"Dissident."

The choice that is ours to make.

Avalokiteshvara. The British Museum, (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it’s propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.                                                                                                                         — Zdenek Urbanek 

10 MAY—The great Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, was not a conformist. The man who would become a Buddha—a fully awakened being—saw through the propaganda of his time and rejected it. He saw through the powerful propaganda of his own ego, thereby liberating himself from the deceitful and seductive narratives that had imprisoned him. The Buddha was in every sense a dissident.

We too must become dissidents—if we wish to wake up.

Right now, the unfortunate and tragic situation in Ukraine could be a cause for waking up. We could seize this as an opportunity to see more clearly, to understand and articulate desperately needed truths, and in that way rescue something meaningful from tragedy. Or, we can slip into a deeper slumber.

From the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February the single most important priority and goal for all of us— every single country or individual that professes to care about Ukrainian lives and sovereignty—should have been, and still ought to be, ending the war as quickly as possible through a negotiated settlement.

Why hasn’t this happen yet? Which countries stand in the way? Why, instead of helping to broker a peace, have certain countries (the United States principally among them) decide instead to ship billions of dollars in armaments to keep the war going? Who precisely benefits from this? It is certain the Ukrainian people do not.

To answer these questions is to undertake a process of disillusioning. To pursue these questions—indeed, to even consider them—means breaking through layers of propaganda. And to do that, we need to look outside of mainstream media to independent journalism. We need to think beyond convenient and comforting narratives.

* * *

This crisis was slow in the making and many nations, not least Ukraine itself, played a role in creating it. How many of us are willing to acknowledge that and to consider these matters with any degree of impartiality?

Former Brazilian president Lula da Silva recently made headlines when he insisted that Zelensky “is as responsible as Putin for the war.” It is a sentiment shared by many nations and people. Indeed, most of the world’s nations have refused to join the sanctions or criticize Putin. We in the West would do well to wonder why.

Lula went even further:

The United States has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided war, not incited it. . . . Biden could have taken a plane to Moscow to talk to Putin. This is the kind of attitude you expect from a leader.

Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The US and the EU are also guilty.

That which has been apparent to much of the world from the start, is now at last openly acknowledged in the West: the United States is in a proxy war with Russia.

From the beginning of this war the U.S. and its NATO allies have worked to undermined the negotiation process. The U.S. does not want a negotiated settlement because our intent is, and has long been, to use Ukraine to destabilize Russia. The U.S. will willingly see Ukraine destroyed in order to accomplish its ultimate goal of regime change in Moscow. As others have astutely put it: We will fight our proxy war to the last Ukrainian.

Putin is quite correct then, in understanding the situation as an existential threat to Russia and the Russian people. The U.S. and NATO have stupidly and pointlessly and arrogantly and dangerously backed a nuclear-armed nation into a corner. We are willing to risk a nuclear war and the destruction of everything beautiful and sacred in order to undermine Russia. In order to maintain U.S.-led Western hegemony.

And Putin is a madman? If so, he is clearly not the only one.

Why do Americans consent to such madness? Because we are ignorant. Because we are the most propagandized people on the planet and we don’t even know it. Because the lies we are told—the propaganda that is constantly fed to us by our own government and mainstream media—confirm our deepest mythologies. They make us feel and believe we are the innocent good guys—defenders of democracy—we so badly want ourselves to be.

As Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday:

Every single US war was justified with the same packaging and rhetoric as the US role in Ukraine: the US is always fighting for benevolent reasons to save innocents from tyranny and aggression. That was the argument for Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria - even Afghanistan.

Let us finally quit pretending that our concern about Ukraine has anything to do with democracy or sovereignty. In 2014, the Obama administration backed a violent rightwing coup in Ukraine, overthrowing a democratically elected president and actually handpicking his replacement. The U.S. has been undermining Ukrainian sovereignty for decades. Long before Trump’s administration began flooding the country with deadly weapons and training neo-Nazi militias.

So why do we keep falling for the same lies, war after pointless war? Because propaganda works best on people who don’t know they’re being propagandized.

All of this stops only when we stop. That is, when we withdraw our consent. It stops when we refuse to be propagandized. It stops when we understand that real truth is always subversive—and when we understand what subversion actually means.

This madness stops when we become the dissidents we are meant to be.

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Note: This commentary is not meant to excuse or justify Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. It is meant to place a large measure of responsibility for the provocation, escalation, and continuation of this war where it belongs: with the U.S. and the administration currently occupying the White House. When we see disturbing images of the war in Ukraine, we need to to remember that that is what war looks like, and we need to recall that most of our wars have actually been much worse. Lastly, the new-found enthusiasm in the U.S. for prosecuting war crimes is to be encouraged and should be directed right here at home, where we can prosecute our war criminals. In the meantime, we should free the journalist Julian Assange, who exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we should free Daniel Hale who is in prison for exposing numerous and ongoing war crimes associated with our drone warfare program.