The lack of objective, principled coverage of the war in Ukraine is a degenerate state of affairs. The one thing worse is the extent to which it’s perfectly fine with most Americans.
Ukrainian government photo of soldiers during battle in Mariupol on March 15. (CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately.
Let me try that another way: The government-supervised New York Times and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.
So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission — most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.
There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all.
There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.
This majority — and it is almost certainly a majority — has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations — NPR, the BBC — serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.
This leaves us in a sad and very parlous place.
Sad: Is there some state more pitiful than having no genuine connection to one’s own thoughts, perceptions, experience—altogether to one’s life? If Americans are not a profoundly sad people behind all the smiles we see in advertising, idiotic comedy shows, and on Facebook, then I must be missing something.
Parlous: Over the course of some decades — from the mid–Cold War years, I would say — Americans have been rendered highly vulnerable to the manipulations of those who control the images through which most people have come to live. Anyone who has read a history of the 20th century knows where this can lead.
The five weeks that have passed since the Russian intervention on Feb. 24 have been shocking on both these counts. The derelictions of the press and broadcasters are without precedent in my lifetime, and with Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the covert operation in Syria among the wreckage in the rearview mirror, this is saying something.
I will let the American public’s enthusiasm for the sinkhole that is Ukraine, the Azov Battalion, and the ridiculous posturing of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian who is no longer funny, speak for itself.
‘Questionable Veracity’
Fan art of the “Ghost of Kyiv” by Andriy Dankovych. (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimeda Commons)
Ten days into the Russian intervention, the propaganda coming out of Kiev was already so preposterous The New York Times felt compelled to publish a piece headlined, “In Ukraine’s Information War, a Blend of Fact and Fiction.” This was a baldly rendered apologia for the many “stories of questionable veracity,” as The Times put it, then in circulation. I do love The Times for its delicate phrasing when describing indelicate matters.
There was the “Ghost of Kiev” story, featuring an heroic fighter pilot who turned out to derive from a video game. There were the Snake Island heroes, 13 Ukrainian soldiers who held out to the death on some small speck in the Black Sea, except that it turned out they surrendered, though not before Zelensky awarded them posthumous medals of honor that were not posthumous.
After railing against disinformation for years, The Times wants us to know, disinformation is O.K. in Ukraine because the Ukrainians are our side and they are simply “boosting morale.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island turn out now to be mere prelude, opening acts in the most extensive propaganda operation of the many I can recall.
There was the maternity ward the Russians supposedly bombed in Mariupol. And then the theater, and then the art school. All filled with huddling citizens the Russian air force cynically targeted because “this is genocide,” as the ever-intemperate Zelensky does not hesitate to assert.
All of this has been reported as fact in the Times and other major dailies and, of course, by the major broadcasters. There have been pictures. There have been videos, all very persuasive to the eye.
And then, as evidence mounts that these incidents were staged as propaganda to frame the Russians and draw NATO forces directly into the war, a silence worthy of a Catholic chapel descends. We read no more of the maternity ward that turned out to be an improvised Azov base, or the theater, where citizens were herded, photographed in raggedy blankets, and sent away. Ditto the art school: Nothing more on this since the initial reports began to collapse. No body counts, no mention of the fact that Russian jets did not fly over Mariupol on the days in question.
Snake Island in Ukraine. (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Before proceeding to Bucha, the outrage of the moment, I must reproduce a quotation from that propaganda-is-O.K. piece The Times published in its March 3 editions. It is from a Twitter user who was distressed that it became public that the Ghost of Kiev turned out to be a ghost and the Snake Island heroes didn’t do much by way of holding the fort.
“Why can’t we just let people believe some things?” this thoughtful man or woman wanted to know. What is wrong, in other words, if thinking and believing nice things that aren’t true makes people feel better?
America the beautiful, or something like that.
Bucha is a suburb of 35,000 souls a few miles north of Kiev and one of the cities Russian forces began to evacuate on March 29 as peace talks in Istanbul progressed. Two days later the mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, celebrated the city’s liberation in a selfie-speech to his citizenry. He made no mention of anything untoward in Bucha’s streets, backyards, or public spaces.
Four days later, April 2, a special unit of the Ukrainian national police deployed to Bucha. And suddenly the place turns out to be a hellhole: bodies in the streets — 410, according to the Prosecutor General’s office in Kiev — evidence of atrocities galore, people bound and shot point blank. The whole nine, in short.
Instant Outrage
The outrage from Washington, London and Paris — “worldwide outrage,” this would be — was instant. No demand for an impartial inquiry, forensic inspections, or any such thing. No one asked why corpses left in the street for five days appeared to be fresh, or why the relatives of the dead left them there until Kiev’s commando unit arrived.
António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, was level-headed enough to state, “It is essential that an independent investigation leads to effective accountability.” This is the only sound position at this point. But we know from a long history how far SGs at the U.N. get with this sort of talk.
In my read this is yet another of the false flags the Kiev regime flies almost by the day now. Paying-attention people will not miss the striking similarity between these incidents and the numerous put-up jobs that featured in Washington’s covert operation in Syria and the campaign of those famous “moderate rebels” who desperately wanted to draw the U.S. into the conflict.
As a matter of principle we must await evidence of what happened in Bucha, even as we know we are likely to see as much about events there as we have in Mariupol. We also know that to most people neither evidence nor its absence matters.
We have been told once again what to think and believe, and most of us will think and believe it.
Media engineer. (State Department/Ron Przysucha)
We are to add this to various other “truths” now almost universally accepted: The Russian intervention had nothing to do with NATO expansion and was “unprovoked” — that favored term in the Biden regime. Ukrainian forces have pushed the Russians into retreat: not that the pressure on Kiev was a Russian diversionary tactic to keep Ukrainian forces away from Donbass where the fighting is.
