In the past 72 hours I’ve experienced the unusual sensation of feeling more in step with the mainstream media than I have with my sceptical friends. I regard Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as something that’s straightforwardly wrong and which all right-thinking people should unequivocally condemn, whereas many of the people I’ve been in the lockdown trenches with over the past two years feel more ambivalent about the conflict. (See Russell Brand’s latest video for an example of what I’m talking about.)
In what follows, I’ll try to summarise the doubts these sceptics have raised about the West’s response to the invasion, and the way that’s been presented in the MSM, and do my best to respond to those doubts.
Over the past two years, the MSM has revealed itself to be fundamentally untrustworthy in its coverage of the pandemic. Why should we trust its coverage of the war in Ukraine?
I’m not relying on the MSM’s coverage for my understanding of the conflict, but, for the most part, ordinary Ukrainians and Ukrainian reporters on the ground, such as those included in the Twitter list compiled by Gavin Sheridan and the list put together by Giles Udy. But even if I was relying on the BBC and CNN, what is it the sceptics think is misleading about the MSM’s reporting? Do they think Russia hasn’t really invaded Ukraine? Or that the MSM isn’t giving enough credence to Putin’s pretext for invading, namely, that Russia was acting as a “peacekeeper” to prevent the newly-independent breakaway republics of Luhansk and Donetsk being attacked by the Ukrainian Army? It strikes me as odd that people who’ve learnt to be sceptical about the claims various governments have made about COVID-19 over the last two years should suddenly be inclined to take Putin’s manufactured casus belli at face value.
Putin has been provoked by NATO’s expansion eastwards since the fall of the collapse of the Soviet Union, pushing Russia further and further into a corner and leaving it with no choice but to invade Ukraine to prevent it joining NATO.
This is essentially the argument of Stop the War Coalition – an astroturf organisation created by the Socialist Workers’ Party – and its useful idiots in the Labour Party and the National Education Union. It’s rooted in the hard left’s long-standing opposition to Western imperialism and its associated blindspot when it comes to the imperial ambitions of China, the Soviet Union and now Russia – hence Stop the War’s noisy opposition to David Cameron’s proposal to join the U.S. in bombing regime targets in Syria but conspicuous silence about Russia’s bombing on behalf of the Syrian regime. Or maybe it’s not a blindspot, more a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Whatever its roots, it’s not a serious argument. The Western allies didn’t invade Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1997 and force their leaders to join NATO at gunpoint; rather, those newly independent states asked to join because they were concerned about the imperialist ambitions of the former Soviet Union. Ditto the admission of the former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 2004 (and Croatia and Albania in 2009). And in case you think their fears of a resurgent Russia bent on territorial expansion were completely misplaced, Russia invaded Chechnya in 1994, again in 1999, attacked Georgia in 2008, annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine last week. Casting these military actions as essentially ‘defensive’, designed to prevent Russia’s encirclement by NATO, is to take Putin and Stop the War’s anti-Western propaganda far more seriously than you should. (For a distillation of the NATO argument, see this piece by Tim Black in Spiked.)
How Should Sceptics Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine?Read More