Liars used to have long noses – today they have communication consultants

I still clearly remember the scene when our teacher read the episode to us first-grade pupils in which Pinocchio, once again caught telling an untruth, was swiftly punished by having his wooden nose extended – an outrageous disgrace to all truthful, honest people. At the time, I was paralysed with shock: I was one of those children who knew the tricks of the white lie and used them from time to time. Involuntarily, I reached for my nose, which fortunately was not yet elongated, but only occasionally not quite immaculately cleaned.
  220 years after the publication of the Pinocchio book, the lie is firmly established as a political tool. What’s more, in view of existing wars and the threat of a third world war, dealing with the truth and its opposite is becoming a weapon in a second war, the war of opinions. In this war, secret services and large corporations enslaved to them, which sell nothing other than opinions, play a major role. And thus undermine the foundation of any real democracy.
  In his extensive and meticulously documented essay on the genesis and significance of the Ukraine war for the whole world, Patrik Baab, political scientist, journalist and author, also repeatedly mentioned this other Ukraine war in the issue of Current Concerns (No. 5/6 of 11 March 2025), the war for our opinions, the strategically approached manipulative steering of our thoughts in the desired direction. Baab’s article, which presents and summarises his research work, is also a compendium in this respect. Step by step, the carefully arranged web of lies that the Western elites, above all the arms lobby, are relying on to ensure that this war continues for quite some time, even under the conditions newly articulated by Trump, becomes tangible. If Trump betrays Europe’s new crusade of the “free world” against Putin’s “Asian autocratic regime”, then the heroic EU will have to take it on itself. That’s how it sounds today in the ranks of the EU war faction and still from Germany.

A new great war is
looming in Europe, constant
lies are preparing the ground for it

Today, long noses in the Pinocchio sense should characterise above all those public officials who cannot do enough to drive their populations into senseless and hopeless wars with fear-mongering. Under the conditions of today’s “controlled democracies” in the West, primarily through the media, politically motivated lying is no longer a disgrace, but a kind of trivial offense.
  During the invasion of Poland, which triggered the Second World War, Hitler had to put his own soldiers in Polish uniforms and fabricate a fictitious attack so that he could shout over the “Volksempfänger” in the morning: “Since 5.45 a.m. we have been returning” the fire”.
  Even back then, his offense was already being misrepresented as a defence. This very simple trick has survived to this day in all wars to expand power. Even states that prove to be aggressive (the USA is one of them) only have a ministry of defence, not a ministry of aggression. The Rwandan army, which for thirty years, together with changing mercenary troops and permanent commanders, has been driving the civilian population out of the lucrative raw material mines in eastern Congo with systematic terror, unanimously recognised for years by all observers on the ground as ethnic cleansing, in order to attack the Congolese rare earths undisturbed, calls itself the Rwanda Defence Forces; the Israeli forces raging in Gaza are called the IDF (Israel Defence Forces). Hitler’s “Volksempfänger”, the obligatory short-wave receiver in every household, was a timid forerunner compared to the means that today’s “communications” industry makes available to the powerful of this world. With today’s hardball tactics and sophisticated propaganda technology nothing is left to chance. The rhetorical question “Do you want total war?” is no longer decided with a staged, thousandfold shouted “Yes!” from the mobilised NSDAP party mob, as was the case with Goebbels’ famous speech on 18 February 1943 in the Berlin Sportpalast. Today, things are quieter and more sophisticated, and it takes more effort to recognise and expose the media manipulation aimed at us. The goal is the same. The whole of Europe should say yes to the next world war, especially Germany, but also Switzerland.

The key role of war propaganda

Every war must overcome the natural protection of species, which has protected apes and their offshoot, Homo sapiens, from killing members of their own species for hundreds of thousands of years. In humans, this requires an extremely frightening enemy image. The fear of the enemy must be greater than the desire to resolve a conflict with an opponent. In the first case, naked anger reigns, in the second, empathy and trust that the partner is fair and will remain so. The inner switch is not given to us by instinct, as is the case in the higher animal world through the law of species protection. Human impulses are hardly guided by instinct, but by the cerebrum which reacts not only rationally, but also emotionally. In order for the Western arms lobbies to continue to achieve their main goal of keeping war alive in a world that is moving towards serious peace, their governments and thus the politicians at the levers of power must frighten their populations. They have to conjure up an acute threat situation.
  The case of Colin Powell, American Secretary of State under G.W. Bush at the time of “Nine eleven”, is an illustrative model. In view of Bush’s announced “turning point” (he also invented his own “Zeitenwende”, not just Scholz), the great war “against terrorism” and all the “rogue states” supporting it, there was initially no tangible opponent. So, he had to be sought and found. Special commissions within the American secret services (with the help of the British and Israeli secret services) worked feverishly and found him in good time. They came across Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had long been a thorn in the side of the USA because it was only settling its oil transactions in dollars. Iraq then also had to serve as the epitome of a rogue state. Colin Powell received enough material from the relevant secret services that his payroll writers heated up into an incendiary speech, which he then delivered to the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003. The Security Council was not convinced, so Bush junior carried out his 2003 Iraq war with the bombing of Baghdad under the telling name “Shock and Awe” without the approval of the Security Council, as had already been the case in the Yugoslavian war in 1999. Powell later confessed to having spread lies and apologised for them.
  With this war and its consequences, the short-lived dream of the whole world of achieving effective disarmament and thus finally eliminating a major threat was unfortunately over. Since then, the global West, led by all the successor American administrations, has been relentless in its efforts to create a permanent situation of tension with the Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin under various pretexts. Under Obama and Biden, their stalling tactics in the face of Russia’s urgent request to receive security guarantees on Russia’s borders in view of NATO’s word-breaking expansion to the east were supported by targeted stalling and humiliation. The fact that a bloody civil war had been raging in Ukraine since 2014 was declared non-existent by the Western media and the political elite and therefore never entered our heads or our hearts. Following the model of the domino theory at the time of the Vietnam War, it is still and again being suggested today that things will only get worse after Putin’s Russia occupies Ukraine. Then the paranoid maniac in Moscow will subjugate one European country after another. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it,” is all one can say.

