Ukraine War Propaganda and the Domestic War of Terror

Whether you support Russia, Ukraine, or neither of the above, prepare to be designated a domestic extremist.

This post is about a specific propaganda campaign that is targeting Americans and Canadians during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I am not attempting to analyze the geopolitical or economic significance of what is happening there, nor am I specifically addressing war propaganda directed anywhere other than North America.

War propaganda, or agitation propaganda, is usually designed to stir up people, making them want to go to war or at least finance a war. While persuading us to support future war efforts is certainly a major part of the Ukraine war propaganda onslaught aimed at Americans and Canadians, it is not the whole story.

The propagandists are deliberately setting up the people of the US and Canada to be the “enemy” of the state in our respective countries. Why? Because ever since the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy and, more recently, the American truckers’ People’s Convoy, we are taking a stand for freedom—a position that is anathema to the control-freak state. To quell our rising people power, politicians in the US and in Canada are implementing domestic police state crackdowns, which they insist are being done in the name of combating white supremacists. Let me explain how I’ve reached this conclusion.

Mark Crispin Miller is an expert in propaganda. His Substack, News from Underground, is a must-follow. In his recent article, "War propaganda works by making you too mad to stop and think it may not be true," Miller reposted a video of a 2017 lecture he gave. In it, he focused mainly on the US war propaganda about Syria and Assad, but he also mentioned Ukraine. Though it’s five years old, his lecture is obviously relevant to what’s going on today. (If you are that rare someone who ended up on this page despite disbelieving that mainstream reporters are spewing war propaganda, please go check out Miller’s work before resuming reading here.)

My initial reaction to the American establishment’s hyping of an “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine was to dismiss it as more transparent lies coming from the lips of habitual liars. Even when Russia really did invade Ukraine, I concluded that all the initial “evidence” of the invasion was overtly and demonstrably fake. I wasn’t alone in that sentiment. Many independent media have done a great job dissecting and cataloging all of those lies, so I won’t go into that part here.

Despite the extreme “Wag the Dog” feel of everything, it is very clear to me now that the invasion was real. And the fighting going on as I write this in early March 2022 is real. Why, then, have the Big Media and the Big Tech social media relied almost exclusively on dubious Ukrainian claims, internet hoaxes, and deceptively out-of-context pictures, when they could be covering the real war? Why are they not doing some actual journalism and showing us the actual war?

My answer is as follows: The “normies” in both nations are being conditioned to trust the corporate media without doing any independent verification or critical thinking whatsoever. Mainstream journalists/propagandists used to at least present “reasons” behind the decisions made by world leaders. But these days they no longer bother to offer historical reasons, any semblance of facts, or logical, credible statements. They have learned that most consumers don’t demand any actual, factual, provable news from them.

The first signs of this shift from actual to imaginary news were apparent when propagandists started pushing the global warming/climate change on the public. We’ve all heard their lying lines: “The science is settled” . . . “There is no opposing view” . . . “97% of scientists agree.”

Then along came a whole new level of propaganda: the scamdemic and its miracle cure, the COVID-19 vaccine. Big Pharma and its lackeys couldn’t repeat the sacred word “science” often enough: “science says” . . . “trust the science” . . . “we believe in science.” Afraid of the virus, eager to jump on the “greater good” bandwagon, and willing to obey their government and corporate (and even theological) masters, large numbers of people lined up to dutifully receive one jab, two jabs, three jabs—four, five, when will they end?

Unthinking, unquestioning acceptance of the climate and COVID propaganda has led the public to fall for still another ruse: this year’s “Russia is about to invade Ukraine” narrative. If you doubt me, consider this interaction between State Department spokesman Ned Price and AP reporter Matt Lee. Matt asked for some actual evidence that Russia is planning to stage false flag attacks with crisis actors, and Ned Price retorted with:

I’m sorry you were doubting the information that is in the possession of the US government. What I’m telling you is that this is information that’s available to us. We are making it available to you in order — for a couple reasons.

