Let’s take a cursory look at the narratives related to the wars fought since 1914. First, it was the war to end all wars, which instead contributed to the second even more violent war that was announced to be fought to free the world from Nazi totalitarianism by making the Four Freedoms reality. But then those couldn’t be enforced due to the Communist Menace which brought us the Anti-Communist Crusade where every anti-colonial action became a battlefield within the Cold War, which served very well to hide numerous genocides committed by the Colonial powers. But then the Big Menace—USSR—retreated and then imploded, which brought a new doctrine that was the same as the old doctrine—dominate the world: The Wolfowitz Doctrine where no equal was to be accepted by the Outlaw US Empire and codified by Joint Vision 2010, published in 1996 and restated in Joint Vision 2020, published in 1999, both proclaiming the #1 policy of the Outlaw US Empire to be Full Spectrum Domination of the planet and its people, which of course needed a new cover story—Narrative— to hide its genuine nature. Thus, we got the 911 “New Pearl Harbor” to “justify” the new Crusade against Terrorism—the War OF Terror. Of course, all the Terror was supplied by NATO, so a new narrative is now needed to obfuscate the current reality: The War on Extremism. Note how all the above is mostly a mirror that projects Western behavior onto the supposed enemy of the moment. That’s the “tool” the ancien regime that was supposedly defeated during WW1 used to resurrect itself to continue onward to this very moment. That’s the brilliant insight provided by Arno Mayer’s deep study into WW1’s prologue and aftermath that’s also present within Dr. Hudson’s scholarship showing today’s Neoliberalism to be the product of the reaction of the Feudal Rentier Class against the regulatory progress being made by the 19the Century’s Classical political-economist’s and their allies in governments that happened in parallel with the building onset of war in 1914.
Yes, today’s troubles have very deep roots, and the players composing the so-called Deep State are essentially the heirs to the Atlanticist Feudal Rentier Class that controlled all the “aristocratic” upper houses of Europe and America’s Parliamentary governments—the age-old oligarchy that’s ruled commoners in the West for most of the last 3-4,000 years. The big difference is that during the age of Serfdom no narrative was required to sway the masses as the advent of Industrial War had yet to arrive requiring mass armies of millions who did need to be convinced that they had to risk their lives for that upper class that was now in the process of being hidden via the cloak of narrative. And thus, propaganda was essentially invented during the onset to WW1 and massively expanded as soon as the war began. And of course, that’s what the Narrative is—Propaganda: a fictitious story created to hide truth/reality.
Of course, even before WW1 narratives existed largely known as myths, superstitions and religions. IMO, at some point during the current century, societies will need to come to grips with reality finally trumping those contrivances aimed at social control. Here it becomes vital that people understand the contrived narratives’s purpose is to obscure two realities—that of current happenings and the identities of those actually controlling Western governments, where in the latter case the ancien regime hides behind political parties and the supposed mechanisms of democracy. That’s why scholars like Sheldon Wolin are capable of diagnosing and describing our reality as “Inverted Totalitarianism,” or that previously shown by Bertram Gross—“Friendly Fascism.” Then there’s the contemporary example of the DNC being 100% authoritarian in making Kamela Harris its presidential candidate, yet not one peep from BigLie Media or the Republican Party why that was possible—the DNC’s a private corporation and can thus do whatever its board decides is best for the DNC, not what’s best for America or what American voters decided via the Primary process, which is precisely what the court ruled the DNC can do. I was hopeful the tattered shroud of “American Democracy” would finally be fully torn from Lady Liberty, but it appears that myth will live until the votes are counted in November.
So, why this topic today? It’s in collaboration with Alastair Crooke’s Strategic Culture Foundation essay that explores the same topic: “The western way of war – Owning the narrative trumps reality” During his chat with Judge Napolitano this morning, events in Occupied Palestine were the main topic that interacted somewhat with Crooke’s essay since BigLie Media was all about distorting reality with absolute falsehoods related to what actually happened there. Despite the tenuous connection with the essay, the chat’s well worth the 30 minutes to watch as other important points are made. First, if the Zionists defense of the attack and success of its counter was as described, then why was a complete media blackout imposed dealing with what actually occurred within Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Crooke outed the photo used by NY Times and WSJ on their print edition covers as an old photo along with the completely false narrative. Crooke also made the point that both Nasrallah and a Zionist Major General Brik used the term attrition to describe the nature of the war, which is one I also began using months ago, while also citing the fact that the Zionists lack Operational Depth, which is the key to withstanding attritional warfare. Then of course, there’s the narrative deception about the Zionist’s true aims—Genocide—versus the cover story: self-defense, an eventual ceasefire and return to the status quo ante. The Global Majority is no longer convinced by the narrative, but many is the West are still, particularly the politicos who endorse it, although they’re likely paid to do so. Now, after all this preamble, let’s get to Crooke’s essay:
War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself.
