September | 2023 | Mandala of Love

I regard the Ukraine conflict as one of the greatest tragedies of the 21st century. It is perhaps an even greater tragedy and more dangerous, than was the Syria proxy-war and the outrage of NATO’s destruction of Libya – because this conflict also involves nuclear weapons brinkmanship, and the possibility of either destroying the world, or drawing the whole world into a new cold war. In the face of the relentless onslaught of the accompanying propaganda operation, I find myself helplessly incapable of finding adequate words for such are horror. The juxtaposition of all that death and destruction with such an appalling collapse in the rational political functioning of the Western liberal democracies, is sometimes just too much to contemplate. I just do not have enough hours in my day to even begin to organise the vast amount of evidence that is available to me – evidence of a monstrous deception in which the Ukrainian and Russian people are the main victims, and the Washington neocons, the NATO bureaucrats, and US military-industrial complex are the heartless perpetrators.

Thankfully there are independant journalists like the Australian, Caitlin Johnstone, who face this moral challenge with extraordinary patience and determination. She writes in detail every day, and always from a very wise place. I regard her a person of spiritual vision – a true individual who sees very clearly how deeply incongruous all the horrific violence and extreme expense of war is, relative to the true nature of our ultimate humanity – our authentic humanity beyond the egoic narratives of greed, hatred and ignorance. To honour Caitlin Johnstone, and introduce my readers to her, I have copied the text of one of her articles below. Its subject is the Ukraine proxy-war, and its title is: If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War.

If you want to listen to Caitlin’s words rather than read them, I have posted the corresponding YouTube video below the article. Caitlin’s articles are almost always read, very beautifully, by her American husband and journalistic collaborator, Tim Foley. You may also want to read her words as you listen.

If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War – by Caitlin Johnstone

“War is the single worst thing humans do. The most insane. The most cruel. The most destructive. The most traumatic. The least sustainable. Those who knowingly choose to steer humanity into more war when it could be avoided are the worst people in the world, without exception.

And there are mountains of extensively documented evidence that that’s exactly what the drivers of the US-centralized empire did in Ukraine. That’s why so many western analysts and experts spent years warning that the actions of western powers were going to lead Ukraine into disaster, and it’s why US empire managers keep openly boasting about how much their proxy warfare in Ukraine advances US interests. They knowingly steered Ukraine into war to advance their own geostrategic interests while being fully aware that no powerful nation would ever permit the kinds of foreign threats the west was amassing on its borders, and then they intervened in the early days of the war to prevent the outbreak of peace.

If there was widespread awareness of these facts, the US war machine would lose support around the world — not just for its actions in this one war, but for all future wars as well. Which is why so much energy goes into making sure this does not become a widespread understanding.

The official mainstream narrative throughout the western world is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom. That’s the actual, literal belief about this war that the western political/media class works to instill in the western public. Anyone who counters this self-evidently ridiculous assessment with facts and evidence gets branded a Russian agent and swarmed with pro-US trolls on social media, and loses all hope of securing a major platform in any mass media.

And it’s important to notice that shutting down all mature adult analysis of the events which led to the war in this way does not actually save a single Ukrainian life. It doesn’t make Russia any more likely to stop fighting and withdraw its troops. All it does is prevent people from seeing the US empire for what it really is. It isn’t being done to protect Ukrainians, it’s done to protect the empire.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to the information interests of the US empire would be for a critical mass of people to become aware that all this death and destruction in Ukraine could have been avoided by the US-centralized empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s doorstep, and that those aggressions were instead increased with the goal of advancing US strategic interests on the world stage.

If everyone really, deeply understood that all this suffering, all these mountains of human corpses could simply not have happened if the US hadn’t been feverishly focused on securing planetary domination at all cost, the US would no longer be able to manufacture consent for its agendas. It would no longer be able to whip up international support for its actions against its enemies. It would no longer be able to persuade the world to help prop up the hegemony of the dollar.

But because the US empire has the most advanced soft power apparatus that has ever existed, hardly anyone understands this. Not even the people who understand that the west provoked this war have deeply grappled with exactly what that means on a visceral emotional level, for the most part. It’s more of a superficial intellectual understanding for most, without really grokking into the horror of it all, really letting the enraging nature of what the US empire did wash over them.

The west was deceived into supporting yet another evil American war, this time with the added dimension of nuclear brinkmanship threatening the life of every terrestrial organism. All to suck Moscow into another draining military quagmire so war plans can be safely drawn up against China while advancing US energy interests in Europe and building support for US military alliances. It’s almost too evil to take in. There aren’t really words for it.

And that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to get people to take in exactly what happened with Ukraine: people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that anyone could be that evil, much less the government we’ve been trained by Hollywood to think of as sane and humanitarian. It’s about as monstrous a thing as you could possibly come up with. Yet here it is, still unfolding in all its blood-spattered glory.

