History warns us that such conflicts tend to be extended, with peak episodes which are revolutionary (as the prevailing paradigm first cracks); yet which, in reality, are but alternate modes of the same – a “toggling” between revolutionary peaks and the slow “slog” of intense cultural war.He says this is the state of the West today: “We are, I believe, in such an era.” You may not have heard of Alastair Crooke, as it is impossible to post links to his writings on social media. If you attempt to link his piece on, say, “The Western way of war – Owning the narrative trumps reality,” the owners of the narrative will not publish it. X (formerly Twitter) automatically censors any links to Strategic Culture, on which Crooke’s essays often feature. If you try to post a link to his analysis, X says no:
We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.The “partners” of X include CHEQ, a content moderation service run by former members of Israeli intelligence, as I reported for LifeSiteNews in June 2023
Crooke has spent his diplomatic career in the Middle East and his analysis is banned as “harmful.”
The West has come to view “owning” the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual “victory” thus trumps “real” reality.His commentary on Ukraine and on Israel expand on the basic premise that the mass media is used to mislead the Western public and conceal from them the truth of the wars and their true cost in financial, moral, and diplomatic terms. As his article above concluded:
So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media.Crooke clearly believes that the liberal-global order projects and secures its ambitions toward worldwide domination partnered with a captive media. “The West completely dominates and completely manages the international media,” Crooke " target="_blank" rel="noopener">tells Judge Antony Napolitano in his most recent video interview. This, he says, is one reason that the Russians, and what is called the “resistance” to Israel, do not attempt to fight back with their own propaganda. Another is that they are, according to Crooke, not only fighting the real war instead of a media campaign, but they are also winning.
Warfare has changed. It is a revolutionary change in warfare and we [in the West] are still going on as if it’s just the post Second World War era.Crooke is referring to the use of cheap drone swarms, missile attacks, and advanced electronic countermeasures which have seen the US Navy fail to secure the Suez against Ansur’allah (the “Houthis”), and Israel fail to prevent missile strikes on its critical military infrastructure. The U.S., together with its allies, announced “Operation Prosperity Guardian” in December 2023, to secure safe passage for international shipping through the Red Sea. It has failed Report from the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, a typically pro-war publication, from August 24, 2024. Crooke also notes that the Israeli media blackout on reporting damage resulting from Hezbollah’s missile strikes has not prevented the destruction of a Mossad intelligence center roughly 1 kilometer from Tel Aviv. “It was also the headquarters of Lavender,” says Crooke, reminding Napolitano of Israel’s artificial intelligence-powered targeting system, responsible for “marking tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination” by facial recognition and tracking. Effectively an automated “kill list” with “little human oversight,” Lavender was investigated by +972 magazine’s Yuval Abraham in April 2024. Crooke is arguing that the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and the rest of the anti-Zionist “resistance” in the Middle East have all developed paradigm-shifting innovative forms of next generation warfare, while the U.S.-led West remains focused on manufacturing headlines in the media. Crooke says that the Israeli media blackout is in place to obscure the fact that Israel has lost its military superiority in the region. As a wave of Hezbollah missiles and drones were launched at Israel early on Sunday, “Immediately at 5:00 in the morning the Israeli government issued an absolute ban on any reporting of any damage or any attacks on either major infrastructure or military objectives in Israel.”
A complete censorship was imposed on what happened in Tel Aviv, at the airbase which they also attacked – absolute ban, no reporting, no photographs, no visuals and so they put a complete blackout on any news of any damage to any infrastructure any defense sites or to the intelligence bases in Tel Aviv.Ukraine has developed a similar policy after it began experiencing major damages from Russian attacks in Kiev and elsewhere. Crooke has visited one site which his sources tell him was struck by the Hezbollah attack. “So, of course, we can’t see and we can’t prove it; but, as I say, I do know independently what I said about that.” Hezbollah stated, according to the Times of Israel, their target was indeed the Glilot intelligence base outside Tel Aviv, home to Mossad, Lavender, and the Israeli 8200 signals intelligence unit, some of whose former employees now police content on X. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed that one missile had struck the Israeli intelligence headquarters. Crooke also says that Israeli claims of having destroyed “thousands” of Hezbollah launch sites is “completely untrue.”
Where they say they knocked out thousands of rocket launchers is complete phooey – it’s nothing. It’s completely untrue.Crooke points out that “Hezbollah are happy with the outcome” because they have achieved their aims, which were to respond to Israeli attacks in kind, and demonstrate a military capacity which the Israelis cannot counter. In doing so, Crooke says, Hezbollah have “reestablished the equation with Israel and clearly Israel for the moment doesn’t wish to go to all-out war against Hezbollah.” Alastair Crooke’s reports on video and in writing provide a perspective absent from the mainstream coverage of two of the world’s most urgent crises, each of which has a dangerously low nuclear threshold. His view of the factors informing these dangerous times includes a routine examination of what he called on August 15, “this Western mind-management in which appearance and reality are cut from the same cloth of hostile extremism.” One example of the identification of arguments for peace with extremism – and even treason – is cited by Crooke in the same article. He mentions a meeting of Christians United For Israel (CUFI) in the U.S. state of Maryland, reported by the Times of Israel on August 8. The Israeli news outlet’s headline said “Pro-Israel U.S. conservatives concerned over isolationism, and antisemitism, on far right,” in a piece which said talk of “curbing aid to the Jewish state” was antisemitic. Boris Zilberman, the director of policy and strategy for the CUFI Action Fund, described an “intricate fabric of bad actors working hand-in-hand” with U.S. “isolationists” who seek to end the forever wars backed by Israel and its lobby in the U.S. Sandra Parker, chairwoman of the CUFI Action Fund, told the meeting that quoting scripture on the death of Christ was “anti-Christian.”
It’s not Christian, it is anti-Christian. Anybody who says that “the Jews killed Jesus” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian faith.Crooke argues that the use of the mass media creates a false narrative of world events, which is itself in a moment of crisis. He cites the work of American cultural critic Douglas Kirn, who noted in 2022:
For years now, the answer, in every situation – “Russiagate,” COVID, Ukraine – has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way.Crooke’s insight extends beyond his diplomatic experience to a full-scale review of the nature of political reality in the West. Quoting Kirn, he asserts that the liberal-global system is a “behavioural-engineering enterprise,” which is in conflict with the wishes of its own populations:
The corporate and state interests don’t believe you are wanting the right things.Crooke’s work is one attempt to show not what is said to be right or wrong, but simply what is there. You can access Alastair Crooke’s writings here, and here, and view his weekly appearances with Judge Napolitano here. Wikipedia provides a fascinating biography of Crooke here. Read more at: LifeSiteNews.com
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