Ukraine: from propaganda to delirium

This Golden Age of propaganda in which we live facilitates the creation and dissemination of collective hysteria — such as the covid pandemic. Are we facing one with the war in Ukraine?

The first sign of collective hysteria is an antinatural unanimity of opinion, consequence of a previous media bombardment designed to numb the brains and excite the passions. Everyone thinks alike, which usually indicates that no one is thinking at all.

The second sign is a simplistic Manichaeism that presents everything as a struggle between good (us) and evil (them). Ironically, power junkies, the champions of relativism, do not hesitate to appeal to good and evil – concepts they do not believe in – as long as they serve their purposes.

The third indication is that the duly manipulated population is prey to unbridled passions (fear and anger) that extinguish any attempt to appeal to reason, serenity or dialogue. The pensée unique becomes dogma and heterodoxy is not tolerated, which gives rise to emotional overreactions to any contrary opinion. Argumentative criticism is replaced by ad hominem criticism (denier, fifth columnist, etc.) and disrespect or even violence — not necessarily physical — is justified to silence the dissident.

Collective hysteria transforms the rational individual into a mass-individual. The rational individual thinks and weighs up arguments and joins others as a free and individual decision, out of conviction. The mass-individual, on the other hand, is moved by primitive impulses and emotions and merges with the mass as a group, by simple contagion. The rational individual is very rarely capable of lynching anyone; the mass-individual can lynch the dissident amid shouts of joy.

The Oval Office “conversation”

Last Act. Scene one. “You are not in a very good position. You are not winning this war. You are playing with the lives of millions of people. You are playing with World War III.”

It is difficult to find a single lie in these assertions that Trump blurted out to the Ukrainian president in the embarrassing spectacle they staged in the Oval Office. Indeed, Zelensky has been trying to drag us into a Third World War for three years, as when he lied by blaming Russia for firing a missile whose remains fell on Poland (NATO territory) killing two people. The missile had been fired by the Ukrainians themselves[1].  

However, the media reaction to what happened in the White House has basically consisted of spitting foam at the mouth. This attitude may be therapeutic, but it is not very useful for analyzing events.

Thus, the somewhat pathological hatred that our journalistic class feels for Trump (and now also toward Vance, after his speech in Munich) led it to repeat the official slogan that branded the incident as an “ambush” by the American tandem.

However, given that the meeting was broadcast on television from start to finish, we know that the facts (and pure logic) do not support such a narrative. Despite the Ukrainian’s sullen and provocative attitude, the first 40 minutes of conversation in the Oval Office passed without incident. In fact, a private lunch between the two presidents had been planned, as well as the ceremonial signing of the trade agreement in the East Room, the largest room in the White House.

The diplomatic disaster, therefore, was the fault of the Ukrainian president, who has lost touch with reality and also lost his manners: out of place, bad-tempered and impertinent, he addressed Vance with unnecessary hostility after the latter had replied to a Polish journalist that “diplomacy” should be given a chance. The Ukrainian president rudely addressed Vance with disdain (“JD”) while the latter politely addressed him as “Mr. President”, and then went into a nosedive, confronting his host (and financier) Trump.

What is wrong with Europe?

However, the incident is nothing more than an anecdote. More relevant is the nervousness of the European political-journalistic collusion. The fake “summit” in the UK makes one wonder why Europe has not had a single peace initiative in three years of war, and shows what Hungarian PM Orban aptly summed up a few weeks ago: the world has changed, and Europe is the only one that hasn’t realized it yet. A reality bath is approaching.

Isn’t it a bit strange that a peace initiative for Ukraine is being received in Europe with reluctance and outrage? Undoubtedly, the show-off nature of Trump does not win him any followers here, but Obama and Biden were also enormously arrogant. Why this visceral rejection of peace? Isn’t peace preferable to war? Isn’t a mediocre settlement better than a good lawsuit? Or are we going to shout victory or death! as European journalists and politicians do with the levity of someone who neither goes to the front nor sends his children to die?

“A certain peace is better and safer than an expected victory,” wrote Titus Livius 2,000 years ago. But the fact is that Ukraine has no hope of victory: the alternative to peace is a greater loss of territory and human lives and a potential return to the non-existence that has been the norm for this country throughout its brief history.

Perhaps Europe has ended up believing its own propaganda, although its leaders say one thing in public and a totally different thing in private, or maybe it is annoyed by its growing irrelevance, for, as I have argued from the beginning, the two main actors in this conflict were always Russia and the US, while Ukraine and the EU being only secondary actors or mere extras.

Anyhow, something is amiss around there. Trump is popular in his country, but very unpopular in Europe. Zelensky, on the other hand, is much more popular in Europe than in his own country. Therefore, either the citizens of those countries are completely unaware of what is going on or it is we Europeans who do not have a clue. Are we not once again blinded by collective hysteria, which prevents a rational analysis of the facts?