Our task then is to help people see this and understand it, not just intellectually but emotionally. Help people really grasp deep down the horrors the US empire unleashed upon our world with the war in Ukraine; the suffering; the death; the existential danger. We can’t fight the empire on our own, but we can each do what we can to help weaken the consent manufacturing machine it uses to rule and terrorize the world.”

Please consider subscribing to Caitlin Johnstone’s website and YouTube channel. Here are a couple of her YouTube video – the one in which her husband, Tim Foley, is reading the article above, and another more recent one.

Reflecting on the Ukraine conflict, in the context of conversations with dear friends, I have been coming to understand that there is a closely-related cultural dialogue abroad about mainstream media versus independent media – a dialogue in which I notice the tendency of some people, and also some government broadcasters and commercial media channels, to make generalised condemnations of independent media on YouTube and elsewhere as providing a voice for ‘dangerous conspiracy theorists’. This is an important conversation for our times, so I wrote the short piece below, which attempts to briefly present a perspective that draws on Buddhist wisdom.

This article is one of several anti-war articles that I have felt to write in amongst my other ‘Mandala of Love’ articles, which have more often focused on Buddhist philosophical themes and on the practice of meditation. When I first learned meditation in my early twenties, I was passionately engaged by the idea of cultivating Loving Kindness (mettā / maitri). In the form of mettā practice that I learned, I was instructed to become absorbed in unconditional love, not only towards myself and the people in my personal life, but towards the whole world.

This concern for the people of the world has become habitual for me, and has increasingly found expression in a deep study of world affairs. I find myself preoccupied with the suffering that I see, and drawn into a deep investigation of its causes. This investigation has in part been an enquiry, following a Buddhist methodology, into the roots of human suffering in the cognitive-perceptual error of personalisation; and in part an enquiry into the collective expression of that personalisation in human history, and in the systemic dysfunction of the modern world.

Below the article, I have included a YouTube from The Grayzone – one of the most reliable sources of commentary and detailed analysis both on the escalating war with Russia and China, and on the lamentable state of journalism in the west.

I have also included a very interesting YouTube video on this collective state of journalism from Graham Majin, a British journalist/writer – here in conversation with wonderful Pascal Lottaz, of the Neutrality Studies channel.

I sometimes hear some of my Buddhist friends and non-Buddhist talking dismissively of sources of news and commentary outside of the mainstream government and commercial media as pedlars of ‘conspiracy theories’, or as Russian / Chinese ‘disinformation’ – often with the implication that it is unethical, undiscerning, and perhaps even a little delusional, to venture outside of the mainstream narrative. As a way into an examination of this situation, I would like to first address a larger question – a question about how we think about ethics – both as Buddhists and more generally in society. Although this seems paradoxical to me, I find that Buddhists are especially prone to thinking that ethics is just about individual choices and judgements.

I see the Buddha as a great model of the non-judgemental attitude – an individual in which the attitudes of understanding, compassion, kindness and empathy spring from a recognition of the complex web of conditioning factors at play in every life situation. It is common for those who identify as Buddhists however, to make a lot of judgements about other individual’s ethical choices as way of affirming and clarifying their own ethical position, and even perhaps, as way of signalling their own virtue. The Buddha’s approach to ethics was actually much more complex and nuanced however. He would say that the self is an illusion; that the collective processes are primary; and that the egoic perspective is always limited and dysfunctional – flawed because of its inherent cognitive-perceptual blind-spots and habitual personalisation.

The implication of this is that ethics requires a systemic perspective – a willingness to see that the good or the bad in this world, the ‘skilful’ or the ‘unskilful’ (if we translate the Buddhist idiom into English), are phenomena arising within a complex web of conditions. The Buddhist view on ethical questions, therefore, needs to start by resisting any oversimplification of what is always much more complex than we can know. We also need the humility to consider, as both the Buddha and Carl Jung urged, that the structure of the egoic mind might be such that patterns of cognitive-perceptual unconsciousness are playing out both in ourselves and in the collective. So, we need to investigate the cognitive-perceptual factors in ourselves, while also acknowledging the cultural, historical, economic, political, social, organisational, and even geopolitical factors in the collective – in other words, to be ‘systemic’ in our analysis of both self and world.

For me, this acknowledgement that decisions and judgements that have ethical implications are always happening within a complex societal context, is the only basis from which to address these questions. Aware that the notion of ‘mainstream media’ is a somewhat crude conceptual construct, I use this term, and I often express a sense of despair about the poor quality of Western journalism in my articles and Facebook posts. Essentially, I am of the opinion that the term encourages discernment – since we all need to entertain the possibility that paradoxically, our established government broadcasters and commercial media channels are subject to a range of increasingly strong systemic factors that mitigate against their presentation of the truth, and that they therefore inevitably tend to generate, at best, distorted and ‘dumbed down’ narratives in the public mind, or at worst, outright propaganda.

Monthly Archive: September 2023

Caitlin Johnstone on the Ukraine Proxy-War

If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War – by Caitlin Johnstone

‘Mainstream Media’ and ‘Conspiracy Theories’ – some Buddhist thoughts