In real time, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which are known in retrospect to be mistakes.
Stand With Ukraine protest in London, Feb. 26. (Catholic Church England and Wales, Flickr, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it, they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.
Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.
This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of blowing other people up for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what looks like very good reasons why those people need to be blown up.
Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It’s not as people might imagine it looks. Instead, it looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun.
No Flower Power
It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.
When people think of themselves as “anti-war,” they’re usually imagining themselves as anti-another Iraq war, or anti-some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They’re not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivering video address to U.S. Congress on March 16. (President of Ukraine, Flickr)
Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing.
There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.
This is why you’ll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest U.S. war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.
Shaped by Propaganda
Our entire civilization is shaped by domestic propaganda, but the only time you ever hear that word in mainstream discourse is when it’s used to discuss the comparatively almost nonexistent influence of Russian propaganda on our society.
All the mainstream alarm ringing about Russian propaganda gives the impression that it comprises close to 100 percent of the total propaganda that Westerners consume, when in reality it’s a tiny fraction of one percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume. Almost all of it comes from Western sources.
Propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It has far more influence over how the public thinks, acts and votes than any of our official mechanisms for doing so, yet it’s barely discussed, it isn’t taught in schools, and even the best political ideologies barely touch on it relative to their other areas of focus.
“Propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society.”
All the fretting about Russian propaganda from Establishment narrative managers comes so close to giving away their secret: that they know it’s possible to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts and votes using media. They just don’t admit that they’re the ones who are doing this.
It’s actually the weirdest thing in the world that there’s something that has been directly affecting our minds our entire lives, and which directly affects the way our entire society is organized, but we don’t talk about it constantly. It should be at the front and center of our attention.
But of course, that’s the whole idea. Propaganda only works on those who don’t know they’re being propagandized. The U.S.-centralized empire’s ability to hide its propaganda machine is a foundational element of its brilliance.
Being truly anti-war is necessarily a commitment to finding out not just what’s true about all the war narratives currently promulgated by the imperial war machine, but all the narratives you’ve been fed about the world since you were young. It’s a commitment to truth that takes on an almost spiritual quality in the way it informs every aspect of your life when truly espoused.
Reexamining Beliefs
It’s important to research and learn new things about the world, but what’s equally important and which doesn’t get emphasized nearly enough is the practice of examining the beliefs you already hold about your society, your government, your nation and your world. Inquiring as to whether they’re really true, and who might benefit from your believing them.
Don’t make the error of assuming you’ll be aware and informed enough to spot all the lies right away. You’re dealing with the single most advanced and powerful propaganda machine that has ever existed, and you’ve been marinating in its effects your entire life. It takes some time.
Even the most aware among us were indoctrinated into the mainstream worldview to some extent earlier in life, and to this day most of the information they get about the world has some of its roots and branches in parts of the propaganda matrix.
It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview. But unless you do this it’s impossible to be truly anti-war, because you can’t skillfully oppose something you don’t understand. To fight the imperial war machine is to fight the imperial propaganda machine.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar onPatreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone andWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Actually we are (almost always) propagandized since birth by our parents and/or early caregivers, and by teachers.
The late writer and psychotherapist Alice Miller documents this, particularly in her book written in 1980, and now online, titled For Your Own Good, and subtitled “Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence”. The link to her book is at:
hxxp://www.nospank.net/fyog.htm (scroll down for contents).
The main thesis of her book is that childhood mistreatment and humiliation, even if (actually make that especially if) done supposedly for the child’s “own good”, and which is accepted by the child as perfectly normal, is not at all harmless but has very serious negative effects which carry through into adulthood. One obvious consequence is that if a person is taught from childhood to be mortally afraid of questioning or challenging one’s parents or other adults (under threat of punishment, physical or otherwise), then that person is going to be afraid of questioning or challenging other authorities (political, religious, or otherwise) later in life. Alice Miller in her book shows that this is indeed the case with leading figures in the Third Reich and with many ordinary Germans who acclaimed and went along with Hitler, and also with Hitler himself. Alice Miller documents that these people all came from “strict” (euphemism for soul-murdering) upbringings which they accepted as being good and normal. They did not dare to question their parents or anything they said or demanded, or to say or even think anything bad about their parents. Later they did not dare question or challenge Hitler. Plus, Hitler had given the German people permission to hate certain “undesirable” people, such as the gypsies and the Jews, giving them an outlet for their long-repressed and forbidden hatred, which they thus directed to these “undesirable” people rather than to those really deserving of their anger, i.e. their parents and early caregivers.
