The conflict with Russia in Ukraine has exposed the increasingly desperate behavior of the US empire, where it’s rapidly restructuring the systems people look to for information about the world in order to ensure control over our dominant narratives while it works relentlessly to subvert Russia, China and Iran and secure unipolar planetary hegemony. Since we can’t have the average Americans seeing and discussing this phenomenon the Biden Administration has created a “Ministry of Truth”.

The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board“, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established. The Disinformation Board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth“, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia.

To add to the dark comedy we have the Disinformation Governance Board to be run by a TikTok musical comedy star, Nina Jankowicz, an instant what-the-fuck! moment, since retailing disinformation has been her main occupation in the short time she’s been a Deep State minion. Ms. Jankowicz is a notorious Russia-gate hoaxer and propagandists in the October 2020 emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop. She has zero credibility as anything but a professional liar.

And, of course, the Biden Administration is telling Americans it’s for their own good. Even though our country is spiraling into divisiveness, poverty and hopelessness, they are hell bent on a proxy war using CIA-trained neo-Nazi’s to bleed Russia and ultimately overthrow Vladimir Putin. Of course they blame the divisiveness on disinformation such as persuading us that we have Trump-voting “deplorables” because of social media “fake news” rather than growing disenchantment with liberal political systems. The masters of war require an enemy. When an enemy cannot be found, as George Orwell understood in 1984, an enemy is manufactured, or in America–sold.

This is not as hard as it may seem as many Americans are fine with being propagandized since they have a deep psychological need for the anti-imperialist critics to be wrong because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie. And it’s not just foreign policy and war, there’s also all of the horrible things neoliberalism has wrought over the last 40 odd years, all made possible by a relentless campaign of advertising, PR and propaganda. The same machinery has been used to reinforce the narratives about the necessity of the rich having all of the money just like it’s been used to reinforce the narrative that Russia and other empire enemies should be destroyed.

Heterodox economist Michael Hudson makes the connection. “So, what are countries going to do when they can’t afford to pay the higher prices for energy?  Well, Janet Yellen, who was the Federal Reserve head and [now] the Secretary of the Treasury says, ‘Well, what we’re going to do is use the International Monetary Fund to preserve America’s unipolar hegemony.’  I think she used almost those words.  We have to keep American control of the world and we’re going to do it through the IMF.  And that means in practice using the IMF to create special drawing rights, which will be sort of like free money, the bulk of which will go to the United States to support its military spending abroad for all of this huge military escalation. And it will enable the IMF to go to countries and say, ‘We will help you pay your debts and not be foreclosed on and get energy, but it’s conditional.’  On usual conditions:  you have to lower your wages; you have to pass anti-labor legislation; you have to agree to begin selling off your public domain and privatize.

So, what we’re seeing, really, isn’t a war between NATO and Russia.  It’s a class war of the neoliberals against labor across the world to establish the power of finance over labor.

The energy and food crisis caused by the NATO war against Russia is going to be used as a lever not only to push privatization, largely under control of US investors and banks and financiers, but it’s also going to lock countries into the US orbit all the more, both the Global South and especially Europe. So, those are the economic effects of the war.  And in the newspaper, you think the war is all about Ukrainians and NATO fighting Russians, and it’s really a war by the United States to use the NATO-Russia conflict as a means of locking in control over its allies and the whole Western world, and in Janet Yellen’s words, re-establishing American unipolar power.”

We’ll see how it goes. I’m not sanguine that the US will be able to win the global hybrid war it has unleashed to maintain its global hegemony despite the massive propaganda blitz and satirical Disinformation Governance Board. They are irrevocably losing it to China, which is rapidly strengthening as a result of anti-Russian sanctions.

As far as the whole ministry of truth thing, it may surprise you, but truth and reality are joined at the hip, no matter how hard the powers that be try to pretend otherwise.