Ukrainian false flags
Disinformation in the western media masquerading as news
We have reached a stage of technological, social, and economic development highly conducive to a type of soft-core totalitarianism that can still somehow market itself to its people as a bastion of liberty and democracy. Conveniently for The Powers That Be (TPTB), it would not even occur to most people that such a thing as censorship might exist in the United States. Unfortunately, it does.
The recent extirpation of anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist voices like those of Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, and Lee Camp from Youtube proves it. The argument goes that the constituent oligarchs of Big Tech are private companies who can do what they want. While this may be factually correct it is morally bankrupt. They are the most important platforms of communication and civic participation in the nation today, the modern day town hall, bully pulpit, and Speakers’ Corner.
In areas of sensitive concern, they are for all practical purposes state actors to whom the first amendment should apply. To make these issues more clear to all concerned, they should be condemned and run as public utilities. They won’t be, however, because then they be unable to fulfill their primary function to the state: to work in tandem with Big Media and the federal government to sell whichever approved narrative whichever oligarchy is trying to sell at the moment.
During the pandemic, it was Big Pharma’s tale of mandatory multiple jabs, masks, social distancing, and universal lockdown. This worked well enough, especially while 75% of Big Media’s advertising revenue came from Big Pharma. Alas, many the allegations that got people deplatformed early on turned out to be plausible at the very least or (in fact) true. Key cheerleaders like Fauci kept providing us with “inconsistent messaging” (or lying). “Following the science” came to require Olympian-level gymnastic skills.
Eventually, the narrative just fell to pieces, the mask mandates were finally lifted, and the agenda for endless jabs ran out of steam after the first or second. Fortunately for Big Media and the government, another oligarchy (the military industrial complex) has a new narrative to sell now. This has brought the ratings of legacy media back up to Trump era levels and given the political class a new means of keeping us all divided and confused so the oligarchs and rentier class can continue to eat our very substance: the war in Ukraine.
Cliches, tired wilted poems, survive as long as they do because they contain more than a grain of truth. Here is one: war is hell. It is always the innocent civilians who suffer most. I don’t question the courage and moral passion of aid workers at the border or in-country or the humanitarian necessity of their missions. I do not question (most of the) refugee reports of atrocities and war crimes committed by individuals or small groups. Neither do I deny that some of these reports could be generated by “intelligence” (sic) operatives. In any event, military discipline is never perfect and rogue soldiers and rogue units are a fact of war.
So is the information war.
If we are to achieve an abiding peace, which is theoretically what we all want, we must have justice. To have justice we must have truth, which is in scarce supply for those willing to accept whichever ideology washes over them in the most satisfying manner, especially the cowardly, incurious, and those understandably rendered near comatose by the quotidian demands of making ends meet. For justice to be impartial, it requires an unflinching review of the facts as a whole, no matter how unpleasant they may be. Or, in this case, how much they contradict the approved narrative given to us by the government, Big Media, Big Tech, the military industrial complex, and academia. To do any less would be intellectually dishonest and, in the long run, of no use to us as we try to prepare ourselves for the dissolution of the nation-state system created by the Peace of Westphalia nearly four centuries ago and the slow collapse of complex contemporary society.
There is no way to deny the role of the CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, Azov Battalion, and Ukrainian oligarchs in the 2014 Maidan revolution, the existence of missile sites at an inland U.S. naval base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border and at a NATO base in Romania, or that Azov burned dozens of people alive in Odessa shortly after Maidan, murdered over 14,000 in Donbas since Maidan, and have an outsized influence over politics and war in spite of being only approximately 10% of the Ukrainian military.
These missiles, bear in mind are nuclear capable ones, not yet hypersonic but are likely to be in a year or so. China and Russia already have hypersonic missiles, one of which was used to destroy a Ukrainian munitions facility on March 21.
To say that Azov are neo-Nazis is a bit misleading. This erstwhile militia (integrated formally into the Ukrainian military in 2014) and their sympathizers are direct descendants of a very powerful and important faction in Ukrainian politics that still reveres WWII Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and have an SS in their logo. In that sense, they are not neo-Nazis. They are Nazi Nazis.
Russia is very touchy about its near abroad, having been invaded in two continental wars by Napoleon and Hitler. Having lost 25 million people (about half of their country) in World War II, they are also very touchy about Nazis.
