cartoon by Michael Leunig from his fans’ FB page
Paranoia strikes deep.
Into your life it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid.
Step out of line, the men come and take you away.
We better stop. Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look, what’s going down?
— Stephen Stills, For What It’s Worth
When I was growing up, spies were cool and sexy, and the Russians were just incorrigible demonic Commie bad guys, except for Ilya Kuryakin of course. And then John Le Carré started writing about western spies who were just as deranged, corrupt and ideologically fixated as those from “Communist” nations. I’m sure the CIA was not impressed.
I continue to be amazed at the level of ideological fanaticism and paranoia that the western spooks, led by the CIA and the Pentagon, and firmly in control of both US Tweedle parties, exhibit. As we learn more and more about the number of leaders they assassinated, the number of popular elected governments they overthrew, and the number of nations they destabilized, corrupted and destroyed through sanctions, propaganda, embargoes, blockades and other misdeeds, I am continually shocked and chagrined that I had no idea and the media didn’t tell us about any of this.
Their fanaticism and ruthlessness surely rivals or surpasses that of the most notorious mass murderers of human history. And most of us never had the faintest inkling what was going on. We still know only a small part of what, in collusion with the spooks of other western nations, they did to turn perhaps more than half of the nations of the world into failed states. If I’d heard ten years ago what I know now about their actions, I would have shrugged it off as an impossible, over-the-top conspiracy theory.
Fast forward to ten years ago, when what was then celebrated as the Maidan “colour revolution” turned out, we found out later, to be a US-orchestrated massacre and coup of a democratically-elected government in Ukraine, simply because that government disrupted the CIA/Pentagon plans for NATO expansion and the commensurate destabilization and destruction of Russia.
I’m still a bit dazed about it all. How I could have been so wrong about what was happening. How the media that I (at that time) mostly trusted could have been so utterly complicit in the Empire’s propaganda, censorship, and mis- and disinformation campaigns. How I could have been so credulous as to believe that decades of large-scale, relentless and violent acts of undeclared war and destruction were just boys playing at being spies, just looking for ‘information’, exclusively for defensive purposes, and mostly harmless if a bit over-zealous.
Now that the blinkers are off, I see all the foreign activities of the US Empire, its allies, and their spooks, in a completely different light. And I see the ‘news’ reports in the mainstream media in a completely different light. It takes work and patience to really see through the continuous fog that this undeclared Cold War (which never really ended as we thought and hoped it had), has wrought, and not to start to see conspiracies where there are none.
The tipping point for me was Biden’s blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines, one of the greatest ecological disasters in human history, and a total betrayal of the European members of the Empire. The utterly obvious evidence that it was done by the US, with the full prior knowledge of the administration, was buried under an endless barrage of obfuscation, churned out daily and faithfully by the mainstream western media. Even without the digging of the award-winning Sy Hersh, how could anyone have possibly come to any other conclusion? But we believe what we want to believe, and most of us in the west just don’t want to believe that “our” government could do something so outrageous.
And Nord Stream is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost everything that, in our politicians’ speeches and our media reports, was reportedly done by the Russians in Ukraine and by the Palestinians on October 7th in the occupied territories, has turned out, like the reports of Iraq WMD and the reports of babies being taken off incubators in Kuwait and the hundreds of other outrage-provoking ‘stories’ about the behaviour of the US Empire’s alleged ‘enemies’, to be complete fabrications. Those fabrications are still believed by most in the US and the US Empire thanks to the endless, massive, unrelenting firehose of lies and misinformation aimed at the countries’ bewildered and dumbed-down citizens.
This is not to say that other countries don’t employ propaganda as well. The best known Russian propaganda was the photo and video of fake BLM protesters burning bibles (with large BLM signs conveniently located beside the conflagration, for the benefit of the more dim-witted racist viewers). It worked, but not terribly well. Putin, in his interview with Carlson, admitted that when it comes to propaganda, the US Empire has absolutely no peers.
So now, through this lens of doubting everything I am told by the governments and their compliant media, I’m looking at the two latest events about Russia. I’m doing this keeping in mind the parting statement from the little-too-blabbermouthy uber-imperial-ideologue Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, the women who orchestrated the Maidan massacre and coup. In that statement she “promised” Putin that her departure would be followed by some acts of “asymmetrical warfare” that he (Putin) would be unprepared for.
And then we had the death of Navalny, the anti-Putin politician, a month before the Russian elections. Of course, US Empire leaders raced to blame Putin for the death, insinuating he was murdered. But now I’m starting to ask a question, whenever a politically inflammatory event occurs and the mainstream media and Empire leaders rush to judgement in the absence of evidence: Who stands to gain? The coroner ruled the death came from natural causes, and they turned the body over to his mother, who could have, if she wished, had a second autopsy performed. He suffered from multiple medical conditions, and prison life is never particularly healthy, in any country.
