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Ukraine: White House Is “Outraged By Images”
Anti-government protesters aim their weapons during clashes with riot police at Independence Square in Kiev February 18, 2014. (Vasily Fedosenko)
The White House – Office of the Press Secretary
We are outraged by the images of Ukrainian security forces firing automatic weapons on their own people. We urge President Yanukovych to immediately withdraw his security forces from downtown Kyiv and to respect the right of peaceful protest, …
One wonders what pictures the White House is looking at? Well, of course the real pictures ain't so helpful in pushing for "regime change".
More "outrageous" pictures below the fold …
(Pics taken from this thread)
“The amount of people bothering to consider other sources or that what passes as news is just propaganda is small. And then they just consider the ‘other side’ (the resistance) as worse than ‘our side’ (western empire).”@3
Isn’t this always the way?
The whole system depends upon the apathy of the masses and their uncritical acceptance of the ruling class’s ideology. The question is how these same masses are woken up to the obvious and barefaced lying of their rulers, and how they react to it.
My view is that it is a complex process. Posts like B’s and sources of information like the MoA play an important part in exposing the way in which the 1% and their tools carry out the propaganda that is vital to them. But the real problems that the system faces are its own contradictions.
It is certainly true that the American people appear to be suckers for the kind of propaganda that the White House churns out. More alarming perhaps is the fact that the fabled credulity of the Cold War indoctrinated, racially divided, economically privileged American populace has, with American culture, spread over Europe as well, where the old working class institutions, the Communist and left socialist parties, the Cooperatives and the Unions, in which a critical understanding of capitalist society was nourished, have been overwhelmed and Zombified.
But the reality is that the current system, though its ideologists deny it, is in real and deepening crisis.
There has never been such a crisis before: the economy is thoroughly purged of non-capitalist elements, those refuges of subsistence for unemployed and “surplus” labour which formerly existed. At the same time millions of people require basic support to save them from famine. This is the underlying problem: increasingly significant proportions of the population are declining into real, not merely relative, poverty: starvation and homelessness are increasing, the number of beggars in rags is growing.
And the system, for ideological reasons as much as anything, cannot bring itself to make the relatively small investment needed to mitigate the worst of these symptoms. It has painted itself into a fiscal and theoretical corner: it dare not tax the wealthy and it cannot confess that poverty is the inevitable product of the capitalist system.
On the other hand as the Four Horsemen approach, and the “middle class” clearly descends into poverty, with all its implications, psychological and social as well as economic, the luxury of apathy is eroded if only because the Capitalist religion, the all pervading ideology of which approving of Obama’s Foreign Policy is an important metric, tells people that they are at fault if they are poor, they are to blame if they have no home, it is their fault if nobody chooses to employ them.
Of course, such is the sado-masochistic character of our culture, this is often welcome news to the victims themselves: there is an inclination to embrace the idea that, having been singled out for punishment by the system, the individual can, by extraordinary efforts, including that submission which The Saker rightly identifies, and self sacrifice there will always be a way out. Prisons, after all need guards. Famines call for burial details and gravediggers.
But in the end, and long before the system can repair itself, reality forces its way into popular consciousness. It becomes impossible to deny that capitalism is a form of cannibalism, that the inmates of the White House, belching out lies and enveloping the world in smokescreens , are actually taking a share of the food that babies in working class homes are being deprived of. They live in luxury because half the population lives in penury. They have never a care in the world because, for most people, most nights are sleepless as they worry about bills, mortgages, fuel, clothing, food, transport and other necessities.
And that is when nothing the White House spokeswoman tells them rings true and every enemy of the Empire appears to be a potential ally.
I should add, of course, that I have touched upon merely one minor aspect of the crisis of capitalism of which climate change and environmental degradation are also aspects. Fukushima and the poisoned waters of Carolina and Virginia are the consequences of capitalism, as are the storms afflicting Europe and the thirty six days below zero we just experienced in southern Ontario. It is a unique feature of capitalism that it devours the planet, not in a cycle of renewal and harvest but in absolute terms.
Posted by: bevin | Feb 20 2014 18:20 utc | 11
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