Source: Unz.com
Russia’s nuclear arsenal of nearly 6,000 warheads is just as formidable as our own, and its revolutionary hypersonic delivery system far superior. A command by Russian President Vladimir Putin could annihilate the bulk of America’s population in less than an hour.
Under such dangerous circumstances, our need for careful and circumspect behavior towards the other nuclear superpower is obvious, but the reality has been entirely different. With one or two exceptions, we carefully avoided any potentially disastrous confrontation during the 1950s and 1960s height of our old Cold War, but in the recent years and especially the recent months of our renewed conflict, we have done exactly the opposite, now spending many tens of billions of dollars to wage a deadly proxy-war on Russia’s own border. Top media pundits and leading U.S. Senators have publicly called for Putin’s assassination, and our officials have boasted to the press of their successful role in killing numerous Russian generals. Such extraordinarily provocative actions would have been unimaginable under President Ronald Reagan, let alone his more restrained predecessors such as Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon.
Yet oddly enough, while most of our mainstream media routinely castigated and condemned Reagan for his occasionally harsh rhetoric against our Communist Russian adversary, today virtually all of our major media regularly spews forth vastly harsher condemnations of Christian Russia and its leadership. Indeed, these outlets spent four years denouncing President Donald Trump for being insufficiently anti-Russian, sometimes even accusing him of being a Russian puppet. A couple of years ago such extremely irresponsible behavior had led the late Prof. Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York Universities, an eminent Russia scholar, to declare that the threat of global nuclear war was as great as it had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, and we can only imagine what he would be saying today.
But in many respects, the near-total silence of the media on some matters is just as dangerous as their jingoistic anti-Russian rhetoric on others.
Several months ago, the Russian government declared it had obtained hard evidence that a number of Ukrainian biolabs funded by America had spent years producing illegal biological warfare weapons for planned use against Russia. Both Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson noted that the statements made by Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland in her Congressional Testimony seemed to confirm the reality of these remarkable Russian claims. But virtually every other mainstream Western journalist either ignored this explosive issue or ridiculed the Russian charges.
Then a few weeks ago, Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces, held a public briefing at which he expanded on those accusations, suggesting that the Covid virus had been created by America as an illegal bioweapon and deliberately released in an attack. The disease soon spread worldwide, killing some 18 million people, including many hundreds of thousands of Russians and more than a million Americans, while disrupting the lives of many billions. If that Russian charge were substantiated, such an Covid biowarfare attack would rank as one of the most important events in the history of the world, probably only exceeded in significance by the two world wars.
Yet none of those shocking claims by a top Russian general were ever reported in the American media, and when the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted them out, its account was suspended by Twitter for distributing “false information.” Apparently, our response to extremely disturbing information is to censor it, under the Ostrich-like principle that “what we don’t know can’t hurt us.”
But such total media suppression merely prevents the American public—and American elected officials and policy-makers—from obtaining an accurate knowledge of the world, and this is an extremely dangerous situation. Over the years, I’ve often characterized America as a regime run by its Ministry of Propaganda, and last month I emphasized the importance of dethroning America’s reigning Lords of Illusion.
- Challenging America’s Lords of Illusion
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 22, 2022 • 2,700 Words
Our elites regard Russia as our bitter international adversary, so perhaps a case could be made that our popular media organs should avoid providing a public platform for that country’s officials, or even covering the presumably self-serving accusations of its top military commanders. But there is another recent example of media silence that is impossible to justify under any circumstances.
For decades, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has ranked as a pillar of our academic establishment, and in 2020 he was selected to chair our Covid Commission, created to investigate all aspects of the deadly epidemic that had taken so many millions of lives.
But over the last few months, Sachs has courageously repudiated the officially-endorsed Covid narrative and instead unleashed a series of bombshell accusations.
In May, he co-authored an article in the prestigious PNAS journal presenting the strong evidence that the Covid virus had been bioengineered and calling for an independent investigation of its true origins, a dramatic pronouncement ignored by almost all Western media outlets. Since then, he has expanded on that theme with a series of major public statements and interviews, declaring that the virus was apparently the product of American laboratory biotechnology, suggesting a possible connection to our country’s longstanding biowarfare programs, while repeatedly denouncing the orchestrated cover-up of all this important information. At the beginning of July, a short clip of his remarks went super-viral on Twitter, accumulating over a million views.
- Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on the Covid Origins Cover-Up
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 29, 2022 • 1,400 Words
As the serving chairman of our Covid Commission, it is difficult to imagine any American who can speak with greater authority than Sachs on the origins of the worldwide epidemic that has killed so many millions. In any properly functioning media environment, his recent public statements would have already produced a series of banner headlines in all our major media outlets. Yet instead, scarcely any Western publications have even acknowledged his words.
Although Sachs has not directly endorsed the Russian biowarfare accusations, he does emphasize important facts that seem quite consistent with those explosive charges. Given that reality, the near absolute blackout that the mainstream media has imposed upon his views seems especially reprehensible.
For example, last Monday morning the New York Times carried a major front-page story by Steven Lee Myers, one of the newspaper’s “misinformation specialists,” who denounced and ridiculed the Russian biowarfare accusations, which he explicitly characterized as “falsehoods.” According to the article, the Russian government has declared that America is in violation of the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention and therefore invoked its authority to hold formal hearings in Geneva to present the evidence and allow evaluation of those claims, the first such session in a quarter century. Yet this obviously momentous development was dismissed as self-evidently false propaganda. Early in his piece, Myers stated that “Russia has offered no proof” while failing to note that the Russians had called the hearing so that they could provide exactly such proof to the world’s representatives.
But the most outrageous omission in that lengthy 1,900 word piece was the complete absence of any mention of Jeffrey Sachs or his explosive allegations, although the Russians had repeatedly cited him. The Times obviously feared to inform its readers that American chairman of the Covid Commission was accusing his own government of an ongoing cover-up of the origins of the virus, a position that might seem to lend credibility to the Russian charges.
According to the Times, nearly 4,000 articles have already appeared in the Russian media this year promoting their biowarfare claims. This surely demonstrates the perceived importance of the issue, and many of the more recent pieces have included Sachs’ revelations. So most Russians may now be aware of these important facts, but virtually all American media outlets have totally ignored them, carefully maintaining the ignorance of our own population.
- Russia’s Unfounded Claims of Secret U.S. Bioweapons Linger On and On
Steven Lee Myers • The New York Times • September 4, 2022 • 1,900 Words
Thus, our country is faced with a bizarre and almost unprecedented situation. The Russian government has publicly accused America of creating and deliberately releasing the Covid virus in a biowarfare attack, thereby killing 18 million people around the world including more than a million of our own citizens. And over the last few months, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, chairman of our own Covid Commission, has confirmed that the virus was bioengineered and denounced an ongoing cover-up of its true origins. Yet virtually all of our major media outlets have maintained a near-absolute silence on those developments, failing to inform any Americans of those bombshell revelations….