The coverage of Prigozhin’s ‘coup’ exposes NATO’s exploitation of Ukraine

The last 24 hours have been some of the most bizarre that Sodium Haze has ever seen.

The decision by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the titular head of the enigmatic private mercenary group Wagner PMC to drive a brigade of his troops up the M04 motorway in Russia towards Moscow in a ‘march of protest’ against his handlers in the Russian Defence Ministry prompted about 12 hours of wild speculation and gleeful narrative management from the western media.

As is often the case, the ‘coverage’ of the western media obscured more than it informed about the truth of the situation on the ground, indeed it swiftly became clear that all reporting was actually going to pivot around the hopes of the west for Russia to come to heel and overthrow Putin. As a guide to the truth of western involvement in Ukraine and NATO policy generally it was thus very illuminating.

A key part of the west’s many Freudian projections is that ordinary Russian citizens are as desperate to rid themselves of Putin as they are. Much of yesterday’s coverage was a nakedly obvious bombardment of propaganda to insist that the Russian people’s desires are at one with NATO.

The idea that Russia and China are in a constant state of expansionist agitation is the key projection of the U.S psyche, their restless quest for global hegemony foisted on others. In tandem with asserting control, the U.S is also hooked on its self-image as ‘defenders of freedom’, thus ‘threats’ to ‘freedom’ can only possibly be from someone else- and if you say otherwise you are an ‘apologist for evil’.   

These ‘threats to freedom’ that the U.S. is endlessly preoccupied with are actually just affronts to their infantile lust for omnipotent power, power without limits or consequences. The U.S, has been ruined by its rich access to material power and now believes it can (and is entitled to) exceed all material and moral limits.  

This has been an increasingly recurring dynamic of western media ‘coverage’ in recent decades – the growing synergy of media psychopathy with U.S. psychopathy, a gathering displacement (that is now near total) of actual journalism with propaganda narratives written entirely through the prism of U.S. prejudices and desires.

The odd day trip of Wagner PMC up a Russian motorway is a wonderful example of this. The U.S. wanted this situation to be the start of a civil war in Russia as a joyful populace seized their opportunity to do for the USA what the USA would love to do (but can’t do) for themselves – namely to shatter the relative unity of the Russian state as a prelude to controlling it for fun and profit.

For those not minded to view reality through the warped binoculars of U.S hubris and lusts, there was head scratching – what on earth was Prigozhin up to?

There is little desire in Russia for regime change, poll after poll show Putin with an 80+% approval rate and most Russians (rightly or wrongly) view the current struggle as a battle against fascism to mirror that of World War 2 (an impression the Kremlin has fostered carefully). Wagner PMC lack even a fraction of the resources to overthrow the might of the Russian military so what was Prigozhin hoping to achieve?

Sky News and The Guardian were beside themselves with joy with the former running live webcam footage from the Russian capital under the headline – ‘watch live as Wagner troops advance through Russian cities!’ rather giving the impression that a coup was imminent and that Russian cities were falling like bowling pins to the swagger of rebel forces.

The truth was orders of magnitude less dramatic. Wagner never reached even the outskirts of Moscow – their brigade of troops had split in two and used back roads to avoid major cities en route, they had then stopped, turned around and headed to base. Some sort of deal had been struck between old mates Prigozhin and Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus.

The ‘great uprising’ had lasted less than a day and had succeeded only in destroying several Wagner trucks and two Russian helicopter gun ships. The live feed from Moscow just showed Russians driving home from work as normal (gripping stuff!) and was quietly taken down. A Sky News presenter then had the unenviable job of transitioning live on air from the hysterical hype of western wet dreams to the sober reality that nothing much was going on. The Guardian et al then spent the rest of the day retweeting nonsense and writing ‘analysis’ about how incredibly significant Prigozhin’s temper tantrum (one in a long line) had been. 

What the western corporate media spends 98% of its time doing these days is not concerned with reality anyway, it is no longer even in the business of reporting news, their trade is in shaping audience perceptions of reality so that it aligns with the approved view.

So the U.S. wanted Prigozhin’s day trip up the motorway to be the start of a Russian civil war – so that is what all the media outlets (to a man) reported was happening. The U.S. wants Ukraine’s grand summer offensive to be going well so that is what the media reports is happening.

The U.S. was unhappy that Bakmhut had fallen to the Russians so The Guardian steadfastly refused to report that it had happened for weeks.

The U.S. didn’t want anyone looking too closely at the destruction of Nord Stream 2 so nobody in the mainstream media did, the media’s studied lack of interest in investigating it, in stark contrast to their eagerness to promote quite ridiculous cover stories about Nord Stream 2 touted by western intelligence agencies. When an actual journalist did investigate it, they quickly buried the story and dismissed it as ‘blogging’.

I suspect that western policy makers, high on their own supply of propaganda have lost the ability to process reality at all. Since the media no longer acts as any check on their delusions but merely reports the world as they want to see it, the lines separating reality from prejudice and reality from desire are gone for them.

The western media now pumps out 24/7/365 how the U.S. wants reality to look like and the powerful then wait for reality to align with their views and wish lists. Mainstream journalism has become little more than Washington’s letter to Santa – a letter the U.S. enforces as best it can via temper tantrums of economic sanctions and military misadventure.

I think the apparatchiks and courtiers of the big western governments are now so hopelessly lost within the mazes of their own lies that they actually believe that all they need to do to control the flow of actual real life events is to control the flow of fictional narratives that they choose.

This terrifying drift was what Orwell foretold in 1984 and was a calling card (ironically) of Stalinist Russia. With a savage irony I now think that the west has embraced a form of capitalist right wing Stalinism that far exceeds anything that took place in the soviet era. If Russia and China in alliance with others eventually supplant the U.S. as the main power axis of the world, then I think the core reason for this change will be that the former retain a degree of grounding in reality that the latter has almost completely lost.

Russia and China are providing some shocking reality checks to the collective west at the moment and they would very much like such affronts to fantasy to just go away  – hence all the hoopla about Prigozhin’s mad day out in Rostov, a most undignified and banal bloat of media driven gloating and wishful thinking.

What the ‘coverage’ of Prigozhin’s big day out reveals about western thinking is actually way more important than the events themselves.

It reveals a collective of people of a corporate mindset for whom reality is now an optional extra – something they imagine they can shape as they choose. It reveals that the truth of western involvement in Ukraine is not based on any principle of democracy or freedom but a desire to invoke regime change in Russia as a further extension of U.S. power, part of a preamble to a war with China.

The western orgasm of delight about the prospect of a bloody Russian civil war tells us all we need to know about what NATO is up to in Ukraine and elsewhere.

When a declining empire (and the U.S. is a nation in steep decline) cannot deal with the reality of its reduced status, it lashes out and trades in fantasies just as is happening today. What is terrifying is what the decline of U.S. hegemony might mean for us all.

If the collective egoistic individualism of this nation means that it simply cannot handle that (or any) kind of blow to its self image, how might they react to another setback in Ukraine or a gathering unwillingness of non-western nations to bow the knee?

Thus far thus these dynamics have led us to the brink of a third world war and I worry daily that there are people in Washington who now believe they can win a third world war – because that is what they want to believe.

A fitting epitaph perhaps for a species that has long struggled to deal with reality.

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.     

---