In 2010, Russia and Ukraine ratified a treaty granting the Russian navy use of Sevastopol through 2042. If Ukraine was to continue being a geopolitical playground for neoconservative ideologues to live out their final fantasies of unilateral American hegemony, Russia would likely have lost this lease and access to their only warm water naval base. This was not going to happen during the rule of an authoritarian who places a supreme value on Russian state pride and power, so Putin took back Crimea, which had been Russian since the late 18th century, and was given to Ukraine as a gift by Ukrainian Khrushchev in 1954 during the Soviet era.
There is no way to deny that these were all contributing factors to this tragic war but in order to whip up the bloodlust required by neocons in the Biden administration, Facebook needed to amend some of their user policies in ways that mitigated against expounding upon these themes. In early March 2022, Meta created temporary exemptions to its hate speech rules. As reported by The Intercept (owned by American oligarch and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), this allowed Ukrainian users of Facebook and Instagram
“to call for the “explicit removal of Russians from Ukraine and Belarus,” posts that would have otherwise been deleted for violating the company’s ban on calling for the “exclusion or segregation” of people based on their national origin. The rule change was part of a broader package of carveouts that included a rare dispensation to call for the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin, use dehumanizing language against Russian soldiers, and praise the notorious Azov Battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, previously banned from the platform due to its neo-Nazi ideology.”
A further word on The Intercept and their role in the media ecology. In October 2020 right before the presidential election, the editors of this same outlet (founded after the Snowden revelations and formerly adversarial to power) signaled their willingness to join the ranks of Big Media and Big Tech like other small fry Democratic apparatchnik websites like Salon, Politico, Axios, and The Daily Beast by refusing to publish an article by co-founder Glenn Greenwald on Hunter Biden’s laptop being a gushing fountain of documentation about Biden family influence peddling in Ukraine (and China).
Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Amazon donated almost exclusively to Democrats. Twitter and Facebook used creative interpretations of their posting rules to limit the reach of the story. Twitter claimed the material had been hacked by Russia and locked the oldest and fourth largest newspaper in the country, the New York Post, out of its own account until safely after the election, and prevented users from linking to the story. The owner of the Delaware computer repair shop who released the hard drive contents later sued Twitter for defamation. Facebook also did its part by tweeting that the story was “eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Theoretically, Twitter and Facebook were fighting disinformation, which is defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as “deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.“
That same agency defines misinformation as “false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm” and malinformation as “fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate…to cause chaos, confusion, and division…and interfere with and undermine our democratic institutions and national cohesiveness.”
Remember these terms. They are used at different times by different actors for different purposes. That which challenges the official narrative is categorized as disinformation. After it is proven true, I suppose it transmogrifies into malinformation because if causes “chaos, confusion, and division” as to why anyone should continue to accept seamless, systematic, and all-encompassing neoliberal oppression and its stepchild permanent war, the very foundation of our so-called “democratic institutions and national cohesiveness.”
Before Obama made a few calls and ensured the selection of Biden just before Super Tuesday, candidate Biden famously promised his big money donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Now that we are nearly halfway into his extremely lackluster administration and on the eve of a bloodbath for Democrats in the mid-term elections, that appears to be the one campaign promise that Biden has kept, making the present an ideal time for the New York Times and Washington Post to suddenly declare that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are, in fact, genuine.
“Disinformation” now becomes “malinformation” or, the news, dutifully reported upon by the ever vigilant Fourth Estate in the context of Hunter Biden’s tax problems.
In the case of the atrocity exhibition of “war crimes committed by the Russian military” we have disinformation presented by the western media as news which has not yet matured into malinformation, or, the truth.
Google has recently proclaimed that “due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.” Presumably this means any content that touches upon the basic geopolitical and historical facts enumerated above that seek to understand Russia’s motivations from their own perspective because one would be very hard pressed to see how the legacy media’s incessant war porn does not exploit the war. War porn not that very different in its emotional impact on viewers then the fear porn they purveyed during the pandemic.
Google further admonished its content creators on Youtube that “this pause includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”
Now, as a free thinking individual, anarchist, and aficionado of cognitive liberty being told not to think something makes me want to understand why not, so I began a review of some of the leading war crimes western media told us were perpetrated by the Russian military.
On March 16 on alleged air strike on the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol allegedly killed 300 people. Max Blumenthal reports
“that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.”
