The way the U.S. provoked and now sustains its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invasion of Iraq. If people can’t see this, it’s because the propaganda around the latest war hasn’t cleared from the air yet.
Nov. 27, 2003: President George W. Bush paying a surprise visit to Baghdad International Airport. Later in his trip he gave a Thanksgiving Day address to U.S. troops at the Bob Hope dining facility. (U.S. Air Force, Reynaldo Ramon)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
War criminal George W. Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event on Wednesday at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with the U.S. government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy.
The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting U.S. proxy war efforts in Ukraine.
CNN reported last week:
“Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.
The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.
‘Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,’ David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. ‘President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.’ “
NEW: President George W. Bush, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen will participate in the Bush Institute’s Nov. 16 event on advancing freedom.
More from @kylieatwood @CNN: https://t.co/cGvBylur7G
— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) November 10, 2022
To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.
Bush, you may remember, drew headlines and laughter earlier this year with his Freudian confession in which he accused Vladimir Putin of launching “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine.” The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the U.S. empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.
Also appearing with Bush will be the leader who’s slated to become the face of the U.S. empire’s next proxy war, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. CNN says:
“Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will also take part in the event next week. She will deliver a recorded message, in which she is expected to underscore that the struggle for freedom is a global challenge.”
And sure, why not. If you’re going to manufacture consent for proxy warfare against multiple powers as your empire flails around frantically scrambling to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, you may as well save time and promote them all on the same ticket.
Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022
Many people who support the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine now recognize that the Iraq war was a horrific disaster, but Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war.
Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the war that’s currently being pushed. The U.S. provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invasion of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.
It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
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.
I predict this will not amount to very much of any significance.
We will hear the same ole same ole from Z-Man Zelensky, “please help us because we are winning ” and not much from 43, the “Village Idiot from Crawford Texas “who seems content to suck on his own foot a major portion of the time.
Of course 43 might extract his foot long enough to mumble , “Hey I like killing Russians”, he is not above it!
I need to take a break from this craziness. It’s starting to make sense.
Oh, the horror!
Thanks CN
p.s., RELATED: The paintings, “Parsing Bill” & “War Games”
In 2012, as a grad student at the New York Academy of Art,” Petrina Ryan-Kleid “painted pictures of Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush as part of her Master’s thesis. When the school put on a fundraiser at the Tribeca Ball that year, they sold” her “painting to one of the attendees. She “had no idea who the buyer was at the time. As with most of” her “paintings, she had completely lost track of this piece when it was sold seven years ago. So it was a complete surprise to Petrina Ryan-Kleid to learn” they “wound up in Epstein’s home.” (source)
“Parsing Bill” features ‘Bill Clinton wearing a blue dress, sitting seductively in a chair, crossing his legs and pointing a finger to the person looking at the picture.’
“War Games,” features Gee Dubyah Bush ‘sitting on the floor of the White House playing with paper airplanes in front of two fallen Jenga towers, referencing’ Dubyah’s ‘manipulation of the attacks of 9/11 to justify war in Iraq, the defining scandal of Bush’s White House tenure.’
“It was just a silly school artwork that was supposed to show, pictorially, the messages we are bombarded with in regards to these presidents.” Petrina Ryan-Kleid. “The Artist Behind Jeffrey Epstein’s Portrait of Bill Clinton in a Dress Tells Us Why She Made It, and What It Means“
hxxps://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/no_author/painting-of-george-bush-playing-airplanes-with-two-jenga-towers-found-in-jeff-epsteins-house/
Will this writer be criticizing Putin for bombing apartment buildings and schools and water and electricity utilities or does she think that is all Ukraine’s doing for propaganda purposes? Are the Russian torture chambers being reported also fake news? Does she think Putin killing civilians is justified because Russia was provoked by the US?
I’ve had enough of the Pro-War Gressives.
Bernie the sheepdog, herding all the sheep, even the sleepwalking ‘woke’ ones, to go vote for Wall Street and Global Nuclear War. If you want to free yourself from mental slavery, the first task is to get beyond the sheepdog.