One is to attempt to deter the Russians from going ahead with this activity; two, in the event we’re not able to do that, in the event the Russians do go ahead with this, to make it clear as day, to lay bare the fact that this has always been an attempt on the part of the Russian Federation to fabricate a pretext.¹

When I first heard that quote, I assumed that the reason State’s Price refused to present any evidence was that there was no evidence to present. Now, however, I believe that the evidence was withheld on purpose to give a win to the “just believe the government” crowd and to make the few journalists still trying to ask real questions about actual facts look foolish.

The normies (or, as in the meme below, the NPCs) are the same folks who never questioned the effectiveness, much less the safety, of masks or the origin of SARS CoV-2 or the ingredients in the shots or the validity of the PCR tests, and on and on. Perhaps the pandemic propagandists fear that if they continue to be consistently wrong about everything, the Branch Covidians will awake from their hypnotic trance. However, this cult is already controlled and too far gone to wake up. If 100% of Americans were in that trance, there wouldn’t be a huge need to update the propaganda. The pharma-paid politicians could just continue using fear of disease and death as the excuse for further tightening the screws and exerting more and more control over every aspect of our lives.

The propagandists of course want both “liberal” and “conservative” legacy media to dutifully repeat the narrative with a little artificial political flavoring on each side to make it more palatable to the audience members who still believe what they see on TV. For the MSNBC/CNN crowd, the message is, “Joe Biden is doing the best he can to help out those poor Ukranians, but Donald Trump screwed up the situation over there so bad that we m̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶f̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶a̶u̶g̶h̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶d̶i̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶W̶W̶I̶I̶I̶ need you to get really mad and change your Twitter icon to a Ukraine flag!” Fox News viewers hear, “Donald Trump had this situation under control but Joe Biden is screwing things up so bad that we m̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶r̶a̶f̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶d̶a̶u̶g̶h̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶d̶i̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶W̶W̶I̶I̶I̶ need you to get real mad and pray for Ukraine!”

One crucial difference between Ukraine war propaganda and early post-9/11 war propaganda is that the grassroots independent media is much, much larger now than it was 20 years ago. The propagandists have to account for and attempt to manipulate thousands of new podcasters, talk radio hosts, news aggregators, bloggers, and Substack writers! Rather than trying to overtly control government and corporate advertising spending and thus control the opinions that the consumers of news have on controversial subjects, the media these days must first and foremost control the subjects being presented. As Michael Parenti puts it,

The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about.²

For weeks, the independent media refused to take the legacy media’s bait on the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine” propaganda. They were (rightfully) more concerned about the ongoing scamdemic restrictions, inflation, and WEF puppet Justin Trudeau’s tyrannical treatment of the peaceful Canadian truckers and their supporters.

Even before Russia’s actual invasion of Ukraine, independent media had started paying much more attention to the Ukraine war propaganda. The impetus was the intentionally absurd State Department briefings that guaranteed imminent Russian invasion complete with false flags and crisis actors. Crisis actors! Podcasters (myself included) couldn’t resist pointing out the absurdity of the same government and media propagandists who had for decades insisted false flags didn’t exist going full-blown crisis-actor-false-flag conspiracy theorist.

Then, when the invasion began, the propagandists threw us podcasters even more red meat. We feasted on fake stories of the Ghost of Kiev (or however they spell the name of the capital city now), Snake Island, the Ukrainian president in fatigues on the front lines, war footage with soldiers carrying wooden guns, Miss Ukraine going into battle armed with an Airsoft gun, a bloody bomb-victim lady from a years-ago gas explosion, dead bodies that sit up on live television, Star Wars footage spliced into newscasts, badly wounded children (from Syria several years ago), and on, and on, and on.

