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Opinion | The Western media narrative on the war in Ukraine is preventing a resolution
- The West is keeping the fervour of war alive with a one-sided narrative that seals any window of opportunity for peace talks
- As the conflict enters its second year, the threat of escalation remains ever-present
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Our hopes for peace and prosperity are being dashed daily. On the anniversary of the Ukraine invasion on February 24, war seems closer to our shores than before.
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Human beings have long engaged in war. However, deciding whether to go to war or not comes down to information. Without information, we could still be blissfully unaware of the seriousness of war. Those in parts of the world cut off from information networks would not be able to join the debate on the Ukraine war, even though they are affected by the resulting carbon emissions, inflation and possible nuclear fallout.
Having been educated mostly in the West, I only came to realise that I was blind to my own blindness when the US-China rivalry alerted me to the power of the media in distorting any objective evaluation of what is really going on.
The West rose to global dominance on the back of advances in science, which values objective truth. Yet there is no objective scientific truth when events are being viewed through a lens of emotion, anger and fear.
Inevitably, the Ukraine war is both a factual reality and a media fest. In Homage to Catalonia, an early account of the Spanish Civil War published in 1938, the British writer George Orwell noted: “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from the people who are not fighting.”
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“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence,” he also wrote.
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