The war in Ukraine is, like all wars, bad. And like all wars "truth" is its first victim, only this time the propaganda and lies from all sides have an even bigger and more devastating effect. This short post is about the typical western perspective on this war and its racial connotations.
source: Flickr
It's funny how history sometimes has a way of coming full circle. Ukraine is, looking at a map, on the left side of the Black Sea. On the right side of that sea we find the Caucasus Mountains and the region known as the "Caucasus," mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. We all know now that we're all descendants from humanoid species that originated in Africa, but in the eighteenth century the prevalent view among European scholars was that the human species had its origin in the region of the Caucasus Mountains. Back then it was believed that the Caucasus was the landing point for Noah's Ark from whom the Bible states that humanity is descended. The region also held a country called Circassia from which the term "Circassian Beauties" was derived; the general view in those times was that white-skinned Europeans were the most beautiful people. And the smartest, and the strongest, and the most loved by God...
It's not hard to see how this obsolete view on racial preference developed into the separation of humanity into three major races, being Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. It has to be said that in those times Caucasoid people comprised of not only "white" people, but ranged in complexion from white-skinned to dark brown, with the focus much more on skeletal anatomy with a special place for cranial morphology. Only much later the root term "Caucasian" became synonymous with "white and of European ancestry." The term Caucasian has largely become obsolete of course, as science has shown that there's no biological basis for the separation of three or more different races; "race" as a distinction between different groups of human beings doesn't exist biologically, only as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is also understood in the social sciences. People who still use the term "Caucasian" mainly do so to indicate the superiority of people of European ancestry who have given us the superior Judaeo-Christian culture, ethics and values. There's that Bible again, the same one that was the basis for the mistaken beliefs about the origin of humanity and the superiority of Europeans...
So now, on the other side of the Black Sea, we have a terrible war going on, the reporting on which betrays a strongly lingering adherence to that supposed superiority. I say this because we can see that the war in Ukraine is reported on differently than the many wars that are going on in regions of the world populated by black and brown people. If you live in western Europe, the last time war visited was during the Second World War, and if you live in America or Australia, it's been even longer ago. For us, whites from European ancestry, war is always something that happens elsewhere, and most of the time between or against people that are "not like us." The latter is different now, and it shows in the way we report on the war in Ukraine.
"But this isn't a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan [...] this is a relatively civilized, uhm, relatively European [...] city where you wouldn't expect that or hope that it's going to happen." - CBS News reporting on "Russia closes in on Kyiv"
The above is just one of several examples included in the below linked video, but even without these examples I think we can all affirm that the victims in this war being white, Christian and European has brought this war a lot closer to "home" in a non-geographical way. The overarching problem is one that may not be avoidable, and that is that war in general is always framed from a strictly western perspective, which is the subject of discussion for much of the below linked video as well. And hey, maybe the fact that we've been bombarded for decades with non-white victims of wars, famines and poverty has something to do with this special treatment by the western media of this "white war," I ultimately don't know... Just watch the video, it's another great one by Some More News, and one that's important in my opinion.
War Is Bad - SOME MORE NEWS
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