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Powerful Media Coverage Creates a Nightmare for Putin

By Walter Donway

March 10, 2022

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In reporting on the war in Ukraine, U.S. journalism has achieved something worth applauding.

In reporting on the war in Ukraine, U.S. journalism (and more broadly Western journalism) has achieved something worth applauding. Perhaps it’s simply because the Ukraine war is against the establishment postmodern narrative, which includes democracy as a value, but I think media coverage by and large has been objective, but also has been characterized by depth, currency, and emotional punch. And reporting and assessment of the story have had a powerful impact on the course of events.

Why “objective”? Because the reality is that Russia, acting on the dictates of a de facto unelected strongman, has launched an all-out war on Ukraine with the pretext of Russian national security, but with the reality of a former communist apparatchik’s dream of restoring the Soviet Union. And that is the reality reported by the media. Objectivity is the reporting of the facts.

Because this is the first war, certainly the first European war, bought to the public in real-time (often), close-up (the faces, the voices, the scenes), and with the almost obsessive focus on individual lives that defines the style of today’s media, the results have been public attention, understanding, and support that have driven response to “Putin’s war” by politicians, businesses, and the public in demonstrations (including in Russia where more than 3,000 have been arrested).

In this broad context, we can view some implications that have emerged as the invasion—still less than two weeks old—has rolled on. (Of course, in a sense, the invasion began in 2014 with the invasion and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.)

American energy independence

It has proved catastrophic for America that President Joseph Biden began to reverse the genuine U.S. energy independence attained during the presidency of Donald Trump. President Trump’s policies did not create that first U.S. world leadership in oil production, of course, but they fully supported it, ignoring the dogma of global warming.

Now, President Biden, who on March 8 banned imports of Russian oil, can only apologize for the price Americans will pay for gas at the pump, heating oil, and everything else with an energy component in their price. The price of a barrel of oil has touched $130. A year ago, it was about $60. Mr. Biden will turn to the American strategic oil reserve, intended to sustain us during a war, to deflect some of the political backlash for his actions.

A “capitalist” boycott

Not lost on journalists has been this war’s test of the strategy of economic sanctions—about the only response to aggression that Democrats and their Western European counterparts can stomach. Many countries have united around using the economic weapon to demonstrate to Mr. Putin that Russia cannot afford to resort to the first all-out European war since WWII.

Do economies that still bear the banner of “free” enterprise have the power to pull the plug on Putin’s War? That is the test.

The ”sanctions” began with the Western financial system acting officially and corporately against Russian banks and other financial systems. Russia’s currency, the Ruble, is crashing (now worth less than one U.S. cent), so is Russia’s stock market. Every day, the roster of international companies joining the boycott lengthens. On March 8 alone, the boycott was joined by Shell Oil (following British Petroleum), MacDonald’s (shuttering 837 restaurants), Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, and Philip Morris—to name a few. It is becoming a matter of tracking and listing Western companies that have NOT joined. Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and other corporate celebrities have taken the pledge. Do economies that still bear the banner of “free” enterprise have the power to pull the plug on Putin’s War? That is the test.

The dress rehearsal for taking Taiwan

The huge economy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pledged to partner with Putin just a week or so before he launched the invasion of Ukraine. Without China’s commitment, it seems unlikely Putin would have invaded. The hailstorm of international companies “canceling” Russia is fierce, but China is Russia’s chief trading partner. Story after story in the media, today, asks if “Putin’s gamble” is a dress rehearsal for Xi Jinping’s invasion of Taiwan—a historic “loss” to the PRC comparable (and more) to the loss of Ukraine as the Soviet Union disintegrated around Russia. If Ukraine is not “virtual” U.S. territory, as are the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Taiwan certainly is a long-standing “trigger” for U.S. war.

Why Ukrainians fight to the death

It was heartening to see U.S. media stories on the context for Ukrainian resistance to the invasion—a contest including the genocidal famine caused in Ukraine by the new Bolshevik Russia of 1917, which had invaded and seized its neighbors. When the widely hailed collective farming “experiment” in Russia produced the first famine in contemporary times, the Communists sacrificed Ukraine, the lives of some 4.5 million victims, to feed Russia and whitewash the causes of the famine. To my knowledge, the media has not gone as far as reporting the causal chain linking the Bolshevik Revolution, collective farming, earlier annexation of Ukraine, and Joseph Stalin’s decision to unleash famine on millions in Ukraine to deflect attention from the catastrophe of communism’s collective farms. What is called the “Holodomor” was the greatest peacetime catastrophe in Ukrainian history—compliments of Russia.