After the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New York Review of Books called “Lying in Politics.” In it she wrote of America’s slide into a sort of collective psychosis she termed “defactualization.” Facts are fragile, Arendt wrote, in that they tell no story in themselves. They can be assembled to mean whatever one wants them to mean. This leaves them vulnerable to the manipulations of storytellers.
“The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts,” Arendt explained in this remarkable piece of work, “that is, with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.”
A dead body in a Ukrainian street, in other words, can be assigned a meaning that, once it is established, evidence to the contrary cannot be used to erase.
It is a half-century since Arendt published “Lying in Politics.” And it is to that time, the 1960s and 1970s, that we must trace the formation of what now amounts to America’s great bubble of pretend. The world as it is has mattered less and less since Arendt’s time, the world as we have wished it to be has mattered more and more.
Nine years before Arendt published her NYRB piece, Daniel Boorstin brought out The Image: Or, What happened to the American Dream, an unjustly neglected work. “I describe the world of our making,” he wrote, “how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”
The press, as you can imagine, did not escape Boorstin’s scrutiny. “The reporter’s task,” he wrote memorably, “is to find a way to weave these threads of unreality into a fabric the reader will not recognize as entirely unreal.”
This is our condition. The Ukraine crisis is the mirror that reflects us as we are.
Now I will relate a peculiar coincidence, pertinent to our case.
Last week I took it upon myself to watch Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, all four hours of it. This is the famously explosive documentary that forced the French to come to terms with the extent to which they had collaborated with the Nazis during the three years and some they occupied France.
Movie poster of an eye with a single teardrop and a tiny swastika near the pupil. (Wikimedia Commons)
This film has a special meaning for me. It came out in 1969, just as I arrived in Paris for university studies. France was in an uproar over Ophuls’ film. It was banned from broadcast on French television until 1981. I did not understand much of this at the time.
The Sorrow and the Pity shredded to pieces, relentlessly, unblinkingly, the national myth that the French had all been heroes of the resistance, or had aided it, or had in some way stood against the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, hero of Verdun in World War I, capitulationist in World War II. This was nothing like the case.
Now I understand what the young student long ago could not quite grasp. The French simply could not face Ophuls’ unyielding exposure of who they had been. Ophuls had punctured the enduring bubble of pretend within which they had lived for 25 years after the 1945 victory in Europe.
People can live in these bubbles a very long time. The unreality within them can be very persuasive. The French finally emerged from their bubble. It was painful, a passage full of angst, but they were fortunate to have escaped.
Will we have our interim of sorrow, of pity, and emerge from our bubble the better for it? May we someday be so blest.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
On Twitter suspending you..
“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
George R.R. Martin.
Thanks CN
I am Polish and I have lived in this bubble all my life. My father told me stories of him fighting in 1939. He was disarmed not long after 17th September by Soviet troops. The unit was dissolved and the officer was captured by the Soviets. Later he turned out to be dead in Katy? with a hole in the back of his head. Nazis, when they occupied the territory, invited international Red Cross to investigate. The bodies were in such state of decay and the uniforms in such good shape that it was impossible for all these officers to be killed recently. And so most Poles (falsely?) believe that the Soviets killed these officers. By the way, Russians in the 90’s admitted and even produced documents as evidence that the massacre was planned by NKVD. So maybe Soviets did kill them because they deserved to be killed, because they were Nazis themselves. Nevermind that the Poles fought Nazis on all fronts. They must have been Nazis since they did not like to be subjugated to the Soviets. Or maybe we are Nazis because we exterminated Jews along with Nazis in Poland, and Soviets killed those officers to prevent greater massacre of Jews at the hands of the Poles. What a smart forward looking move, just like now in Ukraine. And so after Katy? came the years of Soviet occupation of Poland. Or was it not an occupation? Was it the will of the people? Did we want to be under Soviet rule? You know best, tell me. You must know what was going on in my compatriots’ minds when they ploted all these years how to break free. Or maybe this never happend. It is all propaganda. All those demonstrations in Gda?sk, the Solidarity movement, all of this was staged by Americans. Filmed some place outside Detroit with lots of Polish speaking actors. I can’t wrap my mind around this because I saw all this with my own eyes. Must have been a delusion. So I am in this bubble, distrusting the state and its operatives that subjugated, killed, raped the Poles for years. Yes, Ukrainians have inflicted suffering on the Poles, quite a lot. But we had a share of their suffering as well. Please let me be the judge of our bilateral relations. I tell you it has nothing to do with what both the Poles and Ukrainians suffered from the Russians. This is first hand experience of my family. The Russians lied about Katy? all these years and they are beginning to lie about it now. What ground do we have to trust them? When we see hundreds and thousands of photographs of burned down residential buildings in Ukraine now, are we supposed to believe that the Ukrainian state bombed all these places to get the Americans involved? Doesn’t this sound ludicrous, at least a little bit? How perverted should you be to kill thousands of your own people, bomb your own infrastructure and residential buildings in order to get arms from the west and get the west to enter your territory to fight the Russians? Wow, what a devious and perverted plan. Only a comedian could come up with something like this. Only a young inexperienced politician, former actor with a young wife and small kids could kill his own kin by the thousand to get America into a fight with Russia. On the other hand, a former KGB agent who initiated several wars in the past is worthy of absolute trust. A lie could not come out of his mouth for certain. How deluded one has to be to mistrust Putin and fail to understand that this young politician is using American weaponry to bomb his own country. History knows hundreds of such plots that were uncovered later. Sorry, right now I can’t remember of any such example. Could you please remind me of the first dozen that comes to your mind? Well, so what to make of the Snake Island? How do they weigh against the preponderance of evidence? Against common sense? Who usually kills civilians, home army or an invading army? I don’t know you tell me. Who usually bombs civil infrastructure, home army or invading army? I have no inkling. Who has a greater burden of proof. Russians who obviously are in Ukrainian territory or Ukrainians? Where are the hundreds of videos with captured Ukrainian soldiers admitting they where forced to fight for a Nazi regime? Where are the thousands of videos of liberated Russian speaking Ukrainians decrying the oppression under Ukrainian Nazi regime over the last eitht years? Send me links to a couple of dozen at least so that I can get out of the bubble and see for myself. Be so kind and help a lost soul.
