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Thanks to Deb Johnson for pointing out this good article, below - an
antidote to what you've been reading in the New York Times, hearing
on NPR and the BBC, etc.<br>
<br>
I'll also note activist David Swanson's recent comment, considering
how the peace movement should respond to the prospect of war in the
Ukraine:<br>
<blockquote>The most frustrating thing about this crisis, it seems
to me, is the great moral demand to completely ignore either the
U.S. or Russia, but never both. I taped a show called Crosstalk
[...] I denounced the U.S. at great length, but the minute I said
Russia should stop threatening military action the host shouted me
down. [... and re-taped the show without him as a guest ...]
Somewhere somehow someone must find a way to walk and chew gum on
this: we must acknowledge that it is possible for more than one
actor to be at fault.<br>
</blockquote>
======================================================================<br>
<br>
From Patrick Smith, in Salon.com, March 12th, 2014 --<br>
<a
href="http://www.salon.com/2014/03/12/propaganda_lies_and_the_new_york_times_everything_you_really_need_to_know_about_ukraine/">http://www.salon.com/2014/03/12/propaganda_lies_and_the_new_york_times_everything_you_really_need_to_know_about_ukraine/</a><br>
<h1> Propaganda, lies and the New York Times: Everything you really
need to know about Ukraine </h1>
<h2> The media keeps buying the American spin on what's happening in
Ukraine. Let's cut through the fog </h2>
<span class="byline"><a
href="http://www.salon.com/writer/patrick_l_smith/" rel="author"
class="gaTrackLinkEvent"
data-ga-track-json="["author", "click",
"Patrick L. Smith"]">Patrick L. Smith</a></span>
<div class="featuredMedia"><br>
</div>
<div class="articleContent">
<p>You need a machete these days to whack through the thicket of
misinformation, disinformation, spin, propaganda and
straight-out lying that daily envelopes the Ukraine crisis like
kudzu on an Alabama telephone pole. But an outline of an outcome
is now faintly discernible.</p>
<p>Here is my early call: We witness an American intervention in
the process of failing, and the adventure’s only yields will be
much pointless suffering among Ukrainians and life for years to
come in the smothering embrace of a justifiably suspicious
Russian bear.</p>
<p>Nice going, Victoria Nuland, you of the famous <a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbOwfeoDX2o">“F the E.U.
tape,”</a> and your sidekick, Geoffrey Pyatt, ambassador in
Kiev. Nice going, Secretary of State Kerry. For this caper,
Nuland and Pyatt should be reassigned to post offices in the
bleak reaches of Kansas, Khrushchev-style. Kerry is too big to
fail, I suppose, but at least we now know more about what
caliber of subterfuge lies behind all those plane trips, one
mess following another in his jet wash.</p>
<p>On the ground, Vladimir Putin continues to extend the Russian
presence in Crimea, and we await signs as to whether he will go
further into Ukraine. This is very regrettable. Viewed as
cause-and-effect, however, it is first a measure of how
miscalculated the American intervention plot was from the first.</p>
<p>Pretending innocent horror now is a waste of time. The Ukraine
tragedy is real estate with many names on the deed. This must
not get lost in the sauce.</p>
<p>On the diplomatic side, the big charge now is intransigence.
Washington calls Moscow intransigent because Vladimir Putin and
his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, decline to talk to the
self-appointed government in Kiev, which Putin refuses to
recognize. Moscow calls Washington intransigent because Kerry
declines to meet Lavrov unless the latter agrees first to meet
the Kiev provisionals.</p>
<p>The American line: The provisionals are legitimate, they are
democrats worthy of support, and there was no coup when they
hounded President Viktor Yanukovych from office Feb. 21. The
protesters behind them with clubs, pistols and bottle bombs are
democrats, too.</p>
<p>The Russian line: The provisionals are illegitimate, they took
power in a coup driven in considerable part by nationalist
fanatics with a fascist streak evident in their ranks, they are
now dependent on same, and they merit neither support nor
recognition.</p>
<p>This is it as of now, simplified but not simplistic, story and
counter-story.</p>
<br>
<hr size="2">
<div style="opacity: 1;" class="toggle-group target hideOnInit"
data-toggle-group="story-13623781">
<p>It is difficult but not impossible to interpret these
narratives. The first step, admittedly hard for many
Americans, is to drop all Cold War baggage and see beyond the
West’s century-and-a-half habit of demonizing Russia as the
emblematic power of the inherently autocratic East. “Oriental
despotism” was a passing fad conjured by a scholar-stooge
named Karl Wittfogel in the late 1950s. It died a deserved
death — around the time of hula hoops, I think — but the
prejudice lingers, remarkably, in many Western minds.</p>
<p>Here comes the bitter bit. The Russian take in the Ukraine
crisis is more truthful than the artful dodge Washington
attempts. The above forecast of the outcome rests on the
thought that the dodge is simply too flimsy to last.</p>
<p>You cannot make a call such as this without looking closely.
