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Truths to Tell Untruths: Snipping and Sniping: The US Role in the Ukraine War Stephen Reyna [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2024-12-31
Certain thinkers have posted the message that a posthuman stance in which human being is decentered is the way to intellectually go. Others have posted an additional message that we live in post truth times. Baloney! People take center stage at current problematic events -rising fascism, runaway inequality, violent imperialism, and potential extermination by climate change. Moreover, truth exists, and saying it doesn’t, doesn’t make it so; though there are a lot of liars out there.
People take center stage at current problematic events -rising fascism, runaway inequality, violent imperialism, and potential extermination by climate change. Moreover, truth exists, and saying it doesn’t, doesn’t make it so; though there are a lot of liars out there.
Lamentably, it is certain powerful actors in the high-classes who take center stage craving fascism, inequality, imperialism, and climate change. They do so in part by telling partial truths, that turn out at time to be big time lies, in support of problematic desires. This leads us to our topic: Explanation of one way that partial truths become big time lies. Partial truths are constructed by causal snipping in order to perform political sniping. Ultimately, these are ways of manipulating knowledge to create, maintain, or enhance political power by telling untruths by expressing [partial] truths -a decidedly paradoxical situation. The utility of the explanation is illustrated by examining Washington’s big lie about the current conflict in Ukraine. Before proceeding, however, allow me to clarify what is meant by partial truths, causal snipping, and political sniping?
TELLING UNTRUTHS BY TELLING TRUTHS
There is a universe of debates about the truth of truths. Truths are about chunks of reality. Pragmatically -i.e., usefully- truths are statements where what is said to go on in some reality, actually goes on there. Partial truths are those that are true as far as they go, but they don’t tell the full story of what goes on. ‘Smoking often causes cancer’ is a partial truth. It is true that if you smoke in this world you will frequently get cancer. It is unknown what in this world causes cancer. Many partial truths are helpful pointers. They indicate the direction of what you need to know to have more complete truths. Knowing that smoking often causes cancer, points observers in the direction of knowing how this is so. Some partial truths turn out to be lies.
If the partial truth of what goes on in some reality chunk is not what actually goes on in it after its a fuller observation, then the partial truth is a lie. It is true that the Koch brothers are public benefactors. They donated portions of their wealth to public television, medical research, and higher education. However, this judgement is partial, and turns out to be a lie, a whopper, when it is observed that the Koch brothers have been cozy with fascism, inequality, imperialism (Hartmann 2015), and spent over a hundred million dollars to fight the reality of climate change. One way economic and political elites tell big time lies is by causal snipping. What is this snipping?
Snipping
An elementary understanding of causality is needed to explain snipping. Causality is thought of as causes, which bring about effects. One knows causality is happening if every time there is a cause, its effect happens; and if it is known what the connector is that links the cause to the effect. If a sniper kills somebody, the sniper is the cause, the victim is the effect, the kill shot is the connector that puts a bullet in the person’s brain. A causal event is where a particular cause produces a particular effect. Causality normally occurs in chains.
Causal chains are sequences of causal events arranged in space over time. Chains vary. They may be short, long, simple, or complex. There are two major sorts of chains. The first is a chain where the effects of an antecedent causal event become the causes of a subsequent causal event. The second is where the chain consists of causal events in which common causes have common effects. Chains normally lead in some direction towards a particular end. The US presidential electoral process can be said to be a causal chain leading in the direction of the presidency.
Now we are in a position to speak of causal snipping, and to put it in a political context. The less the entirety of a causal chain is known, the greater the partiality of its truth, and the easier it is to misconstrue the reality of the entire causal chain; which to lie about it. Causal snipping can be a way of using parts of causal chains to lie about political reality. It is taking particular event, or events, from a causal chain, and correctly stating the truth about them, but ignoring the other events in the chain which invalidate that truth. This is ‘snipping’ in the sense that it cuts off the events that contradict the direction the chain has taken.
