Yes It’s A Proxy War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

by Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article:

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To be clear, evidence is mounting that this is a proxy war deliberately instigated and perpetuated by the US empire with the goal of ousting Putin. Which means that, despite all the narrative window dressing and spin, this war is just more US regime change interventionism.

Saddam Hussein was not a nice person, and he did bad things. This doesn’t change the fact that Bush’s regime change war was a tremendous evil which unleashed unforgivable horrors, and that it was done because Saddam became inconvenient for the US empire. The same is happening here.

As a result of deliberately provoking this war, the US empire has:

• Manufactured international consent for unprecedented economic warfare geared toward ousting Putin
• Drawn Moscow into another Afghanistan-like military quagmire
• Guaranteed immense profits for the war industry
• Cut in on Russia’s fossil fuel business
• Made Europe further subservient to US interests

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People say “This is not a proxy war! How dare you call this a proxy war?”

Pouring billions of dollars worth of weaponry into a foreign nation to be used by CIA-trained fighters with the direct ongoing assistance of US military intelligence is in fact the exact thing that a proxy war is. That is what those words mean.

If the Ukraine war is not a proxy war, then there has never been a proxy war.

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“So you think Ukraine should just GIVE Putin the Donbas and Crimea and neutrality, to end a war that Putin started??”

No I think Ukraine should sacrifice rivers of blood serving as US proxy cannon fodder for years to drain Moscow while you sit at home eating Pop Tarts and tweeting.

I definitely think every single Ukrainian man, woman and child should be sacrificed to this US proxy war for geostrategic dominance rather than yield some Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine who want to be part of Russia anyway. Only a Putin-loving monster would disagree.

The only humanitarian position is to continue the US plan to flood the nation with just enough weapons to bleed Russia without actually winning for years to subvert Moscow in the grand chessboard maneuverings of a few sociopaths in Washington.

Any Ukrainian mother who wouldn’t sacrifice her son for the remote chance of future NATO membership and control over Crimea just loves Putin and thinks Putin is awesome and is a Putler apologist.

I don’t care how many Ukrainian lives must be thrown into the gears of the imperial war machine to accomplish this. Sacrifice every one of them down to the last screaming baby, because I #StandWithUkraine until the next stylish hashtag and profile pic filter come along.

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There’d be a lot more credibility for the argument that Russia has no right to any “sphere of influence”—even over the presence of hostile military alliances directly on its border—if the US didn’t command a “sphere of influence” that looks like this:

NATO is a “sphere of influence”. It’s an extension of US imperial power. One of many.

You don’t get to unilaterally create a global dynamic and then cry when other countries respond accordingly. It’s like the US making international law meaningless by continually flouting it with zero consequences and then claiming another country violated international law.

People who say “What so Russia should just get to dictate whether its neighbors can join NATO and the EU??” without addressing US hegemony are either truly ignorant of US hegemony, willfully ignorant of US hegemony, or supportive of US hegemony. There are no other options. And there really is no way to address it in a way that makes Russia’s position look unreasonable. It’s simply not legitimate to claim Moscow has no right to even the slightest degree of any sphere of influence while the US empire exerts a sphere of influence the size of Earth.

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Very supportive of Biden’s not-deliberately-obliterating-all-terrestrial-life-in-a-thermonuclear-holocaust policy but strongly opposed to his continually-escalating-cold-war-and-proxy-war-tensions-in-ways-that-could-easily-inadvertently-spark-a-thermonuclear-holocaust policy.

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I still have less than zero respect for the claim that I need to spend more time criticizing Putin, as though the nonstop criticisms of every single one of the most powerful government and media institutions in the western world is not enough. I have no influence over Putin. What I do have some small degree of influence over is the western society that is cheerleading a proxy war which all evidence says is actively being prolonged by the western empire to bleed Russia at the expense of Ukrainian lives.

Saying “Well Putin could just end his war!” is about as useful a contribution to the conversation as saying “Well Ukrainians could just sprout wings and fly to another country!” We have the same amount of control over both those things. I focus my efforts where they can do most good.

Demanding that we criticize Putin and the western powers who provoked and sustain this war equally, or anywhere near equally, is an absurd position. As badly as my empire loyalist detractors want it to be true, I don’t actually have an audience with Vladimir Putin. I have a western audience.

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People are going to get poorer and see their quality of life diminishing as a result of the US empire’s economic war with Russia. Our civilization has an illness. We’re like a patient wasting away as cancer spreads throughout our body. And the US empire is the malignant tumor.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

The Only ‘Agency’ Ukraine Has Is The Central Intelligence Kind

by Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article:

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“You’re denying the agency of Ukrainians!”

This is a line you’ve probably had bleated at you by propagandized empire livestock if you’ve engaged in online debate about the role western powers have played in paving the way to this war.

One of the many, many tricks that imperial spinmeisters have pulled out of their hats in their shockingly frenetic campaign to manage the narrative about what’s happening in Ukraine is to insist that it’s outrageous and disgusting to suggest that Ukraine is being used as a sacrificial pawn in the grand chessboard maneuverings of the US-centralized empire, because it is denying the “agency” of that nation. The argument is that Ukraine freely chose to enter into the situation in which it now finds itself, with no outside pressure or influence of any kind whatsoever.

