If you hate and fear Vladimir Putin as much as I do, you can’t help but be heartened — as I am — every day when I obsessively scroll the headlines for news out of Ukraine. The vast majority of the time, thank God, that news is very good.
The New Voice of Ukraine: Cossack MacGyver – Ukrainian soldier downs Russian cruise missile with just a machine gun – video
Express: Dramatic moment two Ukrainian elite snipers wipe out 22 Russian troops in single night
Ukraine Pravda: Ukrainian defenders kill 960 Russians and destroy 59 armoured combat vehicles and 51 artillery systems in one day
Ukraine Pravda: Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces show destruction of two Russian artillery systems – video
BBC: Ukraine war: Moment missile hits Russia’s Black Sea fleet HQ
Knewz.com: Ukraine Destroys Russia’s Drone-Killing Radio-Jammers - With Drones
Yahoo News: Ukrainian defenders kill 920 Russians and destroy 20 tanks and 19 artillery systems over past day
BBC: Ukraine war: Russia executing own retreating soldiers, US says
Euronews: Officials announce explosion at St Petersburg gas terminal
National Interest: Russia’s T-90 Tank Is Falling Apart in Ukraine
WGN: Ukraine-Russia War update: Russian oil facility targeted by Ukrainian drones
Forbes: Russia Lost So Many Vehicles In Krynky, It Sent Tanks To Fetch Them
Fuck you, Putin. How did your troops like that Krynky mission? Are you enjoying the humiliation? The fatal setbacks? Lost $330 million AWACS planes! The Black Sea fleet sinking like Toncoin! The world’s biggest stockpiler of armored vehicles reduced to “Tanks, but no tanks!” Haha. May the memory of your armed forces be a curse.
Yessiree, it’s abundantly clear, thanks to daily reporting of remarkable battlefield feats by the David in this David-and-Goliath conflict, that the overwhelming Russian advantage in manpower and war materiel is being negated by the tactics and ingenuity of the besieged, heroic Ukranians. For instance, let me give you some quotes from Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief, the “Iron General” Valeriy Zaluzhnyy, tasked with repelling Putin’s Special Military Operation:
I see battlefields that are under 24-hour real time surveillance or near-real time surveillance of all types. I see battle fields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of lethal firepower.
We’ll blast them back into the Stone Ages!
We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.
Oh, my gosh. My mistake. Those aren’t quotes from Zaluzhnyy. They’re from Commanding General William Westmoreland, back when he was running the show for the United States in the Vietnam War.
He always had good news, too, which until about 1968 and the Tet Offensive, the US press corps passed along for the most part unskeptically to the American public. Just like 51 Russian artillery batteries wiped out in a day. Woo-hoo!
Commanders in the field, by the policy of US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, were encouraged to document battlefield success by reporting body counts — and, until the late 1960s, the press corps dutifully obliged. The numbers of enemy dead were so large, and the disparity between those and American losses so lopsided, that you could conclude only that the Communists were not long for the world. But, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1991 about journalism by body count:
Ultimately, it became clear that the casualty comparisons were either wrong or misleading. In 1970, for instance, the Pentagon listed U.S. deaths since 1961 at 41,057 and Viet Cong deaths at 610,308.
So the US military was not only creating an ungodly bloodbath, but inflating the volume of enemy blood. Because, as we remember, by 1970 the war was already effectively lost.
Still, according to scholar Daniel Hallin, prior to the Tet offensive most of the press corps were not just content but predisposed to regurgitate military briefings and press releases as a reflection of reality on the ground. As he wrote, they largely judged that “the forces of good were locked in battle once again with the forces of evil.”
Some saw and pursued truth. But Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam were outliers. For the first five years of the war, virtually all of the media’s criticism — such as it was — was focused on the (corrupt and incompetent) government of South Vietnam. So invested were the press and the public in the U.S. government narrative, we succumbed to wishful thinking and government lies from the very outset.
Not to suggest that today’s press has been bamboozled by Ukrainian or American propaganda. The problem is actually worse.
The individual tales of righteous Ukrainian victories may be legitimate in isolation, but are fed to us by aggregators and algorithms that don’t concern themselves with context — namely, that the Russians will win any war of attrition.
It’s just another manifestation of for-profit distortion, ignoring the larger truth to feed us content that tickles our own wishful thinking. Clickbait, in other words, serving not our understanding of the dire circumstances for Ukraine but only our intermittent schadenfreude and their bottom line. The result is Vietnam 2.0.
Not that Ukraine can’t or won’t eventually prevail; it’s possible. Meanwhile, don’t let the steady stream of headlines about exploding Russian fuel depots fool you. Our Ukrainian friends are not now on a path to triumph. The path, at best, is to years of death and devastation. Which is neither victory nor peace.
Bully Pulpit Needs You
Thanks for your attention. Please consider supporting our work with a new PAID subscription. As a thank you, we’ll send you an author-signed edition of The Big Truth: Dissecting and Debunking the 9 Most Destructive Lies of the Political Right.
Gift subscriptions? Yes! Do that, too. And after you subscribe, please send an email with your postal address to booksmartstudios@gmail.com. Then we’ll have a place to send both the book and the signed bookplate. And do please, please alert your world to our stubborn, irate existence. Facebook. Insta. Twitter. Mastodon. Threads. Office bulletin board. It matters. Thanks again.
Touche. Whether their motives are mostly commercial (aiming for more clicks) or wishful thinking, keeping our and their own spirits up, neither journalists nor scholars should be in the business of putting happy spin on what's happening in the world.
I'm sorry to say that the daily reports from historian Heather Cox Richardson have begun to read like releases from the White House press office.