Even meak and mild Bernie’s spokesman has taken to wearing a T shirt with St Olga the Patron Saint of Ukraine wielding an anti tank missile. Popular amongst his fellow bigots in NAFO.
“Linking Zelensky to George W Bush will give a lot of people one of those “Hang on a minute..!” moments of awakening. ”
I hate to disagree. But.
Double-think has become the standard within “The West”.
Mr. Orwell defined double-think as believing two contradictory things at the same time.
This has become the norm for ‘The West’.
In fact, I’d say in the west, we are probably up to OctaThink or some other mulitdimensional term. Believing two contradictory things at once in America is reserved for school children. To be a functioning adult in Amerika, requires believing at least four mutually contradictory things at the same time. And believing them so strongly that you will immediately fight and kill anyone who disagrees with you on anything.
Double-think, and its more multi-dimensional modern children, is of course the sign that powerful Mind Control is being applied.
If you work to block the Mind Control, and just sit under a tree listening to birds, or sit on a beach listening to waves, for a sufficient length of time, then you will find that you once again resolve down to believing just one thing at a time …. and it will be what your heart tells you.
Watch Zelensky Dancing In High Heels Video in his S&M Outfit doing tongue and hip thrusts. He does an impression of a Ukraine President also and has made money off the billions sent to him. Disgusting. 46 Bio labs threaten Russia and the US keeps shoveling in billions. I’m ashamed to be from the US of A. Brain-dead leadership results in world controllers pulling USA strings.
We can’t just blame propaganda for the warmongering that erupts whenever a new conflict happens. There’s something deadened in most of us, by the culture we live in…..the endless rah rah for sports teams, the reification of competition, the avarice with which we worship ‘the economy’. It seems to me we’re becoming a kind of walking dead in the west…. oblivious to the real threats of extinction…and momentarily resuscitated from our torpor by the latest conflict.
Why it hasn’t sickened us into resistance by now is beyond me. White phosphorus used on Fallujah for the love of God….500,000 Iraqi children starved between the two Gulf Wars………and now we stand up in stiff patriotic poses for this proxy war??? It’s like we have no memory, its like we’re incapable of learning.
When even that arch war criminal, George Bush the lesser commits the Fruedian slip of confusing Putin with his very own former self!!! What will wake us up I wonder?
Nothing less than an attack from outer-space by a hostile alien force, I’m afraid.
Ukraine is the front line of the struggle for democracy.
America is not a democracy.
Pollsters regularly ask whether America is going in the ‘right direction’ or the ‘wrong direction’. Over 70% of Americans tell pollsters that America is going in the wrong direction. A democracy is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. And as such, it is impossible for such a government to go in a direction that a vast majority of the people consider to be ‘wrong’. The only time that number gets to 50%, is after the charade of an election. But the smoke quickly clears and it goes back to 70% of Americans saying we are going in the wrong direction.
America is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. America is not a democracy.
I don’t know if the people get much of a say in Russia or China, but in America, nobody in power gives a damn about what the people think or want. They only tell us that we have to be the ones to pay, pay, pay.
Ours is not to reason why
Ours is just to work lots of overtime, and then die.
Mike Levin, D-CA, used Dick Cheney in an ad telling Californians in his district how Trump was the most dangerous man in America. It’s positively bizarre how the Dems could use such war-mongering f-wads to promote their own war-mongering f-wadery. And the blue people stand behind them like they did Obomba in his invasions and overthrows. NINETY PERCENT CIVILIANS were slaughtered in his drone war alone.
Red and Blue are much the same.
Slaughtering millions in our name.
If you don’t like the wars they make,
You can take a flying skate.
Red and Blue are all alike
War gives them a big pay hike.
If you like peace much more than hate,
You’re an enemy of the state.
But keep on trying, all you guys.
The word is out on all their lies,
They’re clearly shown by you and friends.
We see the truth, and HOPE war ends!
First: Well said, Caitlin, as always. It is truly shocking to me that so many people I know and love accept the current batch of lies. What we need to realize is that, in any conflict, both sides can be wrong. In fact, both sides usually are, because violent conflict is a failure of humanity. But one side can be more wrong than the other.
