Too many frame the invasion as an attack on ‘civilisation’, uniquely awful because it happened in Europe. That approach demeans us all Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has sharpened two terrifying realisations. The first is that Putin does not function within the realm of the usual finely balanced checks and balances, sticks and carrots, that the west hoped would contain him and maintain an uneasy truce in Europe. The second is that decades of work since the second world war to learn from the mistakes of the past and fortify against them in the future have failed. Here again, we have not a civil war, but an invasion of a sovereign state in defiance of the rest of the world. Here again, we have images that are only known to us as historical reels, of frenzy and panic as thousands attempt to flee to safety.
But there is a third realisation that appears to shape the perception of too many western journalists justifiably appalled at the defiling of Europe. From the tone of much coverage, this seems uniquely distressing and more alarming to them because the lives of non-Europeans have less value, and their conflicts are contained, far away from us.
I thought it was just clumsy phrasing from a couple of reporters under pressure, but soon it became clear that it was, in fact, a media-wide tic. From Al Jazeera to CBS News, journalists were appalled that this was not happening in “Iraq or Afghanistan” but in a “relatively civilised European city.” One said: “The unthinkable has happened. This is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe.” Another reflected: “These are prosperous middle-class people … these are not obviously refugees getting away from the Middle East. To put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine … They’re Christian, they’re white, they’re very similar.”…
Ukraine: India refuses to take a clear position on the Russian invasion
10 Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)
Book review: The secret trauma that inspired W.G. Sebald
Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs review – high-impact reminder of our insatiable desire for destruction
Book review: The Tragic sense by Algis Valiunas
Dan Diner – Memory displaced: Re-reading Jean Améry’s “Torture”
Books reviewed: Pope Pius XII, Hitler’s pawn?
The knights of Bushido : a history of Japanese war crimes during World War II
HIROSHIMA 75 years after. ‘To my last breath’: survivors fight for memory
Salvador Dalí’s surreal dalliance with Nazism
Julián Casanova – The Spanish Civil War, 80 years after
Book review: The Colour of Time – a pictorial history of global conflict
JAMES SPRINGER: Remembering the Fall of Saigon, 45 years on
An era passes: legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap Dies at 102
Waging Peace: Vietnam’s anti-war exhibition brings GIs and Viet Cong together
Remembering the Fall of Saigon, 45 years on
An era passes: legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap Dies at 102
Pentagon Papers and time when media was trusted
Robert Fisk: Sinister efforts to minimise Japanese war crimes
After the truth-shower 