Beer Bottle Propaganda

"The first casualty of war is truth." This well known phrase is mostly true, but not exactly correct. Truth usually dies before the war starts, as almost all wars are sold to we, the people, with lies.

This is most certainly true for the wars started in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The mainstream media played a pivotal role in selling the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, by regurgitating the lies they were fed by governments all over the western world, with America and Great Britain being the main culprits. And they kept selling these wars for the duration; for two decades the public has been lied to about the war in Afghanistan, all the time being fed the lie that everything was going well, or as well as it could go. That is, when the media bothered to report on that war in the first place; we've mainly been treated to silence, which is in stark contrast to the non-stop campaign of selling the war in 2001 - 2003. And when the "Afghan Papers" were made public in 2019 following a Freedom of Information Act request, it dominated the news for only one week. These interviews revealed the embarrassing truth that high-ranking officials generally held the opinion that the war was unwinnable while keeping this view from the public.

Comprising more than 600 interviews with key insiders collected confidentially by the Office of Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan [Sigar], and published after a three-year court battle, the trove has been compared in significance to the Pentagon Papers, the secret Department of Defense history of the Vietnam war leaked in 1971.

Like that secret history, the Afghanistan Papers’ accumulated oral history depicts a war mired in failure – in sharp contrast to the “misleading” story told to the US and British publics by officials in massaged figures and over-optimistic assessments.
_{source: The Guardian - December 14, 2019}

This is why it's so frustrating to see those same mainstream media outlets scrutinize every aspect of the withdrawal from Afghanistan under the Biden administration. Don't get me wrong: there's much legitimate criticisms to make, that's not my point. My point is that they keep on lying, the criticisms aren't made in good faith. Let's get one thing clear from the start: the war in Afghanistan was a resounding success for the ones who sold it to us in the first place, they got exactly what they wanted. Watch the below linked video to see why I say that, but the short and simple explanation is this; the war cost approximately $2.25 trillion, and was a great transfer of wealth from bottom to top, from the American tax payers to the moguls in the military industrial complex. It's that simple, it's always money and never "spreading freedom and democracy." The video explains how America could have used all those trillions of dollars to solve almost all domestic problems.

America doesn't have a monopoly on using propaganda to fan the flames of hatred in order to sell wars; we can do that here in Europe just as well. So here's the story of how a Serbian farmer shoved a beer bottle up his own ass, blamed it on Albanian nationalists because he was initially too ashamed to confess the truth, and subsequently ignited a nationalist fervor among the republics that were once united in Yugoslavia. Djordje Martinović arrived at a local hospital in Kosovo with a broken bottle wedged in his rectum. He claimed that the bottle was inserted there by two Albanian speaking men while he was working in the field. After being interrogated by the Yugoslav People's Army however, he reportedly admitted that his injuries were self-inflicted in a botched attempt at masturbation; he stuck a stick in the bottle, the stick in the ground, and sat on top of the anal-piercing contraption; not that this means he sat on the wide end of the bottle... ouch...

Funny as this may be, the incident got picked up by the media and they ran with it. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

The Yugoslav government had for many years made open nationalism a taboo subject, and Yugoslav media outlets had previously systematically downplayed ethnonationalism. The collapse of this taboo in the coverage of the Martinović case heralded the growth of nationalism that was to lead to the country's collapse in 1991.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Djordje Martinović became a Serbian folk hero, with poems and paintings dedicated to his martyrdom at the hands of Albanian demons. Later analogies were made with Ottoman Turks, who had ruled Serbia until 1833, with the incident being compared to the Ottoman use of impalement as a means of torture and execution. And from that the connection to Muslims was made of course, leading eventually to horrific scenes of ethnic cleansing... Never underestimate the power of the media and the lies they repeat over and over again, is the moral of this story.

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