This brings me to your question, Packard. Everyone is tiptoeing around a major cause (or two) of this war. It’s lithium, and other mineral wealth, as well as access to seaports. It seems there is a lot of lithium around Mariupol, which is a port city. So it matters greatly who controls this port.
And who should control it? The people who live there, obviously. Without outside interference, the majority of the people of that area naturally align with Russia–or so I understand it. This is not acceptable to the neocons.
That’s how I have come to see it, anyway. And yet practically everyone I know actually believes we are fighting–aligning ourselves with actual Nazis!–in order to “preserve democracy”. All while Zelensky bans opposition parties. It’s very troubling.
Miss Mary
You certainly make lots of unproven statements except all Wars are a failure of leadership yet we elect the leaders.
My family roots are in the Ukraine -the last I heard they aren’t Nazi’s . Speaking of them how many were saved and employed in the US
after WW2 ? How many embedded in critical agencies ?
How many NAZI groups exist in the US –see the stats at the Southern Poverty Law Center .
The US remains at least for awhile as the Superpower and to stay there they plunder as does China Russia the UK —
The invisible powers are the multinational corporations that promote the plundering of weaker countries and we enjoy the benefits.
It is what it is ..
G.W. Bush, “…The W. stands for war. ” (That’s what he said, ) is mocking people whom believe that war is a crime because war crimes are a natural occurrence in all wars, and he smugly believes that he will never be held accountable. (He is probably right though things like that can change change over night. )
All wars are caused and enabled by the production of weapons systems and we we simplify by making agreements to to limit productions, monitor compliance, and to shame those whom advocate violence to aquire results while simultaneously unequivocally outlaw all industrialized violence.
I firmly believe in Government Gun Control! I believe We the People should tightly control what guns the government are allowed to have. As of now, they have WAY to many, in WAY too many places.
We can start with the abolition of the DHS. Trillions of dollars in weaponry need to be turned into “plowshares” FOR the People instead of mass weaponry AGAINST the People.
“Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the war that’s currently being pushed.” Beautifully said. Most of the people in the West seems totally unable to discern that they are lied to by the media and the authorities at the time when it matters most. It is an amazing feat that so many can be lied to so blatantly, and yet they will only wake up after the whole thing is over. Always a matter of too little too late.
Peace now resides only in that minuscule moment between the time the gameplayers at the Pentagon click the button to fire missiles at their targets and the inevitable destruction of those chosen targets which must follow. It’s a newer version of the Theory of Relativity, the one in which any great mass bends space and therefore alters the light emanating from space: the US bends the path of history until it must follow the acceptable path needed for hegemonic insanity in the service of Empire. And with this new theory of relativity, the one-hundred pages of indescribably difficult, mathematical equations are not needed, just the government using mass media attention to supply needed profits to those media empires who propagandize us all. It’s quite unscientific and simple in comparison. Or at least simple-minded.
YES!
“The way the U.S. provoked and now sustains its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invasion of Iraq. If people can’t see this, it’s because the propaganda around the latest war hasn’t cleared from the air yet.”
Caitlin Johnson is damn right!
If Americans had had the opportunity and the awareness to find and read one of the greatest investigative reporters, Robert Parry’s articles in 2014-2017, such as:
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/26/robert-parry-the-mess-that-nuland-made/
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/20/a-family-business-of-perpetual-war/
And if one of the greatest publishers, Julian Assange, had not been cruelly silenced by that war machine/those ugly NEOCONS, our complicit Justice Dept., Congress, our Administrations over decades
And, I believe, if Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin had not been kneecapped by that same machine.
Americans would have had a chance to escape the clutches of that propaganda.
Better informed, better served (as Julian understood and worked towards, fought valiantly for and hopefully will once again) to hopefully going forward with the help of this author and CN to establish a true democracy before the NEOCONS blow up this world.
We’ve all been had by a very corrupt for profit war machine that holds the people of the U.S. and Britain in contempt and the people of Iraq and Ukraine as expendable.
I hope Prime Minister Anthony Albanese girds his loins and stands up to these criminals and protects Julian Assange’s rights bringing him home. If the WEST & NATO refuses to acknowledge the multipolar world, Albanese needs to consider joining the BRICS, the SCO to help this old world have a soft landing as our Empire, as Randy Newman sings, “is coming to an end”……one can hope.
