Unreality check

As a person who has gone through the painful and discombobulating process of waking up from the media ecosystem of lies and propaganda, it's easy to forget that many if not most people are still happily ensconced in that ecosystem. It’s hard not to envy them a little; I can’t go back to the life I once had, where I could make small talk and laugh about things without the constant niggling knowledge that our civilisation is doing unspeakable evil because it’s profitable to do so.

It feels jarring to me when I'm talking to someone, as I was yesterday in my broken Czech, and they drop into conversation that they think Putin will keep going west into Poland. I asked why this person thought that, and he said that Putin had already invaded Ukraine, so why not?¹

It's hard to know where to start with a statement like that, which is why I usually don't bother, but this guy is almost family to me so I thought I'd try. I tried explaining that there genuinely were neo-Nazis in Ukraine that we in the west had been arming, training and funding since at least 2013 and who had been killing civilians in Donbass. I told him about Azov and their base in Mariupol, on the border with the DPR.

His response was typical, but very amiable compared to many other people's. He said that that was the Russian version of events, but he knew many Ukrainians who had come to Brno and they were fine, not Nazis at all.

Again, a familiar pattern - it is exhausting explaining that no, of course the vast majority of Ukrainians aren't Nazis, in fact many of those Nazis sent to terrorise Donbass weren't even Ukrainian. But this line of argument is already preempted by the assertion that "that's the Russian version of events", and it's too much to ask someone who still has faith in western media to believe that ‘the Russian version’ is just the truth, backed up by copious evidence, and that our entire media has been hiding this, often even reporting the facts but burying them in articles that reach wildly different conclusions. Unfortunately that's really stretching my Czech, too.

This guy is 25 years older than me, so he also had the "I was in the army" argument (Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic had national service until 2000), which is irrelevant but which no doubt feels relevant to anyone who has been in the army. He was also saying that Czech President Pavel commands respect because he was a NATO general, which I don't think is entirely correct, but I didn't say anything.

I had another brush with unreality a few weeks ago, when a Czech colleague was talking about heating his home, and he said that they had decided not to rely on gas because "since the invasion" it had become clear to them that countries that supply gas might not be reliable.

Does he know that Russia didn't choose to cut off the gas supply?, I thought. We - the EU, on orders from Washington - sanctioned them, in our stupid and misguided efforts to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the ruble into rubble, as Joe Biden put it. Our news reported all this at the time, but somehow they have managed to spin the cutting off of Russian gas as a Russian action, rather than the direct and intended effect of the sanctions. It's their gas and their hand on the tap, so in a sense it was them that cut it off, but we forced them to do it. I didn't ask him exactly what he meant by his comment, so I don't know what he thinks about the sanctions, but given the prevailing attitude it's safe to assume that it will be something very negative towards Russia.

I am always curious to know what people still stewing in mainstream media think the Nordstream bombing was all about, but I'm afraid to ask. It’s a case in which extreme doublethink is required to believe that we didn’t cut off our nose to spite our face, that in fact Russia blew up its own pipeline for reasons unknown, but many people still manage to do it or otherwise not think about it. The sanctions were the reason why household energy costs increased enormously, but the Nordstream sabotage is the reason why they can't come back down any time soon, and both of those acts were aggressive acts against Russia (and in the case of Nordstream, against the environment) - yet our media holds up both as evidence of Russian aggression, or at least talks about them as if there is some uncertainty over what happened. The fact that energy got more expensive because we had to start buying expensive American LNG is conveniently ignored.

The recent farcical accusations in the Wall Street Journal that the sabotage was carried out by a rogue group of Ukrainian saboteurs commanded by Valerii Zaluzhny (current Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK!), who refused to cancel it when Zelensky ordered him to at the last moment, and that the prime suspect is a diver called Volodymyr Z, should give an indication of what the US permanent state is trying to do to their 'allies' in Ukraine. But for anyone who still trusts the media, even a blatant throwing-under-the-bus like this one won't be enough to show them that the news is running cover for whichever intelligence agencies are calling the shots in Ukraine. It’ll just get metabolised somehow into the ‘Russia bad’ narrative, or more likely memory-holed the way Nordstream itself has been memory-holed, and if anyone brings it up in polite society then people will roll their eyes and make it very clear that this is not that kind of party.

1. Who knows, maybe we’ll get neo-Nazis to start firing long-range weapons from Poland, and when Russia attacks Poland we’ll act like that was unprovoked, too.