The West has come to view ‘owning’ the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual ‘victory’ thus trumps ‘real’ reality.
So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media.
This objective enjoys a higher priority than, say, ensuring a manufacturing capacity sufficient to sustain military objectives. Crafting an imagined ‘reality’ has taken precedence over shaping the ground reality.
The point here is that this approach – being a function of whole of society alignment (both at home and abroad) – creates entrapments into false realities, false expectations, from which an exit (when such becomes necessary), turns near impossible, precisely because imposed alignment has ossified public sentiment. The possibility for a State to change course as events unfold becomes curtailed or lost, and the accurate reading of facts on the ground veers toward the politically correct and away from reality.
The cumulative effect of ‘a winning virtual narrative’ holds the risk nonetheless, of sliding incrementally toward inadvertent ‘real war’.
Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.
Had the Ukrainian forces succeeded in capturing the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, they then would have had a significant bargaining chip, and might well have syphoned away Russian forces from the steadily collapsing Ukrainian ‘Line’ in Donbas.
And to top it off, (in infowar terms), the western media was prepped and aligned to show President Putin as “frozen” by the surprise incursion, and “wobbling” with anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.
Bill Burns, head of CIA, opined that “Russia would offer no concessions on Ukraine, until Putin’s over-confidence was challenged, and Ukraine could show strength”. Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk incursion – in itself – would not bring Russia to the negotiating table; It would be necessary to build on the Kursk operation with other daring operations (to shake Moscow’s sang froid).
Of course, the overall aim was to show Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in line with the narrative that, at any moment Russia, could crack apart and scatter to the wind, in fragments. Leaving the West as winner, of course.
In fact, the Kursk incursion was a huge NATO gamble: It involved mortgaging Ukraine’s military reserves and armour, as chips on the roulette table, as a bet that an ephemeral success in Kursk would upend the strategic balance. The bet was lost, and the chips forfeit.
Plainly put, this Kursk affair exemplifies the West’s problem with ‘winning narratives’: Their inherent flaw is that they are grounded in emotivism and eschew argumentation. Inevitably, they are simplistic. They are simply intended to fuel a ‘whole of society’ common alignment. Which is to say that across MSM; business, federal agencies, NGOs and the security sector, all should adhere to opposing all ‘extremisms’ threatening ‘our democracy’.
This aim, of itself, dictates that the narrative be undemanding and relatively uncontentious: ‘Our Democracy, Our Values and Our Consensus’. The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraces ‘Joy’ (repeated endlessly), ‘moving Forward’ and ‘opposing weirdness’ as key statements. They are banal, however, these memes are given their energy and momentum, not by content so much, as by the deliberate Hollywood setting lending them razzamatazz and glamour.
It is not hard to see how this one-dimensional zeitgeist may have contributed to the U.S. and its allies’ misreading the impact of today’s Kursk ‘daring adventure’ on ordinary Russians.
‘Kursk’ has history. In 1943, Germany invaded Russia in Kursk to divert from its own losses, with Germany ultimately defeated at the Battle of Kursk. The return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must have left many gaping; the current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army.
Over the centuries, Russia has been variously attacked on its vulnerable flank from the West. And more recently by Napoleon and Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Russians are acutely sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns et al think this through? Did they imagine that NATO invading Russia itself would make Putin feel ‘challenged’, and that with one further shove, he would fold, and agree to a ‘frozen’ outcome in Ukraine – with the latter entering NATO? Maybe they did.
Ultimately the message that western services sent was that the West (NATO) is coming for Russia. This is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. Reading the runes of Bill Burns message says prepare for war with NATO.
Just to be clear, this genre of ‘winning narrative’ surrounding Kursk is neither deceit nor feint. The Minsk Accords were examples of deceit, but they were deceits grounded in rational strategy (i.e. they were historically normal). The Minsk deceits were intended to buy the West time to further Ukraine’s militarisation – before attacking the Donbas. The deceit worked, but only at the price of a rupture of trust between Russia and the West. The Minsk deceits however, also accelerated an end to the 200-year era of the westification of Russia.
Kursk rather, is a different ‘fish’. It is grounded in the notions of western exceptionalism. The West perceives itself as tacking to ‘the right side of History’. ‘Winning narratives’ essentially assert – in secular format – the inevitability of the western eschatological Mission for global redemption and convergence. In this new narrative context, facts-on-the-ground become mere irritants, and not realities that must be taken into account.
This their Achilles’ Heel.
