After 15 months of conflict, The New Yorker’s reportage by Luke Mogelson and photographer Maxim Dondyuk shows us the war in Ukraine that the propaganda machine has been concealing.
Ceremony in Kiev on March 24 marking the ninth anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine and the graduation of officers of the National Academy of the National Guard of Ukraine and the Kyiv Institute of the National Guard of Ukraine. (President of Ukraine, Public domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
Original to ScheerPost
Let us consider the following paragraphs, which appear in the May 29 edition of The New Yorker:
“While Tynda and his team were fighting from the trench, long and powerful fusillades had issued from another Ukrainian position, on a hilltop behind them. I later went there with Tynda. In a blind overlooking the no man’s land stood an improbably antique contraption on iron wheels: a Maxim gun, the first fully automatic weapon ever made. Although this particular model dated from 1945, it was virtually identical to the original version, which was invented in 1884: a knobbed crank handle, wooden grips, a lidded compartment for adding cold water or snow when the barrel overheated….
“In the course of the past year, the U.S. has furnished Ukraine with more than thirty-five billion dollars in security assistance. Why, given the American largesse, had the 28th Brigade resorted to such a museum piece? A lot of equipment has been damaged or destroyed on the battlefield. At the same time, Ukraine appears to have forgone refitting debilitated units in order to stockpile for a large-scale offensive that is meant to take place later this spring. At least eight new brigades have been formed from scratch to spearhead the campaign. While these units have been receiving weapons, tanks, and training from the U.S. and Europe, veteran brigades like the 28th have had to hold the line with the dregs of a critically depleted arsenal.”
The piece, from which this passage is drawn, carries the headline, “Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine” and is the work of Luke Mogelson, a magazine correspondent of a dozen or so years’ experience.
Mogelson’s text is accompanied by the photographs of Maxim Dondyuk, a Ukrainian of roughly Mogelson’s age, either side of 40, whose work focuses on history and memory, topics that suggest a lot of thought goes into those 1/1000ths of a second when Dondyuk clicks his shutter.
There are many things to think about and say as we read this piece. I will shortly have more to say about the excellence of Mogelson’s text and Dondyuk’s photographs. For now, the first thing to note is that, after 15 months of conflict, their work suggests Western media may at last begin to cover the Ukraine war properly.
I will stay with the conditional verb for now, but this could mark a significant turn not only for the profession — which could use a significant turn, heaven knows — but also in public support for the U.S.–NATO proxy war against the Russian Federation.
Luke Mogelson, on right, in a 2015 panel discussion of his coverage of political asylum seekers. (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy University, Flickr, Attribution-NoDerivs, CC BY-ND 2.0)
As astute readers will already know, apart from a few staged forays near the front lines — officially controlled and monitored, never at the front lines — correspondents from The New York Times, the other big dailies, the wire services, and the broadcast networks have accepted without protest the Kiev regime’s refusal to allow them to see the war as it is.
Content these professional slovens have been to sit in Kiev hotel rooms and file stories based on the regime’s transparently unreliable accounts of events, all the while pretending their stories are properly reported and factual.
The exceptions here are Times correspondents such as Carlotta Gall, whose Russophobia seems reliably unbalanced enough to satisfy the Kyiv regime, and the two Andrews, Higgins and Kramer, who have an exquisite talent for stories that make absolutely no sense.
It was the two Andrews, you may recall, who had the Russians shelling the nuclear power plant they occupied and, later on, bombing their own prisoner-of-war camp in eastern Ukraine.
If correspondents cannot see the war and it makes no matter to them, we will not see it either. The result, as your columnist noted a while ago, has been two wars: There is the presented, the mythical war, and the real war.
“Our current brainwashing for war is similar to that preceding other wars,” John Pilger, the journalist and filmmaker, wrote in a Tweet the other day, “but never, in my experience as a war correspondent, as unrelenting or bereft of honest journalism.”
This is what makes Mogelson’s file so startling. In its graphic honesty it is a major step on from the gruel of propaganda corporate media have fed us since the Russian intervention began in February 2022. Those three Times correspondents just mentioned? They all have many years’ experience on Mogelson. None of them could change his typewriter ribbon, as we used to say.
