Thread by @caitoz

Umm… Are We The Baddies?

"It certainly is interesting that the fight for freedom and democracy requires so much censorship, warmongering, xenophobia, propaganda and bloodlust."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/umm-are-we-t…

Umm… Are We The Baddies? (Audio)

"Reuters reports that Facebook and Instagram are now allowing calls for the death of Russians and Russian leaders in exemption from the platforms' hate speech terms of service due to the war in Ukraine."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/um…

"Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday"

https://twitter.com/ReutersWorld/status/1502049271545221131

Twitter has also altered its rules against incitement and death threats in the case of Russian leaders and military personnel, as Ben Norton explains here for Multipolarista.
multipolarista.com/2022/03/10/twi…

Last month we also learned that Facebook is now allowing users to praise the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion because of the war, a move that is arguably the most liberal thing that has ever happened.

https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/1496904703304617986

Western institutions everywhere are rejecting all things Russia with such a savage degree of xenophobia it really ought to shock anyone who was born after the 1800s.
Everything from Russian athletes,

https://twitter.com/HaasF1Team/status/1500031737581158412

to Russian musicians
globalnews.ca/news/8669353/m…

to Russian-made films
spectrumnews1.com/oh/columbus/ne…

to Russian composers
classical-music.com/news/cardiff-p…

to Russian Netflix shows
thetimes.co.uk/article/war-in…

to lectures about Russian authors
english.almayadeen.net/news/Art-Cultu…

to Russian restaurants
nytimes.com/2022/03/08/nyr…

to Russian vodka
edition.cnn.com/2022/03/03/bus…

to Russian-bred cats
washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/…

to Russian trees
treeoftheyear.org/Blog/Russia-lo…

to dishes that sound a little too much like "Putin"
theguardian.com/world/2022/mar…

...have been cancelled to varying degrees around the western world.

These are the people who are being smashed with crushing economic sanctions while western pundits proclaim that "There are no more ‘innocent’ ‘neutral’ Russians anymore" and ask "At what point do you hold a people responsible for putting an evil despot in power?"

This even as the Russian people are being arrested by the thousands in anti-war protests, putting to shame our own western society that has generally slept through war after war in the years since 9/11 while our militaries have been killing millions.
aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/10…

(That's right, killing millions of people since 9/11)

https://twitter.com/NafeezAhmed/status/1438175494801920000

And this is all over a war that the western empire knowingly provoked, almost certainly planned in advance, and appears to be doing everything possible to ensure that it continues.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/ukraine-is-a…

Antiwar's @DecampDave reports that Washington is still to this day not engaging in serious diplomacy with Moscow over this conflict, preferring to strangle Russia economically and pour weapons into Ukraine to make the war as painful and costly as possible.
news.antiwar.com/2022/03/10/the…

@DecampDave Meanwhile the entire western political/media class seems to be doing everything it can to turn this from a regional proxy war into a very fast and radioactive World War 3. Calls for a no-fly zone over Ukraine are now ubiquitous.

https://twitter.com/anyaparampil/status/1501665046769897479

@DecampDave Claims that more directly confrontational military aggressions against Russia won't start a nuclear war (or that it's worth the risk anyway) are becoming more and more common in western punditry.

https://twitter.com/AthertonKD/status/1502152585435701261

@DecampDave Democrats are braying for Russian blood while Republicans are attack Democrats for being insufficiently hawkish and escalatory in this conflict, creating a horrifying dynamic where both parties are trying to out-hawk each other to score political points and nobody calls for peace

@DecampDave As luck would have it, US officials have also selected this precarious nuclear tightrope walk as the perfect time to begin hurling accusations that Russia is preparing a biological attack, potentially as a false flag blamed on Ukraine or the United States.

https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/1501676240180322311

@DecampDave This coincides with Victoria Nuland's admission before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Ukraine has "biological research facilities" that the US is "quite concerned" might end up "falling into the hands of Russian forces".

@DecampDave All of this on top of the unprecedented wave of authoritarian censorship that has been tearing through the US-centralized empire as our rulers work to quash dissident voices around the world.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/defending-fr…

@DecampDave It certainly is interesting that the fight for freedom and democracy requires so much censorship, warmongering, xenophobia, propaganda and bloodlust.

It's almost enough to make you wonder: are we the baddies?

@DecampDave I am of course only trying to make a point here. Geopolitical power struggles are not contested by opposing sides of heroes and baddies like a Marvel superhero movie, though you'd never know it from all the hero worship of Zelensky and the self-righteous posturing of westerners.