The Ukraine war and the manufacture of consent
The Ukraine war. Three simple words that roll off the tongue with little thought or consequence. Like the Iraq war. The Afghanistan war. The Libyan war. And all the others. Each becomes a label, a shorthand, stripped of history, politics, humanity and class content. We read the headlines when they surface, absorb the approved outrage, and move on. For most people in Britain, what is happening does not yet intrude directly into daily life. Our children are not being conscripted. Our homes are not being bombed. There is no rationing, no air-raid sirens, no visible sacrifice demanded. It’s what happens to other people, in other places and has little to do with us.
As long as the war remains ‘over there’, ignorance is not only possible but encouraged. We are fed a pre-digested moral narrative and, like baby birds, many swallow it whole. Yet this ignorance carries a cost. It is not neutral. It is actively cultivated, because an informed working class would not accept what is now being prepared, what will inevitably violate our lives too.
Two soldiers, two stories
Recent interventions by two military figures expose the fault line between propaganda and reality. On one side stands Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a retired US army officer with experience of modern warfare and Pentagon planning. On the other, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, Britain’s current chief of the defence staff, speaking openly at the Royal United Services Institute.
Both men speak from within the military world, yet they offer sharply contrasting analyses, which alone suggests scenarios of greater complexity than that which our BBC and wider media reveal.
Macgregor describes a war shaped by corruption, attrition, logistical limits and political calculation. He emphasises the exhaustion and criminal exploitation of Ukrainian manpower, the distortion of reporting, the scale of Western financial leakage, and the absence of any realistic path to Ukrainian victory. His analysis strips away sentiment and exposes war as the brutal, transactional process conducted by states that it is.
Knighton, by contrast, offers something else entirely: mobilisation rhetoric. He speaks not of limits but of opportunity. Not of restraint but of preparation. He invokes a looming Russian threat, without basis, to justify rearmament, social discipline and sacrifice. He tells us that we must be ready “to build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight”, and that more families must come to know what “sacrifice for our nation means”. Yet it won’t be the families of the ruling class who will know any sacrifice. This is not analysis. It is conditioning. Pre-conditioning for what is to come!
The propaganda framework
Since Russia’s special military operation began in 2022, the West has unleashed a propaganda campaign unrivalled since the Second World War. We were told the war began overnight, without context, without provocation, without politics, without history. Putin, we were instructed, simply woke up one morning and decided to invade his neighbour because that is the evil criminal tyrant he is. No mention of NATO expansion. No mention of the 2014 coup. No mention of eight years of war in Donbass. No mention of the Minsk agreements being openly sabotaged.
The intensity of the propaganda onslaught alone should have raised alarm. When every media outlet speaks with one voice, when dissent is sanctioned, when parish councils fly foreign flags, when schools, hospitals and local authorities are conscripted into ideological display, something is wrong. When respected analysts are silenced or labelled propagandists for refusing the ‘script’, the issue is no longer Ukraine. It is control. Propaganda does not exist to persuade the sceptical. It exists to discipline the compliant.
Suppression of dissent
The ideological control is not limited to official pronouncements. Although the EU has not declared war against Russia, nevertheless across the European Union, voices that depart from the sanctioned narrative are being punished, not debated. Retired Swiss Army Colonel Jacques Baud, a respected military analyst and former NATO adviser, has been sanctioned by the EU for alleged ‘Russian propaganda’ — despite basing his work exclusively on Ukrainian and Western sources and refusing invitations from Russian media. Baud’s offence is not allegiance to one side or another but revealing the gap between media narratives and reality, illustrating that crises must be understood on their material terms, not filtered through state propaganda. His sanction demonstrates that Europe feels compelled to manage its narrative more decisively — perhaps even more aggressively — than the United States, reflecting a fear of internal dissent that might undermine its war effort.
Alongside Baud, other critics such as Xavier Moreau, a former French army officer, and John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff from Florida, have faced punitive measures. The EU’s actions underscore a shift in political regimes: alternative interpretations are not merely unwelcome, they are being outlawed. What does this mean? It reveals that Western states recognise the fragility of their war narrative and fear that, if contested, it will unravel.