What is essential, according to Alice Miller, is for both individuals and society as a whole to become aware of and to take seriously the sufferings of children from abuse and mistreatment, much of which is done in the name of upbringing, and ostensibly for the child’s “own good”, but really for the benefit of the parents (e.g. pride, the need to be or to be perceived as being “tough” and not “soft” or indulgent, and perhaps especially the unconscious need and desire to do to one’s children what was once done to one by one’s parents), and to become aware of and take seriously the long term damage as a result of such mistreatment.
What is essential for an individual person, according to Alice Miller, is to become aware, at the feeling level (as opposed to just intellectually), of what really happened to the person in childhood, and especially to dare to go against the deep-seated societal taboos about holding one’s parents (and other early caregivers and authority figures) accountable and responsible, rather than protecting them or exonerating them from any and all blame, or “forgiving” them.
The commandment in the Bible to “honor your father and mother”, which in the biblical text does not make any exceptions if one’s parents are abusive or are otherwise not worthy of honor, and which unfortunately lies in the heart of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, is one such taboo. That the Bible is the “inspired Word of God”, and that the commandment to “honor your father and mother” is a commandment from God that needs to be accepted as being such, are examples of things that people are propagandized, and actually intimidated, into thinking (often from early childhood) that one had better accept (or else!) as being true. Actually even if one is not a Christian or not religious, one might still unconsciously think that one must “honor one’s father and mother”, and not think to question that.
One example of propagandizing which should be obvious (if one thinks about it) is the idea that a certain book, such as the Bible, or the Koran, is an infallible revelation from God and thus absolute truth not to be questioned.The first thing that should be obvious is that the Bible and the Koran, for instance, cannot both be the true “Word of God”. If one of them is the “true Word of God”, then the other obviously is not. So it seems then that one needs to guess which alleged revelation from God is the “one true” revelation from God. It is very cruel if one is punished for happening to make the wrong guess.
A fundamentalist Christian, for instance, believes that a person who for whatever reason does not come to “accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” during this present life will be doomed to hell for all eternity. This might be somebody who happens to guess wrong by adhering to a religion other than Christianity. Or this might be an “unsaved” murder victim, while if the murderer later “repents” and “accepts Jesus Christ” (which chance the victim is presumably denied) the murderer is let into heaven. These things are obviously unjust, and actually are not things known empirically to be true. They are accepted and believed because one has been propagandized to believe these things have to be true because that is what is said in this particular book the Bible, which one is propagandized into accepting as being the “inspired (and infallible) Word of God”.
Thomas Paine wrote “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man”.
hxxp://kenburchell.blogspot.com/2013/11/quote-check-belief-in-cruel-god-makes.html
hxxps://www.deism.com/post/a-letter-to-a-christian-friend-regarding-the-age-of-reason (a little over halfway down)
Personal note: I consider myself to be a Deist. I have reasons for not being an atheist. A Deist believes that reason and nature show that a Creator or Higher Intelligence, aka God, exists (or probably exists) but rejects any alleged revelation from God, such as the Bible or the Koran, as actually being such. I consider myself to be at 3 on Richard Dawkins’ scale of belief, where 1 = strong theist and 7= strong atheist. I definitely lean toward believing in a God or Higher Intelligence but accept lack of certainty or near certainty. My screen handle links to an article which I submitted to and which was published by the World Union of Deists, in which I explain how I came to be unhappy with Christianity and why I am no longer a Christian (and also why I am not an atheist), and how and why I became a Deist.
Dear ks, I find myself in the same position as you are in. I have the same exact thoughts as you have.
What a great essay, Caitlin!
Our job is not only to individually write and take actions against war — which in this reality means, usually, capitalist state warfare against the working class and poor across the globe AND against nature (and what’s left of the natural environment) — that’s number one. But also to rebuild the kinds of face-to-face communities of resistance that create different social values needed to resist their propaganda machine (in business as well as in warfare), as we did in the 60s and 70s, and to support and nurture each other so that people would be able to consciously resist. That is why Occupy Wall Street was so effective, and why they had to smash it.
I talk a lot about this in my book “What is Direct Action?’. There are many books and articles on this subject that we used to discuss all the time in our affinity groups, along with creating and validate what Alison Jaggar called “outlaw emotions.” (in “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” In Alison Jaggar & Susan Bordo, Gender, Body, Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, Rutgers University Press, 1989, p. 160.)
