Did you know that ‘shoppers’ have been clamouring for UK supermarkets to rename Chicken Kiev ‘Chicken Kyiv’ in commemoration of Ukraine’s heroic struggle against the evil Russkies? Or so says Mailonline.
Gosh, I wonder who those ‘shoppers’ were. One, I expect, was an imaginary friend of the anonymous hack who wrote the piece. The other, in all likelihood, worked for 77th brigade, the propaganda wing of the British Army which pays young squaddies too thick even to make useful cannon fodder to harass Enemies of the State on social media.
This weekend the 77th Boys have been heavily engaged on the front line, defending Queen and Country from dangerous tweets like this one by me.
Here’s how the cream of Britain’s military responded.
There has been a lot of this about on social media over the last few days. Say anything to question the relentless ‘I stand with Ukraine’ narrative and your timeline will be filled with four-letter put downs; accusations of stupidity and treachery and shilling for Putin; or, as above, suggestions that you are either a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist or that you are mentally deranged. [Obviously I’m not suggesting that all of these emanate from 77th. The majority are from their useful idiots].
What’s interesting about the mentally deranged tag is that it is straight out of the Hitler/Stalin playbook. Both the Nazis and the Soviet Communists routinely branded their political opponents as being mentally ill in order to discredit them or, worse, as an excuse to dose them up on drugs or imprison them in asylums. It’s depressing but not surprising to see that these totalitarian techniques are now being copied by the agents of Britain’s increasingly authoritarian state.
The even more depressing thing, though, is that these cheap propaganda tricks actually seem to work. Not only do they encourage pile-ons but they bully the uncommitted into imagining that the only morally tenable position to adopt right now is to pray for Kyiv, daub your social media profile with yellow and blue flags, and cheer every time a Russian plane is (allegedly) shot down or a Russian soldier killed.
Not even relatively nuanced positions like the one in my tweet above are permitted. [Note, I wasn’t in this particular instance even supporting Putin’s incursion. Just suggesting that the mainstream media’s reporting has been deeply suspect]. Right now, if you don’t want to bring back conscription, to sacrifice the flower of your nation’s youth on plucky Ukraine’s altar of blood, to strangle Putin personally with your bare hands then frankly you are quite beyond the pale of acceptable discourse.
This is how it must have felt to be a Conscientious Objector in the First World War: no matter how high your principles, no matter how well-argued your case, now matter how great your courage in going against the grain – as far as the broad mass of the populace are concerned in this climate of rampant jingoism, you’re just a cowardly piece of treacherous filth who deserves to be locked up.
It also goes a long way towards confirming a popular saw about politics: that whenever a leader is flailing domestically all he needs to do to get the people behind him is to find an enemy on which to declare war.
OK, so no Western nation has actually declared war on Russia, but it turns out they didn’t need to: just a bit of sabre-rattling here, a bit of blue-and-yellow lighting on some national building or other there, has apparently been more than enough to distract their malleable populaces from inconvenient subjects like vaccine damage and state malfeasance, and instead to turn the mob’s idiot brains towards events in a far-off country of which they know very little (and about which now, thanks to the lies dutifully spouted by the state’s MSM propagandists, they know even less).
Can people really be this gullible? Apparently so. And on this occasion the gullibility hasn’t confined itself to the kind of people so trusting of Big Government and the lying media that they thought lockdowns were proportionate, masks sensible and vaccines safe and effective. No, sadly, this time even quite a few of those who were sceptical of their governments’ claims about ‘Covid’ have fallen hook line and sinker for those same governments’ claims about Russia and the Ukraine.
Hence my incredulous tweet quoted earlier. Let me expand on this point briefly. For two years now, our governments – via their bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces, the mainstream media – have been lying to us non-stop about everything to do with ‘Covid’: about the severity of the ‘pandemic’, about the efficacy of masks, about the massive amount of corruption to do with safety equipment procurement, about the reliability and safety of the vaccines and, of course, about the real reasons they’ve been doing all this (not public health, obviously)…
…And now, suddenly we’re expected to believe that our lying governments and their lying media mouthpieces are giving it to us straight on Ukraine?
Really??
So how does that work then?
We can’t trust our governments and media on domestic policy? But we can totally trust them on foreign policy?
I suppose this level of gullibility is more excusable among all those who bought into the ‘pandemic’ narrative. They didn’t know they were being fooled then; they don’t know they are being fooled now.
But those commentators who were sceptical of the pandemic narrative but who cannot see they are being played on Ukraine: this I don’t get at all.
What, for example, do they make of this:
I’m referring to the photograph of the woman with the bandage round her head, her face daubed with blood, who appeared on the front page of numerous newspapers to whip up sympathy for the plight of Ukraine. She’s a very unlucky woman because remarkably, she managed to sustain exactly the same injury back in 2018, this time as the victim of a gas explosion in Magnitogorsk.
The mainstream media is awash with this sort of misleading, emotive imagery and with exhortations to anti-Russian violence. As, of course, is social media.
I’m not suggesting the Russians don’t play similar tricks, only that when it comes to Ukraine we are in a hall of mirrors. The idea that we can wholly trust one side and dispense with everything the other side says on the grounds that it is Russian propaganda is absurd.
My own view is that, at the very least, Putin’s incursion is understandable. It was provoked, inter alia, by the US/EU/NATO Deep State coup in Kiev in 2014; it has been further provoked by instances such as last year’s Soros-funded attempt at a colour revolution in Putin’s ally Belarus. Putin may be paranoid but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean They are not out to get you. Putin has the world’s second most powerful military. The West is simultaneously weak and provocative. From Russia’s point of view, what Putin is doing now is both proportionate and rational.
When I retweeted Vanessa Beeley’s fascinating thread on the Russian case, one of my followers commented: ‘Why are you tweeting this nonsense, James? Come on!’
Amazing, isn’t it, what total experts on the Ukrainian situation people have become under the expert tutelage of the mainstream media? I doubt a week ago that the author of that comment could have placed Ukraine on a map. Yet suddenly here he is so sure of the truth that he can dismiss as ‘nonsense’ the analysis of an international reporter who has been studying Russian policy for decades…
I’ll leave the last word on the absurdity of this situation to cartoonist Bob Moran, who clearly feels as disgusted as I do about the double standards on display by our political class and their media propagandists.
D Set aside the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine/Russia conflict – you really can very easily: it’s a local issue and it’s none of our business – and try to put it in its broader context. Over the last two years bad stuff, really bad stuff, perhaps unprecedentedly bad stuff has been happening to us in the US, in the UK, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, in mainland Europe. Some of the evidence for this really bad stuff is finally starting to trickle out into the mainstream media, for example details about the widespread injuries caused by the ‘safe and effective’ vaccines which our governments have been coercing us to take. In other words, I would argue, the nations of the so-called ‘free world’ have been complicit in murdering their citizens.
Are our politicians and our media ‘fessing up to what they’ve done to their own people and seeking to make amends? Are they hell! Instead, they’re going: ‘Look! A squirrel called Vladimir Putin!’ And the idiots are falling for it.
Or as Bob the cartoonist puts it:
Yes, Bob. You nailed it again.
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Author James Delingpole
