Propaganda, media – the fog of war

Farewell: A woman saying goodbye to a relative aboard a train travelling to Przemysl, Poland, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. — Reuters

In the coverage of the war in Ukraine, there is little distinction between journalism and propaganda on both sides.

IN war, truth is the first casualty, noted ancient Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus.

All warfare is based on deception, wrote Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist and author of The Art of War.

Not much has changed since those days, except for the euphemisms used for wartime mendacity: propaganda, misinformation, spin and such. This is being displayed daily in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, which has gone on for more than two months now.

Russia, which launched what it calls “special military operation” on Feb 24, wants Ukraine to declare itself a neutral country and never be part of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) military bloc.

Ukraine claims the Russian invasion was completely unprovoked and denied it was planning to retake the two breakaway Donbas republics of Donetsk and Luhansk by force.

In the coverage of the war, there is little distinction between journalism and propaganda on both sides although most Russian news outlets have been banned in the Western nations aligned with the United States.

Based on the official narrative, Russia invaded Ukraine because the tyrant/dictator Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on restoring the pre-1917 Russian empire to its glory days when the Soviet Union stretched across half of Europe behind what was called the “Iron Curtain”.

Putin is depicted as a villain, in the same ranks of previous monsters like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden and Slobodan Milosevic.

Both sides have accused each other of committing genocide and war crimes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Moscow of genocide after the events in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, where bodies with signs of execution were discovered on April 1, two days after the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Russia dismissed it as another “false flag” staged by the Kiev regime for Western media, as was the case with the fake news about the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol.

Britain, which currently presides over the UN Security Council, blocked Russia’s call for an emergency meeting to discuss alleged war crimes committed in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Last week, the UN declined to support accusations by Kiev and Washington that Russia’s actions during its military offensive in Ukraine had amounted to genocide.

“No, we have not documented patterns that could amount to genocide. There are a lot of these legal qualifications – crimes against humanity and genocide – at the end of the day would be for a court of law to determine,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

For the record, it was Putin who cited genocide as justification for Russia’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics before sending troops into Ukraine.

“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime,” he said, stressing that Ukraine had been killing Russian speakers since 2014.

Although this assertion is largely dismissed by the mainstream Western media as Russian fabrication, the fact remains that a civil war has been going on in Ukraine for the past eight years, with some 14,000 deaths so far.

One key historical context of the war is hardly mentioned by the media – that it was triggered by the “Maidan Revolution” of 2014, the violent overthrow of the pro-Russian elected government with blatant and overt support of the US.

“Maidan” refers to Kiev’s Majdan Nezalezhnosti (City Square). The word, probably of Persian origin, denotes a large space, meeting place or parade ground. The Malay/Indonesian equivalent is “medan”.

Current US deputy secretary of state for political affairs Victoria Nuland played a leading role in the unrest, for which she gained notoriety as “Maidan’s US midwife”, while she was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under former President Barack Obama.

There is also propaganda by omission, such as evading the issue of Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The awkward reality is that a powerful anti-Russian National Socialist movement exists, and it holds enduring hero worship of WWII German Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

But it would be too much to expect the media to report more critically on the US/Nato support for the neo-Nazi ranks in Ukraine’s forces and their links to US foreign policy.

The neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was merged into the National Guard of Ukraine in 2014 to fight against the separatists. Now an official regiment of the National Guard of Ukraine, it uses the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol as its logo while its soldiers sport tattoos on their bodies and have Nazi insignia on their helmets.

In 2010, the battalion’s founder, Andriy Biletsky, was famously quoted as saying: “Ukraine should lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Untermensch is the Nazi term for non-Aryan “inferior people” or “masses from the East” – Jews, Roma and Slavs. The term was also applied to blacks and mixed races.

Another key context disregarded by the media are assurances that Nato would not expand after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The most famous of these pledges was made by James Baker, former US Secretary of State. He told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Feb 9, 1990 that Nato would not move “one inch eastward”.

Archived declassified documents from the US, Soviet, Germany, Britain and France confirm that many such guarantees were given between 1990 and 1991.

In 1996, however, when President Bill Clinton was seeking re-election, the US Senate voted to start Nato’s eastward expansion process, ignoring opposition from 19 Republican and Democratic senators, and another group of 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics who wrote an open letter to Clinton.

“The current US-led effort to expand Nato is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that Nato expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability,” they warned.

Media consultant M. Veera Pandiyan, who is back writing his column after a five-month hiatus recovering from valve replacement surgery, likes this quote by an anonymous author: “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.” The views expressed here are the writer’s own.