‘This Isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan’: War in Ukraine Has Exposed Liberal Western Media’s Entrenched Racism

Isn’t it curious how the loudest voices speaking against “white privilege” for the last few years end up being the most racist when you hold them up against the spotlight. That spotlight has been Ukraine where the blatant and implicit racism of the western press — clueless at the best of times — has come to the fore.

There are two levels of racism here — the innate racism of Western Europe and North America towards Eastern Europe and the far more blatant racism against the “brown skinned”. While black lives have definitely begin to matter in America, black lives outside America have seldom, if at all, mattered. Take for example how the world stood by and did exactly nothing when the Rwandan Genocide broke out. At best we would get human interest stories when the Second Congo War morphed into the Kivu War — essentially Africa’s version of the World War, with different countries supporting different factions resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions displaced. Honestly without googling it, how many of you had heard of the Second Congo War, the Ituri War and the Kivu War? My guess would be almost none. Similarly we’ve seen zero empathy for the “brown skinned” people of the world — not even a basic “brown lives matter” hashtag trend, if nothing else.

Consider this. The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, MSNBC (in all its previous avatars) were blatantly in support of horrific sanctions that killed hundred of thousands of children in Iraq. The meanest cut was when liberal media darling and notoriously incompetent and monumentally corrupt “diplomat” Madeleine Albright — a product of the Clinton crony circuit — was asked during her tenure as US Secretary of State “if our country (can) delivers humanitarian supplies and not death to the people of Iraq (sic)”. Her concentration camp guard-like response was: “We care more about the people of Iraq than Saddam Hussein.” She is now a major celebrity media talker and runs her own crony company focusing on nepotistic connections for American businesses without consequence. Contrast this with the outrage over bombs falling on Ukraine, which have resulted in around 200 civilian deaths — not even a fraction of the deaths caused by the US invasions, occupations and attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Mind you this isn’t simple racism — it’s actually a complex phenomenon that also includes people deemed “not white enough”. Remember, Irish Catholic immigrants to the US used to be treated as “not really white” till the Italians started immigrating leading to the Irish being turned honorary white. The Italians suffered the same fate till Jews started migrating and Jews of course had to try double hard to play along with the WASPs or the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The New York Times’ owner, the Sulzbergers (themselves Jews), had to underplay their Jewishness and suppress news of the Holocaust even though they knew about it early enough — simply to “fit in”.

The multiracial nature of immigration from the ‘60s and ‘70s meant that Jews like Italians and the Irish before them were elevated to honorary white status. Incidentally “honorary white” isn’t a made up term — it’s a legal term employed by South Africa’s Apartheid regime, who had to designate the several non-whites as such, in order for them to avail Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean business. What was legal terminology in South Africa was unstated reality in America. In the past this unstated reality has been applied to orthodox Christians, Eastern Europeans as well — as a former foreign minister of a western country, who is currently very vocal about Ukraine, once told me over a scotch nine years ago, “Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are only good for two things — vodka and prostitutes”.

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This slow mutation of unstated reality into stated position has now become evident in press coverage. Notice the cover of Time magazine when America started an entirely unauthorised and illegal bombing of Serbia versus when Russia started its equally illegal bombing of Ukraine. But this time it goes much further. Further because the primary guilt this time lies with Left-leaning organisations that have been loudest about social justice and equality.

Alan Macleod, a neutral media critic, compiled a thread — some gems from it: The BBC got someone talking about why he was traumatised that “white people with blonde hair and blue eyes were being bombed”. A CBS correspondent claimed he was traumatised because “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan … This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city”. Ex-BBC Peter Dobbie, now with Al Jazeera, produced this gem, “What’s compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East … or North Africa. They look like any European family that you’d live next door to.” The best was ultra woke NBC, “To put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine … They’re Christians, they’re white. They’re very similar [to us].”

Understand — just because things aren’t stated, doesn’t mean they’re not true. The fact is your lives simply don’t matter. Attacks on the western media as being “racist” in the past have all been fended off saying this was Right-wing propaganda. Ex-BBC journalist Nicola Careem’s blatant and demonstrable lies during Article 370 revocation and The New York Times’ disrespectful display of Indian funeral pyres were apparently journalism that “upset the right”, but when you have a systematic, across-the-board demonstration of racism by all western media channels, it seems everyone just wants to ignore it and pretend it never happened.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.

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