It should be easy to find out what really happened to the massacred civilians in the Ukrainian town

The West has made a snap judgment about who is responsible for the massacre at the Ukrainian town of Bucha with calls for more stringent sanctions on Russia, but the question of guilt is far from decided, writes Joe Lauria.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered anger, vitriol, and bigotry in the United States and much of the democratic West. It is an atmosphere of intolerance that surpasses the immediate post-9-11 period (especially the lead-up to the Iraq War) and even the height of McCarthyism in the early and mid-1950s.

Lost in the clouds of combat we forget how the violence in otherwise peaceful Ukraine came about. The spark that lit the fire was struck in Kiev’s central square, the Maidan.

A key witness to the widely publicized incident at the Mariupol maternity hospital has punctured the official narrative of a Russian airstrike on the facility, and raised serious questions about Western media ethics. Meanwhile, news of a massacre in the city of Bucha contains suspicious elements.

Several weeks ago, US President Joe Biden warned gravely that Russia would soon be making a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, thereby violating international conventions and exposing itself to the severest punishment of the world community. Alternatively, the Russians would arrange a radiation leak by attacking one or another of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

An indignant Moscow has angrily demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday over the allegations of atrocities by Russian troops in areas around Kiev through the past month. Prima facie, this allegation is fake news but it can mould misperceptions by the time it gets exposed as disinformation.

Ukrainian #PSYops failed again

Dear Readers: Those who get their news and VSE’s (=Virtue Signaling Emotions) from Westie Mainstream Media, are frothing with impotent rage at Russia’s latest atrocity against innocent Ukrainians! I’m talkin’ ’bout the martyr town of Bucha, of course. This is one of those towns North of Kiev which the Russian army occupied, and then left, according to what is now being recognized as a clever strategic bluff.

For years, from Mali to Afghanistan, I have worked for peace and risked my life for it. It is therefore not a question of justifying war, but of understanding what led us to it. I notice that the “experts” who take turns on television analyze the situation on the basis of dubious information, most often hypotheses erected as facts—and then we no longer manage to understand what is happening. This is how panics are created.