But the death was a huge embarrassment to Putin. He had nothing to gain from having Navalny killed or deprived of essential medical care, and everything to lose. Navalny was not running in the election. He is by all accounts not very popular in Russia, and he embarrassed Amnesty International after they came to his defence, by issuing a series of inflammatory anti-Muslim racist and xenophobic videos.
Even worse, if the CIA paid someone to kill him, that would make Putin look incompetent, allowing a mole to kill someone in a supervised prison. In fact, one of Navalny’s complaints was that the prison guards videotaping their check-ups on him throughout the night was a form of sleep deprivation torture. Maybe the Russians read about the Epstein case. So: Who stands to gain? Same answer as the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. Certainly not Putin. Navalny’s cause of death probably was just what the death certificate said. But don’t try to tell that to Empire politicians or their media, or the Empire’s befuddled citizens.
And then we had the Moscow concert hall attack, allegedly by four ISIL members from Tajikistan. The staggering bias of the western media was again immediately evident: The CBC subheaded their story “Russian media reported that the men were tortured during interrogation”, and said they “showed signs of severe beatings”. The story contained no information on the motive for the mass slaughter. The “Russian media” that “reported” this torture were not identified, nor was any evidence offered.
But toss aside the western media and you start to get some sense of Who stands to gain. The gunmen fled into a forest near the Ukraine border and were pursued and caught by dozens of Russian police. No surprise that they looked pretty rough in court. That doesn’t mean they weren’t beaten by police. But Who stands to gain if any confession they might now come out with is discounted by the west (and readers of shoddy, biased western media like the CBC) as being merely the result of police torture in prison?
Especially if those confessions are admissions that they were paid a million rubles to do the deed (that was apparently the sum offered, according to non-western sources). And especially if the confessions reveal that, especially as they occurred during Ramadan, the mindless slaughter actually had absolutely nothing to do with ISIL — they were just paid to say they were from ISIL. But then, people will say anything if they’re tortured, so clearly they were just ISIL zealots who hated Russia.
Couldn’t possibly be the “asymmetric warfare” that Nuland warned Putin about just before the attack.
Who stands to gain? If you want to send a warning to someone that you hate, by embarrassing them and committing atrocities against their civilians, that would be you.
Of course Putin is no saint, and the Russian prison system is probably as ghastly as most prison systems, and their cops are probably as brutal and corrupt as cops in many countries.
But just keep asking that question, and the claims and allegations from the Tweedles of US Empire and its vassal states, and the reporting from our unquestioning, compliant and incompetent media start to have a uniformly really bad smell.
It’s really shocking, and dismaying, what we can be made to believe. Especially if it’s nice and neat and ‘good vs evil’ simple, and what we want to believe.
So: Why do I care? So what if the fanatic, paranoid ideologues who control both the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties in just about all western ‘democracies’ in the US Empire are orchestrating a quiet and undeclared war of terror on anyone who doesn’t fall into line? So what if the media are so corrupt and/or incompetent that they mindlessly scribe the propaganda, mis- and disinformation fed to them, and censor anything that would arouse suspicion?
After all, as I keep saying, we’re all just acting out our conditioning. The Empire ideologues that control all major political parties and all major media believe that the world will not be safe until Russia and China and the entire Mideast and disobedient states in Asia and Africa and Latin America that elect ‘socialists’ are brought into line, made compliant, and absorbed into Empire where they can be controlled by their betters. They’ve been conditioned to believe that all their lives, and will die with that belief.
Why do I care? I guess it’s my own conditioning — I was brought up to deplore cruelty, violence and war, and, above all, to hate liars. And I’m ashamed at having fallen for so many of the lies. This horrific, devastating global ‘Cold War’ has been going on for my whole life, undeclared, under the radar, and under my radar. How can I not have known, not have seen it?
And as this war rages, the larger battle that threatens us all — the accelerating global economic, ecological, political and social collapse we are seeing everywhere — is being ignored. Our collective struggle to come to terms with collapse will depend on our willingness to set aside our differences and work together. And as long as the wars and the lies continue, that cannot happen. And as it’s our conditioning that is continuing to drive the wars and the lies, there is no chance of that changing.
I would have hoped that, in collapse, we would at least show a little dignity, a little humility, a little humanity. One more thing I was foolish to believe. But that’s where we are. It couldn’t have turned out otherwise.