All at Once Mainstream Pundits Push for WW III

When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”

These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente.

 https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/28/all-at-once-mainstream-pundits-push-for-ww-iii/ October 28, 2022, Caitlin Johnstone says it should disturb everyone in the nuclear age that writers at influential publications frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably bring on unspeakable violence and human suffering.

Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the U.S. needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they frame it as something that happens to the U.S. as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it.

As though it would not be the direct result of the U.S.-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar, planetary domination.

The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes Thomas G. Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” on those two continents.

Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the U.S. will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.

“The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”

But exploding U.S. weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.

Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear-age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China.

He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat Western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.

Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream Western punditry.

In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing por que no los dos? (Why not both?}

In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the U.S. armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”

In “Can the U.S. Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.

In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.

When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”

These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente.

These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish Armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.

As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of President Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies.

Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.

Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.

We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and Armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.

We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.

October 31, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Western military-industrial corporate-media show only the NATO-USA war-mongering side of the news

it’s long been sickeningly obvious that our mainstream media show one side of the story: the NATO, Washington, imperial, war-mongering side.

The Military-Industrial Media Complex Strikes Again https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/28/the-military-industrial-media-complex-strikes-again/ BY EVE OTTENBERG 28 Oct 22, Tens of thousands protested against the skyrocketing cost of living and against Macron in France October 16, led by left-wing politician Jean Luc Melenchon, but there were few front page or top-of-the hour headlines in the U.S. Huge protests occurred in Rome the same day to demand an end to Italy’s involvement in NATO, but no coverage on the west side of the Atlantic. Thousands protesting in Paris October 22 against NATO, but little notice in North America. Massive protests against NATO and inflation due to sanctions on Russian energy in France, Germany and Austria in September, but little news of it here in the heart of the empire. German police beat citizens protesting energy shortages and record-high inflation, both due to Russia sanctions, the week of October 17, but that was not covered in the USA. Seventy thousand Czechs protested in Prague September 3 against NATO involvement in Ukraine, demanding gas from Russia (before some mysterious imperial somebody with means and motive blew up Nordstream 1 and 2, probably to nip the political effects of those protests in the bud) and ending the war, but that got little coverage in U.S. corporate media.

Ever get the sense there are things our media hides from us? Hmm. Ever wonder why enormous protests against the policies of the Exceptional Empire and its attack dog, NATO, seem, um, to be downplayed? Ever think our corporate news outlets behave more like the propaganda arm of our neoconservative state department and military than a free press? Well, if so, you may be onto something.

Lots of Europeans are unhappy about NATO, the Ukraine war, sanctions on Russia and the wild inflation and deindustrialization – which will result in gargantuan unemployment – those sanctions caused. As their living standards sink like stones, Europeans know who is to blame, namely their supposedly great ally across the Atlantic, and many have soured on their so-called alliance with the hegemon. But Washington doesn’t seem to care. Let the Europeans go broke and protest. The important thing is not reporting this news to the American people, who, if they heard about it, might get a subversive inkling that their government had not behaved in an entirely honorable manner.

Meanwhile lies swarm everywhere. Some unintentional, others not. Most recently we have U.S. joint chiefs of staff chairman Mark Milley claiming that if Ukraine falls, the current world order will collapse. Sadly, this is hogwash. What will collapse are the tumescent egos of U.S. and European politicos and military men. Not surprisingly, they conflate that with the world order. But there are other, far more sinister reasons to make such garishly incendiary pronouncements, namely to prepare the American population for the unthinkable – and it is unthinkable, because if the U.S. attacks Russia with nukes, both the U.S. and Russia will be annihilated. Will Biden and his generals get a nuclear war? Unclear. But what’s clear as day is that Americans travel like lemmings to their doom, thanks to the fibs of their rulers and media.

