The liberal freak out following two acts of democracy in 2016 (Brexit and Trump) trapped our culture in binary (liberal and conservative) thought patterns. The lies that Russia influenced the EU vote and hacked the US election were eagerly lapped up by liberals, helping consolidate an anti-democracy pro-war consensus that currently dominates power (posing as two parties) and laid the foundations for a Psychological Operation that has force-fed us non-stop since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Psy-Op has been stunningly effective, leading us to the brink of nuclear catastrophe while shutting down free speech, diplomacy and our prospects for survival.       

Propaganda

The Psy-Op pushes unrelenting propaganda across the most trusted mainstream media outlets. From the start of the war, these outlets presented highly dubious claims about the most serious crimes as true.

Some of their reporting has been entirely false, including the Snake Island ‘heroics’ that you probably forgot a couple of weeks later.

It’s all additive, so even if it’s a lie, it still works because it builds the one-sided narrative and they don’t have to admit or report that they misled us. No other media will call them out because they are at it too.

The Psy-Op has censored alternative (including fact-based) perspectives. No dissenting opinions (including those advocating diplomacy) have been allowed; in the age of mobile phones very little footage of the war is broadcast; Ukraine’s defeats are ignored or downplayed; President Biden’s historic role in the most corrupt country in Europe is under-reported; the inconvenient Ukrainian death toll is generally ignored as if it’s a minor detail, while the dead soldiers are lauded as “heroic” – part of an emotional, irrational justification for British arms manufacturers to export more weapons. The pro-war legacy media refers to these weapons shipments as an “extraordinary level of support” without which the war could not continue.

Imagine if half of the UK’s current population was sacrificed to save Europe from Nazis. That’s what happened to the Soviet Union in World War Two. This historical perspective is omitted from the coverage, yet it is pertinent, as Ukraine’s army contains Nazi battalions. The Psy-Op has even tried to rehabilitate the image of Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Battalion. Nazis – the people we were raised to hate and fear, who blitzed our cities and sought to enslave us. The Holocaust.

To the Psy-Op, Nazis are not a moral problem, only a public relations challenge.

The Psy-Op immediately proscribed the Russian perspective. No more Russia Today on your telly. The war (2014-ongoing) on the Donbas in east Ukraine, covered by all news outlets until 2022, is now omitted from reporting. Why?

As millions of refugees left Ukraine, with millions more internally displaced, the Psy-Op focused on President Zelenskyy as the embodiment of virtue and bravery. He dressed in military colours but is an actor, not a soldier. 

Green?

In October, the Psy-Op told us that Russia blew up its own pipeline, Nord Stream 2. It didn’t make any sense, not from any perspective, but you could accept it or suppress your doubts because no other view (such as the truth) was given air time. Severing the economic partnership between our two most powerful neighbours (Germany and Russia), the pipeline sabotage is a climate catastrophe but the perpetrators will go on to decide sustainability goals for the world. 

The Psy Op plays a game of Them & Us. Russia is them, Ukraine is us. Ukrainians are dying fighting for our values, politicians tell you. The name Ukraine quickly became synonymous with liberal Western values. Despite being located in the east, and despite its intricate ethnic, religious, historical, cultural, and familial ties with Russia, we were suddenly informed that Ukraine is European like us, while Russia is talked about as if it is non-European. Did it help that on day one of the invasion, every single news reporter simultaneously started pronouncing Ukraine’s capital city as Keev? Was that all it took? No doubt the yellow and blue flags everywhere helped too. For those in a torpid state of binary identity politics, joining in with the hysteria was seamless. 

An American, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, was recently appointed as a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The transgender journalist with her outlandish propaganda is not the only American mercenary in Ukraine and Biden has authorised combat pay for them, despite them not officially fighting for the US.

North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

Suspicious? You surely are by now. We have consented to a merger with other NATO states and Ukraine’s autocratic government in an extreme provocation of a nuclear power and nobody is talking about diplomacy. Why not?

In 1947, the United States, at the pinnacle of its unassailable global power, passed its National Security Act. That same year, President Truman warned of the “Red Menace” and the American population got used to the permanent state of fear that justifies military spending. In 1950, a top-secret National Security Council policy paper called NSC-68 committed the US to never negotiating with Russia, the bad faith approach that encompassed the creation of NATO, its aggressive eastward expansion, and American/British interference in Ukraine’s democratic processes.

Politicians, unconcerned by the environmental destruction of the Nord Stream sabotage, and undeterred by the Ukrainian death toll, have played their part to perfection. Any parliamentarians who resist, even slightly, are easily brought into line.

There’s a non-existent dividing line between the media and the state. The media, politicians, and some citizens too, love to demonise President Putin, diplomacy, and peace, but I am yet to meet a British person (aside from British-Ukrainians) whose daily life has ever been negatively impacted by Putin (or diplomacy, or peace).

