Horrifying attack on Mariupol. Children's hospital and maternity hospital targeted by Russian strikes. Many losses. The city is completely surrounded. There’s no electricity, water and gas. Russia refuses to provide green corridor. City is facing humanitarian catastrophe. pic.twitter.com/YwhvABuVVZ
Here’s another example of how easy it is to manipulate people. Apparently, the MSM massively posted a couple of old photos from Ukraine. One is of Zelensky in uniform from last April and another of Ukrainian children greeting troops from 2014. Why not use more recent photos, I don’t know. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe stupidity. Maybe something else.
Immediately, internet sleuths discovered that the photos are old. As if there were any shortage of new ones but OK.
“We are being manipulated!” they wail. “Ukrainians are manipulating us!”
Yes, you are being manipulated. But not by Ukrainians. In Ukraine, everybody has known these images for a long time and knows what they are about. You are being manipulated by your own media and are reacting exactly how they want.
To give an example of how the media manipulate people, I’ll briefly discuss the CNN report on Ukraine I saw yesterday. Mind you, it was a single report, not two different programs. So you can’t say that two different talking heads were offering two different perspectives.
The report insistently transmitted two contradictory messages:
1. Situation in Ukraine is dire and urgent help is needed.
2. Russian troops have only managed to achieve “a minimal advancement” into Ukrainian territory.
What is a regular person supposed to think when hearing this contradictory message? “There’s something fishy going on. I can’t be bothered to unravel this mess.” Which is exactly the goal that the CNN is trying to achieve.
If the CNN said openly “don’t care about Ukraine,” many people would be prompted to care just out of the spirit of contradiction. With this primitive manipulation tactic, they achieve the goal much more easily.
By the way, the part of the programming that is a lie is point 2 about “minimal advancement.”
Stay alert and assume that what they are trying to say is the opposite of what they are actually saying.
To distract myself from everything bad, I enrolled in an online course on the contemporary political novel in Spain. The course is 2 hours a week for 3 months. What attracts me to the course is that in a reading list of 22 authors I only know two. You’d think it’s impossible to find Spanish authors I don’t know but yes, it is. This isn’t my kind of literature (too postmodern) but I want to expand my horizons.
The course starts in early April, so now I need to plough through the reading list. I’m actually really excited about this. I loved being a student and now I can briefly go back to being one. I used to be a mega pest as a student. Let’s see if time has taught me anything.
It’s also cute to observe the starry-eyed gullibility of people who should really know better.
“Biden says the US will stop buying Russian oil!”
“And you believe him because. . . why, exactly? Because he’s been so honest about everything else?”
“But he said so!”
Ah, well, in that case.
Immediately, the Biden administration declared it will be buying oil from Venezuela. Venezuela destroyed its oil capacity years ago under the orders from Russia. “Buying from Venezuela” means buying from Russia through the backdoor.
But you go right along. Continue believing that the same politicians and the same media who lied to you for years about everything else are now all of a sudden completely honest and are sincerely helping Ukraine.
Because they say so. And it must be true if they do.
What’s really funny is that the right-wing position on Ukraine is identical to what the left-wing position was in 2014. Right-wingers unearth the hoariest gossip from the NYTimes and the NPR circa 2013-14 and present it as their own insight. Nazis in the Ukrainian army, the civil war in Ukraine, there is no invasion, the CIA organized the 2013 revolution, etc. Even the weird obsession with Victoria Nuland has once again reared its ugly head but this time on the right.
In 2014 I heard this silliness from the left, and now I’m hearing it from the right. You’d think they might remember whose playbook it is to call the people you don’t like Nazis and fascists. Forget 2014, this happened in Canada just a few weeks ago. The memory should be fresh. But no, if the left is running around and screaming “Nazis!”, we should, too. What’s next, criticizing Ukrainians for being anti-BLM and ‘transphobic’? Give it a few weeks, and we’ll see Tucker rant about racist Ukrainians. The right in Spain is already doing it.
