Naked ‘but they look like us’ prejudice on show – and there seems no shame or self-awareness among those pushing it
The UK media has been full of casual and explicit racism this weekend in its coverage of the Ukrainian crisis.
Footage from Ukraine and areas that border it show harrowing and heartbreaking scenes – but the media have shown no shame in saying that it is especially harrowing because it involves white Europeans and not people of colour or from some ‘third-world nation’.
The Telegraph was explicit:
But broadcasters have been little better. ITV’s reporter looked near to tears as she described scenes in a rail station, ‘unthinkable’ because it did not involve people from ‘a developing, third-world nation’:
And on the BBC, a guest spoke freely, unchecked and unquoted by the interviewer, of the tragedy of the situation affecting people with blue eyes:
The same broadcaster’s ‘Ukrainecast’ portrayed Ukrainians as ‘normal… European people’:
The UK media is no better in its prejudice than their US counterparts:
And the hypocrisy and racism of UK politicians is no better. While UK citizens face jail for travelling to fight ISIS or defend Kurdsfrom genocide, Tory Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has said she will support Britons going to Ukraine to fight there:
Activist account @ToryFibs nailed it in a summary tweet:
The Ukraine crisis has laid bare the racism of the Establishment – and the Establishment is not even trying to be subtle about it.
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INvasion and regime was great and supported by the Labour Party I ssem to remember a few years ago. They can’t now go back on that without recognising their own full-blooded involvment now. Putin lied… Blair ???????
BREAKING NEWS
Vladimir Putin puts Russia’s nuclear deterrent forces on alert over tensions with West
Russian President Vladimir Putin has put Russian nuclear deterrent forces on high alert amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.
Putin told state TV that NATO powers have made “aggressive statements” along with the West imposing hard-hitting financial sanctions against Russia, including the president himself.
He ordered the Russian defence minister and the chief of the military’s General Staff to put the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty”.
The US Ambassador to the United Nations says Putin’s order shows the Russian leader is “escalating conflict in a manner that is unacceptable”.
Putin is said to becoming increasingly frustrated at the slower-than-expected pace of the invasion as Russian troops have so far failed to capture the capital of Kyiv.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-putin-puts-nuclear-deterrent-26341424
Copy and paste in haste…
Repent at your leisure…
Wirral – What on earth is that nonsense supposed to mean, are you claiming that the report is untrue.
No. I’m simply criticising you for being a blank, unthinking drone.
Wirral – You’re the one supporting Putin and his thuggish regime.
Don’t be an idiot. It will help you progress in the world of grown-ups
Wirral – So are you now saying that you don’t support Putin’s and his illegal invasion of Ukraine.
I don’t support US or USSR invasions. What’s the scores on the doors in superpower invasions please?
Wirral – You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t already think that you know the answer.
Yeah, the USA have around a 50-point lead since WWII. Are u backing them mate?
Wirral – My position is quite clear I’m simply backing the right of the people of Ukraine to self determination, how about you.
The US armed and funded Ukrainian, white supremacist, holocaust denying Azov Battalion are doing the same thing. Are you right behind them, arm raised, goosestepping along and cheering them on?
Wirral – So you keep asserting, Whether you like it or not Putin had no right to invade Ukraine and the people of Ukraine have a right to self determination. Now be a good boy and go play with yourself in your 🐰🕳️.
Your beloved Blair had no right to invade Iraq and murder a million. Give your empty head a rattle
Wirral – More desperate lies. I’m not a Blair supporter, you are welcome to try and prove otherwise. . I agree with you about the illegality of the Iraq war as does Keir Starmer https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/17/foreignpolicy.iraq1
Well mr SS H hall he would have to be a bloody fool if he didnt use what the World democracy tour describe as a detterant with NATO increasingly threatning Russia in there own backyard..OR Putin might like me become tired of all the threats and obliterate the world…hes an old man in a world controlled by old men who’ve had a life?enjoy the sunshine 🌞whilst it shines comrade because I have a very uneasy feeling about this whole bloody baiting game and you might just have overplayed your hand by pushing the Bear into a corner.?
Joseph – The UN have called am Emergency General Assembly Meeting to hold Putin to account for his war crimes.
But isn’t that why the marvellous “Corbyn Interregnum” happened, and why over 200,000 party members left Labour when Sir K removed the party whip from his predecessor?
qwertboi – Where did you get the 200k figure from, can you post a link please.
