Caveat: What follows is not insight into the actual truth of foreign affairs. I hesitate to publish this in the knowledge that I have no greater understanding of truth than anyone else. The point of this article is to explore possible parallels in perception management of populations by comparing narrative patterns of past and present wars, and also the Covid narrative.
In no way is this a defense of any party or an expression of preferential support.
I expect many to find what follows lacking and problematic. The reason I choose to publish it is to invite active engagement from readers in the hope that your opinions and insights may help to challenge and advance my own. If you wish to engage in dialectics with me in the comments, I gratefully accept your kindness.
Iraq
The West supported Saddam Hussein throughout the Iran-Iraq war - by some accounts a choice of lesser evils - but also played both sides. The US provided Iraq with intel on Iranian positions that, in their opinion, swung the war in Iraq’s favor. It may have knowingly allowed Iraq to fight with banned chemical weapons without sanction and was late to admit what it knew.
The Kuwait war, prior to which Hussein contacted the West objecting to Kuwaiti slant drilling into Iraqi oil, was not what was presented to the public. There were questions about Iraqi-Kuwaiti debts being affected by the supply rate of oil to markets by Kuwait, which may have been enabled via that Kuwaiti slant drilling into Iraqi oil.
According to the linked write up, Hussein conferred with the US about his interpretation of issues with Kuwait:
There is no dispute about one crucially important point: Saddam Hussein consulted with the US before invading, and our ambassador chose not to draw a line in the sand, or even hint that the invasion might be grounds for the US to go to war.
By that account the Kuwait war was predicated on lies and propaganda from the West. The US effectively green-lighted Hussein by standing off, then had a false pretext to launch its war machine and test all its new weapons. Then Iraq was kept in its box until the next time the US wanted to play with it. After the Kuwait war Iraq was subject to sanctions and no-fly enforcement that the British helped actively police in country.
The world was later told that Iraq had WMD and a 45 minute strike capability against British interests. Despite supposedly possessing that capability, Iraq had never used it.
The resulting Iraq war was more of the same, but with fewer international players, bigger lies, more expansive and visible corruption and wealth transfer, and greater long-lasting global damage.
The Iraqi government’s denials of possession of WMD was mocked in Western press. Turns out, it was telling enough truth. Today it would be blocked from Twitter, de-platformed and still destroyed. Though Hussein was captured, he was not tried in the ICC or elsewhere. He was not allowed to testify or defend himself. Despite surviving the shock and awe he was summarily executed to stop the narrative collapsing. Given the scale of the crimes he was accused of - real and invented - Saddam Hussein was someone who should have been tried. Instead he was quickly strung up and took his version of events and his secrets to the grave while Haliburton poured concrete.
The patterning of the above two wars share similarities:
Acquire a pretext by:
letting events happen and spinning them; or
actually making them happen; or
lying about them (whether they have happened or not).
Magnify and polarize those lies and spin in the public sphere and weaponize them by any means possible, thereby creating a false legitimacy by using the press to repeat and reinforce that there is public need and even support for war.
Build a gang so you are not alone, then invade and kill ‘em all.
Make money on the upside and the downside.
What does Russia want?
In short: that the US, NATO members and Russia recognize that they are not adversaries; pull back NATO expansion and reset it to 27 May 1997 configuration; keep weapons out of strike range of each other’s territories; don’t interfere with each other’s internal security and affairs; maintain direct communications and share information on threats and security issues; pull back all nuclear weapons to national territorial limits and do not help to train or equip “any non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons”; respect primacy of existing UNSC and UN Charters.
Russia has published:
Compare the above to PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses that sought to maintain US global dominance primarily via increased military spending, which implied global US military expansion (including NATO), to suppress all other competitors.
US State Department claims of impending Russian false flag is predated by the opposite out of Russia
In an interview with RT on Thursday, Eduard Basurin, a spokesperson for the forces of the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic, outlined details of an alleged plot to conduct a false flag operation in Ukraine's two breakaway eastern regions. Without providing evidence to back up the assertion, he claimed that commandos under the control of Kiev are planning to wear the uniforms of the Russian special forces as well as those of local fighters.
A report on The Vineyard of The Saker dated January 31, 2022 claimed that the same “top level Russian LDNR military official, Col. Edward Basurin”, stated that the US was preparing false flag propaganda footage of a Russian invasion of Ukraine that would serve as a pretext for US NATO offensives against Russia. Check the link in The Saker article then go right down for info on the false flag footage and sourcing related to it.
The US came out and said on February 3, 2022, the same thing about Russia i.e. it could and/or might make a false flag propaganda video of a Ukrainian attack as a pretext to invade Ukraine.
RT* also carried an article by Paul Robinson on February 5, 2022, which questions the veracity of the intelligence process. Here are the “false flag” search results for RT. Click “More” to see the range of reporting and the timeline into which the US State Department’s statement fits.
