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NY Times leads the charge against Russia

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I was at the NY Times this morning to look up a referenced editorial and landed on the home page instead. This is what greeted me, above the fold and prominently placed at the top and center of the site. <img src="{att_link}usnytimespropagandadistilled.jpg" href="{att_link}usnytimespropagandadistilled.jpg" align="none" caption="NY Times Front Page on 26.01.2022" scale="35%"> I don't usually see the NY Times home page. It's possible that it always looks like this. I honestly hope not, but can't rule it out. This is war propaganda, pure and simple. Their formulation has nothing to do with reporting and everything to do with pushing an agenda. The first headline is a doozy: <bq><b>Germany Wavers in the Ukraine Standoff, Worrying Its Allies</b> Europe’s most pivotal country has struggled to overcome its post-World War II reluctance to lead on security matters and waffled on forceful measures. Its muddled stance has fueled doubts about its reliability as an ally and added to concerns that Berlin’s hesitance could allow Russia to sow division.</bq> Germans are cowards and unwilling to fight a U.S. proxy war. Germans are "wavering", "struggling", "reluctant", "waffling", and cannot be "forceful". They are "muddled", have "doubtful reliability", are "adding to concerns", are "hesitant", and, finally, complicit in "sowing division". Phew. This is a master class of propaganda to launch against a populace well-prepared to accept it. If you're not so well-prepared, then it might come across as trying way too hard to be convincing. Which it is. Next up, <bq><b>As the West Warns of a Russian Attack, Ukraine Sends a Different Message</b> Analysts are puzzled over Ukraine’s “stay calm” posture. But some say that after years of war, the country calculates risks differently.</bq> Ukraine doesn't know its own ass from a hole in the ground without the U.S.'s help. They are too benighted to see the threat that's right in front of them. This is coming from a media that has no shame about having been wrong about every major issue they've pushed for at least the last 20 years. This time they're telling you they're right. Or they know they're wrong and they don't care (see the analysis of a Matt Taibbi article below). Next up, <bq>U.S. to Bolster Europe’s Fuel Supply to Blunt Threat of Russian Cutoff</bq> The U.S. will ride to Europe's rescue to help them surmount the emergency engendered by the U.S.'s own wild and groundless accusations against the Russians. How magnanimous. So the U.S. pushes war with Russia, then offers to sell Russia's primary customer its own product. Could this be a much more naked grab for market share? Invent a crisis supposedly caused by your primary energy competitor, then offer to jump in to "bolster" its former customers. Just so we're clear: "bolster" does not mean "donate". It means "sell", probably at a markup. And, finally, <bq>Russia has stepped up its propaganda war and pushed out a disinformation campaign amid tensions with Ukraine.</bq> A classic case of projection: If you suspected that the U.S. media is, once again, blowing smoke up your ass about a supposedly necessary conflict---see: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Iraq again, Afghanistan again, Iraq again, Iran pretty much always, Libya, Syria, and so on---then you should know that it's <i>the Russians</i> that are the liars! They're the ones sowing "propaganda" and "disinformation", obviously. I mean, they probably are, but they'd have to get up very early in the morning to top the NY Times. <h>It's all about the Benjamins</h> When I finished reeling from that onslaught, I received the article <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/lets-not-have-a-war" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">Let’s Not Have a War</a>, which offers more background on this kind of nakedly aggressive support of war by a supposedly independent media. Spoiler: it's about selling weapons. With most of its industrial base otherwise exported and a massive brain drain toward a hyper-financialized economy, military hardware is the only remaining actual industry that the U.S. can really get behind. Some citations from the article, <bq>Both Biden’s comments and the “Obama doctrine” were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as “our” interests separate from Washington’s war pig clique. <b>The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.</b></bq> When Biden recently backed down on defining a "red line", he was taken to task for weakness. Obama was similarly excoriated when he, surprisingly, did the same in 2014, after the Ukrainian coup and subsequent peaceful annexation of Crimea. <bq>Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, <b>which a compliant press happily calls regime change.</b></bq> Somehow, the most sensible thing to do is always to get more military contracts for burgeoning domestic businesses. The media, funded by the same businesses, is happy to lend a hand in the war effort. <bq>Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country’s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. <b>Since we’re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.</b></bq> The U.S. constantly goes for so-called regime change---it's a euphemism for conquering and occupation by empire---and they're always so bad at it. They follow exactly the game plan that anyone with a whit of sense would know to avoid: ignoring the conquered populace. You're not running a zoo. I'm reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_Rising" source="Wikipedia"><i>Persepolis Rising</i></a> right now and the occupation and insurgency in that book follows the description in the citations above and below <i>nearly exactly</i>. In fact, while I'm reading the book, I can't believe that it's a coincidence that I'm constantly reminded of American occupations of the 21st century. <bq>Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. <b>The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.</b></bq> When we do go meet the locals, we end up working with the ones that are <i>most like us</i>, of course. It's like when you see reporting from somewhere in the Middle East on some mainstream media and the interviewee <i>doesn't need a translator</i>. That means the media ignored everyone who can't speak English---they're literally everywhere---in order to find some relatively affluent graduate of an American university to explain what's going on "on the ground". That's selection bias of the highest order, but it goes mostly unremarked. That person you found that <i>speaks with a Brooklyn, NY accent</i> is almost certainly not representative of the local populace. <bq><b>The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of the first triggers for the revolt against “experts” that led to the election of Donald Trump.</b> Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives pushing Iraq back to the eighth century.</bq> What Taibbi characterizes as "incompetence" should, in light of his other comments about the financial upside of such policies, rather be deemed "malfeasance". They are not incompetent per se: they are good at funneling money upward to themselves and their corporate masters. What they are bad at is actually helping the people who live in conquered countries. They might also be bad at hiding their true intentions, but it doesn't seem to affect the bottom line, so who cares? Therefore, since they're not even trying to do any of those other things, you can hardly say that they're "incompetent" at them. <bq><b>The more recent crew is made up of Extremely Online, Ivy-educated fantasists who rarely leave their embassies abroad</b> and view life as an endless production of Sloane or The Good Fight, soap operas about exclusive clubs of fashionably brainy pragmatists with the guts to color outside the lines and “get things done.” Lines like “Yats is our guy” make them tingly. <b>This is perhaps the only subset of people on earth arrogant and dumb enough to think there’s a workable plan for pulling off a shooting war with Russia.</b></bq> Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The only thing that changes is the cover story. Where one brand is perhaps more willing to be nakedly aggressive, the other talks of "right to protect". But they're all talking about "preemptive defense" or some such nonsense. They're all just lying about everything in order to keep the money train rolling and to advance their own careers. The cover story they use doesn't make a lick of difference, morally. For example, what's the difference to you if someone steals all of your money at gunpoint or cons you out of it with a sob story about a charity that doesn't exist? Your money is still gone. They still have all of it. The only thing that's different is how they took it from you. For some people, that difference may be enough, but not for me.