https://edwardcurtin.com/the-new-york-times-is-orwells-ministry-of-truth/
The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth
“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1974 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a U.S. war, as has always been The Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times. (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)
All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”
Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would not respond forcefully.
This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.
The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident. The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:
- Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
- “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
- That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
- Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
- Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
- Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
- Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
- Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
- During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
- The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”
This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.
It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph
Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.
Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1974 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.
Let Harold Pinter have the last words:
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/duplicitous-eu-bureaucrats-demand-war-crimes-tribunal/5805002
“Punishing Vladimir Putin”: Duplicitous EU Bureaucrats Demand War Crimes Tribunal
Hypocrisy abounds, yet few seem to notice.
German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock is nursing a fantasy. She believes one day Vladimir Putin will be hauled into The Hague and tried for war crimes. Her dream is to punish Putin for fumigating Nazis in Ukraine.
But there is a problem. Russia and Ukraine are not parties to the Rome statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC), thus the court does not have jurisdiction in those two countries. Ukraine tried to circumvent this by accepting ICC jurisdiction.
Russia removed itself from the ICC after the court declared the referendum-backed liberation of Crimea to be an occupation. The peninsula, for centuries part of Russia, was rife with Nazi psychopaths determined to find and kill ethnic Russians.
In Odesa along the coast of the Black Sea, Stepan Bandera worshippers burned people alive and beat others to death with metal pipes for the crime of their heritage and language spoken. No investigation or prosecution of the perpetrators followed.
Anna Baerbock would like to see this barbarism and sadistic mistreatment of largely defenseless civilians continue. She proposed a “new format” for the court, that is she would have the ICC set up a court in Ukraine and “derive its jurisdiction from Ukrainian criminal law.”
In short, the ICC would be working with ultranats and Nazis. Baerbock apparently does not see a contradiction.
“That would be different to tribunals under international law, such as those for the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia,” the AFP notes. “And while tribunals for Cambodia and Kosovo have used local laws, they were not able to try aggression between one state and another.”
Baerbock’s proposal is likely to hit a brick wall. The other option is to take the case to the United Nations, but that is also a dead end. Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, will undoubtedly veto any such move.
According to Baerbock’s fantasy,
A special tribunal would target Russia’s civilian and military leadership for ordering and overseeing the invasion of Ukraine, Baerbock said.
While the ICC could charge Russian soldiers and commanders on the ground, Baerbock said it was “important that the Russian leadership cannot claim immunity.”
Aggression was the “original crime that enabled all the other terrible crimes”.
Hypocrisy abounds, yet few seem to notice. Baerbock’s Germany was deeply involved in the effort to kill Afghans for the crime of attempting to end the occupation of their country. The Bundeswehr was told they didn’t have a combat mission in Afghanistan, but that was nothing more than a flimsy cover.
“US troops as well as the Bundeswehr and other allies not only supported war criminals on the ground, they also committed serious crimes themselves. None of the perpetrators was ever convicted in court for this,” Fabian Scheidler wrote for the Orinoco Tribune.
Germans under NATO command “bombed a mainly civilian trek… with over one hundred dead or seriously injured, including children. The proceedings against those primarily responsible, Colonel Georg Klein and Defense Minister Jung (CDU), ended with acquittals.”
The ICC is apparently fond of European and USG war criminals. Recall the USG shelling the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz.
“The attack, which was clearly a war crime according to different human rights organizations including the United Nations, killed at least 42 civilians, mostly medical staff members and patients,” teleSUR reported in 2016. “ The ‘punishments’ are largely administrative, such as letters of reprimand and no further promotion.”
Gregor Link writes for WSWS,
Back in 2009, WikiLeaks published an internal Bundeswehr (German army) field report on a massacre in the Afghan province of Kunduz, which resulted in the deaths of up to 142 people, including “children and adolescents.” The bombardment of two fuel trucks was the bloodiest military action by the modern Bundeswehr, and marked a turning point in German post-war history.
As we know, Julian Assange is now locked up in Belmarsh prison for the crime of revealing USG and European war crimes.
The German “leadership” was eager to enter the war against the CIA-created Taliban. The German political elite wanted to show they are back in the game of killing officially designated (and created) enemies. Peter Schwarz writes,
German imperialism did not want to be left out of this war for the re-division of the world. On 11 October 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Schröder announced a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy to the Bundestag (federal parliament).
Amnesty International is more focused on Taliban war crimes and abuses than those committed by USG, UK, Australian, and NATO troops over the course of twenty years of war and occupation.
This is quite natural and to be expected, considering where Amnesty’s funding comes from: the UK Department for International Development, the USG State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation (funded by the CIA).
Anna Baerbock is not alone. In December, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested the creation of a special court to prosecute the New Satan, Vladimir Putin. Politico reported the following on von der Leyen’s statement,
“Russia must pay for its horrific crimes, including for its crime of aggression against a sovereign state… This is why, while continuing to support the International Criminal Court, we are proposing to set up a specialized court, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute Russia’s crime of aggression.”
It should be noted, to put this in its proper perspective, von der Leyen lied about the number of dead, saying (minus evidence, of course) “more than 20,000 civilians and 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far.” The claim was later removed from the official statement.
The ICC didn’t approve of von der Leyen’s proposal. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, attempted to defend his turf. He said the ICC is capable of dealing with war crimes on its own, the Associated Press reported in early December.
