Here we are nearing the end of 2016 and we certainly
feel like we are living through momentous times, what with a coming US
president of whom no one has any idea what he may do, the looming end of
the five-year civil war in Syria that
has engaged the attention of the whole world for so long, and the continuing
development of surveillance techniques that now enable our governments to watch
over our every action, and to know more than they need to know about what we
think and what we do.
The old adage
that truth is the first casualty of war has never been more clearly expressed
than in the divergent views about what has been going on in Syria. For some
months I have been watching quite a lot of the TV channel RT (Russia Today), a
channel owned by the Russian government just as the BBC is owned by the British
government and the CBC by the Canadian government.
To watch RT
is a salutary experience, for it has its own alternative view of global events,
and in fact, watching has made me even more conscious than I have normally been
of the extent to which news presented by our Western, so-called “free” media,
is engaged in putting out to the world its own slant on events.
As a fairly
regular watcher of RT I find suggestions being made in the United States, from
the President on down, that the channel is a pure source of Russian propaganda,
to be entirely ludicrous. That is surely more true of the United States than
any other country, for the team that RT has assembled in its American
operations is almost impeccably comprised of journalists with excellent reputations,
and, even among those who are just making their reputations, of young,
vigorous, opinionated people who give every appearance of being completely on the
ball, and of believing what they say.
Among the
luminaries of the RT team are Larry King, with an early evening interview
programme, Thom Hartmann, with a programme covering the news in some depth, Ed
Schultz, an old-style progressive who makes of his newscast every night a
vigorous argument with interlocutors from both sides, and Chris Hedges, who has
spent much of his life as an international correspondent for the New York Times,
and whose emergence as a leading voice of liberalism in the United States arises
from his upbringing in a Christian environment that lies at the base of his
world-view. Although there are other programmes that are somewhat more strident
in defence of the Russian position, to describe any of these forenamed contributors
as pawns in a Russian propaganda game is beyond absurd.
On the other
side, however, misplaced hysteria seems to on the point of becoming the posture du jour of the American authorities.
As the celebrated journalist Robert Fisk (who probably knows more about the
Middle East than any other journalist in the world) has pointed out, the tirade
issued by US representative at the UN, Samantha Power against all Russian and Syrian
actions on the ground, comfortingly ignored the long history of the United States
in carrying out or conniving in exactly
the same brutalities in many parts of the world, and in providing the weapons with which these
brutalities have been carried out. Her outburst was slyly referred to by the Russian
representative Vitaly Churkin, as delivered, apparently, by Mother Teresa.
RT has not
been alone in pointing out that the reported terrible Russian actions in Syria
have to a large extent been based on circumstantial evidence, much of it from
doubtful sources, yet that evidence has
been unquestioningly seized and trumpeted around the world by the Western
media. I could direct anyone’s attention to a debate on Democracy Now on Dec 14
between Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Stephen
Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University and
Princeton University. Roth launched into a full-scale assault on Russia along
the line so familiar from what we read in the press, that 250,000 people have
been literally bombed and starved into submission by the Syrian government that
have deliberately targeted civilians and civilian institutions in a “war crimes
strategy… to make life so miserable that
people either flee or the enclave ultimately topples.”
Professor
Cohen, a notably coherent man who could not be accused of being soft-headed,
had a different view from Roth. Since his attitude is not being endlessly propagated
in western media, I give this fairly lengthy version of what he said:
“The account Mr. Roth just gave is only one of two
or three competing narratives….. He says that the Russians joined with the
Syrians in deliberate war crimes. This is based on very selective reports that
come from sources that cannot be verified. For example, the White Helmet man,
that you had testify to this, didn’t tell us how he knew that, how he observed
it, how he escaped with his own life. Moreover, there are people who doubt the
reports that come from the White Helmets, that they have an agenda. So the rest
of us are left here trying to weigh the different narratives. Mr. Roth’s is a
very extreme set of accusations. What Samantha Power has said at the United
Nations, over a long period of time, can’t be taken at face value, because she
has performed there not as an ambassador, but as a propagandist for a certain
point of view.
“….The
reality is, I think—at least this is what the United States government told us
until September—that terrorists were holding large parts of eastern Aleppo.
They were not letting innocent civilians use the multiple corridors out of the
city that the Russians—yes, there’s plenty of testimony to this—had opened up
and guaranteed, that people could not escape the city because of these
terrorists. Then, suddenly, when the American-Russian—Obama’s plan to cooperate
with Putin there disappeared, apparently all the jihadists and the terrorists
disappeared.
“So we’re left today in a fog of war. Perhaps
Mr. Roth is correct, but I don’t think he’s fully correct. And we have two
narratives. Either we have witnessed the liberation of Aleppo, and then we
would say this is a good thing, or we’re witnessing war crimes by the Russians
and the Syrians in Aleppo, which is a bad thing. So, I would ask Mr. Roth: If
the Russians hadn’t done what he alleged they would do, what was the
alternative to setting the people of Aleppo free?”
That
the mainstream Western media speaks with almost one voice can hardly be doubted,
especially after its behaviour towards this Syrian civil war. I have no doubt
that Bashar al-Assad is not a nice man. Canadians have more reason to know this
than most Western citizens, because we have had three Canadians who were infamously
rendered by the United States to Syria in the full knowledge that they would be
tortured in a Syrian prison. They were eventually released when nothing could
be found against them even under torture, and Canada has paid a substantial sum
to at least one them as compensation for his ordeal. But this torturer’s country appears to have been
in most respects a more secular and progressive place than most of the Middle Eastern
satrapies that the United States (and even Canada) is so busy arming so that
they can keep oppressing their own populations, and interfering in the
governance of neighbouring countries.
It does strike me as odd that the very Middle Eastern
countries that appear to have progressed furthest in the direction of providing
a free education for their peoples (men and women both), and to have moved in the
direction of freeing women from the worst shibboleths of religious oppression,
should have been those chosen to be attacked by Western arms ---- Iraq, Libya, Syria,
being the most notable examples.
As to what is going to happen next, one would need to be
a soothsayer to offer an opinion. At time of writing it appears that among the
proxy powers that have torn Syria apart, only Turkey and Russia seem willing to
put aside differences between them in a conference to be held in Kazakhstan in
an effort to bring the war to a conclusion, whereas the latest offering of the
United States has been an announcement that it is making more weapons available
to the combatants, an action that seems likely to add to the number of deaths, both
civilian and military.
One cannot but shrug, and hope for the best.
No comments:
Post a Comment