In the West it is easy to find and read satires of totalitarian states. One can frequently find texts about how the Russian population is brain-washed by their state media. (This line includes a simple factual error. Despite some websites being blocked, such as the BBC, many Western news sites are not blocked – such as the Washington Post or New York Times. With translation engines built into modern browsers Russians can read all these publications even if they don’t speak English. Those who want can additionally, albeit illegally, use a VPN or an aggregator app. to read banned sites such as the BBC’s Russian language propaganda channel. Russians can get as much Western information as they want). But Western media is far more deceptive than anything which appears even in official Russian media. Try this from the Guardian:
Trump accuses Zelenskyy of helping to start war in extraordinary attack
Good morning and welcome to our coverage of the run-up to the US election as Donald Trump has claimed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy helped to start his country’s war with Russia.
The Republican presidential candidate’s extraordinary criticism – the war started when Russia invaded Ukrainian sovereign territory – comes as Joe Biden arrives in Europe for closed-door discussions with allies with Ukraine high on the agenda.
As Reuters reports, Trump’s comments indicate he is likely to radically shift US policy toward Russia if he wins the 5 November election.
The Republican former president has frequently criticized Zelenskyy on the campaign trail, repeatedly calling him “the greatest salesman on Earth” for having solicited and received billions of dollars of US military aid since the war broke out in 2022.
Trump has also slammed the Ukrainian leader for failing to seek peace with Moscow, and he has suggested Ukraine may have to cede some of its land to Russia to make a peace deal, a concession Kyiv considers unacceptable.
Trump’s comments on the PBD Podcast on Thursday with Patrick Bet-David went a step further than his previous criticism. He said Zelenskyy was to blame not just for failing to end the war, but for helping start it. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start. The war’s a loser,” Trump said. [1]
Trump’s claim that Zelensky has some blame for the war with Russia breaking out is simply good political science. There was the failure to implement Minsk and the signing of a Treaty with the US in 2021 which once again reaffirmed that Ukraine would join NATO, and also included a restatement of the US commitment to see the return of Crimea to Ukraine – the two factors together clearly posing an immediate strategic threat to Russia. It was under his predecessor, Poroshenko, who was elected President in 2014 after the US backed coup which overthrew the previously elected President, that Ukraine reversed the policy of not joining NATO and started tooling up with Western weapons, (under Trump in fact). Zelensky could simply have avoided the war by implementing Minsk, accepting significant autonomy in Eastern Ukraine, and by maintaining the previous (pre-Maidan) policy of not joining NATO. He could then have led his country into the EU. It is true, that he had difficulties implementing Minsk due to resistance from the Azov battalion; but these were problems that he needed to resolve internally. By accepting that the unelected and fascist, (by all accounts including many in the Western media), Azov battalion could veto his plan to implement Minsk [2] Zelensky signed a death warrant for Ukraine. Certainly, Zelensky shares blame for starting this war. Any objective analysis of the events which led to the war can show that.
For those of us who study Western media, what is interesting is how Trump’s comments are framed. His comments are described as an “extraordinary attack” and “extraordinary criticism”. These middle-of-the road and balanced comments are located as being far out and extreme. Another characteristic of modern Western media propaganda is evident in this piece. This is a relatively recent development, something which has really only become widespread in the last 10 years. The media needs to tell its readers the ‘truth’. Long gone are the days when the media reported what was said and allowed readers to form their own opinions. I have commented on this phenomenon before. It is partly propagandistic, but it also reflects the fact that the modern generation of liberal “journalists” simply cannot cope with multi-dimensional reality. They can only live in a simplified world where there are no complex questions of balance and of interpretation. There is only one version of the “truth” – theirs. (Strangely, this is fundamentally illiberal, but here we are). In this piece the author has to write “The Republican presidential candidate’s extraordinary criticism – the war started when Russia invaded Ukrainian sovereign territory – comes as…”. This is their version, “the war started when Russia invaded Ukrainian sovereign territory”, and they have to restate it in order to reassure themselves. Psychologically, this is probably not much different from a cult leader having to constantly repeat to himself his basic falsehood, “I am the anointed one”. The statement is untenable and would dissolve if it met any serious examination – so they avoid evaluation and simply repeat it. A new kind of truth.