95,420 left the party between Nov17 and Nov19
SteveH
27/02/2022 at 2:53 pm Well, there’s the thing, between 2017 and 2019, there was, reasonably, reliable information
Today, it is a guesstimate, because of the record keeping of Southside Labour, and, more importantly, the egregious data breach, which is, still, waiting an outcome.
We all know, of people who have resigned their Membership, people who have been expelled and people under suspension, who have received begging letters, for money, for assistance in canvassing all as though Southside Labour and Southside Admin are living in parallel universes.
So, the last reliable figures we have were back in 2019, when Jenny Formby was Gen Sec, and Jeremy Corbyn was Leader.
Southside Labour must be living in the Berlin Chancellery, in 1945. The place is crumbling around them, and they can only snipe and snarl(a bit like you), with not the first idea what to do about it all.
George – These reliable figures clearly illustrate that during the latter half of Jeremy’s leadership members (20% of then) were leaving in droves
July 2017 – 538,606
November 2017 – 525,779
June 2018 – 506,320
November 2019 – 430,359
January 2020 – 552,835
August 2020 – 495,961
“Where did you get the 200k figure from, can you post a link please.
95,420 left the party between Nov17 and Nov19”
‘Left the party’. I left the party when I cancelled my DD. The party might consider me just a member ‘in arrears’ – but I know I left the party. The 200,000+ I mentioned are people who left the party whether they filled in the appropriate form or not.
qwertboi – Or in other words, you made it up.
The figures above are the actual number of fully paid up members, they do not include any members in arrears.
Labour has for as long as I can remember included in its membership numbers members who are less than 6 months in arrears. Those who have resigned their membership are not included. The membership numbers quoted throughout Jeremy’s leadership also included members who were in arrears.
If you want to let Labour know that you have resigned from the party there is a handy form here. https://labour.org.uk/contact/membership-resignation-form, it wasn’t hard to find.
More like 300k from what I’ve been told qwertboi. If you look at the recent accounts it’s certainly over 200k. Not many left in Coventry to canvass for the Labour candidate anyway, they have only a handful dishing out Labour leaflets…..And now she is too frightened to appear at the hustings because of the strong local feeling towards her. It will be an interesting result next Thursday.
baz2001 – Yes it will, I wonder if Nellist will manage to hang onto his deposit this time
I wouldn’t waste too much time on the membership figures.
Given Keith Trilateral Commission Stooge Starmer’s stance that any LP member who disagrees with the Labour Party supporting Nazi’s thugs has no place in the LP it won’t be too long before the only members it retains are are poundshop wannabe Nazi’;s like steveH.
Putin & Lavrov lied……..unlike ‘our own principled leaders’. You could never accuse Boris Johnson nor Joe Biden & not even Sir Keir Starmer of being without scruples or ever going back on their word?
The only thing connecting the two main ‘warring’ parties are broader, globalist, building back better motivations.
#justsaying
Spot on Wirral
S’box “The Ukraine crisis has laid bare the racism of the Establishment – and the Establishment is not even trying to be subtle about it.”
I’m tempted to ask why would it think it needs to be subtle? It knows its ‘fierce and free’ Media is very effective at lying and deception Jew-hating, pro-Corbyn lefties pretending it’s their support for pro-palestinian rights that makes them AS haven’t got a leg to stand on when they challenge the synchronised-MSM, they would argue. And they’d be right.
EDUCATION is a pressing need to rebuff never-ending establishment lies.
As a retired lecturer, I always get a depressing feeling that when anyone mentions ‘the need for education to counter lies’, It really means that our children either need to be taught more dominant ‘woke’ ideologies or the bourgeois personal beliefs of their tutor. For Education & Diversity of Choice, read Propaganda & Control.
steve101704, it can also be made by marxists who simply believe that the ‘class war’ (antagonism of capital and labour (non-capital)) is not understoood by enough people who are not Billionaires or their enablers (‘the working class’).
If the Campaign for Countering Digital Hate now has a global reach, why hasn’t CEO Imran Ahmed targeted the Vice President Biden-funded and armed, white supremacist “Azov Battalion” who killed thousands of their fellow Ukrainians during the 2014 Maidan coup and are now tooled up to carry out President Biden’s terror Campaign by proxy?
Perhaps successfully attracting Israeli government funding also has made them “the wrong kind of Nazi”?
Spot on again Wirral. Thank you for being a sane voice.
Go & fight in the Ukraine = OK.
