As with other wars, questions of provocation, self-defence and divine right or entitlement are central themes of what the Western mainstream media have had to say about the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the attacks on Iran by the US and Israel in June 2025.

In wars such as these, which are prosecuted or sponsored by the West (led by the US), it is customary to depict each side — in comic-book style but with deadly intent — as representing either the forces of good or the forces of evil and to allocate “provocation”, “entitlement”, and the right to “self-defence” accordingly.

The shabby and ludicrous Western view

In one of the more risible features of the tragic burlesque of modern international relations, the Western view on such questions is largely determined by the self-professed “leader” of the so-called “free world”, the US Government. Risible, for three main reasons.

First, because the leadership credentials of the US Government are so patently thin. To the extent that the government of a nation state can be anthropomorphised, the US Government possesses none of the qualities normally associated with someone who you would want to follow. In its behaviour, as opposed to its rhetoric, it is difficult to detect any sign of integrity, trustworthiness, fairness, consistency, compassion, empathy or authenticity.

On the contrary, its operating principle is clearly the (Groucho) Marxian one, namely, “the secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made”.

However, as the good ship capitalism begins to founder, so the mask has slipped and, in the case of her master, Mr Trump, it has been discarded altogether. Much of the bullying, extortion, and skulduggery takes place in full view on prime-time TV.

Second, it is a feature that is risible because the “free world” followers of the US are a mixed bag of settler societies with similar bad habits and leadership credentials, fawning supplicants and dragooned proxies.

And third, risible because the “free world” that they claim to inhabit is so seriously, and increasingly, lacking in the qualities that are meant to define it.

Yet despite all of this, on matters of provocation, self-defence and entitlement, as with many others, what the US says still goes.

Restraint worthy of a Peace Prize?

But what might the other side of the story look like? As an evidence-based antidote to the Western presentation of the wars mentioned above, consider the Peace Prize-worthiness of the following candidates.

The government of Russia for the commendable restraint it has shown over decades of being hemmed in or surrounded by a duplicitous and bellicose nuclear-armed military alliance led by the US that openly declares Russia to be its mortal enemy, and for the restraint it has shown thus far in its war with Ukraine.

The Palestinian people for taking as long as they did to respond in self-defence to the decades of humiliation, terrorism, murderous expansionism and genocide, they have endured since the Nakba at the hands of their nuclear-armed and Western-backed neighbour, Israel.

The government of Iran for the decades of restraint it has shown in the face of unprovoked military attacks, crippling Western sanctions, assassinations and the constant existential threat posed on its doorstep by a nuclear-armed state that, in cahoots with the US Government, openly vows to destroy its nuclear capability and replace its government with a puppet regime.

And then consider the Netanyahu nominee.

Ironically meant or not, in today’s not-so-free Western world, these statements might well be construed as seditious, antisemitic and supportive of a proscribed organisation and grounds for arrest and seizure of property.

Conclusion

About 2500 years ago, the ancient Greek (Athenian) general and historian, Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian Wars, argued that the challenge posed by Athens to Sparta’s hegemony of the Greek world and the attendant certainty of misinterpretation and misrepresentation of each side’s behaviour by the other made war between them inevitable.

The parallels drawn between the Peloponnesian Wars and the confrontation between the US (for now, principally via its proxy Ukraine) and Russia and the competition between the US and China are clear and have been explained in terms of Hegemonic Competition theory, or the Thucydides Trap.

Thucydides also recognised that the declared reasons for going to war rarely bore any resemblance to the real ones. He used the term proschemata to refer to the pretexts for war and prophasis to refer to the real reasons. For Thucydides, there were three legitimate (real) reasons for waging war, namely, reasonable fear, honour and interest; while pretexts usually relied on appeals to nationalism or fearmongering (where empirical grounds for fear were weak or non-existent).

Our continuing willingness to tolerate, rationalise or turn a blind eye to genocide and injustice and to accept meekly the lies we are told by our governments are testament to the effectiveness of the public relations of war and the pretexts or proschemata that they proselytise, that is, the social control exercised by our governments.

But surely we have now reached the stage where, even by its own inglorious standards, the machinations of today’s Western corporate media have sunk to such depths as to strain the credulity of all but the most co-opted, compliant, disempowered and gullible of their publics.

In such circumstances, we are made complicit by our silence.

And futile though our protests may seem, putting an end to the genocide in Palestine and the war in Ukraine and Russia, eliminating the threat of continuing war with Iran, and defusing the growing prospect of war between the US and China — the last three of which could lead to nuclear self-annihilation — require that the declared reasons or pretexts for war (proschemata), the real reasons (prophasis), and the fallacious and misleading portrayals of opposing sides by the Western media be exposed and reiterated over and over again.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.