Something Is Very Off About The Ukraine Conflict
A few days ago I came across a BBC article, entitled “Indian evacuee: The kindness of Ukrainians saved my life.”
The article relayed the story of an Indian Medicine student in Ukraine who managed to escape the country’s border by paying a Ukrainian man to drive him to it.
The story within the story is one therefore of exchange. Of a monetary transaction.
Even a young child will be aware that no true act of kindness seeks a reward (let alone a financial one).
It is therefore strange that this everyday definition of kindness is overwritten by the BBC article in a semantic extension so gross that it amounts to a total redefinition of the word.
Yes I believe that the student spoke these words. However the choice to detach those words from their context (namely one in which ethnic minorities in the Ukraine have not been treated equally by state authorities and have arguably therefore been at greater risk because of their ethnic minority status) can only be described as a political one. This context is actually referred to by the Indian student. It clearly contradicts the narrative focus of the BBC News Headline.
Yes I believe that the student spoke those words. But within the context I have just mentioned. Within, most likely, a state of shock. Within a state of relief at having escaped apparently desperate circumstances as an Indian national in a country where all pretence of racial equality has currently been abandoned.
This sort of narrative bias and semantic abuse largely characterises the downward shift in journalistic standards in the Western world over the events of the past two years.
It smacks of cultural and intellectual decay (what else do we call such a total corruption of and regression from a value like kindness?) and finally of propaganda.
It echoes the conflation of moral and economic objectives in the reasoning of the UK to keep its borders completely open following the expansion of the EU in 2004.
However 2004 was a different world. The last two years of social political discussion in the West alone have been marked by an even more rapid rise in public conformity, the level of which is arguably completely unprecedented. This process has been buoyed significantly by the rise of “Trial By Social Media” with its concomitant cost of public humiliation and intimidation and the expansion of the ambit of so called “Hate Crimes”. It has been driven by a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (including Facebook, Google and Twitter) now having the power to direct what people think, know and say using a business model which relies on customers being ready to pay to modify the behaviour of others.
Yet there is something else in the air. Look at the lengths that the BBC and others today will go to in order to debunk purportedly “Fake News”. This was initially justified on the strict grounds that it was necessary in order to protect the public health during the Coronavirus Pandemic (itself a highly dubious claim) but these forces still rage on with more fervour than ever by forcing a narrow mainstream public opinion about a foreign international conflict, which at one level at present is most notable for an extremely low civilian death count in relative terms.
I will set out some thoughts around the Ukraine Conflict in the days to come.
For present purposes it will suffice to say that I believe the Ukraine Conflict has as much to do with social engineering in the West as it does with dictatorship – although the two are today by and large the same thing.
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