‘Ukraine worst battle since WW2’ narrative permits the West to overlook this horrific struggle which shook Europe

Europe had “77 years of almost uninterrupted peace” till Russia selected to finish it by “invading” Ukraine, in keeping with a peculiar “analysis” printed by the Associated Press (AP) over the weekend. Having thus erased Yugoslavia’s bloody destruction within the 1990s, the writer contradicts himself simply two paragraphs later. 

In a surreal opener, AP’s John Leicester argues that the battle in Ukraine is the sort of world-changing occasion on the identical degree as the primary nuclear bomb check in 1945 or the 1969 moon touchdown. Except the moon touchdown didn’t actually change the world – the Apollo program arguably was NASA’s excessive water mark – so it’s puzzling why it could even get a point out. Perhaps to emotionally prime the reader for the next whopper, which is that on February 24 this yr, Russian President Vladimir Putin “chews up the world order and 77 years of almost uninterrupted peace in Europe by invading Ukraine.”

Come once more? Leicester, who writes from Paris and has lined Europe for AP since 2002, clearly missed out on the Balkans Wars of the 1990s. Not to say conflicts within the north of Ireland and Cyprus. 

People who didn’t, and dwell with the implications to today, have been predictably upset. 

The struggle in Bosnia (1992-1995) definitely didn’t qualify as “uninterrupted peace” – until this was thought of Europe solely on the maps. Nor did the 1999 “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, which had penalties that have been on show on Sunday. The whole article principally hinges on that one phrase, “almost.” 

It is likely to be attainable Leicester – and his AP editors – had forgotten all about these episodes. There is a curious lack of curiosity within the West in questioning the official narratives of the Yugoslav wars, in any case. Except simply two paragraphs later, Leicester cites an emotionally charged challenge straight out of the Bosnian War – Srebrenica – to check the Russians to Nazis. 

Taking into consideration that his “analysis” is simply dripping with emotionally charged language, this implies that both Leicester and AP don’t take into account the Balkans correctly “Europe,” or selected to gloss over the conflicts there as a way to bend actuality to their most well-liked narrative – that of Russia upsetting Europe’s peaceable slumber.

Just take a look at this verbiage: “generations of Europeans who had grown up knowing only peace have been brutally awakened to both its value and its fragility.” Or this: “the need to take sides — for self-preservation and to stand for right against wrong.”

Or lamenting that the world was making such “progress, with speedy vaccines against the Covid-19 global pandemic and deals on climate change, before Russia’s all-powerful Putin made it his historical mission to force independent, Western-looking Ukraine at gunpoint back into the Kremlin’s orbit, as it had been during Soviet times, when he served as an intelligence officer for the feared KGB.” Just one trope after one other, strung collectively for max emotional affect.

At this level it’s tempting, as one on-line researcher did, to marvel “how quickly the once venerable AP descended into an all-out dumpster fire.” Not simply on the subject of the battle in Ukraine, both – the company’s almost comical “don’t say recession” protection of the US financial system below President Joe Biden has prompted one pollster to explain them as “disgustingly dishonest” individuals who have been “shilling” for the Democrats for years. 

Another instance of that is on show in AP’s protection of the House January 6 Committee, an uncommon assortment of Democrats “enriched” by two rabidly anti-Trump GOP representatives. In addition to the emotional undertones, the company insists on calling the Capitol riot an “insurrection,” a loaded time period most well-liked by the Democrats, as a way to invoke the 14th Amendment and disenfranchise the opposition.

Compare that to AP bending over backwards to not describe the 2020 riots as “riots,” however actually the rest. Their rationalization? The phrase “riot” would “stigmatize broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice, going back to the urban uprisings of the 1960s.”

Instead, the AP’s Stylebook – utilized by most English-speaking journalists world wide – advises utilizing completely different euphemisms, relying on who the violence is directed at. In different phrases, the What issues lower than Who is doing it to Whom. 

If as soon as is coincidence, twice is happenstance, and 3 times is enemy motion, then this can be a veritable onslaught on the very that means of phrases, perpetrated by one of many world’s largest “news” businesses. This is about greater than Ukraine, or the Balkans wars, or the Biden recession, or the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots – it’s about actuality itself and the individuals who attempt to twist it, no matter their causes.