The Overton Window Is Being Shoved Toward Warmongering Extremism
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A substitute teacher at an Arlington, Virginia middle school has been suspended for teaching an insufficiently one-sided perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently one of the students recorded the lesson and showed it to their parents who complained to the school.
This happens as RT America shuts its doors following an astonishingly aggressive censorship campaign against Russia-backed media outlets throughout the western world.
The virulent post-9/11-like hysteria about Russia that has been promoted by one-sided mass media reporting on the war, and by the five years of fact-free conspiracy mongering which preceded it, has created an environment where you'll get shouted down on social media for voicing any opinion about this conflict apart from saying Putin invaded because he is evil and hates freedom. Voices calling for diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are being systematically drowned out.
Meanwhile you've got massively influential pundits like Sean Hannity calling for a direct NATO airstrike on a Russian military convoy in Ukraine, without the slightest risk of losing his immense platform for advocating a move that would probably lead to a very fast, very radioactive third world war.
"You know, if we can see on satellite imagery where the convoy is, I don't know, maybe some smart country, maybe NATO might take some of their fighter jets, or maybe they can use some drone strikes and take out the whole damn convoy," Hannity said on Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday. "And then nobody takes credit for it, so then Putin won't know who to hit back."
Hannity hastily adds that he's "not talking about nuclear war," but then adds a "but" which completely contradicts him.
"But at what point is this gonna end?" Hannity asks. "Cuz nobody did anything after Georgia was taken in '08, nobody cared about Crimea being annexed in 2014."
Hannity has also made repeated calls for Putin's assassination, saying that "if you invade an innocent sovereign country, and you kill innocent men, women and children, you don't deserve to live." An interesting position for one of the most aggressive defenders of Bush's Iraq invasion.
On the other side of illusory US partisan divide you've got MSNBC pundits like Richard Engel and Clint Watts also calling for direct hot war with Russia.
"Perhaps the biggest risk-calculation/moral dilemma of the war so far," tweeted Engel on Monday. "A massive Russian convoy is about 30 miles from Kyiv. The US/NATO could likely destroy it. But that would be direct involvement against Russia and risk, everything. Does the West watch in silence as it rolls?"
"Strangest thing - entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back," tweeted Watts less than two hours later. "NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming."
"Putin knows stop the West throw ‘nuclear’ into discussion and we’ll come to a stop, but the world should not be held hostage to a killer of societies, the west has nuclear weapons too, and Putin’s track record is clear, every war he wins is followed by another war," Watts added.
You've also got increasingly bold calls for no-fly zones and close air support from the western political/media class, which would also mean hot war with Russia.
Now, theoretically, the actual decision-makers of the imperial war machine know better than to initiate a hot war with Russia because it would likely lead to an unthinkable chain of events in which everyone loses. But what these insane Strangelovian calls for nuclear armageddon do, even if they never come to fruition, is push the acceptable spectrum of debate far toward the most hawkish extremes possible.
When you've got the hawks screaming that Putin is Hitler and calling for airstrikes on the Russian military while the doves are using extremely mitigated both-sides language and taking great pains to forcefully condemn Putin to avoid being shouted down and censored, what you wind up with is a spectrum of debate that has been pulled so far toward insanity that the "moderate" position becomes support for unprecedented acts of economic warfare and funding a brutal insurgency in Ukraine.
As a result, advocating for western powers to initiate de-escalation, diplomacy and detente becomes an extremist position, comparable to or worse than advocating for hot war with a nuclear superpower. In reality it's the obvious moderate, sane position on the table, but taking that position unequivocally would be disastrous for the career of any mainstream politician or pundit in today's environment, because the spectrum of debate has been pulled so far toward hawkish brinkmanship.
Noam Chomsky outlined this problem clearly when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
And that's exactly what we are seeing here. Look at this soup-brained take by comedian Tim Dillon, for example:
Ideally this kind of insane extremist talk would get you chased out of every town and forced to live alone in a cave eating bats, but because the Overton window of acceptable debate has been dragged so far away from its center, people think it's a moderate, heterodox position. Dovish, even.
This spectrum of debate has been further shoved away from moderation with the help of pseudo-left narrative managers like George Monbiot and The Intercept, who have both published obnoxious finger-wagging articles scolding leftists who've been insufficiently servile to the US/NATO line on Ukraine. As though there's somehow not enough promotion of the State Department narrative on this subject by every single one of the most powerful governments and media institutions in the entire western world, rather than far, far too much.
The worst people in the world have their foot on the accelerator driving us toward escalations that should terrify anyone with gray matter between their ears, while those who want to tap the brakes get their foot immediately slapped away. This is not leading good places. And we know from experience how profoundly unwise the power structure overseeing all this can be.
Treasure each moment, my lovelies.
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All this started with the 2014 US orchestrated Coup/regime change of the Russian friendly government the majority Russian speaking Ukrainians in the East and Crimea VOTED for, installing the Neo-Nazi anti-Russian government headed by the Man US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape saying she wanted before the regime change was even accomplished, started the 7 year Civil War in Ukraine.
There are just too many SINS of OMISSION in the Historical Record propagated by US and Canadian MSM.
Monday I posted this comment in The Washington Post, "When Western governments declare it's goal and objective is to destroy the Russian Economy without using bombs, Armageddon/WWIII already started.
History proves it's much easier to start Wars than to end them. It took 20 years and $2 TRILLION for the US to extricate itself from the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan.
I expect Putin will use the 'nuclear option' in the Economic War and will turn off Nord Stream I, and all oil and gas pipelines passing through Ukraine to keep Western Europe's Economy going.
The question will be who can endure material privation and want longer? Russians who are accustomed to it, or Western Europeans who aren't, when both the Russian and European Economies crash?
https://rayjc.com/2022/02/28/have-we-arrived-at-armageddon-wwiii"
The comment was posted but when I went to make another comment, The Washington Post suspended me from making any more comments for a week and that one was deleted.
What is so infuriating is what they did with that comment, is just the kind of thing US Propaganda demonize Putin for doing.
US MSM Propagandists have the same Military and Intelligence "experts" over and over again with no dissenting opinions. That's when you know it's War inciting Propaganda.
The real tragedy is all those US Military experts say Ukraine doesn't stand a chance against Russia.
President Putin has been warning since 2007, the US sphere of Influence called NATO in Europe advancing to the borders of Russia represent an Existential Threat.
Supplying weapons exposes the malevolent intention of the US to use Ukrainians as Sacrificial lambs in the US War with Russia that started at the end of WWII.
Where was the MSM outrage with the US invasion of Iraq in violation of International Law? Since WWII, the US invaded and bombed only poor, 3rd World Nations and couldn't get a win in any of them.
My focus in geopolitics is primarily economic. Michael Hudson has a very interesting take on Ukraine in an article called America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century. He divides the oligarch blob, as he calls it, into the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex), the OGAM (Oil, Gas & Mining), and the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate). It's too complex to summarize here but I'm going to do a YT on it tomorrow because it gives a new perspective that's very interesting. He says this will likely result in a New World Order but not the one the blob intends. Check it out: https://michael-hudson.com/2022/02/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/