The person practicing causal snipping, takes their snippet and uses it as a weapon to snipe at their opponents. A sniper is a soldier who attacks their opponent from a disguised position. A political sniper is a person who disguises their position behind a partial truth that turns out to be a big lie. In the realpolitik of competing politics from local administrations to informal empires, sniping has been a useful technique for achieving the power of legitimacy. To illustrate this point, consider the causal snipping and sniping practiced by big boys in the US government concerning the current Ukraine War (2022-present). It’s been a big lie.
A BIG LIE
On February 22, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. President Joe Biden called it ‘without provocation,’ a ‘brutal’ act of ‘naked aggression’.[1] (What? They didn’t wear pants!). Thereafter, his principal spokespersons -echoed by much of the mass media- hammered home this message to the American public and everybody else throughout the world. True, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. However, John Mearsheimer -a respected political scientist of a realist persuasion- has suggested that the Russians were provoked in their invasion by the US, which makes Biden’s comments a whopper. Mearsheimer further judges (2014: 7) that the ‘taproot’ of the conflict is US support of ‘NATO enlargement’. What follows is presentation of a causal chain supportive of Mearsheimer’s judgement. I begin by exploring the ‘taproot’ of the war -i.e., its context- out of which the causal chain emerged and, then, the chain itself.
Context
The Russian Revolution (1917-1923) created in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a largely informal empire, consisting of fifteen ‘national republics’ to which were added after World War II ‘satellite’ nations in Eastern Europe. The USSR was huge, covering fully one sixth of the globe. It possessed the world’s largest store of natural resources. The Soviet military was formidable. By 1988, the Soviets had a military of about 5,5 million soldiers. They possessed 39,000 nuclear weapons. It was locked in a Cold War with the world’s other major informal empire, the US, for global imperial domination.
Fidel Castro at one point said, ‘The Soviet Union’s existence was as sure as the sun rising in the morning’ (in Keeran and Kenny 2010:1). The sun didn’t rise on December 26, 1991 as the Supreme Soviet, the legislative body, formally dissolved the USSR? Only the Russian Soviet Republic remained to become the Russian Federation. The new Russian Federation had lost roughly a third of its territory and a half of its population (Suny 2022: 6). The country had experienced (Goldgeier 1999: 4) ‘economic and military collapse’. Its people had suffered economic hardship worse than that experienced by Germans or American during the 1930s Great Depression. George H. W. Bush (Hush I, the father), at the beginning of the USSR’s dissolution, famously said (Bush 1990), ‘Out of these troubled times … -a new world order can emerge’. The early 1990s were as close as the world came to having a US unipolar imperial moment. A central question for the US government at this time was: What to do about a weakened Russia?
The answer to this question was that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would deal with Russia. Created in 1949, NATO was an intergovernmental military alliance. By 2022, it consisted of 30 members, 28 of whom were in Europe. Alliance members all curtsy to the canons of the American world order and are, effectively, US neo-colonies -though some are increasingly powerful, and occasionally restive (especially Germany and France). NATO military spending was roughly 57% of the global nominal total in the early 2021. In principle, it could mobilize 3.5 million military personnel. Three of its members -the US, France, and the UK- possess nuclear weapons. NATO is an intimidating killing machine. Russia had every reason to be apprehensive of it.
Senior Russian officials worried about NATO territorial expansion into central and eastern Europe as a threat to national security. Moscow ‘repeatedly warned’ that placing NATO on its borders was ‘intolerable’ (Hoh 2023). Senior US security elites responded -don’t worry. In February 1990, Gorbachev, then leader of Russia, and James Baker, then Secretary of State, discussed the former East Germany’s joining of West Germany. Baker told Gorbachev that if Russia let East Germany merge with West Germany, then NATO would ‘…not shift one inch eastward from its present position’ (in Sarotte 2021: 1). This is what Washington told the Russians. What they did was something else.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/31/2294607/-Truths-to-Tell-Untruths-Snipping-and-Sniping-The-US-Role-in-the-Ukraine-War-Stephen-Reyna?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web
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