The difference between war crimes and human shields -how the media and politics see the same thing through different glasses

Weird things you can read in the news.

Siege of Mosul (incredible bloodshed, street fighting and massive civilian causalities) is something that we should look at as the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. (I think ISIS is supposed to be the evil here, but given the fact that the US has been supporting these very same guys in the past makes this distinction a bit murky.)

Anyhow. Mosul is great.

Aleppo, however... at Aleppo we see the evil Ruskies and Assad massacring civilians and attacking helpless rebels who are definitely moderate, and would not chop heads off even if they could. Also: the fact that NATO is putting troops right on Russia's borders is something that will ensure peace. Definitely. How else to make sure you have peace other than provoking a nuclear power? By talking to them? Don't make me laugh. (And let's not forget who those rebels really are.)


So. There is an interesting duality how the media (and politicans) deal with bombs that kill civilians depending on who drop said bombs. We can safely conclude that victims of Western airstrikes are collateral damage only. Also, victims of weapons sold by Western powers to barbaric kingdoms and used on civilians are fine. They don't kill civilians. We're the good guys. (Things can get a bit weird when your allies murder your allies, but what the heck. Let this one slide, I say.)
But victims of Russian bombs, however, are victims of a war crime. And the Ruskies are barbarians. Let's just forget the siege of Fallujah, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians of US forces (not to mention the use of white phosphorus against human targets, which is, you know, a war crime).


It's kind of weird when the two sides do the same thing, but they are not really the same. US (or Israel) hits a hospital: oh well, mistakes are being made, sorry. And the terrorists were hiding there deliberately, anyhow, so it's not a mistake. They were also using human shield, forcing us to kill all those people, while at the same time we hit the hospital by mistake.

Ruskies hit a hospital: WAR CRIMINALS. OMG, THEY ARE TOTALLY EVIL. Poor insurgents who are forced to hide in a city against the superior force! Let's send them more weapons!


Seriously. Do a google search. I can imagine all these people's spirit discussing how one side were murdered by an evil regime, and how the other were just collateral damage. I'm sure the victims of Western bombs take a great solace in the knowledge.


It's astonishing. It's so bad, even the Independent noticed it -after several decades too late.

When are news news?

Weird stuff. Any time something happens in Hungary that can be used to put the country into negative light, the press is all over it. Yet it's absolutely not newsworthy to report about the continuation of mistreatment of Hungarian minorities abroad, and it never has been. You might argue that in Slovakia the situation is much better, but then again an American friend of mine who works there as a businessman asked me a couple of months ago why there is so much hatred against Hungarians in Slovakia, so there's that. It does not point to an improving situation.

Yesterday there was a great demonstration for the autonomy of Transylvania (well, Szekelyfold, which is part of it) within Romania. The ill treatment of Hungarian minorities are pretty well known and still ongoing in neighbouring countries: Slovakia, the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia all have their own ongoing histories of both state level discrimination.

I've only found one non-Hungarian report of this demonstration. It's funny how the fate of a minority in EU countries does not worry anyone, yet everyone is condemning an entire country when it is unable to deal with the influx of 400k people. (Weirdly when others do the same things -tightening borders, building fences, talking about defending European values-, nobody bats an eye.) I would be very curious what the reason is behind the anti-Hungarian attitudes of the Western press; after all, when the Keleti Railway station was full of migrants, the whole world was up in arms against the brutality and indifference of the Hungarian nation in general. After all, what civilized nation would allow such conditions within its own capital, asked these newspapers. Well, yesterday the French police started clearing out similar camps within Paris.

Fair enough. There's one issue here, though. I haven't even read about the existence of these camps beforehand.

I find it very curious. Apparently it's fine when the very same process is happening in France; after all, they cannot possibly as barbarous and xenophobic as the Hungarians, can they? And make no mistake, it is the very same process: a mass of people refuses to register in the country they are in, and instead opt to live under horrible conditions in makeshift camps in the hopes they could go to a more attractive country instead. You might be able to forcibly move them into closed migrant camps until they are properly registered, but that would be akin of the Holocaust. So that's out. There's not much more a state can do. It is well understood with the French or anyone else- but it's apparently not an issue when you condemn the Hungarians.


There's a clear double standard at work here- it's fine when us, enlightened Westerners do something (even when its horrendous), but god forbid something happened we don't approve somewhere else. I would be curious to know the reason.

