COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was bombing and starving a walled-in population of two million, half of them children.
Seriously, imagine it. Imagine the rage and vitriol. Imagine the nonstop media coverage.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, US media coverage of that war exceeded the media coverage of all US wars in the previous three decades. If Russia were deliberately and systematically exterminating civilians in Ukraine or anywhere else, the Western media coverage of those war crimes would be many times more.
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It’s almost cliché at this point to say “imagine if Russia or China did this”, but such comparisons are important for retaining a sense of perspective on just how evil the Western political-media class is being about Gaza right now.
We’re seeing articles come out in the mass media about starvation in Gaza which never once even mention the word “Israel”. Do you think that would be happening if this were being perpetrated by a government which defies the Western empire? Of course not.
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people.
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children.
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons.
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis.
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity.
Imagine how the Western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.
We’d be living in a different political and media landscape. If Russia or China was doing what Israel is doing, entire presidential campaigns would have been built around who would oppose it most aggressively.
Imagine If Russia Or China Did The Things Israel Is Doing In Gaza
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— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 28, 2024
Every sanction and embargo in the book would have been slammed upon the perpetrating government. The Western press would be falling all over themselves to expose every atrocity and every lie and blaring those expositions as feature stories on every platform for months, and showering one another with awards for doing so.
Instead we get this. Government officials babbling nonstop about Israel’s “right” to “defend itself” and how this would all be over if Hamas didn’t keep fighting, while showering Israel with weapons to help it continue its atrocities.
The mass media churning out a constant deluge of passive-language “Gazans are having trouble finding food for some reason” headlines and continuous reminders that this is all happening because of October 7, while repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda like it’s gospel truth.
All viable US presidential candidates vowing their unconditional support for Israel while occasionally impotently finger-wagging at this or that aspect of Israel’s atrocities to avoid looking like complete psychopaths.
That contrast between how the Western political-media class is acting toward the Gaza genocide and how we all know they’d be acting if an unaligned government was doing something similar is exactly why the US-centralised empire cannot be permitted to rule our world anymore.
It pretends to stand for peace, justice, freedom and democracy, but in reality it just inflicts nonstop death and suffering upon human beings around the world and covers it up with propaganda spin from its servile mainstream press.
It purports to uphold the “rules-based international order”, but all that means in practice is that it upholds an international order in which the US empire makes up the rules as it goes along and changes them as it pleases.
Humanity cannot allow itself to be abused and tyrannised by this murderous, hypocritical globe-spanning power structure any longer. A better world is possible, but we’re going to have to find a way to pry the talons of these monsters off the steering wheel first.
Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article was first published here and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
