Even the wars that historians judge to have been noble and beneficial rely on popular support marketed and sustained by lies.
Contrary to what the English government told its people during World War I, German soldiers didn't bayonet Belgian babies in their cribs.
The "cocaine" U.S. troops claimed to have found in Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's home was nothing of the sort.
The Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden - it was George W. Bush who refused to take him because to accept would have denied him his excuse to invade Afghanistan.
As Gen. and Director of British Military Intelligence John Charteris observed after World War I, "to make armies go on killing one another, it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy."
America's incipient proxy war against Russia over Ukraine is no exception to the rule. BS has been flying fast and furious as media outlets dutifully align behind the U.S. government war machine and the array of defense contractors that influence it.
As usual, their purpose is clear - spook the American people into supporting a war in a country they hardly know anything about, take the side of a highly problematic regime, and create a world of death and destruction for the benefit of greedy warmongers, before the rubes/voters figure out they've been conned.
Let's take a look at some of the biggest lies being used to garner and prop up support for the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelensky:
Lie No. 1: Ukraine is a democracy
Zelensky won the presidency in a fair election in 2019. But context is critical. The 2019 election was held in the immediate aftermath of a brutal coup d'etat. In 2014, a violent mob comprising neo-Nazi extremist groups like the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, and covertly supported by the Obama administration, forced President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically elected and pro-Russian, to flee for his life.
The new revolutionary government held an election in 2014, which Petro Poroshenko won. Zelensky is Ukraine's second post-coup ruler.
Here's an analogy for Americans: Instead of failing, Donald Trump's Jan. 6 coup succeeds. Biden flees to Canada and, even though he lost, Trump serves a second term. Trump endorses Mike Pence in 2024. Pence wins that election. Is Pence a legitimate president? Is America a democracy?
Democrats would answer no as do the 49% of Ukrainians, including many ethnic Russians who voted for Yanukovych. They feel the same way about Zelensky, that he's not legitimate which is why ethnic-Russian areas in the eastern Donbas region, Donetsk and Luhansk, declared independence and broke away from Ukraine after the 2014 coup, and ethnic-Russian Crimeans greeted Russian forces when they annexed the peninsula.
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