What a powerful essay; it resonates strongly with me. You point out the sadness in Americans, and I feel it within me and around me. It is, as you put it, rooted in an isolation and disconnection from one’s own direct perceptions and experience. It is existential alienation, but alienation is no longer part of our discussion. Perhaps alienation is just taken as a given of human existence, as if it were natural and normal. And, consequent to that, those who experience this sadness fail to recognize its source and place that instead outside themselves, and agitate to change the outside material world in hopes that will assuage their inner hunger. Almost an inverse of those in earlier generations who tried to assuage that hunger by acquiring wealth and material goods. Both groups fail to recognize that the problem is not rooted in the material and therefore cannot be repaired in the material.
The general decline of critical thinking runs in proportion to the rise of our reliance on direct images instead of words; images are more easily mistaken as truths, while words are symbols that require decoding and thereby engage some thought. That, to me, is just what Hannah Arendt was talking about: the photograph looks like an undeniable fact, but the truth of the photograph is contingent on information that does not lie within the photograph itself; that is its contingency. The general decline of literacy in America is not the direct cause for our passivity and susceptibility to propaganda, but that decline is a predisposing, and I would say necessary, requisite. A properly literate citizenry, with some training in logic, would at least be resistant to this propaganda. Though, to give the devil his due, the propagandists have been at work for the past 100 years refining their tools. And they have become expert.
Any way you look at it, we are in sad shape. And I try to look on the bright side.
Such a bubble has happened from time to time in many places.
It pops.
Reality happens. It can take time, but it does intrude on the fantasy world.
In this case, that is likely to be the crushing defeat of Ukraine, followed by “revisionist” explanations that seek to excuse how such a shock happened.
That revisionism may also be fantasy, but it by definition won’t be what we are hearing now.
Really outstanding article! As a small child, I wasn’t allowed to get up from the dinner table until I ate my vegetables. While I don’t believe in taking hostages, if the roles could be reversed I would not let family and friends get up from the table until they read this.
I’ve also thought that the heart of the problem is “reality forms only in images”. There are many people who still don’t know what deepfakes are. Manipulation of still images is believed to have a limited scope as a product marketing tool, including taking in ladies’ waistlines (along with the wavy walls and furniture that sometimes remain in the background) and not as a propaganda tool.
Does Photoshop ’22 come with a “how to make your own war in 30 minutes” template? Maybe it will be sold separately as an app.
“Facts are fragile, Arendt wrote, in that they tell no story in themselves. They can be assembled to mean whatever one wants them to mean. This leaves them vulnerable to the manipulations of storytellers.”
One wonders if Hannah Arendt knew Humpty Dumpty said almost the exact same thing:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
And “that’s all” you need to know about how US government and the mainstream media works.
Alice.
Very astute.
In fact, Arendt was writing in reaction to the increasing tendency of our pols to lie to the public as a matter of course–and I would say the increasing tendency of the public to believe the lies. In the essay she used the term “Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere.” you seem to’ve got that perfectly right.
I thank all commenters for this especially enlightening thread, and for the generous encouragement of so many readers. Special thanks to Nancy Volle, just below this comment, for her note on the Twitter matter, At this point I am indeed suspended, and there is no way of determining if this will prove temporary or permanent. Diabolic.
If I may, I ask readers to do what they can to get word of the work around., I don’t much care for Twitter, to be honest, but it is useful in leveraging the columns and getting them “out there.” This I regret I am unable to do.
Kindest rgds to all.
Patrick
Patrick Lawrence, I was sorry to discover that Twitter has suspended your account. I hope your thoughtful commentary will be allowed to return there.
“Show us some pictures”. We can the thank the advertising industry for the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words,” plagiarized from multiple sources (and attributed to many more because they already knew back then that nobody would believe anything that came from advertisers).
In fact the opposite is true: a picture REQUIRES a thousand words to provide context and clarification. Lies travel at the speed of light while the truth trundles along at the speed of sound.
The intelligence agencies have become very sophisticated in exploiting people’s perceptions through emotional manipulation. Thank you Edward Bernays, not. Add to that the whole Trump Derangement Syndrome Russia-gate psy-op and you have a population ready made for a proxy war with Russia using Ukraine as cannon fodder.
What’s scary is what this deluded population will be capable of once the economic split between the China Russia alliance and the Western dying empire countries becomes final. The shock waves will be far more than the latter populations are prepared to comprehend. And that’s where the rise of Naziism is taking place. The criminality in Western so called leadership is staggering.
I agree…. Whatever the Russians manage to achieve in terms of ‘denazification’ in Mariupol and the cauldrons in Donbass, (and if the Ukrainians do not accept terms it will be an awful end) there would seem to be an inevitability to the rise of a white supremacist Nazism that will leak out all over Europe – a Europe which will be being torn apart by economic recession.
The pain will cause all the populations to bay for scapegoats – both external and horrifyingly, internal to their own countries or regions. The conditions for fascism will be perfect. Germany is already rearming.
