Photo of a paper document alleged to be Pentagon briefing slides on the Ukraine war.

You can have truth, or you can have propaganda, but you can’t have both. Which will it be?

Investors who are clients of Bank of America were upset recently when a conference to listen to experts on current events heard several presenters who sounded like they were reciting Putin’s talking points!

For example, from the prepared remarks Nicolai Petro, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island who is alleged to have once worked at the State Department, (obtained by Financial Times which I’m quoting here):

“Under any scenario, Ukraine would be the overwhelming loser” in the war. Its industrial capacity would be “devastated”, partly by its economic policy of becoming an agricultural superpower “as recommended by the EU and the United States” and its population would continue to shrink as people left to look for employment abroad. 

“If this is what Russia meant by removing Ukraine’s capacity to wage war against Russia, then it will arguably have won,” he said. 

 He said the US government had no interest in a ceasefire because it had the most to gain from a prolonged conflict through a “dramatic increase in EU energy and military dependence on the US”.

According to FT, a BofA client complained, “The whole event was overwhelmingly pro-Russian.”

This is what happens to people’s brains after long marination in false dichotomy.

The truth about what has happened and will happen in Ukraine is murky, contested, and sometimes confusing. But it’s not partisan.

The truth doesn’t care who wins in Ukraine.

The U.S. and its banksters, on the other hand, are presently caught between a rock and a hard place. Face the truth and use that knowledge to make some rational decisions about investments among other things? Or promote the patriotic narrative that Putin is all bad, all the time, and Zelensky is a hero — and make decisions based on that?

Because you can have intel or you can have propaganda, but you can’t have both.

There are hundred of documents similar to this one. If a hoax, somebody put a lot of time into this.

Which leads us to the fascinating trove of alleged Pentagon-sourced documents on Ukraine, China, and the Middle East. Are they real? Were they leaked or “leaked” or maybe hacked?

Some of the facts seem credible, for instance, that four Ukrainian troops have died for every one Russian troop. It’s the kind of data it’s almost impossible to be certain about, but it is congruent with the tragedy we’ve seen unfolding for the people of Ukraine, like the long battle for Bakhmut which they just lost, and their ongoing conscription challenges. 

If leaked, these documents appear to have come from someone pretty far inside — either at the Pentagon or as a high ranking official of another allied nation.

Were they leaked by a European ally in retaliation for the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline?

By a pro-Russian infiltrator in one of those spaces?

Or maybe a gamer stumbled onto the trove in the output tray of a printer at their office, snagged it, and shared it with their buddies? Mostly the documents seem to have come out in channels like 4chan or in Minecraft chat rooms. What’s that about?

Julian Assange has now been tortured almost to death for leaking truths about the Iraq War, the dirty dealings of the ultra wealthy, and the like. That the U.S. is behind his extrajudicial punishment makes for some spectacular hypocrisy as in the case of a Wall Street Journal reporter just arrested in Russia for trying to obtain classified information about military production.

Did Evan Gershkovich in fact do that or was he just an innocent reporter doing his job, as U.S. Secretary of State Blinken would have us believe?

More than one person has suggested that Gershkovich was nabbed in order to be exchanged for a prisoner the Russians want back, in the way Brittney Griner appears to have been used.

If Russia offered to release Gershkovich in exchange for Assange’s freedom, it would be on par with offering Edward Snowden asylum in Moscow: a blow for truths our government doesn’t want us to know.