What Can WE Affect?
It's the central question.
“Commentaries like Chomsky’s and Varoufakis’s should be front and center in the media, even though we don’t know how much is possible regarding diplomacy—not even trying diplomacy is unacceptable, since prolonging the conflict means killing Ukrainians and also means risking nuclear war.”
See my previous pieces about the war in Ukraine:
“Is US Policy Killing Ukrainians?” (17 March 2022)
“Where’s the Diplomacy?” (26 March 2022)
“Are We in a Propaganda Bubble?” (31 March 2022)
I should note that the 17 March 2022 piece has a syntactically and semantically ambiguous title. The title is supposed to ask whether US policy is having the effect of killing Ukrainians—the title isn’t supposed to ask whether the US has a deliberate policy of killing Ukrainians. So that was a mistake on my part—I apologize for the ambiguity.
Actually, this syntactic and semantic ambiguity makes me think of the following comment from the NYT:
Questions of how to parse the relative morality of these two approaches—deliberately killing civilians versus choosing a strategy that is known to bring it about—may ultimately matter more to the perpetrators of these strategies than to their victims.
So we should consider how much it matters whether you’re “deliberately killing civilians” as opposed to “choosing a strategy that is known to bring it about”.
Diplomacy
There’s an urgent and desperate need to shine the media spotlight on the possibilities for diplomacy regarding the war in Ukraine. It must be incredibly frustrating for people like Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis to watch the horrors going on in Ukraine—Chomsky’s and Varoufakis’s calls for diplomatic efforts have gotten no traction.
Many are understandably skeptical about the possibilities for diplomacy.
Commentaries like Chomsky’s and Varoufakis’s should be front and center in the media, even though we don’t know how much is possible regarding diplomacy—not even trying diplomacy is unacceptable, since prolonging the conflict means killing Ukrainians and also means risking nuclear war.
Propaganda Bubbles
There are some extremely simple points about world affairs:
(1) each state’s citizens should focus on what they themselves can affect—except for rare exceptions, this means focusing on your own state’s crimes
(2) each state creates a propaganda bubble around its citizens—this propaganda bubble renders citizens completely clueless and ignorant and oblivious about their own state’s crimes and extremely attuned to enemy states’ crimes
(3) each state’s citizens should try as much as possible to free themselves from their own state’s propaganda bubble—you need to pop the bubble, get whatever information that the bubble was excluding, and take a look at the morally outrageous stuff that your own state is doing
(4) each state’s propaganda bubble portrays inward-directed criticism as somehow supporting enemy crimes—for example, Bob might criticize Washington’s role in the Ukraine crisis and someone who’s inside the propaganda bubble will perceive Bob as a Kremlin sympathizer, even though criticizing Washington doesn’t somehow entail supporting the Kremlin
The first words that I ever myself wrote about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were as follows:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes criminal aggression. And furthermore, Russia has engaged in various well-documented war crimes during this war.
And yet I have absolutely zero doubt that many people inside the propaganda bubble will perceive my pieces about the war in Ukraine as somehow apologizing for Russia’s crimes—that’s how powerful the propaganda bubble is.
I saw a really frustrating article about the war in Ukraine:
“How the left is reckoning with Russia’s war” (9 March 2022)
A little kid could make the observation that you can condemn both the West and the Kremlin without contradiction, and yet the article acts like it’s somehow quantum physics to say that there’s no contradiction there—the article quotes the following tweet from Jeremy Scahill, and it’s incredibly disturbing that such an elementary thing actually needs to be said:
There is no contradiction between standing with the people of Ukraine and against Russia’s heinous invasion and being honest about the hypocrisy, war crimes and militarism of the US and NATO.
The fact that something this elementary and basic and fundamental—literally something that a little kid could observe—needs to be said tells you a lot about the propaganda bubble that people are inside.
Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan
Here are some questions to think about regarding the crises in Yemen and Afghanistan:
(A) How much coverage should these two crises get, given that we’re talking about millions of potential deaths in the case of Afghanistan and—according to the UN—the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world in the case of Yemen?
(B) How much coverage should these two crises get, given that the US is deeply involved in both situations and given that the US can dramatically affect what happens in both situations?
(C) Inside the US propaganda bubble, how much do people know about these two crises?
The media should focus on the war in Ukraine—it’s a good thing that the media is focusing on the war in Ukraine.
