Saturday, March 22, 2014

The Neocon Propaganda Mill Churns On


"The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked..”.
- George Orwell's 1984
The neocon infested propaganda mills continue to churn, not only spinning away the Svoboda party MP attack on Oleksandr Panteleymonov but in the rush to nail Putin to their cross of lies there are as many omissions as there are sleazy hit jobs. I do have to hand it to the neocons for their perseverance as well as a never-ending supply of chutzpah. The increasing shrill squeals of outrage emanating from our star spangled chorus of swine not only continues unabated but in one of those wonderful centralized talking points that usually get attached to economic tales of wonder is “picking up steam”. The Washington Post though is in a league of its own when it comes to pumping out the lies and propaganda which it does as though each hit piece were a link sausage stuffed with tainted skunk meat.
The crown jewel of Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos’ empire has ratcheted up the production line speed with the latest foray into ridiculousness being a nasty diatribe by chess master Garry Kasparov with yet one more of those amazingly creative titles “It’s Time to Stop Putin” from which I excerpt:
The next obstacle to stopping Putin is the self-imposed paralysis of the leaders of Europe and the Group of Seven. It is easier for them to say that there is nothing they can do to check Putin’s ambitions than to admit that they lack the courage to act. Putin keeps raising the stakes, and the West just keeps folding. There are plenty of levers available to apply pressure on Putin, but they require confronting several hard truths. And this is a generation of political leaders accustomed to telling citizens that it is possible to both cut taxes and spend more, to be free and be safe, to be a great power without ever using power.
AND
The first hard truth is that the only sanctions or other measures that would affect Putin’s conduct are those that, directly or indirectly, would target his hold on power. That is all Putin cares about, because he knows what happens when people in his position lose that grip. This is why a recent comment by Secretary of State John Kerry was precisely wrong. “We hope President Putin will recognize that none of what we’re saying is meant as a threat,” Kerry said. “It’s not meant in a personal way.” With one feeble remark, Kerry took off the table the only thing Putin cares about.
Obama repeated this mistake on Wednesday when he said that the United States would not send troops to defend Ukraine. Nobody was asking for troops, and Obama probably thinks he is defusing tensions. But where Obama sees a gesture of peaceful intent, Putin sees more weakness. To Putin, his opponent freely surrendered one of his greatest advantages: America’s overwhelming military strength. On Iran, on Syria and now regarding Ukraine, Obama has outsourced his foreign policy to Putin and, in so doing, has crippled the power of his office in ways that will long outlast his White House tenure.
While Kasparov speaks fluent neocon which is obvious by the insane level of sheer bellicosity of his screed it will be as pearls before swine because this is after all America and nobody really gives a rats ass about fucking chess. The NFL and NASCAR are king in this macho, war-saturated collection of superstitious religious fanatics, hard core homophobes, gun-totin’ Duck Dynasty types and neo-Confederate dumbasses who think that chess is for fags and pussies and that real men don’t waste their time on such endeavors. Now if the WaPo can dig up some disgruntled former Russian pro football player or distill all of that crap down and put it on the side of a race car it would resonate more with the demographic that the neocons so desperately need to get riled up as shock troops for the November mid-term elections. The WaPo has truly descended into the depths of parody and is little more than FOX News for people who bother to read but the more time that is devoted to the anti-Putin onslaught the more that the venue begins to resemble something more like Der Stürmer which would be apropos given the support pumped out for the neo-Nazis in Kiev. 
What is more troubling however is the flip side of the rabble rousing to topple the Putin regime is the complete absence of any serious discussion of what the consequences may be in terms of the ongoing economic sanctions that Obama keeps pushing. Russia isn’t Iran and there is going to be a very real and serious counter-response at some point. Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas exports and there is already a restiveness afflicting the EU over how rapidly that this disaster is spinning out of control. Mr. Putin could quite simply cut off the gas which would delight American energy corporations already salivating over the prospect of exporting the bounty of domestic gas provided by the fracking boom. Obama may even be tempted to tap into the national strategic petroleum reserves to send it to Europe which should result in his immediate impeachment and subsequent removal from office but any such move would be greeted with the overwhelming bipartisan support that typically is bestowed upon the American war machine.
Putin is already reaching out to China for an alliance that has President Obama sufficiently rattled that he has juggled his coming schedule where he will be attempting to piece together another of those coalitions of the willing to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at The Hague (the sheer irony of that one is delightful) to prostate himself before our top provider of funding. Despite the vast military superiority of the American Empire the wars of the future (and perhaps the present) will be fought through economics and the prospect of Putin cutting a deal with the Chinese who continue to keep the US economy on life support would be very problematic. Imagine what would happen if Russia and China dropped the dollar – you would need the proverbial wheelbarrow full of Reichmarks to buy a loaf of fucking bread as the entire house of cards would collapse. Not that the economic destruction of the imperial war machine would be a bad thing but with the collection of idiots, loose-cannons, narcissists and warmongers currently in charge they may counter any such move by punching in the nuclear launch codes.
None of this is ever offered up as a topic of debate because we no longer have such a thing in The Homeland nor would there be much participation if we did given the triumph of the willfully ignorant.
The US government and the media is lying about everything and the bigger the lies, the more that Obama's overly sensitive pride is tweaked and the more that the entire establishment continues to go 'all in' and push all of the chips to the center of the table this latest orgy of national brainwashing will continue.

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