Blue-yellow hypnosis

Blue-yellow hypnosis
The human frame of thought and evaluation is being twisted by politicians and the media in the Ukraine conflict.

How are pacifists transformed from warmongers into bellicosity? What mechanisms do the powerful and their media supporters use to make people think and do things that contradict their innate morality? For many topics, the media are the only source from which we draw our perception of reality. What is shown on television is therefore often confused with objective reality. The responsibility of Tagesschau, Spiegel, FAZ & Co. is therefore great, and the media are aware of this. Unfortunately, they often do not use their power for the best, using filters, “framing” and manipulation techniques to benefit war, not peace. The author shows examples of how politics and the media hijack our minds and influence our assessment of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

by Uwe Froschauer

[This article posted on 8/3/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/blau-gelbe-hypnose.]

Examples of pacifist efforts and bellicose reactions to them
When SPD parliamentary party leader Rolf Mützenich expresses thoughts of peace, he is treated like a leper by warmongers. The same goes for Oskar Lafontaine, who endorsed Mützenich's pacifist ideas in an interview with Der Spiegel on April 20 this year and rightly insulted the Greens as a warmongering party.

When Rolf Mützenich expresses concerns about the planned stationing of medium-range weapons in Germany in July 2024, he immediately faces a headwind from the “pacifist” Annalena Baerbock - whose party also likes to break election promises. Mr. Mützenich told the Funke Mediengruppe newspapers:

“We must improve our defense capability in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but we must not ignore the risks of this deployment.”

Mützenich does not want to “ignore the threat from Russia at all”; however, NATO has “a comprehensive, graduated deterrent capability even without the new systems”, said Mützenich. The SPD parliamentary group leader went on to say that the weapons systems that are now to be deployed have a very short warning time and open up new technological capabilities. “The risk of an unintended military escalation is considerable,” Mützenich pointed out. Furthermore, he wished “that the German government would embed its decision in offers for arms control”.

Thus speaks a pacifist who does not fall for the oxymoron “making peace with weapons”.

Annalena Baerbock, the transatlantic Federal Foreign Minister who is still in office, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper that Putin has “continuously expanded the arsenal with which he threatens our freedom in Europe (...). We must protect ourselves and our Baltic partners against this, including through increased deterrence and additional stand-off weapons.” Anything else would be “not only irresponsible, but also naive in the face of an ice-cold, calculating Kremlin” - the word “naive” sounds particularly strange coming from Ms Baerbock. She added that Putin had already broken with disarmament treaties and the common European peace architecture years ago.

I believe that this was yet another slip of the tongue by the Federal Foreign Minister, who is known for this, that Putin had “broken with the common European peace architecture” or that the Kremlin was “ice-cold” in its calculations. In both cases, she was probably referring to NATO or the USA.

In contrast to you and your transatlantic party, Ms Baerbock, Putin is doing much more for his country. That's why the majority of Russians support Putin. If elections were held today, your party, Ms. Baerbock, would receive 12 percent of the vote - still 12 percent too much for my liking, measured against the performance of the Greens; unfortunately, there are no negative percentages.

At the NATO summit in Washington, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz had already announced that this was “an element of deterrence, a contribution to peace and an important decision at the right time”. Shame on you, Mr. Scholz, you and like-minded US vassals are making Germany a target and giving new scope to an arms race, a Cold War 2.0! The arms industry will of course be delighted. At last there could be a big bang again!

When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán writes on the online platform X: “You can't create peace from a comfortable armchair in Brussels” and adds: “Even though the rotating EU presidency has no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the EU, we cannot sit back and wait for the war to miraculously end. We will be an important instrument in taking the first steps towards peace,” he is sharply criticized and sanctioned by the warmongers at home and abroad.

The re-elected EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), who in my view lacks integrity, has decided that the planned meetings under the leadership of the Hungarian Council Presidency will be boycotted by the European top level for the time being.

The mere fact that this woman is still allowed to make any decisions and is not in custody shows the status quo of the much-vaunted Western “democracy”, which is in fact devoid of meaning, and the rule of law inherent in it.

Commissioners are no longer allowed to attend the meetings, only high-ranking officials. The EU states that follow this boycott order and send state secretaries instead of the responsible ministers are, in my opinion, outing themselves as warmongering countries. It no longer seems opportune to have a pacifist attitude and to communicate it. The traffic light is on war - as is the EU: they want war!

When Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier communicates that the delivery and use of banned cluster munitions is justifiable, broad circles suddenly see this non-disregard as the right thing to do. If a further military aid package of 40 billion euros for Ukraine is agreed at the recent NATO summit in Washington and, in addition, long-range weapons and supersonic weapons are to be stationed in Germany that could also reach Moscow and thus make Germany the main target of potential Russian attacks, then that is apparently all right. Do they still have all their wits about them? Is this madness with the taxpayer-funded arms race, long thought to be over, starting again? Cold War 2.0 or what?

Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) approves this bellicose nonsense on the grounds that Germany bears responsibility as the largest European NATO member. Mr. Scholz, YOU have a responsibility towards the people who elected you and from whom you are supposed to avert harm. You have sworn to do so! And YOU are making Germany a target by deciding in favor of this military nonsense! Following the directives of the Americans seems to be more important to you than protecting the lives of your own people. Dignified and spineless!

Twisting the framework of thought and evaluation
The question is how the elites and their political and media henchmen have succeeded in turning people's minds in the direction of “wariness”. Professor Rainer Mausfeld describes this phenomenon as follows:

"Silencing people's natural moral sensibilities requires considerable assaults on human consciousness. However, those who have the necessary media resources at their disposal can accomplish this - at least for a limited time and especially in situations that are critical for the stability of prevailing power relations - in relatively simple ways. On the basis of a twisting of the entire framework of thought and evaluation, black can be turned into white and white into black at will. Once the entire system of interpretation has been twisted, it is easy to make an act or a situation appear morally “good” or “evil”. In this way, people become accustomed to the fact that there can be two categories of state crimes, namely those that are not crimes but morally justifiable acts, and those that are to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. You can get used to the idea that morally reprehensible acts such as torture, drone killings, bombing of civilian infrastructure or the use of outlawed cluster bombs and uranium munitions can be morally justified as long as they are only committed by the “right” people” (1).

The good guys and the bad guys
From a Western perspective, the “good guys” in the Ukraine war are the Ukrainians or the USA, which is waging a proxy war (2), and the “bad guys” are the Russians. This is quite astonishing, especially in view of the fact that the majority of the world's population - China, India, Brazil, South Africa and others - tends to support the Russian side. The fact that the “good guys” - in this case the USA - have almost certainly sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines seems to be of less interest to the cowardly German government, which is ducking away. This unforgivable act of terrorism, had it been proven to have been committed by any other nation, would have been interpreted by our “war-minded” politicians as a declaration of war.

The one is anchored in people's minds as only “good” and the other as only “bad” through manipulation techniques such as repetition, fragmentation of information, fear-mongering and unsubstantiated claims.

The commander of the Territorial Command, André Bodemann, for example, recently declared that Putin had announced “that he wants to restore the old territory of the Soviet Union”. At the Federal Press Conference in July of this year, the journalist and self-thinker Florian Warweg asked about the source for this claim - which none of the officers and politicians present could name - a claim that contradicted what, for example, NTV or Der Spiegel (titles: “Nobody wants to believe us”, “We don't want the USSR back”) reported.

The highest level of creating an enemy image is the dehumanization and demonization of disagreeable people as part of the Western narrative. This despicable and diabolical approach is practiced by unethical politicians and the leading media in a deeply immoral way. The Polish-American political scientist and political consultant Zbigniew Brzeziński referred to Vladimir Putin as “Moscow's Mussolini” as early as 2004 and four years later as “Hitler” - Brzeziński, of all people, who in his 1997 book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives” demanded that the USA, as the “only global superpower”, must secure its dominance on the “grand chessboard” of Eurasia (3).

“Is Vladimir Putin really a textbook fascist?” is the title of an article by Telepolis (4), which analyzes articles by various media to this effect.

“There is hardly a media outlet in the German-speaking world that has not taken part in the discussion. Der Spiegel had it in its program, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung discussed these theses, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published several articles on it, and even public broadcasters are spreading this narrative” (4).

