Ukraine: Are We the Prisoners of Our Own Narrative?

Controlling the narrative— that is what “keeps the world running,” one may cynically say. When we want to convince others of something that they wont believe on face value—or by listening to all sides—then we create a narrative to get them on our side. We can even go so far as to punish anyone who dares to listen to another perspective, for lies can only survive as long as they are sealed off from reality.  This happens everywhere, from our frantic efforts to hide personal shame, to navigating a messy marriage breakdown; from church conflicts and corporate scandals to brutal political revolutions. The Bible calls it all lies and deceit. And that’s what it is. And there is ultimately only one species on earth not involved in doing it—the poor in spirit; those hungering and thirsting for righteousness, as Jesus called them in his Sermon on the Mount. They know that all these narratives will come down like a house of cards, when the storm of God’s judgment arrives. They find it not only shameful, but utterly useless, to live in an unreal world, one created by lies and deceit. 

So how do we make sure that we control the narrative on a national or international scale? Well, first of all by owning the mass media, and then by controlling the “airwaves, ” and also by making sure we shut down any possible dissent. Isn’t that why the Russian leaders were so upset when Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first printed in Paris in 1973? They were no longer able to tell their lies, and that is not so nice. That is why controlling the narrative ultimately means purging libraries, getting rid of opposing academics, shutting down voices we don’t want to hear, i.e., anyone who dares to question our narrative. 

That is also why, from the moment the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022, that our media and governments made absolutely sure that we do not ever get the full story. They have been hiding it for years already, since at least 2014. This is so different from the Cold War era, when US media reported both sides of the story, and that while the official Soviet ideology was fully Marxist-Leninist in nature. Even during World War II, Britons could listen to Nazi propaganda if they wished, broadcasted from Luxembourg. We in the West had the confidence that our people won’t fall for the lies from the other side— and they did not.

But that is exactly why Russia Today had to be shut down in the West the moment the war broke out. We could not afford any public exposure to the other side, for that could awaken too many sleeping dogs. Listen to the late Prof. Stephen Cohen, US expert on Russian history. He told the Young Turks in an interview as early as in 2015 that all the main news channels in the US “give only one narrative of the history of this dispute, this crisis, this new cold war, and its a false narrative, because half of the story is omitted…. and the old American adage that I was raised on, that there are two sides to every story, or to live by the golden rule, do unto others as you would want them to do unto you” is now all gone. Yes all of that is gone. Its gone because of two reasons: the seismic moral and cultural shift in the US away from its Judeo-Christian values, and the sinister agenda of the NeoCons in Washington to foment war with Russia for their own purposes. 

So we had the monopoly on the truth, which we disseminated into the entire world. It was therefore nothing strange to see the very same headline all over the news, on the same day, from Washington to Delhi, from Johannesburg to Warsaw, and from Jakarta to Sao Paulo: Putin’s Unprovoked War! 

A famous Anglican archbishop once said: “If you want peace, speak to your enemy, not to your friends.” Now there is a whole lot of truth in these words of the late Desmond Tutu, even though I can’t agree with much of his liberal theology. Neither may his wise approach ever lead you to sell out your own principles and people for the sake of peace. Yet sadly, there is no doubt, that millions of lives would have been spared, had we dared to listen to the other side. But as has been so clearly shown by so many—also by Dr. Benjamin Abelow in his little masterpiece How the West Brought War to Ukraine— listening to the other side was considered an act of treason. We were too nervous and arrogant for that to happen, and yet though the war has entered its third year, we still refuse to listen to the other side… For the first time in my lifetime Western leaders are not the least interested in dialogue— something wholly unthinkable fifty years ago when East and West were locked in the Cold War. Behind this attitude lies only one thing: America’s fear of losing its status as the sole global superpower, and the NATO’s fear of losing its full-spectrum dominance. 