Seemingly overnight it became not just wrong to say that the US hegemon has played a role in giving rise to this war, but actually monstrous and evil. My online notifications are currently flooded with furious empire apologists screaming at me for assigning any degree of responsibility in this conflict to western power structures with the kind of vitriol people normally reserve for Holocaust deniers or pedophelia advocates.

Imperial narrative managers have even been working overtime to make the word “westsplaining” happen, which is their progressive-sounding term for when one makes the self-evident observation that western powers influence world events. Mainstream westerners are actively trained to regurgitate lines like “Stop westsplaining to Ukrainians about coups and proxy conflicts! You’re denying their agency!”

Calling this a “proxy war” between Russia and the United States or calling Kyiv a “puppet regime” of Washington is strictly taboo now. That Ukraine has lacked independent agency in this war and the events leading up to it is something you are simply not allowed to say.

Well, I’m saying it. This is a proxy war. Kyiv is a puppet regime. Ukraine does not have independent agency in any meaningful way. This is not the fault of the Ukrainian people, who are obviously far and away the greatest victims of the Russian invasion, but of the giant western power structure which deliberately worked to take away the nation’s agency many years before the invasion took place.

I mean, my god. The US and its allies are pouring billions of dollars worth of weapons into Ukraine from around the world, the CIA has been training Ukrainians to kill Russians, the US intelligence cartel is directly sharing military intelligence with Kyiv as we speak, and this follows US-backed coups in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2004 before that.

This is a proxy war. This is exactly the thing that a proxy war is. The only “agency” Ukraine has is the Central Intelligence kind.

In an excellent article for Multipolarista titled “Ukrainian leftist criticizes Western war drive with Russia: US is using Ukraine as ‘cannon fodder’“, Ukrainian-American Yuliy Dubovyk writes the following:

Like any other US puppet regime, Ukraine doesn’t have any real independence. Kiev has been actively pushed to confront Russia by every US administration, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian people.

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The support for Ukraine that fills the Western media now is not out of real solidarity with the people of Ukraine. If that were the case, the US wouldn’t have overthrown our government twice in a decade; it wouldn’t have supported the policies that made us the poorest country in Europe; it wouldn’t have fueled a brutal civil war for the past eight years.

The reason US media outlets and politicians are all backing Ukraine now is because they want to use the Ukrainian military and civilian population as cannon fodder in a proxy war with a political adversary.

Yes indeedy. Amid all the phony profile pic activism and concern trolling about denial of Ukraine’s “agency”, no concern whatsoever has been shown for actual, known assaults on Ukrainian independence by the US-centralized empire.

Where was all this reverence for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2004, when The Guardian was reporting that “while the gains of the orange-bedecked ‘chestnut revolution’ are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes”?

Where was the respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2014, when a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland (now working on Ukraine under the Biden administration) and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt showed US officials casually discussing who they were going to select as Ukraine’s next Prime Minister following a US-backed coup in Kyiv?

Where was all this respect for Ukraine’s “agency” in 2018, when Joe Biden openly boasted before the Council on Foreign Relations that he had used his power as Obama’s Vice President to brazenly interfere in Ukraine’s judicial system?

The US power alliance does not care about Ukraine’s sovereignty beyond what measures need to be taken to actively subvert it. When people object to criticisms of the way the empire has actively robbed Ukrainians of any real agency, what they are actually doing is defending the most powerful empire that has ever existed from attempts to highlight its malfeasance.

I’m not just spouting off about a far away nation from my safe home here in Australia, for the record. This is a dynamic which affects my country directly, and is very likely to affect it a lot more as the empire’s “great power competition” with China heats up.

It is very likely that in the not-too-distant future, Australia will end up playing a crucial role in the empire’s grand chessboard maneuverings to stop the rise of China. When that occurs, I will most certainly be saying that we are being used as pawns in a proxy conflict, and I will most certainly be saying that our agency in this matter has been stolen from us.

As in Ukraine, there have been US-backed coups in Australia not once but twice. This nation is now functionally little more than a US military and intelligence base with a smattering of suburbs and kangaroos, which is why the puppet regime in our capital Canberra has done nothing whatsoever to end Washington’s brutal persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange. John Mearsheimer, now the subject of great controversy for his completely accurate predictions years ago that US and NATO actions would lead to this exact war in Ukraine, told an Australian think tank in 2019 that the US will destroy Australia if Canberra doesn’t align with imperial agendas against Beijing. And he was right.

And yes, just as there are Ukrainians supporting the imperial line against Moscow, when the time comes for Australia to make great sacrifices for US unipolarist agendas against the Chinese government there will absolutely be Australians supporting it. Because of a massive propaganda campaign in this nation facilitated by our Murdoch-dominated press and imperial narrative management operations like the empire-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, there are many Australians who intensely despise China right now. I know. I’ve met them.

But that won’t mean our sovereignty wasn’t robbed from us, by mass-scale oligarchic psyops, by CIA coups, by secret deals, by the threat of knowing we’d be immediately attacked by a murderous empire if we tried to pivot to Beijing or even to simply espouse a neutral posture. What’s true of Ukraine is also true of Australia: we have no meaningful agency in the most important decisions made by this nation.

Denying the western role in subverting Ukrainian sovereignty doesn’t benefit ordinary Ukrainians, it hurts them. You can’t fix a problem you don’t understand, and until there’s widespread understanding of the way the US empire uses proxies to advance its agendas of global domination, nothing can be done to stop these ugly proxy wars from happening.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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