The Daily Mail carried a lengthy article about Basurin’s claim on February 7, 2022 and there are reports of it in other British news outlets.
There might be a subtle difference between the reports of Basurin’s claim and the US State Department’s claim in that Basurin is reported to have said in slightly greater detail who is making the false flag footage, roughly where and how, and provided a code name. The US State Department vaguely said the Russians “could” and “might” make one but whether they will or not the US doesn’t know. You have to listen to the language as Matt Lee did.
Who is telling the truth, if any is being told?
*RT reporting and content has been providing a platform to counternarrative Western views. This is a tool and technique hinging upon aspects of free speech. If one looks at the spectrum of the shows it hosts and what those shows say, a parallel that could be drawn between RT’s show content and that of Joe Rogan’s guestlist. If your platform gives space for alternative factual views, you can affect mass perception and possibly puncture the reality bubble in which people are kept, without the need to create propaganda, such is the power of contrasting versions of “truth”.
The boy who is going to cry wolf?
There's a saying, “I'd rather be first than be right.”. Modern corporate journalism is propaganda, and there's practically nothing to lose for being “not right” and everything to gain by being first.
If you cannot be first, you can always look like you're first by stopping someone else's scoop from entering your reality bubble. In this case, the US has been neither first nor completely censored the Russian false flag announcement before seemingly aping it.
Russia being first potentially undermines the legitimacy of an offensive maneuver by the West based on video footage. Russia being right would need proof and won't necessarily stop an invasion by the West if its mind is already made up and that evidence doesn’t make it into the mind’s eye of people in the West who can put a brake on the actions of their governments.
On one level, in the absence of solid evidence it’s almost like children pointing fingers at each other and saying, “he’s going to do it, not me!”, which is one step away from full-on thought crime. These are state actors making accusatory statements for political reasons with potentially maximal consequences. At the extreme, it is only Russia and its allies that will hold the US and its allies to account, or vice versa and all the players have nukes. That’s the worst kind of accountability. What about an arm-wrestle, huh? Loser buys the beer.
Both sides are effectively unaccountable in international law, as shown over the last 40+ years. The US, Russia and China have not ratified the Rome Statue so do not recognize the ICC. Despite having ratified the Rome Statute, the UK has not been tried for crimes in the illegal invasion of Iraq. None of a handful of soldiers charged with offences were convicted.
Moreover, there is a problem with “evidence”. The US has shown that it is willing and able to cry wolf. It has repeatedly presented fake evidence to the UN in order to conduct illegal invasions and it does not present any evidence to anyone when it executes a drone strike wherever it wants. It also lies about evidence of its own war crimes (see Collateral Murder) then it will hunt down and slowly kill the publisher of that evidence and try to do similar to its source. The problematic MH-17 shootdown is difficult to pick apart for many reasons, partly because there is plenty of disputed “evidence” from all sides.
Tucker Carlson’s take
Tucker Carlson brings together a sequence of possible events that suggest discord between the reality that the Ukrainians may be living and that of the US State Department and its propaganda machine. Key to this is a call between Ukraine's President Zelenskyy and President Biden that the Western media has whipped up into the next fear porn nothingburger, and an interview with Zelenskyy himself in which he states that: there's no sign of a Russian invasion; there's no mobilization in Ukraine; Western media and government spin is basically unhelpful.
Carlson's somewhat satirical and sarcastic take on events calls out and demonstrates (via his editorial take and agenda) both the hypocrisy of the administration and the propagandistic mechanisms within the US media , which has now begun backing out of Covid and switching on to the war curve. Without fear, there's nothing on the news to watch. Even Carlson would be out of a job because then he'd have no fear porn to pick apart.
Say what you like about Fox News, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, but mainstream diversity of opinion is important, even if it’s still all just theatre. However, Fox in the US and GB News in the UK provide rare air time to counternarrative opinion and voices. The test of those voices is the back test done in hindsight. My cursory accounts puts Carlson ahead of CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the alphabet soup when it comes to Covid and Rittenhouse, at least.
US and UK hypocrisy on state sovereignty?
If, as the UK has stated, the Ukraine is a sovereign state with the right to live peacefully and under self determination, why:
after requesting NATO support, has the Ukrainian President said that their assessment of their own borders and the presence of any threat beyond them is no cause for alarm in order to wind down the US invasion rhetoric? Why has Zelenskyy just also asked anyone who has actual evidence of a Russian invasion to share it?
have these statements by Zelenskyy not been referred to by the UK Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary in their public statements in which they have issued threats to Russia of open war and sanctions?
did the Biden-Zelenskyy call not match up with reports and didn’t seem to go to plan, resulting in misleading accounts that Carlson points out in part?
has the US media switched into a binary narrative of “anything that doesn't fully back the US State Department is Russian sympathy or propaganda.”? “With us or against us” is a slogan that drove the nebulous War on Terror that chased its own tail by making more and more terrorists. Good business is where you find it.
