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“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,” the great Anglo-Irish satirist, novelist and pamphleteer Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.” True then, and truer now, most noticeably in the disorienting fog of the Syrian war.

It is the first Twitter war, the first YouTube war, and a war that carries on burying its innocent Syrian victims in shallow, hastily dug graves, in real time, before our very eyes. It is the first Skype war, the first “post-truth” war and the first all-out war on facts: at least 107 journalists have been killed in the fighting over the past five years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Syria remained the most deadly killer of journalists in 2015. The fifth year in a row.

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Photo by LJAA/ZDS / Lynda Bowyer/WENN

After nearly half a million Syrian deaths and the uprooting of roughly 11 million people, the horror and obscenity reached a kind of crescendo last week when Aleppo, Syria’s last rebel stronghold, finally imploded in a mayhem of atrocities and war crimes. Aleppo fell under the weight of a starvation siege, Russian jet fighters, Hezbollah militiamen, Iranian Quds Force thugs and Bashar Assad’s barrel bombers.