Go to fight for the Kurds in Rahowa against Daesh; get prosecuted.
Be a murdering, white supremacist in Ukraine 🇺🇦 ✔️Biden luvs ya ♥️
Be a murdering, white supremacist in the USA 🇺🇸 ✖️ Biden hates ya 😠 😡
Germany gets the all clear to rearm
Methinks
I understand now
Doug – What is it that you now understand?
SteveH
Kleptocracy
Let them eat cake
Here’s one for you
Tell us the one about Temporary Embarrassment’s employment policies in relation to the Coventry bin men and the Red Tory Labour Council
How much have they spent on scab agency workers and how does this fit into your understanding of our new new Labour industrial strategy
Doug – Good to see that you’ve finally caught up, most of us already knew that Russia was a kleptocracy
Oh dear, you’re resorting to dead cat tactics again.
Why don’t you ask the democratically elected councillors of Coventry.
SteveH
Temporary Embarrassment is part of the kleptocracy and as anyone with more than half a brain knows it has no borders
They all piss in the same pot
And this is the point where it’s necessary to point out that the officials who are supporting the right of ordinary British citizens to go to Ukraine and fight for what they say they believe in on their own are the political descendants of the ones who refused to defend the right of ordinary people in the UK to do that in Spain in the 1930s- and still don’t get it that we might never have had World War II OR the Holocaust had Franco, Mussolini & Hitler been stopped between 1936 and 1939.
Kenburch, I’d struggle to identify a discernible lineage in political terms over 80 years. It is, as others in this thread have noted, highly selective as to when it is permissible rather than prohibited to take up arms overseas, playing into the stratification of sympathy the article exposes. Though I am not persuaded that Ukraine in totality is the crucible of neo-Nazi activity that Putin and some commentators here and on RT would suggest, there do seem to be elements, particularly in the east, that are unsavoury, though Truss made no effort to distinguish these from the broader population.
Tim, I suggest you do a bit of reading up on the subject. The Azov battalion have been trained by the SAS from the UK on a regular basis, and have been raping and killing Russian Nationals in the Donbass region for quite a while now.
baz2001 – …..and your evidence of this is?
Bugger off back to your bunker ssh…and take mr “unsavoury” timmy with you…Starmer loves “unsavoury” nose in the air numptys…
Joseph – Thanks for your rather telling contribution.
‘I stand with the people of Ukraine’ as SteveH says. Not sure if he means the non-Russian speakers, but I’m sure he’d get on like a country on fire.
charming64 – Why would I want to differentiate between them when they don’t. Most of the population are bi-lingual.
She could be our next PM.
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/220222-Liz-Truss-tank.jpg
TW ‘Mr Objective’ – see: John Pilger, ‘War in Europe and Raw Propaganda’ on his website (27/2/22).
Some of you people can’t move beyond a binary. Having read up on Azov, declassified’s reporting, Pilger and other sources (and being mindful not to accord them a higher state of credibility just because they challenge the dominant narrative) it seems to me that there is a strain of ultra-nationalism in the country but this stops well short of regarding Ukraine as a fascist state and in no way justifying the invasion of a sovereign country.
They signed a treaty that they never kept to, on two occasions actually. So they’re lucky it didn’t happen sooner. Watch Professor John Mearsheimer’s lectures on the Ukraine issue.
Interesting concept ‘a sovereign country’. A little like Yugoslavia or Cuba or even Nicaragua or Venezuela? President John F. Kennedy told Premier Khrushchev to remove the nuclear weapons from Cuba or America would. Cuba, a sovereign country?
Nato expansion is being denied by ‘the Western Alliance’ but it would appear to be another self evident truth. Nato is a defence against what? Not in my back yard (part of the Monroe Doctrine 1823) has since been interpreted by USA that it can do anything it likes anywhere in the world but no other country can do similar ‘in America’s back yard’. If you want to know what USA is doing in Ukraine perhaps you should ask Hunter Biden?
May I suggest another point of interest concerns ‘identity’.ie those people just like us. This is a country situated in the north Atlantic but when we watch a ‘Western’ we know who the ‘baddies’are, they either wear a black hat & played by Jack Pallance, or they are the savages aka ‘the Indians’ & deserve ethnic cleansing. In Israel, only Jews have basic human rights as the Palestinians are only a bunch of Arabs & the Jews are just like us. This is not white supremacy, Semites were Arabs, but it begs another question about ‘being Jewish’ & whether its basis is race or religion. This also begs an even more complex question as to whether anti-Semitism is indeed race-hate? As Confucius said as a curse “may you live in interesting times”.