See this 2014 exchange between the BBC and Putin, where John Simpson makes one-sided statements of certainty about Russia then requests that Putin agrees to make a public statement that John Simpson defines for him. Is that the job of a journalist? Putin then responds, at length, in the context of the asymmetry of US and Russian historical behaviors including defense spending, territorial expansion and weapon deployment, before stating that Russia seeks cooperative global relationships based on equality and security and the reduction of arms proliferation, which is reflected in the draft treaty and agreement that it issued in the last month.
Overlaps with the past?
How much overlap is there between Iraq and Ukraine?
The pretext (manufactured or otherwise) of a potential Russian invasion exists but there’s no solid evidence (offensive troop build up is not certain), it’s contradicted by Ukraine itself and denied by Russia who issued its “draft treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States of America on security guarantees and an agreement on measures to ensure the security of the Russian Federation and member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)”.
A narrative has been expanded and is now being aggressively spun up into polarizing “us vs them”, “one for all and all for one” NATO-based sloganeering supported by a corporate media stance of “with us or without us” messaging (see Carlson segment).
The gang is readymade via NATO, even if some of the EU gang members are squirming and looking for other doors, just like in the Iraq run up.
War is business. The UK has just agreed to sell weapons to the Ukraine and expansion of NATO is good business in many senses (unless you’re not in NATO).
Is the overall Western MO in Ukraine similar to the Iraq and Kuwait wars ?
Also:
The US and UK are in lockstep presenting a single message that “Russia is about to invade and we are trying to stop it the right way”. The EU is not fully onboard with this.
There's a failure to fully reflect diplomatic communications in official statements from the US and UK. Their statements are polarizing rhetoric that are designed to instill the fear of war due to an impending Russian invasion that may not fully or actually exist. If enough people say something is happening, does that mean that it is? If Germany and France are now dissenting voices akin to Blix and Ritter in the hunt for Iraqi WMD, can we expect them to be marginalized or “extracted”? Are Germany and France even “sovereign enough” to keep going against the US hegemony and actually stop war (if war is really on the cards) or do they only have the power to just refuse to take part in the fight?
When counter narrative reports like that of the Biden-Zelenskyy calls surface, are they reported with the appropriate gravity and context? Although the call and the Ukrainian President’s press conference has been reported in the UK press, it is relegated in the constant news stream and rapidly subsumed by it. Good lies have a kernel of truth. Good propaganda does as well. Full Spectrum Dominance of the information spectrum can imply that those who control it flood it with all kinds of information that means that picking out truth from it becomes hard or impossible, which then leaves room to steer people via a dominant narrative that gets hammered home through a variety of means.
Overlaps with the Covid narrative?
As Covid narrative becomes locked in a tailspin of its own making, the War On Russia narrative is a handy replacement. Personally, I doubt that is a coincidence on either side, but the rationales are not necessarily the same. An apparent global insanity is being replaced by another global insanity that this time carries a real existential threat potential. So we’ve really got something to fear now, haven’t we?
In terms of the pattern of the War on Covid and the past and possibly upcoming actual wars:
The virus pretext stemmed from Chinese lockdown in the absence of any evidence and was increasingly contradicted as time went on.
The narrative aggressively expanded across political, financial and legal spectra, spun up into polarizing “vaxed vs unvaxed”, “one for all and all for one” WEF lockstep sloganeering and is supported by corporate media.
The gang is obviously any nation that has signed up for gene therapies and tries to get them into its people, but it is also any gene therapy evangelist including individual vaccinators, such is the extent of the gang this time around.
Health and fear is great business running in an unvirtuous circle. Citizens are simply the feedstock of the pharma money machine and the consumers of junk that puts them in that position in the first place. Are you buying a cure or treatment for that medical issue? When’s the end point for your issue management? What was its cause (so others can avoid it) and what is the real fix (if one exists)?
Equally, war is an unvirtuous circle that creates enemies amongst its survivors. Thus, as pharma makes most money from treatments and not cures, bombs are treatments for political disagreements and not cures that bring about world peace.
The Forever War on Everything
Russia and China have issued a joint statement that essentially states that the American Empire is over and that the world is now and should continue under a multipolar power paradigm. Superficially, what Russia is now proposing in its treaty is for this to be agreed and for what it characterizes as the perceived, one-sided, threatening over-reach of the US hegemony to stop. It has made such calls for many years and now it does so in explicit terms, with reversion to the UNSC and UN Charter as the backstop to cooperative development under a Balance of Power (BOP).
