With the number of weapons being sent to Ukraine the West is back again with a war by proxy, only this one has nuclear weapons on both sides. The sooner people send messages of a peace conference, not pictures glorifying death and carnage, the better chance there is of a solution.
The Doomsday Clock, the symbolic warning of the planet’s destruction when the hands reach midnight, normally minutes to that fearful hour, have been shifted to seconds.
In war, opposing sides invariably resort to false claims and black propaganda. The US is spending billions of dollars in the Ukraine, from weapons to counter-propaganda. US officials are planning to rush through a major Bill that will dramatically bolster funding for anti-Russian propaganda and intelligence support to Ukraine, it was announced on Tuesday. House speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was fast-tracking the Bill straight to the House of representatives, which will see $500 million (£370m) from the Foreign Military Financing programme sent to Ukraine for 2022, straight to the House of Representatives.
This article was penned by Jason Michael McCann taking a cold, hard look at the propaganda coming from Ukraine designed to inflame the conflict, not seek peace.
THE PROPAGANDA WAR
by Jason Michael McCann
The frenetic intensity of the western propaganda campaign against Russia has reached and surpassed anything in living memory. Not since the early days of the First World War have western governments and the media been in such perfect harmony in their demonisation of another state as they are now in their treatment of Vladimir Putin and Russia. All the complexities of Ukraine — its woeful human rights record, its endemic political corruption, its atrocious treatment of vulnerable ethnic minorities, and its glorification of its Nazi past — discussed regularly and in-depth in the western media, were entirely expunged from the record the moment Russian forces crossed its border (24 February 2022), and Russia has been subjected to a relentless, uncompromising, and full spectrum campaign of vitriol and hate not witnessed in Europe since Kaisar Wilhelm II marched his forces through ‘litte Belgium.’
Ukraine, like Belgium in 1914, has been instantaneously and thoroughly revised in the imaginations of Europe and North America. Its twentieth century past and its less-than savoury present realities, as a fledgling democracy struggling to overcome the ugliest and most poisonous ideas of recent European history, have been whitewashed so as to set before western media consumers an idealised righteous victim mercilessly assaulted by a powerful and wholly evil neighbouring rogue state. This fictive narrative allows for no subtlety and is engineered to discipline, discredit, and destroy any voice brave enough or foolhardy enough to offer nuance or balance. Anyone in the West who stands up and points to the wider — and factual — causes of this war is immediately attacked by a rabid western commentariat and decried by the mindless mob as ‘pro-Russian’ or a ‘Putin apologist’ — terms which, in the current climate, are synonymous with ‘traitor.’
Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector and US Marine Corps intelligence officer — a man eminently qualified to comment on the facts of this conflict, was suspended from the Twitter social media platform for stating verifiable facts that challenged this narrative; that it was impossible to lay the blame for the Bucha massacre on Russia and that the missile that struck the train station in Kramatorsk was a type used only by the Ukrainian military. Only yesterday, Roger Anderson, a Scottish socialist activist, suffered the same fate for using the iconic image of August Landmesser refusing to give the Nazi salute at the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg in 1936. Anderson used this image — a world famous symbol of anti-Nazism — in response to western governments arming and training openly Nazi elements of the Ukrainian military and their wilful ignorance of the atrocities they have been committing. Twitter chose to interpret this image as hate speech.
War in Ukraine has pulled us all through the looking glass. The informed opinion of experts and the most recognised tools of anti-fascism are to be silenced and removed from the public arena because they undermine a propaganda drive that can have only one end — the almost unanimous public support in the West for a catastrophic horizontal escalation of this conflict; one which will certainly end in a nuclear war. Western democracies are being asked to park their critical faculties to make way for a US foreign policy objective that is aggressively pushing for a war with Russia that will benefit the United States by being fought in Europe — killing tens of millions of people — and so guaranteeing American global supremacy by weakening Russia and obliterating Europe.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that Russia is in the wrong, that it has committed the greatest international crime by invading a sovereign state. There is no doubt the Russian premier Mr Putin is the aggressor. This is a perfectly rational position to take. It is the correct position. But we do not live in a world where wrong has no rights. Putin’s war against Ukraine is unjustifiable — there is no justification for war, but this is not to say that the Russian Federation does not have perfectly valid reasons for invading its neighbour. Remember, the causes of war are not justifications — they are causes, and the causes of this war are many and they do not all lie at the feet of Russia.