Why did they use fake stories to promote a real war? Maybe because, even though we independent journalists are making the effort to deconstruct and debunk lie after lie after lie and are thinking/writing/talking about Russia and Ukraine more intelligently, factually, and truthfully than the normies and NPCs, we are still focusing on a faraway region—which is right where the propagandists want our attention to be: Far away from our own homegrown tyrants on this side of the Atlantic. Thus, rather than become immersed in the “Putin is worse than Hitler” propaganda and rather than take Putin’s side—or neither side—we should be remembering that many more Americans and Canadians (and people beyond our borders) have been killed by Fauci, Pfizer, and the rest of Pharma than by Putin.

There is yet another layer beyond the “Ukraine is a distraction” thesis, however.

The Biden administration (and even the tail end of the Trump administration) has been pushing the “white supremacists are the greatest threat to national security” narrative persistently, even though it has not yet been adopted by any except the most deranged of the blue checkmark brigade. In Canada, Trudeau slapped the “white supremacist” label on the truckers in Ottawa and at border crossings. While any rational person is tempted to laugh at and dismiss those obvious lies, we do so at our own peril. The governments of our two countries aren’t spending billions of dollars on propaganda and gearing up to fight the American and Canadian people only to wait around and see if a white supremacist threat develops organically. As the late, great Stan Monteith used to say of the CIA-trained-and-funded Al Qaeda, “They are the best enemy that money can buy.”

Whitney Webb lays out the case for this thesis in great detail in her article, Ukraine and the New Al Qaeda over at The Last American Vagabond.

[T]he CIA is determined to manifest a prophecy propagated by its own ranks over the past two years. This prediction from former and current intelligence officials dates from at least early 2020 and holds that a “transnational white supremacist network” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of Covid-19 recedes.³

Have you heard of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM)? Neither had I until a couple of weeks ago. What I had missed was that, as Whitney explains, in April 2020,

RIM became the first “white supremacist” group to be labeled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity (SDGT) by the US, despite not being tied to an act of terror since 2017 and despite those previous acts resulting in no deaths. The acts of terror cited as justification by then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were those perpetrated by Melin. However, the Nordic Resistance Movement, of which Melin was an active member at the time of the bombings, did not receive the SDGT label, even though it is significantly larger in terms of membership and reach than RIM. The decision to label RIM this way was considered “unprecedented” at the time.⁴ 

The presence of white supremacist groups in Ukraine is a much more well-known fact than the mostly fictional RIM. Oliver Stone’s documentary Ukraine on Fire covers part of the tangled and interconnected web between the original Nazi party, the historical and current white supremacist nationalist movements in western Ukraine, and the covert (and sometimes not-so-covert) assistance from the CIA, the US State Department, NGOs, and political hacks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

However, those connections are for the moment conveniently being forgotten amid the calls to “Pray for Ukraine” and “Put a sunflower icon on your social media of choice.” How long until the worm turns and those simple virtue-signalling actions become (in selective cases, of course) evidence of supporting groups linked to an international white supremacy movement?

If you think that narrative is too ludicrous to believe or to be a threat to our liberty, I would recommend listening to frequently arrested Pastor Artur Pawlowski in Canada or to any of the political prisoners still rotting in Washington, D.C., jails 14 months after January 6th.

Propaganda has never had to be true. It has never had to be plausible. It simply has to be repeated over and over by the authority figures we are trained from birth to believe. Right now, we are descending into an authoritarian, Kafkaesque nightmare based on propaganda that is neither true nor even plausible. The Russia-Ukraine War may “end” any day now. Or it may drag on for years and result in the CIA bringing Ukrainian neo-Nazis into the US and Canada under the cover of refugee resettlement. It could even spark a wider European war or, as Biden seems to be overly fond of saying, World War III. Regardless of what happens in Ukraine, though, the domestic War of Terror in North America is just warming up.

1. https://cnsnews.com/article/washington/susan-jones/reporter-demands-proof-us-claim-russia-planning-false-flag-operation

2. Inventing Reality, the Politics of Mass Media by Michael Parenti, p. 23 https://archive.org/details/inventingrealit100pare/page/22/mode/2up?q=strikingly

3. “Ukraine and the New Al Qaeda” by Whitney Webb https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/ukraine-new-al-qaeda

4. Ibid.