Whoomp, There It Is.*
You can almost feel these shenanigans in the air when they're about to go down. I had to ignore this madness while I was in Hawaii because I knew I would get lost exploring all the nooks and crannies of this saga. But I am back now, ready to have a go, and conveniently, fuel has just been thrown on the fire. I’ll explain what “it” is later.
For you knee-jerk reactionaries out there, allow me to shut you the fuck up right up front, because inevitably some of you will read start reading this and jump to the conclusion that I am Pro-Russian before the end: Invasions → Bad. Violence → No likey. I should also preface this by adding that I am not an expert in Ukraine/Russia relations. I know a little of the history, and I do mean a little. There. Now let’s dive right in and look at this breaking story from yesterday.
If you’d like to stop and read the full story first, here is the link:
Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia | Ukraine | The Guardian
For the sake of this discussion, I grabbed two blurbs from this article that caught my attention. The first is the right off the top, and states:
The country’s national security and defence council took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity. Most of the parties affected were small, but one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament.
The second is closer to the end, and it states:
The political move comes as Zelenskiy aims to further assert his influence over the country’s media sphere. On Sunday, the Ukrainian leader signed a decree that aims to unite all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a “unified information policy” under martial law.
Before we break that down, let's Tarantino this b*tch back to February 26 and take a peek at a related story, this time from Deadline.
Again, here is the link to the full story if you want context:
Ukraine: Media Groups Join Together For ‘United News’ & Urge World To Turn Off Russian Channels
And again I have selected some bits and pieces that stand out, which is basically the entire write up:
In a statement in the past hour, 1+1 Media, StarLightMedia, Media Group Ukraine and Inter Media Group said they are now showing one newscast entitled United News, which is “promptly providing comprehensive information from different regions of the country.”
The media groups, the four largest in Ukraine, are taking it in turns to helm the show, which has been forged with the co-operation of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Security and Defense Council, the Office of the President of Ukraine and other government bodies.
With that in mind, the media groups urged the world to impose “media sanctions” and ‘turn off the broadcasting of Russian news channels on European satellites.
The newly formed media group was directly quoted as saying:
We have been waging an information war for years, and such media sanctions are globally important to Ukraine. We understand how powerful the Russian propaganda machine is and what kind of effort the aggressor makes to spread fake news to cynically fool people. We absolutely oppose this.
The Deadline reporter then finished with one last noteworthy paragraph:
When the conflict started in earnest Thursday some Ukrainian channels were still showing entertainment programs but Deadline reported yesterday on a pivot to back-to-back news, with commercial advertising turned off. Ukrainian news bosses have reported through-the-roof TV news ratings in recent weeks and all media groups have enacted contingency plans in order to keep broadcasting.
And then we flash back to another Deadline story from yesterday, reading:
The move means the end, at least temporarily, of privately owned Ukrainian media outlets in that country. Zelensky claimed the measure is needed to combat alleged Russian misinformation and “tell the truth about the war.”
And here is that link:
Those are the facts. This is where we’re at. Now let’s discuss the implications of those facts. I’m gonna throw in a divider line just for the hell of it. I’ve never used that feature before and it felt like this was the right time. The rest of this will contain a little bit of historical context and a lotta bit of…
MY 2 CENTS©️:
Zelensky…my guy…if you’re reading this…Stone Cold Steve Austin is here with me and he has one question for you:
I’m with The Texas Rattlesnake on this one. WHAT?!? And as a follow up to that question, I would also like to ask THE FUCK?!? Less than a month ago the media was praising Zelenskiy as a role model; a brave hero figure with the courage to stand with his people and hold the line in the face of a full-blown Russian invasion. Reports from February 26th claim that the US offered him an emergency evac out of Ukraine and he responded by saying he “Needed Ammo, not a ride.” Remember?
