I don’t normally read Salon Magazine, which seems like an attempt to be somewhat literate yet assiduously middlebrow at the same time. But their articles do pop up in the Microsoft Windows Start feed, the odd mix of news, ads, weather, and clickbait that shows up in the lower right corner of the Windows screen.
Today’s feature by one James M Scott is called “When we criticize Russia's war crimes in Ukraine, we should remember the bombing of Tokyo”. It talks about Gen. LeMay’s decision to bomb the hell out of Tokyo’s residential area in 1945, before the nukes. While that was tragic and historians can debate its merits or sinfulness, it is hardly relevant to today’s war. It seems like major-league whataboutism in favor of the tankie position.
But wait, there’s more! The bottom of that article links to more of Salon’s tankie coverage:
Read more
on the true cost of war
So we have one article blaming Biden for the war, one that talks about how nations who depend on Ukranian food exports want the war to stop, and one that says dissent is suppressed. Now quite honestly that does look like first-class projection of Putin, who is responsible for the war, responsible for the food blockade, and responsible for ruthless censorship in Russia. But Salon, which calls itself “progressive”, seems to take the tankie position that it’s all Biden’s and America’s fault. As if Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or something.
Behind their ad-blocker-detector that blocks reading even without an ad blocker (but with Facebook Container activated), they do seem to be awfully sympathetic to the Trumpist position. Do others see the same?