Most people don’t realize how dangerous America’s tensions are with Russia right now. Russia and the U.S. have experienced a decline in relations during the last few years that’s officially created a new cold war, and that have even escalated into an exchange of nuclear threats between the two powers this March. This threat of war is magnified by the West’s multiple areas of aggression towards Russia, with NATO having illegally occupied Syria, intervened in Ukraine, and advanced unprovoked troops near Russia’s borders. We’re now in a period of nuclear tensions that’s equivalent to that of the last cold war, except in this case there are many more geopolitical risks.
Do the government and media figures who are pushing for escalations with Russia expect this situation to remain stable forever? The Washington consensus seems to be that we’re only trying to contain Russia’s (supposed) aggressions, and that nothing bad could come out of “standing up to Putin.” These are rationalizations for the real purposes of the West’s anti-Russia campaign, which are to maintain NATO weapons sales and to dominate Russia for the benefit of the Western empire. And until the American people reject their government’s propaganda about Russia, this nuclear standoff will continue to loom over our heads.
The last U.S.-Russia cold war lasted for fifty years. People who lived in that period have described being traumatized by the constant fear of annihilation, with children often having taken the biggest emotional scars. A review of the close calls with nuclear confrontation from the era tell us that an apocalypse was avoided only out of luck. Now that our government is planning to put us through another event like this, we need to resist before it’s too late.
This new cold war, like the last one, isn’t based in a blameless American response to Russian “attacks.” Russia’s 2008 intervention in Georgia and 2014 intervention in Ukraine weren’t malicious power grabs, but responses to the expansionism that NATO has engaged in; there’s still no proof that Russia hacked the DNC or the Podesta emails, and Mueller’s indictments last month which supposedly “proved” such a breach are filled with factual inconsistencies; the “evidence” that Russia infiltrated state election apparatuses is dubious as well; and Russia’s online “subversion” campaign has been massively exaggerated by a mainstream media that’s sought to sensationalize this issue at every opportunity.
Additionally, the Russian “influence campaign” that Facebook supposedly found this week consists of Facebook pages with no clearly proven links to Russia. And Facebook’s source for its claims about these pages comes from the Digital Forensic Research Lab, an often unreliable information center that’s run by the neoconservative Atlantic Council.
But by building this war campaign on such blatant falsehoods, the U.S./NATO power establishment has made its propaganda machine vulnerable. As the blogger Caitlin Johnstone recently assessed, “The new media environment is still ripe for a grassroots campaign to expose the lies of our rulers and shine light on the puppeteers of the kabuki theater using facts, information and intelligent arguments.” And if we use this power to push back against the onslaught of cold war propaganda, this charade won’t be able to sustain itself.
The masters of capital and war are on shaky ground right now. The ongoing recession and the catastrophes of the War on Terror have made a lot of people hard to propagandize, and the global oligarchy is now trying to carry out massive propaganda efforts on multiple fronts. If we use social media and online journalism to counter the government’s lies, the push towards apocalyptic war won’t be able to go on. But we have to act quickly, because the potential for world war will get bigger the longer this charade goes on.
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