{"id":206270,"date":"2022-03-07T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=206270"},"modified":"2022-03-03T05:35:38","modified_gmt":"2022-03-03T05:35:38","slug":"ukraine-a-conflict-soaked-in-contradictions-and-new-patterns-in-war-and-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/ukraine-a-conflict-soaked-in-contradictions-and-new-patterns-in-war-and-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine: A Conflict Soaked in Contradictions and New Patterns in War and Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

2 Mar 2022 – <\/em>Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. That\u2019s likely because although the intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also marked a break with the past in a number of ways. The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. This is, however, not a U.S. intervention. That in itself is a surprise\u2014one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike.<\/p>\n

Even as we deplore the violence and the loss of life in Ukraine resulting from the Russian intervention (and the neofascist violence in the Donbas), it is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West\u2019s ethnocentric interest in an attack whose participants and victims they believe they share aspects of identity with\u2014whether related to culture, religion, or skin color.<\/p>\n

White Wars<\/strong><\/p>\n

War in Ukraine joins a sequence of wars that have opened sores on a very fragile planet. Wars in Africa and Asia seem endless, and some of them are rarely commented upon with any feeling in media outlets across the world or in the cascade of posts found on social media platforms. For example, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which started<\/a> in 1996 and which has resulted in millions of casualties, has not elicited the kind of sympathy from the world now seen during the reporting on Ukraine. In contrast, the startlingly frank comments from political leaders and journalists during the conflict in Ukraine have revealed the grip of racism on the imaginations of these shapers of public opinion.<\/p>\n

It was impossible recently to get major global media outlets interested in the conflict in Cabo Delgado<\/a>, which grew out of the capture of the bounty of natural gas by TotalEnergies SE (France) and ExxonMobil (U.S.) and led to the deployment of the French-backed Rwandan military in Mozambique. At COP26, I told a group of oil company executives about this intervention\u2014which I had covered for Globetrotter<\/a>\u2014and one of them responded with precise accuracy: \u201cYou\u2019re right about what you say, but no one cares.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one, which is to say the political forces in the North Atlantic states, cares about the suffering of children in Africa and Asia. They are, however, gripped by the war in Ukraine, which should grip them, which distresses all of us, but which should not be allowed to be seen as worse than other conflicts taking place across the globe that are much more brutal and are likely to slip out of everyone\u2019s memory due to the lack of interest and attention given by world leaders and media outlets to them.<\/p>\n

Charlie D\u2019Agata of CBS News said<\/a> that Ukraine \u201cisn\u2019t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European\u2014I have to choose those words carefully, too\u2014city, where you wouldn\u2019t expect that, or hope that\u2026 [a conflict] is going to happen.\u201d Clearly, these are the things one expects to see in Kabul (Afghanistan) or Baghdad (Iraq) or Goma (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), but not in a \u201crelatively civilized, relatively European\u201d city in Ukraine. If these are things that one expects in the former cities respectively, then there is very little need to be particularly outraged by the violence that is witnessed in these cities.<\/p>\n

You would not expect such violence in Ukraine, said<\/a> the country\u2019s Deputy Chief Prosecutor David Sakvarelidze to the BBC, because of the kind of people who were caught in the crossfire: \u201cEuropean people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed every day.\u201d Sakvarelidze considers the Ukrainians to be Europeans, although D\u2019Agata calls them \u201crelatively European.\u201d But they are certainly not African or Asian, people whom\u2014if you think carefully about what is being said here\u2014certain world leaders and international media outlets expect to be killed by the violence unleashed against them by the global great powers and by the weapons sold to the local thugs in these regions by these great powers.<\/p>\n

Worst War?<\/strong><\/p>\n

On February 23, 2022, United Nations Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres\u2014in a heartfelt statement about the Russian military intervention in Ukraine\u2014said<\/a>, \u201cIn the name of humanity do not allow to start in Europe what could be the worst war since the beginning of the century.\u201d The next day, on February 24, with Russia launching<\/a> \u201cthe biggest attack on a European state since World War II,\u201d European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned<\/a> this \u201cbarbaric attack\u201d and said that \u201cit is President Putin who is bringing war back to Europe.\u201d \u201cBringing war back to Europe\u201d: this is instructive language from Von der Leyen. It reminded me of Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s Discourse on Colonialism<\/em> (1950), where the great poet and communist bemoaned Europe\u2019s ability to forget the terrible fascistic treatment of the peoples of Africa and Asia by the colonial powers when they spoke of fascism. Fascism, C\u00e9saire wrote, is the colonial experiment brought back to Europe.<\/p>\n