So Sebastian Kurz told Profil that only the best educated migrants should be allowed in Austria.

(Could not find the original German article, and strangely no English reports are available on this interesting take on helping war refugees. If it helps, here's a Hungarian report of the interview.)

Let's ignore the fact that had Szijjarto said something like this on behalf of Hungary, the whole Western media would be screaming about racism and the rest.

Let's just think about the implication of this statement a bit, shall we?

Option #1: we are talking about war refugees. The Austrian minister essentially says that we only should help the well educated, rich refugees, and leave the rest to their fate.
This, if you ask me, is an insanely un-European attitude; I'd hazard to say it would justify a little international uproar. After all, this is a very cold-hearted, and frankly evil stance. We can safely say it reminds us to the darkest moments of European history.

Option #2: we are talking about economic migrants. In this case it's a fair stance, however it ignores a lot of things that should have been discussed before even one economic migrant was let over the border.
These things are:
1. why are we allowing in millions of economic migrants in the first place?
2. why did the mass of people start walking towards Europe last year?
3. why are we trying to impose hypocrisy costs on countries who refuse to allow economic migrants into their countries? You have no right trying to shame and coerce countries to accept economic migrants, after all.
4. Why nobody's talking about the costs and benefits of taking millions of economic migrants?

These question, obviously, will not be asked either by the media or the politicians. They seem to be quite content on using this sliding scale of "war refugees" and "migrants" whenever it fits their narrative, trusting that the average reader is an idiot who cannot see how he or she is manipulated. And the worst thing is that it seems to be working. Nobody stops to think about these issues; they read a short article, they take up the war cry, then move on. A couple of days later they repeat the same process with another article which is diagonally opposing to their previous opinion. It works with everything; even when these two opposing things happen at the same time: take the war crime that is the siege of Aleppo, and the heroic liberation that is the siege of Mosul.

US, Russia, war crimes and the infantile double standards that no one seems to notice

This is a real interesting phenomenon. The US and its Western allies are free to invade, bomb, assassinate, torture, fund and support "moderate rebels" (who turn out to be founding members of Al Quaida, ISIS, etc.), use civilians as human shields, target hospitals, target funerals and weddings, support bloodthirsty dictators and regimes, and starve an entire country to death (you know what the fuck is going on in Yemen? Well, a Leningrad Siege on a country scale, that's what), yet no one seems to care.

Russia, on the other hand cannot do anything without being condemned as worse than Nazi Germany. Literally. Even politicians who suggest that what the Russians are doing is not much different from what any other "great" power is doing get abused quite a lot. If you read the newspapers (which are essentially propaganda tools; gone are the days of journalism), you'll read that it's all Russia's fault. The new world war is beginning.

And yet the elephant is quite large in the room: the US and the UK has been responsible for countless bombings, regime changes, invasions, wars, and so on and so forth. Russia in comparison is lagging behind in this race; even  the most often brought up case -up to the Ukrainian land-grabt that is-, the war in Georgia seems to be pretty much supporting the Russian narrative. (It was more than hilarious how fast Western voices stopped criticising the war in Chechnya after 9/11...) And yet- when the US and its allies cause "collateral damage" by hitting civilians in a large scale (or just small scale by drones), it's fine. When they kidnap people to torture them, it's fine. When they ignite regional wars by supporting "moderate" rebels, it's fine. The very same people who are committing these acts, or keeping silent about them are up in arms when the Russians dare to support their own little puppet, and stabilize his country. Right now they are the only force in Syria that tries to quell the civil war, while the US and its allies is happily founding ISIS and other moderates. (And by moderates I mean people who like to behead others, and use kids to execute their POWs. You know; the nice kind the US has always liked to support.)

And everyone just ignores this; they behave if someone farted in the room, and pretend that they did not notice it. Are they aware that the very same policies are responsible for the migrant crisis and the increased terrorist activity in Europe? Nobody cares even when the chickens are coming home to roost. They just ignore it and keep spewing even more nonsense; like blaming Putin for the very same problems. Incredible. It's very rare when spokepersons are forced to confront this double standard, and the results are incredibly telling. How the fuck can anyone take these politicians, journalists seriously if their basic moral core is compromised so much they can only function as a bunch of partisan puppets for "their team"?

What does 100% diversity look like?

Apparently, this.

And, apparently, this is something great. I mean we have achieved our greatest goal! No negative discrimination! ONLY white women are making the decisions now! Yay for diversity...

