As soon as the bombs started falling on Ukraine, the memes started dropping on Facebook. Suddenly, I’m getting bombed by blue and yellow Support Ukraine memes, followed by Boogieman Putin memes, Ukrainian refugees with their pets memes, and heroic Ukrainian freedom fighter memes. This is what a 21st Century propaganda war looks like. I don’t know where these memes come from, but they were clearly created by professionals, and released strategically.
Don’t get me wrong. I have only sympathy, compassion and concern for the people of Ukraine and my prayers go out to them. I also have sympathy, compassion and prayers for the Russian soldiers who have no desire to kill Ukrainian people or destroy their homes, but who have been sent on this tragic errand. I have no affection for Putin, and I condemn this invasion. However, the US invades sovereign nations all the time, with much less provocation. If we can’t control our own government’s military aggression, who are we to complain about Russia’s.
What is missing from this deluge of propaganda, is any acknowledgment of US culpability in this dreadful situation. There’s no mention of the long-term CIA operations to install pro-western governments all over Eastern Europe, especially the Ukraine, or of how those operations foment and finance Nazi movements that have persisted in Ukraine since WWII. Nor do they mention the business deals which insure that Ukrainian wealth, humanity and resources be exploited by oligarchs in Berlin, London, and New York, rather than those in Moscow.
On the ground, in that part of the world, there is great disagreement over which of those two “trading partners” offer a better deal, and more than a few idealistic Ukrainians would prefer to cultivate a free and independent nation without any unwelcome influence from abroad. Most, however, would prefer any of the above options, to war.
Considering US culpability as the driving force behind NATO’s eastward expansion, We the People, bear responsibility for this mess, even though most of us had no idea what our government was doing over there behind our backs. This is a problem. Our government represents us, and when our government commits really horrible, atrocious crimes against humanity, We the People are to blame. However, We the People are the most media-hypnotized people on Earth, and consequently, corporate interests can obtain our permission, through hypnosis, to use our government in any way they choose.
Let me say that again. We are the most media-hypnotized people on Earth, and corporate interests use media hypnosis to get our permission to use our government to do their dirty work. It’s called “Manufactured Consent.” We get bombarded with one-sided propaganda promoting an impossibly simple, unbelievably naive narrative about Ukraine, just at the moment that their impossibly simple, unbelievably naive narrative about Covid began to collapse.
Russia launched its invasion, just as 2021 US mortality rates revealed a shockingly high death toll. The US overall mortality rate, which remained unchanged through the 2020 Covid pandemic, shot up by 40% in 2021 following the roll-out of Covid vaccines. That’s an unprecedented spike in overall mortality. Researchers estimate that lockdown measures reduced the average American’s life expectancy by almost 2 years, another shocking impact, and a recent study by the Harvard School of Applied Economics revealed that lockdown measures did almost no good, for the enormous amount of harm they caused.
I’m just warning you that the people feeding you this bullshit about Ukraine are the same people who convinced you to needlessly live under house arrest for two years, take potentially lethal injections of experimental drugs that don’t work, and wear a mask that you know doesn’t stop the fine particulate matter associated with forest-fires, but somehow prevents the spread of a virus that is a hundred times smaller.
As I see it, there are four great tragedies playing out here:
1. The tragedy of war in Ukraine, for which we bear some responsibility.
2. The Tragedy of US Foreign Policy, driven by oligarchs, promoted through corporate media and drenched in the blood of humanity that stains the hands of every American. The crimes against humanity attributed to our out-of-control government’s policies would, in fact does, fill many volumes. For brevity’s sake only, let’s leave it at that.
3. The Tragedy of Media Monopoly, internet censorship, and the deluge of propaganda that manipulated Americans into doing far more harm, not only to millions of people all over the world, but to themselves, their fellow citizens and their own country, than any foreign power could dream of.
4. Finally, The Tragedy of the American People. Thousands of Americans died needlessly because they were denied early treatment to Covid. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people died, and continue to die, from adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, and thousands more people died deaths of despair as they watched their businesses, marriages, and/or careers collapse under lockdown measures. Perhaps worst of all, in the midst of this tragedy, a kind of insanity has taken hold.
In this socially atomized, media-hypnotized, environment of fear and isolation, Americans are shell-shocked, confused and traumatized. They have no idea where to turn. Out of habit, they turn on the TV; they read the news; they scroll through their feed, because they don’t know what else to do. So, they still live in a virtual reality where Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” and the disease is worth sacrificing your quality of life to avoid. The media continues to ignore the mountain of Covid “vaccine” injuries, while Biden’s administration keeps pushing Americans into this new medical authoritarianism that censors the wails of grieving families while it floods cyberspace with electronic propaganda.
The schizophrenia has taken a toll on the American psyche, and understandably so. Without a firm grip on reality, we’re left rudderless in a shit-storm of sophisticated propaganda. Unfortunately, the technocrats spreading this propaganda know this, and they know how to capitalize on the injuries they’ve already inflicted. Thus far, they’ve played us like a fiddle, and they’re still calling the tune. Regardless of the situation in Ukraine, the tragedy of the American people strikes closest to home, and that’s the one I’m most concerned about.