Here we are on March 21st, and he has now invoked martial law emergency powers to ban 11 political parties from “any activity”, including the leading opposition party which held about 10% of seats in the Ukranian parliament, as well as banning private media companies “at least temporarily”, and combining all Ukranian media companies in to one “United News” network to “combat misinformation.”
And…*THERE IT IS. I told you we’d circle back around. There it is…the inflection point where the cover story is blown and the reality begins to set in. There it is…the moment where we find out once again that “promoting Democracy” is actually slick talk for “installing a pro-American puppet regime that will dance for us and sending them tens of billions of dollars in ‘aid’ (weapons) to use to try to solidify their position of power.” It never fails. Unrest turns to chaos, chaos breeds fear, and when people are afraid, they are almost always willing to sacrifice some freedoms - “at least temporarily” - if some father figure will just step in and make the bad men stop. Please, daddy!
I immediately had flashbacks to the early 2000s when reading these articles. Remember the Patriot Act? First, 9/11 happened and everyone panicked. Americans were freaked the fuck out. Less than a month later the US military was invading Afghanistan. Did Afghanistan do 9/11? No. Bin Laden did 9/11! Was Bin Laden even in Afghanistan? No. But details are irrelevant when the herd is spooked. Nobody cared that the hijackers were mostly Saudis. The news was all about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda…and Bin Laden had “ties” to Al Qaeda…and Al Qaeda had “ties” to Afghanistan. BING BONG! In hindsight, that line of reasoning is downright laughable. At the time, it made perfect sense. And before we had a chance to comprehend the magnitude of the moment or give cooler heads a chance to prevail…we were invading Afghanistan…for 20 years.
For the next few weeks, Dick Cheney would come on TV seemingly every day and read the terror report and tell us we were at Terror Alert Orange or Red or whatever. Watching Fauci through COVID was similar. It was highly kinetic. The information shared with the public came off as ominous and vague. Just enough was provided to keep us glued to the screen, on the edge of our seats, eagerly awaiting the next update. Dick would repeat the same shit over and over again; that he didn’t know where or when it would happen, but he knew for sure that terrorists could be hiding in the shadows right now waiting to pop out and kill us all. We didn’t know what to do. We just knew something had to be done; a rare moment in history where we all agreed that action must be taken. And before November - less than two months after 9/11 - our protectors rolled out the most devious legislation in our lifetime.
The name was internationally chosen to appeal to the nationalist pride in the air; The Patriot Act. It was a masterful bit of PR. None of the details were explained. It was simply presented to us as the necessary action we all agreed must be taken to protect our loved ones and our country. Great! Send it! We can work out the details later, right?!
And send it they did. Thank God. We were all safe. After the smoke was clear, some of us were curious what was contained in those hundreds of pages of unseen text that got through Congress impressively quickly; a little too quickly almost. Come to find out, the bill expanded emergency powers for the government, broadened the definition of “emergency” to include all kinds of shit, allowed for unlimited warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention of American citizens, and on and on. TSA setup shop to finger fuck us at every airport. The definition of “terrorist” was expanded to include absurd things like “people with 4 fingers” and “American citizens who spoke negatively about meat processing companies.” And if we saw something even remotely suspicious, we were encouraged to be good Patriotic Americans and turn each other in to law enforcement.
The Patriot Act was passed during similar circumstances to Ukraine right now. The vote was nearly unanimous. I don't recall Congress ever being in such strong agreement on anything. Turns out, giving themselves the power to completely and utterly invade our privacy and violate a whole bunch of our constitutional rights was something they all shared a passion for. And the terrorists were still out there somewhere! Anywhere! Everywhere! So…it had to be done…ASAP…to keep us safe…to protect “freedom”…and “Democracy”…the ultimate irony of course being that this bill only diminished our freedom and none of us had any say in the matter whatsoever. A dangerous precedent was being reinforced. Congress, I believe, was emboldened by seeing how much shit we would swallow while essentially sitting there silently.