Ethnic Russians in Donbass have been on the receiving end of a state-sanctioned terror campaign from the time of the 2014 far-right Maidan coup. Nazi militias freshly integrated into the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been waging a war against the civilian population of Donetsk and Luhansk in which rape and torture have routinely been used as weapons. Under the cover of state defence, NATO has been training and working with Ukrainian forces — including Nazis — in this war against Ukrainians whose only crime was to demand greater autonomy in the face of a government in Kyiv that threatened the protection of their culture and language. Various western state intelligence agencies, including the CIA and Britain’s MI6, have been on the ground for decades fomenting Ukrainian nationalist and ultra-nationalist sentiment against Russia, and preparing the most extreme elements of these groups for a dirty war intended to destabilise Russia at the cost of Ukraine. And the United States, in violation of international law, has effectively used Ukraine as a black spot to develop illegal biological and chemical weapons for use against Russia in the war it has been engineering. In sum, Ukraine has been weaponised by the West to provoke Russia to step onto the bear trap.
Rather than accept the factuality of these causes, western governments and media working in unison with the Ukrainian government and media have mounted the largest and most sophisticated disinformation campaign ever operated. Using population control methods developed by the US and British intelligence services in Afghanistan, western state-aligned media have turned the so-called ‘battle for hearts and minds’ on their own people. Anastasiia Lapatina, a journalist for The Kyiv Independent, has taken to Twitter repeatedly from the beginning of the war, warning of the threat of rape from Russian soldiers. Apparently, this is all Russian men do — rape Ukrainian women and girls. On 31 March (2022) her claim was that ‘How to protect yourself from rape’ was a post circulating on Ukrainian social media. Perhaps this was true, but by 12 April her fear mongering had reached new heights in her assertion that Russian women were telling their soldier boyfriends and husbands to rape Ukrainian women and girls. Her source for this: the SBU — the Ukrainian intelligence service that was caught lying about ‘the ghost of Kiev’ and the fate of the Ukrainian servicemen on Snake Island.
Within Ukraine, there is clear evidence of a disinformation mill churning out outrageous anti-Russian propaganda that is repeated by western Ukrainian journalists in English on their social media pages for western consumption. Naturally, this is picked up by western media and treated — uncritically — as news from the war. It is interesting to note that Lapatina also contributes in English to The Guardian and The New York Times. Without question, and as this website has already discussed in-depth, rape happens in war. It is a crime — a war crime even, and it is not only committed by enemy soldiers. Yet, the idea that Russian women are encouraging their partners to rape other women is patently nonsense; that Russian women are essentially psychopaths like Rosemary West. This is nothing but propaganda, and its purpose is to gain greater support from people in the West and to encourage Ukrainian soldiers on the front to treat Russians — soldiers of the Russian Federation and ethnic Russian Ukrainians — with unfettered brutality.
This ugly nationalist theme of the avenging raped Ukrainian Völkisch maiden was turned up a notch with the production of the ‘Bloody Harvest’ video. In this nightmarish clip, a vampiric woman wearing a traditional Ukrainian peasant’s smock beheads a wounded Russian soldier after delivering an ultra-nationalist monologue repeating Banderist myths of Ukrainian racial superiority. By welcoming the Russian invaders ‘to hell,’ this putrid ultra-nationalist propaganda piece evokes the national memory of the 1940s when the Ukrainian Nazis, the followers of Stepan Bandera, worked with the SS to round up Jews and slaughter them at Lviv (where there is a giant monument to Bandera to this day) and Babi Yar near Kyiv. This is exactly the kind of Nazi propaganda that fueled the Ukrainian genocide of Poles in what is known as the Volhynia massacre of 1943. Ukraine is getting radical with its propaganda production; digging deep into its ultra-nationalist and criminal past to inspire the Ukrainian soldier of today to see the Russian as his grandfather saw the Jew and the Pole.