This is the reason why the left always defines the narrative. The right can’t be bothered to create its own and always poutily tags in the rear. “You racist!” “No, you racist! I can be a better you than you possibly can.”
In other news, energy to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been cut. Reactors can’t cool if there’s no power.
Today we went out to celebrate the International Women’s Day which is a big holiday in our culture. Of course, at the restaurant there were TVs on every wall, and I was stuck right in front of the CNN coverage of the war in Ukraine, which didn’t do any wonders for my digestion.
This was the first time I saw any US coverage of the war, and all I have to say is, people, I beg you, don’t blame Ukrainians for the failings of your news channels. The MSM were garbage long before the invasion. This isn’t on Ukraine.
I’m glad, at least, that I can get news from directly on the ground and report them here on the blog.
It’s pretty unbelievable that, with all the resources it has, journalism in the US is such exceptional garbage.
Russia doesn’t want to confess the real numbers of its soldiers who died in the war. So how to explain the high death count?
Of course, they blame it on COVID and COVID-related heart disease. Everybody’s favorite excuse for an inconvenient death count. An unexpected wave of COVID is an excuse for another lockdown. What’s not to like?
I can no longer play Russian Wordle because it has that nasty, utterly meaningless flag at the top of the page. (One of the reasons why Russia is this way is that it was never fully formed as a nation-state. The flag, the anthem, the two-headed eagle evoke no emotional attachment from the people.)
So I switched to Ukrainian Wordle. It immediately defeated me by offering as its first riddle the word “kebab.” It’s the Great Lent, so I’m trying hard not to think about kebabs. Plus, when I left Ukraine, there were no kebabs, so how am I supposed to know it’s now a word?
Also, I did some research on contemporary Ukrainian literature last night and. . . yeesh. It’s not good. Obviously, people have other things on their minds but, sadly, the Ukrainian literature hasn’t recovered yet from the destruction wrought on it by the USSR.
There is a great Ukrainian novel titled The Cathedral (1968) by Oles Honchar, which marks a symbolic ending to the twentieth century in Ukrainian letters. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, there was nothing. I mean, people published stuff but it’s not what Ukrainian literature can be.
The Cathedral is a great novel, by the way. It’s about people in a small village in Soviet Ukraine trying to protect from demolition a historic cathedral. They are no longer allowed to worship or even think about worship, but they want to save at least the building itself. The novel was written in the USSR, so you can imagine how angry the censors were. The only thing that saved the author was that he was a decorated hero of WWII. You can read it in English here.
And here is the real-life cathedral the novel is based on:
Like the cathedral in the novel, it was erected without a single iron nail. It took the architect, Yakym Pohribniak, from 1772 to 1781, to create this masterpiece. And by the way, the very first church he built was located near Kharkiv because that’s where he was from. The church was destroyed in the late 1930s by the Stalin regime.
I have no idea how I started with kebabs and rambled all the way to this beautiful cathedral. But it’s good to have something that’s not all death and devastation in the thread, so please enjoy another view of the Holy Trinity Cathedral near Dnipro:
This is the interior of the cathedral today, and it’s very different from what it was like during the Soviet era when it was used to store cow feed:
Like in Honchar’s novel, the residents of the town rose up to defend the cathedral from demolition in the 1960s. And they prevailed.
When very liberal residents of NYC, San Francisco or LA whine endlessly on social media about high crime rates and mask mandates in their cities, do you feel compassion?
If so, you are a much, much better person than I am. All I feel is annoyance. Because these policies were created by the politicians they voted for and will vote for again. And they’ll loudly and insistently declare that anybody who doesn’t vote as they do is a Nazi. At some point, you’ve got to wonder, if they hate these policies so much, why don’t they vote differently? And why don’t they leave? These are usually people who have the means to go someplace else. Of course, when they do leave, they tend to vote for the same policies they escaped from, and the rot spreads elsewhere.
I feel the same annoyance for the Russian anti-war people. It’s been 23 years! Why didn’t they leave? The borders were wide open. And some did leave. Went to Ukraine after 2014. Those people I do respect. But the rest. . . honestly, I don’t have any more patience for them.
