From USS Maine to MH-17

Self-destructive Attitude

The tragedy of flight MH17 did megaton damage to Moscow and the eastern Ukraine leadership. The communication tactics adopted, regardless of the degree of involvement or not, dealt with the matter catastrophically and exonerated the extreme right neo-Nazis who caused bloodshed at Maidan square in Kiev, burned people alive in Odessa, and were engaged in an unprecedented massacre in Mariupol.

The U.S. has a firm, unquestionable pre-eminence in using communication in order to handle issues that raise public awareness, facilitating the pursuit of foreign policy objectives and using military force. This ascertainment concerns existent, alleged or fabricated responsibilities of the other side, with the tragedy of flight MH17 belonging, as it seems, to the first category.

When public opinion is hesitant and allies waver, an event is required, which in the American political terminology is called a “game-changer” and, loosely translated, means a catalyst that changes the game.

In 1898, Washington was looking for the opportunity to wage war on Spain, an easy target, in order to show its power on the international political stage. The news reports orchestrated by press baron Hearst on the violation of human rights by the Spanish colonial rule in Cuba were not enough, until an explosion destroyed the U.S. battleship Maine, which was located in Havana Harbor. The Spanish-American War that occurred resulted in Spain’s overwhelming defeat and people not ever knowing what exactly happened. This was a war that in Spanish historiography is called “El Desastre” (The Disaster) and in the United States, it is recorded as the first humanitarian intervention through which the U.S. got the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and some island groups in the Pacific as a reward.

In 1917, President Wilson was looking for an excuse for the U.S. to enter World War I, with public opinion being unfavorable; the problem was solved by a German submarine, which sank the American ocean liner Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland.

In October 1964, the federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson concocted the fictitious attacks by the northern Vietnamese against American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf in order to justify the launching of massive bomb attacks, which until then were limited to Viet Cong forces in southern Vietnam.

The next stop is Sarajevo, where the horrendous, cold-blooded massacre of 8,000 Muslim civilians by the Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in July 1995 allowed for the first aerial warfare intervention in the history of NATO and ended the dispute over who fired mortar shells at an open-air market a year earlier in the capital of Bosnia, Sarajevo.

The tragedy of flight MH17 did megaton damage to Moscow and the eastern Ukraine leadership. The communication tactics adopted, regardless of the degree of involvement or not, dealt with the matter catastrophically and exonerated the extreme right neo-Nazis who caused bloodshed at Maidan square in Kiev, burned people alive in Odessa, and were engaged in an unprecedented massacre in Mariupol.

It was either a criminal act, for which Moscow and separatist groups had joint responsibility, or the inability of the Russian authorities to refute accusations that could not be proved objectively to be true — or both — that provoked a political turnaround in an ir-reversible way, with the findings issued by experts not having relevant value any longer.

Let’s backtrack to the case of the blast on the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898; it is worth being reminded of the dialogue, which occurred through the exchange of telegrams between Hearst – who has gone down in history as the character Citizen Kane from the eponymous play by Orson Welles – and the young reporter from his working for his newspapers sent to Cuba, who could not find evidence incriminating the Spanish side. The press baron re-assured him with the following phrase, which went down in history, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”