If I can be so presumptuous as to quote that paragraph from Alison, ensconced as it is in my Direct Action book, let me do so here:
Outlaw emotions undermine the system’s hegemony over us and are reflected in our psyches. We may not notice them because they often fall outside the boundaries of what we’ve come to accept as “the political.” In such moments, people may suddenly “feel satisfaction rather than embarrassment when their leaders make fools of themselves. They may feel resentment rather than gratitude for welfare payments and hand-me-downs. They may be attracted to forbidden modes of sexual expression. They may feel revulsion for socially sanctioned ways of treating children or animals. In other words, the hegemony that our society exercises over people’s emotional constitution is not total.”
In fact (I’m writing now), over time the society undermines itself, its own inculcations and teachings. A new radical self-awareness rooted in the growing mass movement is what makes revolutionary change possible. As Marx put it in The German Ideology, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” Awareness and possibility emerge simultaneously, not sequentially. And with them comes the potential for people to envision and momentarily embody a completely different way of living through eruptions of new, human-centered (as opposed to capital-centered) socioeconomic relations within the belly of the old.
The pre-eminent responsibility of conscious revolutionaries today, it seems to me, is not to “recruit” activists to spout the “correct” demands via the selected vanguard Communist party or Anarchist coven; nor is it to raise their consciousness — a failed strategy that continues to plague the Left to this day. Our job is to find ways to nurture impulses toward direct action and democracy and enable them to erupt into one, two, many moments of freedom.
Pretty obvious that the lockdowns have prevented us from those face to face gatherings to validate our “outlaw emotions” and enable the advertisers to pick us off one by one.
Thanks again, Caitlin.
When I was in school (US, NY State, mid 1960’s), we were taught about propaganda and how to recognize and critique it. The classes were called “critical thinking skills” and they were part of the social studies curriculum. We were taught civics too. Both started in 5th grade or so. Even the math classes integrated “critical thinking skills” via word problems that involved basic data and statistics. In English class, we would diagnose NY Times stories for the nature of their arguments and the influence of propaganda.
All of that is now gone from US education – and gone for a long time. Those teachers would all be fired now.
The US media’s propaganda in support of this war has been egregious. Like the COVID pandemic exposed underlying inequality and lack of a public health system and healthcare, this propaganda blitz is so blatantly obvious that it must be forcing even the most naive US exceptionalists to realize the game at hand.
Yet it keeps right on going, without even blinking. Today, NPR broadcast a Zelensky quote about Russia making the Ukraine one big “concentration camp”.
“The US media’s propaganda in support of this war has been egregious” I don’t believe the media “supports” the war in Ukraine, I believe they are supporting Ukraine. They didn’t start this war nor do they want this war but they are not going to turn tail and run. To be anti-war is to look at like in a black and white mode. I am anti aggression but I think countries have the right to defend themselves when attacked. If someone invaded your home, would you just give it to them?
What Ms. Johnstone lays our for us should be glaringly obvious. That it is not for the majority of Americans and Europeans speaks to the effectiveness of propaganda through gradualism. Gradualism has become a disease, and I would say in our lifetime has infected unsuspecting millions, or given the population these days, more likely, billions. It is certainly endemic in the USA. Our politicians count on it, and too many of the self-righteous have found it useful to spread their ideology as well. There’s a good reason ideology and idiot sound so related.
Nature uses gradualism in its inherent cycle to adapt and thrive. Too often “we” (men and women) use it to soft-sell all manner of evils and ever-narrowing ways of seeing the world. In nature’s gradualism, all things expand. In the diseased version, man (who I’ll single out here for the historical burden of the disease they rightly own) uses gradualism to tighten control and reduce, not expand, the spectrum of what is possible. The only expansion they are interested in is their wealth, power and control.
I have trouble reconciling my own anti-war views with the firm belief that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine. I have yet to hear leftists who understands our role in this war, but decry the invasion as a crime, explain what Russia’s alternatives were after negotiations turned out to be a fraud.