The acceptance of a new great
war is being pursued insidiously

The manipulation for the acceptance of war, the winning of the hybrid war, runs like clockwork under today’s conditions. The main lubricant for achieving the desired attitudes in the population is the media. The recipes for waging war against serious peace concepts are very simple. If you repeat a lie long enough, it will eventually become the “truth”. The mental “colour revolution” desired by these forces in the minds of as many voters as possible in Western democracies works according to this simple recipe.
  The main mental weapons used are the empty phrases provided by specialised consulting firms. They guarantee what is known as “language regulation”. Bribery and pressure ensure that large media in particular adhere to the required language rules. A prime example of this is the phrase “Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine”, which has been used millions of times. This empty phrase is always casually mixed in with weather reports and sports results in the same form on Western mass communication channels. This guarantees its hammering in, on the radio every hour of every day, through maximum repetition. At the same time, mixing it with weather and sport guarantees the reinforcement of the impression that a modern war is as normal and irrevocable as football or the weather – a terribly simple and deadly effective means of getting people used to daily murder, currently mainly focused on the example of Ukraine.
  Here, too, Baab’s work provides, among many other insights, the repeatedly verified proof that the phrase “Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression on Ukraine”, repeated millions of times, contains three blatant war lies in a nutshell. The Russian partial occupation of Ukraine is not a war of aggression, but a defensive war against the threatening eastward shift of NATO. Russia’s military action was not provoked by Putin, but by NATO. The war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war, it is an act of self-defence by a nation that is rightly proud of itself. It is resisting submission to the West and its presumed role as the world’s policeman and has now had enough of being subjected to decades of Western sabotage, sanctions, provocations, existential threats and humiliation (see box).

Brazen lying as the  last
word of Western democracies?

Patrik Baab is not the only one who has proven the falsehood of the war doctrine that all Western vassals of the USA worship. In his article, the serious experts he consulted also have their say. Reading the article makes one thing very clear: this war is also based on a construct of lies, which feeds the daily war of opinions in the run-up to it, at its outbreak and in the efforts to keep it alive unresolved. Baab’s chain of evidence is long and has been proven many times over with the “persuasive power of the factual”. He formulates the bitter truth as follows: “The attempt to challenge the largest nuclear power only reveals the West’s megalomania, its inability to realistically assess the balance of power. Once again, the sleep of reason has brought forth monsters. We can now dream on and dismiss the normative power of the factual as Russian propaganda, but this will only lead to more destruction. The loss of reality of Russophobic fanatics in the political and media elite of the West is the main reason for the high death toll.” (Current Concerns, No. 5/6 of 11 March) And this ride into the abyss is now to continue, with a change of horses?

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“Guided Democracy”, which has been steered in the right direction for thirty years according to the recipes of American mass psychology, does not want the autonomous citizen, but rather the patronized one. Baab’s bitter conclusion results to a large extent from the deliberate leading behind the light of the entire Western society by its “elite”. This is the spiritual catastrophe that accompanies war. Emmanuel Todd, the French lateral thinker, has long predicted that it is the hollowing out of the former spiritual substance of the West, that will inevitably lead to the cultural downfall of the West. Nevertheless, it remains to be hoped and worked towards that the decline lamented by many is not inevitable. After all, the erosion was brought about, it did not “just happen”.
  And there remains a spark of hope for correction. History is made by people, it can be changed by people, otherwise there would have been no development. If historical processes had been compelling, the basic misconception, stubbornly maintained in many cultures, that man is man’s wolf would have led to the mutual destruction of the human species much earlier. This has not yet been the case. Urs Graf has pointed this out emphatically in his commentary on the current situation in Europe (“Chance of confusion – turning point?”; Current Concerns No. 5/6 of 11 March 2025). The decisive power of human beings is their empathy, their imagination. It can spiritually transcend the present, develop an image of the future, transcend the oppressive present into a better image of the future, as the philosophers say, and work towards it. The human in us human beings is of a spiritual nature. It can wither and become dull, but we cannot lose it completely as long as we are alive. Part of the hope and honour of humanity is that it has always recognised threatening lies, also the intention of those who brought them into the world, named this intention and derived knowledge and targeted action from it. •