Two Weeks in Trenches
Ukrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Mogelson and Dondyuk spent two weeks this past March with a Ukrainian infantry battalion as it fought in trenches “at a small Army position in the eastern region of the Donbas, where shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes.”
This was just outside a village south of Bakhmut, the much-embattled city lately lost to Russian forces. I have no doubt these two journalists were officially embedded with the high command’s approval. That is the way the Kiev regime is running this war. But, for whatever reason — and I will get to this question in a sec — there is no whiff of inhibition or self-censorship in either the reportage or the photographs. Both are raw, unflattering, as unforgiving as the scenes they depict:
“By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim, neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty percent of his men were new draftees. ‘They’re civilians with no experience,’ he said. ‘If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.’
We were in his bunker, which had been dug in the back yard of a half-demolished farmhouse; the constant rumble of artillery vibrated through the dirt walls. ‘A lot of the new guys don’t have the stamina to be out here,’ Pavlo said. ‘They get scared and they panic.’ His military call sign was Cranky, and he was renowned for his temper, but he spoke sympathetically about his weaker soldiers and their fears. Even for him, a career officer of twenty-three years, this phase of the war had been harrowing. On a road that passed in front of the farmhouse, a board had been nailed to a tree with the painted words ‘to moscow’ and an arrow pointing east. No one knew who’d put it there. Such optimistic brio seemed to be a vestige of another time.”
Mogelson then introduces us to others in the battalion:
“Just two of the soldiers who were rebuilding the machine-gun nest had been with the battalion since Kherson. One of them, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker called Bison — because he was built on like one — had been hospitalized three times: after being shot in the shoulder, after being wounded by shrapnel in the ankle and knee, and after being wounded by shrapnel in the back and arm. The other veteran, code-named Odesa, had enlisted in the Army in 2015, after dropping out of college. Short and stocky, he had the same serene deportment as Bison. The uncanny extent to which both men had adapted to their lethal environment underscored the agitation of the recent arrivals, who flinched whenever something whistled overhead or crashed nearby.
‘I only trust Bison,’ Odesa said. ‘If the new recruits run away, it will mean immediate death for us.’ He’d lost nearly all his closest friends in Kherson. Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: ‘Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.’ Because the high attrition rate had disproportionately affected the bravest and most aggressive soldiers—a phenomenon that one officer called ‘reverse natural selection’ — seasoned infantrymen like Odesa and Bison were extremely valuable and extremely fatigued. After Kherson, Odesa had gone awol. ‘I was in a bad place psychologically,’ he said. ‘I needed a break.’ After two months of resting and recuperating at home, he came back. His return was prompted not by a fear of being punished — what were they going to do, put him in the trenches? — but by a sense of loyalty to his dead friends. ‘I felt guilty,’ he said. ‘I realized that my place was here.’”
Reporting and writing of this caliber makes Mogelson look the dazzling star next to the correspondent-reenactors in their Kiev hotel rooms. But for my money he also keeps pace with a lot of standout names from the past. I see in his copy a little Dexter Filkins, a little Bernard Fall, a little Michael Herr, a little Martha Gellhorn, and I’ll go so far as to say a little Ernie Pyle.
As for Dondyuk’s pictures, the way they leap off the page brings to mind Tim Page, Horst Faas, Robert Kapa, and some of the other great war fotogs of their day. If this piece portends a turn or return (however you want to think of it) to reporting with some integrity to it, the project could not have got off to a better start. But let us stay with “if” for now.
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There are at bottom two kinds of journalists: There are the analysts, as I call them, who add an interpretive dimension to their coverage — understanding in addition to knowledge. And there are the reporters, empiricists in the just-the-facts vein who stay close to the ground and do not much dolly out for any kind of larger take.
Mogelson is of this latter type. Reporters of his sort invite us to infer from what they tell us. What shall we infer from superbly tactile, eye-of-the-camera reportage?
