Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Nobody Who Supports NATO Is A Moderate: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

Someone who believes the US or its proxies sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines can tell you exactly what they’d stand to gain from it and how little it would cost them. Someone who believes it was Russia has to perform weird mental contortions about Moscow sending some kind of message to the world and Putin being insane, or entertain the absurd notion that Russia could only stop Europe from obtaining Russian natural gas by destroying Russian pipelines. This says a lot about whose arguments are stronger.

The west has blamed Russia for bad presidents, for western racism, for western political divisions, for inflation, for pretty much every bad thing western power structures are responsible for, but blaming Russia for attacks on Russian pipelines is probably going to take the cake.

❖

The Wolfowitz Doctrine, penned after the fall of the USSR, describes the US policy of ensuring that no other power develops which could challenge US supremacy. It’s important to understand that this wouldn’t just apply to nations like Russia and China, but to the EU as well.

❖

❖

Nobody who supports NATO is a moderate.

❖

Being an American liberal means wearing a “Punch Nazis” t-shirt while cheering Biden as he arms Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine and Hillary Clinton as she praises Italy’s election of a fascist prime minister.

❖

Looking forward to when things heat up with China so we can find out whether Australia is going to be Washington’s next Europe or its next Ukraine.

❖

Both sides of the Ukraine proxy war are threatening to use nukes. Both Russia and NATO 100 percent understand that nukes may be used by either side and their use is never off the table. The mutual nuclear threat is always there, regardless of what mouth noises either side is making about them. It’s weird how many people I’m running into who don’t get this.

This conflict doesn’t magically get dangerous because of what some Russian official happens to be saying on a given day. It would be just as dangerous if nobody was saying anything about nukes. The threat is there regardless of what anyone says, and it’s rapidly escalating.

❖

It sure was nice of governments to assign themselves the responsibility of regulating how we talk to each other online. I don’t remember anyone asking them to do this, and it sure sounds like a lot of work, but by golly they’ve volunteered for the job anyway:

“How do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?”

I keep tripping on this part. She’s saying people should be forbidden to say certain things about a war, on the absurd grounds that free speech can prevent peace. Even if you ignore the tyrannical mentality from which this claim arises, it also just makes zero logical sense. People saying online that a war is justified prevents that war from being ended? What? How? How could that possibly even happen? What the fuck are you talking about?

❖

If someone criticizing nuclear fucking brinkmanship looks like adoration for Putin or Russian propaganda to you, it’s because you’ve been so brainwashed by western propaganda that the most normal thing imaginable looks freakish and sinister in your eyes. Criticizing your government is normal. Criticizing agendas of unparalleled existential importance is normal. Criticizing the most powerful government in the world is normal. Only by tremendous amounts of propaganda are these extremely normal things made to look abnormal.

Online discourse is crawling with people who really, truly, sincerely believe that if someone doesn’t fully support their government’s foreign policy with Russia and believe 100 percent of what their government says about it, it means they love Vladimir Putin and support everything he does. You either believe Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom and support your government’s actions against Russia no matter how much it costs or how much it risks, or you love the Kremlin and think Putin is a saint. Those are the only two possibilities.

If you can propagandize someone into believing their government is pure and virtuous, they will necessarily see any opposition to that government as evil and malicious. That’s why anyone questioning official narratives about Russia can only be an evil tankie who hates democracy.

Someone who tells you that you love Putin and believe he’s perfect is really telling you that they love their own government and think it’s perfect. They see their government as pure and virtuous and worthy of blind obedience, so failure to do so is indicative of nefariousness.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2



source https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/09/29/nobody-who-supports-nato-is-a-moderate-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/
Posted by on
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)