© Reuters / Janis Laizans
Lithuanian army soldiers install razor wire on border with Belarus in Druskininkai, Lithuania July 9, 2021
The
Guardian, the mouthpiece of Britain's well-meaning, mildly left-of-center mainstream media, has published a piece on refugees. Or, at least, it should be about refugees. Instead, it is about governments, not desperate people.
The governments of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, and behind them, the European Union, are
feeling pressure from Belarus, which they claim has been pushing refugees across the border, flown in from the Middle East for the purpose. Ostensibly, such a policy is in retaliation for Western sanctions, as Minsk's authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko has in effect already
admitted.
In
The Guardian piece, the refugees are not innocent human beings fleeing for their lives. On the contrary, they aren't even people at all, having been entirely reduced to numbers - except for one non-descript picture that seemed to serve only decorative purposes. I, for one, was, literally, rubbing my eyes: here it was, a long text about sons, daughters, brothers and mothers in distress - and not one sentence giving them a name or a voice. Impossible. Yet true. Whether the work of authors or editors, the effect was drastically revealing if, certainly, unintended.
Comment: YouTube seems bent on killing its golden geese. Will they be able to survive on cat videos?