No Pretense of Victory
No Man’s Land between Russian and Ukraining forces during the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Luke Mogelson is not telling us about an army on the way to victory — or an army that pretends to itself it is on the way to victory, or one that wants the world to think it is on the way to victory. There are no battlefield successes, no advances, no high expectations in Mogelson’s story. There is “holding the line,” although few seem to hold, and there is staying alive. This is a story more given to severe attrition among soldiers waiting for the end and wondering how distant in time the end will prove.
In Mogelson’s writing we meet conscripts sent to the front after little or no training. He describes one man who was kidnapped on a city sidewalk and was under Russian fire three days later. Paralyzing fright, exhaustion, demoralization, desertions, a sort of Beetle Bailey incompetence — these are rampant among the green draftees that now make up the majority of the AFU’s infantry. They fight with Vietnam-era vehicles shipped from the U.S., or muzzle-loaded mortars long out of production, or Soviet-era weapons left over from the pre–1991 days—and, withal, too little ammunition for this kind of matériel to make any difference at all.
A 1945 Maxim gun of 1884 design? Jeez. Mogelson is right to question, if too briefly, where may be all the weapons the U.S. and NATO allies are shipping into Ukraine. A great number of them have already been destroyed, he reports, which comes as no surprise. Being as close to the scene as he put himself earlier this spring, he would have done well to tell us something about the greedheads who run the regime and the military as they sell shocking amounts of arms into the black market as soon as they arrive across the Polish border.
At one point, Mogelson and Dondyuk spend a day in a dugout with a seasoned sergeant named Kaban and a 19–year-old codenamed Cadet, so young he hasn’t lost his baby fat. “Later, Kaban entertained us with stories about his past romantic escapades,” Mogelson recounts, “and Dondyuk, the photographer, asked him whether he’d imparted any lessons to Cadet.
“ ‘There’s no point,’ Kaban said. ‘He’ll be dead soon.’
Cadet laughed, but Kaban didn’t.”
These are the voices of the war Mogelson tells us about. Can’t you just cut the anxiety in Cadet’s laugh with a knife?
I have to mention some wonderful touches in Mogelson’s report because they are superlative writing of the kind that is too rare these days. Of the soldier firing that Maxim gun: “The gun’s operator, a rawboned soccer hooligan with brass knuckles tattooed on his hand, spoke of the Maxim like a car enthusiast lauding the performance of a vintage Mustang.” Describing an unwieldy personnel carrier of Vietnam vintage, Mogelson tells us: “It looked like a green metal box on tracks… The maxed-out machine sounded like a blender full of silverware.”
Did Gellhorn do any better as she covered the Spanish Civil War for Colliers?
Mogelson shows us the war a few independent journalists have written of but a war we have not heretofore read about in mainstream media. This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is.
Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kiev regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting — who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service.
Mogelson reported this piece in March, and we can justly assume conditions on the front line of this war are now three months’ worth of worse. His report makes me want to bang my shoe on the table, Khrushchev-style, in equal measure for the disgraceful conduct of mainstreamers reenacting the work of correspondents, for the senseless loss of Ukrainian lives in the service of the presented war and for the AFU soldiers — veterans and the untrained draftees they command — who the Kiev regime has not quite but nearly abandoned.
Why Now?
The New Yorker mascot Eustace Tilley by Tim Needles. (Flickr, Attribution CC BY 2.0)
The obvious question is why this piece appears now in The New Yorker, a magazine thoroughly committed to every liberal orthodoxy you can think of, including the wisdom of this war and the certainty of an AFU victory. Hell broke loose last year, you will recall, when Amnesty International and then CBS News lifted the lid on the realities of the Ukraine conflict. What is different now?
This is hard to say. But the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places —among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media — that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality.
The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference. There is more talk now about the conditions necessary to begin negotiations. NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the West joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.
Mogelson’s intent, surely, was to do good work, full stop, and he has. But read in this larger context, its publication looks to me the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.
If I am right, the real war and the presented war will eventually be one. About time, I would say. Not that mainstream media are about to ’fess up to their sins and disgraces in their pitiful coverage of this war. They never will. Let us not get carried away on this point.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book Journalists and Their Shadows, is forthcoming from Clarity Press. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
This article is from ScheerPost.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Simple solution. The UN General Assembly should take a vote and determine what Ukraine’s borders should be, then EVERY member of the UN should respect that. Oh wait, that already happened.