Not a single western politician or journalist called this horror out. In the same way that the worst excesses of the Nazi Azov battalion and other openly Nazi groups in the Ukrainians armed forces are being ignored, so too is this cultural Nazism — which has very much become the mainstream narrative of the war inside Ukraine. Western media simply is not interested in this, turning its attention instead to atrocities being committed by Russians. And these Russian atrocities suffer from the same lack of evidence right across the board. Social media is awash with videos and pictures of Russian prisoners of war being tortured and murdered, but not a single video or picture of Russian soldiers doing the same has emerged. The Russian atrocities are based almost entirely on assertions made by Ukrainian journalists — the Bucha massacre and the Kramatorsk missile attack, atrocities which are already struggling to stand up to forensic scrutiny. Still, nothing of this has stopped the parliament in Kyiv from declaring the Russian invasion a genocide.
Genocide? Without so much as a scrap of evidence verified by an international inquiry, western governments and media are allowing this language to seep into the discourse — hammered home by suspect images of murdered civilians; allowing it to become a kind of soft fact of the war. This is a genocide — a deliberate targeting of the ethnic Ukrainian population for the sole reason that these people are Ukrainian — on a par with Rwanda, Srebrenica, and indeed the wholesale slaughter of Ukrainian Jews in the Holocaust by Ukrainian Nazis. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, has been the only voice of reason, saying in his refusal to call this a genocide that only the international courts can determine what is and is not a genocide.
This soft factuality has created a media worldview in which the facts on the ground in Ukraine have been manufactured to suit the purposes of the United States — and the intention here is absolutely about building the necessary support in the West for a war with Russia. Western governments have learned the lessons of Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and so have set about a full spectrum media, culture, and social assault on every form of dissent. Anti-war movements have been silenced and nothing today stands between the situation now and an escalation to a catastrophic — possibly even nuclear — war with Russia but the common sense of the average person whose senses are being assailed with wall-to-wall warmongering propaganda. But, thanks to the continual background propaganda of western civilisation, the average person stands no chance of seeing through what is happening. The average western media consumer is waving a Ukrainian flag, not in solidarity with the Ukrainian people or for peace, but to support the gathering momentum of a war that will reduce his or her city to the current state of Mariupol.
NOTES: Jason Michael McCann, M.Phil. (TCD) Conflict Studies The author holds a postgraduate degree in Race, Ethnicity and Conflict from the University of Dublin, Trinity College, and an academic fellowship in the study of conflict from the University of West Flanders. He has published on the history of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and the murder of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. The article was first published on the ‘Standpoint Zero’ website.
REFERENCES
Cohen, Dan. “Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists and CIA Cutouts.” MintPress News, March 22, 2022. https://www.mintpressnews.com/ukraine-propaganda-war-international-pr-firms-dc-lobbyists-cia-cutouts/280012/.
Cook, Jonathan. “Liberals Are Adopting an Old Soviet Tactic: Painting Dissent as Mentally Ill.” MintPress News, April 7, 2022. https://www.mintpressnews.com/liberals-adopting-soviet-tactic-painting-dissent-mentally-ill/280160/.
Dobbins, James, Raphael S. Cohen, Nathan Chandler, Bryan Frederick, Edward Geist, Paul DeLuca, Forrest E. Morgan, Howard J. Shatz, and Brent Williams. “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” Rand Corporation, January 1, 2019. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html.
Jones, James. “Inside Ukraine’s Propaganda War.” Frontline PBS, March 14, 2014. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inside-ukraines-propaganda-war/.
McCann, Jason Michael. “Update.” Twitter, April 14, 2022. https://twitter.com/Jeggit/status/1514501424633331720.
