The U.S. rulers and those in the media who channel and articulate their interests are putting the blame for a possible nuclear war entirely on Putin. Case in point: Thomas Friedman, the principal columnist for the New York Times, last week wrote that “The wired, globalized world has never had to deal with a leader accused of this level of war crimes whose country has a landmass spanning 11 time zones, is one of the world’s largest oil and gas providers and possesses the biggest arsenal of nuclear warheads of any nation.”1
If you leave out the irrelevant factoid on 11 time zones, it turns out that there is a country with an exponentially greater level of war crimes, and an equally massive and destructive arsenal of nuclear weapons—the United States of America.2 And this is the only country “the world has ever had to deal with” that has actually used nuclear weapons, annihilating over 200,000 civilians in hellish infernos in a few days in Japan in August, 1945.
The fact that the main columnist in the “paper of record” is preparing people for a possible outbreak of nuclear war on Russia is ominous. The fact that this “esteemed” Times columnist could ignore the fact that the United States is the only country that has used nuclear weapons shows three things:
- That people have been systematically lied to and kept ignorant of the real history of this country;
- That people within the U.S. who do know better are chained to what Bob Avakian calls the Great Tautological Fallacy (GTF) that excuses every crime committed by the U.S. rulers even when such a crime committed by anyone else is condemned as a horror and leads them to suppress, downplay, or “forget” what they once did know;
- That the press and media like the New York Times, as well as CNN, the Washington Post, and the rest, are propaganda instruments of the capitalist-imperialist system.