.
baz2001, if you are referring to the Minsk agreements then the OSCE tabulation of ceasefire violations makes it plain that these have been long-abandoned by both sides – https://www.osce.org/ukraine-latest. Going back to Minsk, as Corbyn suggested, seems wishful thinking. That there is not the appetite within the country for regime change (as Putin’s cautious advance anticipated, expecting the country to welcome his forces as liberators rather than aggressors) means that an urgently needed ceasefire would probably timetable independent elections for the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (and more controversially Crimea also)
steve101704 – the quality of a sovereign country is, in the examples you cite, strained, with Belarus’ independence and status of self-determination being another pertinent example.
Tim White – what is ‘the quality of a country & what is being strained?’ Perhaps I should have cited Syria & Lebanon, or maybe Iran & Iraq? I did not even mention Belarus nor even the Balkans, but the concept of what is a ‘sovereign country’ now appears to be open to debate. To extend the debate further may I submit that what is now referred to as ‘the Home Nations’ are nothing more than different regions of the British Isles,& are not countries at all, however when Scotland becomes independent & sovereign we can have a real hard border with the EU.compounded by a united Ireland. We live in interesting times..
Steve10174, it was itself a strained appropriation of Shakespeare but alluded to the way in which nationhood is bisected by obligations to supranational entities – EU, NATO and the like.
This has become quite an exciting thread.
I ask a question. A genuine question. Not a dig at anyone since I don’t know the answer.
I don’t know if this site has been operating for 8 years or not but:
Some are now posting comments about the right of the Ukrainian people to make their own democratic decisions.
A fair position to take. Quite right.
Were you also taking the same position in 2014, when a coup overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine, and saying that that was disgraceful and that the Ukrainian people should have been allowed to exercise their democratic will in the elections which were scheduled for later that year?
A fruitful point goldbach even if I think the examples you cite are apples and pears. A revolution is more usually an internal matter that certainly asks questions about democracy (and as the rather good Mearsheimer video this thread has led me to notes it’s not everyone’s bag) but the question is contested between people in that country, an invasion is something visited upon a country from one or more other nations. Mearsheimer’s stats acknowledge that, in 2015, there were those in Ukraine favouring closer alliance with Russia (predominantly in the east) and a larger proportion, particularly as one moved westward, favouring EU and/or NATO membership. The overthrow in 2014 and the current conflict would seem to represent a failure to address this situation but whereas the former was a circumstance where Ukrainian people attempted to resolve it internally, the latter is patently another country deciding to settle the matter on behalf of the Ukrainians.
“Of course, RT and Sputnik are no more biased and misleading in favour of the Russian establishment than UK stations are for the UK equivalent – and have often been more accurate, and hidden less, on UK affairs than the BBC, ITV, Sky and the rest – and the UK ‘mainstream’ media have been full of both racism and misleading information about the situation in Ukraine. There is no more reason for MPs to refuse to appear on RT than for them to refuse invitations from any UK channel.” This from todays article. RT apart from a few “independent shows” is a propaganda station for Putin full stop. The UK TV media is corrupt but not comparable to RT and it is false to suggest so. Any more nonsense like this and my subscription will end.
bedroc56, I too read that and, had the article allowed comments would have made the same observation. I think Sqwawkbox is not far off in noting that coverage has been full of racist assumptions (I was aghast that Thought for the Day on R4 took this as its point of departure – why our national stations could not have made the obvious point that we are more responsive to this crisis because it is closer to where we, resident in the UK, live – an observation of some substance in the light of Chernobyl’s precarity and the direction of prevailing winds – without then going on from geographical fact to assuming that all readers/listeners/viewers were unquestionably white is at best tone deaf. To then, however, apply this broad brush to charges of misleading information is an understanding of ‘full of’ that stretches credulity. I would like the BBC in particular to be more proactive and swift in publishing visible retractions when they err but, after the examples given on this site, I have noticed a great deal more caveating of images and stats around BBC coverage. Perfect? No. Fallible? Yes. Deliberately misleading? I’m not there yet. But this aside, the claim that RT and the BBC are no more or less culpable of the charge of propaganda is, to my mind, a false equivalence of Trumpian proportions.
I can forgive almost anything however for the wonderful photo that accompanied the piece and look forward to finding the video clip to learn more of Lammy’s fishing exploits.