A former diplomat recently answered my question by suggesting that there is tight control on information getting out of Ukraine and solidarity in the mainstream media about how to report it. A journalist told me of his frustration that if you go to Ukraine, you won’t get access to the truth, and when you return to the US you won’t be allowed to report it. For the public who rely on the media, it is like listening to a baseball game on the radio when the play-by-play commentator can’t actually see the game. We have no idea what is really happening on the diamond.
In its reporting on the war, the Western media shuns reporting on causes, dutifully never mentioning the war without including the adjective "unprovoked." Previously respected and trusted voices whom the media once relied upon find themselves banished when they provide the historical context and causes. It is an act of Orwellian rewriting of the past that has the effect about which Orwell warned: those who control the present control the past; those who control the past, control the future. Our consent to foreign policy decisions to go to war are secured by forging our understanding of the past in order to shape our understanding of the future.
When
former German Chancellor Angela Merkel seemingly confessed that the Minsk agreement
she helped broker was actually a deception designed to convince Russia that
there was a peaceful settlement to the powder keg in the Donbas region of Ukraine
while really buying time for Ukraine to build up its armed forces for a military
solution, almost no one in the mainstream media reported it. When former French
President François Hollande seconded her claim, no one in the mainstream
media in the West reported it. The failure to report what challenges the official
narrative makes the narrative we read more fiction than nonfiction and leaves
those seeking information about the world ignorant about the world.
After months of investigating the terrorist attack that blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and deprived Europe of its gas supply revealed that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Russia was responsible, no one in the Western media asked the obvious and crucial question: Who was? If it wasn’t them, it was one of us. But who? Who sacrificed Europe and exploded the pipe line? Not asking a question because you don’t want to reveal the answer leaves even the most informed people uninformed.
But keeping people – even people who seek out information – uninformed is the death of democracy. America claims that it is its mission to spread democracy throughout the world. Biden talks of the generational battle for democracy to triumph over autocracy. But democracy is rule by the people. And democracy without informed citizens is rule by the uninformed: the worst possible form of government.
Sources of information like Antiwar.com are the remedy to this assault on the people. Antiwar.com informs while the mainstream media hides. It enlightens while the mainstream media keeps us in the dark when the light is not convenient.
The News section at the top of the page is simply the best source of news on the internet. Below the News, the Viewpoints section provides probing commentary and analysis of that news. Perhaps more than any other platform, Antiwar has the courage not to censor or edit its writers, allowing its readers to hear what its writers really want to say.
Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