There is a major obvious difference between Cold War 2.0 and Cold War 1.0. The globalization that the US hegemony and the G3P has pursued since Cold War 1.0 has effectively integrated Russia and China into the power structure in political, financial and broader economic terms. Without the Chinese sweatshop, American society will falter despite pockets of onshoring and the necessary lead time to onshore more, which inherently drives inflation due to higher US labor costs and supply switch outs. Supply chains are still global in large part. The US is already seeing supply failures in technology and drugs that aggravate inflation and risk health systems grinding to a halt. Russian exports of natural resources are basically essential to Europe but its bipolar relationship with China creates an economic loop that is less dependent upon the West. Supply control over gas gives Russia a direct lever on European energy price inflation and therefore global inflation overall.
America is largely a war economy that is integrated by the nature of its hegemon, but it is not independent of that hegemon nor is it independent of its competitors. In practical terms, as the dominant power, it is free of the constraints of international law. These dependencies and that freedom have been frequently exposed but by none more so than Wikileaks, whose publications of secrets have never been shown to be false. Wikileaks exposed to the greatest extent, the scale of the US hegemon’s mechanisms of power and also its corruptions and therefore its freedom and independence from moral, legal and ethical constraints.
Why does Western political leadership constantly adopt war footing and war language on most major issues?
The War on Poverty, Hunger, Drugs, Terrorism, Covid, Climate Change and any adversary the West selects for whatever reason puts populations into a constant cycle of endless war against some enemy.
Setting aside their global integration and dependencies, assuming that Russia and China are actually enemies of the West, what kind of enemies are they? They are not overt military economies in terms of force projection - the US hegemon checks their ability to project - but they are the world’s second and fifth global arms exporters and wield effective nuclear deterrents that underpin a de facto military BOP. Its expertise in the espionage game, it is suggested, puts China ahead on value-for-money of its technology and weapons development because it is good at stealing secrets (not always).
Without nuclear weapons, the US couldn’t win an invasive war against Russia or China. With them, what’s left to win? NATO expansion provides a gang close enough to Russian borders to contain Russia until gang members bottle it and lose motivation or belief.
Controversy Erupts After Ambassador Says Ukraine 'Flexible' On Joining NATO
Russia using Nord Stream 2 as ‘geopolitical weapon’, Zelensky warns Germany’s Scholz
China and Russia, it could be argued, are managing to effectively compete on a Full Spectrum Dominance basis via soft power on economic, intelligence, espionage, information and financial fronts while efficiently maintaining sufficient hard power to redress a BOP that diminished at the end of Cold War 1.0. Hunter Biden’s laptop contains evidence of financial ties between the Biden family’s personal wealth and China. That information alone is a weapon wielded against the minds of the US population. Simultaneously, Russia and China construct a global network to compete with the US hegemon through means that are not overtly, conventionally militarized. Bypassing the SWIFT payment system and doing bilateral deals with each other and their Eurasian “partners” is a bypass of US power. What does fighting that threat look like? Why has the US fomented that threat by building up China into what it is today, if it wanted to remain unopposed on the global stage? You might not be able to buy Russian natural resources from anywhere other than Russia, but you can outsource manufacturing capacity across the globe to even out your competitors’ economic development if you have a long-term, balanced view of power and wealth distribution. If you maintain a short-term greed-based view of next year’s profits, you might just dump all your business into the one country that will do whatever you want, whenever you want. Thirty years later and what has that one country become? Why? Because of you. If China has become your enemy today, are you your own worst enemy of all time?
It is claimed that China does not see any other nation as its greatest enemy. Rather, it sees technology itself as its greatest enemy and seeks to control it and bend it to the CCP’s will. That is a very different perspective to that peddled by the West, which advertises Tik Tok to its populations in global sporting events (see also JRE Tristan Harris episode in the previous link).
Cold War 2.0 could, to some extent, continue a bigger picture pretext: the world’s supposed continuing need for the US hegemony’s war machine economy as an essential counterbalance to threats from the East. In order for a threat to exist in the mind of mankind, it must be convinced that the threat does exist. Whether mankind can discern between truth and lies depends upon each person’s capacity to question what they are being told or shown, before it depends upon how each person might go about seeking to answer that question, which relies on access to information and verification.
In order for an all-encompassing war economy to exist, there must be war. On Everything.
Who is trying to transition to a peace economy? What does such a thing look like?
What do the beats of peace sound like?
Just as my fingernails are painted with the pigment from the balsam flowers,
my heart is painted with the teachings of my parents.Although the galaxies in the sky are countable,
the love and wisdom of my parents are not.Just as the ships that run in the night are guided to safety by the polestar,
I am guided by the parents who birthed me and watch over me.Just as there's no point in owning splendid jewelry if you don't maintain it,
human beings who maintain their souls will live life wonderfully.The wishes of he who lives sincerely always come true and he prospers.
You can do anything if you try, but you can't if you don't.
Spotify: Tinsagunu Hana - Takaesu Shohei
2015:
2019