WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #71, May 4, 2022
1. Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Scahill on Ukraine War, Media, Propaganda and Accountability
2. Ukrainian Academic Olga Baysha on The Real Zelensky
3. Caitlin Johnstone: Everyone’s Anti-War until the War Propaganda Starts
4. Pope Francis states the NATO may have provoked Ukraine War
Video: Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Scahill on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Media, Propaganda, and Accountability
TRANSCEND VIDEOS, 25 Apr 2022
Jeremy Scahill | The Intercept - TRANSCEND Media Service
Video: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/04/noam-chomsky-and-jeremy-scahill-on-the-russia-ukraine-war-the-media-propaganda-and-accountability/
Noam Chomsky spoke with Jeremy Scahill in a wide-ranging discussion on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
14 Apr 2022 – The Russian invasion of Ukraine has now surpassed 50 days of sustained mass death and destruction. Despite several rounds of negotiations over the past seven weeks, the war continues to intensify. Russian President Vladimir Putin remains defiant and has indicated that the brutal military campaign will continue unabated. On Tuesday, Putin said negotiations had hit a “dead end” and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that Russia will not pause its military operations during future peace talks. U.S. President Joe Biden announced this week yet another allocation of $800 million dollars in “more sophisticated and heavier-duty weaponry” than previous transfers to the Ukrainian side. Meanwhile, NATO appears set to expand further, with both Finland and Sweden indicating they are actively considering joining the alliance. Germany and other European countries are publicly committing to buying and selling more weapons and spending more on defense. NATO is raising the prospect of expanding its permanent military presence in Europe, and Washington is reasserting its political dominance over Europe on security matters.
On Sunday, in an interview on NBC, national security adviser Jake Sullivan cast the war not just as a defense of Ukraine but also an opportunity to deliver significant blows to the stability of the Russian state. “At the end of the day, what we want to see is a free and independent Ukraine, a weakened and isolated Russia, and a stronger, more unified, more determined West,” he said. “We believe that all three of those objectives are in sight, can be accomplished.”
As Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russian forces of heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity, including massacres of large numbers of civilians, Putin’s government and media apparatus is waging an all-out campaign to denounce the allegations as lies and fake news.
Biden has officially accused Putin of war crimes and suggested he should face a “war crime trial.” Russia, like the U.S., has steadfastly refused to ratify the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, so it is unclear how or where the administration believes such a trial would take place.
This week, renowned dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky joined me for a wide-ranging discussion on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, holding the powerful accountable, the role of media and propaganda in war, and what Chomsky believes is necessary to end the bloodshed in Ukraine.
Video: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/04/noam-chomsky-and-jeremy-scahill-on-the-russia-ukraine-war-the-media-propaganda-and-accountability/
UKRAINE: The Real Zelensky
April 29, 2022
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/29/ukraine-the-real-zelensky/?fbclid=IwAR3MiEIbcBCga5j_v04yINJ-m24xyXFKt4BYQDG7G26hS62tH5D3QXFtwyA
Natylie Baldwin interviews academic Olga Baysha about Ukraine’s president, a former TV actor who has become, since the start of the war, an A-list celebrity in the U.S.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 23, the eve of Russia’s invasion. At the time he was hosting the presidents of Lithuania and Poland in Kiev. (President of Ukraine, Flickr)
A comedic actor who rose to the country’s highest office in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was virtually unknown to the average American, except perhaps as a bit player in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment theater.
But when Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, Zelensky was suddenly transformed to an A-list celebrity in U.S. media. American news consumers were bombarded with images of a man who appeared overcome by the tragic events, possibly in over his head, but ultimately sympathetic. It didn’t take long for that image to evolve into the khaki-clad, tireless hero governing over a scrappy little democracy and single-handedly staving off the barbarians of autocracy from the east.
But beyond that carefully crafted Western media image is something much more complicated and less flattering. Zelensky was elected by 73 percent of the vote on a promise to pursue peace while the rest of his platform was vague. On the eve of the invasion, however, his approval rating had sunk to 31 percent due to the pursuit of deeply unpopular policies.
Ukrainian academic, Olga Baysha, author of Democracy, Populism, and Neoliberalism in Ukraine: On the Fringes of the Virtual and the Real, has studied Zelensky’s rise to power and how he has wielded that power since becoming president.
In the interview below, Baysha discusses Zelensky’s embrace of neoliberalism and increasing authoritarianism, how his actions contributed to the current war; his counterproductive and self-absorbed leadership throughout the war, the complex cultural and political views and identities of Ukrainians, the partnership between neoliberals and the radical right during and after the Maidan uprising and whether a Russian takeover of the entire Donbass region might be less popular among the local population than it would have been in 2014.
