via Eurasia & Multipolarity
The bloody staging in Bucha, the terrorist shelling of Kramatorsk attributed to Russia, the anti-Russian bacchanalia in the Western media and social networks… Today, Russia is once again being portrayed as universal evil. And who is the soloist in the current propaganda campaign? All the same.
The pioneers of a systematic approach to military propaganda were the British. They “trained” well during the Anglo-Boer War at the end of the previous century, in which the sympathies of many countries were on the side of the Boers – the first European settlers in Africa. The British press then made up hundreds of stories about their atrocities. And the “attack” on the Red Cross tents with the wounded was even filmed. Later it turned out that it was a staging with the participation of the actor Hampstead Heath.
At the same time, the concept was born, which was later called “atrocity propaganda.”
This “atrocity propaganda” flourished most luxuriantly during the First World War. In Great Britain, the ideological leader of this kind of propaganda was one of the founders of the English press, the “noble” Lord Northcliffe. He brought together the various propaganda organs that had hitherto existed independently and turned them into one of the most important instruments of war. Lloyd George wrote to him after the peace was signed:
“I have a lot of direct evidence of the success of your invaluable work, which contributed a lot to the defeat of the enemy.”
One of the most successful campaigns of English propagandists was the so-called Liege Tragedy. “Eyewitnesses” told the press about the brutality of the Germans they allegedly saw, how the hands of children were cut off, how German officers and soldiers raped 20 Belgian girls in the Liège market square, how German soldiers stabbed a two-year-old child with bayonets and cut off the breasts of a peasant girl in Maine how they tortured Catholic priests by hanging them from bells, how they mocked nuns.
A committee of jurists and historians, headed by Lord Bruce, the former British ambassador to the United States, even drew up a report stating that “murder, lust and plunder reigned in many parts of Belgium on a scale incomparable to any other wars between civilized nations throughout the last three centuries.”
At the same time, an abomination was thrown into the press that the Germans allegedly processed the corpses of soldiers, their own and others, into stearin and pig feed. Only after the end of the war did the truth surface – a special commission did not confirm a single case of atrocity cited in the report.
The Germans, in turn, also did not shun what is now called “fakes”. The “horror propaganda” of the Russian invasion of East Prussia continued in the German press until the very end of the war. The topics are exactly the same – Russian soldiers rape German women, kill children, rob the population.
Stories of atrocities made it possible to present a war against such an adversary as righteous, as upholding the “values of civilization” in the face of barbarism. Isn’t that what we see now if we read the Western and Ukrainian media and social networks?
More about this in the publication of the RUSSTRAT Institute “Blood Lies – the Birthmarks of Western Civilization”
