When History And The News Clash...
When History And The News Clash...
What history can we learn from headlines?
I’ve been talking about Russia and the invasion of Ukraine for some time now, and events have developed in a way that is unfamiliar to many people.
Russia’s invasion seems to have failed.
Has it? While they have indeed pulled the northern arm of the invasion back, the southern arm has grabbed Mariupol, an important port on the Black Sea, giving Russia land access to the Crimean Peninsula. This has been a goal for Russia since March 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea. This means that the Russians have been playing a long game.
And Russian artillery hasn’t stopped pounding Ukraine.
One thing the Russians are good at is artillery. Remember what I said before about Russians: their armies are rarely efficient, but usually effective. The Russians lost over 40 million people in their Great Fatherland War (what we call WWII), so these kinds of losses are… not unexpected. And what else keeps coming? US aid and arms… during a high inflationary period. Know all those Javelins? We can’t make them as fast as the Ukrainians can fire them. But the Russians have tanks dating back to the 1940s that they can expend, burning out American arms stocks.
But there’s more…
There was this news blurb first released on 16 May that speaks of a coup already underway in Russia as early as 14 May. Now, read the first paragraph:
The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service said a coup to oust Russian President Vladimir Putin is already underway.
American Military News, “Coup to oust Putin is underway, Ukrainian general claims,”16 May 2022.
This would be interesting if CNN or even Fox News got hold of it. Many more might ask what was going on; one might expect to see official statements from Ukraine, from Russia, even Washington.
But no…
Why? The article also included this statement:
“Europe sees Russia as a big threat. They are afraid of its aggression. We have been fighting Russia for eight years and we can say that this highly publicized Russian power is a myth,” Budanov said. “It is not as powerful as this. It is a horde of people with weapons.”
American Military News, “Coup to oust Putin is underway, Ukrainian general claims,”16 May 2022.
The quotes are in the original. He also said that Putin is ill with cancer. Discerning readers will note the phrase “[w]e have been fighting Russia for eight years…”
CNN and most of the rest of the mainstream media have not been covering this conflict with the avidity that they have been covering, say, Johnny Depp’s lawsuit (What is that about, anyway?).
Why?
A better question is, what have Russia and Ukraine been fighting over for the past eight years? They’ve been fighting over the “breakaway republics” of Donets and Lugansk, two parts of Ukraine that are peopled mostly with Russian-speaking Ukrainians. On 21 February 2022, Russia recognized them as independent republics.
The two self-proclaimed rebel republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, whose independence Moscow recognised [21 February], are situated in the rust belt in eastern Ukraine and escaped Kyiv's control in 2014.
Agence France Presse, Donetsk And Lugansk: Ukraine's Breakaway Republics, 21 February 2022, quoted in Barron’s.
Didn’t hear that on CNN either, did ya? These two little bits of turf are the steel-making heart of Ukraine’s industrial power, and Russia has wanted it for a while. Quite a while longer than we’ve been hearing about it over here in Vespucci-land. Now, Vladimir Putin has been shouting about the abuses of the Ukrainian regime, and its corruption, and said variously that he wants to “save” the Russian speakers in Ukraine from the “genocide” that Kiev has in mind. He’s also made statements that make him sound like a sentimentalist who wants to get the old Russian Empire’s band back together.
These are the facts. Now…
Failed invasion: not yet. Russia plays a very long game, longer than Western news cycles. They always have. Just because the Second Coming hasn’t happened yet, the Pope dosen’t close up the Church…and the Russians don’t stop invading just because of a setback that only cost a few thousand privates.
The coup: probably a dream. Third parties rarely announce coups while they are underway. The cancer part is possible, and has been speculated about elsewhere.
Western news failure: harder to explain, but very few newsrooms even knew where Ukraine was before Russia invaded. It became Headline News as soon as the first Russians crossed the border. This has been a Breaking Story because there are casualties involved, and women and children and old folks…you know, the usual victims. While there are no “minorities” or significant numbers of Persons of Color involved, there are enough victims for the American media to talk about.
The Clash…
The consensus among the glitterati is that the Russian invasion has failed.
It hasn’t… yet.
An intelligence officer claimed a coup was ongoing in Russia.
No evidence for that.
Western news agencies haven’t been reporting an ongoing war for eight years.
Not enough of the right victims.
Conclusion
If the news is supposed to be the first draft of history, this one needs a lot of work.
Sergeant’s Business and Other Stories
This is a collection of short stories I wrote and edited over the course of perhaps ten years.
These are short stories of heroism, sacrifice, Christmas, friendship, loss, tragedy, childbirth...in short, something for everyone. These are about people in peril, in danger of their lives, their livelihoods.They save others; they save themselves.
From pre-history to yesterday, these stories take you from the hunting fields of prehistoric man to Shiloh, from the Pacific to Pointe du Hoc, from Korea to the English Channel, from Bastogne to Appomattox and more.
Available at your favorite booksellers or autographed from me. Drop me a line and let me know…
Coming Up…
Normandy/D-Day Reconsidered
What Is Reality… and Does It Matter?
And Finally…
On 4 June:
1615: The siege of Osaka, Japan ended. It may not seem like much to us, but it was the end of the Toyotomi clan and the beginning of the Peace of Tokugawa that would last until 1867, with the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
1977: JVC introduced the VHS videotape format in North America. In direct competition with Sony’s Betamax, this format would win out by 1990, just in time for the CD…