I find it difficult not to believe that this has actually be gamed for a very very long time.. The role of the CIA and British intelligence services and others in keeping Nazism alive, trained and now armed is undeniable.
I read Patrick Lawrence’s piece carefully because I am curious and open-minded. I also read each and every comment plainly, without prejudice. I am convinced, more than ever, that a large percentage of Americans are fearful and ignorant. Most disturbingly, they have successfully coalesced into a fantastically large, interconnected bloc where paranoia and outrage are echoed and amplified. Once upon a time, Trump-style lies could be easily slapped down. But the Voices of Conspiracy have grown louder and more vicious… Sometimes I think the world has gone completely mad. And maybe it has. This morning’s read has made me think so.
“The one thing worse is the extent to which it’s perfectly fine with most Americans.”
Not all agree since journalists and strategists tend not to view phenomena through the same prism, whilst journalists and propagandists do tend to view phenomena through the same prism.
Such are among the Jaw dropping power(s) of US propaganda – attempts at chastisement mutating into self-flagellation.
The media in France, even more hyped up next to the election here, are completely on the side of Ze and his over-the-top takeover of the whole story. Even the UK refusal to have the UNSC meeting called by Russia, then allowing a meeting with Saint Zelinsky speaking (no mention of what Russia said, though I did find Nebenzia’s ripost on the saker blog), did not warrant any comment.
btw I have never found out about the actual facts on the disgusting boycott of the paralympian athletes from Russia and Belarus in the Beijing Winter Olympics. What did really happen? No word on any media I read. Shameful but of course not admitted.
Isn’t he just there to split the nationalist vote to ensure Macron gets back in?
Excellent as always. Like termites in a tree, when the collapse comes it comes seemingly all at once. This is a paradigm shift for America’s corporate press. There is just no pretending anymore that it is not a bonafide propaganda arm of the US governement, fifth estate be damned.
I understand that Biden’s press secretary, Psaki, is leaving to join MSNBC in the next few weeks. She is not the first. This seems to be the modus operandi for spies and press secretaries and other administration officials over the last several decades. That about sums it up. A free press? An educated and informed public? This is the American empire collapsing before our eyes, a people’s democracy be damned.
Well, since the ’90s, MSNBC has served as a marketing tool for the Democrat Party, just as Fox is a marketing tool for the Republican Party. They are currently our leading propaganda vehicles.
To understand why Americans are so susceptible to propaganda just look at what’s happening to Julian Assange and why.
Julian was purveying uncomfortable truths about American imperialism and a majority of Americans correctly perceive him as a threat to American domination.
That’s the crux of Americans’ addiction to lies. They support U.S. hegemony, if only tacitly, or even subliminally, because they think there’s money in it for them.
Average Americans foolishly believe that American oligarchs are going to cut them in on the action. Of course, U.S. oligarchs have no intention of doing any such thing. U.S. oligarchs want easy, dirty money only for themselves and have no intention of sharing it with pissant peasants, regardless of color, creed, or nationality.
There are none so blind as those who believe their paycheck depends on their not seeing, regardless of whether that belief is foolish and mistaken.
Can anyone tell me where to go to hear reports from Western journalists embedded with the Russian forces?
I also can’t seem to access the Kremlin website or Russian news outlets.
It’s hard to trust what I hear about this war when I can only access one side.
France continues the tradition Patrick describes. I do not have TV or read any of the newspapers, but just the main points in my QWANT search engine (to avoid google) I have only the repeated lies as in the US mass media, word for word, no replies allowed.
Well said RNB, this is a true form of propaganda such as I remember from the NAZI occupation during WW II in The Netherlands!!
It doesn’t appear any western journalists are embedded with Russian forces not least because they ban all non-military electronic communications (ie, confiscated cell phones), but there are some in the DPR attached to the militias there (Russell Texas Bentley, now banned from Youtube but can be found in Rumble, reporting from Donetsk); from Mariupol, Patrick Lancaster who still is on Youtube who reports first hand harrowing stuff from the streets; Gonzalo Lira reports from Karkhov, but mainly from second-hand accounts from locals he knows and interviews (partly banned from Youtube, but still hanging in there). And Regis Tremblay based in Crimea who gets informative interviewees on, also on Youtube.
Thanks for the information!
There are nice counternarratives on thegrayzone.com and moonoveralabama.org. They admittedly get stuff wrong and own up to it, unlike State Media. Also Scott Ritter and Colonel Douglas MacGregor, though almost as strident as State Media, give nice insights into what the Russian military is doing and why.
I got on RT last night, so I think I do have access to some Russian news outlets. Let’s scratch the second sentence of my preceding comment. I still can’t access the Kremlin, and I’m looking for a transcript of Putin’s Nov 18, 2021 speech.
I found two speeches with date 11/18/21:
Transcript of Putin’s speech at a meeting on social issues
hxxp://prezident.org/tekst/stenogramma-vystuplenija-putina-na-soveschanii-po-socialnym-voprosam-18-11-2021.html
Transcript of Putin’s speech at the extended meeting of the Foreign Ministry Board
hxxp://prezident.org/tekst/stenogramma-vystuplenija-putina-na-rasshirennom-zasedanii-kollegii-mid-18-11-2021.html
I recommend you check out TheDuran and also Patrick Lancaster on youtube.
For those who understand Russian, and want to see the actual battles fought from the Russian side, go to simplicius76 on bitchute, which is pretty hard to beat as it’s like how war journalism was during the Vietnam war.
Sounds like Mass Formation Psychosis. Gee, where have I heard that term recently? Great article Mr. Lawrence, except that it fails to answer the most present question on the western mind; why did Will slap Chris?