Anyone who has known Ukrainians generally relates what great people they are.
What has happened to Ukraine is a horrific and totally unnecessary tragedy.
At independence in 1991, Ukraine had a great future. It was the most prosperous and highly developed part of the Soviet Union, with a well educated and highly skilled population of 52 million.
It had everything, steel, non ferrous metals, coal, oil refining, chemicals, aircraft, motor vehicles, locomotives and rolling stock, agricultural machinery, specialist shipbuilding, engineering, armaments, missiles, spacecraft.
The Antonov plant turned out the world’s biggest transport aircraft. All the engines for the Soviet Union’s thousands of military and civilian helicopters and its many export customers were manufactured there, as were most of the country’s marine engines. There were over 100 large machine building concerns producing things like machine tools, turbines, and giant presses that could stamp out a car body in a simple operation.
By 2010, this had all gone, the result of 20 years of non stop uncontrolled looting by a coterie of corrupt gangster oligarchs like Kolomoisky and Timoshenko and their ilk, acting in concert with Hunter Biden style western carpetbaggers. The economy collapsed. There was mass unemployment, poverty, destitution, alcoholism, drugs, prostitution, and organised crime indistinguishable from the endemic political gangsterism. Society disintegrated and the health service collapsed. Life expectancy plummeted from simple illnesses like TB which are not normally a problem in developed countries. Just 3 of the 100 machine building concerns remained, and they were hanging on by their fingertips.
By this time, Ukraine was already a failed state. It was the poorest country in Europe. In terms of GDP, it was slightly poorer than Egypt and slightly more prosperous than Syria. It was a centre of sex-, child-, arms- and organ-trafficking. The population had fallen to 38 million, with a further 7.5 million living abroad, either scratching a living picking cabbages in Poland, or working as the ubiquitous “Natasha” prostitutes, the only thing Ukraine produces the EU actually wants.
Now, post Maidan and after 15 months of a brutal war of attrition, Ukraine and its people are simply disappearing from the map, melting away before our eyes. Crimea and Donbas were lost with their population of over 7 million years ago. Millions have fled the country, a minimum of 8 million to the EU and 1.5 million to Russia. The true figures are certainly much higher. Ukrainian military dead are now somewhere north of 200,000 with a much larger figure for the wounded. The population currently controlled by the Kiev Regime is probably around a third of the pre independence figure, somewhere below 20 million.
If Ukraine survives at all, which appears increasingly unlikely, it will be as a landlocked, impoverished, depopulated rump state, a European Somalia/ Afghanistan/ Syria, or Libya-On-The Dnieper, with its Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian and Romanian neighbours licking their lips and hovering vulture like over the carcass. It is unlikely even that much will survive in the form of Monsanto style agribusiness or extractive industries.
That is what happens when a country is targeted by the neocons and turned into a CIA playground with a bought and paid for compliant client regime. It is always the same, chapter and verse from the same playbook.
Everything in this article is essentially what we’ve been told in regards to Russia as the operation began. From the beginning of the operation, the context of the article is basically a mirroring reflection of the lies that were spewed from our medias up to today. Further evidence that everything our western governments and their MSMs tell us are not only lies, but also what they are and the conditions they create.
With an election winding up in the US, the main goal now is to keep it going despite the casualties that will mount for the Ukrainian side. Biden’s administration can’t be allowed to look like the loser it is. The arms mentioned in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. I should say the last bit of the iceberg. The best of what has been sent to Ukraine, I should say, made it to the front, is highly useless towards Russian technology. Which is why it’s used against civilian populations where there isn’t any military positions. The obvious more important agenda must be creating a terror effect on the population rather than winning a war. Turning people against the operation and Putin.
