The ProWar Playboook
Step #1: Wealthy capitalists identify public assets that they want to steal (see banana wars in early 20th Century, Iraqi oil 2002, Ukraine right now).
Step #2: Independent Media ignores Step 1 until years after war ends.
Step #3: MIC PR kicks into gear demonizing opponent, including xenophobia, often years before war starts (Russia 2013 to now)).
Step #4: Hitler lives again! Instead of wW2 being the exception, Hitler is now the standard. All other comarisons, including much more apppropriate and recent wars, are forgotten by the media. All debates are framed in terms of nation-states, rather than a more accurate private interests.
Step #5: It's Munich all over again! Anyone who wants to avoid war is smeared by the media as being soft on Hitler.
Step #6: Atrocities are "discovered", either ones we were complicit in (Iraqi Kurds in the 1970's and 80's) or invented whole cloth (Libya 2011, Iraq 2003), or exaggerated (Kosovo 1999).
Step #7: Every dissenter and peace advocate is smeared as Blame America First, Putin Puppet, and treasonist Useful Idiot. These include anyone pointing out Step #1. When smearing isn't enough, police are used (WW1).
Step #8: Trigger event created/invented (Vietnam 1964).
Step #9: War! Once troops are used then anyone opposing using our troops for private profit is "not supporting the troops."
Step #10: Peace! Suddenly everyone ignores that negotiations aren't treason.
Step #11: Wealthy capitalists cash in.
Step #12: Media eventually discovers Step #1.
Comments
At first I thought you were talking about the other guys
There wouldn't even be a discussion if Russia just went back to Russia. Starting a war in Vietnam sixty years ago doesn't make it ok for Russia to start one in Ukraine.
The war could end tomorrow if Russia simply went home.
I don't understand
why liberals can't imagine a discussion about war that doesn't involve Russia, especially when the US is still involved in several wars.
Nor discusssing the private interests involved in Ukraine.
How can you associate Viet Nam
with Russia? The US wanted to control the hand-over from the French
in south East Asia. Now the US wants to control the hand-over of
Ukraine to the Poles. Do you see a pattern?
question everything
Ukraine would continue its war on the ex- Ukrainians
who live in the Donbas if Russia went home tomorrow. Weird how you continue to overlook the fact that Ukraine started attacking those people before Russia crossed the border with US weapons and consent.
And actually it’s was NATO’s war on Yugoslavia that gave Russia the right to protect the Donbas citizens who became Russian citizens . But keep believing in your fantasy that America didn’t start the war if it helps you sleep at night. But if you knew how many Ukrainians have died in just 18 months you might have less sleep. It’s an astounding number.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt
I don't believe
he sleeps at night. He's got to keep an eye on the russians under the bed and in the closet.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
The war could end tomorrow if Ukraine
simply implements the Minsk Agreements. In fact there never would have been a war if Ukraine had implemented the agreements back in 2014.
I'm great at multi-tasking. I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at the same time.
The big difference here --
is that the US, through its proxies, is not only losing this war (it lost Afghanistan and Vietnam, after all), but that while it loses the war, it pretends that it's winning the war. Moreover, this is a war -- an endless war, or at least that's what they want -- against a nuclear power. And sanctions against Russia are strengthening Russia and weakening Europe.
In the history of US wars against the world, there has been nothing this stupid since Vietnam. And this promises to be even stupider than Vietnam.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
Truer words
have seldom been said. Now all we need is to put 50K or so of our troops on the ground to get dead in one way or another, and we'll be able to exceed Vietnam in every respect.
I wonder how many thousands of US citizens have already been killed there, off the books? The mercenaries I could care less about, but there are probably quite a few sub-rosa active duty and various three-letter-agency types who've been collateral damage, and ought to be honored somehow...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
not honored, but swept under the rug
the idiots in DC do not care about human life
it seems to be mostly about the weird stories
continually propagated under the guise of
freedom and democracy to enrich the war pigs
why the US will not reinstitute the draft? word has
gotten out that meat grinders are not a good future
if longevity, family and friends are important
question everything
Well with Vietnam you know
you had fraggings, and, what, maybe a few million deaths for the locals? Apparently in Vietnam it was hard to tell, since the US made no diligent distinction between those who were loyal to one side and those who were loyal to the other, and so there was no serious attempt to stop the daily casual murder of civilians. If the mass murders were too spectacular they could attract official notice, but this happened only once, at My Lai, which was a revenge operation against the Tet Offensive. An attempt to set the record straight was Nick Turse's (2013) book Kill Anything That Moves, which focused upon Operation Speedy Express, another 1968 revenge operation which killed what one observer called "a My Lai a month." Operation Speedy Express lasted for one year, bleeding into 1969.
What made Vietnam especially stupid, however, was the casual way in which 500,000 troops were thrown into Vietnam in the late Sixties and asked to participate in pointless warfare, thus definitively destroying the notion that US troops could be sent into any country at the Commander-in-Chief's pleasure and thus establish "order." Spending upon Vietnam also destroyed the US Dollar's gold standard, replacing it with "dollar hegemony," which appears to be dying as we keyboard these messages now. What happens to a faith-based dollar when the faith runs out is anyone's guess.
In Ukraine, NATO feeds Ukraine a hodgepodge of weapons and a bunch of ammunition (which has since run out), and then obliges Zelensky to wage "counter-offensives" which have so far killed or disabled more than 400,000 Ukrainians to maybe 50,000 Russian casualties. This is so because said Ukrainian "counter-offensives" are conducted without any air cover. And then you have the desertions and mutinies, about which there are yet no reliable figures. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are not going to be replaced, the war isn't scheduled to end, and the US is ceding global hegemony to Russia and China in a way which never happened during the Soviet period. Maybe we could say that Ukraine will in the end be less deadly than Iraq or Vietnam, though that has yet to be decided. Ukraine, however, is really stupid.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
Yeppers.
And it keeps getting more stupid daily, as we double down over and over.
It isn't going to end well. Don't get me wrong, it *will* end- just not in any way well, for anyone other than the Owners. And probably not even them, if they finally manage to make this thing go nuclear. Wonder what the next double-down will look like?
I'd really like to see them try to reinstate the draft. If there's *anything* that will finally awaken Joe and Mary Sixpack to sweep an administration out of office on a wholesale basis, I hope that'd do it. It'd be downright fun to watch. I still remember where I was in the lottery last time around, because I wasn't born into money...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
"BELLUCULTURE"
The One Atrocity To Rule Them All.
Literally, the planned "farming" of war.
You heard the term here first; I coined it some time ago.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!