Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts
Saturday 16 December 2023
Wednesday 5 July 2023
Friday 10 March 2023
Sunday 5 March 2023
Saturday 21 January 2023
Thursday 1 December 2022
Wednesday 10 August 2022
War or peace, truth suffers
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.
As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.
UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.
As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.
Rahul Gandhi has made the grade more frequently than many others. Opponents of nuclear weapons on both sides are easily saddled with the opprobrium of helping the enemy. Occasionally, campaigners for peace between the two become targets of slander. Others run the risk of annoying both sides.
The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.
Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.
The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.
A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.
Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.
Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.
The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.
According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.
The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.
Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.
From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.
“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”
Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.
“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.
“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”
Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.
“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”
The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.
Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.
The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.
A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.
Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.
Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.
The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.
According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.
The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.
Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.
From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.
“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”
Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.
“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.
“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”
Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.
“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”
Tuesday 12 April 2022
A requiem for fine journalism
Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
RONALD L. Haeberle was a combat photographer with the US army whose pictures exposed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, at peril to his life, leaked the papers revealing the cover-up of US perfidies in Vietnam. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli scientist who shared his country’s nuclear secrets with a British newspaper. Israel kidnapped him and put him in jail. US soldier Chelsea Manning handed over 750,000 secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was court martialled for it. She went to prison.
There’s no end to ill-informed media chatter about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past. But it took KGB master spy Vasili Mitrokhin to hand over a treasure trove of Kremlin’s secrets to the Western media. Likewise with Edward Snowden, living in exile in Moscow after exposing the US government’s illegal surveillance of its own citizens.
If there were no journalists, it seems, the truth would somehow still come out. That is one’s best bet for Ukraine. Somebody will blow the whistle, almost inevitably, after pattern, as it were, and the world would know a little more than what the media wants us not to know.
It’s a strange war out there in which columns upon columns of enemy tanks were lined up for days without stirring from their highly visible location a short distance from the capital city, and no one took a pot shot at the sitting ducks. Is there something one is missing? It’s a strange war in which the besieged capital of the invaded country should be running low on critical daily resources but its citizens are able to keep their mobile phones charged and these work very efficiently.
An Israeli analyst says the Russians are allowing the phones to work to be able to listen in. It’s tempting to believe that. But then, why couldn’t the Israeli wizard advise his friends in New Delhi to keep the mobile phones running in besieged Kashmir. Not for days or weeks, but for months, till the courts intervened, did Kashmir have no internet. It’s nice to have an Israeli expert talk about phone tapping.
It’s a strange war also, in which leaders and politicians from friendly countries wade into the heart of supposedly besieged cities to cheer on the fighters they are arming to the teeth and return home unscathed. In football matches, the team managers shout out orders from outside the arena. Here you have them walking to the goalkeeper to plan which way to dive to stop the curving ball.
The Ukraine war looks set to reset the world order. It has in the bargain already exposed the overstated claim of objective journalism the West had credited itself with. The claim lay in tatters, of course, for the most part since the US invasion of Iraq. Many in the media covering Ukraine had purveyed brazen lies that provided the fig leaf for the destruction of a robustly secular country like Iraq.
The overwhelming impression being created is that the Russians are being chased out of Ukraine if they are not being drawn into a trap. Frustrated by their failure, the retreating troops are committing war crimes. It would be difficult to regard any army, Western or Eastern, as a saviour of human rights. It could be a great point to start a discussion. Who is going to try whom for the massacres? The US refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court that is reported to have initiated its probe into the Bucha killings. And neither is Russia looking interested in blessing the court with acceptance. The worried world and the ICC can only persuade but not prosecute a non-member.
The basic question many are keen to ask is this: is the West on top of the situation in Ukraine, or is Russia winning the war, as non-Russian, non-journalist analysts are beginning to assert. Any journalist should be interested in both parts of the question, but asking the latter would be deemed tantamount to betrayal. Or are we heading towards a long-drawn stalemate dipped in even more innocent blood? The even-handed, old-fashioned school of journalism with cautionary words like ‘alleged’ and ‘claimed’ and ‘could not be independently verified’ etc is becoming sadly extinct.
As a South Asian journalist, one grew up admiring the probity and diligence of Western journalists. There was a time when the BBC in all the South Asian languages would be way ahead of domestic news services in credibility and speed. Z.A. Bhutto’s execution and Indira Gandhi’s assassination, for example, were first announced on BBC and only later reported by the national media outfits. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob were household names during the Punjab turmoil. Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan told me that he respected Western journalists more because they were honest in describing the injustices of the Hindu caste system. Indian journalists, he said, were mealy-mouthed about caste inequities.
