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Why the Media War Over Ukraine is a War Against Everyone
by Seth Ferris, via NEO.org:
The ongoing media war between the United States and the Russian Federation is pretty much official. Even before the first official shots were fired, through the announcements by Andrew Lack, the newly-appointed chief of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which compared the English Language Russia Today to the Islamic State and Boko Haram, it was being conducted alongside the other concurrent conflicts: the ground war, the sanctions war, and the currency war.
In any sort of conflict opposing sides will have opposing views, and will present whatever suits their purposes and ignore what they don’t want people to hear. However, history shows us that there is such a thing a Truth, and if you ignore it it will come back and bite you. Ask any American who has served in Iraq and Syria, or any of the Vietnam veterans who came home vilified for doing their duty when, having seen the situation on the ground, they had no idea why they were there to begin with.
It is therefore in the interests of any conflicting party to base their propaganda on facts which give their actions justification. However, in Ukraine only one side is endeavouring to do this, and regretably it is not the US. All the Western powers have no choice but to go along with another projection of the US world view, despite the fact very few people outside the US believe it has any connection with reality. This is important, when people’s lives, and millions of war machine dollars, are involved.
Pot calling the kettle black
The American world view is very simple. It is based on one premise: everyone else has something wrong with them because they are not American. This encourages the US to look for the splinter in everyone else’s eye whilst neither seeing the log in its own nor imagining it could exist.
Consequently the US has expectations of different countries which reflect this prejudice. If they have wrong with them what America says they do, they must therefore want to do what America wants to put it right. Maybe these countries have their own ideas about what they want and what is good for them. But America’s ideas are superior, so what America wants must be what is good for the world as a whole, there is no need to take any other interest into account.
The US view of Ukraine is as follows: Putin’s view of what the new Russia should be is not compatible with the 21st century. His “nostalgia for the years of tsarist or communist conquest” is a utopian and dangerous sympathy out of step with the modern world. Reincorporating or annexing Crimea must therefore be part of an effort to create a buffer zone (East Ukraine, Moldova, Ossetia, Abkhazia and maybe more to come) between Russia and Western sympathizers, because his views are not American, so he must be setting up an anti-American bloc.
As journalist Robert Parry writes, part of the problem is that the neocon propagandists who conduct such wars have been allowed to get away with introducing a fundamental falsehood into the modern American media. The personal has become the political: that is, you don’t deal with the larger context of a dispute, you make it all about some easily demonised figure.
