Below are a couple of pieces from a source that may raise the hackles of some of our readers. Please bear with us because there are sound reasons why we’re linking to these pieces which we’ll briefly explain.

It will not have escaped your attention that there have been calls for a NATO enforced no fly zone to be set up over Ukraine. These calls come from a number of Ukranian politicians which to be honest, was expected. What is more worrying is the number of people in the West calling for a no fly zone to be set up and enforced without seeming to understand just what this means. Basically, it means direct military engagement between NATO and Putin’s Russia. Direct military engagement that will dramatically escalate the situation leading us straight to World War Three. This is why we’ve featured the piece by Edward Curtin in a bid to get people to take a step back and think through the implications of what they’re calling for. It will hopefully illuminate why we get really p***ed off with the unthinking idiots calling for the setting up of a no fly zone.

The people calling for the setting up of a no fly zone have, to put it bluntly, been played. Propaganda and psyops are an integral part of warfare. They’re designed to sell narratives that the protagonists on either side want to sell to their own populations and also to the ‘enemy’ populations. The first casualty of any war is the truth. The current conflict between Russia and Ukraine has complex and messy roots. While it’s understandable that in a time of crisis people want explanations of a situation that make sense, there’s always the danger of accepting a narrative that’s overly simplistic. The simpler and more emotive a message is, the more people should be asking serious questions about what it’s intended to achieve. Inevitably, it’s aimed at getting a substantial section of the population to support a course of action which any free thinking, rational person would reject out of hand. This is the reasoning behind our featuring the piece by Dustin Broadbery.

Hopefully, this exercise in featuring readings about the conflict from a range of perspectives will encourage people to think critically about what’s going on. Encouraging people to think critically about the situation is not intended to be an exercise in intellectual gymnastics. The aim is for it to inform the strategy and tactics needed in the short, medium and long terms to bring down a system that treats all of us as mere pawns in their sick power games.

On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss – Edward Curtin | OffGuardian | March 13, 2022

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining US Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first-strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official US policy.

My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet – Dustin Broadbery | OffGuardian | March 15, 2022

The intersection of social science and military intelligence is recognised by the US Army to have begun during WW1 when pre-war journalist Captain Blankenhorn established the Psychological Subsection in the War Department to coordinate combat propaganda.

These grey-area operations, as they become known, plateaued during world war II, when military strategists, building on wartime research in crowd psychology, drafted social scientists into the war effort through the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). The office would aggregate information about the German people and develop propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOPS) to lower their morale. This culminated in 1942, with the US federal government becoming the leading employer of psychologists in the US.