Stop Believing:
Be skeptical of the civilian-casualty narrative
Jim Kavanagh
Moscow Times/TASS / CTK Photo / Vladimir Prycek
As I’ve said before, in a full-scale war, no one gets out with clean hands. In any war, both sides are going to kill some innocent civilians and each side is going to downplay its own excesses and highlight the enemy’s. Though we’d like to, we cannot avoid what we all know is the terrible answer to this question: When has any side in any war stopped fighting because of civilian casualties?
In such a context, by no means should anyone believe either
the report or denial of an atrocity on the basis of statements from the warring
parties and their interested allies alone. To decide what version of events one
thinks is true, it is necessary to critically analyze the versions of the interested
parties and seek information from as many independent sources as possible who
have demonstrated their honesty, fairness, and reliability in such situations.
We’ve had decades of “aggression and atrocity” lies to justify the U.S. going to war—Vietnam’s attack on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf, Iraqi soldiers dumping babies from incubators in Kuwait, WMDs in Iraq, Viagra-pumped Ghaddafi rapist soldiers in Libya, Syrian government poison gas attacks on their own citizens in Syria, etc. In this very conflict, within the space of ten days, we’ve had a number of blatant lies loudly promoted and then demurely retracted—the ghost fighter pilot of Kiev, the heroic Snake Island martyrs who fought to their death, the vicious Russian tank driver who crushed a car, the non-existent then “dangerous” biological research labs, etc. So, I think it’s imperative that Americans not believe, on first hearing, the atrocity reports coming from the media that peddled and memory-holed all those lies.
The U.S. and Western media have demonstrated that
they are interested parties, allies and voices of the Kiev government (ward of
the U.S. government), who accept and transmit as true any of that government’s accounts
of Russian crimes. Without any further proof, they will maintain the truth of
those accounts, until and unless someone else (they will never look)
provides irrefutable counter-evidence they cannot ignore. Their attitude, which
they have successfully inculcated in most of their American audience, is that
what Kiev says can must be taken as true and what Russia says must be
taken as false. It is the most dangerous attitude in the world.
