{"id":41638,"date":"2023-01-23T09:24:31","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T17:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=41638"},"modified":"2023-01-23T11:28:13","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T19:28:13","slug":"the-new-york-times-is-orwells-ministry-of-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/23\/the-new-york-times-is-orwells-ministry-of-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"The New York Times<\/I> Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIngsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.\u201d
~ George Orwell, 1984<\/em><\/p>\n

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon\u2019s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times\u2019<\/em> Editorial Board, \u201cA Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine<\/em><\/a>.\u201d It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times<\/em> is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.<\/p>\n

The Times\u2019 <\/em>Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. \u201cLike the last European war, this one is mostly one man\u2019s madness.\u201d Russia and Putin are \u201ccruel\u201d; are conducting a \u201cregular horror\u201d with missile strikes against civilian targets; are \u201cdesperate\u201d; are pursuing Putin\u2019s \u201cdelusions\u201d; are waging a \u201cterrible and useless war\u201d; are \u201ccommitting atrocities\u201d; are responsible for \u201cmurder, rape and pillaging,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, \u201ca heroic Ukraine\u201d \u201chas won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces\u201d who have lost \u201cwell over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,\u201d according to the \u201creliable\u201d source, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none<\/strong> are mentioned by the cozy Times\u2019 Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a US war, as has always been The<\/em>Times\u2019 <\/em>modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists\u2019 dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.<\/p>\n

But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a US proxy war waged via Ukraine by US\/NATO \u201cto strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.\u201d No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by \u201cthe Kremlin\u2019s propaganda machinery\u201d that has churned \u201cout false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.\u201d US\/NATO were \u201chorrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,\u201d so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine\u2019s defense as \u201cMr. Putin\u2019s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times\u2019<\/em> Board of propagandists \u2013 and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense \u2013 is there any mention of the US engineered coup d\u2019\u00e9tat in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn\u2019t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The US, together with the Ukrainian government \u201cled\u201d by the puppet-actor \u201cPresident Volodymyr Zelensky,\u201d are completely innocence parties, according to the Times<\/em>.<\/em>(Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that \u201cMr. Putin\u201d is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)<\/p>\n

All the problems stem from when \u201cMr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end US\/NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia\u2019s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the US out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the US has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO\u2019s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the US has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the US\/NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the US has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the US was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn\u2019t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.<\/p>\n

This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.<\/p>\n

The editorial has all its facts \u201cwrong,\u201d and not by accident. The paper may say that its opinion journalists\u2019 claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:<\/p>\n