Are the events of the Ukraine-Russia conflict really worse than other wars?

[milestogo]

Or is it just that we are finally seeing the horrors of war close up, in real time?

[enneacanthus]

1. Does it matter? We are seeing it. Point? nt

[WarGamer]

5. The point is... without guessing what the OP meant...

Is the MSM treating ALL wars the same re: reporting.

[Throck]

2. Depends if you're a survivor or victim.

[Hoyt]

3. Think pretty much the same as most wars. Believe george war bush's Iraq invasion killed a lot more

innocent people. But, that does not make Putin's invasion any less deplorable.

[WarGamer]

10. yup...

[WarGamer]

4. No

Not worse than Syria... not worse than what happened in Iraq for 20 years...

I hate to say it... but the Euro-centric MSM is using the "they look like us" filter.

We saw the same videos from Iraq... from ISIS...

[Hoyt]

6. +1. Although don't blame MSM. Viewers are the ones using that filter (hate to say it too).

[Celerity]

29. disagree with:

Although don't blame MSM.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

The way some reporters are talking about Ukraine is revealing their implicit bias

https://www.upworthy.com/bias-reporting-ukraine-race


The media’s racial bias is also happening off screen

https://fortune.com/2022/03/10/racial-bias-ukraine-war-reporting-media-diversity-trust-marcus-ryder/

[Hoyt]

31. I think viewers are calling the shots, and they don't care as much about Iraq,

Somalia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. Hence, media ain’t gonna try to set them straight.

Still a deplorable war, as are just about all after WW2.

[Celerity]

32. I just gave you multiple examples (& not just on telly) of media bias regarding the question at hand

I think viewers are calling the shots

Following that logic, Fox, OANN, Newsmax, etc, could be excused, as they are (based off of that line of reasoning) just doing what the viewers want, as the viewers are calling the shots.

[Hoyt]

34. And I said those examples are media playing to their viewers' opinion that

those other wars aren’t similar to European wars.

FOX darn sure plays to their rube viewers, don’t you think?

[Celerity]

36. The bias was there before the audience. As for Fox, they manipulate the rubes, make them worse.

[Hoyt]

38. Wrong. Grew up with racists and would be trumpsters decades before FOX, etc.

[Celerity]

41. No, not wrong, as that is not what I said. Fox manipulates pre-existing bias and makes it worse.

I am ending this as it is becoming circular and also tangential.

My original positings (and subsequent arguments in their defence) all stand as valid and correct IMHO.

I gave more than enough evidence to effectively rebut your claim with my original reply.

Let the readers of this colloquy decide who made the more convincing argument.

[malaise]

47. Trevor nailed

Europe has had wars for centuries - spare me.

[Quixote1818]

7. + 1000 nt

[Sherman A1]

15. Precisely

We are perhaps seeing more of it as social media provides more coverage, but it is no worse than previous conflicts.

[leftstreet]

50. +1

[Boomerproud]

8. All wars are horrible. Humanity will never learn its lesson.

[milestogo]

23. Well seeing it up this close is a pretty good teacher.

The media showed too much of the vietnam war and the country turned against it. There is no way you can look at this conflic and not be horrified.

I think with WWII people did not realize the horrors until much later.

[spooky3]

9. 1 death is too many, but the Bosnian war of the 1990s

Left over 100000 dead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_War

People seem to forget about this when they talk about the worst conflict since WWII.

[WarGamer]

13. absolutely. +1000nt

[relayerbob]

19. Agreed, to a point

That was certainly incredibly terrible, but we don't really know what the toll is up to this point, we only know for certain it is lower than reported by a large margin. And we are far from done.

[malaise]

48. * 1,000

It’s an inconvenient truth

[Lovie777]

11. War .....

Tends to kill majority of the innocent.

[ratchiweenie]

12. Think of Cambodia. And no one would stop Pol Pots killing fields. It took the Vietnamese

to finally step in and put an end to that hideous killing. The "civilized" nations just watched the news reports, rung their hands, and decried the horror.

[brooklynite]

14. We haven't seen a war like this in decades.

This is a land war between two fully equipped armies. This is not Afghanistan. It is not Iraq. Arguably its similar to Yugoslavia, but what do you actually recall about how that was covered?

[relayerbob]

16. Mostly the coverage

Although it is certainly one of the nastier modern wars. The scale of destruction and the level of war crimes in just a few weeks is right on up there, usually takes a while longer to get this bad.

