No this picture isn't from the Ukraine. It's from Yemen in 2016 and I include it to make a point about a war that is raging right now and that will get almost zero 'coverage' in the western press today.
The news factories don’t care about civilian suffering
The mainstream media’s ‘coverage’ from Ukraine is heart rending and shocking, no moral or sane person could possibly do anything but condemn those responsible for the violence there. I don’t doubt that individual journalists do care about the suffering they are witnessing, but the people who sent them to Ukraine to gather almost forensic evidence of Russian war crimes don’t really care.
Where was the same morally outraged commentaries about civilian deaths and suffering during the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003? A war based on a pack of lies. A war that lasted for eight grinding years and killed a million Iraqi’s in the first three, to add to the deaths caused by the crippling sanctions that preceded it. Where was the tear stained sanctimony about terrified mothers and children, dead families, destroyed infrastructure, starvation and displacement? It was almost nowhere. Western journalists were embedded within coalition military units and breezily spread another pack of lies about ‘precision guided munitions’ and ‘surgical strikes’ – lies that persist to this day.
Were microphones and cameras afforded the citizens of Libya as they fled more illegal western bombing in Benghazi – based on another pack of lies about an imminent massacre? Of course not. The west had an oven ready narrative about Libya that it didn’t want disturbed. Did hacks from the Guardian and the BBC trouble themselves with the shattered state that the West left behind them once the usual suspects had affected the regime change they wanted? Of course not.
Where is the ‘coverage’ today – right now – of the war in Yemen? A war of aggression waged by the immoral despotic state of Saudi Arabia, a brutal savage conflict that the West could end in a heartbeat if it wanted to, but instead the U.K. has sold £20 billion of arms to it. U.S. arms sales are almost beyond computing but Obama wanted to sell $115 billion worth to the Saudi’s. This war has left over 370,000 dead, is an ongoing humanitarian disaster and has no end in sight – with 1.3 million deaths predicted by 2030.
But there will no rolling live blogs today or lurid media outrages about the suffering of Yemen – because the media establishment’s interest in civilian suffering is selective and tactical – not moral.
Western media outlets are only interested in civilian war suffering when:
(a) The west isn’t directly causing it
(b) When the West doesn’t have an ongoing geopolitical interest in hiding it
The news factories have abruptly rediscovered in Ukraine that wars are bad, that bombings and shelling are rarely ‘precision guided’ and that innocent people suffer and die in them? Why now?
Well it’s because the constraints about reporting western wars are inverted when reporting Russian wars. The west has a vested propaganda interest in truthfully reporting the horrors of this war, so the vague rose tinted binoculars have become sharply focused microscopes. They can use their eyes and join up the dots when they want to. It’s just that they rarely want to.
Western outrages in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and of course Israel form but a part of what a genuinely free and moral press would routinely report and condemn – but instead it ignores and whitewashes the truth of those wars for that is their real job.
We will have plenty to say about Ukraine in the coming days but we start with this. Ukraine presents just one opportunity for good, it will allow western audiences to share in the true horrors of war through the eyes of white European people they identify with. This opportunity must be built on if we are to prevent future wars.
We must not however allow the mainstream media to portray Russian war actions and aggressions as somehow different from those of the West for they share exactly the same barbarity and have exactly the same selfish immoral roots.
We must tirelessly prevent the mainstream media from using Ukraine to wash way their sins and that of the political class, to paint both in new lacquers of aloof moral grandeur they do not and have never possessed.
The suffering of Ukraine could at least highlight the hubris, lies and depravity of the west’s arms trading, wars and complicit media. I pray it will, for it will serve no other good for anyone.
Ignore the tub thumping of the western media that purports to support Ukraine, because if they really cared about Ukraine they wouldn’t fan the flames of war.
Don’t allow the mainstream media to narrowly define your range of permitted emotions and thinking in response to this invasion. Alongside your quite correct horror and grief about Russian aggression in Ukraine, allow yourself to be sickened by the rank hypocrisy of the west’s political and media class.
Allow yourself to wonder what the West’s bumbling and self-serving role was in bringing down catastrophe on Ukraine.
Allow yourself to ponder Russian soldiers, actions and leadership as human dynamics, for whatever the mainstream media (on both sides) assert, only humans are doing all this – not some separate race of alien madmen.
Do not allow the media to spin the spirit and courage of the Ukrainian defenders into a jingoistic bombast of good and evil, of winners and losers and of naked hate and racism against all Russians. We stand on the brink of a nuclear war and European history is already replete with the tragic consequences of such bogus narratives.
The only oft learned truth about war, the one that echoes down the centuries – is that there are no winners – only losers and the screams of the innocent.
Since 2013 I have worked on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and speaking simple truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.
I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.
If you find this website useful and could spare us a few shillings to help keep our lights on, it would be very much appreciated.
Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.
A very good article John. It would be good to hear your comments more frequently. Thank you.
Following the political assassination of Corbyn and the death of the brief possibility of genuine democracy in the UK – I lost the heart to keep documenting the antics of the British political class. So depressing.
Its not true to say that there are no winners in every war.
There are some who profit very handsomely from it, whoever comes out on top.
If I were a cynical type I could see myself musing that a logical extension to the profit motive would be to ask who it was that set the fire that started the war.
The jury will disregard that last statement.