The war of feelings manipulated by the mainstream
by Davide Gionco
20.03.2022
Who is not moved by the big eyes of a Ukrainian child fleeing the war, in the arms of his mother with tears in his eyes?
For charity! It is sacrosanct to open our hearts to people in difficulty and to help them generously. But why do the media constantly raise awareness in helping people affected by the war in Ukraine and on no occasion for people who since 2014 in the Donbass (Lugansk and Donetsk regions) have been hit by the bombs dropped by the other (pro-western) side of the fence?
Why should the Ukrainian boy have more solidarity rights than the girl in the Donbass?
Why should the Ukrainian child receive more solidarity than the children who still suffer the forgotten war in Syria today?
Why should the Ukrainian child have more right to solidarity than the children of Yemen, under the bombs of Saudi Arabia (to which Italy sells weapons) since 2015 and which the media never talk about?
And why should refugees from Ukraine be more entitled to solidarity than refugees fleeing the war zones of Ethiopia?
And wouldn't the children of Somalia also have the right to a peaceful childhood, instead of being drafted and trained to fight the war from an early age?
What makes the difference in the degree of solidarity aroused is not the objectivity of the situations, for which all children in war should deserve the same attention, the same need for help, for peace, for affection, for serenity. The difference is made by the feelings that the mass media, wisely, know how to arouse in readers or viewers.
The heart is moved by what it sees and perceives, not by what it does not see and does not know.
Who decides the topics to be covered or not to be covered in the media (first climate change, then the pandemic, then the war in Ukraine, tomorrow perhaps the energy blackout) have decided that people should get excited about the children who suffer in Ukraine and not for the children who suffer from other parts of the world or even for those in the Ukrainian regions, but on the other side of the Donbass front.
The goal is not to get people to offer aid to the children of Ukraine (who, of course, should be helped), because if that were the case, they would also have shown us images of other war situations in the world. Instead, the goal is to bring people to emotionally take the side of the "only" victims shown in the images, in this case of Ukraine, its President Zelensky, NATO, the USA and our Italian government who have sided with that part, adopting very heavy economic measures that also affect and providing them with weapons to fight, which we would never have justified, without adequate "sentimental motivations".
The purpose of this communication is not to end the war, to guarantee peace to the children who suffer in Ukraine, but to justify the political decisions of those who govern us, because the "bad" Putin is bombing children in Ukraine, and we must absolutely do something to defend them. Without making us reflect on the fact that, to "defend" them in the way decided by the political power, we will certainly go to bomb the children of Donbass, adding dead children to other dead children.
With the same sentimental logic we are presented with the images of the bombings.
It is certainly terrifying to see a Kiev palace gutted in this way by bombs.
But why don't they show us the gutted buildings of the Donbass?
Why don't they show us pictures of Donbass cemeteries from 2014 to today?
There is talk of at least 13,000 people who died from bombing or from snipers, before Western TV started talking about the "war in Ukraine".
They never showed us these images, because they are emotions that the people of Western countries should not have felt, otherwise they would have found reasons to oppose the political decisions of Western countries to supply weapons to the perpetrators of these killings.
In this case, the non-diffusion of these images has as its objective the indifference of the people towards the populations that suffer all this.
In the same way, they do not tell us about the buildings destroyed in Syria, it is not known by whom, if by ISIS, by Israel, by the Turks or by the Americans who supplied them with weapons to carry out the bombings.
The important thing is that there is no risk of feeling a feeling of solidarity for the Syrian people, because it would risk becoming a dangerous moral support to their president Bashar al-Assad. The watchword is "ignore" the suffering of the Syrians. People don't have to care about the life of Syrians
Nor should we be moved by the houses destroyed in Yemen by the bombing of Saudi Arabia, a faithful ally of the USA in the Middle East chessboard.
They decided so. People must not be informed about wars, they must be emotionally involved only when Western governments need political consensus to justify political decisions that otherwise the conscientious people of Western peoples would never want to justify.
In the same way they introduce us to political leaders.
Every day the "president of the world" Joe Biden tells us the official truth that we must believe. Never a criticism by journalists of his statements, because he speaks "in the name of good", for the "defense of democracy".
