Britain’s corporate media is doing its level best to deceive the public over the UK’s support for NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
The corporate media hacks know very well that NATO provoked the war. They know that the Biden administration made a provocative public statement in 2021 supporting Ukraine joining NATO. They know that the US and NATO rejected Russia’s diplomatic overtures in 2021 aimed at avoiding war. And they know that Boris Johnson was despatched to Kiev in April 2022 to scupper a tentative peace deal. But they never challenge the government’s pro-war narrative.
Julian Assange took a dim view of the media’s role in starting wars. He said the journalists helping to start wars were war criminals, and the pro-war hyperbole emanating from these journalistic war criminals has gone into overdrive since the beginning of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
These corporate media hacks willingly regurgitated the blatantly misleading and hypocritical G7 statement on Ukraine earlier this month, complete with its phoney “sympathy and condolences to the Ukrainian people for their loss and suffering”. If the G7 leaders were genuinely concerned about the loss and suffering of the Ukrainian people, they would be pushing for a negotiated peace deal, rather than escalating tensions.
I catch a train to London every week to record the weekly Palestine Declassified show that I host. The waiting room in Derby’s railway station always has Sky News playing in the background. I was in the waiting room the day after Bakhmut fell to Russian forces. Given what we know about the course of the war, I naïvely thought they’d acknowledge that fact on Sky News. But Sky News had a different tale to tell. They had some alleged military expert in the studio telling viewers that Russia was losing the war, and that China had made a strategic blunder by strengthening its collaboration with Russia. This level of media unreality is quite incredible, and demonstrates the dysfunctionality of the fourth estate.
The alarming truth is that the British corporate media is merely a mouthpiece for NATO’s pro-war propaganda. They make no attempt to critically analyse the claims by politicians that Russia and China pose a threat to world peace. The politicians are not held to account for prolonging and escalating the war in Ukraine either. There is no media scrutiny of Zelenskyy’s clamp down on opposition political and media voices. In fact, these apologists for war write approvingly about Zelenskyy’s authoritarianism. They ignore the torture and murder of Ukrainian citizens by literal Nazis and other far-right extremists in Ukraine as well as the shocking mistreatment of Russian POWs.
Furthermore, there is no examination, of the so-called Advantage Ukraine investment initiative, which is basically Zelenskyy’s vehicle for flogging off his country’s assets to the likes of BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Halliburton. Halliburton notoriously, made a financial killing out of the carnage in Iraq and now want a repeat performance in Ukraine. Zelenskyy is quoted on Advantage Ukraine’s website saying the war in Ukraine, “is the greatest opportunity in Europe since WW2.” Meanwhile, BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, says that Ukraine, “can be a beacon to the rest of the world about the power of capitalism”. What NATO is clearly trying to facilitate in Ukraine, is a kind of neoliberal nirvana. But you would never know that from listening to or reading the output of Britain’s corporate media outlets. They give no consideration either to NATO’s ultimate goal of balkanising Russia.
I’ve only done one interview with the corporate media about the war in Ukraine, and that was back in March 2022. It was with a local BBC radio station in Derby and the presenter admitted on air that they were uncomfortable about inviting me to speak. He even asked how I’d respond to people saying I was betraying my country. Ironically, despite being an obvious mouthpiece for British foreign policy and the purveyor of disinformation, the BBC has just launched ‘BBC Verify’ to supposedly “counter disinformation.”
But NATO and its corporate media stenographers don’t get it all their own way. The alternative independent media makes it harder to hoodwink people. The online independent media didn’t exist in the run-up to the illegal war in Iraq. But 20 years ago, unlike today, anti-war voices like George Galloway were regularly given the chance to make the case against war, but not today. Platforms like Dorset Eye are therefore crucially important, even revolutionary, because as George Orwell is reputed to have said: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Tragically, the corporate media’s pro-war, Russophobia is being amplified by some who claim to be on the political left. A number of these have simply been duped, but others are state actors, who’ve infiltrated the left over many years. It’s the old Establishment divide and rule trick. For example, Paul Mason’s links to British intelligence were exposed last year. He was the former BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 economics editor, who previously claimed to be an enthusiastic Corbyn supporter, but was secretly plotting against him. He even joined me on the last leg of my democracy roadshow in 2018 that was campaigning for Labour MPs to be made accountable to members. However, I subsequently discovered that he had included me in a “dynamic map of the ‘left’ pro-Putin infosphere” that he was keen to deplatform. Unsurprisingly, Mason is now publicly backing Sir Keir Starmer.
So, it’s essential that we cut through this nonsense. That means taking direct action and using the democratic mechanisms of trade unions to push the anti-NATO message. The No2NATO campaign group has launched a parliamentary petition, calling for the UK to invoke Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty to take us out of NATO. This will require a formal response from the government if it achieves 10,000 signatures and could force a debate on the floor of the House of Commons if it gets to 100,000. This will help to expose and pressurise the politicians who are supporting NATO and its proxy war in Ukraine.
So, the minimum we should be doing is promoting this petition to get as many signatures as possible. In other words, we have to do everything we possibly can to resist the attempt by the political class and corporate media to brainwash the public into accepting that NATO is a defensive alliance, when all the evidence since its inception proves it’s the opposite.
And failure isn’t an option, because NATO is driving us toward a third world war, which means we could be facing the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon. That means there has never been a more important time to stand up and be counted.
Chris Williamson
Join us in helping to bring reality and decency back by SUBSCRIBING to our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ1Ll1ylCg8U19AhNl-NoTg and SUPPORTING US where you can: Award Winning Independent Citizen Media Needs Your Help. PLEASE SUPPORT US FOR JUST £2 A MONTH https://dorseteye.com/donate/