The excessive canonization of Zelensky

In the rest of the world Zelensky lacks the halo that surrounds him in Europe. Aesthetically, the Ukrainian president was always a carefully constructed publicity stunt — green/black uniform, military haircut and stubble — but he is now something more: a bunkered messianic leader who “is deluding himself”, as one of his collaborators admitted to Time magazine some time ago. “We have no options left, we are not winning, but try and tell him that,” lamented the frustrated assistant to the Ukrainian president[2].  

Kissinger said that power is the supreme aphrodisiac. Dazzled by the spotlight, Zelensky never understood that he was being used by Biden’s Deep State and does not seem to have realized that a regime change has taken place in the US: the Deep State that promoted him and later pushed him to war has lost the elections to Trump (as I predicted), and Trump wants peace.

As much as we sympathize with the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people, it is difficult to understand the canonization of a power junkie (yet another one, like those in Moscow, Washington or Brussels) who has dragged his country to destruction with a war that was lost in advance against a ruthless adversary who could not lose.

The media also hide the fact that the Ukrainian president is an authoritarian leader. In effect, “with the excuse of the war” (in the apt expression of Newsweek magazine) he has practiced a clearly repressive policy, closing down hostile media and imprisoning, prosecuting or sending his opponents out of the country[3]. A year ago, he dismissed (in the middle of a war!) the competent General Zaluhzny, sending him to London as ambassador because in the polls Zaluzhny obtained 41% of popular support compared to the meagre 24% that he obtained[4]. As Newsweek points out, it is very doubtful that Zelensky’s Ukraine can be considered a democracy today[5].

An unloved peace

Does the Ukrainian president want peace? In 2022 he passed a decree banning negotiations with Putin, in other words, making it a crime to seek peace[6]. Isn’t that a bit strange? We cannot ignore the fact that the Ukrainian president has a perverse incentive to maintain his warmongering: as long as the war and martial law remain in place, he does not have to call elections, and he can continue with his international vanity tours and keep controlling the money of one of the most corrupt countries in the world. However, when peace comes and elections do take place, he will lose them, and he’ll be out of business.  

There is, therefore, a potential conflict of interest between the president of Ukraine and his citizens, as the former is in no hurry to achieve peace, but the Ukrainians are, despite the hatred generated during this bloody war. Contrary to what Zelensky suggested in the White House, 52% want to negotiate an end to the conflict and are willing to make territorial concessions to achieve it. Only 38% want to continue fighting, a percentage that is falling with each passing month[7].  

It is odd that the other day the Ukrainian president based his refusal to negotiate peace on the fact that Putin supposedly does not honor the agreements he signs. Trump refuted this based on his experience during his first term in office. Bill Clinton would have agreed with Trump: asked in 2013 if Putin could be trusted, Clinton replied: “He kept his word in all the agreements we reached”[8].  

The advantages of rational analysis

As I have had occasion to argue in many articles, Western propaganda, transmitted verbatim by the European political-journalistic cabal, has constructed a fallacious narrative about both the root causes and the course of the war. According to such narrative, we are faced with a struggle between good and evil, between the ideals of democracy and tyranny, and the Russian invasion came out of the blue (the mantra is “unprovoked aggression”) as a prelude to a new invasion of Europe, even though Russia’s borders have not moved an inch since 1991 (unlike NATO’s).

All this is nonsense, a ridiculous and quite puerile story that takes advantage of the ignorance of the people and that has found a special echo in Spain due to our nobility: we admire courage in others and always defend the weak against the strong. Thus, a war in a distant country, which very few Spaniards would have been able to locate on a map three years ago, has given rise to a quixotic anti-Russian reaction that is far removed from what a more dispassionate analysis of the data would suggest and, of course, very far from what is in our long-term national interests.

There is a better way. To gain an understanding of reality and a certain capacity to foresee events, we must replace this volcanic eruption of emotions with a calmer analysis and the use of logic. A necessary condition, of course, is to follow a strict media diet: read little and believe nothing.

Thus, for the fortunate non-consumer of media, real data and logic made it possible from the outset to understand that we were not facing a conflict between Russia (Goliath) and Ukraine (David), but rather a proxy war between the US and Russia provoked by the US, in which Ukraine put up the dead and Europe the economic (and geopolitical) suicide. While the media led us to believe that Ukraine was winning the war, this blog was reporting the reality, that is, that for Ukraine the war was inevitably lost from the beginning. In this sense, we always criticized the futility of sending Western weapons and battle tanks, which, far from being miraculous weapons, would only postpone the inevitable.

Although the usual informational fog makes it difficult to know the exact number of casualties among the combatants, the order of magnitude of Ukrainian casualties today would be between 750,000 and 900,000 men compared to a minimum of 150,000 Russian casualties. Take it with a grain of salt, but in any case, it is the inverse proportion to that preached by the media. As an indirect indicator, in the exchange of corpses the Russians are handing over between 5 and 10 times more bodies of dead Ukrainian soldiers than the bodies of Russians handed over by them

An even-handed analysis of the reality of the situation would have also allowed to predict that one of the US objectives in this conflict was to derail the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, as I did five months before the Americans (alone or together with others) allegedly sabotaged it. This blog also predicted the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive of the summer of 2023, cheered on by the media, who prematurely declared victory while pushing the Ukrainians to their deaths.

