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Bulletin 294: Please consider forwarding this fine statement from UNAC re Ukraine March 23, 2022 Permalink for this bulletin. Please forward! United National Antiwar Coalition, "Statement on Ukraine." Previously:
Dear friends and colleagues -- We are going to increase the frequency and timeliness of these bulletins. We hope you find them useful. So hang on; there will be two today. History is not a gentle tide at this moment but rather a tsunami. We are all "in the swim" whether we want to be (who would?) or not. Ukraine. The managers of the national security state and mainstream media are continuing to deepen what amounts to a psychotic break with reality, as we already said in 2015 (slide 7): Beginning in late 2013 or early 2014 at the latest, mainstream US news media achieved close to a complete break with reality -- over Ukraine. This is not just the "Big Lie" from a single source; it is nearly universal. No dissenting views are presented in elite and popular media. Many people have noticed that this is unprecedented in our lifetimes...[I]n 2014 breathtaking, detailed claims potentially affecting the US existentially were being made without any proof whatsoever. Regarding this psychotic break, …in The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (1924) [Freud] wrote the following: “Neurosis does not disavow the reality, it ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it.” (p. 185) What psychosis replaces reality with is delusion….Psychotic delusion on the personal level becomes ideology at the group level; both possess the power to annihilate the Other – be it the foreigner or the domestic subversive. 'We communicate with the psychotic part of our self by locating that communication in our politics. We only hide or repress or split off the inaccessible side of who we are and project outward, as collective phantasies, toxic emotions that take shape in political programs, acts and ideologies.' [James M. Glass, Psychosis and Power, 1995, p. 169]...When illusions break down, they are replaced with delusions. 'The result, in both the self and the community, is tragedy.' [ibid., p. 176] Loss of the American Dream may well lead the individual citizen to loss of identity, ego disintegration, psychotic rage and compulsive self-mutilation and the nation to an explosion of racism, jingoism, fanaticism, xenophobia, scapegoating, witch-hunts... in short, to tyranny. Dmitri Orlov, “Peak Oil Oppositional Disorder: Neurosis or Psychosis?” A great many people in the West have gone crazy over Ukraine. They have no idea why events have unfolded as they have, and are unfolding as they are. Where understanding and peace-oriented action should be, too often there is just hate -- propaganda-driven, pure Orwellian hate. This is more than just ignorance and misinformation. Our news media and national political leadership have created this situation, since blaming the Other allows citizens, who are also voters in this year's elections, to forget so very, very much that this country has done and is doing that is reprehensible -- or just plain incompetent. We face converging existential crises -- a "global polycrisis" as Thomas Homer-Dixon calls it, referenced in a fine recent essay by Jem Bendell -- that challenges not just business as usual, including the industrial renewable electricity model relied upon by so many environmentalists, but also the basic legitimacy of governments that are utterly failing to provide for the basic security of their citizens. A nice theatrical war is just the distraction needed, a war where Ukrainians and Russians do the dying. This war could have easily been avoided had the West used a smidgen of diplomacy. Western leaders, now apparently all more or less subservient to Washington, could also end this war at any time. But diplomacy is not our thing. War and more war, not avoidance of war, was and is the U.S. immediate objective, toward the longer-term goal of breaking Russia's sovereignty and independence. Instead of diplomacy we have "imperial infantilism," as Patrick Lawrence so brilliantly describes it. Diplomacy, he writes, requires one to "understand how those on the other side of the table think and see things, what the other side wants and why." This quality is not only missing from U.S. leaders, it is missing from the news media and it is missing from much of what passes for the arms control and nuclear disarmament communities here and abroad. Western bodies-politic desperately need to recover their rational minds. Our totalitarian government and corporate structures (Michael Glennon, Sheldon Wolin, Ray McGovern) are producing a violent national consciousness with characteristics of a mob, or "mass formation" (please see the discussion, "Mass Formation and Totalitarian Thinking in This Time of Global Crisis" with Mattias Desmet and others). Unless the spell is broken, totalitarian thinking -- an oxymoron -- will lead to total war, leading to total annihilation. We are just one or two short steps from that today, and it is our responsibility to tell you that. If we have any small credibility with you, please look at what we have been sending and for humanity's sake, act! Don't send tennis shoes or whatever to Ukraine. Don't do anything that "supports Ukraine" -- which means, in plain English, keeping the war going. Stop your government from being involved further in this damn war, however you can. As we said last time, if you want a ceasefire, tell your government to stop sending weapons and other military support to Ukraine. If you want a ceasefire, cease firing. Or, as the Bard put it, " Will you yield, and this avoid, / Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd? The West may soon discover -- sooner, we hope, than later -- that economic sanctions are economic suicide. Economic pain may be the only contact with reality some of our governments are able to feel. One of the best current statements regarding this war is that of the United National Antiwar Coalition. Their "Statement on Ukraine" deserves careful study and wide circulation. And that is what we are hoping you will do, for starters. Meanwhile, we hope you are keeping up with the timely, superb analyses offered by the editors of Consortium News, by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, Caitlin Johnstone, the Grayzone, and others mentioned last time. Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
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