Just when you think propaganda couldn’t get any worse, it gets worse. Iraq 1990 surely had to be the worst imaginable, didn’t it, the premature baby thrown from her incubator in Kuwait, the weeping nurse who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. Then came Iraq 2003 and that was worse than the already worst, chemical weapons ready to hit the UK in 45 minutes, and enough anthrax in the phial brandished by Colin Powell at the UN to destroy lower Manhattan. Then along came Libya, the Viagra-fed rape of women, the mad dictator’s air attacks on his own people; then Syria, the photo-shopped phony ‘revolution’ and the brutal dictator destroying his own people with chemical weapons attacks and guess who intervened to save him? None other than the latest monster in his lair, the beast, the ogre, Vladimir Putin.

Decent governments everywhere are gasping with horror. The cry goes up from the US and its allies: ‘Flagrant violation of rules-based international order!’ Of course, no one has shot more holes, literally, through the laws written to underwrite global peace and security than the US and and/or its allies, in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, not to speak of the Balkans and Latin American countries that have fallen under the American hammer. Order has not just been turned into disorder but global chaos. The aggressive invasions/wars/proxy wars/drone strikes and occupations launched by these so-called ‘liberal democracies’ have ended the lives of millions of people, have turned millions of others into refugees and ruined or destroyed entire countries.  As hypocrisy has been a standard motif in ‘Western’ attacks on distant lands for centuries, why waste time even talking about ‘Western’ horror at violations of the ‘rules-based international order.’

Mockery can work.  In the late 19th century the British press called the sufi poet shaykh who resisted European intervention in the Horn of Africa the ‘mad mullah of Somaliland,’ irrespective of the fact that he was neither a mullah nor mad.  In the 1950s the same media jeered at Muhammad Musaddiq, the Prime Minister who had nationalized Iran’s oil, because he appeared to be crying and wearing his pyjamas. Generally, though, the driving force of propaganda is unmitigated venom, creating such hatred that people will believe anything, justify anything, write anything and do anything to see the enemy destroyed.  

Moral invalidation epithet by epithet builds up towards dehumanization.  The enemy as a human being is removed from the species.  William Gladstone’s reference to the Turks in the 1870s as ‘the one anti-human specimen of humanity’ comes to mind. Never mind that the crimes committed by Ottoman irregulars in the Balkans were far surpassed by the atrocities committed against Muslims by the Russians and their Bulgarian ‘army of revenge’ when war finally broke out in 1877: Gladstone was not interested in these massacres by erstwhile Christians.    

In the 7th century the Arabs arrived in Europe, but soon fell back, whereas the Turks came and stayed. The combination of Islam as an ideological threat and the Turks as military nemesis was the most formidable challenge European kings, princes and city states had ever faced, with repercussions that have flowed on to the present day.   

The joint invalidation of Islam and the Turks as a people was the propaganda foundation of the efforts over centuries to drive them both out of Europe. The Balkan wars of 1912-13 almost completed the task, not that Europe took much notice yet again of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims ethnically cleansed from their Macedonian homeland and surrounding regions. In 1990 the remnant population was to suffer a third round and Europe was shocked, as if it had never happened before. When the First World War broke out, centuries of anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish bigotry was just waiting to be plucked out of the rag bag of history: the British public had already been groomed to believe that the Unspeakable Turk was congenitally capable of committing any crime, no matter how heinous.

In 1914, the crimes committed by the Germans in ‘poor little Belgium’ turned out to be mostly lies.   As this war was effectively a civil war within ‘Western’ civilization, the German enemy had to be turned into something else: the Huns, a central Asian people who turned up in Europe in the 5th century and swept all before them. They conquered the Goths and German tribes before receding into history, leaving an indelible imprint on the German character, as British propagandists suddenly discovered.  The German as Hun was a beast in a spiked helmet, snarling, frothing at the mouth and ready for rape.  

