Western media and the war in Ukraine
Stefan-Moore is one of the rare breed of western journalists who really respect the professional ethos of objective reporting. I have followed his writings and film documentaries for some few years and his level of analysis of international politics is laced with utmost objectivity. It is perhaps his recent piece on his observation of how western media reports the war in Ukraine that compelled me to bare his brutal honesty to the wider public through this article. In fact the dark spectre of war is once again haunting Europe and the world. As the gruesome death toll mounts from Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, most of us stand on the brink of the unthinkable, a nuclear confrontation which could literally spell the end of life on earth.
Amid all these Stefan-Moore says it is so unfortunate that the Western media has largely reduced the complex causes behind this disaster to one simplistic meme: that all is the fault of one man, Vladimir “Mad Vlad”
Putin whom they regard as the evil autocrat, a modern-day Stalin, an unhinged Hitler with visions of global domination. Stefan-Moore warns that unless you adhere to this facile bogyman narrative that reduces a complex global conflict with deep historical roots to a binary contest between good and evil, you are blamed for siding with the enemy and won’t get a word in edgewise in any discussion about the real causes behind this horrific war.
He says that to even suggest that the US and its NATO allies might share some responsibility by pushing Russia to the brink and encouraging Ukraine to reject compromises that could have prevented the invasion, automatically makes you a Putin apologist, a Kremlin stooge or worse.
Stefan-Moore is right because we have seen this before. From Vietnam to the illegal invasions of Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Somalia, the US foreign policy establishment and a too often compliant media have made a fine art of crafting simplistic narratives. Not so long ago, Stefan-Moore avers, the mainstream New York Times became the leading cheerleader for the Iraq invasion that was later proved to be based on the completely false claim that Saddam Hussein was building a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. He says in the White House - media echo chamber, so called “evidence” was fed to this paper by the Bush administration officials who then claimed the paper was one of the sources of their evidence. Only after the loss of over a million lives and trillions of dollars did the truth come out, but the paper of record never published a correction. Instead, a new reason was concocted for going to war, to topple the evil dictator Saddam Hussein. Today, as Stefan-Moore has rightly observed, this is the same kind of simplistic narrative now being used to claim that Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine rests solely on the wicked persona of Putin. But this is dangerously misleading as Intelligence Analyst Scott Ritter laments that: “By tying the problem of the Ukraine to one man, American policy makers are dealing with the wrong problem as they fail to acknowledge that Russia’s interests are greater than any single individual, no matter how long serving or powerful.”
Stefan-Moore decries the fact that today, as we are saturated with numbing images of bombs exploding, buildings turned to rubble and bloodied corpses, and western media shockingly becomes silent when it comes to reporting on how the situation got here in the first place. This biased media reporting provides almost no historical context to help viewers grasp the chain of events that precipitated the Russian invasion.
Stefan-Moore states that from the start, the war in eastern Ukraine that precipitated the wider conflict has been reduced to a war between the Ukrainian army and “pro-Russian separatists”, a purposely misleading label that obscures the fact that there are really two main cultural and linguistic groups in the Ukraine, one made up of 60% ethnic Ukrainians in the west and about 30% ethnic Russians in the east, with Ukrainians in the west identifying more with Europe, those in the east with Russia.
The media rarely reports that the current crisis began in late 2013 when the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych, viewed by many ethnic Ukrainians as pro-Russian, rejected an EU (IMF) loan deal that imposed harsh austerity measures in favour of a more favourable deal offered by Russia.
Following this fateful decision, there were mass anti-government protests and Yanukovych was overthrown in a US-engineered coup, a claim given credence by the billions of dollars that the US spent on regime change (in the name of democracy promotion) in the Ukraine and a smoking gun in the form of a secret recording of a phone conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt where they can be heard plotting to install Ukraine’s next leader weeks prior to the protests that led to Yanukovych’s ouster. Although the toppling of Yanukovych is not acknowledged as a coup in the mainstream western media, Stefan-Moore says it is vital to understanding the current situation as Yanukovych’s removal was the spark that ignited Russia’s reaction to everything that followed. Stefan-Moore tells us that in this case, Russia’s perspective is almost completely absent from the media that has airbrushed out its most fundamental concern, namely being surrounded by NATO forces and nuclear warheads after the US promised Russia that it would not expand NATO following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is shockingly very rare if ever to hear that as NATO has expanded its forces 800 miles east to Russia’s border since 1996, or that when Ukraine’s NATO membership was first proposed back in 2008, Russia declared it to be an existential threat and a red line it would not allow to be crossed. Stefan-Moore says instead, the official narrative coming from the US State Department and an overly credulously media is that a malevolent and possibly unhinged Putin has invaded the Ukraine with revanchist ambitions of redrawing Russia’s borders to recreate the Russian Empire. Furthermore Stefan-Moore expresses shock that the western press has completely ignored the decades of dire warnings by America’s most senior foreign policy officials about the danger of NATO expansion since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He says in the early 1990s, US diplomat George Kennan, an arch anti-communist and the architect of the US strategy of Soviet containment, sounded the alarm that “NATO expansion would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era. This is entirely true because subsequently, when NATO first considered Ukrainian and Georgian membership in 2008, CIA director and former US ambassador to Russia William Burns warned that this would “not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, it would engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region”. And in the lead up to Russia’s invasion, Stefan-Moore says the last US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock wrote, “obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War.” These alarms have been coming from the highest-ranking members of the US foreign policy establishment including
Henry Kissinger since 1989 and the failure to report them is a serious omission from the historical record by the western media, reiterates Stefan-Moore. Meanwhile, the propaganda machines on both sides are now in hyper drive. In addition to arresting thousands of protesters against the war, Russia has banned Facebook and Twitter, and shut down all opposition to the war on state run media, and anyone who posts “fake news” could face 15 years in prison. In the West, Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik have been banned in the US and Europe.
None of my criticisms of western media are meant to justify Russia’s monstrous and devastating invasion of the Ukraine. But you’ve got to ask: Could this war have been avoided if western leaders were less intransigent and the public was more informed about its complex causes and America’s role in precipitating the crisis? If there was a better understanding of Russia’s security concerns? If the media had conveyed the warnings of insiders sounding the alarm? If reporters had been less credulous about US State Department talking points and media group think? One can only wonder.