IN life, it is absolutely critical to learn to pick your battles.
While celebrated English playwright William Shakespeare once noted that “cowards die many times before their deaths”, Nigerian novelist, poet and critic Chinua Achebe rather left us with a more invaluable lesson.
“It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward,” he opined, adding: “We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.”
Kikikiki.
But it only takes the wise to know when to be hawkish and when to be dovish.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro apparently agrees with Bishop Lazi that you cannot possibly entrust your fate and leave consequential decisions to clowns, especially young, impressionable comedians, who oftentimes cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasies.
And because of the false bravado being projected and peddled by one such foolishly brave leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine might soon lie in ruins over a conflict that ordinarily could have been avoided.
Mirage
Bishop Lazi, however, is not in the least concerned with the spectacle of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but the broader geopolitical intrigue between Moscow and Washington that has been festering for decades after the ostensible end of the Cold War with the collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in 1991.
For woke people who have always been sceptical of the valorised image of the US as an international force for good that abidingly ascribes and lives by the virtuous values of integrity, morality, decency, human rights and democracy, the Ukrainian war has actually exposed its hypocrisy — which we already knew – and, most importantly, its witchcraft, dark arts and cloak-and-danger tactics of asymmetrical warfare, which have been years in the making.
Ever since Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine on February 24, those who have been relying on global mainstream media and social media platforms to keep tabs on the evolving situation in Eastern Europe have been bludgeoned by pro-Ukrainian propaganda disguised as news, giving the impression that the Russian army, for all its capabilities, was being routed and could possibly fail to achieve its objectives.
Networks such as CNN, CBS, NBC, ITV, BBC and Al Jazeera caricatured Russian President Vladimir Putin as a crazed madman apocalyptically fiddling his fingers on a nuclear button that could set the whole world ablaze.
TIME magazine even compared him to a latter-day Adolf Hitler driven by delusions of grandeur and needlessly prosecuting a senseless military assault on an innocent, sovereign nation.
Equally, the Russian military were portrayed as a clueless, demoralised and rag-tag ensemble that was being successfully repelled by brave, determined and organised Ukrainian forces.
And Zelenskyy, despite being clearly outflanked, outwitted, outgunned and outnumbered, literally acted the part by churning out video after video claiming his “valiant forces” were on the verge of upending a superpower.
How foolish!
It was even more graphic on social media platforms such as TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which routinely showed images and videos of smouldering Russian tanks and helicopters, giving the impression that the “aggressors” were being vanquished.
In most instances, most, if not all, of these images and videos insidiously and subtly popped up on people’s timelines and projected a contrived reality willed by the West.
Except that all this was not true, but a big, fat illusion and lie.
Take it from the Bishop, Putin, who has for years been methodically planning for a pushback against the overweening influence of an ambitious US-led NATO willing to spread its tentacles onto Russia’s doorstep, has been surgically carrying out his mission and will logically see it to the end.
Smoke & Mirrors
The mirage of Ukrainian forces standing toe-to-toe, pound-for-pound and man-for-man with the Russians is actually a creation of well-planned and well-executed aggressive disinformation campaign being carried out by the Americans through, in part, a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV). Last week, James Clapper and Beth Sanner — former director and deputy director of US national intelligence, respectively – unwittingly told CNN as much.
You see, in 2011, the US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees much of Washington’s armed operations abroad, engaged a California-based company to secretly develop software that could manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
This innovation gives Americans the capability to “create false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives”, which is exactly what they have been doing.
At one time, US security hawk, James Mattis, whose last high-profile job was Secretary of Defence under the Trump administration, revealingly told a US Senate Committee that this electronic warfare programme “supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement and web-based product distribution capabilities”.
To shut out alternative narratives that might challenge the contrived reality of the West, Russian media and news agencies such as Russia Today and Sputnik News have been banned in the European Union, while signal carriers such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and MultiChoice are being pressured to switch them off.
Such unilaterally sacrilegious moves, which represent an unabashed assault on media freedom, free speech and net neutrality, are ironically being carried out by the so-called high priests of freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, in this part of the world, we credulously consume these compromised sources of traditional and new media, which make us a blank canvass upon which the imperial designs of the West are painted.
It is not surprising that some of our own, parrot a quixotic worldview as projected by the West. Most of our naïve folk think that Western media is the paragon of professional journalism when it is in fact an appendage of spy agencies and institutions that seek to further the foreign policy objectives and interests of their governments.
We all saw it during the evolving conflict between the Ethiopian government and the regional Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), where the Ethiopian Media Authority’s director-general Mohammed Idriss had to warn four major media outlets — CNN, BBC, AFP and Reuters — on November 19, 2021 against “consistently disseminating news that sowed seeds of animosity among people and compromised the sovereignty of the country”.
In particular, CNN, among its litany of transgressions, was singled out for manufacturing and disseminating news analyses to further TPLF objectives; reporting law enforcement operation as a genocidal campaign, undermining government’s efforts to address the humanitarian crisis; defamatory reports on the country’s institutions; and deliberately generating news to discredit the country’s leader, Abiy Ahmed, in the international arena.
Empire of Lies
But what is the Bishop getting at with all this?
Well, it has to be remembered that Washington still continues to consider Zimbabwe its adversary, and do not be surprised when the same playbook is used especially in the lead-up to the 2023 elections.
Social media platforms will be used to maximum effect for a full frontal assault on Harare, as Washington once again angles for regime change, which, according to their political calculus, will naturally engender a pliant administration.
The budget and infrastructure is already in place, and the imminent by-elections will provide ample rehearsals for the main show.
You might have seen how anti-Zimbabwe news sites have of late come alive and are operating almost in lockstep.
Sometimes when you are scrolling down your timeline on social media, do you find yourself regularly wading through a deluge of anti-Government news and voices?
And, conversely, those voices and news sites perceived to be Government enablers are systematically either shadowed, throttled, switched off or suspended.
This is not by default, but a seemingly imperceptible campaign of asymmetrical electronic warfare carefully designed to promote anti-Government sentiment.
Twitter has already had several run-ins with authorities in India, Nigeria and Uganda after being outed for these covert campaigns.
Although all this will come to naught, Government has to be extra wary regardless.
The battlefield has shifted and the war is now being fought on a different terrain.
World War III might already be underway, albeit in a different format.
Job 24: 13-24 warns us of evil forces that thrive in the dark.
“There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths. When daylight is gone, the murderer rises up, kills the poor and needy, and in the night steals forth like a thief.
“The eye of the adulterer watches for dusk; he thinks, ‘No eye will see me,’ and he keeps his face concealed.
“In the dark, thieves break into houses, but by day they shut themselves in; they want nothing to do with the light. For all of them, midnight is their morning; they make friends with the terrors of darkness. Yet they are foam on the surface of the water; their portion of the land is cursed, so that no one goes to the vineyards. As heat and drought snatch away the melted snow, so the grave snatches away those who have sinned.
“The womb forgets them, the worm feasts on them; the wicked are no longer remembered but are broken like a tree.
They prey on the barren and childless woman, and to the widow they show no kindness. But God drags away the mighty by his power; though they become established, they have no assurance of life.
“He may let them rest in a feeling of security, but his eyes are on their ways. For a little while they are exalted, and then they are gone; they are brought low and gathered up like all others; they are cut off like heads of grain.”
In Ukraine, in a war that is largely of the West’s making, they all know how it might possibly end for Zelenskyy — their stooge, who they euphemistically refer to as their ally – but for now they are prepared to offer false messages of solidarity, which they know are only palliative.
Bishop out!