For more than two months now, readers of the New York Times have been greeted with daily front-page stories describing Ukrainians who suffer the horrors of the Russian invasion. The stories continue inside with full pages and huge photos, often identifying the Ukrainians in these photos by name. The message is that the NYT, and by extension all Americans, grieve for every one of those poor Ukrainians and are horrified by Russian atrocities.
Skeptical Americans – those not brainwashed by media propaganda – might find this odd. Over the last twenty years the United States has destroyed one Mideast country after another, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya among others. We have shot up Afghan wedding parties, gunned down journalists from helicopters in Iraq, bombed the life out of tens of thousands of civilians in half a dozen countries, and yet there are no pictures of any of these victims. They died nameless, faceless and unacknowledged by the American killing machine and its media stenographers. It seems Americans should not have to face the results of their overseas murders, since that would ruin the myth of American exceptionalism.
At the same time, according to American officials, the only appropriate response to help Ukrainians is to send them more weapons, so that more of them can get killed and we can see more pictures of their suffering. In reality, the United States provoked the war between Ukraine and Russia, and is thereby responsible for every Ukrainian death. Thus the outpouring of grief from the New York Times is just a case of hypocrisy. Their crocodile tears are in the service of defense industry profits and our national arrogance, which demands that any nation which opposes us, whether Russia, China, Iran or Venezuela, be crushed. Any inconvenient side effects, like thousands of dead, must not be mentioned. If there is such a thing as a “war crime,” no one is more guilty of it than the writers and editors of media like the New York Times, who encourage worldwide slaughter for their own profit.