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But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. This week the state-corporate media made my job a little easier. Over the past few days, it has reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests.
The first such event was an Israeli air strike last Saturday on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure.
The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide – not that you would know from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole.
The second event, on Monday, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians.
Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it.
The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself.
So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine?
The headlines tell much of the story.
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I’ve read all of those (yes, even The Silmarillion). They’re the only high fantasy works I’ve read, so I’m not in a position to compare it to others in the genre. I’m not interested in the genre in general, but AFAIK these are unique in terms of the depth and breadth of world building that he sets them in. ~20,000 years of astoundingly detailed history of an area the size of Europe, a sumptuous attention to languages, and a whole cosmology laid out from the beginning of time.
The Silmarillion is for masochists only. I only read it because I was trapped somewhere once with no internet and nothing to do for a long time. A lot of it reads like the Old Testament (I think: hell if I’m ever going to pore through the Bible).
The work is racist and reactionary; divine rights of kings and such. From an ML-perspective it’s hot garbage. But whatever, it’s not like it’ll give you liberal cooties.