Dear ks, I find myself in the same position with my four siblings, We were raised in the 50’s and 60’s by very left parents, the five of us ” red diaper” babies. Now I’m the only one who finds himself in the same position as you. I can only even talk politics with one sibling. and I end up getting screamed at and asked to shut up over Putin’s decision to recognize at the same time the Donbass republics and enter the special military operation or if you insist ” invasion”, I ask her and also Chris Hedges, Aaron Mate, and Noam Chomsky, what Putin was supposed to do. Try to negotiate? What do you think he had been doing for the past eight years? Meanwhile the US/NATO rejected everything Putin/Lavrov proposed and de facto arming and training the Ukraine Army as if it were a member of NATO anyway at the same time. If Putin stands by another eight years or even any longer where would Russia be? It’s easy to say Putin is a War criminal for starting a war but I’d Like to see what Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges would actually do that Putin hasn’t already tried. If either of them had the weight of the responsibility for the future safety of the Russian People and the People of Donbass on their shoulders could they do any better? They are ” armchair ” critics of Putin. It’s easy to attack Putin from the relative safety of the US. Nobody has actually spelled out a realistic alternative to what Putin has done. If you have it I would like to see it.
Yes, I’ve never felt so isolated
I think the question we should be asking those who claim Russia had other options is; does Russia have the right to defend its sovereignty against NATO aggression? The answer or lack of one would be revealing. The Russophobes would no doubt be thinking the answer is no, but would they say it out loud? I’ve read some people claim NATO is not a threat to Russia, which is an admission of either willful blindness or ethnic hatred.
My response would be, yes, Russia has the right to defend itself but only to actual aggression. As in actually attacking Russia.
Pre invasion of Ukraine I genuinely don’t believe Nato was a threat to Russia. A threat to Russia’s “interests” perhaps, but only in reducing Russia’s influence on the states next to it.
Dear ks, I find myself in the same position as you are in. I have the same exact thoughts as you have. Somehow, when I hear people on the left call Putin a War Criminal I can’t put him in the same box with George Bush or Bill and Hillary Clinton. Putin is resisting the unipolar control of the US. He’s for a multi-polar world. I believe a multi-polar world would be better for everyone. I am thinking of Putin’s speech in Switzerland in 1997. That’s a big part of the reason I don’t like to hear him called war criminal. I feel he has something more positive to offer the world than the one’s who promote the continuation of the US unipolar Empire. I just cannot equate him with the US/NATO war criminals.
Moi aussi (just in case ‘me too’ has been copyrighted). As others have pointed out elsewhere both the UN and OSCE charters have provisions to permit the actions that Russia has been taking (and not the coup that the US engineered 8 years ago which led to the current situation, let alone the agreements that the four leading countries in NATO entered into with Russia three decades ago about limiting NATO expansion eastward).
When I read the original article I found it somewhat unfocused. Its title suggests an unconditional anti-war screed, which I suspect many people would have difficulty accepting in extreme cases where all other facilities for preventing war have failed to work. Its main content discusses propaganda but fails in the current instance to point out how it has used nominal ‘anti-war’ sentiment to its advantage – e.g. by characterizing Russia’s behavior as ‘unprovoked aggression’ (what could be more war-like?) and the West’s behavior as ‘defending democracy and sovereignty’ (what could be less war-like?). And the use of ‘imperial’ twice in its last sentence uses a word which the US propaganda machine has also co-opted to mean (again) ‘unprovoked aggression’.
If Caitlin’s article appeared on the front page of the NYT these clarifications would be critical to getting very important points across, but here at CN she is presumably preaching mostly to the already initiated.
Biden has asked for $33 billion in aid for Ukraine.
Given the situation the Russian military finds it’s self in might it not be much cheaper to simply pay them not to fight. $33 billion is a lot of dough.
Once these Russian 19 year old kids get the taste of big money, say $100k for defecting with another $500k to follow even the officers would be all – in, especially since if they tried to stop the kids the kids might make short work of them.
Once the Russians join the Ukrainians they need to be told to go meet all Russian new arrivals and kill them, for the promised money will have to split among those new arrivals. Hell Putin might even take the deal!
Thanks CN
Hopefully my point here is not lost. I said from the start this entire episode it could have and should have been handled differently.
But NO! The ruling elite’s thirst for more blood to be spilled prevailed. Based on Putin’s past, if we have any military specialists in D.C. , all should have known Ukraine was headed full bore down the road to perdition. The results of not talking seriously to have Peace we instead have a blood bath in progress. D.C. knew damned well what they were doing and did it regardless of the outcome. Yet another failure of the U.S. government to act in the best interest of THIS country and most importantly, the people of the world.
The giant propaganda push of anti-Russian sentiment prevailed, lies and all. Still Americans resist openly criticizing the events there. But I digress.
