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How odd to look back now — now, as Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine ends in ignominious defeat—and think of that cornucopia of propaganda spilling out of what I called during the early months Washington’s “bubble of pretend.” Take a few minutes to remember with me.
There was the “Ghost of Kyiv,” an heroic MiG–29 pilot credited with downing six, count ’em, six Russian fighters in a single night, Feb. 24, 2022, two days after the Russian intervention began. The Ghost turned out to be a fantasy confected out of a popular video game.
So crude, the early Ukrainian propaganda, so rank.
And then, shortly to follow, we had the heroes of Snake Island, 13 Ukrainian troops who — trumpets and drums here — defended a Black Sea islet to the death. It turned out this unit had surrendered, and the posthumous medals of honor President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded them with great flourish were neither posthumous nor deserved.
This corny nonsense, slathered on as thick as frosting on a wedding cake, went on and on such that The New York Times could no longer pretend it didn’t exist. I do not care for journalists who indulge in self-reference, but allow me these sentences from a piece published a couple of months into the conflict:
“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.”
Prelude, indeed — prelude to a war so malignly reported it was soon impossible for readers and viewers in the Western post-democracies to see it (which was, after all, precisely the point).
And prelude, let’s be careful to note, to the probably fatal collapse of foreign correspondence among Western media, the Times and the BBC well in the lead in my estimation, but with many pilot fish swimming beside them.
By the end of that first year of the war — last reference to columns past here — I reckoned there were two versions of the Ukraine conflict: There was the war suspended in an opaque solution of cloudy rhetoric and the war taking place in reality.
And now, as we come out the far end of this debacle, the delusions and illusions remain just as they have been throughout. The U.S. and its puppet regime in Kiev have decisively lost the war they provoked but no, there is no speaking of a defeat.
There is no calling the victor in this conflict the victor and certainly no accepting that victory — the real world intrudes here — gives the victor the upper hand in setting the terms of a settlement. As to these terms as Moscow repeatedly articulates them, if you study them they are thoroughly reasonable and to the benefit of both sides but must never be spoken of as such. If they are Moscow’s terms — the golden rule — they cannot by definition be reasonable.
Most of all, there is no acknowledging the cynical sacrifice of Ukrainian lives somewhere in six figures in a cause that has had nothing to do with their well-being and certainly nothing to do with the democratization of their country.
And most, most, most of all, there cannot be and must not be any lessons learned from this wasteful disaster. The imperative is to go on to the next one.
The Ordering of Obfuscations
The mis– and disinformation soon got heavier-going after those first months of outright silliness, and, so far as I could make out, this was when the propaganda pros in Washington and London took over from those amateurs in Kiev.
The “Russian massacre” in Bucha over the last couple of days of that first March was not at the hands of Russians — persuasive evidence of this — but the never-happened brutality of retreating Russian soldiers is now fixed in the official record and the collective memory of those who still allow mainstream media to mesmerize them. [A U.N. report was ambiguous about who was responsible for the Bucha killings but blamed Russia for executing civilians in the Kiev region.]
Among my favorites in this line occurred later in 2022, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine was shelling the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on the east side of the Dnieper River.
But because the A.F.U., the good guys, could not possibly be reported as indulging in so reckless an act, it had to be — straight across Western media, this— that the Russians were risking a nuclear meltdown by bombarding the plant they guarded and occupied and within which there were Russian detachments and a lot of Russian matériel.
Let us be clear as to what lies behind all this chicanery. Before all the obfuscation of the progress of the war in Russia’s favor these past three years there was the obfuscation of its causes.
I am so weary of the word “unprovoked” in accounts of this conflict I could… I could write a column about it. Ditto the notion that it began in February 2022 and not in the same month eight years earlier, when the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev set off the regime’s daily attacks on its own people in the eastern, Russian-speaking provinces, causing of the order of 15,000 casualties.
At issue here are questions of history, causality, agency and responsibility. The U.S. and its clients in Kiev and the European capitals have erased the first and denied the latter three.
The reason Westerners have not been given a clear view of the war is that they must not develop an understanding of why it began. Start to finish and no exceptions, the good guys must always be the good guys and the bad guys always the bad.
How’s that for the Western powers’ idea of high-end statecraft in the 21st century? Shall we call it un–Realpolitik?
Undercutting Peace Talks
Recent rounds of talks notwithstanding, in my read this purposely constructed distance from reality is likely to make an enduring settlement — at the mahogany table, not on the battlefield — difficult and perhaps impossible. This stands to doom the lives of who knows how many more Ukrainian and Russian men and women.