Somehow all the big news gets blacked out. Like China dumping $100 billion worth of U.S. treasuries and what that means if this becomes a trend (I’ll tell you what it means: we’re $30 trillion in debt and we can’t pay, so when we cart SUVs full of cash to the supermarket, we’ll make those Weimar wheelbarrows look petite). Or how sanctions on Russian energy backfired and caused ruinous inflation in Europe, pretty awful inflation here in the U.S. and pushed the whole west toward recession…or maybe ultimately depression. Or how Biden’s ever more reckless sanctions on China could wind up bankrupting us all. China is, after all the chief U.S. trading partner. Sanction China, as Biden recently did to its chip and semiconductor sector, and prices for everything explode upwards.

But money isn’t everything. What about Biden’s devil-may-care attitude toward continued human life on this planet, which he endangers every time he opens his mouth to bloviate that the U.S. will throw its military into the fray, should Taiwan and China go to war? True, Biden’s bellicose pronunciamentos do make the news – he is, after all, the ruler of one of the most violent empires in human history – but details of their global life-and-death implications, namely that they could kill us all? Not so much.

No, this news is not of interest to the editorial bigwigs who tell us what to think. They’re too busy stuffing our heads with bubble gum for the brain like rubbish about Tik Tok, or celebrity drivel or anything else deeply stupid enough to cretinize viewers and readers, so they won’t notice that their utility bills doubled in recent months, or their grocery bills shot up many percentage points, or the world is closer to being incinerated in a nuclear apocalypse than it has ever been.

But they notice anyway. And even though they may lack the finely tuned mental framework to fit it all together, thanks to their news consumption habits, lots of people have begun to glimpse that Washington’s idiocy could get them blown up tout de suite and meanwhile is bleeding them dry and will very soon be bleeding them drier. Hence the public’s growing reluctance to keep handing Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, blank checks. The GOP even climbed onto the bandwagon and announced it won’t fund this misbegotten war if it regains congress. I, for one, will be astonished if Republicans have the backbone to keep that promise. Anyway, Biden plans to preempt this oath by forking over more billions to Kiev now. This will not, ahem, help the Dems, which is probably what Republicans count on. But then Biden gets to look like he’s a man of principle (the show must go on), while the rest of us go broke and calculate our distance from atomic ground zero. Americans struggle with utility bills, grocery and gas prices, medical and educational debt. They don’t need to fund defense contractors to the tune of billions of dollars so Ukrainians and Russians can kill each other halfway around the world. And they certainly don’t need a war that has humanity teetering on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

In an unexpected dribble of good news, on October 24 the Washington Post reported that some 30 members of the progressive caucus urged Biden to get diplomacy to end the war rolling. The next day, they sniveled and recanted. This was the first time any Dems had the guts not to cheerlead for more bloodshed and more war on Moscow. What caused this initial sea change, I don’t know. But it was good news. Better late than never, it seemed. It appeared to mean some on the so-called left in Washington had finally come to their senses and just might not behave as disgracefully as so many European socialists did once World War I started, when they abandoned their erstwhile pacifism. For a long time, honestly, it has looked like that was the inheritance Dem progressives wanted to claim, an inheritance not just of shame and mass murder, but, were the Ukraine war to morph into World War III, human extinction.

For less than a day the sun of reason and goodness shone down. Briefly, the people who consider themselves of the left decided this danger of humanity’s mass execution was worth speaking out about and that diplomacy for peace is the only sane route out of the fiasco. But then, the next day they chickened out of bucking their party’s bloodlust. Even their timid gesture was too much to ask. These people are not leftists. They are cowards. They are a disgrace to the left. If anyone in the progressive caucus ever speaks out for diplomacy again, I’ll be very impressed.

Speaking of being impressed, how about that Washington Post actually playing this story big, about progressives calling for diplomacy, instead of burying it? That was unexpected, to say the least. Because it’s long been sickeningly obvious that our mainstream media show one side of the story: the NATO, Washington, imperial, war-mongering side. And it’s been doing that, shamelessly, for a generation. (It did that earlier too, but with a bit of actual embarrassment, whenever it got called out.) Remember Iraq’s infamous weapons of mass destruction? The editors who hyped that lie for months on end went on to bigger and better things, and so did the politicians – Biden even became president! – while an entire country, Iraq, was bombed to smithereens, based largely on mendacious reporting and political chicanery and now, decades later, has simply

swirled down the drain.

