Dear Guardian editors: this is why no one believes you anymore

by BlackCatte, OffGuardian.org

Dear Guardian editors, especially the Anonymous Perpetrator of Sunday’s Guardian view on Ukraine –

While this is just the latest on the conveyor-belt of state-promoted Stalinist ‘alternative realities’, which now constitutes the vast majority of your (ahem) political analysis, I feel the need to make a few observations, more out of pity than anger.

You must be wondering why, after over a year of a continued propaganda campaign that has seen you defending neo-nazis, racist massacres, and the wholesale terrorising of innocent civilians, you are still largely failing to get the message across, even to your core traditional readership. I can sense a rising panic, bafflement and bewilderment in you. And it makes me want to reach out. To bridge the gulf and explain why you are so totally failing to convince anybody of anything.

It’s not just because you cosy up with nazis (sorry, ‘nationalists’), while queasily obscuring their crimes and ideologies. It’s not just because you fail to see that your go-to Russia correspondents such as Shaun Walker and Luke Harding come over either as racist Russophobes or idiot-shills, on a par with, if rather more intelligent than your other poorly chosen protegé, the tragi-comic Eliot Higgins.

It’s because you’re just terribly bad at what you do.

Look at this from your most recent Anonymous offering:

President Putin’s recent language may nevertheless indicate that he is looking for a way out of what may have turned into something of a military and political quagmire.

Russia’s in a political and military quagmire?

Russia?

How many people who have been even half paying attention for the past year and a half do you think are going to believe that?

Let’s recap. The US neocon plan of financially annexing Ukraine and drawing Russia into a proxy war with NATO seems to be dead. And let’s hope it stays that way, because while it lived it was so hardline even Kissinger repudiated it. So insane italmost sparked a nuclear war. So incompetent it dragged Europe to the point of financial ruin, the fallout of which we are still experiencing and will continue to experience for the foreseeable future.

Don’t forget, dear Graun, we have spent the last 18 months watching our political leaders in Europe and the US demonstrate they are equally divided between lunatics, morons and moronic lunatics. We’ve seen the likes of Cameron, Merkel and Hollande trundle their people to the edge of Armageddon, just because Nuland et al told them to, blinking in the headlights of the oncoming juggernaut, passive, helpless and completely idiotic.

We’ve discovered (if we didn’t already know) the US State Department is run by a hard core of dangerously insane halfwits who have zero understanding of realpolitik or anything else. We’ve been forced to realise these people don’t understand their own (profound) limitations, can’t comprehend that Ukraine is not Tunisia, not Egypt, not even Georgia. WE’ve hd to face the incredible fact that these guys actually believed they could have another of their ridiculous ‘color revolutions’ in Russia’s strategic and political and emotional heartland, use the usual rent-a-mob to throw Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea, and not ignite a thermonuclear war.

“…our political leaders in Europe and the US demonstrate they are equally divided between lunatics, morons and moronic lunatics.”

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We have seen Ukraine torn apart and die economically, spiritually, politically and militarily, all in pursuit of serving this fatuous, self-defeating, sub-intelligent agenda.

And you think you can make us forget all of that and believe it’s Russia in the quagmire, just because the Guardian says so?

The same Guardian that has destroyed its own reputation in offering unquestioning support for this lunatic death-train from the beginning?

How much power do you think you have to sway opinion these days? Have you checked on that recently? Do you realise you are competing with literally hundreds of other outlets, big and small, not all of which are offering your version of reality? Do you realise it’s as easy for today’s Well Meaning Guardian Reader to click on RT as the Graun?⁽¹⁾ On Global Research as the Indy? Do you think you have a magic filter that blocks their access to these places, just because you used to have a monopoly?

It’s as if you think you can tell us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and we’ll obey. How else to explain why you continue to write as if an interested or sceptical party can’t source check you in five minutes, and find you wanting?

As here:

After annexing Crimea last year, Mr Putin raised the stakes by launching a conflict in the Donbass

Here’s a little bit of Internet 101. Online publications have things called “archives.” Look it up. The Guardian has one, just as we do, and all web based journals do. Your readers can visit that archive in a few clicks. And there they can read what you were writing about ten years ago – or a year ago. And they can see quite easily if you are trying to subtly – or not so subtly – change the narrative. For example, here’s some extracts from the Guardian’s archive concerning the start of that “conflict in Donbass” you now want us to believe was kicked off by Putin riding in to Donetsk on the back of a tank…

Ah yes, the ATO, as you described it not so very long ago. That glorious moment when John Brennan of the CIA visited Kiev and coincidentally, just a few days later Yats and Turch decided to name all the people of Donbass “terrorists” and launch a military operation to obliterate them. The images of armoured vehicles being stopped and disarmed by the women of Slavyansk. The videos of unarmed civilians being murdered in Odessa and Mariupol.

You see how sleazy and manipulative your agenda immediately appears when you pretend these things didn’t happen, while at the same time your archive proves you know full well they did? You see how morally and intellectually bankrupt you seem when you opt for simplistic summations that are basically lies? You see how scummily cavalier you seem to be about truth, reality and human lives?

This is why people don’t believe you any more.

Obviously, in the end your chums at the top will manage to close down, or entirely control the internet, but until they do, if you want to sell their sociopathic agenda, you really need to become a bit more au fait with how the world wide web works. Just lying about everything isn’t enough any more. You need to cover your own tracks. Rewrite your own recent past. Erase the inconvenient shards of truth therein.

If you’re going to lie, serially and self-contradictingly, then don’t forget to use the Memory Hole.

NOTES

⁽¹⁾  The paper’s nickname The Grauniad (sometimes abbreviated as “Graun”) originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye.^[153] This anagram played onThe Guardian’s early reputation for frequent typographical errors, including misspelling its own name as The Gaurdian.^[154] The Guardian and Private Eye initiated and continually co-sponsor the Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism.^{[citation needed]}

The very first issue of the newspaper contained a number of errors, perhaps the most notable being a notification that there would soon be some goods sold at atction instead of auction. Fewer typographical errors are seen in the paper since the end of hot-metal typesetting.^[155]