Just half a functioning brain will suffice to see through propaganda
The elites of the European Union who are running the show seem to have a contemptuous view of their fellow citizens. Russian media must be banned from the air waves lest the poor simpletons who call themselves Europeans be led astray by the Kremlin!
I submit that the people could not care less about the entire fuss over Ukraine at the ideological level of democracy versus autocracy, or civilization over barbarism. They care about their fuel bills, about rising costs at the supermarket check-out. Full stop.
This indifference to the military and economic warfare being led from Brussels is sad, though it may yet be reversed and shift towards street protests in the coming months. Not because of Russian propaganda, which is surely now nipped in the bud, but because the pain being inflicted on the population by the economic kamikaze political leadership through sanctions on Russia becomes unbearable here.
Meanwhile, I offer some further thoughts bearing on my essay of two days ago about the New Iron Curtain.
First, to anyone with half a brain and a bit of mental concentration, the contradictions in Kiev-Collective West news (read propaganda) are glaring and self-defeating without an adversary in the ring.
I noted more than a month ago such contradictions in a BBC report from Kharkov on supposedly savage Russian artillery fire against residential buildings A well-coiffed and dressed female reporter pointed to a partially burned out high rise building a hundred meters or so behind her, saying: ‘just imagine, four people died here under Russian artillery fire!’ Four people died in the destruction of a multistory apartment building? A better interpretation is that the building was empty except for Ukrainian military supplies or sheltered heavy weapons, as the Russians said at the time.
Over this past weekend, a similar bit of nonsense was reported by Euronews and other Western media with respect to a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in downtown Kiev. Four of the nine stories were destroyed, but only one or two casualties were reported by the Ukrainians. Was this not a building from which the civilian residents had been chased out and a weapons production line had been installed, as the Russians claimed?
Now today’s featured headline report on the morning edition of Euronews speaks of a Russian aerial bombing raid on a shopping center in a still resisting Donbas town. The smoldering remains, the twisted iron frame are shown on our screens. Zelensky claims that more than a thousand civilians had been sheltering there. Yet the reported deaths were a dozen or so. Does this make any sense if you put your mind to it? Was this perhaps the site of fuel or weapons caches? Wouldn’t that explain the reported secondary explosions?
In closing, I am obliged to correct my remarks about the accessibility of the Russian point of view on www.smotrim.ru: I have now discovered that the live broadcasts , as opposed to the shows already aired and stored on the site, can be viewed without difficulty. This means there is no need to find exotic hi-tech solution s that some readers have proposed in the Comments section.
I also note that the Russians are seeking and finding alternative ways of presenting their point of view on youtube, from which the official Russian channels have been banned. Yesterday I received a link to a Russian language news program in which I appeared in vignette interviews. The production company is called “Mir” and is an offshoot of the Community of Independent States ( CIS), the organization of a dozen or so former Soviet republics. Formally, legally it is not a Russian entity and so it slips past the youtube censors. I assume that the cat and mouse game of the Information War will continue to evolve.
Украина и Молдова на пути в ЕС. Сколько продлится кандидатский срок?
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022