by Robert Gore, Straight Line Logic:

Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Part One

Think of an activity that’s essential for a government bent on subjugation: censorship and the suppression of expression. Governments on both sides of the present conflict have further jacked up their efforts to control expression from the plateau reached with Covid. Russia just passed a law imposing a 15-year prison sentence for anyone spreading “fake news” about its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and European governments and lapdog legacy and social media have blanketed populaces with official propaganda. Just as with Covid, questions and deviations from the approved narrative are stifled, censored, and punished.

TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

It was all so much easier back in the post World War II, pre-internet good old days. In the U.S. and Europe, there were several “papers of record” that had been infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and state-licensed radio and television stations. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t even that, just a few official propaganda organs.

Yet even with that degree of control, government repression wasn’t wholly effective. In the U.S. the truth got out about the Vietnam War. The Soviets could stop everything but people talking with each other, albeit in hushed tones. The cynical humor became legendary. (“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”) Humor always contains an element of truth, which is why statists can’t do humor. The number of citizens red-pilled to Soviet corruption and incompetence and the comparative freedom and wealth of the West reached critical mass and the government fell. It took way too long, but it happened.

Today, there are billions of potential journalists and video producers—anyone with a cell phone and access to the internet—and trillions of text and email communications. People still occasionally engage in face-to-face conversations. The infrastructure needed to monitor all this is complex, gargantuan, and costly. Only algorithms and artificial intelligence can sort through it to identify threats to the state. Once identified, a separate infrastructure is necessary to apprehend, arrest, process, incarcerate and perhaps execute those engaged in wrongthought, wrongspeak, wrongwrite, and wrongact.

Repression’s seen costs are dwarfed by its unseen costs. Neither the jailers or the jailed are doing anything productive. Persecuting people for telling the truth amounts to cutting off a society’s eyes, ears, and tongue. Deliberate ignorance imposes costs of which the ignorant will, to their detriment, remain forever ignorant.

There is a meaningful cost imposed even on those who escape state persecution. Through fear or cupidity they trim their own sails, conforming, flattering, and propagating the party line. There are undoubtedly capable journalists in today’s legacy media, but they’ve smothered themselves as it’s become a purveyor of state propaganda.

The best and brightest have migrated to the alternative media, perhaps the freest endeavor left on the planet. From its cacophony—freedom is never quiet—has emerged 99 percent of disclosed truths and counter-narrative analyses these past few years.

The legacy media is comatose, having lost all credibility and whatever control it had of the narrative. Its dwindling though still sizable audience is simple-minded sheep and predatory wolves. The alternative media will continue to expose mainstream depredations, but it has other concerns as well.

Covid threw a curveball. It posed complex issues of medicine and science and evoked widespread fear—even within the alternative media —amplified by the barrage of propaganda. The alternative media was on its back foot until it became apparent that Covid wasn’t going to be the predicted scourge; most people who got it recovered.

The trickle of articles that questioned and debunked became a flood. Junk science was exposed. More importantly, so was Covid tyranny as alarms sounded about the totalitarian design behind masks, physical distancing, lockdowns, job loss, mandatory vaccinations, quarantine camps, vaccine passports, digital IDs, and digital currencies. In many instances exposure amounted to telling readers what the designers themselves were saying.

Debunking Ukraine propaganda will take some work, but it’s less demanding than Covid and will be punctured in far less time. There’s the historical record that runs counter to the “narrative”: the U.S.-backed 2014 coup, the government’s corruption, payola to American political figures and their children, neo-Nazis, the war on eastern Ukraine’s Russians, the failure of the Minsk accords, and U.S. supported bioresearch labs. These are facts, and while the mainstream media is ignoring them, the alternative media isn’t.

For all its ramifications Ukraine is also easier to understand than Covid’s scientific complexities and unknowns. The Covid commissars hid behind them and peddled fear: You could die! That gave everyone a personal stake in Covid that’s lacking with Ukraine, which most Americans can’t find on a map.

The Russians’ methodical military strategy drains the drama from the Ukraine story. An invasion with indiscriminate attacks on cities and civilians would have been over in a week or two and would have been far more spectacular. The Russian strategy has been the boa constrictor’s slow strangulation, not the viper’s venomous quick kill. The Russians want to break Ukraine and achieve their objectives, but they don’t want to own it.

Skepticism that they can do so is warranted. Invasions are easy, withdrawals difficult. Regardless, the butcher’s bill from laying waste to the country and slaughtering civilians would be far higher than it will be if Russia hews to its present course and the outcome will be the same—Ukraine will capitulate.

By then the West will have grown bored with the story, assuming Western leaders don’t do something stupid—military intervention or nuclear weapons deployment. Provided they don’t (not a sure thing), Ukraine flag emojis will be replaced by ones suitable for the next manufactured crisis, maybe Cyber Polygon.

Meanwhile, the West’s sanctions against Russia will bite . . . the West. The Russian-Chinese alliance can cut off natural resources, minerals and materials vital for agriculture, industrial production, and high tech, although in Russia’s case the West has—suicidally—already cut itself off. De-dollarization will continue, and perhaps payment in gold will be demanded for whatever trade remains. Rubles, yuan or both could be backed with gold—Russia and China have plenty—instantly making them more attractive money than the West’s fiat crap.

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