as the situation gets more and more out of their control. I don't believe they will start an all out war with Russia and China because they simply won't win, no one will, but they will bring us damn close as they try to call their bluff and try to hold onto control with bullshit and lies.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Not to mention how the mainstream media is up in arms that Cambridge Analytica mined Facebook to influence voter's decision because we know anyone who uses a social media site doesn't have the mental capacity to think for themselves. I'm so glad our trusted media outlets are looking after our democratic values by not using such sophisticated means of disseminating propaganda. FTC will investigate Cambridge Analytica and if found to be bad will be punished but CNN, MSNBC, FOX, BBC etc, etc... will continue to have free license to espouse their unbiased, truthful and non propagandistic reporting on our blessed little hearts.
This was full of information, this issues belongs to russia was unknown to me, thanks for sharing
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So, we’re to believe that Russia’s finest ninja assassins keep accidentally dropping their weapons at the scene of the crime? And, because of Kremlin budgetary controls, each weapon is helpfully engraved: “If found, please return to GRU, Red Square, Moscow”….. Also, wasn’t the nerve agent Novichok produced in Kazakhstan, and didn’t the US have a hand in supposedly “destroying” it several years ago?
Yeah, "the first casualty when war comes is truth," which means that truth has been dead for a very long time.
nice
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I believe it could have been Russia. Putin uses disinformation and confusion as a weapon. If you doubt he has any reason for it, recommend this post of mine:
https://goo.gl/uRV62G
Maybe it is nothing else but tactic to make us an the media care about complete bullshit!
Continuously bashing a country will also result in the effect to strengthen nationalism in that country! If they continue this for some years, the Russians might vote for someone who swear revenge and calls Putin weak to allow all this aggression...
Maybe this is what the initiators of all this bullshit really want! It works the best when the fake is obvious! The Russians must be really pissed about them.
Loved your work for awhile now @caitlinjohnstone all thanks to my intro from H.A. Goodman, i think you might find this worth taking a look at, hope ypu see this, i normally do not post my links as comments... But i feel this is important to note. https://steemit.com/news/@stayyoung/this-needs-to-be-seen-and-shared-extreme-brainwashing-alert
Actual, real, psychopaths (the people that are running the deep state, for example) DO NOT possess the same fear gene, as the rest of us.
(this is one of the attributes making them psychopathic)
They are not scared of a hot war.
I don't normally upvote my comment s- I' trying to see what @heather 2000 is doing - twice now today..
The election of Putin to another term as President has become a lightning rod for inane proclamations. A Facebook Friend from High School posted an article from the Washington Post headlined: Trump’s national security advisers warned him not to congratulate Putin. He did it anyway. Above the link to the article, he wrote,
“How’s your Russian? It may be time to study up.”alleging that Trump’s “collusion” with Moscow meant Russia was on the verge of not only successfully invading, but subjugating on the order of suppressing the national language. These sentiments seem to be quite widespread. Someone else posted as a comment, “Dah” along with a picture of Trump as a hand puppet of President Putin:
I would say that kind of xenophobia and prejudice is out of bounds. And then there’s this:
If you’ve listened to President Putin’s most recent State of the Nation speech, then you know why he was so overwhelmingly and resoundingly re-elected. Widely acknowledged outside NATO and the U.S., Putin is an impressive Statesman. One would think that whose who had access to Youtube and could read and listen to multiple sources to confirm what the rest of the world knows, would stand up and protest. But, if you live in the U.S., you probably don’t do this. You rely instead on extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds, and I imagine you do so because you were programmed to in middle school and onward. An entire nation of Manchurian Candidates.
As a child In my American middle school, Mr. Meisenheimer, our social studies teacher, wiled away an hour of our afternoons with the curtains drawn and a series of filmstrips entitled, “Two Worlds”. As he intoned the text that went along with the images, we learned that we were free, and they were not; we learned the difference between Americanism — which was good, and Communism — which was bad.
Being a child back then, I didn’t give it much thought. I don’t recall believing any of it, but it looks as though my classmates did. It would be years before I met my first bona fide Russian, the poet Yevtushenko, who impressed me with his erudition. This was in the early eighties, when most Americans knew who Solzhenitsyn was. In the years since, the Russians I’ve met have inspired in me respect and admiration. It seemed like a great waste that the American and Russian cultures had been estranged from each other for so long.
McCarthyism, I was taught, wasn’t so much about hating Russians or Communism as it was about anti-intellectualism, a strain that runs straight through the American character. We can see this pernicious anti-intellectual mindset pilloried in the pages of Sinclair Lewis novels, or, we can look out the window and see the current Russophobia/ Russiagate shitstorm. It’s pernicious and threatens to justify contesting Syria’s air space, or to justify escalating NATO hostilities in the former Soviet Satellite States (where the quality of life has been steadily decreasing since the arrival of neoliberal economics). This anti-intellectualism is being harnessed to make our adversary on the Syrian or European battlefield into an enemy so detestable that we would feel comfortable murdering. There’s been deep-seated hostility toward Russia programmed into us. Hostility which perhaps can only be countered by getting to know Russian people; and coming to understand, probably through study, Russian culture and history. For those who are resolutely anti-intellectual, this may never happen. Wallowing in their ignorance, they will become more and more rabid in their derision.
There are times when I feel alone in this critical fight against government propaganda and media lies. It's hard work trying to persuade people who have watched MSNBC and CNN all their lives that they are being constantly lied to.
It can be exhausting.
Whenever I feel alone and tired of the fight, it's reassuring to know I can always head over to one of your pages and be reminded that there are some powerful voices fighting alongside me, and be reassured that I'm not alone.
Wonderful article, Cait. Witty, intelligent, direct, and oh so bloody true!
Keep up the good work. You are truly inspiring!