On April 1 403 bodies were allegedly found after the Russian military evacuated Bucha, a suburb of Kiev 20 miles northwest of the city, allegedly killed by Russian forces. The mayor is on video the day the Russians evacuated saying how happy the town was. Dead bodies littering the streets were not mentioned. The national police advised residents to stay inside as the Ukrainian military was about to conduct a cleansing operation. The first person documented mentioning them said that they had been lying around for a month. The first display of bodies occurred when western media arrived, shortly after the Azov Battalion entered the city. Video and photographic evidence does not present them in a month-old state of decay. A timeline is here.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter issued a tweet contradicting the official narrative about Bucha, implying that it could likely have been a false flag and was permanently banned from Twitter for “violating rules against abuse and harassment.”
On April 8 the Kramatorsk train station in Donbas was rocketed, allegedly by Russia, killing 50 and injuring 100. Serial numbers on the Tochka-U missile fragment indicate that it was from Ukrainian stock piles and fired by the “19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, deployed near Dobropolie 45 km from Kramatorsk.” Russia deactivated their supplies of Tochka-U missiles in 2019.
As best as I can piece it together, the final decisive battle of Ukraine is underway in the port city Mariupol. While “more than 1,000 Ukrainian marines have surrendered” the Azov Battalion appear to have been given the option of fulfilling their promise to die fighting. They have refused a surrender offer and are holed up in the “Azovstal iron and steel works, one of Europe's biggest metallurgical plants.” Presumably they will be captured or destroyed and one of Russia’s central goals of denazifying the Ukrainian military will have been achieved.
Russia is now claiming that Ukraine will carry out another Kramatorsk style false flag attack by firing another Tochka-U missile against a train station in the major railway junction of Lozovaya from “Staromikhaylovka, a village west of Donetsk.” Time will tell.
Note that two of the three of these alleged atrocities occurred in the Donbas, a region Azov and the Ukrainian military have been attacking for eight years.
Russia will soon finish denazifying the Ukrainian military. Russia will soon finish securing to the self-declared people’s republics of Donbas. Russia has achieved a land bridge to Sevastopol. Their peace terms will be autonomy for those regions and Odessa, recognition of Crimea as Russian, and permanent neutrality for Ukraine. It would be nice if America offers to withdraw missiles in Poland and Romania in exchange for Russian recognition of Kosovo but I am not holding my breath.
A little remarked upon study by professors from Princeton and Northwestern laid out the basic fact that America is really an oligarchy and a democracy in name only
“that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
This is the neoliberal economic agenda that has beset America since it went off of the gold standard in 1971 (a real hum dinger and turning point of a year in a lot of ways), an unrelenting war of capital on labor and the environment: focused fire under Republican administrations and controlled demolition under Democratic ones. The neoconservatives, many of whom started out as Democrats, thrived under the Cheney administration, have all wormed their way back into the Democratic party as anti-Trump resistance warriors, and currently set foreign policy in the Biden administration.
They are not that different from the traditional realpolitik of the Democratic wing of geopolitics, exemplified by this passage from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 classic The Grand Chessboard:
“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
But in his silver years even Brzezinski came to realize that facts on the ground were beginning to necessitate an American accommodation to the rise of Russia and China. Clearly, this notion of rapprochement finds little favor in Washington today which is, paradoxically, hell bent on destroying the American empire as quickly as possible in a deluded attempt to preserve its unilateral prerogatives.
In February 2022 the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advised an anxious America about how to prepare for and mitigate foreign influence operations targeting critical infrastructure. Included among the “national critical infrastructure” were Big Tech, schools, and academia. To attack those vital pieces of infrastructure
“malicious actors use influence operations, including tactics like misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM), to shape public opinion, undermine trust, amplify division, and sow discord.”
Because (however improbably) freedom, democracy, and prosperity can still circulate as good coin in the waning years of the American empire, “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” can still be utilized as terms identifying how opponents of freedom, democracy, and prosperity may choose to contest it, when in fact they actually describe any rhetoric or techniques contrary to the plutocratic interests of domestic rapine and raw imperial adventurism abroad.
As the Phoenix Program in Vietnam became Cointelpro at home, so too will the terms misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to label foreign actors be increasingly used to define domestic ones, with academia offering the comfortable assurance of upward mobility to anyone who serves faithfully as an ideological sniper policing the boundaries of the consensus reality Big Media, Big Tech and the government are trying to sell us.