JOHNSTONE

Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteers. If these omnicidal war sluts are so horny for "direct military involvement" against Russia, I wish they would just get on a plane and go do it themselves without trying to drag all of humanity into it with them.

You want direct military involvement? Fine. Go do it yourself. Be the direct military involvement you want to see in the world.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Article with relevant links: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/pundits-who-advocate-hot-war-with?s=w

On the empire's grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent's strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the US empire would be well advised to try and topple China's nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria recently put it, "ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow."

Reading by Tim Foley.

Fucking ridiculous that it's 2022 and it's still a shocking and controversial position to say your government and media are lying to you about a fucking war.

You know you're living under an empire with the most sophisticated propaganda machine that's ever existed when it can lie about literally every war it's ever been involved in and then when you say they're lying about the latest war people still act like you're a paranoid lunatic.

Reading by Tim Foley.

People say "This is not a proxy war! How dare you call this a proxy war?"

Pouring billions of dollars worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by CIA-trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of US military intelligence is in fact the exact thing that a proxy war is. That is what those words mean.

If the Ukraine war is not a proxy war, then there has never been a proxy war.

Reading by Tim Foley.

So the US government is continuing its established policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that's being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg's Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order "bleed Putin" and achieve regime change in Moscow.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The swelling likelihood of imminent armageddon draws everything into focus. Helps clarify your priorities. Helps you figure out how to live your life from moment to moment.

And from where I'm sitting this clarity brings with it a sense of responsibility as a human being. A responsibility to really be here now. To truly live our lives with presence and appreciation. To drink deeply of the cup of human experience. Because the only thing worse than everything ending would be if it ended without having been seen and valued while it lasted.

We have control over so very little in this insane little pickle we've found ourselves in. But one thing we can definitely control is whether we're really showing up for however much time we've got left on this amazing blue planet.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You know you are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine by the mass media and by Silicon Valley. You can feel it in your guts. Everyone can feel it, on some level. It feels gross. 

The split on this issue is between those who trust this gut feeling and those who choose to psychologically compartmentalize away from it. Because if you don't compartmentalize away from it, the implications of this are very frightening. It means pretty much everything you've been told your whole life about the government, about your nation, about the news media, and about the way the world works, has been a lie.

But that is the basic reality. If you've already seen this, you won't experience cognitive dissonance when you observe it in the unprecedented imperial narrative management campaign we're seeing with Ukraine. If you haven't seen it, you'll likely experience a lot of cognitive dissonance if you try to square your gut feeling that you're being propagandized about Ukraine with your belief that your favorite politicians and news sources always tell you the objective truth. And you will compartmentalize accordingly.

That's just how we're wired. Our minds are wired to select for cognitive ease and forcefully reject information which challenges our present worldview. Pushing past the cognitive discomfort and facing reality is the only way to come to real understanding.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We're risking a very fast, very radioactive third world war defending the "democracy" of a regime who just banned eleven opposition parties.

Reading by Tim Foley.

"You're denying the agency of Ukrainians!"

This is a line you've probably had bleated at you by propagandized empire livestock if you've engaged in online debate about the role western powers have played in paving the way to this war. 

One of the many, many tricks that imperial spinmeisters have pulled out of their hats in their shockingly frenetic campaign to manage the narrative about what's happening in Ukraine is to insist that it's outrageous and disgusting to suggest that Ukraine is being used as a sacrificial pawn in the grand chessboard maneuverings of the US-centralized empire, because it is denying the "agency" of that nation. The argument is that Ukraine freely chose to enter into the situation in which it now finds itself, with no outside pressure or influence of any kind whatsoever.

Reading by Tim Foley.

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run "NGO" being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.

Article version: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/people-overestimate-the-us-war-machine?s=w

Reading by Tim Foley.