Paying the price for telling the story

We owe thanks to journalists everywhere who have brought us daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute information on the invasion. (Notably, CNN has selected lovely, impassioned, and moving Ukrainian women for close-up interviews on air. As CNN keeps flashing on the screen: “This is why CNN was created.”)

I do not wish in any way to asperse reporters on the scene in Ukraine. (Nor do I have less admiration for the sheer hard work of all reporters on this story.) I have not read, so far, of any deaths of Western journalists reporting the story.

Russia, it seems, is where telling the truth about the war exacts a fearful price. As I have roamed Google daily in search of the best source of news, I keep going back to Al Jazeera. That was a surprise! But I find that they are practicing a kind of deliberate objective reporting (with the slogan “fact-based news”). I have not investigated why. But on March 8, they had a story based upon reporting by a Russian journalist whose only platform, now, is Facebook). Boris Grozovski commented on an emigration largely missed by the Western media:

“Many Russians have arrived in Georgia in recent days. Do you think we are tourists, or it’s just that we got the calendar wrong and decided that it’s July-September? Or that we all suddenly and desperately wanted Saperavi and khachapuri? (Georgian wine and pastry)?

“We are not tourists, dear citizens of Georgia. We are refugees. Personally, I was wanted by the police in Russia for distributing anti-war petitions … [We] ran not from bullets, bombs, and missiles, but from prison. If I wrote what I write now while in Russia, I would inevitably go to prison for 15-20 years.”

He is referring to a statute passed last week in Russia under which those accused of spreading “disinformation” about the war in Ukraine could face up to 15 years in prison. Another law just passed punishes “discrediting” the armed forces, including calling on them to lay down their weapons or withdraw. You get three years in prison for that.

Of course, Russians who flee are asked why they did not stay to fight. Grozovski replies: “We feel pain, shame, horror, disgust, anger, and powerlessness. We cannot influence what Putin is doing under the name of the Russian Federation, destroying both Ukraine and Russia.

“We can only resist it by being abroad … It is impossible to fight this from within Russia now.”

We the dying: remembering Russia’s history

Perhaps journalists in the current “fog of war” get no thanks for reflecting on that chamber of horrors that is Russia’s memory of WWII. Yes, Lenin’s communist take-over in 1917 had created a Russia that one tragic voice pleaded with the young Ayn Rand, on the eve of her escape to America, to present to the West in these words: “Tell them Russia is a graveyard and we are all dying.”

Ayn Rand did tell that story with incomparable emotional impact and intellectual lucidity in We the Living. And she continued to tell it for half a century in words that changed the world.

But in the bitterest irony of the 20th Century, socialism in Russia and its annexed nations, including Ukraine, became the victim of socialism in Germany during WWII. The national socialism of Adolf Hitler identified as one prime enemy the “internationalism” of socialism of Soviet Russia. (So did Benito Mussolini in creating Italian fascism.) It was a spat within one of the nastiest families in world history: socialism. Its consequences were horrific.

When Hitler abruptly trashed Germany’s non-aggression pact with Russia (the Hitler-Stalin Pact) and in June 1941 launched an invasion of Russia—Operation Barbarossa—Russian deaths (not to mention rape, murder, and pillage) mounted into the millions. With the ghastly siege of Stalingrad, the German invasion was halted. The cost was millions of Russian lives (the official figure at the time was 20 million but is now thought to be closer to 27 million). The Russian sacrifice that stymied the Nazi forces on the Eastern front may have decided the outcome of WWII. At the least, the stalemate to the East baffled Hitler’s plans. The cost in lives as the crippled Russian economy, and the demoralized Russian population, tried to fight back must haunt Vladimir Putin as it does every Russian conversant with history.

Facing Russia, today, are all the nations once part of the Soviet Union’s post-WWII Warsaw Pact.  They have joined NATO, a military alliance pledged to defend every member against Russian aggression. Speculation: Is Mr. Putin, right or wrong, motivated by historical perspective on the Nazi forces by land and air that thrust across Russia into its heartland and to Stalingrad in just days?

Foreign policy fantasies, and even realistic forecasts, cannot justify preemptive wars like Mr. Putin’s.

