Introduction to the Special Issue
Pat Walsh
This special edition of Irish Foreign Affairs is largely made up of speeches revealing the Russian perspective of events in Ukraine. This is entirely absent in the Western mainstream media which has been careful to present a narrative facilitating unquestioning support of the government in Kiev among the European masses. In some quarters this would be labelled ‘information terrorism.†The main purpose of the totalitarian narrative that saturates Western consciousness is to elicit total support for a sanctions regime and the waging of a war against the Russian people of the Donbas and Ukraine in order to overthrow the functional administration that presently exists in Russia. To question this dubious and dangerous project of Washington ideologues is to be pro-Putin and to be a Russian stooge. Dissent is unacceptable.
When a great moral campaign of demonisation was launched in August 1914 against Germany to muster up support from liberal, and previously anti-war people, in Britain, the German view was still made available to the public. It was sometimes published under misleading titles to distort the meaning in English translations, but it was published all the same. Today Russian news agencies are suppressed by various means and there is almost a complete absence of criticism in the UK and Ireland of Western activities in Ukraine. There is a pretence that the whole world is in favour of the West’s actions in Ukraine, when, in fact, the vast majority of the world’s population is either opposed or not supportive. Moral outrage over Ukraine, is, in fact, confined to the White, privileged, former Imperialist and Colonialist sections of humanity which now dress their geopolitics in the colours of the rainbow. Like the disgraced anti-war liberals of 1914, who collapsed under pressure of war, they need to feel good about themselves in waging it, to make the sacrifices needed in their standards of living for the cause. As long as the Ukrainians do the fighting and dying, that is.
There are large numbers of people in the West who believe the war in Ukraine began with the Russian military intervention in February 2022. That is the seminal event in their understanding. Nothing before that matters. And that understanding is what is encouraged in the narrative to prevent any deeper thought that might be inconvenient to support for Kiev’s enthusiasm on the battlefield.
The all-prevailing narrative is produced by a network of the UK State’s military, intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracy that has suddenly appeared on the scene, having lay beneath the public consciousness for years.
Tom Stevenson, in reviewing a recent book written by one of the Ukraine analysts for the BBC, Lawrence Freedman, for the London Review of Books, 6 October 2022, described the people and networks who lie behind the construction of this narrative that the BBC presents to the public:
“Many countries find a special place for civilians who share the interests of the state’s military, intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracy but operate outside its hierarchy. In Britain they are spread among a network of security think tanks and academic departments that include the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From fine old buildings in Whitehall, Temple, St James’s Square and the Strand, they shape much of the foreign and defence policy analysis produced in Britain. Each institution has its own flavour (the Chatham House sensibility is more mandarin than military), but they have a great deal in common. All have close connections with the intelligence services – after John Sawers retired as head of MI6 in 2014, he took up posts at King’s and RUSI – and an equally close relationship with the national security establishment of the United States.
Among the British defence intelligentsia, Atlanticism is a foundational assumption. A former director of policy planning at the US State Department and a former director at the US National Security Council are on the staff of the IISS. Until he stepped down in July, Chatham House was led by Robin Niblett, who spent time at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. RUSI’s director-general, Karin von Hippel, was once chief of staff to the four-star American general John Allen. In 2021, RUSI’s second largest donor was the US State Department. (The largest was the EU Commission; BAE Systems, the British army, the Foreign Office and some other friendly governments account for most of the remaining funding.) IISS’s main funders aside from the EU Commission, the State Department and, notably, Bahrain – are mostly arms companies. Chatham House gets more money from the British government and oil companies than from arms sellers, but its list of backers is similar. Despite these US links, however, and despite the fervency of their commitment to American national security priorities, British security think tanks have next to no influence across the Atlantic. Staff from UK think tanks sometimes take temporary jobs in more prestigious offices in Washington, but they very rarely become insiders.â€
So it is British Intelligence and its offshoots, acting for British and US State interests, that owns and forms the narrative about Ukraine that is presented to the British and Irish public and makes up its thoughts. What we hear about Ukraine is therefore neither objective, realistic or really informative. News management and control, along with misinformation and disinformation, also involves a process of deliberate omission and the suppression of information.
That is why the current edition of Irish Foreign Affairs publishes the Russian view of the events of Ukraine. Some day this will be needed, in order to explain events, which, if history is a guide, we can predict will be inexplicable within the current narrative. |
