You know that the US intelligence establishment is in bad shape when the highest ranking American military officer publicly regurgitates unfounded «talking media points» with a view to incriminate Russia over events in Ukraine.
Why would anyone – a highly decorated soldier at that – prostrate himself with such unthinking subservience?
Welcome to the American gulag of thought-control. This a culture where the media has all the illusion of freedom and independence, but where in actual fact it operates like a totalitarian regime to crush and punish any dissent.
Look at the way American mass media is covering the conflict in Ukraine and the recent downing of the Malaysia civilian airliner. It’s a scary, unthinking, uninformed drumbeat of «Russia did it, Putin did it, sanction Moscow». No-one is allowed to step outside this uniformity of thinking, or raise the questions begging to be asked, under pain of being ostracised and vilified by the virtual army of drumheads.
America has its physical gulags alright in the form of Guantanamo Bay prison and countless other jails that house an inmate population of over two million. But what is also just as real is the virtual American gulag of mass media tyranny and public thought control.
Its latest inmate on display in virtual stocks is General Martin E. Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joints of Staff. He is just the latest in a long line of public figures put on a show trial to trot out accusations against Russia over Ukraine and the downing of the Malaysia airliner in the eastern Donetsk region. The airliner crashed under suspicious circumstances on 17 July with the loss of all 298 lives onboard.
US President Obama and other top Washington officials have immediately sought to politicise the disaster, accusing the Russian government and ethnic Russian self-defence militia in eastern Ukraine of bringing down the passenger jet.
Hardly a shred of credible evidence has been presented. Much of the so-called evidence cited so far by Washington, its European allies and the Western media has turned out to be unverifiable secret information of amateurish faked data cooked up the Western-backed Kiev regime, whose capacity for lies, denials and outlandish claims knows no bounds.
Yet on the back of this cringing vacuity in reliable information, Washington and the European Union so-called leaders are moving this week to ratchet up economic sanctions on Russia’s strategically important energy, finance and defence industries.
What Washington lacks in credible evidence to implicate Russia on over the airline disaster it is making up for it in bluster – and lots of it. Or to put it another way, out and out propagandistic assertion.
So, out parading in the propaganda procession is Barack Obama, his foreign minister John Kerry, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, Democrat Congress leader Nancy Pelosi and senior Senator Diane Feinstein. Then we have political grandees and arch US imperialists Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeline Albright.
All of these senior figures have been regaling the American media outlets with boilerplate platitudes accusing Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin of having some involvement in the downing of the MH17 airliner. At the very least, according to this chorus of chattering marionettes, Putin is guilty of supplying the pro-independence rebels with the weaponry.
This is even before an independent international investigation into the disaster has got underway. This week Dutch and Australian investigators have been blocked from accessing the crash site because the Western-backed Kiev regime is waging a war on the pro-independence ethnic Russian population in the east of Ukraine.
Why is the West backing a regime that is blocking an investigation? Why is the West backing a regime that is killing hundreds of civilians in indiscriminate shelling of towns and villages? Why are the Western media and politicians not asking these glaring questions?
Now adding his penny’s worth of gravitas to the mindless chorus pillorying Putin is America’s highest ranking military man – General Dempsey.
Adding a new twist to the lynch mob invective, Dempsey reiterated accusations that Putin’s Russia is firing missiles across its border into Ukraine. Dempsey was speaking at a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, last week. It was clear that he was making reference in the context of the downed MH17 airliner.
Dempsey told his audience: «You’ve got a Russian government that has made the conscious decision to use its military force inside of another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives – first time, I think, probably, since 1939 or so that that’s been the case.»
Aside from his ropey grasp of history, the top US General gave no evidence to support his claim that Russia was indeed firing artillery into Ukraine. He was simply regurgitating unverified claims that were made earlier that same day by the US State Department’s spokeswoman Marie Harf.
The US has subsequently released satellite images that supposedly prove its claims against Russia. But those images, posted on social media, have been derided as unintelligible owing to low resolution and offering no verifiable location data.
Yet Dempsey proceeded to claim that his counterparts in the Russian military are on his side – that is, that these Russian senior military figures are in some way dissenting from Moscow policy.
Dempsey accused Vladimir Putin of pursuing a geopolitical strategy in Europe that is akin to «lighting a fire that he loses control of».
The American General goes on to name his counterpart Russia’s Chief of Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov and to claim that Gerasimov is «reluctant” about Putin’s alleged interference in Ukraine and Europe.
Dempsey, quoted in a US Department of Defence report, said: «I think that the Russian military is probably reluctant – you know, this is risky for me to say this, and 10 of them could end up in a gulag tomorrow – but I think that the Russian military and its leaders that I know are probably somewhat reluctant participants in this form of warfare.»
Russia’s General Gerasimov has previously denounced Washington’s «colour revolutions» in Ukraine and elsewhere as a new generation of warfare aimed at destabilising Russia. Gerasimov and the Russian military are well aware that the conflict raging in Ukraine is a direct result of US illegal regime change in that country.
The fatal demise of the Malaysian airliner has to be seen in that critical US-fomented context, as has the ongoing shelling across Ukraine’s border into Russia’s territory – in complete contradiction to what Dempsey and other talking heads in Washington are claiming.
It is a stretch to speculate that Dempsey was engaging in some form of psychological games with his Russian counterparts. The evidence would show that the American military chief is too stupid to carry off such a game of black arts.
What his public display most probably shows is just how low-grade US intelligence is. If America’s top military leader can seriously regurgitate amateurish lies and fabrications in order to score cheap political points then that illustrates how degraded the highest offices in the US have become.
A soldier is supposed to be a noble warrior standing up for integrity with courage. In America, evidently the leader of its soldiers is too busy worried about getting in line with the prevailing propaganda narrative and thought-police, rather than making independent judgements based on objective evidence and integrity.
As with all the other pundits and politicians slavishly obeying the whip of US media uniformity, it looks like General Dempsey is afraid too, very afraid, of ending up in the gulag that is American isolation for daring to think or speak the truth.
By Finian Cunningham, SCF
© Strategic Culture Foundation