It is not fanciful that an attack might one day be launched on Russia. It is said that Ukraine and Belarus form a “plug” between Western Europe and the Soviet Union across the great northern European plain. If Ukraine becomes a member of NATO, then there is no buffer. No one in 1918, as WWI ended, would have foreseen an annihilating German attack on Russia a quarter of a century later.

Foreign policy fantasies, and even realistic forecasts, cannot justify preemptive wars like Mr. Putin’s. Speculation cannot even begin to justify the Russian attack. But the chamber of horrors that is Russia’s historical memory may be motivating Putin to defy the world in the name of Russian national self-interest.

Mystified markets

Fulfilling their historic role, the financial markets have been a faithful barometer of the uncertainty unleashed by the war. The ultimate “safe haven” for investment, gold (which has the virtue of being real money, not “fiat,” politically manipulated money), since the Russian invasion, has broken out from a year or more of dead-level pricing. Now, it is challenging its all-time highest price (though not near its inflation-adjusted highest price). So, too is its obedient little brother, silver. The U.S. equity indexes, by contrast, are down to “correction” levels.

The price of oil per barrel is soaring to all-time highs, now approaching $130 a barrel, doubling over a year ago. It is a confusion investors do not need. The U.S. Federal Reserve (“the Fed”), the creator of our “money,” has about doubled the amount of U.S. dollars in less than two years, unleashing a general price increase not seen in decades. This leaves Americans with any investments of any kind to ponder to what extent price increases result from “safe haven” demand during war—and to what extent from Fed-driven inflation.

How we see the world

Living in the moment, we see on our TVs and laptops a war as it happens. In the end, this may be the most impactful aspect of the war. My wife sits watching the screen and says, “This is the worse thing I ever have seen.” That is literally true. We do not so much “read reports” of deaths, cities reduced to rubble, and 2.0 million displaced persons fleeing Ukraine as we watch it all happen.

Doesn’t that influence the response of politicians like Joe Biden? Influence international corporations to join the honor roll of enterprises closing in Russia? The hourly response of the financial markets? The worries of the mandarins of the PRC about China’s “image” as a mainstay of Russia? The reaction of Russia itself, where Mr. Putin and the Duma announced that journalists who reported anything but the official truth about the war could go to prison for 15 years?

Doesn’t it influence the morale of Ukraine, where the patriotism and courage of the partisans are reported continuously by Western media? Certainly, the demands of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are driven, in part, by knowing that the attention of millions is riveted on the drama of Ukraine’s refusal to yield.

The “new” war

If the war by Russia to occupy Ukraine, a blunt power grab, feels to us different, it is a difference made by our media.  After all, the revolution of our time has been our new life online. How many hours a day do you spend attending to your laptop screen? News outlets now emphasize not their reports but their blogs with real-time, moment-by-moment reports on events.

If the war by Russia to occupy Ukraine, a blunt power grab, feels to us different, it is a difference made by our media.

Military commentators I have heard have ruefully predicted that the war cannot go on because volunteers, hastily organized, confront the massive Russian war machine. The latest reports are that the pace of Russia’s invasion has slowed and that seems to be true. The 40-mile-long armored column we heard was racing toward Kyiv must be approaching it asymptotically. It has still not arrived. Is time on the side of the Ukrainians?

Again, the factor of intense sympathy, admiration, and support for Ukraine’s defiance comes into play. The U.S. Congress is considering a big jump in its “security assistance” to Ukraine. And yesterday there was news that Poland, a member of NATO, broached the idea of providing Ukraine with fighter jets—a step the United States and NATO seem to be opposing. Ukraine has pleaded for some counter to Russian control of its airspace and ability to bomb cities at will. So strong and broad is public support for the Ukrainian resistance that even U.S. Congressmen are demanding that Biden “facilitate the transfer” of aircraft to Ukraine. But if Polish airfields or U.S. airfields in other countries are offered as bases for these fighter jets then those countries have joined the war. Russia hardly could be expected to consider those airbases sanctuaries for fighter aircraft used against its forces in Ukraine. This is but one of many routes by which war in Ukraine could become a European war.

Pandemic out of China, Russia’s resort to war in Europe, the Putin-Xi “alliance” against the West, implications for a PRC military move against Taiwan, signs of runaway inflation in the United States, an increasingly ruinous U.S. national debt: The world seems suddenly a much more dangerous place.

But many of us had been expecting that—for a long time.

 

 

 

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