Another example from this short piece of characteristically delusional reporting in the Guardian is this: “As Reuters reports, Trump’s comments indicate he is likely to radically shift US policy toward Russia”. Trump has indicated that he would seek to bring an end to the war. People on Trump’s campaign have sketched out what kind of peace settlement might be proposed. It appears to envisage a demarcation line along the current front-line and a commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. [3] (There is no guarantee at all that Russia would accept Trump’s plans, which do not appear to sanction the annexation of the four provinces in Eastern Ukraine which Russia has laid claim to). This claim that Trump would “radically shift US policy toward Russia” is part of a wider campaign to describe Trump as somehow linked to Russia. This started with the entirely unsubstantiated claims that Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hilary Clinton and win the 2016 US Presidential election. Despite being completely unsubstantiated this narrative is endlessly repeated as true. In fact it was under Trump’s Presidency that the flow of arms to Ukraine started. Robust economic sanctions were also imposed under Trump: “As a result, during Trump’s four years in power, a record forty-plus rounds of sanctions have been slapped on Russia. Many of them are enshrined in law, meaning they are here to stay.” [4] Trump’s policy aim of ending the Russia-Ukraine war is not “pro-Russia”; it is balanced and in America’s interest. It is a war which cannot be won; it is accelerating the development of the BRICS economic group and attendant plans for de-dollarisation; it is costing the US a lot of money; it contains the risk of escalation to WWIII. There is no core US interest involved in either putting Ukraine (an economically weak, unstable, corrupt and undemocratic country even before the war) into NATO nor in supporting Ukrainian nationalists in their refusal to grant political autonomy to those parts of Eastern Ukraine which have historical links with Russia and want to be autonomous. But their thinking is so delusional that they now see a serious (if perhaps unlikely to succeed) plan to end the war on reasonable grounds as being “pro-Russian”.
These are just about 300 words in the Guardian but they reflect a state of total delusion. They share with the delusional thoughts of a madman the flaw of thinking which is unanchored in reality. Most worryingly of all, this kind of thinking – routine in the West’s media class is shared by much of the West’s political class – certainly by people like the UK’s Keir Starmer who has recently been performing the “we will stand with Ukraine for as longs as it takes” routine, seemingly unaware of how horrible this looks given the current destroyed state of Ukraine and the costly losses incurred slowing the rate of the Russian advance in the East. The enormous power of the West insures them against paying the price for their hubris. They can destroy whole countries, kill tens of thousands, and walk on by, but this mess-up is in Europe and it has been in the news for two years and we have been treated to endless spectacles of Ukrainian flag waving in parliaments across the West with the ex-comedian (and as Trump says superb salesman) Zelensky being lauded as the second coming of Winston Churchill, so this time at least, it is going to be a little harder to brush under the carpet.
Notes
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/oct/18/us-election-news-joe-biden-berlin-kamala-harris-donald-trump-ukraine?page=with:block-67125a888f08156d1577588f&filterKeyEvents=false
- “More menacingly, several Ukrainian nationalist militias, including the Azov Battalion that was then fighting in the Luhansk region of Donbas, compromises necessary … they preferred to fight than give one centimetre.’ The threat of a nationalist Maidan implacably opposed to any kind of compromise with the Kremlin had destroyed Zelensky’s attempt to bring peace in 2019 – and would remain a major threat to any future negotiated peace in the endgame of the 2022 war”. Matthews, Owen. Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine (p. 149). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/17/whats-donald-trumps-plan-to-end-russias-war-on-ukraine
- https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2020/11/trump-may-be-leaving-but-russia-sanctions-will-stay?lang=en