Russia’s conditions — chief among these a new security framework in Europe, de–Nazification and a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO — are deserving of negotiation, as I have already suggested. But, the bubble of pretend having never burst, any suggestion of this in Washington or anywhere else in the West is marked down as “echoing Putin’s talking points.”
It is infra-dig, no other term for it.
We find in consequence various new delusions abroad in the West. Volodymyr Zelensky, understood at last as the punk of the piece, carries on as if Kiev, the loser, has the power to set the terms of settlement talks with the victor .
The Europeans, having supported Ukraine for years and now promising to continue this support, are working on a “peace plan” whereby they would change uniforms, so to say, and require Russia to accept them as keepers of the peace on Ukrainian soil.
As we watch the Atlantic powers twist themselves into pretzels to avoid any admission of defeat in Ukraine, I look to the larger significance of this conflict. Boiling the matter down, this is a confrontation between the West and non–West. At bottom — and I missed this for a time — it is a major front in the war the reigning order, the disorder with which we live, wages to resist the new world order swiftly enough coming into being.
To make this point in specific terms, a new security architecture between the Russian Federation and its European neighbors would mark an historically significant turn toward parity between the West and non–West. And it is parity that the Western powers resist most vigorously — never mind it will prove of benefit to all of humanity when it is finally achieved.
The Times of London ran a thought-provoking piece in last Sunday’s editions about an 83–year-old veteran of the Vietnam war named Stuart Herrington. He served as an army intelligence officer in the final years of the war and recalled for a Times interviewer the days before the Viet Cong closed in on what was then Saigon.
Vividly and painfully, Herrington remembers those fateful last days in April of 1975, when the last Americans evacuated from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy. He had assured passage out to all the Vietnamese who had collaborated with the Americans, only to sneak out on a staircase to the roof and leave them behind in the final hours.
It was the broken promise that caused me to reflect on the then-and-now of the piece. The broken promise, the abandonment of those who supported the American cause, the implicit reality that the war was not waged for the Vietnamese but for some larger ideological cause that had nothing to do with them: Herrington seems to be no peacenik in his advancing years, but these were the sources of his enduring regret.
We have learned nothing from those days, he remarked as he considered, 50 years on, the Ukraine war. “Here we go again,” he remarked as the interview ended.
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What do you mean, “we have learned nothing?”
We have gained experience from all of these wars, haven’t we? The war on drugs? On crime?
On poverty and terror and… the viruses.
It is obvious, to me anyway, all we need now is a war on ” peace. ” With the assistance of artificial flavorings, oops, I meant intelligence,
synthetically, or if you prefer hypothetically, it should be simple to begin learning something.
Besides, we already have federal, local and state educational departments , along with private home schooling, advanced technical training, and religious theological seminary degrees. Duh.
But all those dead Ukrainians mean the remainder of Ukraine, which is 80% of the country minus the areas taken by Russia, now totally belongs to Blackrock, or Jewish Empire.
Russians lost lots of men and resources to gain 20% of Ukraine.
Jews didn’t lose a single life and will be taking the rest of it.
As remaining Ukrainians will have patriotic defensive reaction to the Jewish takeover, Jews will use mass immigration to replace Ukrainians with nonwhites(who will serve as dogs and cattle).
I used to be sympathetic to people who supported the US in places such as South Vietnam and Afghanistan. But no more–you backed the wrong horse, make the best deal possible with the victors. Justice meted out to collaborators isn’t likely to be pretty, but it’s probably what turncoats deserve.
The Ukraine war is probably what industrial scale war between peer adversaries would look like. Westerners especially see the war as an aberration because we have been condition by media to see “normal” warfare as a clever use of technology to dodge harsh realities.
If Western air support is frustrated by an enemy with functional air defense one would probably see Western armies struggle with mass casualties the same as is happening in Ukraine. Western people have forgotten about WW 2 and the Korean war.
It has been the first war in history where outcomes could be predicted with reasonable accuracy based largely on the quality (i.e. the psychology) of the leadership on each side.
The propaganda, as it is called, simply serves as one of the many mirrors into their minds.
As such, it has been an easy one to call.
PS
I am a humble man and haven’t boasted about my disturbingly (lol) accurate post regarding North Korean troops being involved in the SMO. I was 100% correct at the time. North Korean troops were actively involved. (Cheers, Mr. Martyanov!) And for all the reasons I stated. But there was something else extremely significant about this event that I posted. It was the first time the Western propaganda machine was not lying.
The Norks are probably a nothingburger, there are are likely very mundane reasons for them taking part. Now there is talk of them going into Ukraine, again don’t pay them more mind than Chechens or Siberians. They seem to be used in not huge numbers and part of some training and experience agreement.
A lot of things that are seen by media as being significant could be features, not bugs.
