Taibbi: Does Anyone Believe American Propaganda Anymore?
Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News Substack,
A new Washington Post article about Nord Stream throws Ukraine overboard and absolves the United States, offering another version of reality we'll have to strain to take seriously
This is getting silly now.
The Kakhovka dam just exploded in Ukraine, flooding a huge territory and causing another insane ecological disaster.
Russia and Ukraine spent yesterday trading accusations, while the U.S. leaked it was “leaning towards Russia as the culprit of the attack.”
The synchronicity was uncanny, with the media’s dam freakout coming exactly as public panic about the previous lunatic infrastructure attack came full circle, moving from certainty Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to belated claims we knew all along Ukraine did it. It’s as if officials want the world to take American intelligence assessments more as Gilbert Gottfried routines than truth.
At 10:52 a.m. yesterday, the Washington Post published an exclusive called, “U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline.”
The story contended the United States learned from a “European intelligence service” in June, 2022 that Ukraine was planning a “covert attack” on Nord Stream, using divers who “reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces,” General Valery Zaluzhny.
Apparently, U.S. and European allies knew about the Ukrainian plan and were impotent to stop a move they worried “risked a severe Russian response.”
The only people in the country who didn’t roll eyes or laugh at these latest anonymous contortions were reporters.
“Americans Were Aware of Intelligence Warning of Ukrainian Pipeline Attacks,” wrote the New York Times, while Rolling Stone declared, “The U.S. Knew Ukraine Was Planning to Attack Russia’s Nord Stream Pipelines,” and so on. My favorite was the Godfather-themed header on the site of former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum, “Ukraine was behind the Nord Stream bombing all along”:
Who blew up Nord Stream?
Look at Matt Orfalea’s damning video made last October for a refresher on how absolutely certain we’ve been in these situations before, only to completely change our tune later.
If you’re keeping track, this new Nord Stream piece is about the seventh or eighth theory that the Washington Post alone has posted since September, which puts the Kakhovka story in perspective.
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Specialists in “anti-disinformation” insist a goal of foreign fake news artists is to assault the reasoning process itself, making populations distrust once-reliable sources, leaving them susceptible to conspiracy theories. If that’s true, how is it not provably the case that domestic officials are playing the same game, moving goalposts on everything from the origin of the coronavirus to vaccine efficacy to Nord Stream?
The Nord Stream narrative has now gone from “No one thinks anyone but Russia did it” to “It’s a mystery!” to “There’s no evidence Russia did it” to “pro-Ukraine saboteurs may have done it” to “The U.S. and its allies have known for nearly a year Kyiv did it, but said otherwise the whole time.”
What are we supposed to think next time officials make statements after a disaster? Are we supposed to forget all this background?