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, neither the United Nations secretary-general nor the president of the European Commission came forward to make any immediate condemnation of that war. Both international institutions went along with the war, allowing the destruction of Iraq, which resulted in the death of more than<\/a> a million people. In 2004, a year into the U.S. war on Iraq, after reports of grave violations of human rights (including by Amnesty International on torture<\/a> in the prison of Abu Ghraib) came to light, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called<\/a> the war \u201cillegal.\u201d In 2006, three years after the war had begun, Italy\u2019s Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who had been the president of the European Commission in 2003, called<\/a> the war a \u201cgrave error.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the case of the Russian intervention, these institutions rushed to condemn the war, which is all very well; but does this mean that they will be just as quick to condemn the United States when it starts its next bombing campaign?<\/p>\n

War Stenography<\/strong><\/p>\n

People often ask me, what\u2019s the most reliable news outlet? This is a hard question to answer these days, as Western news outlets are increasingly becoming stenographers of their governments (with the racist attitudes of the reporters on full display more and more often, making the apologies that come later hardly comforting). State-sponsored outlets in Russia and China now increasingly find themselves banned on social media sites. Anyone who counters Washington\u2019s narrative is dismissed as irrelevant, and these fringe voices find it hard to develop an audience.<\/p>\n

So-called cancel culture demonstrates its limits. D\u2019Agata has apologized<\/a> for his comment about Ukraine being \u201crelatively civilized, relatively European\u201d compared to Iraq and Afghanistan and has already been rehabilitated because he is on the \u201cright side\u201d of the conflict in Ukraine. Cancel culture has moved from the chatter of social media to the battlefields<\/a> of geopolitics and diplomacy as far as the Russian-Ukraine conflict is concerned. Switzerland has decided to end a century of formal neutrality to cancel<\/a> Russia by enforcing European sanctions against it (remember that Switzerland remained \u201cneutral\u201d as the Nazis tore through Europe during World War II, and operated as the Nazi banker<\/a>s<\/a> even after the war). Meanwhile, press freedom has been set aside during the current conflict in Eastern Europe, with Australia<\/a> and Europe<\/a> suspending the broadcast of RT, which is a Russia state-controlled international media network.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Agata\u2019s reliability as a reporter will remain unquestioned. He \u201cmisspoke,\u201d they might say, but this is a Freudian slip.<\/p>\n

Calculations of War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wars are ugly, especially wars of aggression. The role of the reporter is to explain why a country goes to war, particularly an unprovoked war. If this were 1941, I might try to explain the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II or the Japanese assumption that the Nazis would soon defeat the Soviets and then take the war across the Atlantic Ocean. But the Soviets held out, saving the world from fascism. In the same way, the Russian attack on Ukraine requires explanation: the roots of it go deep to various political and foreign policy developments, such as the post-Soviet emergence of ethnic nationalism along the spine of Eastern Europe, the eastward advance of U.S. power\u2014through NATO\u2014toward the Russian border, and the turbulent relationship between the major European states and their eastern neighbors (including Russia). To explain this conflict is not to justify it, for there is little to justify in the bombing of a sovereign people.<\/p>\n

Sane voices exist on all sides of ugly conflicts. In Russia, State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveev of the Communist Party said<\/a>\u2014soon after the Russian entry into Ukraine\u2014that he voted for the recognition of the breakaway provinces of Ukraine, he \u201cvoted for peace, not for war,\u201d and he voted \u201cfor Russia to become a shield, so that Donbas is not bombed, and not for Kyiv being bombed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matveev\u2019s voice confounds the current narrative: it brings into motion the plight of the Donbas since the U.S.-driven coup<\/a> in Ukraine in 2014, and it sounds the alarm against the full scale of the Russian intervention.<\/p>\n

Is there room in our imagination to try to understand what Matveev is saying?<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at<\/em> Globetrotter. He is the director of <\/em>Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research<\/a><\/em> and a senior non-resident fellow at <\/em>Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies<\/a><\/em>, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including <\/em>The Darker Nations<\/a> and <\/em>The Poorer Nations<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Washington Bullets<\/a>, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was produced by<\/em> Globetrotter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Mar 2022 – The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. This is, however, not a U.S. intervention. That in itself is a surprise\u2014one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike. It is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West\u2019s ethnocentric interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[2009,2197,1035,1268,91,818,253,278,254,961,70,92,481],"class_list":["post-206270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight","tag-anti-war","tag-biden","tag-eastern-europe","tag-european-union","tag-nato","tag-proxy-war","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-security","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-violent-conflict","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}