The Pentagon Leaks: Washing Reality

The blow of a whistle gets the military out of its Ukrainian pickle

• Plans detailing war in Ukraine seem genuine, but whom do leaks serve?

• Authoritarian regimes must change reality to escape their fictional rhetoric.

• This exposé serves handily to reframe the facts, while saving face.

• A leak from a video gamer transforms Zelenskiy from dragon slayer to flight risk.

• Macron flies to China insisting he’ll never be U.S. “vassal.”

• Ukraine leans on Poland - implying that merger would disguise retreat.

• Western states, unable to meet retirement and welfare promises, seek liquidation.

• Fire sale as countries sell talent and companies overseas, following BASF.

• Narrative prepares population for disillusion - a gentle solution.

• Covid response, AI, threaten to crush the West’s middle class.

• Milit-intel silent in the face of energy and monetary sabotage or treason.

• For they were founded by oiler-bankers to justify and execute policy.

(About 2,600 words or 13 minutes of your company.)

See also: NATO Plan For Ukraine’s Spring Offensive Leaked (Apr 7, 2023)
Vaccines Withdrawn, Penalties Too... But The Project? (Apr 8, 2023)

Changing reality is more effective than reposting the narrative

Apr 15, 2023

The Pentagon identifies the leaker in record time. Journalists repeat CIA assurances that the leaked documents are real but altered, true but not, yes but no....

Observers who debate whether it is a leak or may have been staged are missing the point. The leaks serve a purpose by clearing the air.

When the leaden hand of censorship and propaganda asphyxiates discussion, governments struggle to change course. They push a ubiquitious narrative and dismiss questions as the misdirection of Russian agents. Such group think cannot change tack; it is incapable of adjusting to reality. Reality itself must change.

When the state corporate media repeat, like stenographers, whatever the millitary and intelligence services tell them — when journalists betray their trade by failing to push back and interrogate — the press is locked into a lie. Once the Pentagon leak broke, the media saw its role as hunting down the whistleblower Teixeira.

They tell us to read only “trusted sources” that are all-knowing. They tell us it is wrong to doubt government; that polarised discourse is dangerous — we must all think the same!

If the wise counsels of authority are always correct, they cannot possibly admit their previous policy to have been wrong.

If they cannot shift policy, reality must shift. Today’s truth is not yesterday’s. Wipe your memory and get with the programme.

Rear-view mirror

The state corporate media told us Zelenskiy was winning; Putin was felled by cancer; Russia had run out of missiles and men; that we must all bear higher fuel and food costs because Ukraine was worth it; just one more surge and victory would be... ... someone’s.

Authoritarian regimes always have this problem: present fiction is prelude to future glory.

It is not the politician’s promise of jam tomorrow, of delayed gratification, of handing over more taxes for vague promises of a pension and retirement.

The problem is not the tyrant’s demand of obediance in pursuit of loot, conquest and new order. It is the central planner’s conceit that Utopia and eternal happiness are just around the corner.

The central planner is like a driver who steers forward while looking in the rear-view mirror. He relies on past data to derive future decisons. All else is modelling.

His eternal claim is that he would have reached the destination if only if it hadn’t been for the those pesky wreckers and saboteurs, and those bourgeois fuddy-duddies who rejected the New Normal, who would not let rations and quotas, directives and diktats silence their warnings of the rockfall ahead.

In the land of the future, the future never comes. The only certainty: that which was unthinkable, will one day have become inevitable.

Reality winners

The state corporate media unanimously agreed that the leaked documents should not be published, while focusing on the mechanics of the leak itself, by an airman and video gamer called Jack Teixeira, through a Discord server where fellow gamers chat about virtual weapons.

The Guardian said the leaks could reveal intel methods by which the U.S. had confirmed the huge toll on Russian forces — by implication, the newspaper accepts at face value NATO’s claims of losses that are far from clear.

The Washington Post says the leaks reveal four more Chinese spy balloons. You can be sure the Pentagon will demand more air-to-air missiles.

CBS said the leaks showed Ukraine lacked the munitions to launch a spring offensive with any confidence in victory.

The leaks confirmed the presence of NATO special forces which is more or less what we knew.

This is not news to anyone who’s been following honest attempts to report on the war in Ukraine but it is a sharp reversal to a Western audience assured every day that Ukraine is on the brink of smashing Russia.

It took a video gamer to change our reality: president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is not the warrior king about to slay dragons but a flawed individual whom Western intelligence is monitoring carefully less he flee to Poland, Miami or elsewhere.

Governments target basement podcasters under a range of decrees, using everything from laws on radicalism to rapid response units and military “disinformation” regiments. They’re assisted by ranks of grant-funded academic experts on the “dangers of the web”; numerous billionaire-backed “non-profits” who trawl the net for examples of hate; and the social media giants themselves who spend millions on third-party censors. Governments around the world are drafting new “online harm” bills.

Opinion - Journalists! What is to be Done?

Plus ça change

The leaks create a new reality in which the U.S. and NATO can claim that their policy has not changed; that they never wavered or faltered in goal and commitment — while they climb down without losing face.

In the new narrative — one in which Ukraine's spring offensive may not happen — Zelenskiy may be removed and NATO’s last frontier with Russia may be reset. The line of contact would no longer bisect Ukraine’s blood-soaked wheat fields but be a fortified strip of Ukraine, west of Kyiv, that is annexed to Poland.

The two countries have already equalised rights, effectively removing their border, and allowing their citiziens to work freely and reside on each other’s territory.

A Polish front would combine an resolute response to Russia with an implicit retreat. The facts would change on the ground but the song remain the same.

This would right a historical wrong in the eyes of many Poles, and the proposal has popped up on television and most recently in the journal Foreign Policy. [1]

For the U.S. and NATO it would fulfil their desire to advance up to Russia’s doorstep. It would also mask a quivering jowl and twitching eye (think of Clouseau’s nemesis chief inspector Dreyfus in Pink Panther) in the event that Russia retains Crimea and most of the Donbas.

Would it be another military embarrassment or would it be goal achieved: Ukraine, like Afghanistan, was used to increase the military budget and line the pockets of arms manufacturers. Billions of dollars are unaccounted for and the U.S. Congress does not seem to care — one can only assume that it approves of the distribution to stakeholders.

Grandes vacances

French president Emmanuel Macron is on the verge of losing France, a country of strong regional traditions united by a national idea. When he ventured into the streets recently the public anger was right in his face, driven by a migrant crisis, economic austerity and the gradual crumbling of France’s welfare state, symbolised by Macron’s move to raise the retirement age without a vote in L’Assemblée nationale.

His answer was to fly to Beijing where he said Europe should not be a U.S. “vassal” on Taiwan and instead called for “strategic autonomy.” The Élysée presidential palace moved quickly to remove even more frank comments from compliant media.

US Republican senator Marco Rubio said that if the French president’s comments reflected the view of other European countries, the US should leave Europe to handle the war in Ukraine and focus Washington’s policy on relations with China.

The leaks would tend to distory reality to that end, as would the U.S. response to Macron’s comments from Beijing.

Beijing likely regards the West’s implosion with perplexity, and the resulting vacuum if not as an opportunity, as an imperative if there is to be any international order, rules-based or not.