Eye on the Media | Patrice Greanville
This item is an eloquent example of the "half-truth" technique, so frequently utilized by western media.
Prefatory Note
When I first came upon this piece on Britain's rag The Independent, bearing the surprising headline, How the Soviet Union helped save the world from Hitler during World War II my first impression was: How weird (and noble!) of them to recognize at last something they have been denying and fudging for a long time?! Where's the catch? The Wikipedia provided something of a glancing explanation:
The Independent is a British online newspaper.[1] Established in 1986 as an independent national morning newspaper published in London, it was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media from 1997 until it was sold to Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in 2010.[2] The last printed edition of The Independentwas published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only its digital editions.[1]
OK, the paper was now in the hands of a Russian oligarch, Lebedev, and I heard there was also some opportunistic Middle East money in there as well. So that might shed some light onto why such a piece favorable to Russia's prestige would suddenly turn up in a press culture noted for its rabid anti-Moscow sensationalism.
Closer inspection revealed that the UK piece had a dateline of 9 May 2016, and, that it was a slightly edited version (catering to British readers) of a previous iteration published by The Washington Post exactly a year before, 8 May 2015. It was signed by one Ishaan Tharoor. (1)
Since the Washington Post and The New York Times are literally the twin anchors of the "respectable" American disinformation machine at the service of the hegemonist global plutocracy with its world capital in Washington, DC and with its media control center in Langley, VA, just a stone's throw from the official seat of American power, there was reason to suspect some foul play.
The hunch proved correct, as the CIA's "paper of record" —particularly now under Amazon's potentate Jeff Bezos' greedy direction—rarely disappoints. WaPo's professional disinformers had outdone themselves in this outing, a classical example of the half-truth: give them a truth that cannot be denied any longer, but use that credibility envelope to inject huge lies that more than cancel the beneficial impact of the admitted truth. It works like a charm, at least in the thoroughly manipulated West. (Incidentally, the corporate media are also experts at the "downplay" technique where any important news inimical to the interests of global neoliberalism and/or US policy is relegated to the back pages or barely mentioned. And there's of course outright omission of truth, the lying technique that leaves "no fingerprints". The Big Lie travels far and travels fast, and it does not take many lies to poison a big well. (2)
So, without further eloquence, please take a look at this exhibit of expert media manipulation in the service of the empire, and try to remember how the half-truth technique operates so you may vaccinate yourself against future instances of mental highjacking. The poisoned or insidious passages—many apparently originating with certifiable anti-communist and anti-Stalinist historians like Timothy Snyder— have been flagged down in bold red. —PG
Don’t forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler
'It was the Western Allies' extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire 'butcher's bill' for defeating Nazi Germany'
May 8, 2015
But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.
It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present, with Putin's relations with the West having turned frosty after a year of Russian meddling in Ukraine. (sic) (1) When Russia's T-14 Armata tank broke down at a parade rehearsal on Thursday, the snickering could be heard across Western media.
Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.
Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R. [The tone here makes the Soviet Union pact and her creation of a buffer zone to keep the Nazis at bay something sinister and done simply for imperialist reasons, something that applied to Hitler's actions, not Russia's.—Eds.)
[What one Soviet soldier saw when he entered Auschwitz.]The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writesBritish historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime lossesfighting the Red Army.
"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.
Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.
"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin."
By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.
In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:
When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.
To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.
"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.
By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.
For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.
Notes
(1) The indisputable meddler was Obama and the US Deep State who literally boasted of having destabilized Ukraine's legitimate government in a classic coup via color revolution technqiues, and later (per Nuland) of choosing Ukraine's new Nazi-sympathising puppet leaders. The British version of the article is titled How the Soviet Union helped save the world from Hitler during World War II; the original is headlined, as presented here, Don’t forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler. A quick inspection of the readers' reaction show the British more balanced in their attitude to the facts of history, with many hailing the USSR's anti-Nazi effort, and viewing Russia with admiration or more equanimity than their American counterparts, possibly reflecting different levels of successful indoctrination.
(2) For a thorough discussion of Western techniques of thought control as used in the media, please see my FIRST (ABRIDGED) CATALOG OF U.S. MEDIA BIASES, DISTORTIONS AND SUPPRESSIONS, in Cyrano's Journal premier issue (1982).
(3) Some photos and video have been replaced with similar or superior materials for technical and editorial reasons.
Related
Speaking of World Wars. Since we just went through the disgusting celebration of World War One, I recommend reading “Hidden History: The Secret Origin of World War One”.