In conclusion, a calm analysis of events has its advantages: it allows us to understand reality, foresee events and dismiss nonsense, such as the extreme weakness of the Russian army (incompatible with its intention to conquer Europe), the cancer, Parkinson’s disease and mental imbalance supposedly caused by Putin’s Covid isolation, or the possibility that Russia would use chemical or nuclear weapons, narratives that are broadcast only to be withdrawn (and then forgotten) as soon as they become useless.

The background

Propaganda often relies on the population’s lack of memory, so it is worth recalling some of the background to the conflict. As Euripides said, “the telling of the truth is simple, and requires no elaborate commentary”.

The war in Ukraine did not arise out of the blue, but rather after a constant decades-long provocation by the US. At the end of the Cold War, the US promised Russia that NATO would not expand “an inch” towards its border[9], but NATO broke its promise: taking advantage of Russian weakness, it expanded eastwards, a “fateful error”, in the words of George Kennan[10].

By then NATO had abandoned its purely defensive character (as has shown in its aggressive commitment to a non-member conflict). Indeed, in 1999 it had attacked Serbia, an ally of Russia, bombing its capital without any UN mandate.

In 2007, Putin denounced NATO expansion at the Munich Security Conference. Once again, the US response was to ignore and provoke Russia: at its Bucharest summit the following year (2008), NATO approved the process of annexation of Albania and Croatia and agreed to the future incorporation of Georgia and Ukraine[11]

With regard to Ukraine, the US knew from its ambassador to Russia (later director of the CIA) that its incorporation into NATO was “the reddest of red lines” not only for Putin, but for the entire Russian ruling class: “During more than two years of conversations with the main Russian political figures, from the greatest defenders of a hard line in the Kremlin to the most bitter critics of Putin, I have not found anyone who did not consider Ukraine’s membership in NATO as a direct challenge to Russia’s interests”[12].  

In 2014, the US Deep State allegedly instigated a coup d’état in Ukraine[13] (yet another regime change) that ousted its then democratically elected president, who advocated a pro-Russian neutrality[14]. Faced with such policy of fait accompli, Russia reacted in kind and annexed Crimea, which had belonged to Russia from the end of the 18th century until 1954 (when Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as part of the USSR itself) and whose importance lies in the fact that for 240 years it has been home to the only Russian naval base in warm waters (Sevastopol). It did so without firing a single shot, as the population of the Crimean Peninsula is mostly pro-Russian, as showed in a referendum to join Russia held afterwards (suspicious of course a priori, but confirmed by Western polling)[15].

After the murky events of 2014, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk Agreements, which would soon be a worthless piece of paper. Russia’s traditional victimhood was vindicated by the subsequent recognition by former German Chancellor Merkel that the Agreements had been mere dilatory maneuvers by the West to give Ukraine time to rearm for a future conflict with Russia[16]. From 2014 onwards, NATO began arming and training the Ukrainian army. Therefore, the war in Ukraine did not begin in 2022, but in 2014, as NATO secretary general himself acknowledged[17].

In June 2021, NATO declared that it was “reiterating the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance”[18].  

In December 2021 Russia presented NATO with a draft mutual security agreement proposing that it undertake not to incorporate Ukraine into the organization, along with other more maximalist proposals[19]. The proposal-ultimatum was arrogantly rejected by the Deep State-Biden Administration.  

The invasion

Finally, in February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine with a relatively small contingent of troops that was clearly not intended for the conquest of the country nor for a long conflict, but rather to achieve a rapid capitulation: “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” (Sun Tzu).

For a few weeks it seemed that this was precisely what was going to happen. However, the negotiations held in Turkey in March 2022 after only a month of hostilities (which pointed to an imminent agreement) were torpedoed by the US and the UK, who pulled Ukraine away from the table. This was stated by the former Israeli Prime Minister[20]and corroborated, as a first-hand witness, by the Turkish Foreign Minister: “After the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting, the impression is that (…) there are those within NATO member states who want the war to continue: let the war continue and let Russia be weakened, they say. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”[21].

As I wrote in June 2023, “until then the conflict had caused few deaths, but, for some, weakening Russia was well worth sacrificing a poor and distant country that no one would remember when it was all over, even if it meant taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of people”.

The West provoked war, and the West must bring about peace

Although some of these events allow for different nuances and Russia is far from being an angelic victim, this succession of events has a common thread: the warmongering and arrogance of the American Deep State and the obsessive British Russophobia.

But what is indisputable is that this war has been “avoidable, predictable and intentionally provoked” by the West, in the words of the last US ambassador to the USSR[22] , an opinion shared by many experts[23], and deliberately lengthened. The Ukrainian people were always acceptable collateral damage for the Deep State, because on the big chessboard the power junkies play on, human life is as expendable as a pawn. But the Deep State lost the election to Trump, and he is trying to stop a useless massacre.

In fact, the Ukrainians will soon be forgotten by the same media that pushed them into disaster, and within a year, maybe two, not a single Western media outlet will be talking about them again. What will be left for them when the cameras are turned off? Nothing except the memory of the dead.