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As Prof. John McMurtry explains in "Global Society Destruction and the Ukraine Crisis: Decoding Its Deep Structural Meaning", [vii] the "West" consistently uses ad hominen and "reverse-projection" propaganda strategies to create a domestic war-mongering group-think. NATO, for example, will first vilify a target country's leader, and then project its own attributes onto the enemy. Consider some examples of "reverse projection": the West has Weapons of Mass Destruction, but CIA asset Hussein did not, though he was accused of having them. The US has military bases throughout the world as it expands its hegemony. Russia does not, but the West accuses Russia of expanding its hegemony. The West orchestrated a coup to topple the elected government of Ukraine. Russia did not, but the West accuses Russia all the same.
The repetition of these propaganda strategies entices domestic mass-media consuming populations to turn on their "Hate switches".
How do nations qualify to become the next target for a NATO war of aggression? McMurtry explains that the target nation invariably has more advanced social structures than its neighbours, and that this contradicts the West's agenda which seeks supranational corporate control of resources and markets. The agenda, then, is to destroy these societal structures with a view to replacing them with parasitical models that enrich the oligarch classes and impoverish the masses. It's a globalized settler/colonial dynamic, where the masses, including those in the NATO aggressor nations, are impoverished, and lose their "social life bases" as the domestic and international oligarch classes enrich themselves.
Consider the examples of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela:
Ghali Hassan reports in "Living Conditions In Iraq: A Criminal Tragedy"[viii] that, prior to 1991,Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the Middle East, and one of the best education systems, as well as modern sanitary and water infrastructure systems. He reports that Iraq ranked 50 out of 130 in the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Index.
This author reports that prior to the NATO invasion, Libya [ix] had the highest standard of living in Africa, a high Human Development Index (HDI),ranked above the regional average, free public healthcare, free public education, 89% adult literacy rate (with girls outnumbering boys by 10% in secondary and tertiary education), subsidized, affordable food, and almost no homelessness.
A similar narrative emerges with Syria. In an article by Eva Bartlett, "The real Syrian moderates: voices of reason" [x] Dr. Shaaban, a former prof. at Eastern Michigan University and now Political and Media Advisor to President al-Assad, recounts that,
"Syria was formerly one of the fastest developing countries in the world, and one of the safest. We have free education and health care. We did not know poverty; we grew our food and produced our own clothing. At universities, 55 percent of the students were women."
Though not being directly invaded at the moment, Venezuela too has a superior social development structure relative to its neighbours. In "A Coup in Venezuela Means Another Victory For Corruption"[xi] this author notes:
Between 1998 and 2011, the poverty rate dropped from 49% to 27.4%
Venezuela's extreme poverty rate dropped from 11.4% to 6.9% in ten years
Venezuela reduced its extreme poverty rate from 6.3% to 5.5% in 2013 alone
Venezuela now boasts the lowest Gini coefficient in Latin America (a measure of income inequality, lower numbers mean less inequality)
Venezuelans have access to free and universal healthcare
Access to quality education (at all levels) is guaranteed for all
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