The Russian government was duped into playing along with the Minsk Accords, hoping to bring peace to eastern Ukraine where Nazis and other Ukrainian units were targeting ethnic Russians. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted the Accords were just a ruse to buy time to prime Ukraine for war. She framed this as a clever move, which it is if you’re a psychopath who doesn’t care about human life.

Projection: “the attribution of one’s ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or to objects.”

The Psy Op’s functionaries project their own characteristics and psychology onto Russia. What are the traits? A salivating desire for violent domination of others. This enables the functionaries to ignore or downplay the very real prospect of nuclear war. The UK follows the country that dropped two atomic bombs on Japan for no reason other than pursuit of a destructive rivalry with the Russians. President Biden is “leading” the Western world, yet he can’t walk or talk straight. He doesn’t know our prime minister’s name, but we follow him anyway, enslaved.

British people have sponsored approximately 180,000 Ukrainians to escape the hell of war. What a contrast to the cynicism of the officials and corporations who knowingly sacrifice Ukrainians, and possibly Ukraine as a functioning state, for their own ends. 

Us

British popular culture and millions of individuals declared their solidarity with Ukraine at the onset of Russia’s illegal invasion.

But this was a passive activism reflecting a herd mentality. Manchester City players wore tracksuits emblazoned with ‘No War’ but it reflected the Psy-Op’s co-opting of the language of peace rather than an effective grassroots movement calling for an end to hostilities. It was all easy, risk-free, socially acceptable virtue signalling.

Nuance is still not allowed. If you suggest that diplomacy is preferable to war, get ready to be shadow-banned or shut down immediately by those in the pay of the Psy-Op, or those who understand that the war industry (the constant state of war that keeps us scared and arms dealers’ profits high) benefits them and their economic status and have appointed themselves as Psy-Op cops policing the home front for signs of critical thinking.

From day one of the invasion, anybody with a functioning brain cell knew the war could only end one of two ways: defeat for one side or a negotiated settlement. Because engaging diplomatically with Russia would undermine the purpose of the Psy-Op, the media and Psy-Op cops parroted the lie that Ukraine was winning. The Psy-Op’s victims, on (and in) the ground in Ukraine and the population of the Western world therefore had to maintain two contradictory ideas in their minds: Russia was so terrifyingly powerful it had to be stopped quickly before it decided to conquer all of Europe. And Russia was so meek that it was sure to be defeated on the battlefield by Ukraine.

Confidence in a Ukrainian victory was useful in the early months of the war, to persuade the public that it was all worth it and that there was no need to consider alternative solutions while BAE Systems and the rest reaped the spoils of war (they will reap the spoils of reconstruction too).

Consideration of the Russian point of view has been left to serious analysts who are not invited to appear in legacy media, which has become infantilising and lightweight.

At home, the state is becoming increasingly draconian. Journalists are imprisoned in Belmarsh or harassed if they publish inconvenient facts, and the right to protest has been significantly limited. Parliament’s official opposition has purged its membership of peace activists. At the next election, we will choose between two pro-war parties willing to play brinksmanship with nuclear Armageddon.

The latest round of our impoverishment was labeled “Putin’s price hike” by Prime Minister Liz Truss. The surreal concept that China is a “threat” is being normalised, as it was with Russia, with no explanation of what exactly the “threat” is to the population. The Psy-Op’s media talk as if it is self-evidently true. With the “threat” of China, they pretend that all British people share the same values. But when it comes to these values being practiced in our daily lives, in our economy, they vanish – it’s then survival of the fittest, and if you can’t feed your children, that’s your problem.

From 2014, the United States turned Ukraine into a client state and a proxy. Nine years on and the proxy is fulfilling its role as a suicidal guarantor of endless war (endless war being preferable to successful war of course). We have heard stories about Ukrainian men who don’t believe in the war, who know their government has been conned for nine years with the promise of EU and NATO membership and they don’t want to die for it. They hide at home all day to avoid getting picked up by army recruitment officers. At night they scurry out and buy what they need as quickly as possible, hoping to wait out the carnage. What will be left of their country by the time Western states decide Ukraine has given enough for their anti-Russian cause?

If you disagree vehemently with my point of view yet managed to read this far, you deserve credit. Even if you believe that Ukraine really does represent Western liberal values that must be protected, we can surely still agree that the war needs to end. Anybody who cares about Ukrainians should be calling for peace talks as soon as possible, while Zelenskyy still has a bit of leverage.  

But the Psy-Op doesn’t want you to think that deeply or logically, even at this stage when Ukraine seems to have no future as a unified country and the permanent displacement of the millions of refugees is a real prospect. If you can see this and still insist that Ukraine should fight to the last man, then maybe you don’t really care about Ukrainians. Maybe you never really did. 

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles