“The way wars are reported in the western media follows a depressingly predictive pattern: stage one, the crisis; stage two, the demonization of the enemy’s leader; stage 3, the demonization of the enemy as individuals; and stage four, atrocities.”

I have my own take on our contemporary, accelerated timeline. In the days of rule-by-mob, there's no real need to propagandize false atrocities to justify demonizing the other; the automatons are so ready to lash out, so addicted to hatred and conflict, that the atrocities are generated in real time, aimed at the new target of our collective hatred.

1. Russian troops on the border!
2. Evil Putin.
3. Evil Russians.
4. Denying Russians healthcare, education, access to free markets, and destroying businesses, cultural icons, and eventually open homicide.

We're one step away from the end stage here, but there'll be plenty more from the first section of the list along the way.

The maternity hospital bombing story has all the features of the atrocity story which mobilized the American public for the Gulf War of 1990-91. It was claimed that Iraqi soldiers had burst into a modern hospital in Kuwait, gone to the premature babies ward, and then tossed the babies out of the incubators and onto the floor...

Two years later, the truth came out. The Kuwaiti government, through a front called the Citizens for a Free Kuwait, had paid the PR firm Hill & Knowlton $10 million to campaign for American intervention to oust Iraq from Kuwait. Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, and Hill & Knowlton had spent hours coaching her testimony. The invasion of the premature babies ward? It never happened.