“A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes. By the time the truth catches up, it’s too late. The lie has become lore. And that’s what’s so worrying. …” — Professor Heather Cox Richardson
This article describes why I gave up on the NY Times and unsubscribed. Not only was I being misinformed by them, they seemed to be censoring my comments when I presented Russia’s POV in comments.
“IF YOU DON’T READ THE NEWSPAPER, YOU’RE UNINFORMED. IF YOU DO, YOU’RE MISINFORMED.”–Mark Twain (who fought a long but unsuccessful battle against the US invasion and occupation of the Philippines, a long ago model somewhat for today’s Forever Wars.)
Despite technology and the ability to present both sides of debate on all topics, major media outlets (what, five or six left from at least 50 in the early ’80s?) have all become State Media, presenting the Official Narrative (Propaganda), with no dissent allowed, on all important topics (Covid and Ukraine, recently, strongly).
Consortium News is an oasis in a desert of controlled information, supplying many needed dissenting views. But like Julian Assange, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Sidney Schanberg, Sy Hersh, Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Robert Scheer, Scott Ritter, etc and many younger true investigative reporters (The GrayZone, Matt Taibbi, Caitlin Johnstone, etc) they are irritating thorns in the side of the Establishment, and will be eventually removed, the excuse being they got something wrong (daily transgressions, usually intentional, in State Media).
For most ordinary Americans, avoiding homelessness is the highest priority. Many fail. Foreign politics is far higher on the Pyramid of Needs.
The saying “ it’s easier to fool a man than convince him he’s been fooled “ just about sums up the present state of affairs.
Proof that humans use emotions to rationalize thinking, and that no amount of facts can deter how you feel.
At least a small percentage of us are willing to gather as many sources of information as possible, whereas many are afraid to hear any opposition viewpoint.
“Proof that humans use emotions to rationalize thinking, and that no amount of facts can deter how you feel.”
That sales pitch has been used since inception – we the people hold these truths to be self-evident being a later version of sales pitches that “religious fanatics” imported from England and The Netherlands in the 17th Century.
However it didn’t quite work and so from then to now almost constant attempts have been made to coerce populations into reliance on beliefs/emotions – including that humans are only to be found in “The United States of America”, at least the white bits but we are not sure about the Irish, The Italians, The Jews depending on the day of the week/century – so don’t pay attention to these smart-ass “intellectuals”.
“The saying “ it’s easier to fool a man than convince him he’s been fooled” just about sums up the present state of affairs.
Resort to belief/emotions are attempts to describe the world, not to understand it in order to change it.
The resort to belief in the saying quoted above is illustrated by, and predicated upon, “..convince him ” – the belief that people can be convinced by others, there by obfuscating methods to attain understanding in order for him to convince himself – an increasing trend even in “American science” which others suggest lies in the spectrum from oxymoron through opportunity to source of amusement.
” just about sums up the present state of affairs.”
Not everywhere, unless you deem “The United States of America” to be the whole world, because it has the World Series and a super bowl from which to drink Kool Aid.
Just a relevant quote:Max Born-Intro to Thomas Merton’s “Disputed Questions”.rtf
SHOULD THE HUMAN RACE NOT BE EXTINGUISHED BY NUCLEAR WAR IT WILL DEGENERATE INTO A FLOCK OF STUPID,DUMB CREATURES UNDER THE TYRANNY OF DICTATORS WHO RULE THEM WITH THE HELP OF MACHINES AND ELECTRIC COMPUTERS. THIS IS NOT A PROPHECY BUT A NIGHTMARE.
MAX BORN-NOVEMBER 1960
BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTIST.
I know from my own experience that in the last twenty years the world has moved a very long way toward conformism and passivity.So long away that the distance is to me both frightening and disconcerting. I have been all the more sensitive to it because I have spent this time in the isolation of a monastery and have only recently come back into contact (with certain discrete conversations) with the American again I used to know as rather articulate, critical and vociferously independent. It is certainly not so anymore. Not that the people do not complain and criticize but their complaints and criticisms , indeed their most serious concerns seem to be involved in trivialities and illusions, against a horrifying background of impending cosmic disaster. It seems to me that for all of our pride in our freedom and individuality we have completely renounced thinking for ourselves. What passes for thinking is mass produced, passively accepted or not even accepted. We simply submit to the process of being informed without even registering on our mind at all. We are content to just turn on a switch and be confronted by the vapid but self assured slogans of the speaker that we fondly hope is thinking for the whole nation.
Introduction to Thomas Merton’s “Disputed Questions”
There is no expedient which a person will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
J. Reynolds
Thank you for this comment.
Brilliant and very scary, thank you
Fresh bodies appearing five days after the Russians had vacated the area?
Occam’s Razor would strongly suggest to me that this was not the work of the long gone Russians.
A little reflection would suggest that perhaps it became the fate of all the poor souls who were shown being tortured in the streets by the “patriotic” (non-Russian) Ukrainian people. After all, the conflict exists because the Ukrainian “blue bloods” have no use for the many ethnic Russians that live in the country–most in the South and East, but surely many to be found everywhere. Such people have been called traitors by pure-bred Nazi Ukies.
Likely these dead were alive up until the Russians departed, taking their protections against ethnic cleansing by Ukrainian “patriots” with them. The US and Nato made a full blown case for dismantling the entirely of Yugoslavia on the basis of alleged Serbian “ethnic cleansing.” Why would no one consider the same possibility here, especially in light of the pre-existing widespread animosities that date back decades? Why with the precedents of Odessa, the severing of essential utilities to Crimea, and eight years of bombardment, murder and persecution in the Donbass of Russians ethnics by Ukrainian ethnics? Why would the notion that mass murders, embellished with torture, be most “logically” ascribed to the regular Russian army, whose troops were likely recruited from the many different ethnic groups across the entire Russian Federation? That’s akin to claiming that the dead guy in the living room with two shots to the back of his head must certainly have committed suicide!