[Hoyt]

35. Iraq and Vietnam had plenty of war crimes. Ukraine is still terrible, even

viewed through non-European eyes.

[BeyondGeography]

17. For the we suck just as bad crowd

Not going to get into body counts and tactics (although child rape and mining civilian corpses never struck me as an American thing), but at least we were informed about the horrors of Iraq and free to protest. We also made war supporting politicians pay at the polls.

Carry on.

[intrepidity]

18. I think there are genuine differences

A major military power is directing a massive unprovoked assault at a civilian population.

Not collateral damage.

Not because "insurgents" are hiding in those populations.

Show me a similar example?

[WarGamer]

27. Hmmm let me think.

You mean like where a superpower kicked off a 20 year war with an aerial bombardment of a cosmopolitan city with 1000 sorties a DAY including attacks by F-117's stealth fighters... B1's and B2's...

200,000 dead civilians and a destabilized gov't that led to the largest terrorist uprising in decades??


Nope I can't think of any examples.

[leftstreet]

51. +1

[BeyondGeography]

52. Hmmmm, question

If you were a civilian of a defeated nation with a choice of two occupation zones, would you take the American army or Russia’s?

[WarGamer]

54. Definitely an American occupation army.

Now your turn.

Would you rather have been a resident of Baghdad or Kiev on the first day of their respective wars?

[Kaleva]

59. Probably Baghdad

Saddam's bloodthirsty regime was about to end. As for Kiev, we see what the Russians did to innocent civilians.

[BeyondGeography]

60. Keep clutching that straw

The only thing stopping Putin from doing worse is his lack of a competent Air Force.

[Crunchy Frog]

56. The object of this war is the actual annihilation of the attacked country.

The destruction of civilian populations is the point.

[Whiskeytide]

20. I think all military organizations claim to ...

… adhere to some code of honor/conduct. Some do a better job of it than others. Also, sometimes people want to believe THEIR military does a better job as well.

But the reality is that if you’re unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can get dead or otherwise abused no matter the war. It’s Hell for someone, somewhere, no matter what.

Edited for a typo.

[Beastly Boy]

21. This war is far worse than any other wars.

This is the first war in which an invading country explicitly threatens the entire world with nuclear holocaust if it is prevented from committing war crimes. ukrainians are the victims, but the rest of us, all of us, are hostages.

[Demsrule86]

22. The Russians are brutal... monsters.

[JanMichael]

24. No. It is media. Ask the Hutu's about that. Not the Tutsi's.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

25. Nope.

[sarisataka]

26. Without looking, Can you give a rough estimate of how many were killed or displaced

In Yemen or the Tegray region of Ethiopia last year? Were any civilians executed by military forces or other crimes committed?

I think you have your answer...

[WarGamer]

28. smdh... I hear ya.

[Iwasthere]

30. Depends on how true and/or widespread this is (copied from from a recent post in here)

link:https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1510636403784364038.html|

The tweeter is President, Kyiv School of Economics; Adviser, Zelensky administration; Minister of economy, Ukraine, 2019-2020; Associate professor, University of Pittsburgh
Tymofiy Mylovanov


Unrolled twitter thread:

The war crimes in Brovary and Chernihiv directions might be more heinous that those in Bucha. We have eyewitness accounts through friends, relatives and students. We need help documenting them Journalists and lawyers who can help please contact @ZoyaMylovanova Examples: 1/
A boy burned alive : eyewitness account. 🇷🇺 found a Molotov in his house, poured over him and set him on fire. 2/
Holodomor in a village in Chernihiv region. 🇷🇺 took away all food. People survived on what they had hidden, pets, and … (I don’t even wanna say it…). A contact from the village 3/
Mass rapes of young females with summary executions afterwards. A contact from a village where it happened. 4/
Families executed in fields who worked the fields / were planting their gardens. Eyewitness who saw the bodies

more at link

[marie999]

33. There are a lot of wars going on and some like in Yemen, both sides are using boy soldiers.

The International Labour Organization states that boy soldiers are being used in 17 countries. Non-White countries don't make the news like European countries do.

[malaise]

40. Close to a million dead iraqis

I don't plan to forgive or forget. Funny how the embedded Western media didn't show folks the truth of that one.
That is all.

[Kaleva]

43. To me, it appears Putin is very much like Saddam and ought to be examined.

Shortly after taking power in Iraq, Saddam launched an attack on Iran believing he'd score an easy victory. After 8 years of fighting and with over a million Iraqi and Iranian dead, the war ended in a stalemate.

