Editor’s Note: There are many ways in which I often disagree with Caitlin Johnstone. I absolutely respect her intellect and writing skill and most of the time I agree with her perspectives, but sometimes we diverge. On the issue of Ukraine, I agree with her wholeheartedly. Just as Americans woke up to the realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, opposing them eventually despite widely approving of them in the beginning, so too do I hope more Americans will realize we’re being sold a false narrative in order to get our dollars and potentially our troops over to one of the most corrupt countries in the world. I support the Ukrainian people and their plight, but we are far too involved in this regional conflict thanks in large part to propaganda and gaslighting. Here’s Caitlin…
Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:
“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”
~ John Pilger
This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.
From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear that the western world was being smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. In the first full month of the conflict, American network TV stations gave more coverage to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the US has been directly involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam.
Literal Iraq war architects were some of the first pundits sought out for analysis of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls for insane escalations against Russia succeeded in pushing the Overton window of acceptable debate in the direction of warmongering extremism and away from support for diplomatic solutions.
And this was all easily piped into mainstream consciousness because the way had been lubricated by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass scale psychological operation known as Russiagate.
America’s most dangerous confrontation in generations just so happens to have been preceded by years of media-generated panic about that very same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. Heckin’ heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.
“It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
~ Noam Chomsky
This quote, from an interview last month with Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should be pointed out more often.
People don’t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they’re trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d immediately become suspicious because that’s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,” we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s understanding about them.
The need of the political/media class to continually bleat this phrase “unprovoked invasion” over and over again is itself a confession that they know they’re not telling the whole truth. It’s the imperial propaganda version of this classic tweet:
My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
— mike ginn (@shutupmikeginn) November 21, 2013
Chomsky outlines many of the provocations the US/NATO power structure engaged in prior to the conflict, which countless western analysts spent years warning was coming as a result of the provocative actions that were already being taken by the empire.
The invasion could easily have been prevented with a little diplomacy and some low-cost, high-reward concessions like honoring the Minsk agreements and providing assurances of neutrality for Ukraine, but they chose provocation and escalation instead. Add to that the exponentially increased shelling of the Donbas by Kyiv immediately prior to the invasion and you can understand why empire spinmeisters are working so hard to push the “unprovoked” line.
None of this is to say that Russia is blameless in this war; if I provoke someone into punching somebody they are still morally responsible for having thrown the punch, but I am also responsible for having provoked it. Russia is responsible for its actions, and the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure is responsible for its actions. Putin is responsible for invading, the western empire is responsible for provoking that invasion. Not complicated.
In the same interview Chomsky also says that “censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime” regarding this war. That assessment plus Pilger’s testimony about war propaganda unlike anything he’s ever seen shows that imperial narrative management is at an all-time high, which wouldn’t be happening unless the empire had some major agendas it wanted to roll out in the coming years.
“At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.”
~ Chris Hedges
— Chris Hedges (@ChrisLynnHedges) July 10, 2022
Echoing the urgent warnings that Stephen Cohen was making at the end of his life, a new article by Hedges outlines the profoundly dangerous games the empire is playing with a nuclear superpower in its continually escalating proxy war against Moscow.
The observations by Pilger and Chomsky about how much effort is going in to manipulating people’s understanding of this war make sense when you realize that the agendas the empire is trying to roll out against Russia now and then China later down the road stand not only to throw the world into poverty and starvation, but to wipe us off the face of this planet.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no good reason the world’s most powerful government needs to risk the life of everyone on earth in a bid to secure planetary domination. It is possible for all nations and peoples to simply get along and collaborate toward the common good together. All that would need to happen is for these agendas of total hegemony to be abandoned.
Unfortunately the managers of empire don’t seem to have any plans to abandon their goal of global conquest anytime soon, so we the ordinary people of this world may end up having to force the issue with them at some point in the interests of our very survival.
This is a hell of a time to be alive, but man they’ve been keeping it interesting.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
I don’t understand why Russia invaded Ukraine, unless it was to disrupt the world food supply. I can’t think of any other reason that makes sense.
In the beginning, it looked like they wanted to “appear” to overrun Ukraine. But not so much anymore. If the Russians wanted access to the Black Sea, at some point, the Ukraine would comply.
If the goal of the invasion was to disrupt the world food supply and secondarily the energy sector they have succeeded. I don’t understand what they expect to gain past the food and energy disruptions.