My earlier comment here($33 million), IMHO is a crystal clear example displaying the fucking insanity of war. An insanity which has come to be the identity of the silent multitudes of Americans who seem to be deathly fearful of any confrontation with their so called government. Either that or they have sufficiently suppressed any thoughts that run contrary to the party line. Never mind that our so called government is busy drilling holes in the hull of our sinking ship of state.
Military recruitment goals are not being met currently. We can only hope this trend continues. Those higher standards required by all branches of the military could be a large part of the reason. I does not take a Rhodes Scholar to know that the increased military pay will not keep up with double digit inflation, pay for dependent expenses, or replace missing limbs or brain damage, never mind the PTSD.
Still there is no outcry for Peace, no second examination of U.S. policy, no call from either party for calm or reflections from our recent past. The Pentagon War Hogs all lined up at the money trough draining the nations treasure to fulfill the lost dream of beating communism. The ruling elite getting richer and richer from the deaths of others. Blood sucking sons of bitches they are.
So, for all practical intents and purposes a simple warning to all, “The Good News is We are way ahead of schedule, The Bad News is, We have most certainly lost out way.”
… — … …—… …—…
thanks CN
I love the way you keep hammering away at this most important subject. The sophistication of the official narrative machine is I believe, our biggest obstacle to freeing ourselves from global oligarchy which has captured Western governments and relies on war to perpetuate itself.
Your reference to the the fact we’ve all been indoctrinated since childhood rings so true as I sense a deep need on the part of the believers of the Ukraine narrative to hold onto the idea of the US as the guys in the white hats rescuing helpless victims. Not surprising as the narrative managers treat their audience as children. Any mention of the obvious hypocrisy of US/NATO foreign policy is quickly condemned as whataboutism. Clinging to childhood fairytales seems to be feeding a latent need to feel protected by a perceived benevolent authority. I hope we grow up soon.
TOTALLY TRUE. THIS IS YOU, AND ME/I. WE ARE DUPES, NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY YOU LIVE IN, WHETHER RUSSIA, AMERICA, ETC. WE ARE DUPES.
In the past I have served time briefly as the Democratic chair of my GOP infested small New Jersey town. I have held office in organizations like my church from Roman Catholic to Unitarian Universalist, American Association of University Women, and Delaware League of Women Voters. As a widow I attended three National Newsmedia Reform conferences in Boston, Memphis, and Minneapolis where I found many good political books for sale. Finally following Bernie Sanders but disappointed in his foreign policy it wasn’t until 2016 that I changed to the Green Party affiliation with Dr. Jill Stein. It takes many years of attempts to make changes to realize that everything is getting worse and worse in American politics and it’s the USA who are the bad guys in the world. All the US organizations are very careful in limiting the involvement of their members. Watch how many times in US presidential debates, foreign policy never even gets a question.
Consortium News comment threads are always worth reading. This one is especially inspired and inspiring. I write this with great affection and appreciation for my fellow travelers, for Caitlin Johnstone, and for CN. Thank you!
Thankyou for this essay.
I’ve found that the best way for me to approach the subject of invisible cooperation is to start with the thought that I am totally brainwashed, then to walk/think backward, elinating all of the my thoughts which seem “pro war” and eliminate them one by one.
Non-violence is a start for comparing my reäctions to news and “news”.
Keep writing
Thanks Caitlin. “It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview.” A workable approach is easy enough to propose. Take the western, corporate MSM media as your starting point. Assume it to be a lie. Work backwards from there. Perhaps something the MSM produces isn’t a lie. Which part could possibly be true? It’s like searching for a good shirt in an op-shop. You’ll have to rummage though a lot of shirts to find something that you can go with. Just keep rummaging, because most things there aren’t what you want. But you might just find something worthwhile. Start by assuming the MSM is propaganda. Try to disprove that. You’re on the right path. Keep going.
This writing by Caitlin is absolutely brilliant. I am so grateful as i got many tools to use in my lonely crusade against the various organisations and individuals here in Finland. I have read so many articles by peace organisations, trade unions and others who claim to be anti-war but still support exporting arms to Ukraine. In their writings they show their hate towards Russia, their infinite love and trust to Ukraine and their firm support of US and EU actions/sanctions. They never write about Minsk agreement or propose diplomacy, they never tell stories about ethnic russians in Ukraine, they never are worried about free speech and they often end their articles with ”slava Ukraine”. All this is sometimes so absurd that it is hard to stay sane. For example in a professional magazine for architects there were a piece with a headline ’now the architects in ukraine design barriers to russian tanks’. Never before has such a magazine included any geopolitics.
