"The first casualty of war is truth," the many-sourced epigram holds. Whoever first said it, and however they meant it, it's true. In the battle, no one knows the entire picture. While the "fog of war" is a lot less foggy for modern generals thanks to advanced technology, for ordinary troops, regular citizens and journalists things are as murky as ever, if not more so: social media is the latest extension of the battlefield, strafed with rumor and strewn with Photoshop landmines and poisonous memes.
Reports of large-scale movement are likely to be approximately correct. Everyone has spy satellites these days and while NRO-or-whoever is unlikely to show their cards, commercial imagery is widely available. On the other hand, NATO is unlikely to be flying anything at all over Ukraine and bordering non-NATO nations (or at least anything but thoroughly anonymized drones, which of course belong to no one, no one at all) and if they did, they wouldn't tell Fox or CNN what they were seeing.
From the Russian government,* we'll get bullshit and bravado; from the Ukrainian government, we'll get bravado and bullshit. A lot of the "amateur reporting" supposedly from Ukraine has been shown to be faked. Is some real? Certainly; but only the crudest fakes are easy to spot.
One of the major products of war is dead people. Count on it. Not just soldiers; grandparents, babies, schoolchildren, grumpy bastards and nice young people have already died and more are going to die. No sane person cheers for that. But we can't stop it.
Various sanctions have been implemented, more will be, and most of the complaining about this or that not having been done is based on profound misunderstandings of who runs what. Take SWIFT, a secure financial-exchange communications system: it's owned by the member banks, all across the world. It takes some doing to get them to agree to pull the plug on member banks. The President of the U.S. can't order them to. It's a pretty sure bet that NSA reads all of SWIFT's mail, too, and that can be a valuable source of intelligence info. That's one tiny corner of the complicated picture, and it's all that knotted, or worse.
Most of the big-picture reporting will be reasonably accurate; most of the live coverage in-zone from major news organizations will be a mixture of official news releases (generally serving a specific end), whatever they can find out themselves or from locals (eyewitness testimony, which can be of variable trustworthiness) and live pictures (what's in-frame is real, and what's out of frame is unknown). The heart-wrenching human-interest stuff? Who can say. War is terrible. It's also chaotic. We're always being told to "remember the Maine!" We're rarely encouraged to find out what actually happened to the Maine.
Be compassionate. Follow the news as closely as you care to. But don't be a sap (MIT has some hints) -- and don't cheer for the aggressor. That'd be the side that sent tanks clanking towards the capitol city.
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* Which includes nearly all Russian media and they're working on the holdouts. Ukraine is better off for press freedom, with independent press and both official government-run and independent radio and TV broadcasters. But they're trying to report and run their transmitters, webservers and printing presses from inside a war zone, so....
Update
18 hours ago
1 comment:
I have tried to remain emotionless while watching the reporting about the Ukraine battle that is ongoing. I have tried to watch it from at least 3 different television points of view, and for the most part, they have been pretty similar, with FOX NEWS being slanted to the right quite a bit when it comes down to talking about individual stories about how the war is effecting families or people. CNN and MSNBC do stories about families and individuals and how the war is hurting them, but mostly their side shows more emotional heartbreak about the past, and the future, while FOX is more interested in finding horrifying pictures and videos of some of the most brutal action done by the Russian forces.
While I know what happens in war, from tales told me by an uncle who fought the Chinese in Korea, the Vietnamese in Vietnam and Laos, and another close mentor who fought and was wounded twice in Vietnam.
I tried to explain what the people of the Ukraine are going through compared to what our founders went through during the beginnings of this nation, and the battle from door to door, and the locking up on a ship just out to sea, of people, just to let them die there.
And I told her that I prayed very hard that it never came to our shores, but if it did, I had to fight. She said that I was too old, too decrepit, etc. I just said, that some things you don't have a choice in, but you have a duty to do. I hope it never happens.
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