And who can forget the frenzy whipped up to justify NATO’s criminal 1999 bombing of Serbia? Nowadays Biden and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg would have you believe NATO is a “defensive” organization. What it did to Serbia should have tossed that mistake in the trash long ago. Instead, the error persists (not accidentally). When Russia reacted to the chance of Ukraine joining NATO and thus the presence of a hostile bomb-happy axis on its borders, western rulers protested that NATO is “defensive.”

So also clamor our media, prevaricating just as they do every time they mention the U.S. defense department, which should ditch that moniker and return to the previous, more honest “war department.”

You know things are bad when absurd chuckleheads like former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are the ones almost nailing reality on the head. He did that October 20 with his remarks that Ukraine provoked Russia into its invasion. It could be argued that Kiev did so by slaughtering 14,000 Russian-speakers in the Donbass since 2014 and then, last winter, massing huge numbers of troops on that region’s border, in preparation for what Moscow took to be a genocide. 

 But actually, Ukraine’s supposed instigation had lotsa help. It would have been more accurate for Berlusconi to say that Ukraine’s puppet master, the U.S., provoked Moscow with its nonstop incitement by expanding NATO eastward since the Soviet Union’s fall, as numerous American experts and diplomats – from cold war brain-trust luminary George Kennan to former ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock to CIA chief William Burns to great powers expert John Mearsheimer, and others – had  warned, and more recently egged Moscow to attack with a 2014 Kiev coup and the eight years of violent nonsense that followed, and that Washington did so with premeditation to rupture the economic relationship between Russia and Europe; but nonetheless Berlusconi landed his verbal dart on the board with the bullseye. And when you have to go to Berlusconi for informed commentary, you’re in trouble, because he recently chose his side in the Italian government and it was the fascist one. So now things are so bad that fascists are among the people objecting to imperial propaganda. Fun times.

But we have the same disastrous mess here in the U.S., where the next presidential election could shape up to be a choice between Trump’s fascism or Biden’s nuclear war. Choice? Ho, ho. That’s no choice. That’s death on the installment plan or instant death. Either way it’s disastrous for ordinary people, because Trumpism either ends what civilization we have in America, which has a dire, global because imperial impact, or Bidenism directly ends civilization on earth.

At the start of the Ukraine war, Biden promised not to launch World War III. He broke that promise, by flooding Ukraine with weapons, CIA operatives and some special forces. To call this reckless is an understatement. Biden’s refusal to use his considerable weight to promote peace negotiations killed thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, will likely kill many more, and also endangers the lives of billions of other people, worldwide – 5.3 billion from nuclear-winter-induced starvation, who would suffer a slow, agonizing death. And I’m not talking about the canard that Russia may use a low-yield nuclear device on the battlefield. I’m talking about Moscow and Washington determining that they really are in a hot war and the long-range, high-yield nuclear missiles that could then begin to fly.

Biden’s sole task is to prevent this. His desire to be seen as the new FDR, as a friend of the unions, as some sort of social democrat, mean nothing if he can’t deescalate this war with Moscow. If Biden wants any legacy other than that of earth’s destroyer, leaving humanity a cold, charred, radioactive planet, he will stop his war-mongering garbage at once and throw his definitive, presidential heft behind peace negotiations with Moscow. And Washington must be an in-person party to those negotiations. Absent that, anything else he does goes down in history, if there even is a history, as a waste.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Hope Deferred. She can be reached at her website.

October 31, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?

 As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. 

 the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war.

Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new. 

 https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-government-sees-silicon-valley Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 22

The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”

Bloomberg reports:

Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.

“Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.”

“Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg. “His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”

“If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.

Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?

Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably “Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:

This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.

It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control system. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new. 

Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception. 

October 23, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment