In every war ever fought the percentage of civilian casualties has always been high. The Americans call such casualties ‘collateral damage’, a term most find extremely cold and unfeeling. Few wars can be called good or righteous wars and naturally all wars should be avoided where possible. Where they do occur however, civilians are always casualties in one way or another. But are they actively targeted?
Yesterday the official spokesperson of the United States, Matthew Miller made an assertion that is heard very often, that Russia is actively targeting the civilian population of Ukraine. These are his exact words:
“...Russia’s war machine that is targeting and killing innocent civilians in Ukraine…”
Independent expert opinion is however that Russia has been extremely scrupulous throughout its campaign, avoiding impact on the civilian population to an extraordinary degree. In comparison with the series of regime change wars the USA and its allies have waged over the last several decades this avoidance of causing civilian casualties is striking. What then is going on here that can account for this disparity of views?
In wartime it is quite normal for the demonisation of the opponent to take place, my question however is should a service to journalists such as the daily Q&A by the official spokesperson of the USA be used for this to take place? The impact of such a repeated assertion when channeled through the mass media will inevitably be significant. Hearing or reading a distortion of reality one or twice may well be ignored as an unproven assertion. But when such an assertion and many other highly negative assertions are repeated on an almost daily basis for a period extending to years a subconscious conditioning effect on the general public is inevitable.
When yesterday morning external damage was done to a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital those supporting the Ukrainian side in the conflict were quick to point at Russia. Terms such as ‘evil’, ‘monsters’ and ‘unhuman’ were used. As the day wore on however and talk of the hospital being hit and more accurate information showed the explosion had been nearby and had not impacted the hospital directly the situation began to become clearer. By evening images were appearing taken at the scene which showed that a Ukrainian air defence missile (of western origin) had been the cause of the explosion damaging the hospital.
The facts which emerged concerning the explosion did not modify the assertions of Russian guilt however and this has been a constant over the last two plus years of the conflict. From the several Ukrainian missile attacks which hit groups of civilians at a train station in Kramatorsk to the strike in another Ukrainian town while Tony Blinken arrived for a visit, to the Ukrainian-caused explosion at the Mariuopol’s premier theatre to the massacre at Bucha and in so many other instances from 2014 onward Russia gets accused when the facts, when examined, reveal otherwise.
How many look back and change their opinion on such events when the facts are revealed weeks or months after they occur? How many western news agencies bother to report such revelations when they occur? Take the mass shootings that killed so many on Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014 for instance which more or less brought the government and its president down? At the time every western news outlet and West-oriented activist blamed that government and president. However, the official inquiry into those mass shootings found that this was not the case and that the Maidan “protesters” had occupation of the site from which the shooting took place. In short it was a false flag event designed to discredit the Ukrainian authorities of the time.
The reaction of the vast majority, those who are likely not to involve themselves in a detailed examination of events is likely to be a strong one. Then presented with a news item designed to push certain emotional buttons, will have little resistance to the effect planned. This is especially true when children are involved. This was seen to greatest effect during the long conflict in Syria where an organisation named ‘The White Helmets’ were clearly set up to generate the material required to effect a western political need to generate support for the war. Fearful children, injured children, children under threat are the most potent propaganda tools in the West where a highly pre-sensitised population can easily be made to react in the way desired by those seeking support.
Noam Chomsky, along with Edward S. Herman, wrote an entire book on this general subject by the name of ‘Manufacturing Consent’.
‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication. The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922). The book was honored with the Orwell Award.
A 2002 revision takes account of developments such as the fall of the Soviet Union. A 2009 interview with the authors notes the effects of the internet on the propaganda model.’
Wikipedia
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I hope that you would agree that seeking to generate lust for ever more war based on falsehoods is surely immoral. In the normal course of things all wars end sooner or later in some form of agreement between the two sides to once again establish reasonably normal relations and at the very least to bring an end to war between them. When there is no intent to do so, when false claims demonising your adversary seeks only to prolong a war and therefore cause ever more death and destruction is this not clearly both an immoral and unethical act denoting cynical purposes having precisely nothing to do with right and wrong? I would contend that it instead very clearly characterises the motivation described by George Orwell below.
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