Last Wednesday, on February 23, Russian forces launched an invasion of Ukraine in the dark of night by bombing military facilities across the country and bringing ground troops across the border on three sides of the country. News of the Russian invasion was met with fierce condemnation from people around the world, even in Russia. The US media had a field day, enjoying ratings they hadn’t seen since the Trump era. Americans are looking on in horror without realizing that what they are looking at is simply a distorted reflection of what their own country did in Iraq just 19 years ago.
In the few times that US media figures have pointed out the connection between these two invasions, their comments have been blatantly orientalist, insinuating that the invasion of Iraq was to be “expected” because it is a place where conflict “has been raging for decades.” The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association were quick to point out how comments like this are indicative of a Western consciousness that “normalizes tragedy” in parts of the world like the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and South America, where the US and Europe have traditionally been the countries bringing this tragedy about.
Now that Russia is the country perpetuating these crimes against humanity, crocodile tears pour down the Botox laden faces of anchors and correspondents who mourn the loss of the “peaceful” world that existed before, in which conflicts of this kind were limited to the periphery. In the new multi-polar world order in which the US is no longer the singular dominant global power, conflicts of this kind will be come commonplace as countries from the semi-periphery, such as Russia and Turkey, attempt to exert their own imperialist agendas in the power vacuum left by the decline of the US.
The cognitive dissonance of the US media is on full display, and we must take this moment to remember that all the death and destruction that accompanies invasions of this sort is completely unjustifiable, no matter who the perpetrator is. Since the media is eager to paint Russia in a negative light, they will have qualms with honestly reporting the unimaginable humanitarian consequences of this devastating war. But we must not forget that the next time the United States decides to invade a country in this manner, these journalists will turn into agents of the same kind of propaganda being put out by Russian state media outlets with regards to Ukraine.
As Robert Kurz first pointed out in Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus [The Black Book of Capitalism], foreign dictatorships opposed to the West are often used as an “ideological dumping ground” onto which the evil core of liberal democracies can be projected. Comparing the media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the media coverage of the US invasion of Iraq reveals how the same violently destructive behaviors are legitimized and vehemently defended if they are carried out by the West (or states within its sphere of influence), but are strongly condemned when carried out by a foreign “other.” This double standard, while easy to see, remains incomprehensible for the vast majority of Westerners, whose intellectual capacities have been completely subjugated by a delusional liberal ideology after a centuries-long brainwashing campaign that would make even the Catholic church of the Middle Ages jealous of how it has trained millions of people to so fervently believe in utter nonsense.
Oliver Blackwell 