The DNC convention in Chicago however, underscored a further concern:
Just as the hegemonic West arose out of the Cold War era shaped and invigorated through dialectic opposition to communism (in the western mythology), so we see today, a (claimed) totalising ‘extremism’ (whether of MAGA mode; or of the external variety: Iran, Russia, etc.) – posed in Chicago in a similar Hegelian dialectic opposition to the former capitalism versus communism; but in today’s case, it is “extremism” in conflict with “Our Democracy”.
The DNC Chicago narrative-thesis is itself a tautology of identity differentiation posing as ‘togetherness’ under a diversity banner and in conflict with ‘whiteness’ and ‘extremism’. ‘Extremism’ effectively plainly is being set up as the successor to the former Cold War antithesis – communism.
The Chicago ‘back-room’ may be imagining that a confrontation with extremism – writ widely – will again, as it did in the post-Cold War era, yield an American rejuvenation. Which is to say that a conflict with Iran, Russia, and China (in a different way) may come onto the agenda. The telltale signs are there (plus the West’s need for a re-set of its economy, which war regularly provides).
The Kursk ploy no doubt seemed clever and audacious to London and Washington. Yet with what result? It achieved neither objective of taking Kursk NPP, nor of syphoning Russian troops from the Contact Line. The Ukrainian presence in the Kursk Oblast will be eliminated.
What it did do, however, is put an end to all prospects of an eventual negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Distrust of the U.S. in Russia is now absolute. It has made Moscow more determined to prosecute the special operation to conclusion. German equipment visible in Kursk has raised old ghosts, and consolidated awareness of the hostile western intentions toward Russia. ‘Never again’ is the unspoken riposte. [My Emphasis]
Crooke’s closing point is one many don’t want to believe, but his prose is restrained compared to that of Dmitry Medvedev writing on his Telegram on 20 August:
In my opinion, there has been one danger lately, albeit theoretically, – a negotiation trap where our country could fall under a certain set of circumstances. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime. With unclear prospects and
consequences.
After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything fell into place. The idle chatter of intermediaries not authorized by anyone on the topic of a beautiful world has stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don't say it out loud. They understand that NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY!
So let the vile bastard with a nasty muzzle and disheveled white hair from the country where the terrorist operation was being prepared not rejoice in it. His country has done much worse than the territory of the former Ukraine under his care: there will be much more senseless spending, significantly more damaged military equipment and radically more coffins. And let the unfortunate Ukrainian serfs now voluptuously kiss the bloody hands of the necrophiles who mock them - their Anglo-Saxon masters. [Emphasis Original]
Do you think the writers of the Western Narrative heard Medvedev? And prior to the above he wrote this excerpt on 7 August:
There is another important political and legal consequence of what happened. From this moment on, the NWO should acquire an openly extraterritorial character. This is no longer just an operation to return our official territories and punish the Nazis. It is possible and necessary to go to the lands of the still existing Ukraine. To Odessa, to Kharkov, to Dnepropetrovsk, to Nikolaev. To Kyiv and beyond. There should be no restrictions in the sense of some recognized borders of the Ukrainian Reich. And now we can and should talk about this openly, without embarrassment and diplomatic curtseys. The terrorist operation of the Bandera followers should remove any taboos from this topic. Let everyone, including the British bastards, realize this: we will stop only when we consider it acceptable and profitable for ourselves. [Emphasis Original]
It’s unknown how deep the closing sentence is shared with the top echelon of Team Putin, although it has been mentioned before by several. I know Putin has recently met with both field commanders and the General Staff along with the Security Council, but there’s very little information from them. The choice to call the Kursk invasion by NATO an Anti-Terrorist Operation—ATO—meaning it’s a police action under Russian law so there’s no need to observe/obey the rules of war. By extension, it makes NATO and Kiev terroristic entities, which also has international legal considerations. Looks like the genuine terrorists have finally been named and an actual war against terrorism will now be mounted to rid the world of that extremism. Quite a maturation of the situation Putin vowed to put an end to back in 2022 and repeated several times since.
So, we can expect the amounts of projection done by BigLie Media to escalate against Russia, China, Iran, Trump, and anything else that aims to counter the “whole of society” theme to cast those not us as Extremist Others, another Manichean eschatological staging of the Good Versus Evil zeitgeist that’s been at the core of the Western Narrative since WW1. And yet, not all is explained as the Why lurking behind it all has yet to be explained here at the Gym, although it’s been explained elsewhere, Hudson’s Destiny of Civilization being one of those places.
*
*
*
Like what you’ve been reading at Karlof1’s Substack? Then please consider subscribing and choosing to make a monthly/yearly pledge to enable my efforts in this challenging realm. Thank You!
I shake my head when I see msm reporting on Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Iran, Lebanon. It truly is a mirror world. Thanks for the excellent context you provide, Karl.
Many thanks for your brilliant commentary on our looking-glass world.