Propaganda makes you stupid. We know that the Ukrainian integral nationalists committed abominable massacres, particularly during the Second World War. But we don’t know what they’ve been doing on our doorstep for thirty years, especially the civil war they’ve been waging for eight years. Our own stupidity allows us to bear the battle cries of our politicians alongside these criminals.
When war breaks out, governments always believe that they must bolster the morale of their people by showering them with propaganda. The stakes are such, life and death, that the debates are hardening and extremist positions are gaining ground. This is exactly what we are witnessing or rather how we are changing. In this game, the ideas defended by each other have no relation to their ideological presuppositions, but to their proximity to power.
In the etymological sense, propaganda is just the art of convincing, of spreading ideas. But in modern times, it is an art that aims to reconstruct reality to denigrate the adversary and magnify one’s own troops.
Contrary to popular belief in the West, it was not the Nazis or the Soviets who invented it, but the British and the United States during the First World War [ 1 ] .
Today, NATO coordinates efforts in this area from its Strategic Communication Center in Riga (Latvia) [ 2 ] . It identifies the points on which it wants to act and organizes international programs to bring them to fruition.
For example, NATO identified Israel as a weak point: while former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a personal friend of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his successor Naftali Bennett recognized the merits of Russian policy. He even advised to return Crimea and Donbass and, above all, to denazify Ukraine. The current Prime Minister, Yaïr Lapid, is more hesitant. He does not want to support the integral nationalists who massacred a million Jews shortly before and during the Second World War. But he also wants to stay on good terms with Westerners.
To bring Israel back on the right track, NATO is trying to persuade Tel Aviv that in the event of a Russian victory, Israel would lose its position in the Middle East [ 3 ]. For this, it disseminates as widely as possible the lie that Iran is Russia’s military ally. The international press keeps claiming that, on the battlefield, Russian drones are Iranian and soon medium-range missiles will be too. Yet Moscow knows very well how to manufacture these weapons and has never asked Tehran for them. Russia and Iran continue to deny these allegations. But Western politicians, relying on the press and not mere reflection, have already imposed sanctions on Iranian arms dealers. Soon Yair Lapid, son of the president of the Yad Vashem memorial, will be surrounded and forced to side with the criminals
The British, for their part, traditionally excel in the activation of networked media and the enlistment of artists. MI6 relies on a group of 150 news agencies working within the PR Network [ 4 ] . They convince all these companies to resume their imputations and their slogans.
They are the ones who successively convinced you that President Vladimir Putin was dying, then that he had gone mad, or that he was meeting strong opposition at home and that he was going to be overthrown by a coup d’etat. Their work continues today with cross interviews of soldiers in Ukraine. You hear the Ukrainian soldiers say they are nationalists and the Russian soldiers say they are afraid but must defend Russia. You hear that Ukrainians are not Nazis and that Russians, living under a dictatorship, are forced to fight. In reality, most Ukrainian soldiers are not “nationalists” in the sense of defenders of their fatherland, but “integral nationalists” in the sense of two poets, Charles Maurras and Dmytro Dontsov [ 5 ]. That’s not the same at all.
It was not until 1925 that Pope Pius XI condemned “integral nationalism”. By this time Dontsov had already written his Націоналізм(Nationalism) (1921). Maurras and Dontsov define the nation as a tradition and think their nationalism against others (Maurras against the Germans and Dontsov against the Russians). Both abhor the French Revolution, the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and tirelessly denounce Jews and Freemasons. They consider religion useful for the organization of society, but seem agnostic. These positions lead Maurras to become a Petainist and Dontsov a Hitlerian. The latter will sink into a mystical Varangian delirium (Swedish Viking). The next pope, Pius XII, repeals the condemnation of his predecessor, just before war broke out. Upon release, Maurras will be condemned for intelligence with the enemy (he who was Germanophobe),
As for the Russian soldiers whom we see interviewed during our television news, they do not tell us that they are forced to fight, but that, unlike the integral nationalists, they are not fanatics. For them, war, even when one is defending one’s own, is always a horror. It is because we are repeatedly told that Russia is a dictatorship that we understand something else. We do not accept that Russia is a democracy because, for us, a democracy cannot be an authoritarian regime. Yet, for example, the French Second Republic (1848-1852) was both a democracy and an authoritarian regime.
We are easy to convince because we know nothing about Ukrainian history and culture. At most we know that Novorossia was governed by a French aristocrat, Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis de Richelieu, personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. He continued the work of Prince Grigori Potemkin who wanted to build this region on the model of Athens and Rome, which explains why Novorossia is still of Russian (and not Ukrainian) culture today without ever having known the serfdom.
We in Ukraine are unaware of the atrocities of the interwar period and the Second World War, and have a vague idea of the violence of the USSR. We do not know that the theoretician Dontsov and his disciple Stepan Bandera did not hesitate to massacre all those who did not correspond to their “integral nationalism”, the Jews first in this Khazar country, then the Russians and the Communists, the anarchists by Nestor Makhno, and many more. The “integral nationalists”, who had become admirers of the Führer and deeply racist, returned to center stage with the dissolution of the USSR [ 6 ]. On May 6, 1995, President Leonid Kuchma traveled to Munich (at CIA premises) to meet with the leader of the Integral Nationalists, Steva Stesko, the widow of the Nazi Prime Minister. She had just been elected to the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), but had not been able to sit there because she had been stripped of Ukrainian nationality. A month later, Ukraine adopted its current constitution, which states in article 16 that: “ preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state ” (sic). Subsequently, the same Steva Stetsko twice opened the session of the Rada, concluding her speeches with the battle cry of the integral nationalists: “Glory to Ukraine! “.
Modern Ukraine patiently built its Nazi regime. After proclaiming the “genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people”, it enacted various laws. The first grants the benefit of human rights by the state only to Ukrainians, not to foreigners. The second defines what constitutes the majority of Ukrainians and the third (promulgated by President Zelensky) who forms minorities. The trick is that no law speaks about Russian speakers. By default, the courts therefore do not recognize the benefit of human rights.
Since 2014, a civil war has pitted the integral nationalists against the Russian-speaking populations, mainly those of Crimea and Donbass. 20,000 dead later, the Russian Federation, applying its “responsibility to protect”, launched a special military operation to apply Security Council resolution 2202 (Minsk Agreements) and put an end to the martyrdom of Russian speakers.
NATO propaganda fills us with the real suffering of the Ukrainians, but it ignores the eight years of torture, murder and massacres that preceded it. She talks to us about “our common values with Ukrainian democracy”, but what values do we share with the integral nationalists and where is democracy in Ukraine?
We do not have to choose between one or the other, but only to defend peace and therefore the Minsk Accords and resolution 2202.
War drives us crazy. There is then a reversal of values. The most extreme triumph. Some of our ministers speak of “suffocating Russia” (sic). We do not see that we support the ideas against which we believe we are fighting.
The articles on Voltaire Network may be freely reproduced provided the source is cited, their integrity is respected and they are not used for commercial purposes (license CC BY-NC-ND).
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/10/thierry-meyssan/war-propaganda-and-blindness/