A sober analysis of the leading media was not to be expected in their function as propaganda organs, as the image of Putin as a killer, liar and fascist is to be built up among the population in order to maintain the deadly arms deliveries and, not least, to distract attention from the fascists in the Kiev regime. The masses, who think of themselves as do-gooders, should have the feeling that they are on the right side despite the arms deliveries.

With the insinuation of genocide through this “incomparably vicious” Russian action in recent history - there is no mention of the many illegal wars of the USA since 1945 and the more than 20 million deaths as well as the genocide of the Kiev regime in eastern Ukraine - the opponent is labeled a demon and becomes the perfect enemy for the lulled and one-sidedly informed sheep.

Politicians and their propaganda organs, alias the mainstream media, are building up public pressure to conform by defaming other opinions and labeling their proclaimers as lateral thinkers, pests of the people and the like - to rely only on military “solutions” in the Ukraine war. Enemy stereotypes are fuelled by disinformation and the dehumanization of opponents. “Creating peace through Pistorius, Roderich Kiesewetter, Friedrich Merz, Anton Hofreiter, Ursula von der Leyen and others who are complicit in the unnecessary bloodshed in Ukraine. They and their prostituting media persuade people that even more weapons would bring Russia to the negotiating table faster - where it was already sitting at the end of March 2022.

However, just six weeks after the Russian invasion, the West was “not yet ready for peace”, as Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister at the time, announced. The weakening of Eurasia - the “weapons” is the motto of bellicose German ladies and gentlemen such as Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Annalena Baerbock, Anton Hofreiter and Boris - was not yet to the desired extent in this blood-soaked conflict. The rouble or dollar had to continue to roll over bloody terrain.

In the 2019 study “Overextending and UnbalancingRussia”, the RAND Corporation (RAND: Research and Development, a Deep State think tank founded in 1948, mouthpiece of the CIA and the Pentagon, financed by the US government) found, among other things, that Russia had no aggressive intentions. However, this result was not in the interests of the USA, as from a hegemonic, geostrategic and economic perspective, the USA does not want détente and rapprochement with Russia. An imperialist power like the USA needs an enemy image that is accepted by the public in order to further expand its sphere of influence and rehabilitate its ailing economy. “War is the best merchant. It turns iron into gold,” as Friedrich Schiller once said. The RAND Corporation proposed a very comprehensive - provocative - package of measures to which Russia should respond aggressively. The underlying “philosophy” is to force the opponent to expand by appropriate means and thus use up its own economic resources in the strategic confrontation (5, 6).

How can it be that a country like Russia, which in recent decades has not acted nearly as aggressively and imperialistically as the USA, is seen in people's minds as an aggressor and its leader as the devil? Rainer Mausfeld describes the possibility of this perversion of human thought as follows:

"In terms of power strategy, it is extremely useful to get people used to the idea - much like Orwell - that black is white, war is peace, disinformation is information and total surveillance is transparency, and that pacifism is a danger to peace. This distortion of natural moral evaluation categories is at the heart of ideological power. Those who have the power to do so are also able to bring people to voluntary submission and make their submission appear to them as true freedom.

If the powerful manage to distort people's entire frame of thought when perceiving social realities, they become incapable of recognizing and adequately assessing social causalities. If they are virtually conditioned by mass media and socialization instances to distort causalities, there is hardly any prospect of curing such a distortion in an argumentative exchange and by rational means. By twisting the entire framework of thought, moral evaluations can also be reversed and switched on and off at will - something the mass media make ample use of on a daily basis" (1).

Politicians and the media are not interested in the people's opinion
Manipulative reporting in the mainstream media on the Ukraine war was “dominated in particular by German politics” in the first three months - from the end of February 2022 to the end of May 2022. This was the conclusion of a study by the University of Mainz. Military support for Ukraine with heavy weapons was presented in seven of the eight media outlets examined as “predominantly sensible” and rated better than diplomatic measures (7).

At the end of April 2022, the ARD-Deutschlandtrend(8) came to the conclusion that 45% of respondents from the population were in favor of the delivery of heavy weapons and 45% were against it, although this was not mentioned in the leading media.


The diverging results of the Mainz study and the ARD Deutschlandtrend prove that most of the leading media belong to the government. Politicians and the government-instructed media are less interested in the opinion and will of the people, as Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also announced in Prague - “no matter what my voters think”. The following two quotes hit the nail on the head with regard to the non-existent sovereignty of the people and freedom of the press in a supposed democracy:

“The prevailing thoughts are nothing more than the ideal expression of the prevailing material conditions” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, from ‘The German Ideology’) and ‘Freedom of the press is the freedom of 200 rich people to spread their opinions’ (Paul Sethe).

