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Western people generally make a major error when attempting to compare the US-led West with Russia and China. That is, the Western person assumes that both the East and the West have the same kind of flaws and that ultimately, both regions are essentially the same because “people are the same everywhere.”
They also reject the idea that there is a “Western” way of thinking and an “Eastern” way of thinking in relation to geopolitics. Many Westerers believe there are an infinite number of nuances in the media and that one should pay attention to all of them. Sadly, the US and European media in reality do not contain an open discussion precisely of the most vital issues, ie, the cancerously growing public and private debt, the perennial wars and US-inspired and promoted regime change interventions like the Maidan coup in Ukraine, the Venezuelan uprising and more recently the Bolivian uprising that are unabashedly and openly supported by the US Establishment. The best illustration of the West’s repression of the public discussion of these issues is that in all the televised US presidential debates of the past few decades, no moderator has asked the candidates how they would deal with the ballooning debt bubble or how they would end the constant US military and soft regime change attacks on Third World countries or what the candidates thought about the Israeli intervention in US politics via AIPAC (despite the fact that discussion of so-called “Russian meddling” in US politics is encouraged) and the murder of unarmed Palestinian protesters and the bombing of residential areas in Gaza. Any moderator touching any of these taboo topics would have lost his or her job and fallen into permanent obscurity. So where are the nuances? Nuance is quashed in the Western public debate. It’s all about supporting the official narrative and most of the victims of state propaganda are happy to defend their persecutors. This belief among Westerners that one can obtain an accurate picture of the world by reading all the viewpoints in the media is understandable, however, because, although the Westerner sees their governments approving wars against countries that have done Western citizens no harm whatsoever, the media on both the Left and the Right assure them that these wars are justified based on very tenuous and superficial arguments that are never adequately explained and not subject to questioning. Further, all news outlets throughout the West repeat this narrative and Westerners believe that, of course, it would be impossible for all their news outlets to be wrong. The pretext for these wars is generally the postulate that if the US and its European allies do not invade certain poor Third World countries, these countries will threaten our security. Western people are willing to accept this postulate even though they don’t understand, or ask, why this is so and how or in what way these countries actually threaten our security. In other words, they accept it not because they are convinced intellectually on the basis of logic, reason and facts but because their “leaders” assured them that it is so. These citizens reason that it would be impossible for all the new outlets to make the same mistake. They believe it would be absurd to think that all major media are following the same erroneous political line. And yet, the Western media unanimously reported, for example, that Saddam Hussein was using weapons of mass destruction when in fact, no such weapons were ever found after the US invaded Iraq. And the Western media reported in unison that Serbia was abusing the human rights of Kosovars but that the Kosovars were their innocent victims, although UN special prosecutor Carla De Ponte found, after the Kosovo conflict in which NATO killed an estimated 13,500 mostly civilians, that there were war criminals on both the Kosovar (ethnic Albanian) and the Serbian side and that even after the war, Kosovar leaders were behind the murder of Serbian citizens and trafficked in their organs. Pointedly ignoring vital facts, the media repeat this postulate of a supposed threat from certain national actors over and over again and somehow, the people eventually wind up believing them even though no sufficiently logical arguments or facts are employed by the journalists who support the narrative of a threat. Nor does the American or European citizen question the postulate, put forth by Western politicians and journalists, that Bashar el-Assad is a cruel and barbaric dictator even though he, unlike the unelected Saudi dictator kings, was elected democratically and there is no actual proof that he is cruel and barbaric. In fact, the media and political class almost all agree that Assad – and not the hordes of terrorists who had taken over most of Syria by 2014 – is solely responsible for the numerous deaths in the Syrian war. This really challenges the credulity of the Western people because the man who has been fighting terrorists since 2011 is said to be more dangerous and ruthless than the terrorists who are known to decapitate innocent civilians! If we accept this narrative, we are assuming that the terrorists have never harmed anyone and that Assad is the only terrorist leader in Syria, who has ruthlessly slaughtered his own people for no reason at all, simply because he hates his own people, including the ones who elected him, despite the fact that Assad’s popularity is higher than that of any US president in the US. How did he manage to convince the people he tortured and killed that he was their friend? The average Western citizen never thinks about this obvious discrepancy. He simply accepts as fact that Assad is evil but somehow, the Saudi kings are useful allies of the West, even though these allies were the source of most of the terrorists’ funding and weapons in Syria. Further, it is known that the US has funded so-called “rebels” who murder the troops of the legitimately elected Syrian government. In other words, we are asked to believe that the terrorists are harmless but the leader who fights the terrorists is cruel and barbaric and is responsible for all the war casualties. Note that Russia has not supported the terrorists in any way and has fought them so effectively that, whereas the Syrian army was about to be driven into the sea by 2015, the Russian air force immediately turned the tide of the war in September of that year by providing air support for the Syrians, even though the US had claimed it was fighting the “war against terror” long before the Russians arrived. In addition, the US does not comply with international law and does not respect the sovereignty of other nations. It invaded many countries without a UN mandate or even a clear purpose and created disasters in these countries, killing civilians in the hundreds of thousands from North Korea to Iraq to Yugoslavia to Libya and in many cases, reducing once-prosperous countries like Iraq and Libya to grinding poverty. Further, while the West has managed its economy irresponsibly, accruing a debt of $23 trillion dollars that threatens the US and the world with recession, Russia has a debt that is so small that it is roughly equal to its reserves in gold and bonds [As explained at New Silk Strategies]. These differences between Russia and the US are not trivial and we cannot justifiably equate Russia with the US-led West.
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