Europe's stark choice: Hostage to Erdogan or work with Assad

October 10: Erdogan threatens to flood Europe with 3.6 million refugees as his Syria offensive forces tens of thousands to flee
But now you're in a pickle, aren't you? Working with Assad would mean repudiating the lies you've told about Bashar al-Assad. After all, it would never do if that uh bastion of liberal democracy cooperated with a genocidal dictator.  

There would also be NATO to contend with; the NATO view, controlled by Washington, is that it's better for the Europeans to be at Turkey's mercy than do anything that might assist Russia.

The biggest problem would be how to walk back the lies about Assad without explaining how so many whoppers were reported as fact by major European media.  

Well, I suppose you could blame everything on the British -- and American -- propagandists:  'How were we to know? We're just NATO members; we're not allowed in the Five Eyes alliance.'  

Yes, that might work, although I can think of more than one European government that could suddenly find itself the target of a regime-change operation if they dug up too much detail about the Syrian regime-change op.

As to whether the threat of bone-crushing sanctions would prevent Erdogan from carrying out his threat: I think the consensus view is that Erdogan would not lose sleep about it.

Yet the biggest issue for Europeans isn't Turkey or Syria or even an onslaught of refugees; it's how many more refugees with Islamist leanings the EU can take in without more Europeans voting for very right-wing governments. That's the issue, isn't it?  You may trust that a large number of refugees Erdogan could pack off to Europe aren't Syrian. They are from that place on the map called Jihadi Central, which during the Syrian War has been based in Turkey.

Those Europeans who would like just a small idea of the lies told about Assad might read my February 2017 post summarizing Rick Sterling's deconstruction of the Caesar Photos Affair. They could also read my April 2017 post, 
A neuropharmacologist debunks use of sarin in the Khan Shaykhun [Sheikhoun] incident. 

In both cases and in all others, the liars got away with so much because they played to their audiences' assumptions. An old propaganda trick is to make the lie so big and repeat it so often that people assume there must be some truth to it. But how could U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley sit in front of the world's cameras at the United Nations and hold up pictures of Syrians if she knew they couldn't have been killed by sarin gas, let alone sarin unleashed by the Syrian Army? 

But did she know? Did she ask herself, 'What are the symptoms of sarin gas poisoning?' What about you, if you accepted what she said? I think you would've assumed that nobody would tell a lie that could be so easily repudiated. You would've assumed that the press organizations reporting on the story would surely have checked up on the symptoms. 

If you say it's not possible to live like this, each individual member of the adult public having to double-check on everything reported by the press, on every important claim made by an official -- you could take a page from Bashar al-Assad and rely more on common sense.  Often his answers to questions put to him by members of the foreign press are reminiscent of a physician telling a hysterical patient that if he was choking to death on a chicken bone he couldn't very well be explaining this to the doctor, now could he? 

Take, for example, his reply to Michael Isikoff, Chief Investigative Correspondent for Yahoo! News. From the transcript (there's also a video of the 2017 interview):

Isikoff [Question 37]: Is it a mistake to use barrel bombs and chlorine gas?

Assad: You have to choose which part of the narrative is correct. Once they said we are using indiscriminate bombs and they called it barrel bombs. The other day, they said we targeted hospitals and schools and convoys. We either have precise armaments or we have indiscriminate armaments. So, which one do you choose?

Mr Isikoff preferred changing the subject to making a choice.  If the name rings a bell, yes this is the same Michael Isikoff who was part of an infamous episode in the tower of lies called Russiagate. Indeed, the irony to emerge from the West's propaganda war on Assad is that it is mirrored in the propaganda war launched against Donald Trump.  

Although it would be a small help to Assad at this late stage, in addition to relying more on common sense the public might make better use of the internet. When one is consistently told a one-sided story that has obvious political overtones -- and especially if it has to do with a shooting war -- it's wise to look for other views of the same issue and take these into account. Granted, the search can be a time-consuming task but with practice, it gets faster. Eventually, patterns of behavior become evident and these include a pattern of lying.

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