If you want another realistic outlook, I highly suggest catching one of the latest episodes of CrossTalk.
hxxs://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/577139-f16-jets-ukraine-unacceptable-escalation/
The point of all wars America provokes is not to win them, the point of it is capitalism, to profit from the prosecution of those wars. The for-profit US government and Pentagon have not taken and wasted all your tax dollars to buy weapons that will sit in storage waiting to be used against simplistic caricatures as Hitler and other “bad guys”. The point of it all is capitalist business for profit. They have to contrive some “bad guys”. Just think of all those people who were killed, raped, poisoned, irrevocably harmed, everywhere in the world, by the US in its fight to bring them freedom and democracy and consumer choice. The point of all that death and destruction is to make some very wealthy, powerful, unaccountable people repulsively wealthier still through the exploitation and extraction of human and natural resources of those “liberated”. That is the best that America can do. America kills children by their dozens. That is the best that America can do. The US is the “bad guys” now.
The piece made me think of the Russian officer in a Patrick Lancaster video. A young soldier asked the officer if one ever got used to the carnage — they were watching Ukrainian snipers fire at a woman trying to cross open ground to the Russians. The officer said, “No, you never get used to it.” Meanwhile they were providing food and medical aid to people. I’ve listened to Ukrainians who even support Kyiv talk about how the Ukrainian military did nothing to help them when the Russian military did. I don’t think Westerners can even comprehend this.
it is very sad..250,000 Ukr.soldiers died and many more wounded …for what ????
100% of the “news” from the front disseminated by the “mainstream” media is the most extreme outrageous pack of lies meant to hide any semblance of truth and keep most Americans believing that their government and their tax money supports alleged “freedom and democracy” rather than the neo-Nazi fascism of Bandera, Zelensky, “glorious” Ukraine, the thoroughly corrupt local oligarchs and the global American-based Neocon movement. 90% of the same is found on the so-called “independent” media of the internet which is controlled by a small number of biased corporations and tyrannical state entities. Would-be purveyors of truth on You Tube are always reminding their audiences that truth only goes so far on that subsidiary of Google, and that they risk being yanked if they disclose too much of it. Look, even the EU has announced that revived Twitter under Elon Musk will either consent to be censored, shielding the population once again from anything resembling the truth, or it will be blocked within their jurisdiction. Yes, exactly the same policy of censorship practiced by China which is so roundly condemned in the hypocritical West. Bloviating American Windbag-in-chief Lord Biden has built his current political career and presidential campaign around condemning half of his fellow Americans as “White supremacists” along with the enactment of policies meant, not just to push selected minorities ahead, but to systematically condemn and disadvantage individuals amongst his targeted foes in terms of equal rights and opportunities–in other words to “fight racism with racism” all made possible with sleazy politics. Seems like a natural choice of allies for loco Joe to make, as that is exactly what those Ukrainian Banderites he so fervently supports also stand for, only their targets for destruction are ethnic Russians, indeed all of Russian culture, rather than specific categories of fellow Americans. Joe, with his obnoxious upside-down “smile,” squinty-eyes and nasty sarcastic tone, is a rare match to unctuous and weaselly Volodimir on the revulsion scale. A perfect team they make to dispense hatred, lies and perdition, at least as far as I am concerned.
What else is to be expected when Imperial Foreign Policy is ceded to a Bronze Age Death Cult?
I can only imagine the angst and tearful cries of, but Putin is a monster from the liberal set if the US is forced into negotiating a deal with Russia. First the debunking of Russiagate and now no victory for Ukraine. Will they ever recover from such a reversal of the Democrat’s imperial triumphalism?
What Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, Austin, Miley etc. have done to the people of Ukraine is unforgivable. Unfortunately, just as Bush Jr., Cheney, and Powell escaped consequences for their decision to invade Iraq based on lies, the people responsible for this Ukraine debacle will also suffer no consequences for the massive amounts of Ukrainian blood and guts spilled all over the war zone.
The D.C. crowd, including WaPo and the NYT just forget about all the deaths and destruction and start an immediate search for the next victim (country). If Madeline Albright can get a big ceremonial send off given the carnage she was responsible for, none of the above mentioned has to worry about a proper D.C. going away party.
Sadly, Robert, I fully agree with your post. Not only will the upper echelon not face serious consequences for their actions, they will be feted as elder statesmen/women, their books will be read, their lofty place in life never threatened.