Bernie is a false hope. He’s in favor of this war, like the shills in the “squad.” It’s a blue war, so blue people support it.
“Everybody’s antiwar until the war propaganda starts.” Ain’t that the truth. I and a group of peace activists were demonstrating against Bush Senior planning to invade Iraq the first time. We got lots of support from people driving by until the planes started flying. The support completely dried up and people got downright nasty. It was like a switch flipped in their heads.
The powers that be understand how human psychology works. That’s how they obtained the power they wield. Too bad the average person still hasn’t learned how they are being manipulated.
The other day I referenced the book “Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr. In that book Niebuhr directly addresses the exact ‘phenomenon’ that you have identified. In the chapter ‘The Morality of Nations’ I quickly find this passage:
“There is a critical paradox in patriotism which defies every but the most astute and sophisticated analysis. The paradox is that patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to the nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefor becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervor that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation’s power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint.”
Many other passages further explain why we act tribally (nationally) differently that we do (or would strive to) individually.
Thanks for this. I will make a point to check out the book.
Wow, the idea that overthrowing democratically elected governments is “defending freedom and democracy” is now bolstered by the support of an intellectual heavyweight such as George W. Bush is … well, the same nonsense that the U.S. has been fraudulently selling to an ignorant and foolish “American people” since the declaration of the phony “War On Terror” in 2001. In a decent society war criminals such as George W. would not be able to show their faces in public. In fact, in a decent society they would be in prison. Perhaps some day the U.S. will be such a society; however, don’t bet any money on it.
Amen!
It’s extremely hard for me to believe that people, so many of us, believe what the US administration is saying about the war in Ukraine. It’s frightening that they are so successful in pulling the wool over our eyes. But, on second thought, if people thought at all, they should realize how. The majority of us it seems wake up with their cell phones, as if consulting an oracle from Delphi. Delphi is not what it’s cracked up to be; it’s a way of control.
I read Consortiumnews.com including your comment on my cellphone.
Somewhat tangential to Caitlin’s main point:
In the closing days of the recent election, I thought the desperate GOP had hit on a dangerously potent argument for winning – the threat of de-funding the US’ most recent war of choice. My suspicion was based on my GUESS that there really is no majority support (emphasis on majority) for US funding of Ukraine and that truth could be tapped into. However, as many here likely realize, but it needs reminding, the funding “for Ukraine” largely ends up in the greedy hands of US arms manufacturing war-profiteers. To think that the grand poohbahs of the GOP would ever interrupt the funding conveyor belts to-and-fro from Congress-to-industry-to-Congress would be ludicrous and evidence of a lack of understanding of 21st century US political reality.
Yes Caitlin, every responsible member of the W. Bush administration should be in prison for crimes against humanity; however, we do that, and then all the other recent occupants of the WH should be there also keeping Shrub and crew company. Not saying that it shouldn’t happen, only that it won’t.
Like the faraway India/Pakistan dispute over the Kashmir, many Americans are still waiting to learn what vital national strategic interests are at stake in all Eastern Europe, much less in Ukraine? What exactly is going on in any of these remote places that might justify the enormous economic/KIA/WIA risks of an accidental nuclear WW III with Russia?
That is, what vital American strategic interests are at stake outside of filling the already deep, taxpayer funded coffers of our own MIC, Pentagon, US State Department, CIA, & NSA?
Asking for 330 million close friends.
It shouldn’t be that hard…that it is not only demonstrates the power of Western propaganda, but also the naivete and utter ignorance of US citizens. After having gone through almost identical war-mongering campaigns over the course of the last 2 decades, how are so many of us so unable or unwilling to question or be wary of the most current campaign? Are memories so short?
“The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the U.S. empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.”
Yes, that nails it. Not to mention that under US leadership, “the world’s leading democracy (TM)”, no responsible government official has been prosecuted for that illegal, criminal invasion and occupation (which continues to this day). Not exactly trivial when over a million people lost their lives, millions more displaced and the world set on fire which is still burning merrily twenty plus years later. But then, that is how the “rules based international order” which the US continues to promote as cover for its actions, rather than actual international law, works. Convenient. Sounds rather like mafia lawyers.
