Ukraine-conflict: US-China war of narratives
Here in my gentrified bubble in northwest Washington DC, I can count at least six houses displaying Ukrainian flags within four blocks each way.
The dogs of war are loose and there is anxiety in the air. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, President Joe Biden has called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and a “butcher”, apparently calling for a regime change and most recently accusing him of “genocide”.
The carnage in Ukraine continues to top cable news channels in a competitive, self-reinforcing cycle of graphic images of corpses lying in the streets of bombed-out and blackened cities, of mass graves, of broken families. This war is by far the most extensively documented of the media of our time across multiple platforms. That, plus the heated rhetoric, has created a binary, manic narrative of good (Ukraine) versus evil (Russia) based on closely followed developments on the battlefield.