The Western media saturation coverage of terrible events in Gaza over the past three weeks is driven in large part by the onerous need to divert attention from the scandal and debacle of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Strategic Culture – Oct 27, 2023
The horrendous violence and suffering in Gaza have dominated the global news cycle. That is not untoward given the dreadful scale of disaster where over 7,000 people, mainly civilians and nearly half of them children, have been killed over the past three weeks by Israeli bombardment and siege.
Death toll numbers are obsolete within a day, such is the wanton murderous destruction by the Israeli regime. And yet Joe Biden and other Western politicians minimize this criminality by trying to cast doubt on the casualty numbers. How utterly despicable of Biden and his Western accomplices to this genocide.
But what is also notable is the abrupt cancellation of Ukraine as a story by Western media. The wholesale relegation of interest in Ukraine is truly astounding. The precipitous fall-off in Western media coverage reflects how the proxy war in Ukraine was always a contrived geopolitical agenda devoid of any purported principle of Western democracy.
For nearly 19 months the hostilities in Ukraine have been plastered all over Western news media. The conflict was described as the biggest in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Western governments and media outlets roundly condemned Russia for alleged aggression towards Ukraine and it was hysterically proclaimed that the whole of Europe was under threat from a would-be Russian invasion if Ukraine was not defended.
The violence in Ukraine was portrayed as a bloody manifestation of U.S. President Joe Biden’s “grand narrative” about a global Manichean struggle between “democracy and autocracy”. The Western public was lectured that it was vitally imperative that hundreds of billions of dollars and euros were spent to support Ukraine against alleged Russian belligerence because this conflict was a line in the sand for supposed Western democratic values and civilization.
This narrative was always a travesty of Hollywood proportions. As many informed people rightly discerned (those who do not rely on Western news media propaganda), the conflict in Ukraine was and is a proxy war against Russia ordained by the United States and its NATO military vehicle. The war is part of a wider geopolitical struggle by the U.S.-led Western imperialist bloc against Russia, China, and other nations of an emerging multipolar world that repudiates American-dominated hegemony.
Lamentably, the proof of that analysis is evinced by the obscene genocidal violence in the Middle East. For the past three weeks, the Western-backed Israeli regime has been slaughtering Palestinian civilians with impunity. The United States and the European Union have effectively endorsed this criminality under the fraud of Israel’s “right to self-defense”, and Western media have amplified and reinforced this fraud with their distorted reporting.
Of course, this shockingly criminal aggression has dominated the global news cycle. Every media outlet around the world has been transfixed by the barbarity, albeit differing in their perspective on how much blame to apportion to the Israeli regime or to the Hamas Palestinian militant group that triggered the escalation in violence with its mass killings of 1,400 Israelis on October 7. (It is now becoming clear that many of those deaths were actually caused by the Israeli military using indiscriminate excessive lethal force.)
In any case, the point here is how remarkable is the sudden cessation in Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine. For the past three weeks, there has hardly been any mention of that conflict. This peremptory absence is phenomenal. For months on end, the war in Ukraine was given non-stop, saturation coverage – albeit with an anti-Russian propaganda spin – and then just like that there is a void in any attention to what had been previously billed as an existential crisis for Europe and Western democratic civilization.
It’s not as if the hostilities in Ukraine have really diminished. Far from it, the battling between the NATO-backed Kiev regime forces and the Russian military has been as fierce as in previous months. Over the past week alone, it is estimated that more than 2,000 Ukrainian troops were killed by Russian forces on the frontlines in the Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.
How is that absence in Western media explained? Part of the “cancelling” of the Ukraine conflict in Western media coverage is due to the failure of the NATO-backed counteroffensive that was launched in early June. That military venture was hyped as the expected breakthrough against Russian forces after months of heavy weapons supply from NATO leading up to the counteroffensive. The gambit has been a disastrous anti-climax in NATO terms. Up to 90,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been lost in four months adding to a total of 400,000 Ukrainian military deaths over the entire conflict so far. The great NATO surge has been an abject calamity. Russian defense lines all along a swathe of former Eastern Ukrainian territory (now part of the Russian Federation) reaching down to Crimea and the Black Sea remain formidably intact and invulnerable.
The expenditure of $200 billion in military and other aid by the United States and the European Union for propping up a corrupt Nazi regime in Kiev can now be seen as the biggest farce and scandal of modern times. The Western governments and their servile media must therefore not let the Western public see this grotesque waste of money and human life. Public attention must somehow be diverted to avoid the resounding political repercussions.
The slaughter of Palestinians going on in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank territory is a global shame that certainly deserves priority attention. A ceasefire must be called immediately and the mass murder and siege must end. Palestinian rights must be defended and a proper peace settlement to the conflict must be pursued urgently in a genuinely brokered legal and diplomatic framework – not the disingenuous process that Washington and the European Union have been peddling for decades.
However, even the extensive Western media focus on the violence in Gaza is not out of a genuine concern for facts, let alone truth or justice. It is, as usual, a cover-up for the Israeli regime’s crimes and the complicity of Western states in the decades-long genocide against the Palestinians. A genocide that has going on for 75 years since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 by British and American subterfuge as our columnist Finian Cunningham contended this week.
No, the Western media saturation coverage of terrible events in Gaza over the past three weeks is driven in large part by the onerous need to divert attention from the scandal and debacle of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.
The quickness and expedience of canceling Ukraine as a story by Western media and their governments is a powerful demonstration. The purported concerns about Ukraine were never about principle or the alleged narrative of defending democracy. If there was any credible substance to that narrative then how is it dispensed with so readily? It is something to behold how Western media have simply dumped Ukraine as if it were damaged goods of no longer any use, or, worse, a soiled rag.
It is a further diabolical tragedy in the long-suffering of the Palestinian people. Not only are they being annihilated, starved and denied their basic human rights by the Western-backed Israeli regime. Their suffering is also poignant proof of the callous deception and criminality of the United States and its Western partners in Ukraine.
Get your copy from our Online Store or your local book and magazine retailer
Australian Retail Locations » Uncensored Publications Limited
New Zealand Retail Locations » Uncensored Publications Limited
As censorship heats up and free thought becomes an increasingly rare commodity, we appeal to our readers to support our efforts to reach people with information now being censored elsewhere. In the last few years, Uncensored has itself been censored, removed from the shelves of two of our biggest NZ retailers – Countdown Supermarkets and Whitcoulls Bookstores – accounting for 74% of our total NZ sales.
You can help keep the Free Press alive by subscribing and/or gifting a subscription to your friends and relatives.