Tully’s dispatches from New Delhi were broadcast in Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Sinhalese etc. They found audiences in remote villages. One day, Mark Fineman of the Financial Times was travelling with me to a village near Mathura where a Jat girl and two Jatav boys were lynched by a kangaroo court in a typical love story that went tragically wrong. Fineman decided to flash his press card at the village octroi to get past the barrier speedily. The village boys took one look at him and said: “Oh! Mark Tully! You may go.” Incensed, Fineman promptly thrust a five-rupee note into the toll collector’s hand — more than twice the octroi fees and shouted: “No, I’m not Mark Tully. I can never be.”
Likewise, there cannot be another Robert Fisk who died in 2020. However, John Pilger and a few others of the old school are still around to give us a sliver of hope about an otherwise fatally stricken profession.
RONALD L. Haeberle was a combat photographer with the US army whose pictures exposed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, at peril to his life, leaked the papers revealing the cover-up of US perfidies in Vietnam. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli scientist who shared his country’s nuclear secrets with a British newspaper. Israel kidnapped him and put him in jail. US soldier Chelsea Manning handed over 750,000 secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was court martialled for it. She went to prison.
There’s no end to ill-informed media chatter about Vladimir Putin’s KGB past. But it took KGB master spy Vasili Mitrokhin to hand over a treasure trove of Kremlin’s secrets to the Western media. Likewise with Edward Snowden, living in exile in Moscow after exposing the US government’s illegal surveillance of its own citizens.
If there were no journalists, it seems, the truth would somehow still come out. That is one’s best bet for Ukraine. Somebody will blow the whistle, almost inevitably, after pattern, as it were, and the world would know a little more than what the media wants us not to know.
It’s a strange war out there in which columns upon columns of enemy tanks were lined up for days without stirring from their highly visible location a short distance from the capital city, and no one took a pot shot at the sitting ducks. Is there something one is missing? It’s a strange war in which the besieged capital of the invaded country should be running low on critical daily resources but its citizens are able to keep their mobile phones charged and these work very efficiently.
An Israeli analyst says the Russians are allowing the phones to work to be able to listen in. It’s tempting to believe that. But then, why couldn’t the Israeli wizard advise his friends in New Delhi to keep the mobile phones running in besieged Kashmir. Not for days or weeks, but for months, till the courts intervened, did Kashmir have no internet. It’s nice to have an Israeli expert talk about phone tapping.
It’s a strange war also, in which leaders and politicians from friendly countries wade into the heart of supposedly besieged cities to cheer on the fighters they are arming to the teeth and return home unscathed. In football matches, the team managers shout out orders from outside the arena. Here you have them walking to the goalkeeper to plan which way to dive to stop the curving ball.
The Ukraine war looks set to reset the world order. It has in the bargain already exposed the overstated claim of objective journalism the West had credited itself with. The claim lay in tatters, of course, for the most part since the US invasion of Iraq. Many in the media covering Ukraine had purveyed brazen lies that provided the fig leaf for the destruction of a robustly secular country like Iraq.
The overwhelming impression being created is that the Russians are being chased out of Ukraine if they are not being drawn into a trap. Frustrated by their failure, the retreating troops are committing war crimes. It would be difficult to regard any army, Western or Eastern, as a saviour of human rights. It could be a great point to start a discussion. Who is going to try whom for the massacres? The US refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court that is reported to have initiated its probe into the Bucha killings. And neither is Russia looking interested in blessing the court with acceptance. The worried world and the ICC can only persuade but not prosecute a non-member.
The basic question many are keen to ask is this: is the West on top of the situation in Ukraine, or is Russia winning the war, as non-Russian, non-journalist analysts are beginning to assert. Any journalist should be interested in both parts of the question, but asking the latter would be deemed tantamount to betrayal. Or are we heading towards a long-drawn stalemate dipped in even more innocent blood? The even-handed, old-fashioned school of journalism with cautionary words like ‘alleged’ and ‘claimed’ and ‘could not be independently verified’ etc is becoming sadly extinct.
As a South Asian journalist, one grew up admiring the probity and diligence of Western journalists. There was a time when the BBC in all the South Asian languages would be way ahead of domestic news services in credibility and speed. Z.A. Bhutto’s execution and Indira Gandhi’s assassination, for example, were first announced on BBC and only later reported by the national media outfits. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob were household names during the Punjab turmoil. Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan told me that he respected Western journalists more because they were honest in describing the injustices of the Hindu caste system. Indian journalists, he said, were mealy-mouthed about caste inequities.
Tully’s dispatches from New Delhi were broadcast in Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Sinhalese etc. They found audiences in remote villages. One day, Mark Fineman of the Financial Times was travelling with me to a village near Mathura where a Jat girl and two Jatav boys were lynched by a kangaroo court in a typical love story that went tragically wrong. Fineman decided to flash his press card at the village octroi to get past the barrier speedily. The village boys took one look at him and said: “Oh! Mark Tully! You may go.” Incensed, Fineman promptly thrust a five-rupee note into the toll collector’s hand — more than twice the octroi fees and shouted: “No, I’m not Mark Tully. I can never be.”