His propaganda alternative was the German as helmeted ape, still snarling, frothing at the mouth and ready for rape. Taught to hate the Huns, British soldiers set off to kill them with an untroubled conscience while their womenfolk kept the home fires burning and hating the Huns just as much.   After 1941, the imagery was taken over by US propagandists:  the Japanese soldier was turned into a drooling ape, knuckles dragging on the ground, as ready as the Hun to rape the nearest white woman. The acceptable ‘collateral damage’ was the dehumanized civilian population: Tokyo could be firebombed and atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it wasn’t real humans being killed. In Germany, the fire-bombing of Dresden, Konigsberg, Hamburg and other cities burnt tens of thousands of people alive in just one night.  The racism inherent in the decision to wipe out two Japanese cities with a large civilian population would not work because the Germans were Europeans but they were still Nazis who deserved their fate. 

In 1948, ‘poor little Belgium’ was replaced by beleaguered little “Israel”, defenseless against the Arab hordes massing around its borders. Chaim Weizmann, who was to be the Zionist settler state’s first president, grabbed the headlines with claims of an impending second extermination of Jews, this time by the Arabs. It was a lie dished up for propaganda effect: in private he dismissed what he had said for public consumption, assuring his American allies that “Israel” could quickly defeat any or all combination of Arab forces.  Far from besieging the Zionist regime from all directions, they were thin on the ground, outnumbered and outgunned by the Zionists even at the start of the war and lacking even the semblance of coordinated military control.  Most Palestinian villages had only a few rifles to defend themselves. 

The truth had been inverted:  it was not “Israel” that was beleaguered but the Palestinians, about to have their land stolen from them by recently arrived settler colonists supported by a ‘West’ theoretically committed to self-determination and the ‘rules-based’ international order.  Placing this settler state at the very heart of the geographical Middle East in 1917 served ‘Western’ (especially British) strategic interests and has continued to serve them since then.   

In 1967, the propaganda worked again:  the double lies of a ‘pre-emptive strike’/ “Israel” again threatened with extermination filled the transatlantic media. In fact, the ‘preemptive strike’ was a carefully prepared war of aggression designed to destroy the paramount symbol of Pan Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and occupy the rest of Palestine. Behind the closed doors of intelligence agencies there was no doubt that “Israel” would triumph: it was not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘how long’ “Israel” would take to overwhelm its enemies and the conclusions were a couple of weeks at the most.   

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The British media in particular was gleeful when not vicious, twisting Nasser’s name into ‘Nazi’ in its propaganda cartoons.  The 1956 ‘dictator of the Nile’ had finally had his comeuppance, and David with his slingshot of Western-supplied armaments had triumphed. “Israel’s” fallback insurance was the nuclear weaponry it had just developed. In the context of Ukraine, it is worth bearing in mind that Anthony Eden, in a mad and murderous mood, said he would rather see the British empire go down fighting than be relegated to the level of a second rate country like the Netherlands or Portugal through the loss of the canal.  

This is perhaps what makes the situation so dangerous. The Ukraine war is shaping up as marking the end of an epoch of ‘Western’ global primacy. On all sides it is existential, for Russia; for a declining world power, the US; for NATO; and of course for the Ukrainian government. Having risen from the ashes of the USSR and having re-established itself as a global power, Russia has to be stopped: how far the ‘West’, led by the nose for decades by the US/NATO, are prepared to take this we have yet to see.  

In recent years the US has had its nose repeatedly pulled out of join, especially in Syria, where Russian intervention blocked the US and Gulf-orchestrated attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.  While the US talked, it was Russian air strikes that broke the back of the Islamic State; as a result, Russia now has an air base it did not have before 2015 as well as porting facilities for its navy at Tartus. In 2014, the US orchestrated the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, a blow which Putin countered by snipping off the Crimea to punish Ukraine and protect Russia’s naval position in the Black Sea. The Maidan coup set the stage for the unrolling of the next stage of the US/NATO plan to turn Ukraine into an actively hostile anti-Russian state right on Russia’s border.  No Russian president – not just Putin -  could allow this to happen without picking up the gauntlet that had been thrown down. 

There are facts and media facts, in other words real facts and false facts. Real facts matter to Western governments and their media arm only if they serve ‘Western’ interests. Generally, however, false facts - fake news -  dominate when it comes to issues of global importance. On Iraq, Libya and Syria the media was a gushing fountain of abuse, misinformation, outright lies and the suppression of all information that exposed the falsity of their narrative. It is now doing the same over Ukraine, accusing Russia of launching the missile attacks on Bucha and the Donetsk railway station without a grain of evidence that it did.  

