The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.”  Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.  To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue.  When you support a U.S. war, as has always been The Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners.  So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted.  Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion?  They too must never have  existed since they are not mentioned.

But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.”  No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.”  U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”

Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.  It just didn’t happen.  Never happened.  Magic by omission.  The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.  (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)

All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”

Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc.  In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.

This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.

The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident.  The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:

  • Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
  • “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
  • That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
  • Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
  • Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
  • Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
  • Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
  • Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
  • During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
  • The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”

This is expert opinion for dummies.  A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address.  The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.

It is a fight they will lose in the days to come.  Russia was, is, and will triumph.

Everything in the editorial is disingenuous.  Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys.  Putin another Hitler.  The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t).  History is repeating itself.

Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate.  As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world.  It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial.  It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth.  It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.

Let Harold Pinter have the last words:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

 

 

16 thoughts on “The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth”

  1. By the time i got to the library yesterday, that issue of the Times had disappeared, but I look forward to finding it elsewhere. From your description the editorial doesn’t surprise me.

    When I was in college, I read the Times almost every day. It landed on the doorstep of my fraternity about 2 in the afternoon. In those days it came in two sections, with sports in the second section. Most days I had the first section to myself, as my brothers were interested only in the second section. James I followed the columnist James Reston religiously but also read other opinion pieces, letters, and news from Times reporters. I think the paper enjoyed higher credibility then.

    Sometime in the 1970s a journalism review movement started, owing in part to establishmentarian tendencies of the quarterly Columbia Journalism Review. It began with the Chicago Journalism Review. Shortly thereafter the New York City-based [MORE] (brackets included in magazine’s title) added more enlightenment and entertainment for a few years. In 1990, the monthly Lies of Our Times (LOOT) began publishing, and would last five years, with the goal of keeping tabs on not only the “paper of record” but also the rest of the news media. Another breath of fresh air.

    Now there’s the Internet. Ed, your post is in the tradition of [MORE] and LOOT. Thanks.

    1. Thanks Mark….my question has been; just since the Vietnam War, Watergate era…why would anyone believe anything that came from mainstream sources of information ? So now, for many people, ‘we’re’ left having to provide tangible proof that the earth is not flat! Good Grief !

  2. As I was contemplating shaving this morning, my train of thought led me to take inventory of my vintage razor blades and the need to scour the internet for more. For, I thought, they have truly brought us into Orwell’s 1984, right down to the cheap razor blades that are what’s available. I’ll bet TPTB had a great laugh about that, when the directive was issued to cheapen the razor blades.

  3. I’m glad the NYT charges money to read anything there, so most people who read widely won’t bother.
    Scott Ritter says it all more simply: “NATO is a suicide pill for the world.”
    Thanks for including the link to Harold Pinter’s Nobel prize speech.

  4. I can only subsume that the saturation at the end of the conflict is an attempt to purge the mainstream of grounds for adjustment.

    The world as we will know it will no longer be one of darkness.

  5. Yes Paul…I too think something of greater stupidity will occur. I think that is all that can occur. We are on a treadmill. We stay on the treadmill while complaining about being on the treadmill and do not consider getting off ! Now why is that ? (please do not refer me to a book title) Perhaps our indoctrination process has deadened our entire state of being ?

  6. so true. The NYT is blatant. What gets me though is that I know people (few) who won’t question anything in the rag. THAT is what boils my blood.

  7. Oh, this is PSYOPS, Edward, way deeper than some NYT Chosen People’s forum of Edward Bernays and Mad Men propaganda. You see, we are still fiddling with words and poems and newspaper columns and the collective west’s borderline personality disorder en mass, when the reality is we are two seconds to midnight.

    And there is a Dead Hand policy in Russia.

    We are living in truly perverted times, even us, Ed, writers and creatives, attempting to hear something in the forest of immolated and falling ashes of trees.

    imagine:

    The United States – as announced last month – began shipping the new B61-12 nuclear bombs to Italy and other European countries in December. An official document from the US Air Force Department confirms this. It establishes “safety standards for operations of C-17 aircraft carrying B61-12 weapons in the U.S. European Command area of responsibility. This area, in the Pentagon’s geography, includes not only the European Union, but also the entire Russian Federation.

    The document specifies which nuclear weapons are transported with the C-17 Globemasters, the largest US military transport aircraft. They bring from the United States to Europe the bombs they replace: the B61-3, B61-4 and B61-7. A single B61-12 has in fact four power options depending on the target to be hit. The C-17 Globemasters – the document further specifies – also carry other nuclear weapons: B61-11, W78 W80-1, B83-1, W87-0.

    +–+

    If this is not provocation, then I have a Fascist Jew in Occupied Palestine ready to babysit the children at the Mosque.

    Insanity and ignorance and megolamania and this TOm Clancey education (sic) are killing the world, or soon will be killing it. That Uncle Tom Tom from Raytheon is puffing up his racist chest (against Russians) and itching for more mercenary contracts with the offensive weapons manufacturers while parading around in both his civilian uniform and dress blue murdering soldier uniform. Imagine that, Lloyd. Listen to Gerald Horne on that account:

    https://www.blackagendareport.com/bidens-dangerous-foreign-policy

    +–+

    Now now, read all about it:

    17. The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.

    18. The decision to use nuclear weapons is taken by the President of the Russian Federation.

    19. The conditions specifying the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation are as follows:

    a) arrival of reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies;
    b) use of nuclear weapons or other types of weapons of mass destruction by an adversary against the Russian Federation and/or its allies;
    c) attack by adversary against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces response actions;
    d) aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.

    https://www.voltairenet.org/article218581.html
    https://archive.is/g7hMf#selection-1473.0-1509.134

    +–+

    Have you figured out yet the conspiracy?

    When the lights go out, well, let’s all get together and petition the NYT for their folly.

    1. Paul K Haeder when I started reading you post, it appeared you spied a very deep psyops.

      As I read on I couldn’t see it materialize. I was left with the Japan’s prolific Haruki Murakami quote from his 1Q84: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

      How much of this is imagination and how much is really, really real? After 3 years of weaponized fear over an invisible pathogen, driven by the great societal fear of dreaded death, one is left to wonder. Then there’s the endless wars, and Full Spectrum Dominance policy which has been with us since at least the end of WWII and the prologue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (the bombs that Stalin never thought really existed) that commenced the chilly Cold War with the Soviets.

      All of these B61 series and seconds before mid-night seem to emphasize the Murakami quote. “News at 11.”

      Perhaps Paul you can illuminate your “psyops”. I’d be interested.

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