Thursday, May 12, 2005

National Post's rusophobic coverage of VE Day

I didn't have time to post on Monday but it is hard to find words to express my deep disappointment and even anger over NP's choice of article on May 9. It's the Victory Day in Russia and fSU so the Post editors felt compelled to run something appropriate for the occasion.
What boy, what an awful choice did they make!!!
First it was this article by George Jones wherein he states as a self-evident truth that Russians are uncapable of building a society of their own. I mean it might be true to some extent but heck, I want some evidence, proof, argument as to why it is so. Instead, he spent the better part of the article by sugarcoating his main thesis in a completely phoney praise of Russsian virtues.
Then, it was another article "Communism's corrupt legacy". In fact, Russia was not even mentioned there, it was all about recent scandals in the Czech republic and other 'central' European countries. But make no mistake, an average reader goes from the first article to the second and without even a whiff of hesitancy he/she would think it's about Russia too!
And finally we come to this 'An eye for an eye' - this is the title of the article that features some excerpts of Max Hastning's book on Soviet atrocities in the occupied Germany and other countries. Hasting implicitly compares, wait for this!, Russian occupation of Germany and the Japanese occupation of China, notewithstanding the fact that the Japanese were the aggressors while the USSR after all had to defeat an enemy that had attacked it first.
I don't want to go into detail to what extent the Soviet war crimes against the conquired Germans paradigm is true or not. But to run such an article on the Victory Day (plus the other two articles, not exactly Russia-friendly) was a fit of Russophobia, let's be blunt about it.

There are enough dumbheads in Russia who are convinced that the West has no other business but to destroy and even enslave Russia. Being on the other side of the fence I always thought they were nuts. I still think they are and it's unfortunate that NP's coverage may in fact fan this prejudice.

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