Retired NATO Colonel Jacques Baud

Our Western narrative about the Ukrainian conflict has, however, now become a massive snare and deadly trap, from which we urgently need an escape, if we are concerned about the future of this globe. That much a former member of Swiss strategic intelligence, who used to work as a specialist on Eastern Europe for NATO, alluded to in an interview. Colonel Jacques Baud said on Max Milo: “The problem is that now, the West is a prisoner of its own narrative.” And that narrative is stopping us from facing reality and gaining the wisdom and courage to seek an offramp from a war that could engulf the entire world in a nuclear catastrophe. Let me explain…

It began long before February 2022 of course. As tensions were building up east of the Dnieper, I followed things on the alternative media, since our mainstream news was not paying much attention, apart from blaming the Russians for almost anything that went wrong in the world. During 2021 only one theme dominated our news, mainline or otherwise: Covid, and the draconian measures invented to combat it. By the end of that year the ruling class of the West had spent their capital and lost the plot. Three of the top WEF favourites, Justin Trudeau of Canada, Mark Rutte of The Netherlands and Jacinda Adern of New Zealand, were looking like withered flowers in the scorching sun.

Meanwhile I was watching things developing in Eastern Europe, amazed that so few were paying much attention. I tried to warn my friends on social media that there was something coming far worse than Covid. And then suddenly, as with the blink of an eye—when the trucker protest in Canada was finally gaining support from around the globe—all the news camera’s switched to Ukraine. Almost overnight, the disgraced leaders of the West became our heroes, facing up against prime evil far away in the Kremlin. The narrative all around the globe was plain and simple: It was an unprovoked war. Russia was the aggressor and Putin a crazy dictator, bent on reclaiming the former Soviet territories in Eastern Europe and even beyond. Ukraine was entirely innocent, and a sovereign independent democracy, just seeking to live in peace. We need not to worry though, the war (helped by our monstrous sanctions campaign) will bring Moscow to its knees in a few months. Ukrainian troops far outnumbered the Russians, and the Russian economy was not much bigger than that of Spain or Italy’s, we were told.

 

February 24, 2022

 

When the “Special Military Operation” (as Moscow called it) began on February 24, 2022, I was both shocked and deeply saddened. Having followed things for years I thought Putin’s patience and restraint would hold. It obviously did not. And so, from day one the war was fought on three “fronts,” with the collective West pouring in everything. On the military front things looked pretty good for Ukraine for a while; on the economic front everyone expected the Rouble to be turned into rubble with the Russian economy collapsing under the weight of all the sanctions; and on the information front the West enjoyed complete “full spectrum dominance,” mopping the floor with its adversary. And if anyone still doubted what Western intentions were all about, then President Biden’s wild off-script remarks in Poland spilled the beans— it was to get rid of the evil man in Moscow. We made one massive mistake though, not only at the beginning, but for the first eighteen months at least: We based our calculations and predictions not on reality, says Jacques Baud, but on what we wished to believe reality was. We believed our own propaganda! A lethal mistake.

 

Let’s listen to some of the top “experts” in the West as they voiced their opinions in our media. They almost sound like a church choir. The famed US political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote for the Huffington Post that “Russia is heading for a total defeat.” He said that Russia’s military planning was incompetent and he ruled out any possibility for a diplomatic solution. Russia is facing “outright defeat” and “sudden collapse” which would also spell the end of Putin. Seven months later Fukuyama could state on Radio Free Europe that “the ground for a massive Russian failure has already been laid…”

 

Noah Yuval Harari wrote for South Africa’s News24 that it was “Putin’s War” in which he tried to revive the Russian Empire, but that it would spell the end of Russia. Under the heading “Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war” the Israeli historian wrote for the British Guardian that the Russian dictator is heading towards an historic defeat for “[t]he Russian despot has told his lie so many times that he apparently believes it himself.”

 

Conservative Harvard historian Niall Ferguson weighed in too. He alleged that Russian aggression was not prompted by NATO’s eastward push at all, but by the desire to eradicate an Eastern European democracy and that Putin’s intentions are much larger than Ukraine. In March of 2022 Ferguson wrote for Nikkei Asia that “Czar Vladimir Putin is not mad, but rather corrupted by power and divorced from reality.”

