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Slightly over two weeks into Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, the Western media looks war-weary. The hysteria has lessened; sobriety seems to return, albeit slowly. More thoughtful pieces are emerging, with some writers in the West even querying Western narratives and verities on the operation. The overly condescended upon global reader gradually feels respected, slightly.
Western hypocrisy, first casualty
They say the first casualty in any war is truth; in this conflict it has been hypocrisy, Western hypocrisy largely. The West routinely tells us media rights are human rights. We have swallowed that lofty claim, even placing the institution of the media outside the vast repertoire of capitalism’s infrastructure for justifying Western conquest and global dominance for the exploitation of lesser human beings. The claim has become a strong precept, a shibboleth.
Silencing alternative view and plural media
Yet soon after the special operation in Ukraine, RT or Russia Today, was ripped off bouquets of all Western content aggregators across hemispheres. Even Multichoice was not spared. This harkened the days of NATO operations in Kosovo; or of the US-UK, Bush-Blair coalition of the willing in Iraq. Broadcast stations were taken out as legitimate targets of those wars. Then, we thought these were aberrations; doyens of free speech and human rights cannot, could not, take out apparatus of mass communication!
Right of West’s propaganda
Today, RT which NATO cannot take out without triggering a global nuclear conflagration, has been bombed off bouquets of content aggregators. As that happened, Western media narratives hyped how “autocratic” Putin was abridging media freedoms inside Russia itself, and bombing broadcast towers in Kyiv! No one told us this was retaliatory; or that media victims of Putin’s actions were protégés of the West set up in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union as propaganda beachheads against Russia. Or that the bombing of Ukraine broadcast tower had had long, repeated precedents in the West’s own wars. So what happens to our right to free speech, to thought variety which different media outlets and systems assure? As I write, many feel entrapped in, and concussed by, monolingual, monological narratives on Russia and Ukraine. What there is, it seems, is the West’s right of propaganda, with the rest of mankind playing human repeater stations to flat news. So much about media freedom as a human right.
The phenomenon of Russian oligarchs
Soviet Union, American’s Reagan-led propaganda used to harp, was an evil empire. It had been from 1917 when Lenin founded the first Communist State on ideas propagated by Marx and Engels, both citizens of the West. What was/is right, righteous and normal, was “free enterprise” which the West champions. After the fall of Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc system, the West promoted free enterprise and its ideological root, neo-liberalism. Defeated and traumatised by this vertiginous change, successor societies from the Soviet Union took to capitalism and free enterprises as best they knew how. Therein lies the roots of what the West now derisively calls oligarchs: celebrated Russian investors in the West until Putin starts his special operations in Ukraine. These Russian investors – sorry, oligarchs – funded much of Europe, PM Johnson’s broke London especially. None in the West sanctioned them. In fact there was celebration, with Russian capital free to invest in practically anything, including in English premier football clubs.
Re-engineering societies against communism
The “evil empire” and its ideology of apostasy — communism — had been supplanted, to be replaced by latitudinarian Russian moguls who spent months floating aimlessly on high seas, enjoying unparalleled opulence. Here was the West’s cherished capitalism unbridled and let loose upon Russian soil. The West was happy this would complete old USSR’s re-engineering, well away and beyond any prospects of communist recidivism. Lest we forget, the 19th Century West had had similar experience in primitive accumulation, creating a middle class on which present capitalism is erected worldwide. Nothing was new, or unfamiliar.
When Putin asked to join NATO
One video clip which Western propaganda has been unable to suppress is that of George Bush (jnr) and Putin serenading Russian ladies in Moscow. Then Putin was a good man, with his citizens moving Western capitals through their vast stashes of capital they invested abroad. Shrewd and calculating as ever, Putin had asked an American President to allow Russia to join NATO. The old barrier of communism had, after all fallen! The request was turned down. But we are now one system, Putin opined, noting Russia was now a capitalist State?
Clutching at several propaganda straws
Came Ukraine’s operations, the West’s propaganda pundits clutched at propaganda straws. They likened Putin to Lenin before realising Lenin was a communist. That was dropped. They called him the latter-day Czar, forgetting much of Europe, Britain foremost, was monarchical. That, too, was dropped. Next, Putin was made to be a Hitler re-incarnate. Until they realised more than any other Nation, USSR had not only made the greatest sacrifices in fighting Nazi Germany; it was also the first power to walk into defeated Germany at the conclusion of the Second World War! In the end they called Putin the Devil, which he remains imaged to this day.
Communist Putin?
Beneath this propaganda clutter is a key, serious question: that of framing what is happening between Russia and Ukraine, but without indicting NATO, or without exculpating Putin. That appears to be the insoluble bind for the West. They can’t call it a Cold War. For if it was, or has to be made to be, what is the ideological divide pitting the West against Russia? Both are capitalist? In any event, since when has communism bred oligarchs who invest in Western capitals? How do oligarchs emerge in classless societies which Marx dreamt about, and which Lenin strive to built?
What is NATO’s antithesis?
The framing crisis goes deeper. If Soviet Union and its dominance of Eastern Europe gave us “the evil Empire”, what has NATO’s eastward expansion into former Soviet Empire given us? A new empire? Called what? UCNATO, Union of Capitalist NATO? Historically, NATO found justification in an armed antipode, an armed antithesis? What is NATO’s antithesis now? Founded on what ideological apostasy? So NATO is a defensive bloc against what/which threat?
Hobsbawm’s age of expansionism
This leads to yet another problem: the bogey of Russian expansionism with a view to restoring the old Soviet Empire. Except it is NATO, not Russia, which is expanding, and which has expanded eastwards into old Soviet Empire, seemingly with exactly the same goal they used to accuse old Soviet Union of historically? The West cannot say the Hobsbawmian age of imperial expansionism and empire is gone without self-chastising. Without looking hypocritical. Equally, Russia’s claim that the West seems threatened by her mere existence seems very hard to dismiss. Need we wonder that most countries of the world – led by China – have maintained NATO, not Russia, has precipitated Russia’s operations against Ukraine?
When voting against Russia is not voting for NATO
American-led propaganda seeks to sell the many countries who voted for the resolution to condemn Russia’s operations in Ukraine, as global consensus against Russian expansionism. Yet the same geography of anti-Russian resolution consensus shrinks and crumbles when nations are asked to adopt punitive sanctions against Russia. Only America and the West have done so, with some western nations falling in line reluctantly. The rest of the world regards these sanctions as NATO’s long-planned economic aggression against Russia, with Ukraine as an excuse and pawn. Voting against the resolution against Russia is not quite the same as excusing or cleansing NATO’s expansionism into East Europe.
Who was the aggressor abroad since 1945?
There is so much to say regarding this whole saga which is sure to remake the world, and create a new world order rotating on anvil of totally new precepts. Except space and time do not allow. Let me slide in one more evidence of Western hypocrisy and senselessness.
The Chinese did a small yet telling exercise. They traced all the wars and conflicts which broke out after 1945, all of them overseas.
They arrived at the conclusion that more than 81 percent of those wars were traceable to the United States’ expansionism and desire to create spheres of influence. I have taken this exercise a step further: in all these wars, USSR and later Russia, used its veto power consistently in defence of the aggressed! Which is to say, USSR and Russia used veto power against U.S. aggression.
For us in Zimbabwe, this is very real. We almost fell foul to US/UK aggression in 2008/9 had it not been for Russia and China.
For us on the African continent, this is a recent experience: Libya is writhing through last rites of its death as a nation because Russian and Chinese vetos could not save it against an American-led assault by the West.
Why then is the devil citing scriptures? #OnlyABrayingVillageDonkey.
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