[quote AngelsForever]@Redtoothbrush
I've been a bit of a lurker here and have really liked your insightful posts and your are 1000% more knowledgeable than me!
I was wondering what your thoughts are of propaganda from the media (our media)...the Russians as we have seen are getting it but do you feel we (Europe and the the west) maybe lied to and goaded also? Please don't get me wrong putin is a wart that needs eradicating! I just have a gut feeling they are ramming things down our throat without us knowing the whole story and scaring the hell out of us![/quote]
We are always being lied to. I think over wars like this it tends to be more by omission rather than dirty great black lies. Simply because there is this point that you can only hide something so much if you have many journalists all looking for a scoop. Journalists in war zones have to also be mindful of how their reporting can endanger lives if they aren't careful. So details are likely to be often changed.
For me I think its about getting an overall sense of things thats important and what you should look for - cross reference things. Look for patterns.
Even though Ukrainian numbers of military losses aren't being reported, we KNOW they are relatively high. Not as high as the Russians, but still significant. No one is denying this.
In terms of civilian loses, its incredibly difficult to calculate. People will just be 'missing' and with so many dispersed across Europe it might be impossible to work out in the long run too. If anything it works to Ukrainian propaganda to over emphasis civilian deaths. However all the numbers that there have been seen small compared to the sheer scale of damage. So you have to assume that people largely got out.
I think the biggest issue now is actually in terms of 'the taken' as they are being called. These are people who are alive but have been abducted. We don't know who they are and there is no way of tracking them. In the midst of all the unidentified bodies and refugees its easier to make thousands just disappear.
And also think people need to reflect (in some cases HARD because the whatabouttery is painful) about the fact that Ukrainians are not abducting Russian children from their homes in Russia. They are not going to the homes of elderly Russian women who have lived there for 80 years and burning it to the ground. They are not going into Russian towns and gang raping Russian women.
There is no 'preemptive' about it. There is evidence for it unfortunately.
The scale of what we are misled about in the West for this conflict is on a completely different scale.
FWIW It serves the purposes of west governments to largely tell us about whats happening in Ukraine because of who the attacking force is and what our political objectives are. I don't think I could say the same about Afghanistan or Iraq in the same way for the same reason. (Doing a thesis comparing war reporting in the Middle East and Europe in the 2000s is someone's destiny)
I actually think we are seeing more of a reality because of this dynamic. There isn't the incentive to sanitise in the same way,. It also is the first war in the social media era in Europe.
We are struggling to cope with that. Other parts of the world have already been through this...
Its a shock to the system to suddenly be confronted with it I think.
I have also noticed that there seems to be a marked difference between posters old enough to remember Bosnia and those who are too young to remember it too.