Time for more White genocide. 🙁
A Triple Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger?
You are completely missing the point. It is not about the specific military details. It is about the analysis of the propaganda.
Bingo.
They won’t get this in the Chicago suburbs or in Los Angeles until the gardeners turn on them.
I get your point, but don’t care about the media anymore, I want to know how the war ends. People have had a long time to think about causes and right or wrong or narrative. I got media fatigue I guess.
excellent article as far as it goes. the mockingbird media and mighty wurlitzer have slowly absorbed all independent media in this country, distilling the sources of “information” from over 50 major news outlets down to six, that are the informational tentacles of our zioneocon empire. we are told the press is the fourth estate, there to act as part of the checks and balances of our glorious “democracy”. well now they are an actual arm of our government, as the checks have all bounced and the balances are tilted.
we’ve all seen the clips of local “independent” news sources, that parrot the exact same talking points, in a greek chorus of disinformation and revealing that the “Independent local stations” are all owned by the aforementioned six, or other oligarchs within their system.
obama really opened the floodgates, legalizing the misinformational propaganda and allowing it to be turned on us. they had been doing this for years but it was now legal. this is just as when the bush administration was caught illegally spying on their own citizens, so in response they legalized it.
i wish the author had made more of an attempt to show, that what they did with the news of the s.m.o., was identical to the reporting from palesine, as in fact they are one in the same war. could this have something to do with the zionist overlords that have taken over not just the news sources but the big six major propaganda outlet themselves?
this hive mind exists not only in the echo chamber of the media but in our government as well, that is sold to us, by the billions of dollars worth of political ads, that are brainwashing the public into thinking we have some say in our government and in fact that we picked these manchurian candidates ourselves. these costs not only enrich the media oligarchs but insure that only the super wealthy, will have a say in “our” government.
all of these sources now tell us that anti-semitism is so rampant, that we need new legislation, without revealing the cause of the increase. this provides protection from any inquiries, as to the jewish supremacist influence over our entire country and its foreign policy. it is becoming ever more clear, that their murderous genocidal rampage, not only unchecked but blank checked by our taxes, is a taboo subject and any that would speak out on this henious act of genocide, will be labeled as white supremacist neo-nazis, attempting to genocide their population.
so the victims are portrayed as victimizers and this false narrative is repeated endlessly, until the brainwashed masses begin to repeat the lies, to their friends and family.
Daniel Davis’ commentary is growing on me, he seems to have a common sense take more reasonable than my own point of view:
Video Link
As regards the lies inherent in war reporting, Orwell wrote on that subject before WWII had even reached its Jew-victorious conclusion. (The essay is in the collection – one volume – published by Everyman, and as the book is over 1,300 pages, you can see the problem of finding it). In short, he stated that, even in that very time, war-reporting was designed to be a means of controlling the beliefs and attitudes of the common people, and facts had no very important connection to that goal.
Having USians in your country, is akin to having flecks of dogsht in your ice cream.
Well, one’s man lie could be, I guess, another man’s truth. What was the case with NK troop articles was not that they were a lie, but rather how the news was reported. Many of the articles, and I think Zelensky said it too, alleged how upper Korean troops were fighting on the ‘front lines’. They key phrase in the reports was the ‘front lines of the battle’.
But what was glossed over was that this meant they were fighting inside Russia, in Kursk, against invading Ukrainian troops, but not the main battle lines within Ukrainian territory proper, i.e., west of Bakhmut/Artymovsk and Pokrovsk.
Below, from a BBC article (January 22, 2025), they begin writing about NK troops on the ‘front lines’ facing weapons used in Donbas:
Below is a 4/26/2025 NBC headline, but you have to dig into the article to find out the NK troops were ‘not in’ Ukraine:
From The Hill, 10/23/2024:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week warned that North Korea was sending close to 10,000 troops to Ukraine to fight for Russian forces.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know why they bother. The average person probably doesn’t even care, and doesn’t take time to read the articles. Their minds aren’t worth manipulating. And anyone who is really interested will understand the obfuscation. Just the usual MSM garbage. I think they do it because they imagine they are being clever, or maybe it is what they want reality to be.
Tucker Carlson has a prescient comment on one of his recent programs: “Now they’ll bring in third-worlders [to Ukraine].”
General Kellogg is an insane Cold war neocon who has advocated war with Russia for a decade. I have no idea why Trump chose this 81-year old psychopath to make peace with Ukraine. Here he is on Fox News yesterday saying Russian cannot win the war. His nutty plan is a ceasefire to allow the retreating Ukrainian army to rebuild while NATO “peacekeepers” arrive.
Video Link
Anyone can watch the daily updates at Military Summary to see how many kilometers Russian forces advanced each day.
