The recent sinking of Russia’s Flagship, the Moskva inevitably sparked a second engagement between the two enemies.
Ukraine claimed that two of its anti-ship missiles had hit the vessel. Russia insisted that a fire on board had caused an ammunition explosion leading to the loss. As for the truth; it is indeed the first casualty in war.
Most of the world’s sympathy lies with the little guy in this fight, but Ukraine has shown itself on the battlefield not to be so little after all. It is equally capable as Russia of practicing all of the dark arts of media manipulation, deceit and propaganda.
Still, Russia’s strenuous denials that their build up of forces on Ukraine’s border was a prelude to war and surreal denials that this is actually a war at all, leads to skepticism when they offer an implausible explanation as to what happened to their ship.
That led me to post a cynical imagining of what a press release from Russia’s foreign minister might look like on my Facebook page:
“Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov issued a statement a few minutes ago about ‘Crude Western Media Propaganda’ surrounding the sinking of the Moskva in the Black Sea.
“The false and misleading accounts by Western Media about the supposed sinking of the Moskva exposes to the world the despicable lies and deception of America’s corrupt media.
“The Moskva is in fact the first Russian revolutionary design of a battleship which is simultaneously a submarine!
“When the Ship’s state of the art defense systems detected the incoming Ukrainian missiles, the Captain simply submerged so they missed their target and landed harmlessly on land!
“But the really brilliant genius of the Russian mind is what comes next!!!
“You see comrades, what the West’s media did not suspect was that when the ship resurfaces in a few hours time, it’s advanced technology will have changed its name and appearance to, ‘The Hunter Biden!’
“This will in turn trigger a Kremlin press release declaring the renaming of the entire Russian campaign to, ‘Operation Hunter Biden.’
“That will immediately cause most of the West’s media like the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, etc., to impose a complete news blackout until we are victorious!”
After I wrote and posted this, an uncomfortable truth occurred to me that this lampoon of mine was not actually too far from the truth.
And if Russia or Ukraine can be expected and even forgiven for engaging in propaganda when their two nations are at war (oh! ok Sergei, a special military operation), what is the excuse for America’s major media outlets burying the Hunter Biden laptop story and its disturbing revelations about the Biden family’s finances, unless they too believe they are in a war?
Certainly the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel argues precisely that in her 2019 book “Resistance (At All Costs)…How Trump Haters are Breaking America.”
Much of it examines the media’s role in suppressing what it knows to be the truth and promoting what it knows to be a lie.
And if in Putin’s Russia, telling the truth and calling Ukraine what it so obviously is, a war, can get you thrown in jail, it’s not too different for anyone who works in Woke-controlled America. Infringing any of its preferred terms, attitudes and beliefs will get you fired and your career ‘cancelled’ faster than some little left-wing fascist can say, “George Orwell 1984.”
Canceling people in the Soviet Society that Putin and Lavrov spring from was a standard weapon of the state to suppress the truth and terrorize those who spoke it.
It has existed in the past here in the United States too and does so increasingly now in the present.
Cambridge University’s Robert Henderson points to a survey conducted during the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism.
At that time 13.4% of Americans felt less “safe” to speak their minds. By 1987 the figure reached 20%. By 2019, when Kim Strassel’s book came, out the figure had reached 40%.
Of all groups, Jews should be especially appalled by and opposed to a media and state that seeks to demand silence and submission to one political group’s beliefs and ideology. We have suffered from that so many times in our history to not smell its foul odor from miles away.
But you do not have to be olfactory-sensitive to identify this particular stink. When it comes to Jews and particularly the State of Israel, the stench of the Left’s demand for submission to its increasingly explicit anti-Jewish bigotry, is both rancid and overwhelming.
Those who do not sheepishly follow it silently and passively, soon find they have no home working in many places including, state or federal government, academia, hospitals and needless to say, the media.
Take the case of ex-New York Times writer Bari Weiss.
This talented writer had impeccable left-wing and feminists credentials when she arrived at the Times in 2017. She had written for Haaretz and the Forward. But she was proudly Jewish and outspoken about antisemitism and anti-Zionism especially in her alma mater, Columbia University. That mattered in one of Wokedom’s most passionate mouthpieces.
She resigned in 2020 writing an explosive criticism of the ‘selective’ journalism of the paper.
Or how about Times Editorial Page editor, James Bennet who resigned in 2020 after no fewer than a thousand staffers signed a letter protesting his publication of an Op-Ed by Senator Ted Cotton. In it the senator advocated the use of the army as back up when so many American cities were being burned by rioters.
Bari Weiss summed up this episode as a ‘civil war’ at the Times between young far left staffers and older ‘free speech’ advocates.
So why would most of America’s major media outlets bury the Hunter Biden laptop story, unless they believe they are in a war? They do, and many of the readers of this paper are among the enemy.