Continued: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/29/ukraine-the-real-zelensky/?fbclid=IwAR3MiEIbcBCga5j_v04yINJ-m24xyXFKt4BYQDG7G26hS62tH5D3QXFtwyA
Everyone’s Anti-War until the War Propaganda Starts
IN FOCUS, 2 May 2022
Caitlin Johnstone - TRANSCEND Media Service
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2022/05/everyones-anti-war-until-the-war-propaganda-starts/
27 Apr 2022 – Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout, waving the flags they’ve been programmed to wave, and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.
Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.
This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.
Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun. It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.
When people think of themselves as “anti-war”, they’re usually imagining themselves as anti- another Iraq war, or anti- some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They’re not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.
Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing. There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.
This is why you’ll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest US war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.
Our entire civilization is shaped by domestic propaganda, but the only time you ever hear that word in mainstream discourse is when it’s used to discuss the comparatively almost nonexistent influence of Russian propaganda on our society. All the mainstream alarm ringing about Russian propaganda gives the impression that it comprises close to 100 percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume, when in reality it’s a tiny fraction of one percent of the total propaganda that westerners consume. Almost all of it comes from western sources.
Propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society. It has far more influence over how the public thinks, acts and votes than any of our official mechanisms for doing so, yet it’s barely discussed, it isn’t taught in schools, and even the best political ideologies barely touch on it relative to their other areas of focus.
All the fretting about Russian propaganda from establishment narrative managers comes so close to giving away their secret: that they know it’s possible to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts and votes using media. They just don’t admit that they’re the ones who are doing this.
It’s actually the weirdest thing in the world that there’s something that has been directly affecting our minds our entire lives, and which directly affects the way our entire society is organized, but we don’t talk about it constantly. It should be at the front and center of our attention.
But of course that’s the whole idea. Propaganda only works on those who don’t know they’re being propagandized. The US-centralized empire’s ability to hide its propaganda machine is a foundational element of its brilliance.
Being truly anti-war is necessarily a commitment to finding out not just what’s true about all the war narratives currently promulgated by the imperial war machine, but all the narratives you’ve been fed about the world since you were young. It’s a commitment to truth that takes on an almost spiritual quality in the way it informs every aspect of your life when truly espoused.
It’s important to research and learn new things about the world, but what’s equally important and which doesn’t get emphasized nearly enough is the practice of examining the beliefs you already hold about your society, your government, your nation and your world. Inquiring as to whether they’re really true, and who might benefit from your believing them.
Don’t make the error of assuming you’ll be aware and informed enough to spot all the lies right away. You’re dealing with the single most advanced and powerful propaganda machine that has ever existed, and you’ve been marinating in its effects your entire life. It takes some time. Even the most aware among us were indoctrinated into the mainstream worldview to some extent earlier in their lives, and to this day most of the information they get about the world has some of its roots and branches in parts of the propaganda matrix.
It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview. But unless you do this it’s impossible to be truly anti-war, because you can’t skillfully oppose something you don’t understand. To fight the imperial war machine is to fight the imperial propaganda machine.
Pope Says NATO Might Have Provoked Russian Invasion of Ukraine
By Francis X. Rocca and Evan Gershkovich
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-2022-05-03/card/pope-says-nato-may-have-provoked-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-
Pope Francis delivers his Sunday prayer in the Vatican.VINCENZO PINTO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
ROME—Pope Francis said that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine and that he didn't know whether other countries should supply Ukraine with more arms.
The pope at the same time deplored the brutality of the war and criticized the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church for defending the invasion in religious terms, warning that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow “cannot turn himself into Putin’s altar boy.”
Pope Francis made his remarks in an interview with Italian daily Corriere Della Sera. He described Russia’s attitude to Ukraine as “an anger that I don’t know whether it was provoked but was perhaps facilitated” by the presence in nearby countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Meanwhile, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow delivered a sermon Tuesday at the Kremlin's Cathedral of the Archangel, falsely claiming that Russia never attacked another country.
“We don’t want to go to war with anyone, Russia has never attacked anyone," he said, in remarks carried by the Interfax news agency.
"It’s amazing that a great and powerful country never attacked anyone," he added. "It only defended its borders."
Since February, Pope Francis has deplored the suffering of Ukrainians and denounced the invasion but refrained from explicitly naming Russia as the aggressor, reflecting both a Vatican tradition of neutrality and his own agenda of better relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as a reluctance to align the Vatican with U.S. foreign policy.
“In Ukraine, it was other states that created the conflict,” Pope Francis said in the interview, without identifying which states. He likened the war to other conflicts that he said were fomented by international interests: “Syria, Yemen, Iraq, one war after another in Africa.”
“I don’t know how to answer—I am too far away—whether it is right to supply the Ukrainians” with weapons, the pope said. “What’s clear is that in this land arms are being tested… Wars are fought for this: to test the arms we have made.”
In the past, Ukrainians have criticized the pope for describing their conflicts with Russia as “fratricidal,” which they have said plays down Moscow’s aggression.
The pope said that he was ready to travel to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir Putin to appeal for peace, but that the Kremlin hadn't responded to the offer. He said he told the Russian ambassador to the Vatican at the start of the war: “Please stop.”