Do You Ever get Sick of the Constant Gaslighting by Shitty Journalists and Sold-out Politicians?

Western media is perpetually shocked. They clutch their pearls and gasp for breath whenever the predictable blowback of imperial overreach lands. How much fake surprise do they have in reserve for events that were entirely foreseeable. It seems as though presenting predictable events as shocking breaking news has become their entire editorial model.

NATO creeps, inch by inch, in broad daylight, right up to the Russian border for thirty years straight. Every anti-imperialist, every Marxist, and the occasionally mainstream journalist with an actual spine warned us that NATO expansion would lead directly to trenches and artillery.

The legacy media called those warnings conspiracy theories circulated by useful idiots and Putin apologists. Now they report daily on the Ukrainian front as if it were a shocking surprise that the Russians have held on to all the positions they "liberated." Western media pundits and academics seem incapable of drawing the direct line from the Maidan coup to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties.

Quell surprise that the Russians treated what they always understood and always claimed was an existential issue as exactly that. An existential issue. When the wolf is at the door the Russians don't have a tradition of running to hide.

Who could have predicted that all the Russian diplomacy conducted prior to the Special Military Operation would lead to the exact consequences that Russian diplomats pleaded and warned about. Who could have guessed that the deliberate sabotage of the Minsk agreements by Zelensky would result in a massive escalation of tensions on the border between what used to be Ukraine and the Russian Federation.

Russian diplomats begged the US to rein in the rabid ultra nationalists from western Ukraine. Who could have guessed that US funding and arming and encouragement of Azov and the Banderites to keep shelling Donetsk, would result in Russian tanks rolling across the border. The answer is anyone who was not suffering from western propaganda brain rot.

We were told on a daily basis that Russia had a smaller economy than Texas. We were told it was a gas station masquerading as a country. We were told it was Nigeria with snow, run by incompetent mobsters. We were told they had to disassemble washing machines to use the microchips for weapons. And we were told after a month that they had completely run out of bullets. If you take the time to go back and look at Russian coverage of the special operation during this period you will find that they correctly called out all these lies peddled by western "experts."

Russian media understood perfectly that the west had to pretend the invasion was unprovoked and morally reprehensible. They understood that western media would pretend Ukraine "held all the cards" and pretend they had every chance of winning a real war against Russia.

The only way they could convince western media audiences of this Ukrainian victory fantasy was to pretend that Russia was weak and unprepared.

The relentless lies and omissions pushed daily by western media weren't a miscalculation or a mistake. They were an important part of the imperialist plan to convince ordinary Western workers that it would be okay if all our tax revenue was transferred directly into the bank accounts of the billionaires who own US arms companies.

The billionaire class who push imperial policy in the West want us to forget completely that every escalation, every step along the path to where we are, was as predictable as it was easily avoidable.

European leaders now want us to be as coddled and infantilised as US media consumers. They expect us to play along with pouring billions of precious European taxpayers money into a terrible and unnecessary war against an enemy who only ever wanted peace.

It's worth reminding everyone that both Yeltsin and Putin himself made many attempts to join our NATO gang. But they were refused because NATO was never about the security of Europe, it was always about US led Western imperialism. It always was and remains to this day inherently Russophobic.

This is how Western media has always conducted itself and it's just useful to look back over previous events while examining the current ones. They inflict horrific violence on the targeted nation. And when the targeted nation reacts in a completely understandable predictable manner they gaslight media consumers in the west into imagining that the response was unprovoked, out of the blue, disproportionate and shocking.

The leadership in the targeted nation is presented as uniquely evil and Hitler-like Then 'hey presto' you've got a Western propaganda narrative ready to be used as justification for economic war, total blockade, invasion, bombing hospitals, shooting children in the head, all the way up to mass murder by famine. It's always the same.

The Cuba narrative is equally grotesque. We've watched the blockade for six decades. Recently we're seeing starvation by design. Now that the island nation suffers their worst crisis of scarcity in history, those same voices who cheered for the continued strangulation of Cuba under the Helms Burton Act are suddenly shocked that the Cuban regime has allowed itself to fail so far, that her own citizens are dying.

Fake humanitarian champions. They posture as saviours of a people they intentionally starved. They feign ignorance of their own sanctions regime whilst blaming socialism for the very crimes they committed in the name of western imperialism.

You're not supposed to remember that the only reason the Cuban people struggle at the moment is because the US is deliberately trying to kill them. You're supposed to forget that and pretend that Cuba is a dictatorship that's deliberately trying to kill its own citizens.