O’Toole, Patricia. “How the US Government Used Propaganda to Sell Americans on World War I.” HISTORY, May 22, 2018. https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-wilson-fake-news.
Platonova, Daria. “Raising and Losing Children in the Donbas War.” Strife, February 12, 2020. https://www.strifeblog.org/tag/gorlovka/.
Ritter, Scott. “Political Constraints within US Inhibit Critical Thought on Ukraine Crisis.” Global Times, March 24, 2022. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1256693.shtml.
Ryan, Missy, Ellen Nakashima, Michael Birnbaum, and David L. Stern. “Outmatched in Military Might, Ukraine Has Excelled in the Information War.” The Washington Post, March 16, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/16/ukraine-zelensky-information-war/.
SBU. “Служба Безпеки України.” Telegram, April 12, 2022. https://t.me/SBUkr/4104.
Smith, Yves. “Twitter Re-Ban of Scott Ritter, Kafkaesque Support of Impersonator, Is All About Anti-Russia Propaganda.” naked capitalism, April 14, 2022. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/04/twitter-re-ban-of-scott-ritter-kafkaesque-support-of-impersonator-is-all-about-anti-russia-propaganda.html.
Trejo, Shane. “ISIS-Style Propaganda Video Promotes Globalist Ukrainian Puppet Regime, Demonizes All Russians, Promotes War Crimes.” Big League Politics, April 11, 2022. https://bigleaguepolitics.com/isis-style-propaganda-video-promotes-globalist-ukrainian-puppet-regime-demonizes-all-russians-promotes-war-crimes/.
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Grouse Beater 
Well what a lot of very informative information. I am now in a better position to deceminate and anylise the mince we are being fed in the west. Those who shoot from the hip after watching or listening to the BBC are just apeing some vested interests weaponised tools. We should have learned from Vietnam that it’s all about the money and power. The chessboard of the military games has never become more risky. We Scots should never ever be used or manipulated. When independent soon we must stay and remain NEUTRAL.
JM McCann: “… Twitter chose to interpret this image as hate speech… ” Yes, JM, and that is exactly how Twitter chose to interpret the tweets of females in opposition to the trans agenda, when females were, and still are, being denounced and forced out of their jobs for daring to say anything against this pernicious lobby that is backed by megabucks from the Big Pharma/Big Tech/Big Medicine/Big Prosthetics industrial complex. Journalists just like you have followed the money – in a different context.
Having said that, JM, I agree with you that the real story of Ukraine is being obliterated in favour of Western interests. I am totally in opposition to the invasion and to the destruction of Ukraine, to the deaths and suffering of the Ukrainian population, but, like you, I have been following the story of Ukraine for a number of years, and what we are hearing now is very far from reality. It shows how big money can buy even the media. It is fortunate that independent sources are able to verify the truth of what is going on. The internet has its down side, its really dark side, but it could be our salvation, in spite of it. I also wholeheartedly agree with you that Scotland must also make its neutrality known internationally before we become a target through our own puppet status, as has happened to Ukraine. Had Zelenskyy declared Ukrainian neutrality before the invasion, in full knowledge that his country could not join NATO or even join the EU at that stage, he would have saved them all this unnecessary suffering and the prevented the destruction of his country. I know it’s so hard, but you have to stand up to those who want to use you to get what they want.
All my life I thought I was on the side of the good guys with the white hats. What a rotten world this is. Money and greed corupts all.
It is generally agreed the USA is the worst terrorist nation on the planet. Informed Americans agree. They love their country which is why the speak out about what it does in the name of so-called Christianity and democracy.
I started taking an interest in Ukraine while campaigning for Scottish Independence in 2014, and at that time I wondered if we’d ever have our own ‘Orange Revolution. However, when I saw what that revolution actually meant, I decided it was something best avoided.
In 2015 I watched Professor John Mearsheimer’s lecture in which he warned us that Nato’s (AKA USA’s) push the get into Ukraine was another example of ‘the West’s (AKA the USA – again) shocking expansionism and warfare by proxy.
