Has Russiagate Nudged Us to the Brink of Nuclear War in Ukraine?

Glenn Greenwald warned us about this risk of Russiagate several years ago.

Now that the U.S. is actively engaged in high-stakes brinksmanship with Russia over Ukraine, I can't rule out that Russiagate hysteria has been a significant factor. Admittedly, Russiagate is not the only factor. We are risking civilization-annihilating nuclear war for other reasons too.  For instance, decades of U.S. warmongering and profiteering.  Also, conflict pornography by our "news" networks, right and left wing, which constantly feature war-obsessed military officials and members of the spy state, often without disclosing their conflicts of interest. There is a profit-motive behind this media behavior too.

Equally troubling is the failure of our "news" outlets to offer viewpoints criticizing the dominant pro-war narrative. For instance, where are the voices advocating strongly for negotiation and peace?  Viewpoints like those of Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky: "This is part of the concept that [the United States] owns the world"

And how about our ignorance of history? The United States has a well-established track record of using our military to "save" countries by launching invasions that end up destroying countries financially, politically and socially. This is the sad state of U.S. foreign policy and the "news" industry that enables it, IMO.

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Matt Taibbi: The Perils of Ukraine Whataboutism and the Wisdom of George Orwell

An excerpt from Matt Taibbi new article: "Orwell Was Right: From free speech to "spheres of influence" to our passion for endless war, we've become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted":

One would hope there would be at least a few Americans left who’d hear about Russia barring the BBC and Voice of America and at least recognize the sameness of the issue involved with banning RT and Sputnik. Or, seeing how pathetic and manipulative it is for Russians to prevent reporting on war casualties, we’d recall the folly of the ban we had for nearly twenty years on photographs of military coffins, or the continuing pressure on embeds to avoid publishing images of American deaths from our own war zones. We should be able to read that Twitter and Facebook are cracking down on the “fake accounts” spreading “misinformation” that “Ukraine isn’t doing well” and notice that Russia’s measures against “fake news” and “disinformation” about its own military failures — though far more draconian and carrying much more severe penalties — are rooted in the same concept.

We don’t, however, because we long ago reached the doublethink phase predicted by Orwell, where most of the population is conscious of double standards but ignores them effortlessly. A healthy person should be able to be horrified by what’s happening in Russia and also see a warning about the degradation that ensues from using “pre-emptive” force, or from trying to control discontent by erasing expressions of it. But years of relentless propaganda have trained Americans to doublethink their way out of such insights. Cornel West just laid all of this out in an interview with the New Yorker:

Everybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow. [Biden] sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years. Come on, America, do you think people are stupid? What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?

That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster—of course he is. But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize. Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror. That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.

We’ve been trained to rage against this thinking. We even have our own borrowed Newspeak word for the offense: Whataboutism. The offender supposedly does a bait-and-switch, distracting with charges of hypocrisy without refuting the actual argument. But a Soviet giving a professionally two-faced answer to questions about Gulags by saying, “And you lynch blacks” isn’t the same as the much more serious thing West is talking about. Lying to others is shameful, but lying to ourselves and not even realizing it, that’s hardcore spiritual decay. We’re being driven faster toward the cliff-edge of this moral insanity with each new act of mass forgetting.

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Dozens of Things the Mainstream News Won’t Tell You About Ukraine

Fascinating thread by Glenn Greenwald. Many topics related to the situation in Ukraine, including Google's decision to take down Oliver Stone's documentary, which discusses the history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine (you can now view it on Rumble).

Many people on the political left would rather feed their brains with DNC-aligned "news." You'll know who they are, because they size up this complex conflict by walking around zombie-eyed uttering things like "Putin is worse than Hitler."  They are getting this "information" from "news" outlets parading out endless streams of retired military generals, all of them beating the war drums to crank up sagging ad revenue in the post-Trump era.  You would think that we would have learned some important and expensive lessons after our Iraq "weapons of mass destruction" post-mortem, but no.

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Ukraine: Forbidden Discussions

I'm despondent that the mainstream news outlets are so intensely jingoistic, so focused on the logistics of war, so unwilling to look into the mirror. This is not surprising given the vast numbers of retired military and spy state talking heads who now work for the left leaning MSM. It's also unsurprising given that this is how war propaganda always works, illustrated brilliantly by "War Made Easy."

Here are a three snippets of conversation that I with the news media would take much more seriously:

First, this is from Freddie DeBoer's Substack:

[R]ight now, [the United States is] investing hideous amounts of treasure to maintain an order that we can’t afford and that no one really believes we can maintain. Perhaps the Ukrainians will beat back the Russians and they’ll be welcomed into NATO and we can all cheer that the good guys won. But hegemony does not last forever, and sooner or later you’re going to have to ask more adult, more useful questions than, “who’s the goodie, and who’s the baddie?” Otherwise the superpower eventually goes down the hard way.

I find myself considering this quote from a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?

It doesn’t take sympathy for Putin to see that this is a very good question.

Second, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted this:

Third, Matt Taibbi reminds us that history matters:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man we can do business with,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Fourth, this excerpt is from Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of our tribal dysfunction that mushroom when that exciting topic of war hits the tabletop:

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

. . .

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

I will end with a photo:

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