Look at Syria. They told us al-Assad was a monster. Another Hitler to be removed. They told us the "moderate rebels" were a hothouse for true democracy. Good independent journalists and those from outside the imperialist propaganda sphere knew very well what was coming. They warned us. They knew Idlib was a petri dish of CIA funded Wahhabi head choppers.

They knew that the continuation of the al-Assad government was fundamental to the smooth running of a nation as complex demographically as Syria. And they warned us that if Assad was removed he would be replaced by something far more dangerous.

Every step along the path was entirely predictable if you listened to the right people. But you're not supposed to know any of that. You're supposed to wake up every morning and think that the news cycle started today. The western press then run a three part docuseries about a country they helped dismantle, wondering aloud how it became a playground for radical Islamists.

We're all supposed to be surprised that this post Assad Syria isn't a utopia for free Syrians. Again surprised by predictable events. Spend five minutes reading about Operation Timber Sycamore. Billions in dark Contra style money funnelled into groups of radical jihadists who promised to assist the CIA with their regime change operation in Syria. The inevitable blowback of Syria falling into the hands of ISIS head choppers is as predictable as the timely departure of a Swiss train.

As for the EU, what a pathetic circus that's turned into. Commission mandarins act stunned that the EU population has turned against them. They can't fathom why ordinary people might not wish to fund a genocide in Palestine with hard earned European tax money. They've turned the EU into little more than a rubber stamping operation for US imperialism and now that monster is turning on its own imperial junior partners.

Collapsing empires always begin to eat themselves. That's why heavily armed police are on the streets of the US shooting civilians in the face without cause. That's also why the US has begun deliberately sabotaging the EU. Threats of invasion (Greenland), the destruction of EU energy infrastructure in Nord Stream, trade tariffs etc. The honeymoon is very much over and the only people in Europe who want to be part of a gang that endorses genocide, are the Fash, the Billionaires and the bent politicians.

We're supposed to be shocked that European industry is collapsing. Even though it's the direct result of sanctions we slapped on ourselves to stop buying cheap Russian energy. We could be paying a fifth of the current price. We could be making our own fertiliser plastics and chemicals.

We could be providing the world with these exported goods from the EU, building up our continental economy and reinvesting into our infrastructure, improving the lives of European citizens. Instead we've allowed US imperialists to bring us on a merry dance of war, regime change and genocide. This was all entirely predictable yet we're supposed to be surprised that things aren't going our way.

Looking at West Asia and the mess that western imperialists have created there should make your head spin. The West has spent decades planting US assets and puppets as leaders in each of the phony statelets that surround the Zionist regime. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, even Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. These countries are all occupied. If you've got a US military base on your land, it's not your land.

With regard to the US Israeli attack on Iran we're supposed to be shocked and surprised when Iran retaliates by targeting US military bases in neighbouring "countries." Iran is one of the only unoccupied countries left in the region. They are known to have huge weapon stockpiles and it's commonly understood that they've spent the last year since the 12 days war preparing for another invasion by US/Israel.

How cucked do you have to be to believe that Iran wouldn't immediately retaliate with strikes against US military bases in their vicinity. It's been clear for decades that Iran's number one policy would be to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. I remember Iranians telling me in September 2001 that if the US invaded them without provocation, in the same way that they threatened to do in Afghanistan, that the Iranians would shut down the Strait and block all their neighbours oil from getting out. Again completely predictable events being described as shocking or surprising by western media.

I notice yesterday that the Russians have issued a warning to the government of Finland and the Baltic states against allowing Kiev to continue using their airspace for drone attacks on Russia. Will this be one of those moments when the Finns cross a line after which the predictable consequences of their own actions will be presented as shocking breaking news. Russian retaliation would be presented by Western media as unprovoked imperial aggression rather than the predictable consequences of Finland's refusal to comply with international law. It's the same thing all over again.

Some of us have been studying this for years and thankfully the gaslighting has no effect on anti imperialists or anyone from a post colonial country with a culture of resistance but I'm watching people all around me wake up and smell the bullshit. Everyone is sick of being gaslit by low IQ journalists and compromised politicians. It's not journalism we get in the west. It's all one deep US imperial psyop, dressed in beige chinos, with a phony smile exposing painfully veneered teeth and game show host hairline.

They're manufacturing amnesia so they can continue to make up the narrative as they go along. If nothing exists within actual historical events, if everything happens without context, it's a perfect environment for mass mind control.

Every day we're surprised by predictable events. But we need to wake up, there should be no surprises. The people screwing us are doing what they've always done. We should be disgusted by the fact that our leaders keep making decisions on our behalf which have predictable apocalyptic consequences for the rest of us schmucks. We need a revolution.

Polemics by Rory Mo-ran (Critical Theory) published on Substack.

Inspired by Chris Hedges.