Concealing the truth and dramatising falsehoods

Politics can be that sphere of life where the truth is not always true.

It is that province of history where true interests, desires and fears are easily concealed and remain undeclared.

There can be more political profits for lying than there are for telling the truth. 

As early as 1918, US senator Hiram Warren Johnson is recorded to have observed that “the first casualty when war comes is truth.”

Johnson was just reciting the ancient Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, who noted how war kills ideas before it slaughters people.

Recently, Boaventura De Sousa Santos, the decolonial philosopher, lamented how the armed conflict in Ukraine has exposed the “inconvenient complexity” of “information warfare on European soil” that has always been part of Euro-American modernity and the western civilisation. 

Far more than it did during the American military involvement in Vietnam in 1971 and that of Iraqi in 2003, the North Atlantic media axis has escalated information warfare to the detriment of honest critique, political analysis and the truth itself. Concealing truths, silencing ideas and privileging misinformation and disinformation has enveloped the information and media landscape in the West. 

The media as weaponry of mass-deception have gone into a full gallop as the world is not being told what exactly is happening in Ukraine and why it is happening in the very first place.

Santos decries that: “in the case of Ukraine in particular, manipulation is aimed at preventing public opinion and politicians from considering and making decisions on the only measure required at the present moment: to search for a lasting peace both in Ukraine.”

The NATO alliance keeps supplying private military companies, weapons and money to Ukraine while Russians have elevated their arsenal to hypersonic missiles that are slowly but surely reducing Ukraine to ash and dust. Meanwhile arms manufacturers are making a killing in profits. 

Sleepwalking towards nuclear warfare

The joint pledge between Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Regan in the historic summit in 1985, Geneva, has been vandalised to nothing.

The two leaders had sworn that there is to be no nuclear threat or war between Russia and the USA because “no one can win nuclear war.” The wisdom of the ages that war is better avoided has been thrown out of the window as threats of nuclear war are daily stated and performed by the gladiators.

 Recently, the Republican Matt Gaertz reminded Americans that “just a year ago, we lost a war against goat herders waving rifles,” meaning the Taliban in Afghanistan, but “members of Congress are now recklessly asserting that we are at war with Russia, we are sleepwalking into a war and the American people are left in the dark.”

Gaertz was reacting to some members of Congress that have publicly stated that America is in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and that losing that war should not be an option, more money and weapons should be injected into the war until Russia is defeated, retreats or surrenders. 

On the Russian side Dmitry Kiselyov, a state television show host started a programme with a chilling question, “why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?”

He continued to reason that “our submarines are capable of launching over 500 nuclear war heads, which guarantees the destruction of the US and all NATO countries.”

The former advisor to the presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, Sergey Karaganov, has continued to advance what is called the “Putin Doctrine” which justifies maximum force in pursuit of what is believed to be true and just.

Stop barking for war

European and American powers know that the apex of the continuing escalation of the conflict in Ukraine might be an all-out nuclear war but keep pouring fuel to the fires of war.

Pope Francis added his big voice to the condemnation of the NATO alliance for provoking Russia by “barking at the gate of Russia” and threatening an already suspicious country that carries enduring fears of being surrounded and suffocated by western enemies. 

What is concerning to the Pope and other independent minds in the world is that powerful leaders that have the power, and should have the wisdom, to stop barking for war are pretending that there is no alternative to war, which is not true. Pretending that the war is so natural, normal and inevitable is an act of concealing rather than revealing the truth about the conflict in Ukraine. 

Western propaganda machineries keep peddling the false story that Russia has failed to overcome Ukraine because of the patriotism and courage of Ukrainians.

And that Russia is slowly being defeated.

Truth is that Ukraine with the help of NATO has armed civilians which Russia must, at all costs avoid shooting at, hence the carefully slow pace of the war that has become a slow but sure destruction of Ukraine as a country. 

More concealed to the world is that the war is actually a battle between NATO, led by America, and Russia on Ukrainian soil. 

Calling the temerity of Ukraine leader Zelensky courage and branding him the “Winston Churchill of our time” is all part of the barking for war, a war that is finishing off Ukraine and is deepening the suffering and misery of Ukrainians. 

The truth that the world is not being told is that this conflict could have been avoided and that it can be stopped.

Those that have the responsibility and the power to stop the conflict, for their own geopolitical interests and reasons, are not doing so and have to pretend that it could not and cannot be stopped.

Concealing the truth and dramatising falsehoods is a part of the information world war that weaponises the North Atlantic information axis as the true weapon of mass-deception. 

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, in Pretoria, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].