Only in America could nearly the entire public, force fed by the NYT, the WaPo and all the TV networks, believe any part of Zelensky’s daily clown show. Yet they do. Moreover, every idiot and his brother eagerly joins the mob and sanctions people of Russian descent from any interaction whatever with or in America, including organized sports, musical or art performances. People are fired from their jobs for not practicing group think and knee-jerk condemnation of Putin and Russia irrespective of that encumbrance we used to call the Bill of Rights. If Squinty-eyed Joe has his way, Russians breathing the very air on this planet would be outlawed. And, to top it off, after all the baseless sanctions we’ve heaped upon them for mostly imaginary, contrived and trumped-up offenses, we simply up and steal hundreds of billions of dollars worth of their assets, again without any precedence in law. How? By simply demanding the banks freeze the accounts and turn them over to the American gangsters in Washington who will then dispense them as they see fit–presumably mostly to Ukrainian gangsters led by Zelensky. We are now mere baby steps short of the Genghis Kahn technique for winning friends and influencing people, viz., give us all your possessions and bow down to our authority or we will slaughter every last person in your city. How cool is that? Europe must dig it. Few others though.
Probably like 80 percent braindead lemmings here in USA unfortunately.
I think the “show is in the can”
and John Q Public has no say
the talking heads must talk
and talk they do
they rerun image after image
I think the people see & get it but are impotent in the face of national & international scheming
we have been beaten and mollified while the lunatic fringe run the world
Regarding the French, are they not currently trapped in the same bubble as Americans? Of course, this is a bubble that they themselves chose, when they accepted the United States as their master.
Europe supports and applauds Zelensky, who legalized Nazism in his country. Shouting and smiling, the slogan is for the “glory of U ….. s.” Members of the European Parliaments understand that this is the slogan of Ukrainian nationalists? Europe applauds fascism. Deja vu.
“[W]e know from a long history how far SGs at the U.N. get with this sort of talk.”
Indeed, as the cases of Dag Hammarskjöld and Boutros Boutros-Ghali likely attest:
“Hammarskjöld, travelling with two [CIA/BND-infiltrated] CX-52 Crypto AG machines, was killed on the night of 17-18 September 1961 when his plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) not far from the Congo border. A UN investigation, triggered by [Susan] Williams’ earlier book [‘Who Killed Hammarskjöld?’], has yet to be completed.
Williams writes: ‘Communications sent from the CX-52 cryptographic machine used by Hammarskjöld appear to have been intercepted by British and United States signals and intelligence agencies as a result of a secret interception and decryption setting that those agencies held that enabled them to intercept surreptitiously.’
In evidence to an earlier inquiry into the crash, Commander Charles Southall, a US intelligence officer attached to the GCHQ listening station in Cyprus, described how he had heard the recording of a commentary of a pilot, believed to be a Belgian mercenary, as he shot down Hammarskjöld’s DC-6.
Southall said that in his view a CIA unit was responsible for shooting down the plane.
Williams quotes documents from a South African organisation linked to mercenaries examined by that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She writes: ‘One of the documents states that CIA director Allen Dulles had promised full cooperation with ‘Operation Celeste’, a plot to kill Hammarskjöld. The murder of Lumumba is referenced: ‘I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice [Lumumba]’’.”
Source:
Richard Norton-Taylor, “Did Britain Help Murder An African Leader and U.N. Secretary General?,” Declassified UK, October 26, 2021
—
“[The recently-deceased Madeleine] Albright and I and a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary-General of the United Nations, a secret plan we had called Operation Orient Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in doing in the U.N. head [due to his resistance to US unilateralism]. In the end, the U.S. had to do it alone (with its U.N. veto), and Sheehan and I had to prevent the President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending Boutros-Ghali’s tenure, often by our racing to the Oval Office when we were alerted that a head of state was telephoning the President. In the end, Clinton was impressed that we had managed not only to oust Boutros-Ghali, but to have Kofi Annan selected to replace him. […] The entire operation had strengthened Albright’s hand in the competition to be Secretary of State in the second Clinton administration.”
Source:
Richard A. Clarke (former US National Security Council member), “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror” (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 201-202
Thank you, Casey. These historical anecdotes go a long way in illustrating to novitiates the realities of how so much of our foreign policy is actually conducted; hopefully leaving a strong enough impression to encourage others to look deeper into the pablum presented even to this very day in all of its egregiousness as Patrick lays out in this article. The web of deceit that constitutes the American mythos covers much time and space in a dark cloud that really got its wings beginning this phase in 1947, the year of the CIA’s official inception. So much remains to be uncovered if we are ever to reclaim the Republic.
Again, thank you.
“We have met the enemy and he is us” Pogo
Excellent article again, Mr. Lawrence, one of the best I’ve ever read on this subject. It’s hopeless, though, to expect any shift in thinking by people falling for manufactured consent so persistently. I am torn between thinking life on earth will be destroyed by nuclear weapons or climate change. It’s a race to the death at the bottom. And it’s in the near future.
Actually, the Western press coverage was just as bad during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in the 1990’s (in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia). Massive lies of commission and omission. The current war in Ukraine has many echoes from those other wars.
In fact, I remember Marcel Ophuls being interviewed after visiting the Bosnian govt held portion of Sarajevo, and him saying that the Western journalists stayed together in the same hotel, and that it felt like “a club” to be with them there. He said it approvingly, and I heard it appallingly.
