Syrian and Russian officials are again warning about a coming false flag chemical attack. Sources in Syrian intelligence and the Russian military have both warned in the last several weeks that U.S.-backed forces in Syria are preparing to stage chemical weapons provocations that will be used to escalate Western attacks against Assad’s government. This week Russia’s defense ministry followed up Russia’s past accusations about a coming false flag, having said Al-Nusra terrorists are preparing chemical provocations in Syria’s Idlib province.
I’m not saying we should automatically trust these authorities. But the last time the Russian government warned about a coming false flag Syria chemical attack in March, it was shortly followed by just such an event. As I can’t keep repeating enough, overwhelming evidence has come out that the April 7 incident in Douma was falsely blamed on Assad: seventeen witnesses to the event publicly testified in April that no gas was involved, and the people interviewed by journalist Robert Fisk have said the same.
Fisk’s report concludes that a heavy dust storm had happened in Douma at that time, depriving many people of of oxygen and prompting the mass hospitalizations that we saw videos of. Bizarrely, the people interviewed by Fisk say that members of the White Helmets were going around the area at that time shouting that a gas attack was happening. The White Helmets, along with every other major Western institution, then reported that Assad had done such an attack.
It was an outrageous and flimsy deception. And the U.S. was still able to use it to justify several strikes on Damascus, which were luckily not substantial enough to start a major escalation in the Syrian war. But it could be different when the next false flag happens.
People on the antiwar right don’t have reason to be comfortable right now with the Trump White House’s agenda for Syria. Trump’s state department continues to fund the White Helmets, and the Trump administration’s explicitly stated goal of regime change in Iran directly entails a regime change war in Syria. When the next war deception comes, the entire antiwar coalition needs to be ready to fight back.
As Caitlin Johnstone wrote over a year ago: “In order to beat the legacy media we need to replace it, so the more psywar soldiers we’ve got creating content the better. Write articles, make videos, create memes, build a viral Twitter presence; use whatever gifts you’ve got to throw monkey wrenches in the gears of the propaganda machine.” Johnstone wouldn’t advocate these actions if they were ineffectual. The political establishment is very concerned right now about what people are seeing online, as has been shown with the fixation from politicians and the media about “Russian trolls” and “fake news.”
This obsession isn’t about protecting Americans from misinformation, it’s aboutkeeping people under the influence of oligarchic propaganda. If social media users, bloggers, and activists put as much effort as possible into exposing the lies about Syria when this next deception comes, the empire’s plans could be disrupted on a revolutionary scale.
We have the power to stop the war machine from manufacturing consent for a continued assault on Syria. If we succeed, we could set off a streak of further victories, such as a prevention of a conflict with Russia, an obstruction of the plans for Iran regime change, and a permanent damage to the effectiveness of the war propaganda machine. Use your power to make peace and truth win out this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment