Does Your Government Lie To You?

     Does your government lie to you? Of course it does. It is silly to think anything else. As an American I actually think more like a Russian in the sense that Russians don't think that they have any rights to know anything about what their government is doing. I feel the same. Our government has to deal with things all over the planet including many bad players, and I don't think that I have the right to know about it. Apparently most Americans think differently than me, and feel somehow that their government is telling them the truth, and should tell them the truth, and should tell them everything.

     In most cases I don't even want to know what our government is doing, but when it comes to the Ukraine it's a little bit different. Our government has been lying to us for over a year, telling us that Putin is crazy, that Putin is losing the war in the Ukraine, and that the casualties are so high that it is leading to dissent among the Russian people, all of which is just plain not true.

     The recent revelations from the US military tech guy who was arrested for posting classified information to a discord server used by gamers, which then got uploaded to 4chan, then to Reddit, then to the New York Times tells us that our government has been lying to us about the war in the Ukraine. Because this is the US State Department and the United States government, the leaker has committed something like treason and he probably faces the death penalty. He was photographing documents and uploading them to a server, apparently just to impress the other people on the server. 

     In my post America's War In The Ukraine, I detail various estimates as to the number of casualties that the Russians have suffered in the Ukraine in the last year or so, with Western estimates ranging between 80,000 and 180,000. I wrote that since it was all propaganda, we may never know the truth. Thanks to a leaker who likely faces the death penalty, we now know that our own US military believes that the Russians have only suffered 17,500 casualties since starting the military operation in the Ukraine over a year ago, yet they have been telling the American people that it is over 80,000, and our government allows our media to print estimates from General Eirik Kristoffersen of Norway who placed the numbers at 180,000 Russian casualties.

     There is a big difference between 17,500 casualties and 180,000 casualties. It is literally 1/10 the number. Throughout my entire adult life I've been aware that a standard military technique of misinformation or disinformation is to, "double it and reverse it," or in this case, reverse it times five, or times ten. So if the Russians are winning in the Ukraine and have only lost 17,500 troops, reversing it times five means that our government says that Russia is losing the war in the Ukraine and has had over 80,000 casualties so far, and reversing it times ten means the Norwegian government says that Russia is losing the war and has had over 180,000 casualties so far.

     If the US State Department narrative is that the Russian people are getting fed up with Putin because of all of the casualties, then that would make sense if there were actually up to 180,000 Russian casualties, but if the number is less than 1/10th of that, and the Russians don't think that they have the right to have any opinion about what their government does, then Russia is doing just fine in the Ukraine, having annexed 15% of Ukrainian territory along the Sea of Azov in September of 2022, extending Russia all the way to the Crimea.

     The US has been giving weapon systems to the Ukrainians since 2014, in 2022 Putin wiped out every single bit of military equipment that the United States had given the Ukraine over 8 years in only 18 days, and declared victory in his special operation to demilitarize the Ukraine. But the US won't back down, we are committed to taking the Ukraine from Russia, which is sort of similar to if Russia decided that they wanted to flip Canada to being pro-Russian and anti-US. None of this can end well. By aggressively re-arming the Ukrainians over the last year we have destabilized global food supplies, destabilized peace and security on the planet, and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, all paid for with US tax dollars.