Tuesday, July 26, 2022

The Madness of Ukraine News Coverage

 

If the war between Russia and Ukraine were a TV comedy show you’d laugh your ass off.  But it’s not.  It’s a meatgrinder, a war that started in 2014 and has gotten deadlier with the Russian Special Military Operation’ Feb 2022,  conceived to rid Ukraine of Nazi infiltration and to protect the persecuted Russians of the Donbass region. 

If a person wanted to find any hilarity at all in it, you would look to the headlines in American media.  Not surprisingly, you would find that most reporters would have been given hand-written notes by MI6 and CIA flaks about what to say in the day’s ‘coverage.’

There are, of course, hard and fast rules for westerners covering the war in Ukraine:

 You must always mention that Russian targets are civilian occupied apartment houses,  aid workers,   churches, hospitals, food supplies and especially mothers pushing   tots around in strollers.

You must always remember that Ukraine soldiers, foreign mercenaries, and native Banderite militias always hit only military targets squarely and without ancillary damage. 

You must always emphasize that foreign mercenaries rally to Ukraine’s flag out of moral outrage and not for the $1000 to $2000 dollars a day they are paid from Ukraine or, more likely, from American and British coffers.  If we are to believe Ukraine’s claim that there are 20,000 of them fighting against the Russians, you’d come up with a figure of $30 million a day (using the mid 1500 dollar figure) and where does a besieged Ukrainian government get a billion a month to pay the mercenaries?  You can guess that the piggy-banks of the western powers are increasingly stressed  while their citizens are hurting from high inflation, crime (in the U.S), supply shortages,  bad leadership or none at all.

You must ignore the existence of Azov and Right Sector Nazis and other groups similarly espousing anti-semitism, white power, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of hate.

You must never mention that Ukraine's President Zelensky is fueled by amphetamines and has degenerated into a raving mad and psychotic paranoid driven by blood-lust.  

You must never point out that Russia now owns approx. one-third of The Ukraine and is on its way to owning more of it.  

So. . . . one of today's headlines from a news aggregator site called Benzinga:   Vladimir Putin Has Extended The War In Ukraine To 'A Second Front' In Europe: Expert

 Notice first of all that the headline is tagged "Expert" after the eye-catching phrase "Second Front." Who is this so-called 'expert'?  That would be Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global.   

Note also that all information about this 'news' is derived from a Yahoo Finance article, previously published, the purpose of which is to sell advertising. 

 In other words, this is a low content article ripped off from another news source.  There are dozens of articles just like it all over the 'meta'. . .(spare me)  which are actually wobbly repetitions of what everyone with two brain cells to rub together already knows:

The EU countries are in energy crisis mode. Germany stands out because that's where the Russian gas pipeline comes into western Europe.  There are two other pipelines, one through Ukraine, the other through Poland, but these were  closed due to political pressure from the U.S.  

With Russian energy coming through these pipelines at 20 percent capacity, you know that western Europe can't stockpile enough gas/oil to last through a Russian winter.  The German recommendation is that the European countries should right now cut down their energy usage by 15 percent.  This is a largely symbolic  as-if'we-are-doing-somethingfeel-good message because it can't be enforced and is strictly voluntary.  The economies of western Europe are not a monolith, much as the U.S. , the British, and Germany would like you to believe.  They're all different, all with different needs, capacities, strengths and weaknesses.  

This "second front" idea has little or nothing to do with the military fight in Ukraine.  It's the result of a U.S. led cabal of western leaders putting harsh sanctions on Russia, openly attempting to destroy the Russian economy, and forcing them to withdraw troops from Ukraine.  The hypocrisy of the sanctions are phenomenal in that the EU/US expect Russia to continue delivering oil and gas even as they punish Russia's economy with largely failing sanctions.  

There is no 'second front,' there is only the same front, the same conditions that existed at the start of the war, with the difference  now that conditions are far worse in Ukraine than they were before the EU/US sponsored sanctions began to have some effect.  

So far the sanctions have boomeranged.  Responding to the sanctions against them, the Russians have found new allies and new markets for  in India, China, and throughout the developing world. The Russian Ruble is stronger than ever.  While people in the U.S. are suffering high energy prices and food inflation, people in other countries are dying because of the immense stupidity of the Russia-Ukraine war, to which there is no end in sight. 


 

 

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