I wish it wasn’t so, but Mr. Robert, you are 100% correct.
“Reverse natural selection”. I don’t agree with that. Actually, it pains me to say it. But it’s really just natural selection. Isn’t the fundamental principle of natural selection that those most adaptable to the world they live in survive to produce the next generation and so the species survives? While, in a different epoch, the best fighter may have indeed been the one to survive and spawn the next generation. In this epoch the ability to read past propaganda and the willingness to get on better with our fellow humans from other countries are essential qualities needed for survival of the species.
The war we are finally allowed to see. Yes, but in tiny, disconnected pieces.
I wish Lawrence or Ritter would do a similar reality check on the war reporting by Col. Douglas MacGregor. He can be full of right-wing BS but some of his straight military analysis of overall strategy is interesting – certainly what is not appearing in the Guardian or NYT.
Douglas MacGregor has appeared on the same platform with Scott Ritter, both with and without Judge Andrew Napolitano as the interviewer. Napolitano, a strong advocate for peace and truth in this war, has also interviewed on multiple occasions British ambassador Alistair Crooke, American colonel Daniel Davis and former CIA agents Larry Johnson, Phillip Giraldi and Ray MacGovern. They all seem to concur on the major aspects of this conflict deliberately provoked, and escalated every step of the way, by the United States government. I am still oriented to progressive, initiatives in domestic politics, yet if all these gentlemen are conservatives, it is only the conservative side of the aisle speaking truth to power and anything resembling sanity about the war–about its course and any realistic plans to end it. No prominent Dem (except RFK Jr and former Dem Tulsi Gabbard) wants to end it as they all pine for their “precious.”
I’m afraid the Democratic Party and “liberals” aren’t what they claim to be either in foreign or domestic affairs. Chris Hedges wrote about the sort of people in his Death of the Liberal Class as well as Thomas Frank in Listen LIberal from a different perspective. The “left” as its termed by conservative critics is not any kind of left but, rather, has turned into a neo-fascist party in favor of the FBI, the CIA, war, empire, identity politics and against free speech, liberty, the Bill of Rights. It is fascist because it favors the use of force from the top-down whether it’s to force school systems to adopt the absurdist 1619 version of American history, transvestites performing sexual stereotypes in front of small children, and whole anti-liberal “wokeness” phenomenon that threatens to radically divide us culturally so the corporations and oligarchs can more effectively divide and rule us. I say this as leftist of the old style, anti-war, anti-empire, pro civil rights for all, pro civil liberty, against censorship and for the working class which means there is no place for me on the left except for the few at the “far” left like Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, and many others who flock around the ideas of opposing rather than enabling the authoritarian mafia state we currently live in.
What’s really chilling is to read an accurate translation of Germany’s Dec. 11, 1941 Declaration of War against the United States. The US regime’s endless provocations, the rejection of every peaceful solution for Europe, massive arms shipments, endless media demonization – they are all as familiar as the factual explanation by Macgregor and others of how and why Ukraine is being bled to death today. Yet the myth of the “good war” is still as sacrosanct to most Americans as the “Lost Cause” is to many southerners. Dare to contradict either with accurate facts of what actually happened and you are in for a world of hurt. Meanwhile, our country is still run by a cabal that wants to rule the world, while paying lip service to freedom and democracy.
So many thanks for a marvelous report and also to “The New Yorker”. Many have come to similar conclusions
but have been innundated by the official narrative. Very occasionally there is a tiny peak into reality, a few
words from a soldier… And all this for the scripted US-NATO-EU view. Today in Helsinki Secretary of State Blinken
states a commitment to the no compromise view of the Ukrainian (and far right?) line . More profits for defense
contractors. More death and destruction for Ukraine. The only solution seems more and more to be a total
defeat for the current Kyiv government.
It used to be that Zionism was the litmus test for the dividing line between liberal and progressive. The new dividing line is Ukraine and Russiaphobia.