Likewise, there cannot be another Robert Fisk who died in 2020. However, John Pilger and a few others of the old school are still around to give us a sliver of hope about an otherwise fatally stricken profession.
Monday 14 March 2022
Saturday 12 March 2022
Friday 11 March 2022
‘People Like Us’ – The Reporting On Russia’s War In Ukraine Has Laid Bare Western Media Bias
"Marred with racial prejudice, the coverage of the war tends to normalise such tragedy in other parts of the world," writes Mohammad Jamal Ahmed in The Friday Times
Charlie D’Agata, a CBS news correspondent, commenting on the conflict described Ukraine as a “relatively civilized, relatively European” place in comparison with Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a framing propagates the narrative that wars and conflicts are unacceptable in Europe where the people have “blond hair and blue eyes” and “look like us”, but justifiable elsewhere. After his comments went viral, Charlie D’Agata did issue an apology but this was far from an isolated incident in the bigger picture. There are far too many examples reflecting the prevalent biased mentality in Western journalism.
In the same vein, Daniel Hannan of the Telegraph wrote, “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections, and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon remote and impoverished locations”. Philippe Corbe of BFM TV, a France-based channel, reported, “We are not talking here about Syrian fleeing the bombing of Syrian regime backed by Putin, we are talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”
When Western interests are at stake, the resistance is labeled as “gallant, brave people fighting for their freedom.” Otherwise, they are mere “barbaric savages” or “terrorists”
This orientalist signalling relies on the notion that our looks and economic factors play a role in determining who is “civilised” or “uncivilised” and whether the war is somehow normal and expected in other areas of the world.
Even Al Jazeera, a Doha-based news outlet, could not refrain from such insensitive and irresponsible comments. Although they did apologise for the comments made by Al Jazeera English commentator Peter Dobbie about how Ukrainians do not “look like refugees” because of how they are dressed and look “middle class”, it shows how deeply ingrained such stereotypes and preconceived notions really are.
The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association issued a statement categorically condemning such “comparisons that weigh the significance or imply justification of one conflict over another.”
Mehdi Hassan, a political analyst, on his show on MSNBC, bluntly called out this blatant hypocrisy, “when they say, ‘Oh, civilised cities’ and, in another clip, ‘Well-dressed people’ and ‘This is not the Third World,’ they really mean white people, don’t they?”
However, this imprudent emergence of biases is not just restricted to journalists.
Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s VOX party, said in parliament, “Anyone can tell the difference between them (Ukrainian refugees) and the invasion of young military-aged men of Muslim origin who have launched themselves against European borders in an attempt to destabilize and colonize it.” Such commentaries enable the expression of racism pervading in the Western society. The mere existence of “men of Muslim origin” is conflated with a threat in itself.
The far-right French presidential candidate Marie Le Pen, rightfully, and very conveniently, recalled the Geneva Convention when posed the question about Ukrainian refugees. However, when she had to acknowledge the plight of the Syrian families seeking refuge in France, she defended her disapproval by stating that France does not have the means and if she were from a war-torn country, she would have stayed and fought.
Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said, “These are not the refugees we are used to. They are Europeans, intelligent, educated people… this is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unknown past. No European country is afraid of them.”
Such comments are not unprecedented, they have been emboldened by years of biased coverage of geopolitical events that serve western interests normalizing such narratives.
When America invaded Iraq under the garb of threat from weapons of mass destruction, it was done to “free the Iraqi people” from themselves. It was done in the name of liberation. The Economists’ May 2003 edition was titled “Now the waging of peace”. All it did, however, was leave a trail of destruction and chaos in the region.
The biggest humanitarian crisis is ongoing as you read this, and it is being perpetrated by American bombs and funding to Saudia Arabia. The United Nations Food Agency warns that 13 million Yemenis – nearly half children – are on the brink of starvation. All because of the genocidal US-backed war, yet no outrage on this catastrophe.
In 2014, when Israel killed over 2,300 people in Gaza with their incessant bombing of more than 500 tons of explosives, there was not a single outcry in the Western media outlets. Moreover, Google even allowed games like ‘Bomb Gaza’ to be sold from the play store. Earlier this year, Amnesty International even declared “the only democracy in the Middle East” an apartheid state, yet Western journalists and politicians flocked to its defense.
Just last year, even Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenksyy defended Israeli apartheid aggression against Palestine. The United States and the European Union continue to support and uphold this “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity”, yet hardly are there any calls for collective action against the perpetrators.
When Western interests are at stake, the resistance is labeled as “gallant, brave people fighting for their freedom.” Otherwise, they are mere “barbaric savages” or “terrorists.”
The framing of the current crisis at the expense of others is abhorrent, at the least. We must show solidarity with civilians under military assault all over the world regardless of their socio-economic factors; for selective justice is injustice.
Tuesday 8 March 2022
Sunday 6 March 2022
Monday 28 February 2022
Sunday 27 February 2022
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