The task of journalists is not to support politics or even to make politics, but to report on political events objectively, neutrally and with an open mind. The manipulative leading media in the hands of the elites are miles away from this task of freely forming public opinion.

Examples of manipulative measures by politicians and the mass media
In September 2022, NachDenkSeiten received an internal document from the German government entitled “Ongoing activities of the departments and authorities against disinformation in connection with the RUS war against the UKR”, which reveals the “narrative synchronization” in the Ukraine war. The whistleblower, who was not named by NachDenkSeiten, described the intention for forwarding this information as follows:

"In my eyes, it is a glimpse into the abyss of the bundled activities of horizontal (cross-departmental) and vertical integration of modern state propaganda. From the ministries and their partnerships with transatlantic think tanks like the ISD (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, author's note) down to the press, 'fact checkers', social media, 'multipliers', 'critical civil society' and so on. They do not even stop at involving schools and children of primary school age" (9).(9)

The document “(...) meticulously lists the relevant activities of the federal ministries and subordinate authorities as of June 27, 2022” (9). It shows “(...) the official involvement of the media - for example Spiegel and Stern -, Western social media groups, educational institutions and the so-called fact checkers. (...) All of this results in a concerted attempt to synchronize information by the federal government” (9). (9)

Ministries such as the Ministry of the Interior headed by Ms. Faeser and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headed by Ms. Baerbock work hand in hand with the media and, in my opinion, strive for the opposite of objective reporting. In the following, only a few points of the so-called 10-point resilience plan of this explosive paper will be pointed out and briefly commented on.

The first point of this plan describes the “linking to fact-checkers on the federal government's websites”. These institutions - most of which can be described as “fact-checkers” - are to be massively advertised through the “websites of the federal government”. Since corona and the RKI files revealing the truth, I think there is no need to explain what we have to think of fact checkers such as Correctiv, ARD-Faktenfinder or Faktenfuchs from BR. They have supported the government's corona lies by hook or by crook and defamed and discredited the truthful information of dissenters. In the Ukraine case, it will be no different with the fact-checkers who are paid to develop half-truths and, in some cases, even lies, and who proclaim themselves to be far removed from the state and independent.

I find it strange that some politicians and their media and fact-checkers seem to be convinced of the nonsense they are telling the people. Their own thinking and evaluation framework seems to have been distorted by programs such as those of the “Young Global Leaders” of the World Economic Forum - which have also “washed” Annalena Baerbock's brain - in such a way that access to reality hardly seems possible any more. I usually get the impression that Ms. Baerbock actually believes what she is saying. If she did, she would not be lying, but she would be expressing her ignorance all the more.

In addition, brochures on “Disinformation in the context of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine” were to be produced and sent to federal ministries, members of the Bundestag, federal states and local authorities. The list of institutions was supplemented with the reference: “Distribution to multipliers in civil society is underway.” Remarkable: alleged disinformation is to be combated with obvious disinformation!

The fifth point in the “resilience plan” is dedicated to cooperation with the press. Magazines such as Spiegel, Stern, Tagesspiegel and the like are explicitly mentioned. These magazines, now practiced in war rhetoric, defame pretty much all opinions that do not contribute to the Germans' “readiness for war”.

It is also mentioned that the term “task force against disinformation” has been successfully established in reporting. In the document, “disinformation” is understood to mean everything that corresponds to a reproduction of the official Russian position. Truthfulness does not play the slightest role! Official Ukrainian or US views, on the other hand, are not considered “disinformation” by the German government. No comment is necessary. You can find much more on this and the leaked document in the NachDenkSeiten article.

A second example of the targeted manipulation of the population is the internal ARD document also leaked to NachDenkSeiten entitled “Glossary reporting Middle East conflict - for internal use, as of 18.10.2023”. Business journalist Norbert Häring aptly called these formulation specifications a “declaration of journalistic bankruptcy”.