Six years ago the professor also predicted what’s happening right now in Ukraine.
I’ve kept an eye on events in Ukraine, and as the article states, the western media (including BBC News Night) has covered the terrifying rise of Nazism ( it never went away post WW2) )and the ultra-fascist militias – the murders, the attacks on and destruction of Russian and Jewish owned businesses, and the persecution of the Roma community in the NW of the country.
It was a very familiar narrative
As many as 5 million Russian speakers have fled Ukraine because of the attacks by the ‘Azov Battalion’ and it’s allies – and they’ve fled to Russia, not the west.
In 2018 the UN reported that 10,500 – mostly Russian speaking civilians – had been murdered in the Donbass region.
The figure was estimated to be close to 17,000 immediately before Putin’s forces invaded.
Putin tried to justify his actions by stating he intended to remove the nazis from power in Ukraine – because ‘we’ (the west) were actually helping the fascists/nazis deal with the ”Russian/Jewish/Roma problem ”.
This is easily confirmed as most of the previously-mentioned reports from credible media outlets are still available via Youtube.
At least … they were.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, the US Navy joined the Saudi Navy and helped the latter sink an entire Yemeni fishing fleet – as hundreds of thousands of Yemeni children and their parents slowly staved to death.
Aid supply routes, food processing and distribution centres, aid convoys, and medical facilities have been bombed out of existence by the Saudi forces (and their allies) using UK munitions.
But those horrific acts aren’t news.
While I disagree with Jason ( and Craig Murray ) on the * Trans * issue – properly speaking , the Women’s Rights issue – this doesn’t invalidate his views on other subjects . Likewise with Craig .
Jason has been excellent on the Ukraine situation , and endured the ill-informed invective of the knee-jerk * Putin/Russia = the Devil incarnate * mob : and a mob is what they are , with all the irrational group-think prejudice implicit in the term .
The above article is another honest , considered article by Jeggit .
As is this one
https://www.sott.net/article/466340-Retired-Swiss-Military-Intelligence-Officer-Is-it-Possible-to-Actually-Know-What-Has-Been-And-is-Going-on-in-Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR0zCJgT0m3Q8gYEBtPja4f0uWrGa6vju-wG5CKqMAiIY97BSZry7SOMaFE
In the competition to see who can scream ” PUTIN APOLOGIST ” the loudest , extremely well-informed , objective voices are being – deliberately – drowned out
Yes, Robert, we all have different views in different situations. That’s normal. However, have you read the letter in the National on Sunday today, by Frances Earnshaw? Puts the whole trans issue in stark contrast to the reality of Scottish politics. While I agree with most of what she says, I do not see why independence should suffer in a referendum on that issue because a referendum is neutral as to the trans issue.
It is the SNP and Green alliance that is at fault here. Most women with a little life experience under their belts knew from the outset that this Bill would cause massive division within the wider independence movement. Many men, some of them bloggers, saw it as specifically a women’s issue or were not interested at all. That was the biggest mistake they could have made. I, for one, and many others women, were warning that the independence movement would be adversely affected by this issue because it was so much bigger than just who wanted to pee next to whom. Many of us were deeply disappointed by the lack of support from men in the movement (not from the majority of bloggers who were very supportive). We tried to tell Scottish men that Scottish women would not put up with this imposition on our very existence as a sex class, and that the ramifications and repercussions would be enormous.
Unfortunately, anger at the SNP/Green nonsense has caused many women to turn away from independence altogether, which is a disaster. If Nicola Sturgeon and her pseudo woke cohort had wanted to both stymie a referendum/independence and crush women in Scotland, they could not have done a better job. She is condemning Putin as a war criminal. What do we call her? A sex criminal? A social criminal? A conniving, ruthless politician or a very stupid woman?
Hi Lorna . No , I haven’t read the article you refer to , in fact , I haven’t bought The National for some time now , though , prompted by your reference , I sought it out in my local shop earlier but there were no copies left . The whole 2 must have been taken !