If criticisms were expressed, one could doubt the validity of Biden's declarations and of democracy, in the sense of respecting the values of the American Declaration of Independence.
After which they introduce us to the new hero Volodymyr Zelensky, who communicates every day with (high definition) images, presenting himself (taking care of every detail of the image) as a "different" politician: never in a suit and tie, never clean shaven, because in war you can't afford it. Better a short-sleeved shirt and an undone beard. Wise political marketing strategy, similar in all respects to advertising marketing.
And then they introduce us to the "bad" Vladimir Putin, who after 23 years in power would have suddenly "gone mad", becoming an unscrupulous warmonger. His every statement is peppered with negative and discrediting comments from commentators.
By highlighting this we do not mean that Putin is a "good" and a "democrat", but only that the image presented to us of him in the last 23 years has changed a lot, depending on the emotional reaction that the mass media intended to arouse. in viewers to Russia and its leader.
Gone are the days when the US collaborated with Russia and when a completely different image of Vladimir Putin was presented to us.
And the presidents of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk?
Denis Pushilin Leonid Pasečnik
Not received. Non-existent. Nobody talks about it on TV and newspapers, because the self-determination of peoples (see the cases of Kosovo, recognized, and of the Kurds, not recognized) is recognized only when it suits those who hold the power to recognize it.
Here is a memory of when the US supported, with bombs, the independence of Kosovo from Serbia.
Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state, with the then self-proclaimed president of Kosovo Hashim Thaçi (linked to the local mafia and arms trafficking)
The emotional approach to information plays the game of those who hold political power and intend to use it for objectives other than those stated. People are induced not to think critically, but to take the side of those who "feel" that they are on the side of reason, feeling they have to adapt to the point of view of those who offer "the only solution" to help victims with which we feel solidarity with, who is the good who fights against the bad, as in American films.
If, on the other hand, the goal is that people do not take the opposite side (obviously decided by the political power), then the mass media ignore the situation, to arouse indifference.
Most people were on the side of Greta Thunberg, passionate about climate change. Now nobody talks about it on TV anymore. All forgotten! Climate change has ceased to be an emergency. An end to ecological sentiments, because now political power needs support on other choices, such as that of reopening coal-fired power plants, the most polluting that exist.
And how many Italians have sided with the government, with a thousand discriminations against unvaccinated people? They did it after seeing impressive images like these.
Note the military colors, a sign of the situation as well as of war.
After having excited the Italians with the fear of death, politicians had an easy game to pass their decisions as the only possible ones to avoid the repetition of the "tragedy", hence the uncritical support for discriminatory measures against the minority of Italians that he did not intend to get vaccinated, without actually there being scientific reasons and a rational logic to support them. Emotion blinds reason.
But no one has ever been moved by the graphs showing the number of deaths in Italy from smoking and alcohol, which should have long since justified draconian measures against smokers and alcohol users.
We have never been presented with this health situation in emotional terms, so everyone knows that people die from smoking or alcohol, but there is no "emotional" public support for the adoption of political measures to reduce mortality from smoking and alcohol. This is because those who govern, and have control of the media, have decided not to take an interest in the issue. So people must be strictly indifferent.
TV and newspapers have decided not to inform Italians of the thousands of bankruptcies of small businesses. There would be some excitement, between entrepreneurs who commit suicide and families reduced to the streets.
But those who govern us have no intention of solving the problem. Indeed, he probably intends to aggravate it, as has been the case for 20 years now.
For this reason, they do not show us the lines of the poor at the Caritas canteens, not financed by the Italian state, but by the benevolence of many Italians with a sensitive heart. The issue should not be seen as a serious social problem, which is numbers in hand, but as an individual problem that affects our unfortunate relative or neighbor.
And even if, in some situation, they have to show us these images, they will never explain the causes of the impoverishment of Italians or the closure of shops.
In conclusion, we continue to maintain the sensitivity of our heart towards the people who suffer, but we do not allow our feelings to be manipulated by those who intend to use them to create consensus or keep us indifferent to the decisions of those who hold the political power and the power of control the "mainstream" information of the media.
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The article The war of feelings manipulated by the mainstream comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-guerra-dei-sentimenti/ on Sun, 20 Mar 2022 10:18:35 +0000.