{"id":216600,"date":"2022-07-18T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=216600"},"modified":"2022-07-15T09:42:17","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T08:42:17","slug":"three-illuminating-quotes-about-the-war-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/07\/three-illuminating-quotes-about-the-war-in-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Illuminating Quotes about the War in Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

12 Jul 2022 – <\/em>John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I\u2019ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I\u2019ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

~ John Pilger<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This comment comes from a recent interview<\/a> with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.<\/p>\n

\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=u9pEotvlW-s<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear that the western world was being smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike anything we\u2019ve ever seen before. In the first full month of the conflict, American network TV stations\u00a0gave more coverage<\/a> to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the US has been directly involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam. Literal Iraq war architects<\/a> were some of the first pundits sought out for analysis of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls for insane escalations<\/a> against Russia succeeded in pushing the Overton window<\/a> of acceptable debate in the direction of warmongering extremism and away from support for diplomatic solutions.<\/p>\n

And this was all easily piped into mainstream consciousness because the way had been lubricated<\/a> by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass scale psychological operation known as Russiagate. America\u2019s most dangerous confrontation in generations just so happens to have been preceded by years of media-generated panic about that very same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. Heckin\u2019 heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the \u2018unprovoked invasion of Ukraine\u2019. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn\u2019t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

~ Noam Chomsky<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This quote, from an interview last month<\/a> with Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should be pointed out more often.<\/p>\n

People don\u2019t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they\u2019re trying to manipulate how it\u2019s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as \u201cmy wife who I definitely never beat,\u201d you\u2019d immediately become suspicious because that\u2019s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don\u2019t say \u201cround Earth\u201d or \u201cthe Holocaust that totally happened,\u201d we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we\u2019ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people\u2019s understanding about them.<\/p>\n

The need of the political\/media class to continually bleat this phrase \u201cunprovoked invasion\u201d over and over again is itself a confession that they know they\u2019re not telling the whole truth. It\u2019s the imperial propaganda version of this classic tweet:<\/p>\n

\n

My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.<\/p>\n

— mike ginn (@shutupmikeginn) November 21, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n