Everything you say above – and have said previously , is correct . Any astute politician would have foreseen the divisive ( lunatic ) nature of this * stuff * and at the very least had the sense to remain neutral on the subject . To have become so dogmatically partisan – as NS has done , displays a total lack of political acumen , the result of which can be seen in the recent polls showing a decrease in support for Independence among women : the very demographic whose support was lesser in 2014 , support that is absolutely essential if our ambition is ever to be realised .
Happy Easter to yourself , Gareth and readers .
One doesn’t have to be an observant Christian to feel the resonating , archetypal power of the Resurrection story . One day it will be ours
O/T . Hope you don’t mind Gareth . I’ve not been able to comment on YFS for a couple of weeks now ; no idea why and Iain is equally puzzled . Just wanted to say to Lorna I read and really enjoyed your story on YFS today . I’ve not really met any of those types – the Jock/ish version of ” Bright Young Things ” , aspiring career politicians sans real life experience , sans insight , sans everything , except a promising future in * Progressive * Scotland , but you capture very well the *type * and the kind of background we can easily imagine as typical . I could go on ! But won’t . Have you considered finding a publisher ?
Thank you, Robert. No, not given it any serious thought. Not sure I’d make the grade, to be honest, and I just enjoy my scribbles. If others get something from them, that’s good; if not, I don’t mind I did want to be a writer once upon a time, but life got in the way – you know, marriage, family, home, day job. Or are they just excuses? Probably. As for the piece, as I said, it was purely fiction very loosely based on observation.
It is both nice and encouraging to see so many positive comments on this article. I made the deliberate choice to disallow comments on the standpointzero website because I feel discussion is unnecessary on such fora. People are dying. Yet still … “I disagree with Jason on *trans* but …” I gave up on blogging about Scotland because of this brain-dead fixation on one particular subject. The dead in Ukraine do not give a flying rats fart about this monomaniacal obsession. But I do hope you enjoy the new site. Thanks for reading.
PS. I am not interested in further discussion in the comments, but feel free to chat among yourselves.
” monomaniacal obsession ” . lol . Sorry J . ” People are dying ” all over the world due to having Leaders/Governments that refuse to listen to and act in the best interests of their citizens . Sound familiar ?
Thank you for this – for the past eight years I have found myself shocked by the UK media , the pundits they offer and their so called balance.
Jason Michael: no one is forcing you to engage. Just like no one is forcing the trans allies to engage. It was a fair statement given your own comments on the issue. I am not on Twitter, as I have said before, so I have not attacked you on that medium. I would not attack you, anyway. Your observation that female rights are not worth your attention is hurtful, but not unexpected. What is an utterly baseless proposition is that people are not dying or being hurt as a result of the trans issue or that it is a monomaniacal obsession. If left to its own devices, this issue has the potential to sweep across every country in the world and change their basic social, political, economic structure, culture, etc. to one that is wedded to unfettered capitalism at its very worst, where human beings are commodities to an extent that they have never been before. I’m sorry that you simply don’t see that, possibly are incapable of seeing it, and you have that in common with so many others, but there you have it. Incidentally, I once tried to work out the numbers of unarmed females who had been murdered, in every country across the globe, through the centuries, but the numbers were so stupendously huge, that it became an impossible undertaking. You may argue that that has nothing to do with the trans issue, but I’d offer a counter-argument that the trans issue is just another shade of the same old misogyny that caused all those unnecessary deaths of helpless, unarmed females of all ages since the dawn of time. Unnecessary deaths of, and injury to, innocents of all kinds should concern all of us, not picking and choosing like sweeties from a jar.
Thank you, GB, for another article which reassures many out here that we are not crazy people but in fact stable and reasonable individuals.
Pretty shocking article from Macwhirter today in the Herald.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/20078359.iain-macwhirter-decision-time-nato-russia-advances-donbas/?action=success#comments-anchor
Macwhirter’s line is to turn NATO from a defence system into an *offence* force, which is highly dangerous, and in any event, Ukraine is not a member pf NATO, not that that troubles NATO’s US instructors.