When i comment their articles or send other feedback, they either not reply or just deny my arguments. They say that this is just a brutal attack by Putin without any context, without any other reason but sheer evilness and lust for more land. They say that Finland will be next and thats why we have to join to the NATO. Oh man, this is great.
Hey Vesa. there are other sane people on the planet. Don’t despair. I’m thinking of you in Finland and all the great things about your country. Keep sending comments to articles. Do that every day. You are changing the world, one journalist at a time. Toivottaen
When a single nuclear-armed superpower has been laying waste all over the world for decades and demonstrates every intention of continuing to do so and the world’s arrangements nominally responsible for reining it in (U.N., OSCE, etc.) have proven useless in doing so exactly what credible alternative to military action remains for the rest of the world if anyone has the balls to step up to the plate and challenge others to develop some as well to stop the damage.
Simply being uncritically anti-war does not have a very good record of effectiveness under such circumstances given how easily (as the article observes) many people are manipulated out of such sentiments until a taste of the real thing hopefully awakens them.
I have never claimed to be antiwar. I grew up during the American war in Vietnam and you better well damn believe I supported the Vietnamese in their fight against the U.S.
“I have never claimed to be antiwar.”
Neither have I. And I was scrupulously honest when I wrote a very polite letter to my draft board when I received my draft notice in 1968 and refused to report for induction because placing myself in a position where I would likely be ordered to perform acts that my personal (non-religious) convictions forbade me to do seemed like a bad idea for all concerned (and I was very lucky that they agreed and classified me as a Conscientious Objector).
“I grew up during the American war in Vietnam and you better well damn believe I supported the Vietnamese in their fight against the U.S.”
Since I felt the same way I have no difficulty believing that you did. In the current instance I happen to believe that Russia’s actions are eminently justified so I responded to assert that circumstances can in fact alter cases for any but the most rigid of ideologues. I confess to having written my comment in a way that might cause any rigid ideological knees to jerk reflexively in response if they read into it something else (as you might have, though your response did not lead to the interesting discussion that I thought might ensue).
This writing by Caitlin is absolutely brilliant. I am so grateful as i got many tools to use in my lonely crusade against the various organisations and individuals here in Finland. I have read so many articles by peace organisations, trade unions and others who claim to be anti-war but still support exporting arms to Ukraine. In their writings they show their hate towards Russia, their infinite love and trust to Ukraine and their firm support of US and EU actions/sanctions. They never write about Minsk agreement or propose diplomacy, they never tell stories about ethnic russians in Ukraine, they never are worried about free speech and they often end their articles with ”slava Ukraine”. All this is sometimes so absurd that it is hard to stay sane. For example in a professional magazine for architects there were a piece with a headline ’now the architects in ukraine design barriers to russian tanks’. Never before has such a magazine included any geopolitics.
When i comment their articles or send other feedback, they either not reply or just deny my arguments. They say that this is just a brutal attack by Putin without any context, without any other reason but sheer evilness and lust for more land. They say that Finland will be next and thats why we have to join to the NATO. Oh man, this is great.
The large-scale coordination of the censorship is striking. Who can afford that? And all pushing for war?
“That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true.” – Thomas Paine, 1791
hXXps://war**profiteer**story.blogspot.com
[Note: Remove all asterisks to use link, along with replacing XX with tt.]
impressive lovely keep it up
Great article! Great analysis! Yes, it’s hard to question one
s assumptions, especially if one has grown-up with them. American Adam, American Exceptionalism propaganda, about we can do no wrong, has been powerful since the early 19th century, Cold War “hate-the-Russians” prom the 50s-60s has been powerful ever since.
Not watching TV, living abroad, help. But if you live abroad, you started identifying with the new country’s propaganda. Also, Hollywood movies propagandize the world.
Hey Lester. Getting rid of the TV is a great start. I haven’t had a TV for 20 years. No home should have one. Propaganda ground zero.
Excellent comment concerning Hollywood movies and propaganda. A terrific and most informative book which easily backs up your assertion to great effect is The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture by Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard.
In order to get any factual information about the war in Ukraine you must go outside western media, the US media is probably the worst of the lot. Most of what is reported is actually 180 degrees from the reality on the ground and it`s astonishing how uniformed the average citizen is this issue.
