Late Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin with soldiers of the Wagner PMC. File photo.
The Western Anglo-Saxon Empire is controlling people’s minds and their self-awareness to maintain its global hegemony, says US writer and geopolitical analyst Daniel Patrick Welch.
Welch, who studied Russian History and Literature at Harvard University, made the remarks in an interview with the Press TV website on Friday, August 25, while commenting on the Western media coverage of the death of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences over the plane crash that killed Prigozhin and nine others on Wednesday, August 23.
An investigation is currently underway into what caused the crash, which came two months after Prigozhin led a short-lived armed mutiny against the Russian military leadership in June.
Putin said that it was necessary to await the outcome of the official investigation into the crash, in which all 10 people on board were killed. The Russian president said the inquiry would take some time.
‘Putin did it!’ Blame game goes on for US
Welch scoffs at the reaction of Western media to the presumed death of Wagner’s boss and the immediate claim of Western sources that “Putin did it.”
“The first instinct that pops into my head on a news item like this is just to scream out. No, he didn’t. No, he didn’t. You hear about this of Yevgeny Prigozhin being killed in a plane crash outside of Moscow. Immediately, the Western press ramps up. Biden says it was Putin. The Sun calls it Putin’s revenge. British media is a joke anyway, but all of the Western outlets are screaming this.”
The airtight control over the information pipeline in the West is most apparent here, according to Welch: “In fact, what is sad for me and interesting is that this is actually how I found out about it. My acknowledgment of Prigozhin’s suspected death was from a friend who texted me, and said, ‘Hey, Putin doesn’t mess around.’”
The writer sees it as a foregone conclusion that Western press outlets will respond almost reflexively with a virtually preapproved text. “This is a friend who was joking, but the fact is that the news and that gargantuan lie and twist of the news are presented as one always. And that is how the Western Anglo-Saxon Empire maintains its hegemony. It’s as important as genocide. It’s as important as nuclear war,” he says.
And it pays off. “They are controlling people’s minds and people’s self-awareness so deeply that people might not even be fooled that they would have to look a little deeper. Why did Putin do this? Why would it be Putin?”
In preventing any further reflection, mainstream sources fall back on the assumed narrative that Putin is bad, so anything goes. “This is not a sock puppet, an autocrat, who runs Russia in the palm of his hand, as crazy as it might seem for Westerners to question that impulse.”
And again, it works smoothly, says Welch. “But evil is bad. That’s the thing you can use. Evil is bad. Why would he do it? Because he’s evil. Because that’s the thing you do to your enemies. Evil people do evil things.”
‘US accuses others of exactly what it does’
The irony, he believes, or perhaps part of the plan, is the US is accusing others of exactly what its own actions have been. “Well, if you really turn it over, it’s what the US does, and they do it all the damn time. They don’t care.”
Welch points out that this is basically the only script that US and US-friendly media follows, as we see in “hotspots” or points of interest (to the US) around the world. Readymade narratives immediately fill all available space: “Imran Khan disappeared both literally in being sacked with these ridiculous charges, but also from the press. Nope, no media, nothing. This isn’t important,” says the analyst.
Instead, the press decides what to focus on. “What is important is Putin’s psychosis. We’ll have a panel of idiot psychologists or whatever, whatever. Just stupid.”
“Stupid, or brilliant?” Welch says it might as well be all by design.
Karl Rove’s mantra: ‘We create reality and we respond to it’
“Maybe this is exactly what they want,” he says. “This is how they got to the point that Karl Rove smugly said, ‘We create reality and we respond to reality that is created by us. We watch people’s reaction to it.’”
This neocon mantra of George W. Bush’s advisor is now basically a mainstay of the political elite, claims Welch. “The press is useful in this regard–the population is so well managed, so dumbed down that they just say it.” And a compliant populace accepts it as real.
“They don’t notice that the Russians were shocked at this,” Welch points out. “This is not something that helps Russia at all.” By contrast, he believes, the Western propaganda machine was ready to go. “And the West and Ukraine and the US had print-ready fiction, ready to go. If this happens, we’ll just call it Putin’s revenge, and that will be the headline.”
‘Brzezinski’s chessboard’
The trouble is, Welch thinks that people don’t even realize that this almost impenetrable filter applies broadly. “It’s not Ukraine, it’s not Prigozhin, it’s not Niger, it’s not Imran Khan, it’s not Pakistan,” says Welch. “It’s the West’s need to control the world. It’s Brzezinski’s idiot chessboard, which goes all the way back to Mackinder, on who controls the homeland.”
He refers to former official Zbigniew Brzezinski, who advised many presidents and had a major influence on US relations with the USSR. “Brezhinsky is dead, finally, in a blessing to all of humanity. But his obsessive, Russian-hating, ignorance of history lives on in this grand scheme of the Great Game and how to corner, surround, and ruin China, Russia, and whoever gets in their way.”
Welch expands on this, saying it is not just a Cold War relic. “This goes back into Africa on the same ground. There’s no shady junta in Niger, who’s ruining the country, which they love to spout.” Some of the military leaders involved were actually trained by the US, he notes. “First of all, several of them were trained by the US in their constant attempts to plant spies and CIA creations in other governments, and it backfires.”
The objective, he believes, is to use a front story to distract people from what is actually happening. “They’ll talk about this so that no one will talk about Areva, the French mining company that has been digging and mining the resources and the hopes and the dreams and the future of the Nigerien people for 60 years, and the French government that uses it to profit from death, profit from other people’s hunger, from other people’s deprivation.”
‘We get rich, they just die’
The truth, in Welch’s view, is so straightforward that they do indeed need to cover it up. Corporate elite say, “We get rich, they just die.”
The challenge, he suggests is not to accept information at face value in either case. “Okay, so why would Putin do this? Why would young Africans rise up against this? Why is it happening this way? Cui Bono, to whom the benefit? What makes sense?”
“That is what people need to use as a barometer to react,” he states. “As it happens the people are left, people in the West, under the regime, under the yoke of this really terrible media occupation.” It is demoralizing, but an effective way to control people, he says.
“People have no agency, they have no self-conviction, they have no real identity to stop, ask why, ask who, and try to figure out what makes sense,” he adds.
He concludes by pointing out that people themselves, either in the West or elsewhere, have a power they don’t even realize. “Because guess what? People all over the world are trying to get through another day, and what makes sense is the only thing that has meaning to you. And their curse of centuries, like half a millennium, is going to end.”
(PressTV)
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