In this internal paper, the station's employees are instructed to portray the Israeli army as the “good guys” and Hamas as the “bad guys”. Below are a few excerpts from this 44-page internal instruction:

"We continue to speak of ‘attack/s from Gaza on Israel’ or ‘terror attack/s on Israel’. However, 'war against Israel' can also be used. What must be avoided at all costs are words such as 'spiral of violence', and 'escalation in the Middle East' does not adequately describe the current situation since Saturday. The situation is more complex. Please also be careful how exactly we use the word 'attack': In this situation, it is 'counterattacks by Israel on Gaza'. It is abbreviated to say or write: 'attacks on Israel and Gaza'. (...)"

“Please avoid Hamas ‘fighters’!”
"As already determined by the editors-in-chief, we should not write and speak euphemistically of Hamas ‘fighters’, but of terrorists. Synonyms include 'militant Islamists', 'militant Palestinians', 'terrorist militia' or similar. The anti-Semitic Hamas is widely classified internationally as a terrorist organization. In contrast to the Israeli army, Hamas does not differentiate between military targets and civilians in its actions. Rather, Hamas' declared goal is the 'destruction of Israel'. To achieve this, it uses terrorist means, such as carrying out attacks, indiscriminate rocket fire and the like. The same applies to members of 'Islamic Jihad' who are involved in the Hamas attack. (...)"

Radical Islam, Islamism, militant Islamism
“Hamas is clearly Islamist in orientation - its goal is the establishment of an Islamic state” (10).

It is unbelievable how the “Western values” and its organs try to label the Palestinian Hamas or Vladimir Putin as the “bad guys” simply by using the wording. What about the Israeli genocide, to which tens of thousands of Palestinians have now fallen victim? What about the 14,000 deaths in eastern Ukraine for which the supposedly democratic but in fact fascistically undermined Kiev regime is responsible?

The leading media have not learned from their total failure during the coronavirus pandemic and are once again making the same mistake in the Ukraine and Middle East conflict. Who can still trust them?

US presenter Tucker Carlson recently denounced the fake news machine in an impressive event and said that the mainstream controls what is perceived as reality by large sections of the population. He said:

"You don't know what the world looks like except through them. They are the pipeline through which all information flows."

Tucker goes one step further and accuses his mainstream colleagues of lying. He says: “Either they're really stupid, or (...) they're liars, and my money's on the latter” (11).

The manipulative distortions of our natural, innate ability to judge by elites, politicians and the media will lead society into the abyss if the majority of the population does not recognize its external control and we do not put a stop to these dark forces.

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that nobody believes anything any more. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies can also no longer distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, which sees itself robbed of its power to think and judge, is also, without knowing or wanting to, completely subject to the law of lies. You can then do what you like with such a people" (Hannah Arendt).

Sources and notes:

(1) Rainer Mausfeld (2023): Hubris and Nemesis, page 28, Frankfurt am Main: Westend Verlag.
(2) https://wassersaege.com/blogbeitraege/stellvertreterkrieg-der-usa-in-der-ukraine/
(3) Zbigniew Brzeziński: The Only World Power: America's Strategy of Supremacy (1999). Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer Verlag (English edition 1997)
(4) https://www.telepolis.de/features/Ist-Wladimir-Putin-wirklich-ein-Faschist-wie-er-im-Lehrbuch-steht-7140783.html?seite=all
(5) https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB10000/RB10014/RAND_RB10014.pdf
(6) https://wassersaege.com/blogbeitraege/schwaechung-russlands-die-rolle-der-rand-corporation/
(7) https://www.otto-brenner-stiftung.de/sie-moechten/sich-ueber-aktuelles-informieren/detail/news/die-qualitaet-der-medienberichterstattung-ueber-den-ukraine-krieg/news-a/show/news-c/NewsItem/
(8) https://www.infratest-dimap.de/fileadmin/user_upload/DT2204_II_Report.pdf
(9) https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=88618
(10) https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=105894
(11) https://odysee.com/@EvaHermanOffiziell:1/01.07.24_Tucker_Debatte_V2:5

Uwe Froschauer studied and graduated in business administration at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He was particularly interested in business psychology. He worked as a management consultant, gives seminars at vocational training institutions, is the author of several books and runs the blog wassersaege.com. His passion for worldwide travel has made him sensitive to the cultures and problems of other peoples. He is close to nature and loves animals and plants.