72. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS #72,
May 4, 2022
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.”
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