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caityjohnstone.medium.com
The president and first lady of Ukraine have
posed for a romantic photoshoot with Vogue magazine, wherein President Volodymyr Zelensky
waxes poetical about his love for his darling wife.
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
how is Zelensky making time for a Vogue photoshoot amidst his busy schedule of PR appearances for other major western institutions?
I mean this is after all the same Volodymyr Zelensky who has been so busy making video appearances for
the Grammy Awards, the
Cannes Film Festival, the
World Economic Forum and probably
the Bilderberg group as well, and having meetings with celebrities like
Ben Stiller,
Sean Penn, and
Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.
Oh yeah, and also isn’t there like a war or something happening in Ukraine? You’d think he’d probably be somewhat busy with that too.
Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to suspect that there might be a concerted effort to manipulate the way we think about the war in Ukraine. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say it’s the most aggressively perception-managed war we’ve ever experienced.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February we have not only been
smashed with
mass media propaganda unlike
anything we’ve ever seen while
Russian media are
purged from the airwaves, we’re also seeing the new media element of
unprecedented amounts of
online censorship, algorithm-boosted
propaganda, and
social media trolling.
So we’ve literally never seen this much overall effort put into manipulating the way the public thinks about a war. Which makes sense, given that it’s a profoundly dangerous proxy war which stands to benefit ordinary people in no way, shape or form.
I mean, can you imagine if people were allowed to just think their own thoughts about their government’s economic warfare against Russia
which is hurting them financially and
pushing millions toward starvation with the full awareness and approval of the US government? Or if Americans were allowed to wonder if the
billions they are pouring into this proxy conflict could be better spent at home? Or if people started objecting to a needless conflict for geostrategic domination threatening their lives and the lives of everyone they know with
the risk of
nuclear annihilation?
Can’t have that.
There is a night-and-day difference between wanting to tell people the truth about something and wanting to manipulate their perception of something. There are times when true facts can be used to influence people’s perception one way or the other, but if your agenda is to manipulate perception rather than tell the truth you will necessarily be forced to rely on lies, half-truths, distortion, and lies by omission wherever the truth doesn’t serve that agenda.
If they were telling us the truth about this war, they wouldn’t be censoring Russian media. They wouldn’t be censoring online voices who disagree with the official narratives about Ukraine. They wouldn’t be continually blasting us in the face with mass media perception management, and they sure as hell wouldn’t be putting Ukraine’s celebrity-in-chief on the cover of Vogue magazine.
We are being manipulated, and we are being deceived. And we are being manipulated and deceived because our perceiving clearly on our own would go against the interests of the empire.
They are lying to us because the interests of the people and the interests of the empire are, as usual, squarely at odds.