EDITOR, The Tribune.

Sensible people stopped taking the western media seriously at the time of the 2003 Iraq war, when it became little more than a cheerleader for the western war machine, ridiculing dissenting voices as it destroyed an Arab country in a war based solely on lies. It did the same with Libya and it almost did the same with Syria – until Russia stopped it.

At the time, media figures as inoffensive as Phil Donoghue (once a household name in the USA) were blacklisted for questioning the official narrative – which turned out to be a pack of lies.

Meanwhile western governments sought (and obtained) the collusion, or at least the silence, of the whole western media in its persecution of Julian Assange, now held in inhumane (according to Amnesty International) detention, a hostage to the political misfortunes of the buffoon now running the United Kingdom. Mr Assange’s crime? Revealing casual and routine western war crimes in Iraq.

Today, the same pattern of collusion between western governments, corporations and media is emerging, as media outlets turn their power against Russia, pretending, firstly, that this war came out of nowhere and, secondly, that its prosecution is more outrageous and one-sided than their own.

The Western way of war, if we recall, involves crushing and often illegal sanctions on a civilian population, the destruction of civil infrastructure from the air by pilots based safely in Idaho and the use of (often jihadist) proxies to do the fighting, keeping western military casualties very low.

Access to the defeated country’s oil and other resources is then given to the corporations who funded the politicians who made up the lies that started the war. Invariably, the target country is left an utter mess – compare Libya today and 12 years ago – but a lucrative one for western oil corporations and military contractors.

Today, CNN, the BBC and the UK’s Guardian newspaper refer to dozens of Ukrainian casualties of Russian airpower or artillery as “massacres”, while the approximately 185,000 civilian deaths from the illegal Iraq war were merely “collateral damage”. Curious.

The reality, of course, is that, while war is always an ugly and tragic thing, to be avoided at all reasonable costs, Russia does it in a fairly traditional way. Rather than using made-for-television “shock and awe” tactics and manipulating the global trade system to starve populations, it sends in large armed formations and inflicts - and takes - significant combat casualties. That is war.

And make no mistake: this war was started by the west. It overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, installed a puppet regime that included neo-Nazi elements, and then armed and sustained a violent counterinsurgency in the ethnically-Russian east of the country, creating a pretext for the puppet regime to seek NATO membership.

Russia simply had no choice but to finish the war that western meddling begun, just as it had to finish western-initiated wars that threatened its survival in 1812 and 1941. Its losses were immense, but it had no choice but to fight and it ultimately won.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. But any disruption to an unbalanced global system imposed by NATO, the G7, EU and their puppets is ultimately a good thing. It will clearly hasten China’s alternative to the SWIFT banking system, which has been so controlling and abusive to the world.

And many others too are watching keenly how the dollar-led global financial system and supposedly ‘independent’ western corporations like Meta and Instagram are now being weaponized against Russia for daring to stand up to the west’s global dominance.

India has already begun trading with Russia in their own respective currencies, China is working with it to replace the dollar as a medium of exchange between them and even Turkey (a member of NATO) has indicated its own discomfort with continued reliance on US dollar transactions.

For decades, the western world (cheered on by its media) has used these subtle, but comprehensive and malign levers of global control against perceived disruptors (be it Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Iran or Venezuela).

But in attempting to use them to “isolate” so vast and important a country as Russia, the tactic will this time backfire, as others recognise that their own sovereign interests do not benefit from western-controlled rules, currencies and institutions being left as the unchallenged regulators of global trade relationships.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

March 13, 2022.