President Putin banned the word “war” and insisted that Russians use the term “special military operation” to describe his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine because he wanted to manipulate the public’s thinking and divert it from reality. I lived in Russia until October 2022 – for eight months after the invasion – and can attest how manipulating speech facilitates manipulation of thinking. It works slowly and insidiously.

There is now widespread support for the war against Ukraine. Tatiana Stanovaya has written that “critiquing the war makes you an enemy of the state (and by extension, the public)” and liable to be branded a neo-Nazi or Fascist and be jailed.

Josh Frydenberg and several Australian Jewish organizations, such as the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), are grossly exaggerating Australian antisemitism – which is mostly the result of events in Gaza – to divert attention from Israeli brutality. They want Australians to feel un-Australian and akin to a Hitler admirer if they focus their minds on a government in Israel – and it seems a society — that wants to purge Gaza of Palestinians.

Frydenberg and Co. are happy to manipulate thinking in Australia because their true loyalties are to Israel. I have written about my personal experience of this with Colin Rubenstein of the AIJAC. See:  https://www.jeffschubert.com/me-and-colin-rubenstein-an-australian-traitor/

Frydenberg slickly uses the PR trick of getting a couple of vulnerable people who have genuinely suffered — in this case in the Holocaust – as pawns to try to focus attention on “bad Australia” and away from Gaza.

Yvonne Engelman said: “My message is: get involved. Stand up and say, ‘this is wrong. We don’t want this in our country’.” Nina Bassett says: “Open your eyes and open your mind and open your heart … speak out on the right side of history”.

If Engelman and Bassett really and honestly think there will be a Holocaust in Australia, they would be sensible to leave!

Finally, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Richard Marles, says he is “deeply uncomfortable” with the phrase “from the river to the sea” because it “is a phrase which calls for only one state” and it undermined bipartisan support for a two-state solution. Oh! So, now Australians will soon only support something other than a “two-state” solution at the risk of criminal prosecution?

In addition to living in Russia, I have lived and worked in China where my book on dictatorship is banned, and I would be happy to explain to Marles – if he has the guts — why he would be happy working in a dictatorship! See my book on Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Kemal Ataturk: https://www.jeffschubert.com/

My other internet sites are: https://russianeconomicreform.ru/  and https://shanghai-ifc.org/

 Jeff Schubert

WhatsApp and Telegram:  +855 6157 6627