I note how Americans love to be hopelessly outraged at someone else; which always is some other country or leaders whom they have no control or influence over. In contrast, the country and leaders that they are responsible for, for whom they are paying and supporting with their own tax dollars, for whom they have a complete “democratic” system of government and laws with which to fulfill their responsibility for keeping them in line, strangely, this country which has been more criminal, literally unlawful, in its actions, especially over the last 30+ years, than any other country on this planet1, this country they give a pass. It must be hard to live while constantly breathing in all that putrid hypocrisy. Perhaps the American public is simply the weakest, most meaningless public of all time. They certainly shy away from doing something, anything, to correct themselves or their country. And so they rage, safely at home and well out of harms way, powerless and pathetic, against someone else while real criminals are paraded and praised in their name. This is not the sort of society that is prepared nor qualified to lead the world, except to hell.
1. John Pilger (hXXps://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/07/john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works/) “In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.”
Easily led, easily bled.
I posted a mild article on FB recently that suggested negotiating an end to this conflict, something I think Zelensky was going to do before Bozo Bojo visited Ukraine. I was criticized as being at best naive, and advised that you can’t negotiate with psychopath Putin by fellow Democrats. You know, that villain who single-handedly pushed all those levers for Trump in 2016. A lot of folks apparently see nothing wrong with our interfering in Ukraine politics in 2014 and our steadfast opposition to implementing the Minsk agreement. That is if they even know about or remember either.
I in no way condone this Russian invasion, but I in no way condoned our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan 20 yrs ago.
Linking Zelensky to George W Bush will give a lot of people one of those “Hang on a minute..!” moments of awakening. A lot of people who supported Ukraine might now pause and reflect upon that decision. The Americans talk about optics and this was not a good look, thankfully. The war planners may come to regret it. Among thinking people the only thing going for Bush is he ain’t Biden.
You’re darned tootin’ that “Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy.” It is on the side that is trying to crush both of these concepts (according to their standard dictionary definitions, not the tweeked American versions). It is also on the frontline in the struggle to deny any potential peers of the almighty American hegemon, like say Russia or China, from ever obtaining the slightest modicum of security against rampant capricious American military aggression, including the hovering threat of nuclear weapons directly on their frontiers, or even from the economic and financial blackmail, extortion and theft, otherwise known as those infamous American “sanctions,” purportedly infused with the force of law across the entire globe by mere Washington fiat. Let’s just say that whatever is evil, vile, and thoroughly immoral, Washington will push, insisting it has some intrinsic right to do so, and Ukraine will mindlessly support such acts out of pure nobility and altruism. There will be no “happily ever after” scenarios in the American dreamscape for any civilisation except those exceptional Americans, especially the corporate variety. This backdrop should make abundantly clear why any intelligent and moral person must hope that Russia prevails in this conflict that it earnestly tried to avoid for eight long years of constant American provocations. First, for its own continued existence as a free and sovereign nation, but also to finally clip the wings of a non-stop bellicose American state that, over the course of three generations since World War II, has murdered, maimed and made homeless multiple millions of other human beings in its capacity as the most mean and cussed bully that prances around the entire planet just looking for fights with weaker victims whom it can later exploit with its shameless vulture capitalism, theft of resources, and the pauperisation of the local citizenry using its creations such as the World Bank and the IMF as its weapons of choice. In other words, Russia would be doing the entire world (yes, even Germany and the EU) a big favor by winning this war, and not merely surviving it.
Excellent points. Not only is “memory” a casualty of propaganda but this concept of “freedom” and “democracy vs. autocracy” is also never questioned.
“Liberty is a phantom. I’ve thought about that sincerely and I believe it. Freedom is no more than a ghost of mist. Man can seek it out, even believe he has grasped it … and in the end he is left with only fleeting bits of mist in his hands.” – Luis Bunuel
If humanity is to avoid nuclear annihilation we must recognize that all wars are fought for power, but that power is an illusion: that is everyone eventually gets the conflict the seek to avoid – even WW3 it would seem.
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