You Furnish The Photos, I'll Furnish The War

"Though the Cuban insurrection against their Spanish rulers was stagnating, Hearst continued to send many of his high-profile writers and illustrators to the Cuba in hopes of capturing a great story. Among Hearst’s employees was the famed illustrator Frederic Remington. In 1897, Remington became very bored by the lack of anything newsworthy in Cuba and cabled to Hearst, “Everything quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. Wish to return.” In response to Remington’s message, Hearst reportedly replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

In 2009, as the US worked on a Color Revolution in Iran, a beautiful young woman walking down the street was shot in the chest by a sniper. Her death was recorded and spread all over the world in a matter of hours by the Mighty Wurlitzer, to show how very brutal the Iranians were. No one asked why a camera was pointed on her at that minute, or how the footage made it around the world so fast. That was the first time I realized that they were creating incidents instead of simply recording them.

In Syria, as the US-backed terrorists were being removed from eastern Aleppo, to screams of outrage from the media, another photo went viral, that of a little boy sitting in an ambulance. Media consumers were told lurid tales of the evil Russians who killed him, in order to get people to support the jihadists occupying eastern Aleppo. His father explains that the boy was captured by the camera team while the father was trying to rescue his family from the rubble.

Today we are being shown the graphic video of a tank hitting a car in Ukraine and told that it was a Russian tank who deliberately ran over a car, cause that's just how brutal the Russians are. No one asks if it is actually a Russian tank or how Russian tanks ended up in the middle of Kiev so fast (I guess the ground is frozen, amirite?) or why a camera was pointed at the car or how it spread all over the world's media so fast.

And there is another story going around, but without video, the story of brave Ukrainian soldiers who refused to surrender to the Russians and were killed for their defiance. I have a Russian friend who remarks on the ability of the Mighty Wurlitzer to shape the narrative, create Reality (h/t Karl Rove) and furnish the war.

"So now we have Blinken instead of Rove, defining realities and mocking the rest of the world for trying to proof that these realities are based on fantasies and projections. The case in point is the already famous story of the Snake Island (Zmeinnyi Ostrov) near Odessa. According to the Karl Rove version of reality, there were 13 Ukrainian defenders of the island, who when told to surrender, said "Putin, go f..k yourself" and then they were shot. New Martyrs, new myth of the heavenly thirteen was born. Writers and poets already began to write their poems about stone like heroes, who turned into stone, defending their island. In comes Russian version with the pictures of 82 soldiers defending the island, who were offered to surrender -- which they did, and were taken to Sebastopol, fed, allowed to call their parents, and promised to be released when the war is over. There are plenty of videos to that effect and so on".

The power of the US/NATO media to shape the opinions of people, to create entire war narratives to get people cheering on war is incredible. It's obviously not new, but they have perfected the art of mind manipulation over the last 120 years, and now can turn people into slavering war supporters in a matter of hours, instead of days or weeks. Either people evolve into rational beings or we will goosestep and cheer our way into oblivion.