The issue is that the media should additionally focus on Yemen and Afghanistan—insofar as people are completely clueless and ignorant and oblivious about Yemen and Afghanistan, that’s obviously a damning illustration of the propaganda bubble at work.
Make sure to read these two pieces, since they’re really important:
“As U.S. Focuses on Ukraine, Yemen Starves” (16 March 2022)
“Afghanistan Facing ‘Total Collapse’ as Biden Refuses to Release Central Bank Assets” (30 March 2022)
Here’s a quote from the 16 March 2022 piece:
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the Saudi blockade of Yemen the most “offensive action” the Saudis engage in.
“The blockade is an act of war against the Yemeni people and is directly responsible for the massive humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, especially the malnutrition of children,” said Riedel, who served as a CIA analyst and adviser on Middle East issues to four U.S. presidents until his retirement in 2006. Biden has “broken his promise to make peace in Yemen a top priority,” he said, adding that the blockade “should be investigated as a war crime.”
“The Saudis are bogged down in an expensive quagmire,” Riedel told The Intercept. “The Congress needs to step in and cut off all military assistance to Riyadh.”
Until that happens, more Yemenis will be pushed closer to famine. Acute malnutrition has increased by 284 percent among children and by 374 percent among pregnant women since October 2020, according to U.N. figures.
And here’s a quote from the 30 March 2022 piece:
An international aid group warned Wednesday that Afghanistan is on the brink of complete collapse as the Biden administration and European governments refuse to release the war-torn nation’s central bank reserves, depriving the economy of critical funds as millions face poverty and starvation.
Focusing on What You Can Affect
There was a situation in the past where two atrocities went on at the same time—in one case there was nothing that the US could do and in the other case the US was responsible.
This was a striking case of the propaganda bubble at work—the US media focused on the one that the US could do nothing about, whereas nobody in the US had a clue about the atrocity that the US was responsible for and that the US could’ve ended at any time.
This isn’t the situation right now, though—the US can affect what’s going on in Ukraine, and the US could even potentially end the war in Ukraine if the diplomatic efforts that Chomsky and Varoufakis are calling for were pursued.
And yet the propaganda bubble is keeping people clueless about Yemen and Afghanistan, so that’s analogous to that past situation that I mentioned with the two atrocities.
The past situation with the two atrocities is discussed in Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 Manufacturing Consent:
The nature of the Western agony over Cambodia during phase II of the genocide, as a sociocultural phenomenon, becomes clarified further when we compare it to the reaction to comparable and simultaneous atrocities in Timor. There, as in phase I of the Cambodia genocide, the United States bore primary responsibility and could have acted to reduce or terminate the atrocities. In contrast, in Cambodia under DK rule, where the blame could be placed on the official enemy, nothing at all could be done, a point that was stressed by government experts when George McGovern called for international intervention in August 1978, eliciting much media ridicule.
So there was one atrocity where the US “bore primary responsibility and could have acted to reduce or terminate the atrocities”—silence on that and a media blackout on that.
And then there was another atrocity where “nothing at all could be done”—tons of noise about that and tons of attention to that.
Like I said, the situation with Ukraine and Yemen and Afghanistan is different, since we can affect what happens regarding the war in Ukraine.
But I nevertheless wanted to bring up the Cambodia-vs.-Timor situation in order to show the propaganda bubble at its very worst. And also in order to draw the analogy between the Timor media blackout and today’s Yemen-and-Afghanistan media blackout:
The UN Security Council ordered Indonesia to withdraw, but to no avail. Its failure was explained by then-UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In his memoirs, he took pride in having rendered the UN “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” because “[t]he United States wished things to turn out as they did” and “worked to bring this about.” As for how “things turned out,” Moynihan comments that, within a few months, 60,000 Timorese had been killed, “almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.”
The massacre continued, peaking in 1978 with the help of new arms provided by the Carter administration. The toll to date is estimated at about 200,000, the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust. By 1978, the United States was joined by Britain, France, and others eager to gain what they could from the slaughter. Protest in the West was minuscule. Little was even reported. US press coverage, which had been high in the context of concerns over the fall of the Portuguese empire, declined to practically nothing in 1978.
Regarding today’s situation, Ukraine and Yemen and Afghanistan should:
all be in the center of attention
all elicit major moral outrage
And of course, the coverage regarding the war in Ukraine should focus on the opportunity to end the war, since not even trying to end the war is both immoral and irrational—just because that war is something that we can affect doesn’t mean that the coverage is focused on the biggest opportunity that we have to make a positive difference.