An issue that may lead to their daughter or son dying on another senseless foreign battlefield and costing our country billions and billions of dollars we don`t have.
You can watch the mainstream news and pretty much figure what’s true is the exact opposite, as you point out. What I’m interested in is who is financing the U.S. weapons going to Ukraine. An economist I was reading said we can still finance our domestic policies just by printing more money, but ever since the war in Vietnam we have been depending upon other countries to finance our wars.
Congratulations Caitlin, on this seminal analysis of the ways in which propaganda has brainwashed those of us with a lifetime of exposure to it. It’s been heartbreaking to see the speed with which the CIA line on Russia’s Special Operation in Ukraine infected almost the entire Western narrative, by using strategies like the blatant omission of the truth and the demonisation of Putin.
And worse, as a psychologist and teacher, I know that very little can be done to change this dreadful situation, because most people simply lack the insight to see what’s happening.
But there’s a prophecy in the I Ching to the effect “WORK ON WHAT HAS NOT BEEN SPOILED” meaning ‘band together with like minds, and through public discourse, attract a large group of people who trust you enough to do as you say’.
That means we need to do something like Elon is suggesting and start to talk to the 80% of people in the middle and not just each other.
That doesn’t mean we abandon the 4% on the edge, far from it. The 4% become the architects of the narrative and the means of creating its flow to the centre.
If we do that, I think we can save the world.
Read Bright Green Lies and see what you think about saving the world. The only thing that will save this world is the end of Homo sapiens sapiens.
A wonderful thoughtful commentary Caitlin, well done. Your comment:
“All the fretting about Russian propaganda from Establishment narrative managers comes so close to giving away their secret: that they know it’s possible to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts and votes using media. They just don’t admit that they’re the ones who are doing this.”
Nails it. Goebbels would be gob-smacked at the inclusiveness of it all. Orwell (Eric Blair) is rolling in his grave. You can’t make this stuff up, it’s surreal, and simply awful.
All the best.
I have been antiwar since I was a teenager in the 1960s, when I started joining antiwar marches. I also marched for civil rights in thne 1960s. I am not one of those bandwagon jumpers who started waving their blue and yellow flags and/or wearing blue and yellow clothing (no matter how unflattering) even before the Russians crossed the border into Ukraine. I stand practically alone in my neighborhood in San Francisco in not supporting the Nazi-infested NATO puppet government of that benighted country. I have been called all kinds of names that you, Caitlin, no doubt here every day from a certain middle-class liberal element who point and accuse you of not being “woke”. While I agree that far too many people here in the States are fooled by the liars of the mainstream media (whose bombardment of the public with aggressive propaganda has become deafening), there are also many more of us who oppose war and NATO and the government’s addiction to violence in every situation from war down to the police and mass shooters. Keep up the good work.
“Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked … unless they are Patrick Clawson or Ian Morris.”
“Even the most aware among us were indoctrinated into the mainstream worldview to some extent earlier in life, and to this day most of the information they get about the world has some of its roots and branches in parts of the propaganda matrix.”
I raised two sons in this environment. I am: a true agnostic; anti-war; anti-capitalist; a rational skeptic secular humanist. At times I found it almost impossible to communicate with my sons, as their successful assimilation into the society they were born into depended on digesting and accepting the “official narrative” pertaining to so many aspects of our lives. Often I felt I had to choose to let them be assimilated by the Borg, so they could have “successful lives” or hammer away at the truth and turn them into a societal pariah and outsider like myself. Growing up can be so very difficult and painful, and to have this artificial and completely unnecessary situation overlain on the ordeal, at times was all that I could bear.
Caitlin, your work gets better and better all the time.
What a good article, and you are right, being an anti-war activist, being a communist, a far-leftist, a marxist, a socialist, a supporter of The Bolivarian Revolution, of the Cuban Revolution, of the anti-imperialist governments of the world is not easy. Even being a believer of extraterrestrials is hard. That’s why i am also a realist, a reader and supporter of the philosophy of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and other realist thinkers who claim that life is a war, and humans should be warriors in order to be free, a person, or a whole nation that doesn’t have warrior spirit is not a free society. And I don’t mean supporters of imperialist wars, I mean supporters of revolutionary fighting and fighting against every evil like Fred Hampton, Thomas Jefferson, Kennedy, Malcolm X, who were warriors, renegades, like the song Renegades of Funk from Rage Against The Machine says