The question “why is this appearing now?” can also be asked with respect to Jack Texeira’s “leaks” ( if that is what they were). Too few people are asking how this lowly Air National Guardsman got access to high level intelligence, including material from the CIA. Not only military intelligence, but info from an entirely different silo. It brings up the question: was this info fed to him? Was this an exercise in public expectation management? The info paints a grim picture of the progress and trajectory of the war.
The Texeira episode reeks of an exercise of the Deep State preparing for the inevitable: “Look , we had reservations and doubts all along but those erratic lunatics elected by Boobus Americanus insisted on the “Whatever it takes, for however long it takes” policies. People need to listen to the Experts; Us.”
It will, of course, succeed.
America, your TRUTH ain’t strong!
This silly war—it does us wrong!
Like Bushie and Biden
America’s sliding—–
And so dies America’s song! : (
The familiar pattern is truth followed by disengagement, which would mean a curtailment of U.S. munitions to Ukraine.
With a presidential election on the horizon, there seem to me too many variables to make a confident prediction.
A recent comment to a CN column suggested to me the view that readers here are not in sympathy with Ukraine and its victims. I do not believe this is so. Idiots and monsters prevail and fling innocents into the trenches–the hideous repeat of history. But I wanted to draw attention to an excellent analysis on a related topic–regarding the revelations of Jack Teixeira (and thank you, Patrick):
xttps://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/jack-teixeira-the-deep-state-and-captured-media/
In keeping with preparing the American people for the reality that Ukraine is a lost war, has anyone noticed that some of the photos of the Ukraine President now show him in a less attractive pose. No more stunning photos of him and his wife on the cover of US magazines. And the recently announced report from the CIA that 400 million dollars of US tax payer money without strings to Zelensky and his friends cannot be accounted for. Zelensky now owns a villa in Italy. The then there is the statement USDOD that neither side will win and that negotiations need to start soon.
The truly sad part of all this that those in the Biden who advocated for this war will not be fired, but will still be in a position to lead the. American people to their next policy disaster. i
Zelensky supposedly has a nice place outside of Miami. The purpose of the war is to fleece the American people before the whole kit and kabuttle nose dives. Western Ukraine will be owned by Cargil.
‘those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches’ are in reality advertising their deranged, that is unhinged determination to hold onto their hatred of Donald Trump. They have no concern whatsoever for the people of Ukraine who are dying. The deaths of Ukrainians are evaluated as a just cause in the endless pursuit of their addiction to hatred for Trump. Like the flag of Ukraine, the Trump haters come in two colors. There are the demoralized blue haters who still believe that Trump somehow conspired with Putin. This despite the failure of the Mueller partisans to produce an indictment. As well as the Inspector General and Durham reports that detailed the FBI, DOJ and Obama White House corruption and collusion. Then there are the yellow version, who know full well that the Trump-Russia hoax was a lie, but will do anything to remain in power. Count most Democrat party leaders, Biden, Schumer, Pelosi among them. These people have no ideas for how to run the U.S. let alone the rest of the world. All they can do is destroy what other people have built. Thus, the need to create a monster to deflect all of their own incompetence and failure. Once Trump was out of office, they needed a new figure to demonize. The Psychological Operation was then shifted to Putin. Then the demoralized faithful were all issued blue and yellow flags for their porches and lapels.
The dopes with the Ukrainian flags on their porches are just engaging in massive virtue signalling, just like a majority of Americans. A vast majority whom couldn’t find Ukraine on a map.
“The New Yorker, a magazine thoroughly committed to every liberal orthodoxy you can think of”
Ah, well, hmmmm. What is “liberal” these days. I am sure I do not know. The magazine was once a pillar of journalism and might become so again. It did important work in the Vietnam era.
The Vietnam Holocaust was a war informed by Democratic liberal values.
Those working from “home” never understand the realities of working and sweating at the same time. So it is with those reporting this war — with rare exceptions. Meanwhile, the offensive remains mostly still born and waiting for burial.
Hold on Rudy. At the recent NATO foreign ministers meeting in Oslo, Blinken said another $300 million has been approved for Ukraine weapons aid. Maybe just waiting for that.
Loyal Americans : Forget oldtruth. Embrace newtruth.