In the case of the latter, the notion that Russia would kill the civilians it intervened to save from more death and destruction by the Ukrainian military is patently absurd but with all access to contrary information suppressed, and with the Putin pile-on continuing relentlessly, people  are falling for it everywhere in the ‘West.’ Day by day they are being softened up to accept what might come next, depending on how far the US and its camp followers are prepared to take this, but open war on Russia, with all its horrific consequences, rather than the proxy war now being fought, cannot be ruled out.  

With Britain blocking Russia from putting its case, the UN Security Council then welcomed a man who initially made his name as a low grade comedian on Ukrainian television. His media profile was undoubtedly of great help when he switched tracks to politics. Zelensky is a practiced media performer who knows how to work an audience, especially when the audience has already been conditioned to believe whatever he has to say, in this case continuing smears of Putin and Russia at   the UN and before parliaments around the world.   

The Azov Brigade and its brutal ideological soulless mates have replaced the Islamic State, Jabhat al Nusra, Ahrar al Sham, Jaysh al Islam and their brutal clones, so Vladimir Putin has now replaced Bashar al Assad as the world’s greatest war criminal.  One would think George Bush, Tony Blair and Barack Obama would at least be in the running but they are not even in the race, as the ‘West’ decides who runs and who wins.  In horse-racing parlance, the race is rigged even before the barriers come up. 

The mantle of greatest war criminal surely should be awarded on the basis of responsibility for the number of lives obliterated and countries destroyed by invasion or proxy war or subjected to drone missile attack but no, the organizers of this race have different criteria.  It is not who is the greatest war criminal but who they can persuade you who is.  On this basis the ‘West’ has been eminently successful time after time, with the corporate and social media functioning as no less than a propaganda arm of government.  

While the Turk was unspeakable and the Hun a displaced Asiatic, Russia in the 19th century was half Asiatic, half barbarian but never fully civilized, in ‘Western’ eyes.  In the 19th century, ‘great game’ Russia, swallowing central Asia and the Caucasus and pushing against British imperial interests from Afghanistan and Iran, was Britain’s primary enemy. The Russian bear might be dancing in a Punch cartoon but menace was never intended to be hidden by the whimsy; by the 1950s the bear was carrying a hammer and sickle; now, in hibernation since 1989, he is caricatured as snarling again as he comes out of his cave.  

The propaganda directed against Russia and Putin slots into the same category as the propaganda war waged against Iraq, Libya and Syria. It is not the bear who is frothing at the mouth but the entire ‘Western’ media. Frothing and frustrated because while it is winning the propaganda war hands down, it is not winning the war that counts, the one being fought on the ground. Nevertheless, it has refined a template which suits all circumstances. Whatever the nature of your dissent -  Syria, Russia and Ukraine or the Covid pandemic – you will be shut out of the corporate media if you raise your voice, you will be deplatformed by the social media for spreading ‘misinformation’ and you will probably lose friends.  The truth (‘what you need to know’) is what the media tells you it is. Those who fall into line – who comply - need to remember the swarm of lies told over Iraq, Libya and Syria by these same media outlets, lies that were critical to the launching and maintenance of wars that destroyed countries and ended millions of lives.   

After the last Iraq war, the New York Times and the Washington Post apologized for ‘getting it wrong’ over weapons of mass destruction; but this was just self-serving deceit, as it was glaringly obvious from the start that Iraq did not have them. This was the finding of the weapons inspectors but these influential organs of public opinion wanted you to believe the opposite. Remember again the lies retailed by the media over Syria and the corruption of the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) report on an alleged attack at Douma in 2018 to show the exact opposite of what the inspectors concluded, that it was most unlikely the Syrian government was responsible.  It was the corrupted report that made banner headlines, not the evidence of corruption by the OPCW’s own executive.  

The media is now engaging in the same manipulation of truth over Ukraine and no doubt will come up with the same pathetic excuse if the truths buried under a mound of lies are ever excavated. The result of ‘liberal democracies’ is a repressive communications sector that rivals the worst of the authoritarian states in modern history.