WESTERN MEDIA & THE DONBASS - “WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T MENTION THE WAR.”

How do you manage to see a war break out against a population largely composed of civilians and that war continue for nine consecutive years and somehow manage to hardly report on it except in terms of the side you like best? That side you like best in this case was an army waging war against civilians. It does seem quite incredible, does it not? Yet this, in broad outline, is what has occurred in eastern Ukraine between 2014 and the present day.

“War? What war?”, you might say, and with some reason. This being because televisual and print media across the entire western world described what was going on in the region affected in very different terms. These terms absented the attacks being made by the favoured side, they took no account of the steadily mounting civilian casualties except to infer by omission that these casualties were nothing to do with the activities of the side they favoured.

The people of eastern Ukraine within the region known as the Donbass had decided that they could not stand idly by while all their rights were stripped from them. Their democratic rights had gone due to a west-backed violent coup that had caused the ouster of both the president and government they had voted into power. The prospect in the very near future coming on the heels of this coup was that the very language they used, Russian, would soon be banned from use in most walks of life and that they, as Russian speakers would become subject to restrictions that made them second class citizens within their own country.

With their rights being steadily stripped from them the people of the Donbass took matters into their own hands much as those who had instigated the coup against their democratically-elected leaders had done. They determined to achieve the degree of autonomy necessary to protect and preserve local democratic processes and procedures that in turn would protect their ability to retain their language, their freedom to associate with a neighbouring nation with which they had many ties, familial, historical and commercial, and in order to protect their own particular regional culture as they saw fit in all aspects as citizens with full rights under the law. This was all found to be completely unacceptable to the coup-leaders and subsequently they sent the army to “normalise” the situation. This began the war. In the spring of 2014.

Since the spring of 2014 that army has continually shelled the civilian population who had the temerity to protest non-violently against an ultra-violent coup that had overthrown their democratically-elected leaders. The army sent to do this was the army of Ukraine though they were not alone. Along with this army came a smaller army, of militants who believed in the extreme views of historical personages such as Adolf Hitler and a man named Stepan Bandera whose followers had joined Nazi battalions during world war two. Together these armies began to fire mortar shells and missiles into civilian apartment blocks, into schools, hospitals, town centres and modest one-storey homes.

It is a remarkable fact that the description above will be foreign to a large number of people who might read it. They will say that they heard nothing of this but instead that some ‘bad people’ called ‘Separatists’ had risen up illegally and backed by Russia were causing mischief and had to be put down for the sake of public order and the sovereignty of Ukraine. As time went on pejorative terms were exclusively used to describe this side in the violence. No reference was made to the fact that the vast majority of civilian deaths were caused by shells and missiles being fired by the Ukrainian military and their militias. As the figure for civilian deaths rose and eventually topped 14,000 news reports merely gave the headline figure without attribution. The OSCE however, who were monitoring the situation constantly reported that these deaths were primarily being caused by the Ukrainian forces, not by the ‘Separatists’.

You must imagine how obvious the conclusion was at the time that it was the Ukrainian army and their helpers who were causing the civilian casualties to mount. But only if you were interested in observing this and reporting it. For all the time between the spring of 2014 and the very day you are reading this western mainstream media has not been at all interested in reporting this fact. Why would they? They were not interested in applying anything akin to journalism to the war being waged against these civilian populations. As far as they were concerned, or so it seemed due to the absence of reporting this, these people deserved everything they got (though they sought to imply the "Russians had done it") and that each village road, every urban conurbation in each town and in every city were manipulated in news reports to this end. And it appears they would rather have died themselves than report that ‘their side’, the Ukrainian army and its extremist helpers were perpetrating these war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This is a blank page in human history from the viewpoint of western editors and journalists ostensibly employed to communicate news in as neutral, objective, honest and all-embracing a manner as possible. At least it would be a totally blank page except that the editors and journalists involved filled it with a continuous stream of allegations and insinuations designed to condition those in receipt of them into believing only one side, the side they opposed, was continually ‘doing wrong’ and that ‘their side was consistently ‘doing right’. This is the situation that prevails to this very day. The war being waged against the civilian population of the Donbass region by the Ukrainian army is continuing with civilian deaths occurring on a daily basis. Yet many will be totally unaware of this fact and will scoff at the very idea due to the nine years of perpetual conditioning that has prevailed across western mass media over these nine years.

“What war do you mean?” they will say and will continue with, “The war began on February 24th 2022 and was begun by the Russians.”

In this way the perfect psychological infiltration of the mass subconscious and its almost total conditioning has brought us to this present moment where Russia can be personified as totally evil and the western powers, the successive Ukrainian regimes along with their army and extremist militants can be personified as totally good. All achieved by emphasising the “good” of those western press, media and politicians favoured, and the “evil” of all those who had opposed the coup that was assisted and cheered on by the USA, EU and Britain. A more cynical, deadly and psychopathic campaign has not been carried out since the Nazi’s propaganda regarding the Jews.

For the political elites of the western world it was imperative that no mention ever be made of why it became necessary for the people of the Donbass to do what they did to preserve their rights. Western populations had to have no sympathy whatsoever with those men, women and children in the Donbass who were to be stripped of their rights to vote for the president and government of their choice, of their right to choose to maintain their cultural mores and affiliations and ultimately their right to speak the language of their birth and that of their ancestors. They were to be waged war against for daring to seek those rights and all of western media were to keep them in a virtual vacuum chamber of death until they could be silenced once and for all.