 

Divorced from reality

 

But then as time went on, it became clear who was really divorced from reality. Russia’s economy, due to its vast natural resources and little national debt not only survived all the sanctions, but even bounced back. On the warfront the Ukrainian summer offensive failed spectacularly. And slowly but surely, the West was also beginning to lose the information war. Concerns were being raised in Western news media about Putin’s rise in popularity across the world, and that fewer and fewer Westerners believed our own narrative that he is a crazy dictator. Putin, by the way, admires the 20th Century Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin above any other, and quotes him regularly in his speeches. Ilyin, a devout Orthodox Christian,  was an ardent opponent of both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. Nevertheless, when Canada’s popular liberal Global News posted a short video where Putin was jokingly calling the speaker of the Canadian parliament either “a bigot or an idiot,” for inviting an unvetted Nazi war-criminal into the house, praise for the Russian president in the comment section was virtually 99 per cent.

A shift was taking place across the board. Major voices changed their tunes or came out bolder. Many influencers on the left also changed their minds, so that left and right began to see and say the same things, with one common concern driving them all: to find the truth and to seek an end to the senseless slaughter that to date had already claimed up to 600 000 Ukrainian lives (even though Pres. Zelenski claimed recently that only 33 000 of his men had died so far). Our popular Western narrative was showing serious signs of collapse in more ways than I can show here. It did not help either when three former European leaders, Poroshenko, Hollande and Merkel, came out openly in the press, admitting that they did not sign the 2014 Minsk peace accords in good faith. Like those Western leaders promising Michael Gorbachev in the early 90s that NATO would not move an inch east of Germany, these leaders also blatantly broke trust. They were fooling the Russians by signing, while they were in fact only buying time for Ukraine to get armed to the teeth by NATO during the Trump years. The Russians on the other hand, never changed their story: They wanted a pan-European security architecture, peace in the Donbass and no Neo-Nazi commandos on the other side of their border.

The Western narrative was increasingly looking incredulous. Not even the claim that the war was unprovoked was readily believed any more. A 2019 video appeared in which Olexii Arestovych, Zelensky’s chief advisor, stated boldly how they were going to provoke a war in 2021 or 2022. The contents were never denied. Another appeared where Senator Lindsay Graham said basically the same thing to Ukrainian troops around the same time. And so in January 2022, Kiev’s shelling of the Donbas skyrocketed, which a close friend of ours living in Krasnodar confirmed at the time. Refugees poured into Russia… forcing the Duma to call Putin to action. It was early February 2022. Meanwhile Ukraine’s reputation as a democracy was rapidly fading too. And so when Avdiivka fell at the two year anniversary of the start of the war, and even Western intelligence confirmed that Putin’s 87.5 per cent election victory in March was a fair reflection of Russian voter-sentiment, the writing was on the wall for the popular Western narrative. Perhaps worst of all for our withering narrative, was the news everywhere confirmed, that Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK flew to Kiev in April 2022 to tell Pres. Zelenski NOT to make peace with the Russians in Istanbul, when a deal was almost brokered.

Western narratives collapsed one after the other, just as the Ukrainian armed forces are right now collapsing before the Russian onslaught, even though it is so hard for us to admit either.  A recent narrative (or reason for the war) that astounded me, came from none other than Dr. Jordan Peterson; one for which he got a fair bit of flack on Politico. He concluded (as one of four reasons for the war) that Putin believed, and convinced his own nation, that Russia is a salvivic force against Western wokism. In a conversation with Lex Fridman Peterson went so far as to say that Putin “manipulated” his people (over 80 per cent of Russia) into believing him that he is the bulwark against Western woke insanity.

Really? Putin convinced them? This assumes that Russians are dumb people, which they are not; and Putin a charismatic speaker, which he is not. It means that they can’t read or think for themselves, which they can certainly do.  It assumes that they can’t see what’s is going on in the West, and that they don’t realize what will happen to their country if Russia loses the war and the West takes over. It also reveals Dr. Peterson’s complete lack of understanding of how multiple events since the end the Cold War, since the Maidan of 2014, and for sure since the start of the SMO in 2022, galvanized the Russian people behind Putin, in what they all consider to be an existential fight for survival.