About 2 years later, Saddam again miscalculated and invaded Kuwait. In the ensuing Gulf War, Saddam lost approx. 200,000 men killed, wounded or captured and thousands of tanks, military vehicles and artillery pieces.

[malaise]

46. Seems more like Bush and Cheney to me n/t

[Hoyt]

49. +1.

[usonian]

42. ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Thinking of all the countless atrocities and genocides since WW2, why do we only remember a few?

BECAUSE SO MANY WERE INFLICTED ON PEOPLE OF COLOR, NON-WHITES, who in our society DON'T COUNT AND DON'T EVEN MATTER.

All atrocities are detestable, no matter who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Some just don't get the air time and attention of NFL trades and such.

[malaise]

61. Great post

Wish I could rec - one more thing - the US was involved in many of them

[usonian]

62. Thread coming?

Feel free to copy/share. It should be obvious.

[Meowmee]

44. I saw a lot of the Vietnam war coverage

As a child. I don’t remember what the coverage was like of crimes / atrocities. Now many people have cellphones etc. so first hand coverage is easier in some cases if it can be documented at the time. As to whether they are worse I can’t say. They are atrocities and crimes none the less and on the same level at this point in time. Who knows what will happen and how long it will go on for.

I think we are seeing it more blow by blow now more than in the past maybe. This has the potential to become a ww if it is not already. Which could result in use of nuclear weapons and mass deaths and injuries like we have never seen before as well as a total collapse of society.

[Chainfire]

45. No, the really big problem is that this is war up close.

The difference is only in the instant coverage. Everybody has a camera and uncensored access to the world. All of the brutality, torture the senseless killing and raping is what all wars look like. There is nothing new here, just a change of dates and venues and perhaps the scale. It is good that we can be horrified by seeing the events without government cleansing. Everybody needs to know what they are asking for when they suggest war is a solution to a problem.

This is a big part of the cause of all of the broken vets who have come back from war zones throughout history. They have discovered what being "human" looks like when we open Pandora's box. Mothers and fathers should take a close look at what they may be sending their children to. There is nothing glorious on the battlefields or the demolished cities, just death, pain and suffering.

[ForgedCrank]

53. In my humble opinion,

we have probably not seen the worst of the acts in this war.
And no, it's no worse than those of the past. There have been far worse, at least form what we've been able to see so far.
People of all walks die in war, elderly, soldiers, children, everyone. It's difficult to even think about.
And even those who don't die suffer terribly. It may be unpopular, but I even think about the Russian citizen who wants nothing to do with this mess. Just everyday people who will suffer all because of bureaucrats and shitty leaders. It's a horrible situation no matter what angle one views it from.

[denbot]

55. No recs, no wonder..

Send in the trolls..

[Crunchy Frog]

57. Flame me if you like, but I think one of the unusual aspects of this war

is how clear cut it is in terms of good guys and bad guys.

Most other wars in recent history have been civil wars in which both sides were somewhat unsavory or unsympathetic. Same with wars between poor, developing countries. Who were the good guys in the Iran/Iraq war?

Even in the wars where we were the bad guys (Vietnam, Iraq) our opponents were not particularly sympathetic.

This is a war where a large and powerful country with a brutal, autocratic leadership has attacked, unprovoked, a much smaller and weaker, mostly peaceful and mostly democratic country.

The object of the attack is simply to conquer the country and eliminate it as a distinct nation. In order to achieve this objective, the attacker is perpetrating atrocities against the civilian population intended solely to break it and totally subjugate it.

I don't think it's a color or race thing either. If China does the same thing with Taiwan, I believe that our reactions will be very similar, and for similar reasons.

Other wars have as much, or even more, atrocity and suffering, but few of them involve such a clear cut, one sided aggression.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Flame away.

[herding cats]

58. I don't know if I can reply to this and not break into a million pieces.

Iraq ate my soul one bite at a time. Syria was so horrific and broke my heart. Then I saw this today and the flashback laid over what took place in Bucha kneecapped me. Genocide is what we're witnessing, again.

Link to tweet

War is horrific all of them, but when it's a genocide it's even more painful to endure.

[SmallFry]

63. No two wars are created equal.

Even if you are an arms trader.

We can see the horrors of war up close anytime we want. So many brutal campaigns in the last decade. What the masses know is based in which conflicts the MSM covers. Normally that requires a strong connection to the west or the people have to look light in color.