Censorship and narrative control
This fear is institutional. Recent investigations by The Grayzone into Britain’s Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee expose a pervasive system of narrative control where journalists are conditioned to obey editorial ‘advice’ from a secretive body funded by the Ministry of Defence. Internal documents show the DSMA committee boasts of a 90-percent-plus success rate in shaping or suppressing content on sensitive national security topics — a regime where stories that should be public are buried, and journalists ‘apologise’ for stepping out of line.
The DSMA system operates in the shadows, exempt from freedom of information laws, and routinely pressures media outlets to avoid or alter reporting on issues that could challenge the official line. This is state influence over what we are continually told are independent media, turning newsrooms into cogs within the national security state. The goal is clear: maintain a uniform portrayal of Russia as the imminent threat and prevent perspectives that might open space for debate or dissent.
The D-Notice regime now seeks to extend its reach into social media, signalling an intent to suppress revealing disclosures on platforms far beyond traditional newsrooms.
War without casualties, for now
A central contradiction runs through Western policy: the necessity of war without Western deaths. Nato understands perfectly that mass British or European casualties would provoke resistance. Colonel Macgregor when asked in the interview, what it would take for the American people to become vocal in their criticism of Ukraine said, 100-200 Americans in body bags. That is why Ukraine functions as a buffer, a proxy, a sacrificial zone. Ukrainian lives are expended so that Western publics will remain passive. Macgregor’s analysis makes clear that this is unsustainable. Wars of attrition consume men and material. They expose corruption. They bleed treasuries. They eventually demand escalation or retreat. And therein lies the rub: Anglo-American imperialism is in no position to escalate (yet) and can’t find a face-saving way to retreat.
Knighton’s speech reveals which path the British ruling class prefers. He speaks of abundant capital and attractive returns from defence investment. War, he tells us openly, is an economic opportunity. Skills unavailable in peace will be made available through militarisation. Infrastructure neglected for generations, (he suggests since the 19th century!), will finally be rebuilt, not for social need, but for war readiness.
What peace could not justify, war will. That he actually reveals that truth proudly and boastfully, tells us everything.
The looting of the public purse
Hundreds of billions have already vanished into the Ukraine war. Arms contracts, logistics, reconstruction promises, consultancy fees, financial instruments. Much of it unaccounted for. Macgregor details the endemic corruption within Ukraine itself, well known to Western governments long before 2022 and quietly ignored because it serves imperial objectives.
Despite these efforts to manage perception, the material costs of the proxy war are ballooning. European Union leaders have agreed to offer €90 billion in loans to Ukraine, even as US aid purportedly diminishes and debates over frozen Russian assets collapse. The UK government has reaffirmed “iron-clad” support.
British workers are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, transport or wages, while vast sums are funnelled abroad. Our infrastructure decays because investment is politically unnecessary in peace. Suddenly, under the banner of Russian threat, money appears. Not for hospitals, but for arms factories. Not for railways, but for mobilisation corridors. This is not incompetence. This is not immigrants. This is class policy.
Good, evil and the rejection of the frame
Our task is not to choose between competing moral fairy tales. The language of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ exists to block analysis. The moment a conflict is moralised, material interests disappear from view.
The Ukraine war, like the Iraq way and all the others imposed on innocent peoples of the world by Anglo-American imperialism, is not about democracy, freedom or values. It is about imperial strategy, economic crisis, and the reorganisation of capitalism under conditions of decline. Western propaganda insists on a single conclusion: endless confrontation, permanent militarisation, and obedience at home.
Knighton’s speech is an indictment not of Russia, but of Western capitalism itself. A system so exhausted that it must prepare for war to discipline its population, revive profitability, and suppress dissent. The danger is no longer abstract. The bow has been shot. The message is clear. The British ruling class is preparing us not for peace, but for sacrifice.
And it will not be the ruling class who pay the price.