Survival of what? Of their thousand year old country, faith and culture. Leaders of the West have said it more than once: This war is about “Western values.” When Russia invaded, the leader of Britain’s MI6 said it in so many words: The war is about LGBTQ+ values.  America made that much clear when it occupied Afghanistan, by raising its rainbow flag in Kabul and at the Bagram airbase. This must happen on the Red Square as well. No-one from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg has to listen to Mr. Putin to believe this. Maybe Dr. Peterson should ask himself why someone like a Joe Biden or an Emmanuel Macron or an Olaf Scholz is not able to manipulate their own people behind them in similar fashion. The simple answer is that the West is irreparably broken and terminally ill ever since it has lost its own soul. One only has to read Paul Robinson’s Russian Conservatism to realize why the Russian people, in spite of all their  admiration for so much of Western history and culture, would never want to go where we have gone, Putin or no Putin. 

Yet the mainstream media and most of the Western ruling class refused to change course. In fact, one part of their narrative was broadcasted only louder: The Kremlin has its eyes on the Baltics, Eastern Europe and beyond. By keeping this line alive, in spite of zero evidence for it, they could keep the war going. But as a sweet British girl asks on her youtube channel “Natasha’s Take on the World:” Why then did the Russians call for peace negotiations with Georgia, five days into a war that Georgia started (according to the European Commission and reported on the BBC) in 2008, and again shortly after invading Ukraine in March 2022 (which the West sabotaged)? Moscow was perfectly willing to settle. Was Vladimir Vladirimich Putin then not an imperialist dictator, bent on conquering the world? 

No morals left

The truth of the matter is, our narrative is not going to save us. The truth alone will set us free.

Both in American and in European corridors of power, the argument is regularly heard that funding the war in Ukraine is “a good investment.” They do the fighting, and we do the spending (borrowing from the next generation). And so another $91 billion was approved for Ukraine in April 2024 in Congress. We know none of this money will reach the ordinary Ukrainian, nor will it change the outcome of the war, but it will find its way back to the Military Industrial Complex in the US, and to the interest groups keeping the politicians in power who voted for it. And that’s why they need their narrative, even though the counter narrative from the ground, much closer to reality, has now become “unfalsifiable,” according to leading Western sources like the Financial Times. 

Ohio senator JD Vance called the reasoning behind the spending bill  “grotesque” in April of 2024.  And it is, for it shows that we have lost all sense of morality and sensitivity. Even worse was Anthony Blinken’s recent appeal to all Ukrainians in Kiev to “support conscription.” And yet we still have the nerve to say: “Losing the war would be a catastrophe…since we are fighting for Western values!” For which values exactly? We lied ourselves into this war, and are now even ready to “seize” frozen Russian assets worth $300 Billion. Whenever did that happen before? The only values we have left, it seems, is to have elections every four or five years, and to fly the rainbow banner!

The Russians, for their part, also need to look carefully in the mirror. I know from several reliable sources how the church of Jesus Christ in Syria is blossoming and growing again, thanks in part to Mr. Putin who could not stand watching her being wiped off the map by Sunni Jihadis, sponsored by the West. However, the NATO proxy war against Russia has now driven Moscow into the arms of nations such as North Korea, Iran and China, the former two of which have been some of the most brutal persecutors of Christianity and other minorities for half a century (see www.opendoors.org). The Hebrew prophets always warned the kings of Judah against the fatal trap of unholy political alliances, when facing a formidable adversary, saying: “If you do not believe, you shall not be established.” Aligning yourself with evil to overcome your foe, exposes your lack of faith in doing the right thing for the right reasons, trusting the living God. 

And yet it makes little difference to the fact that, as Swiss economist Claudio Grass noted, “Western civilization is being destroyed by their own corrupted and rotten political system.”

Anyone still wondering why we have a war in Ukraine today, should listen to the late Professor Stephen Cohen, in this incredible interview. Let us ask ourselves a simple question: Do we really want the truth, or an illusion we can bear to live with?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdCcR8pEm3g