Thank you for pointing this out. I was in my 40’s, recently ecstatically married to a newly minted Yuppie, settling into a new profession and finding the reporting on Bosnia so confusing and contradictory and seemingly aimed at discrediting Clinton—which was the press’s full time job at the time—that I just gave up and ignored the whole thing. Not like me as I had been an anti-war protester and social justice worker for decades before that. And now, 30 years later, I still don’t know what happened there and then. But I believe it’s a lot better now. The digital Revolution has helped destroy and discredit print media, including the Paper of Record, and sites like this have been pushing back on its propaganda to the great joy of all us non-Yuppies. It only takes a small minority to change things and Consortium News, Greyzone, Aaron and Max and Glenn and our poor martyr Julian have been the vanguard. I’m very grateful decent society hasn’t suffocated under the weight of the last 40 years and the Foster Bros nefarious control and that due to everyone’s efforts, small or large, it has the potential to rise again.
“THE LADY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH”
When I read the daily narratives from “The New York Times” I wonder if they have said too much. Every day
it seems that there are more holes in their stories. I do not know all the answers but wonder that others may finally
begin to suspect the lies they are being fed. For example in today’s rambling Times story there was the mention
that the bodies in Bucha were weeks old. That uncomfortable “fact” (uncomfortable for them) seems odd on its
face. And so on and so forth.
Thanks to Patrick Lawrence for a magnificent piece of work.
I can only second all of the above.
I was repulsed reading this. This is the question I lead with in my podcast and in comment sections like this: “If you ran the world, what would you do?” How can you present something so radically slanted in opposition to what is radically slanted? I know you would acknowledge there is a confrontation going on, and what would you do?
Please tell us what you find slanted in Patrick Lawrence’s article. In other words, let us see your biases.
Thank you Alan. My thoughts exactly.
“If you ran the world, what would you do?” Um we aren’t talking about running the world here, are we? Are you referring to your Uncle Sam who IS running the world (for now) Well if I was Uncle Sam I would wake up , smell the roses, stop the wars and the military spending and bring all the soldiers home. Is that too radically slanted for you?
Hear, hear!
Excellent.
Timely. And as ever, wry and reflective, your conclusions based on a life lived truth-seeking. As such, much appreciated by me as one of your times, our time on this Earth similar in length.
I just sent off an email to my chosen circle of sentients featuring two Michael Hudson interview assessments of what and why re: Europe-USA from last week. Why in particular I found your latest so timely. For I’d written:
“I meant to send this last week; too preoccupied in circles within circles spinning ’round me head. Lucky enough to even yet be able to communicate still/yet in more than guttural sounds including shrieks and moans, I suppose.
Jayzus H! What a mess we have allowed the (our U.S.) psychopaths to promulgate.
Nonetheless, understanding even a little bit more what our contemporary ‘is’ is, hopefully points us toward an ability to cope with the so many things beyond our individual abilities to influence toward a more positive inclination, and perhaps even more, leaves us with a positive path for a better outcome. Otherwise (for meself anyway,) I’d be throwing me hands up already and walking (limping on me crutches) into the sunset, searching for an ice floe to sail away on…
Here’s to knowledge, accurate facts, in this era’s requisite necessity of learn, unlearn, relearn, repeat.” And I’ll add to it, “And the growth of numbers of people yet standing, withstanding especially, the full brunt of this determined assault.”
Paraphrasing ex-OSS/CIA and then Director of Central Intelligence William Casey as Reagan’s CIA chief: “We will know we have succeeded when the American public believes every lie we have told them.”
The man was serious. Deadly serious. May we too be so serious in undoing by truths-told what Casey and ilk have thus far set in stone.
This, more than any previous article in CN, is the one I’d most like to send to “friends” who are very nice to me and consider me to be a very good person, but do not comprehend the extent to which I disagree with their viewpoint. The problem I am facing is that we, as a nation, have proven the statement “The most effective propaganda is that which is not seen as propaganda, but as fact”. I don’t see how this can be reversed, now that it’s become so systemic within our society. God, how I wish it weren’t so!
So many of us are in the same boat–trying to bail out the lies while our friends and family seem all too happy sink to the bottom.
i think one would do well to think what it would be like to be born in any given decade, 1980 for example, to be 10 in 1990, 20 in 2000, 40 in 2020
what a warped world view they have been exposed to
Always excellent work from Patrick Lawrence. Thanks, Patrick, for pointing out all the stuff I haven’t yet read and now must read. I’ve ordered them all from the public library. That’s a bonus to your wise observations.
As always, Patrick Lawrence hits the nail on the head. Now read this piece again with gender ideology in mind, and see what much of the so-called left has signed onto. Utter denial of reality — there are two sexes with a very few individuals with DSDs — a magical belief in the medical-industrial complex and their horrifying mutilation of children and young people’s bodies.
Very good, thank you.
I’ve just tried to follow Patrick on Twitter – account suspended! @micknolangalway
Brilliant stuff, Patrick, as usual.
Thank you for being there, a candle in the darkness, a voice of truth amid the whirlwind of howling lies which buffer us all.
Thank you, Patrick. I’m going to forward the link to my daughter who (foolishly) disagrees with me on these sorts of subjects. We ended our last go around, on the Ukraine as it happens, with her saying to me, I know what I saw. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough to respond, no, you know what you have been shown. Not quite the same thing.
I can relate to your exchange with your daughter. She is an intelligent young woman but doesn’t follow politics much and I consider myself much better informed than she is. I don’t get my “news” from the MSM which helps. Here in the UK the BBC is the worst for pro establishment, pro US, pro NATO and pro war propaganda. She stated at the start of the invasion that Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked because he is just an awful person. When I challenged her she refused to listen to verified facts. A couple of weeks ago she said that a Polish friend of hers, who lives in the UK, said that someone should put a bullet in Putin’s head. I said that was awful but if Putin deserves a bullet in the head why not Bush or Cheney or Blair or any of the other western war criminals? At this point she became very angry and said Putin was completely different. My daughter is a warm and kind person and I know her Polish friend a little and she also seems lovely, but this is what happens when facts don’t matter.
