The American People Can Stop War With Russia If We Want To

When a drive to war gets manufactured, reason leaves the conversation. History gets forgotten. Nuance is not tolerated, and opponents of the official narrative are demonized. All that matters is destroying the enemy that the state and its media have put in front of us, an enemy so terrible that war is the only option. But this doesn’t mean resisting war will never work; it’s (rarely) worked before, and it has a chance of working during the establishment’s current effort to escalate with Syria and Russia.

Right now, the state’s propaganda systems are maybe more vulnerable than they’ve ever been. Americans are outraged at the poverty and dysfunctionality that the war-enforced neoliberal paradigm has created, and the politicians and pundits who promote the lies of the corporatocracy are distrusted and mocked. If not for the state’s repressions against dissent, Bernie Sanders would be president, alternative media would likely have surpassed the corporate media’s viewership by now, and activists would be poised to upend the system-but the establishment has remade the rules of the game through its censorship and other assaults on
democracy. So our way to stop the war campaign, and the rest of the ruling elite’s plans, is to fight from an increasingly subversive position.

In addition to the more direct actions of organizing antiwar events, demanding politicians reject the war efforts, and resisting paying war taxes, our most important task is changing the consciousness of the American people against establishment narratives. “Mass media propaganda is why things don’t get better and keep getting worse,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone recently about how propaganda is used to pacify the people, who would otherwise be able to easily overpower the state with their numbers. “Not corruption, not a two-headed one-party system, not foreign influence, not gerrymandering, not a garbage electoral system, not crooked politicians, not the stupidity of the public. Mass media propaganda.”

There are far more people who distrust media and government than there are who’ve been assimilated into the echo chamber of corporate propaganda. The latter are virtually unswayable; the diabolical manipulations of the war demagogues create circles of mass hysteria and fear. But the others are the ones we’ll be able to build the war opposition out of. And the absurdity of the war narratives should make that easy for us.

We’re being told the U.S. needs to strike Syria, an action that the Trump administration is considering despite Russia’s explicitly threatening military retaliation if it happens. The case for it is based in claims that Assad has done chemical attacks this year-a charge that’s come from the State Department at a time when the U.S. is trying to sabotage the Syrian state, and the reports of which come from the known imperialist front group the White Helmets.

This charge also comes within a year after the U.S. claimed Assad perpetrated a chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun. A claim that’s been made only on empty assertions, and that was contradicted in the report that Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) put out on April 11, 2017:

“Our U.S. Army contacts in the area have told us this is not what happened. There was no Syrian ‘chemical weapons attack.’ Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died. This is what the Russians and Syrians have been saying and – more important –what they appear to believe happened.”

The rest of the case for “doing something about Syria” consists of casual media demonizations of Assad, psyops like the Bana al-Abed public profile, and several other chemical attacks that Assad has been proven not to be behind. The “war” rhetoric about Russia also rests on false charges that are individually easy to see through, but whose numerousness makes the Russia narrative seem indisputable. 

When you notice the falseness of a few of them, though, the magnitude of the lies we’ve been told throughout the last two years becomes easy to accept. The establishment’s claim that Russia hacked the DNC emails, aside from its transparent motive of deflection, has been proven through VIPS’ forensic digital tests not to have occurred. Says the July 24 VIPS memorandum:

“Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].”

As Orwell said about removing oneself from a false and narrow reality, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” It’s information like this that can lead to a person’s worldview being upended, which is why governments and corporations are working so hard to censor this information. We’re spreading it around with the hope that humanity can see reality before fantasy destroys us.