An incredible piece not only confessing to but proudly bragging about the West’s historic lies during the Cold War that are still repeated and taught to this day!
Think of the Berlin Airlift as a big-budget movie sold as a true story. Now one of its loudest fans finally admits it was staged.
For decades, the Berlin Airlift has been told as a fairy tale. Stalin blockaded the city: cruel and heartless, while heroic Western pilots fed starving Berliners with flour and chocolate from the sky.
The perfect moral script: light against darkness, liberty against tyranny, good vs evil. Exactly the same moral wiring that still fuels the superhero industry today, cultural programming as moral training.
The same Guardian now admits what Soviet and Eastern historians said all along: there was no full blockade. In Britain’s own National Archives, the Foreign Office wrote in 1948:
“The blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege… movement in and out of Germany is possible all the time.”
Do you want to know what really happened? Washington and London imposed a new currency in their occupation zones, breaking prior agreements with Moscow.
The Soviets responded with limited restrictions on Western transport: not starvation, not tanks, just a border dispute over sovereignty. But the West needed a story and it created one.
A three-billion-dollar media performance named The Berlin Airlift complete with cameras, pathos, and heroic speeches about “freedom.”
As The Guardian now concedes, the entire operation was “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends.” In other words, propaganda. It even helped re-elect Harry Truman that same year.
By the way, the article doesn’t condemn this psychological manipulation but actually celebrates it. The author writes with longing for the era when the West “lied effectively,” calling for a revival of those tactics. But he got it wrong: the tactics never changed, the Western media keeps lying at the same speed and volume. The only thing that changed is that people recognize the pattern, and the spell weakens.
When liberal newspapers begin revealing their own disinformation with nostalgia, recalling the days when it worked and lamenting that it no longer does, they’re mourning the decay of their own illusion, fully aware of it, and desperate to keep the echo alive.
From: https://xcancel.com/rinalu_/status/1986071152964579730
Original article, archive.org version (community rule 3)
What we’ve lost most since the airlift, when the US and UK poured into Europe money, information power, and military might for the first time in peacetime, is mojo. We held back Stalin with a remarkable resilience, and one damn great, if not entirely true, story. It’s good we’ve grown more truthful, but not that we’ve lost fighting spirit.
This becomes funnier if you imagine it said by some 80-year-old guy in overalls, sitting in his rocking chair and chewing a straw.
I was taught this lie about the Berlin blockade in school in Germany. They make a really big deal out of emphasizing how big bad Stalin decided to starve Berlin for no reason and how heroic the Americans were for defying Stalin and saving the city.
Come to think of it, looking back on high school history, the entire post war period curriculum consisted really only of four things: praising the Americans and the Marshall plan, demonizing the DDR, masturbatory self-congratulation about how well Germany “dealt with” its war and Holocaust guilt (you can see how well that worked…we have Germany now obsessed with war and rearmament and fanatically supporting not one but two Nazi regimes and their genocides), and glorifying the EU.
In hindsight i almost can’t understand how i became a communist given how much propaganda was drilled into me in school that i totally bought into at the time. After WWI the history curriculum just turns into an absolute propaganda fest with a (for an educated adult) very transparent ideological agenda to sell you on “the West”, capitalism, and liberal democracy, but you only realize this as an adult, decades later, once you have spent years and years learning the real history rather than the fairy tales you were told when you were young.
No one is immune to propaganda but just the same no one is immune to deprogramming.
Thanks for sharing. Its unbelievable. We need to work on documenting german disinformation i think. Feel free to share more info like this.
We need to work on documenting german disinformation
A colossal task. You could work a lifetime and still not cover it all. And this is not just a German problem, it’s a broader European problem, and this is clearly a coordinated and organized decades long effort to propagandize the population. There are some resources that i’ve posted about this topic that are a good starting point to understand how the disinformation machine works:
Thank you, saved.
I know that its not a german problem. But germany needs to crack its own egg. So ze germans need to start deprogramming ze german population
Thanks for posting this!
You’re welcome. When i came upon this article i couldn’t believe what i was reading. I don’t mean the “revelation” about the cold war lies - any well-read communist already knew about those - i mean the fact that they are so openly gloating about their lies and saying that the West needs to lie more. And this from a publication that socdems keep telling me is “leftist” and “progressive”. The irony is that all the West and Western media do nowadays is lie, but it’s not working anymore.
I think the internet makes their job a lot harder, even if it seemingly simultaneously makes it a lot easier lol.
Holy shit, that’s wild. I just assumed that the story was true.
Is their censorship guy on sick leave?
Jokes on them, I never learned about this airlift in history class.