Video Link
Yes, such a cause, to fight for your own suicide and against your own nature. No wonder things have gone so well for them.
I have done several short videos detailing plans to destabilize and provoke Russia. Here is one:
Video Link
If I may:
There would, still, be the matter of NATO artillery. Try to research/compare the current NATO and Russian tubed artillery, from weapons team organization to brigade CiC.
Then, there is a also the matter of night fighting capability.
But, that’s all academic, and interesting only as an intellectual exercise, if nothing better to do.
The real question IS:
As it looks at the moment, it will grind on, as it is, for quite some time.
Many more Slavic working class/underclass cannon fodder, from both sides, will get killed and crippled for life. While some people will acquire more wealth and power. Top echelons of Ukrainians and Russians included.
And plenty of people talking about it, online in particular. Enjoying their daily infotainment sessions.
North Korean training:
Video Link
subtitles
An interesting bit from 2.08 to 2.15. Two bits, actually.
And two conclusions from the bits.
This Ukraine war isn’t over its just in a transition period.
The Western elite have brought time through this fake negotiations but a more important development is the signing of a minerals deal between the U.S and Ukraine, this now gives the U.S a reason to put troops in whenever they believe they have a strategy to defeat Russia, they will use the excuse they have done on many occasions before of defending vital national interests.
The project of bringing down the peer competitor of China by first dealing with Russia and Iran is still on, the only way to stop it is to remove the western elite.
President Putin is my personal hero. And a medical genius! He ended a Global Pandemic™️ by invading the Ukraine – even whilst US hospitals were overwhelmed by
vaxxx-poisonedcovid patients and weekly deaths frompoison injectionscovid were at record highs. Who ever would guess before Feb 2022 that Pandemics®️ are ended by war?! President Putin deserves several Nobel prizes for discovering this One Weird Trick….The Ukraiyniyyan s.m.o. also taught me to spell Russyan words wyth lots and lyts of Y’s – apparyntly profuse Yyyyy’s evyrywhyre makes Presydynt Putyn super mad.
The lying and complete fabrication just never stops. References to the war are always prefaced by ‘unprovoked, full scale invasion’ of which neither is true. It’s repeated across all media as a slogan and appears to have been handed down by some central committee pulling the strings. Not only are they lying about this they’re lying about everything and have been for a long time. Orwell, in ‘Homage to Catalonia’, described journalists as people paid to lie for a living and this was back in the ’30’s. The more one looks into anything regarding American history the more one realizes how it is all just one long fairy tale that’s been shoved down our throats by the education system and all media.
Yes, when one man’s propaganda becomes another man’s good news, it’s typically bad news for the propagandist.
North Korean troops now have successful operational combat experience, as do their medical, support and logistical personnel under combat conditions. As important is the integration with the Russian military and logistics this would have required.
Western planners must now contend with the reality of future reciprocal cooperation should they ever decide to get frisky along the DMZ or take military action against Russia. We now know North Korea is not as isolated as Western propaganda would have us believe.
In light of the politico-military precedent set by the SMO, the uncertainties posed by this relationship will reduce the likelihood of future direct Western military aggression in a number of theaters.
These events will also likely lead to greater cooperation between Russia and North Korea in other areas as well and even, perhaps, greater prosperity for the North Korean people.
By this, Mordor has again been significantly weakened.
I didn’t know Davis was this direct:
@7:28, “…Jewish influence…”
Is it true, vaccine deaths were still high in February 2022? Hmmm…
In March of 2022, Biden visited the 82nd Airborne, in Poland. In an unguarded moment, speaking about the possibility of US troops being in Ukraine, he told them “when you are there.” Not “if”, but “when.” A commenter above suggested that protecting US mineral rights might serve as the pretext.
Alternatively, “peacekeepers” might morph into troops. In any version, this will happen. Hey, what’s another few US foreign bases.
And suppose artillery gets taken care of, or has to shoot from within drone distance of the the enemy?
If NATO faces a peer level enemy they will probably have to be able to deal with mass casualty events just like any other army in a similar situation.
It’s going to be ugly, but Russia can finish it, the West will pour fuel on the fire and Ukraine will get used to the point of collapse.
A lot of commentators would say something similar now and then if you listen to them often enough, but I don’t think they want to talk about it to the point of getting censored in some way.
‘Top echelons of Ukrainians and Russians included.
And plenty of people talking about it, online in particular. Enjoying their daily infotainment sessions.’ – unfortunately true
thank you carlton, for your service…..to humanity. the tao te ching, states, show me a man of violence, that came to a good end and i will take him for my teacher.☯️
The Chinese rehearsing for Victory day parade in Moscow:
Get you some real propaganda!