This weakness would be exploited again two years later when the invasion of Iraq was announced. We were like “Iraq? They didn’t do anything, did they? Oh. Sadam has weapons of mass destruction, you say? Fuck. That does kinda sound like Sadam. Ok. Well…have fun storming the castle!” And off went our military to save us from that savage. Strangely absent from the buildup to that war was any mention of how we used to sell Sadam all types of weapons. It probably just slipped their minds to mention that to us. Oops! Anyway…
…the point was…Zelensky is wading in to the territory of our government. He uses the word a lot, just like Biden and Nancy, but his actions in the past days seem quite at odds with even the loosest definition of Democracy. When the Minister of Information Policy (which sounds like a title straight outta Nazi Germany) and the military and media moguls take over the news to “combat misinformation ” and tell you to turn off everything else because they are the only ones you can trust…you are in BIG fucking trouble, Mister. Run. Get the fuck out of there. Those are the kinda people who will call you a patriot right before sending you out to die. Then they’ll have the United Media run the clip on TV 100 times so they can show it to Joe Biden and get some more shiny American weapons. He flat out admitted Ukraine has been waging an “information war.” That’s AKA propoganda. Hell…they turned the fucking commercials off so their messaging wouldn’t be interrupted by advertisements. You gotta figure there's big money involved when you can get advertisers to stop advertising for any length of time. That’s unheard of. Meanwhile the media moguls are relaxing and paying close attention to the spike in their ratings caused by all this violence; reinforcing another dangerous pattern of thought, that violence is good for business.
Honestly it feels like US foreign policy coming out of Zelensky's mouth; like Hillary Clinton and GW Bush have been coaching him off camera. It’s as if the US government said “Hey look, we’ll hook you up with all the weapons you want, but one day you'll be called upon to do me a favor, and when that day comes you can't refuse.” Some Godfather gangster shit.
Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but when you look back on all the “freedom fighters” our Congress and CIA have sold weapons to that later turned out to be “power-hungry sociopaths”, all the attempted coups, the duly-elected governments overthrown, it feels like a rerun. Ya know? I’ve already seen this one. But, sadly, Communists are involved so obviously everyone gets caught up in the mania and we collectively become too consumed by the media fear porn to make sound decisions.
And American politicians were warned about this. Here is an excerpt from a March 2019 PolitiCo article:
As a result, foreign diplomats and Western capitals are coming around to an ironic realization: Poroshenko, the leader whose slow pace of reforms has at times frustrated their hopes for rapid change, is now their best — and only — chance of keeping Ukraine from drifting back into Russia’s orbit of influence. It’s important not to underestimate Putin’s deep-held desire to restore influence over Ukraine. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, it doesn’t so much matter who wins the election, just as long as it’s not Poroshenko.
A win for either of the two other front-runners — the politically inexperienced comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the left-leaning political veteran Yulia Tymoshenko, whose policies could rupture Ukraine’s relations with the International Monetary Fund — would be likely to destabilize the country, and create an opening for Putin to exert greater influence.
Link: Why the West loves Poroshenko again
Our “leaders” either ignored the red flags or…perhaps more concerningly…saw those red flags as something they could use to their advantage. Either way, now Zelensky has seized control of the national media to control all messaging and he has the authority to point at a political rival, say “HE HAS RUSSIAN TIES”, and have that guy banned from “any activity.” Just like the War on Terror, whether or not they actually do have Russian ties - which some of them seem to - is completely irrelevant. It’s McCarthyism 2.0: The “On Steroids” version, backed by US dollars and Javelin missiles. In January Z was preaching Democracry and accusing former president Poroshenko of treason. In March, he is overthrowing democratically-elected political opponents and blasting state-sponsored propoganda at his own people.
I believe the word for this shit right here is…Orwellian. If you didn’t catch powerful "1984" vibes oozing from Zelensky’s statements up top, you clearly haven’t read the book, and you should probably go do that now. On that note, I need to stop staring at this screen, so I will leave you with a couple quotes from the man himself:
“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.”
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”