When is a wall not a wall?

If you have not lived under a rock for the last year or so, you are very aware of Hungary's wall. In fact this is something so deplorable, the country should be ejected from the EU. (Let's ignore all the other walls coming up before Hungary's.)

And now, Austria, a country that likened the country to Nazis (literally), is building its own wall -the second one. The first one was between Austria and Slovenia (two Schengen countries); this one is going to be between Austria and Hungary.

The contrast between the two walls is incredible. (Well, between any wall and Hungary's.) If you look at what politicians say about these walls (next to nothing), and what journalists say about these walls (poor, overran countries trying to cope) and what they say about Hungary's (OH MY GOD, THEY ARE WORSE THAN THE NAZIS AND THE COMMUNISTS, THOSE BARBARIANS, AAAAAAAGH), you come to a conclusion: there is something rotten in Denmark.

How the narrative changed about Muslims on the Left in Hungary

Let's do some reading, shall we? Literature-time!

“Europe will soon go under because of its previous liberalism which has proven childish and suicidal. Europe produced Hitler, and after Hitler there stands a continent with no arguments: the doors are wide open for Islam; no longer does anyone dare talk about race and religion, while at the same time Islam only knows the language of hatred against all foreign races and religions,”

“I should say a few words about politics too… Then I would talk about how Muslims are flooding, occupying, in no uncertain terms, destroying Europe; about how Europe relates to this, about the suicidal liberalism and the stupid democracy… It always ends the same way: civilization reaches a stage of maturation where it is not only unable to defend itself, but where it in a seemingly incomprehensible manner worships its own enemy.”

So who wrote these lines? Farage? Le Penn? Some Swedish right winger?

Well the answer is: Imre Kertesz, the Nobel price winning Holocaust survivor (The Last Refuge).

It's kind of shocking, to be honest. Put "Jew" instead of Islam, and you get a Neo Nazi Manifesto.

Let's look for some more. When Israel did a little of the usual picnic and target shooting in the Gaza strip a couple of years ago, a prominent Hungarian thinker (as Leftist as they come), TGM, wrote a condemning article about it in the Hungarian (and leftist) version of The Economist, the HVG.

For this he got a tremendous amount of flak from his fellow left-wing writers (and even more horrible ones on the comment page). He got called an Anti-Semite, he was told to go and live with his terrorist buddies, and so on and so forth. The commenters were pretty brutal on Islam and Arabs, too - they were not shy calling the religion a fascist one, and its followers (all 1.5 billion of them, apparently) terrorist sympathisers. The answers too, which were published in both the HVG and other outlets were full of anti-Muslim sentiments: Israel stands as the last bastion against the Muslim menace, the Muslim culture is the culture of intolerance, terrorism, and so on and so forth. Reading this from the USA at the time I was quite shocked that this can be published in Hungary. (This is a very much living trend in Hungary when it comes to Israel. Israel can do no wrong, the Palestinians are always guilty -well, there are no Palestinians, as we know-, and any criticism of Israel amounts to Antisemitism. I was quite shocked when I started to read books about the Nakba in the library of the American university I went to. Things that you can write about in the New York Times or The Economist would land you in hot water in Hungary. I don't even dare to think what they would say if you translated The Holocaust Industry into Hungarian, either...)

Anyhow.

Fast forward to 2015. The Orban government does a quite disgusting, and idiotic poster campaign against the migrants who are flooding the country from the Balkans. Suddenly, the very same writers -Tota W Arpad, for example- forgot all their reservations against Muslims. The whole of the political and intellectual Left broke out in condemnation of the intolerance of the Government, and defended the poor Muslims against any unjust and xenophobic accusations. Surely if Islam really is that scary as you have described it back then, you should be giving a standing ovation to Orban, The Protector of Christian Values?

It's strange, really. Only two years before they said the Muslims had an intolerant, xenophobic culture, a culture that has the very idea of terrorism embedded in it. Now these intellectuals were the white knights of human rights and the protectors of the poor Muslim migrants, meanwhile condemning the Hungarian population for their stupidity, provincialism and Islamophobia. The very Islamophobia they had no problem with when it was about Israel's action in the Gaza Strip. The very Islamophobia they themselves expressed. This is really astonishing. Apparently people have even worse memories than I suspected; we trail behind goldfish when it comes to retaining information.