Sorry I omitted to say at the beginning that this related to my daughter and exchanges I’ve had with her. I never discuss the situation in Ukraine with her now because she’s made up her mind this is all on Putin and it’s unpleasant arguing with those you love. Unfortunately other members of my family think the same. Another relative said recently that the electricity in their house went off recently and she thought Putin did it and was about to kill us all! We live on Merseyside in the north west of England!!
This is not surprising at all. the Media and Government officials, as well as talking heads HIRED by media companies to parrot the propaganda, have all combined, to ensure their narrative stays the same wherever it is diseminated. In fact it wasn’t too long ago, certain Governments announced publicly, they were going to create offices deliberatly to spread such propaganda. I don’t recall any objections ever coming to light anywhere.
Way back in the 60’s with the Vietnam war in full swing, my Government bent the knee to it’s U.S. masters, and agreed to involve it’self in that illegal war, to stay on the “good” side of it’s masters. Problem was, our military was insufficient for the task, so CONSCRIPTION was introduced, which caused massive uproar. Immediately the MSM got up to speed, and began educating our people as the why it was a good idea, to involve ourselves in this illegal war, as if we didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before we would be fighting the Communists on our shores and we’d all be speaking Vietnamese in no time. No holds were barred, everything was acceptable. The MAJORITY of the people, accepted without question, the propaganda they were being fed on a daily basis, and stood behind their Government. The only folks who disagreed, were the young folks who were all looking down the barrel at their conscription, very few of which wanted to be involved, but they had no choice. Go to war, or go to gaol. I myself was very curious to learn what the TRUTH was, and at the ripe old age of 17 years, signed on to our military. Within 12 months I found myself on foreign shores, running thru the jungle, with folks trying to kill us, chasing us. I found out very quickly indeed, our Government and the media, as well as our religious authorities had all COLLECTIVELY LIED TO US ALL. NOTHING, of what they claimed, was true. NOTHING ! In fact the Vietnamese did not even have a blue water Navy, nor did the Vietnamese people even know Australia EXISTED. Did our people learn anything from that event ? YES, they did, never introduce CONSCRIPTION, unless the political party wishes to be booted out of Government. That’s all they learnt. The rest as we see today, is the same old, same as. I feel sorry for your daughter, as she’s been totally brain washed, as thousands of others. Don’t hold that against her, the machine that’s responsible, has been fine tuned to do exactly what it’s doing. But she does need to broaden her horizons, otherwise she will quickly discover herself in uniform, and at the coal face with her life held in the balance.
These days it is DIShonesty that will get you places. Honesty went the way of the Dodo bird…
How beautiful is the truth, no matter how ugly?
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
? Carl Sagan
Isn’t it also that ‘we’ only hear or see what ‘we’ suits us???
Absolutely spot on Vera. I keep saying to many people, some folks simply refuse to see, what’s staring them in the face, because they simply do not want to know, something that might upset their long held beliefs.
“Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Mr. Sagan was very aware of the necesseties of embracement of doubt, recognition and acceptance of ignorance, and that change is a constant whose variables include, but are not limited to, trajectories and velocities.
Hence the key word is “almost” as some opponents understand, hence their encouragement of belief/certainty in attempts at minimising almost.
Thanks for this article! It details exactly how I feel when I get in my car and NPR comes on full blast after I’m sure I turned it off the last time I drove somewhere, disgusted by the war-mongering propaganda.
Patrick Lawrence said:
“There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all.”
Bob Dylan said in License to Kill:
“Now he’s hell bent on destruction.
He’s afraid and confused.
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.
All he believes are his eyes.
And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
Oh, there’s a woman
on my block.
She just sits there
in a cold chill
saying, ‘Who’s gonna take away
his license to kill?'”
Can’t stomach NPR anymore. I used to listen to their hourly updates if I was driving but now it’s just one lie after another. And they’re so smug about it.
We get from NPR and BBC what we settle for. feedback(at)npr.org
All sadly true, Patrick. The ignorance and imbecility of the Media is truly disturbing. I watched a short segment on one of the networks the other day, the first time I’d seen anything on a major network on the war, and it was a pack of slanted lies. Ots especially weird to see the media try to explain away Biden’s outbursts and contradictions.
What’s really bizarre, Tim, is that like all liars they contradict themselves from day to day. One day it’s “The Russians are pulling back,” the next week it’s about a massacre that occurred where the Russians had already pulled back. And this is the problem with lying: it’s fairly easy to be consistent when speaking the truth, but when individuals or media lie they’re always trying to cover their lying tracks.
The media aren’t ignorant. They are totally complicit in spreading these lies. They know exactly what they’re doing and it works very well in our simpleminded and superficial society.
The US has become a totalitarian state ruled by bribes to the duopoly political parties.
All three branches of the federal government and the mass media are completely corrupted.
The morally corrupt unregulated market economy elevates only its lowest scammers.
The US is ruined and rotted. It has grown this way for more than a century.
Mark Twain: “I can say… with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.”
H.L. Mencken: “The average man avoids truth as diligently as he avoids arson, regicide, and piracy on the high seas, and for the same reasons: it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn’t pay.”
Certainly the people of the US must abandon the major political parties and the commercial mass media.
One proposed reform is the CongressOfDebate dotcom, which will conduct balanced text debates and provide summaries commented by all sides. Its administration may be a model for an incorruptible democracy of the future.