Russia invaded Ukraine because Ukraine was bombing the Russian speaking peoples of the Donbas. Buy an effing clue you maroon
Jimmy, you are no Jimmy, but you have no effing clue your self maroonchik. Russia invaded Donbas just as it invaded the rest of the country to Steal, Kill and destroy. Don’t pretend you don’t know who invaded who in 2014.
The people of the Donbas invited Russian intervention because contrary to your belief they don’t like being killed by Nazis.
Don’t pretend that your not a proficient goosestepper.
The US and its allies overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed anti-Russian puppets. See State Dept. official Victoria Nuland’s infamous “F–the EU” quote in which she was caught selecting the new leadership preferred by the US.
With NATO’s help the Ukraine then began deny rights to the ethnic Russian majority in the east. They also shelled eastern cities killing over 15,000 and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees into Russia.
This year, the people of the Donbas asked for Russian help as the shelling of their cities ramped up again despite treaties and agreements that such violence would stop.
There’s the provocation.
True. Also, type “NATO expansion through the years” in YouTube. Watch a couple of those vids and be educated.
wait……..you don’t understand? NATO has moved right up to russian borders. russia has warned the west for 40 years not to, and they did it anyway, got it now?
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Now for some math 2022 – 1990 = 32 years NOT FORTY SOME! Remain silent and fewer people will think you’re stupid.
Shouldn’t you be crouching in a foxhole somewhere in the Ukraine?
Diplomacy failed, remember? Russia is to blame for invading a sovereign country, period. Have you not listened to Russian TV and the things being said there. They are planning on taking back the old USSR and have been doing so for a decade or more. Your assertion that Putin can be negotiated with is laughable if it weren’t so serious. Of course now Putin wants Alaska back.
The only thing we can do is stop Putin in Ukraine and devastate his 3rd rate army and send them packing. That would include Crimea of course. We have a lot of Putin’s money that can go towards rebuilding Ukraine after. He’s another Stalin and will keep going until he either runs out of men and artillery, or the people of Russia refuse to fight.
Who is we?
I have no desire to join Nazis in killing innocent people. Why do you find mass murder and fascism to be so attractive?
And if the Russian army is third rate then why don’t you fight them yourself instead of trying to enlist me and my tax dollars? You’ve already missed your chance to be captured in Mariupol. Better get your boots on.
Are you a paid imperial troll? Washington and its NATO vassal states have been waging low-intensity war against Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Zio-Anglo-American Empire has finally pushed Russia to the point where Russia must fight or give up its sovereignty. It chose to fight. If WW3 is the result, the fault will be Washington’s, not Moscow’s.
Not too bright eh?
It is simple and straight forward: Putin wanted to stop the killing of the Russians in the East of Ukraine as he considers them Russians. And, to stop the Bio-labs we were financing. There are lessor reasons too but…
An evil corrupt country (Russia) invades another evil corrupt country (Ukraine) and we are supposed to care why?
I cared more about the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. The US is so good at hurting others while we hurt ourselves.
Any decent historian will understand this is a complex and messy situation. History actually tells us far more about the mess people create than about their sterling achievements. What disconcerts me most is the lack of effort on the part of Western leaders to try and find a peaceful resolution but instead they want to pour more gas on the flames of war. I wish that my family members that volunteered to fight against Germany in WWII had never done so because of the way the EU and USA has recklessly promoted this war.
If your family members refused to fight Germany in WWII. You would be speaking German @sshole!
No we would not be speaking German. The goal was not to eliminate the USA. The goal was to eliminate the synagogue of satan. The jew bankers with there hold on worthless fiat and inflation destroying Germany. The elimination of the jew run child sex trafficking in Germany that was well documented around the world as the place to go for pedos after the treaty of Versailles. The end of the secret societies created by Jews like the Freemasons who were corrupting the soul of the German folk. To stop the jew created communist ideology from overtaking the German nation. What is this war now? A war between the jew fag leader of Ukraine vs the jew fag leader of Russia? No, it is these wicked men controlled by jew oligarchs who’s goal is to wipe out all white Christian’s in the region except for the ones they kidnap for the sex slave trade which is legal in Israel. Then the main goal is accomplished of a land free and clear of goy for the khazaria kingdom to stake its claim. Read what General George Patton said about the war at its end and what he realized what wrongs we had committed against the Germans and how evil the Jews are.