Stay sane and demand peace – how to resist warmongering propaganda about Ukraine

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I have little idea what is happening in Ukraine. I am not an eye witness and have spoken to none. Like nearly everyone else I use the corporate media for information. These privately owned news factories operate almost entirely from outside of Ukraine and promote the prejudices and aims of oligarch owners. The BBC, C4 News and The Guardian are no different – all captured long ago by the usual suspects.

I seek balance from independent sources of information, but few operate in the places that matter. 

‘Battle theatre disinformation’ is part of warfare. The eagerly complicit mainstream media provide no check whatsoever against wartime propaganda. So how can we to get to the truth  of what is going on in Ukraine?

We can’t.

All we can do is assess the propaganda, add context and retain a healthy skepticism about the pulp fiction we are being carpet bombed with.

Are Russian troops committing atrocities in Ukraine? Are Ukrainian troops killing Russian POW’s?  I don’t know. Evidence is hard to come by, dead bodies are easy to find in a warzone, photographs easily staged and testimony easily scripted to suit an agreed narrative. 

I certainly note a wearily familiar pattern from the news factories regarding Ukraine. It goes like this:

• A branch of the Ukrainian government makes an allegation of Russian evil doing.

• This allegation is reported without seeking external verification. Few (if any) caveats note that such allegations cannot be verified and come from sources with a vested interest in leveraging western military aid via exactly this kind of propaganda.  

• Western sources rush to condemn the evil doing. This ‘cements’  the status of the allegations as sacrosanct – thus no-one is allowed to ask questions. 

• Once the western corporate media have pinged such allegations between them for a while, they attain the status of ‘widely reported’ and ‘widely condemned’.

• You are invited to headfuck yourself into not noticing that they are ‘widely reported’ and ‘widely condemned’ entirely at the caprice of corporate media stenography and ‘widely condemned’ mostly by strong vested interests.

• Once an allegation has ascended to the status of being unquestionable – then opinion pieces treat the alleged happening as literal fact.

Hence we have unquestioned and indeed unquestionable allegations of Russian evil-doing to lay alongside the banal chauvinism, bombastic nationalism and naked militarism that journalism is supposed to be above. 

I am not saying that atrocities haven’t happened in Ukraine. Heinous events of this kind do happen in wars. The truth may never emerge from the killing fields around Kyiv but getting at it right now is all but impossible. 

To stay sane during the current blanket bombardment of wartime propaganda I suggest the following alternative viewpoints. You don’t need to believe in them – just accept that they might be true.

(a) The point of the Western media’s faux moral outrage about Ukraine is to prevent peace. The geopolitical ambitions of elite power are not advanced by peace talks.

(b) Resist moral amnesia about Yemen, Israel, Syria, Venezuela, Grenada, Chile, Panama, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – to list but a fraction of the west’s moral and military failures. 

(c) Journalism is basically dead as a mainstream practice – hollowed out and captured by neoliberalism long ago. All that the media portals do now is mash up press releases / wire copy to amplify the rhetoric of the already powerful. Don’t dignify their spin or ever process it as journalism.

(d) You will find little to no factual or moral truth in the media’s ‘coverage’ about Ukraine. Their job is to manufacture consent for war and thus ever increased military spending.

Have better uses for $2 trillion a year than lethal weapons? It is the media’s job to persuade you otherwise by keeping you frightened and outraged.

The truth of what is happening in Ukraine is vitally important. It is not a simple goodies and baddies narrative. I am an opponent of war – thus I am opponent of pro-war propaganda from any source. Ignore the mainstream media. Seek out your own sources – take ALL of them with a pinch of salt for ALL have an agenda of some kind.

If you care about Ukraine then be the adult in the room that asks without flinching – ‘what can we do to bring peace?’. That is the question that matters most right now. Keep asking it and don’t allow any media outlet to brow beat you into giving up on it.

Since 2013 I have worked on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and speaking simple truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.

I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.  

If you find this website useful and could spare us a few shillings to help keep our lights on, it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.     

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