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

Andrew Sheng

Published: 2:13am, 25 Feb 2023

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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.

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.”

“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.

A protester holds a placard reading “Putin Kills” at a protest against the Russian war in Ukraine in Berlin, Germany, on March 27, 2022. Photo: dpa

The physical reality is that war will consume material resources and human lives until one side capitulates or both sides become so exhausted that they negotiate for peace. The media-driven reality is that war will continue so long as information outlets owned and controlled by the dominant West – which have been called the “white man’s media” – continue to stir up war to contain challengers to Western hegemony. Having the most powerful military or media is useless if you don’t flex those muscles every now and again to show who is boss.

In short, the war is being obfuscated by misinformation and disinformation, so much so that only a few understand the real situation or its possible outcome.

In Ukraine, we have a real war going on, but there is no independent, authoritative view of the casualties, devastation or trauma taking place there. All we know is that Ukraine is being flattened and, without Nato support, the conflict would have ended with negotiations.

It’s hard to know who to believe any more, since the BBC, The New York Times and RT seem to be voices for their own respective deep security states.

Admittedly, no information outlet is free of vested interests. But all media channels today, including the internet, are either voices of power (the state) or money (the rich).

The top Western media outlets are owned by mostly white tycoons, such as the Murdoch family (News Corp), Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post) or Elon Musk (Twitter). We are bombarded with news, which largely consists of opinion pieces backed by flimsy facts, asking for a victory that is not defined realistically. What does victory mean in a possible nuclear outcome?

03:27

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We should note that the role of information and systems thinking in war is a recent Western development resulting from World War II. Allied scientists from different disciplines brought together to think about the nuclear bomb and other war efforts discovered that thinking in systems is very different from thinking in parts. The collective has properties very different from that of its parts.

Classical scientific thinking until that point was linear and mechanical, moving from cause to effect and assuming that the external environment does not change. The big shift in thinking was the understanding that the whole system changes dynamically on the basis of the interaction between parts, or what are called feedback loops.

Feedback loops mean that for every action, there are consequences that are not immediately obvious. Incidents create accidents and vice versa. Thus, media propaganda has consequences we have no way of predicting. The deep state assumes that it can fool most of the people most of the time, but this cannot be done forever.

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The pioneer systems thinker and ecologist Donnella Meadows recognised that feedback loops have lags, so that the effects of any action may not be evident until later, and the interaction between different feedback loops with different lags mean that we can never predict exactly the impact of policies or new information released through the media.

Electoral democracy is a media game whereby different parties try to persuade voters to back them. But the real game is to fool enough voters to maintain the status quo for the powerful, especially those who control the media. The media cannot be held accountable unless they also bear the consequences of their misinformation or disinformation.

Such are the lies that feed a never-ending war. Humanity will not rest till war destroys everything that is worth fighting for. But in the meantime, let’s enjoy the metaverse with its digital fantasy of a beautiful life.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective