News or fib? You better pop that question, as you tear through the latest menu on the on-going West-Russia face-off over Ukraine.
The United States claims a Russia Ukraine invasion is only days away. Russia counters it’s withdrawing its troops, after some war games around Ukraine borders.
The only things you can track — but hardly vouch for — are the specific claims and counter-claims. All else perhaps is spin.
The West, over the years, is notorious for raining its values (no crime?) and its biases (no virtues either) on other races, in its perennial go at cultural domination.
A core value is “democracy”, in which Russia and former satellite communist states are trapped, after the 1991 collapse of communism, as global opposite to capitalism.
A core bias — call it vice, if you will — is the West’s activism in gay rights, which it tears from harsh censure of faith and morals, to the sweet, airy plain of “human rights”.
Why? Age-old sodomy the West and its mass media now garnish and push as regnant rights; for which the Metropole must harshly sanction erring peripheral races!
The USA/Europe versus Russia showdown on Ukraine, however, is more of an intra-tribal war among basically the same people, nevertheless torn apart by ideology and sundry preferences.
Ukraine is the big prize — a former state in the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR: 1922-1991), pushing to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, formed in 1949): the post-World War 2 North America/Western Europe capitalist defence alliance, arrayed against the Soviet communist Warsaw Pact (dissolved 1991), to which Ukraine belonged.
Indeed Ukraine, in historical terms, echoes the 1955 birth of the Warsaw Pact. West Germany just got admitted into NATO. So the USSR, which principal state was Russia, rallied communist East Germany and other satellites to enter the Warsaw Pact.
So, if Russia now balks at Ukraine pushing to join NATO, you could see the history behind it. Besides, for context: it is like Texas (which sometimes threatens to pull out of the United States) actually doing so; and leaving NATO for another defence alliance which its former satellite states, in the USA and Europe, consider hostile.
But what Ukraine is to the West is what Belarus is to the old Soviet bloc. Belarus is comfy with Russia, as much as Ukraine seeks fresh friends in Western Europe.
By the way, Russia and Belarus labour under skewed post-communist era “democracy”, for which they get throatily mocked by the West. Both, however, face their traducers with cold contempt and chilly defiance.
So, Russia makes no fuss over Belarus’s fealty to it. But over its dead body would Ukraine look West.
But the West too has demonized Belarus to no end as Russia’s puppy, flashing Belarus’s often fiddled votes; and Alexander Lukashenko, its gangling President, as notorious proof of bad company with Russia.
On Ukraine and Belarus, therefore, the West and Russia only manifest visceral preferences, not any logical differences. All are of the same Euro tribe. But the visceral differences stem from differing ideologies.
Still, Russia has been more gung-ho to prevent Ukraine from exercising its sovereign rights of association; than the West has frowned at Belarus’s relations with Russia.
Indeed in 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a peninsula part of Ukraine, though peopled mostly by ethnic Russians. For that, Russia stands condemned.
That invasion and annexation could well justify the West chaffing at another encore by Russia the Bully, salivating to pounce on Ukraine yet again — not unlike the Achebe coward that becomes hungry for a fight, each time he meets an unfortunate fellow he can maul.
So, no tears for Russia — for whatever Western response to its current manoeuvre in Ukraine. But that hardly banishes a fair x-ray of the West’s tactics — and for that matter, the Russian counter.
That returns the discourse to the original poser: news or fib? On this score, neither side is an angel. To push its case, fair is foul and foul is fair to both sides.
In reporting Russia’s latest Ukraine stratagem, Western channels present no news. All they rain down is rogue Russia guilty as charged. On the double, it should be marched to the guillotine! That could well have happened — had the West had the means!
But Russia too is no saint. It may have been hopelessly out-gunned in the global media war, as it had hoped to crush and squelch Ukraine. It has practically encircled its neighbour by formidable troops and fearsome arms. It also projects raw, if rogue power, by its provocative nuclear war game with Belarus.
Yet, in its local media — ironically as reported by these same western media — Russia is alleged to have thoroughly slanted the report, presenting itself as an innocent victim of media bullying and international conspiracy.
Media bullying? Yes. International conspiracy? Maybe. But innocent victim? Never! A power player that chokes another with mass troops and brutal arms is never innocent.
Still, the United States and allies have done a good job of putting Russia on the leash. President Biden warns that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is days away, even after an earlier definite date of invasion — Wednesday, February 16 — came and passed, with Russia selling an alleged counter-dummy that it was withdrawing.
Then, Vice President Kamala Harris went to the Munich Security Conference (MSC) to thunder hail and brimstone should Russia invade Ukraine which again, she insisted, could be days away.
Too bad for Russia — the optics were not good at all! With its Western foes in Munich, Germany, rallying the tribe and playing peaceniks, Russian Vladimir Putin and Belarus President Lukashenko were beamed enjoying a live war game, cutting the very contrast as war hawks!
The near-official rumour? That Putin stayed way from Munich because he never wanted peace! You can trust the West to go on an over-drive, in patented media bullying, when they want to impose their preferences as global holy writ.
All these torrents of warning have sort of frozen Russia, whatever its Ukraine intentions are — can’t go forward; can’t step backward; just frozen in its tracks!
Still, from these patented rituals come probing queries from the most unexpected of quarters: a critical reporter told a high US Department of State official that US “intelligence” didn’t quite cut it, as proof of Russia’s settled invasion of Ukraine.
Remember how former US Secretary of State, the late Gen. Colin Powell, quoted “US intelligence”, and told the UN Security Council that Iraq indeed had “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), to justify the second US Iraqi invasion? That was 5 February 2003.
It all turned out a fib that Powell would regard as his illustrious life’s darkest single blot!
So, when you read, listen to, or watch the next report on Ukraine, just pinch yourself: is it news? Is it spin? Or even outright fib?
That may well gauge how the crusading angels of free speech have under-developed basic news.