The ICC will not prosecute USG, British, Australian, and German war crimes, but it will, minus the legal ability to do so, attempt to prosecute Putin and selected Russian officials. This is, of course, nothing if not an exercise in futility.
Do Anna Baerbock and Ursula von der Leyen actually believe Vladimir Putin, General Sergey Surovikin, Colonel General Andrei Serdyukov, Major General Yevgeny Nikiforov, Lieutenant General Sergei Yudin, and other military officers of the Russian military command will get on a plane and fly to the Netherlands to be prosecuted?
USG, NATO: Long Record of War Crimes
The NATO and USG use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Basra, Samara, Baghdad, and Mosul is apparently not considered a war crime by the ICC. Habib Siddiqui writes,
The use of firebombs puts the US in breach of the 1980 Convention on Certain Chemical Weapons (CCW) and is a violation of the Geneva Protocol against the use of white phosphorous, “since its use causes indiscriminate and extreme injuries especially when deployed in an urban area.”
The US and NATO ignored the 1980 Protocol on Incendiary Weapons and the Chemical Weapons Convention when they used white phosphorus in the attack on Fallujah, Iraq. New Zealand Brig. Gen. Hugh McAslan admitted to using phosphorus munitions against Iraqis in Mosul.
For well over a century, the USG has avoided responsibility for a large number of war crimes.
The genocide of “Indians” in America by the USG in the 1800s was an act of fumigation to open the West for unfettered exploitation. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” declared Colonel James W. Forsyth during the Wounded Knee massacre.
During the 1899 USG invasion of the Philippines, the order was given by General Jacob H. Smith to “kill everyone over ten.” American history books drastically undercounted the number of Filipinos killed during the invasion, occupation, and subsequent colonial rule. The actual number of dead was over 3 million.
No Gun Ri, Korea, 1950. The USG 7th Calvary massacred Korean refugees attempting to escape the war. The refugees
were machine-gunned, mass-executed, and strafed by planes. Children, the elderly, and the disabled were all killed by the Americans. Survivors were forced to hide under corpses. It’s thought over 400 refugees died at No Gun Ri alone… When the Army’s subsequent cover-up was finally revealed by the Associated Press in 1999, the Pentagon refused to accept any responsibility.
The USG occupation of Haiti. “In addition to executions and violence against unarmed combatants, the US Army and its Haitian auxiliaries (the gendarmerie) allegedly committed massive killings and acts of violence against the civilian population… These included summary executions, rapes, setting houses on fire after gathering their inhabitants inside them, lynchings, and torching civilians alive.”
In 1945, 2 million German Wehrmacht POWs were held in 19 camps, known as Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps). The camps were in violation of the Geneva Conventions. “Prisoners mostly slept without shelter, exposed to the elements. Rations were generally between 1000 and 1550 calories per day. There was often little or no access to clean drinking water. Thousands died,” writes Colin Fraser for War History Online.
Eisenhower decided to circumvent the Conventions by classifying the captured Germans not as POWs, but rather as “disarmed enemy forces.” The Red Cross was prevented from visiting the camps.
Henry Kissinger, grotesquely characterized as an “elder statesman,” presided over the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia (600,000 civilians killed). This destabilized the Lon Nol government and made way for the massive atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The campaign of indiscriminate violence during the Vietnam War also resulted in the murder of 350,000 civilians in neighboring Laos.
Did China ever target a USG embassy? Not to my knowledge. However, the USG, in its violent effort to break up Yugoslavia (resulting in the states of Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro), bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists and injuring 20 staff. It used its notorious JDAMs to accomplish this war crime.
“NATO claimed it was acting on information that the embassy was actually the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement,” the National Interest reported in 2017.
This is an outright lie. Recall Clinton’s Secretary of State, William Cohen, declaring NATO and the USG had used “the most precise application of airpower in history.” NATO said targets were “carefully selected,” thus we should have no doubt the Chinese embassy was deliberately targeted.
The above is a small sample of the manifest war crimes and violations of international and humanitarian law committed by the USG and its NATO attack dog. The crimes are largely ignored and never cited when the propaganda media “objectively” discusses the unverified war crimes of Russia in Ukraine.
Of course, the double standard blather of German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will predictably come to naught.
In response to calls for a war crimes tribunal in the EU, Russia may hold war crimes tribunals of its own and showcase the disgusting crimes of Ukrainian ultranats and neo-Nazis, guilty of torturing, murdering, and attempting to ethnically cleanse any person daring to speak Russian, celebrate Russian cultural events, object to the war, establish an opposition party, or attend the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Russians have commenced an International Public Tribunal on Ukraine, initiated in April. The objective of the tribunal is to “collect data and prove the commission of war crimes by the Kiev regime, discrimination against its own citizens, persecution on linguistic, national and ideological grounds,” according to a report posted by the Center for Information Resilience.
In order to understand the goal of this organization, consider that it has “partnered” with the Institute for War & Peace, and in turn consider the Institute works with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, doing what the CIA formerly did), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. These are described as “strategic partners” and sponsors of “soft power,” working for regime change behind the scenes.
The corporate propaganda media will continue to omit the crimes committed by the USG and NATO while pointing out Russian war crimes that have little evidentiary standing.
As I said in a previous post, all warring parties commit war crimes, either intentionally or “collaterally.” However, the war crimes of the USG, going back more than a century, cast a large shadow over the finger-pointing of German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Unfortunately, that shadow will remain invisible to those indoctrinated by revisionist history and the deliberate omission of the manifest crimes committed by the USG and its NATO attack dog.
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