Not since the Iraq War and those notoriously elusive ‘weapons of mass destruction’ have the people of America and Europe been told bigger lies by their warmongering political leaders.
LEO HOHMANN
Peter Hitchens, in an Op-Ed published by the Daily Mail, says he learned long ago that governments specialize in lying and in getting others, especially the mainstream corporate media, to lie for them.
“It is what they do,” he writes. And yet, seldom has he seen such a massive cloud of lies as we face now with regard to the war in Ukraine.
He writes:
“There has been nothing like it since we were all lied to about the Iraq invasion, with bilge about fictional ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. The liars were caught. And they learned from it. They learned to lie more skillfully.”
I’ve been writing about many of the same things, trying to dispel the same lies about Ukraine, but for someone as noteworthy as Hitchens to step forward and join the fray of truth-tellers, that’s significant. Hitchens, a legendary British author and journalist, has been covering the West’s foreign policy toward Russia for 47 years. He’s a major critic of Putin and Putin’s style of governance, so nobody can call him a “Russian asset,” as the establishment globalists are fond of labeling anyone who challenges their narratives.
Hitchens writes:
“We have never had a debate about the Ukraine crisis which started from the beginning. Did anyone in power ever tell you truthfully how, when or why this war began? No. Did anyone in power explain why Britain, crime blighted, decrepit, rubbish-strewn, rat-infested, broke Britain, had to get involved in it? Never.”
Instead, Hitchens says we have just been fed a steady diet of “propaganda rubbish about ‘democracy’, freedom and an invented Russian menace.”
Here are just a few of the biggest lies you have been told over and over and over again:
Lie number 1. The war, they say, was not provoked. Hitchens said “seldom in history has a war been more provoked.”
Russians, nice ones like the liberal, democratic politician Yegor Gaidar, and nasty ones like the bloody despot Vladimir Putin, begged the West to stop expanding its military alliance, NATO, eastwards towards Russia.
Hitchens reminds us that ALL Russians, including the great anti-Communist author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, had been shocked and angered when NATO in 1999 (under the leadership of Bill Clinton) abruptly gave up its defensive posture and launched attacks on Yugoslavia, which had not attacked a NATO member.
Lie number 2. These protests reached their peak in February 2007, when Putin made a dramatic speech in Munich.
He said NATO expansion was “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”
Hitchens writes: “Look, if someone as gaunt as Putin spoke to you like that in a pub late in the evening, you’d take it as a warning that he was seriously riled. And unless you wanted a fight, you’d back off. But we didn’t back off.”
NATO, exposed as no longer just a defensive alliance, kept right on expanding eastward, right up to Russia’s doorstep. In 1999, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. In 2004, seven more former Soviet Bloc nations joined including the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, followed by the Balkan states of Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia.
Hitchens notes that it was US President George W. Bush who deliberately raised the temperature the following year. In April 2008, Bush said Ukraine should be placed on the path towards joining NATO. Even the Guardian, which Hitchens describes as “the Liberal Warmonger’s Gazette,” conceded that this was “likely to infuriate the Kremlin.”
Lie number 3. We are repeatedly told that Russia attacked Georgia later in 2008. But Hitchens notes that anyone can find, on the web, a 2009 Reuters story headlined “Georgia started war with Russia: EU-backed report.”
The article summarizes an inquiry by the respected Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini. She had been asked by Brussels to look into that war’s causes. She found that Georgia started the war, not Russia. Predictably, Western media outlets ignored her findings.
Hitchens says he still meets supposedly informed people who have never heard of Ms. Tagliavini or her report.
Lie number 4. The claim that this war is about democracy and freedom. “It isn’t,” Hitchens says. “The more the West claims to care for these things, the less it does to help them.”
Some examples:
Ukraine’s elected president was lawlessly overthrown by a mob in 2014. Britain and the USA condoned this shameful event because they preferred the illegal rebels to the elected government. You just can’t do that and pretend to be the guardian of democracy. But then, we aren’t anyway.
You will search in vain for protests against the treatment of Romania’s presidential candidate, in a country that is in the EU and Nato.
CALIN Georgescu’s election was canceled by judges in December when he looked like he was winning the first round. He was then banned from running in the second round – all because he has the wrong kind of politics. If that’s not enough, look at the West’s deep, shaming silence over the frightening, thuggish behavior of Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan. Turkey is a NATO member state and key Western ally.
A few weeks ago, Erdogan, whom Hitches describes as “the Turkish Putin,” arrested and jailed Ekrem Imamoglu, an opposition politician who looked likely to beat him at the polls.
Hitchens writes:
“Mr. Imamoglu joined the many journalists and democrats who already rot in Turkish prisons. Erdogan has crushed free media, free speech and the freedom to protest. But his country is still allowed to stay in NATO, and Western states have made less noise than an angry vole guarding its nest. They’re scared of Erdogan.”
Hitchens doesn’t even go into the ultimate hypocrisy, which is the fact that the government in Ukraine is every bit as authoritarian as the one in Moscow. Zelensky’s government has shut down opposition parties, censored and silenced all critical media, bullied and intimidated the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. When his term was up, Zelensky canceled elections and has yet to reschedule them because he knows he would lose.
Read Hitchens’ entire article here.
This article (LEGENDARY BRITISH JOURNALIST: You’ve been ‘fed steady diet of propaganda rubbish’ about Ukraine and ‘the invented Russian menace’) was created and published by Leo Hohmann and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: dzen.ru
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