So let’s.</p>
<p>Putin and Lavrov are open to negotiations with the U.S. and
the European Union. Putin commits to supporting Ukrainian
elections set for May and backs the agreement struck between
Yanukovych and his opponents just before the latter abandoned
it and deposed him, even as Putin did not like it at the time.
No, Moscow does not recognize the provisionals in Kiev, with
sound reasons, but it does not require that Washington drop
its support before getting to the mahogany table.</p>
<p>In the climate our media have generated, I almost feel the
need to apologize for this but will refuse: I cannot locate
the intransigence in this.</p>
<p>Now to Kerry and President Obama. Last week Lavrov invited
Kerry to Sochi for face time with Putin, and Kerry considered
it. Then he abruptly declined on the argument that the
Russians must first commit to talks with the new crowd in
Kiev. Here is the problem: Kerry’s demand does not hold up as
a precondition; it is logically a point of negotiation. Set it
as a precondition and you have, so far as I can make out,
intransigence.</p>
<p>What is the preoccupation with a Moscow-Kiev gathering,
anyway? This gets interesting, and you have to recall the
dramatis personae in the Nuland tape of Feb. 7.</p>
<p>Insisting on direct talks between Russia and the provisional
government in Kiev is to insist the former recognize the
latter, a trap Putin cannot possibly be stupid enough to fall
into. Recognition, in turn, would complete the Nuland-Pyatt
project to gift Ukrainians with a post–Yanukovych puppet
government. This is Kerry’s unstated intent.</p>
<p>It is remarkable what a good road map the Nuland tape has
proven. She mentioned three names in her exchange with Pyatt:
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok and Vitali Klitschko. The
first, Nuland’s favorite, is now prime minister; Tyahnybok was
running ahead of Yanukovych in polls at the time Nuland was
taped and remains the vigorously anti-Russian head of Svoboda,
a power-balancing party of rightists; Klitschko is not in the
government but plans to run for president in the May
elections.</p>
<p>This is precisely the constellation Nuland described as her
work in progress: Yatsenyuk in, the others more useful outside
for now. As a measure of Washington’s unseemly haste to lend
legitimacy, Obama meets Yatsenyuk in Washington as I write —
an unelected leader of who knows whom sitting in the White
House.</p>
<p>Just for good measure, Nuland also mentioned one Robert
Serry, a U.N. official Washington arm-twisted Ban Ki-moon into
sending to Kiev to give a veneer of multi-sided consensus. And
there was Serry in the news last week — when Crimeans chased
him across their border at gunpoint. They must be reading the
papers carefully, those Crimeans.</p>
<p>At writing, the Obama scrum is debating whether to impose
swift, cutting sanctions on the Russians (the political
people) or ease off for fear of self-inflicted damage (the
trade and business people). Leading the charge for tough stuff
are none other than Nuland and Pyatt.</p>
<p>Maybe they are scared of getting sent to Kansas if the
project does not come good.</p>
<p>The more I scrutinize it, the more the American case on
Ukraine is held together with spit and baling wire. Were I
Obama or Kerry, I would be looking for an out by now, cutting
losses on a commitment to intervention that was sheer hubris
from the first.</p>
<p>Significantly in this connection, the contorted logic of just
who is running things in Kiev is soon to fail, in my view.
Washington is all out in denying the character of the protest
movement and the provisionals, casting Putin as a paranoid in
his characterizations. It is wishful thinking. Incessantly
repeated untruths never transform into truths.</p>
<p>The decisive influence of ultra-right extremists, some openly
committed to an ideology of violence, some whose political
ancestors sided with the Nazis to oppose the Soviets, is a
matter of record. Svoboda and Right Sector, the two most
organized of these groups, now propose to rise into national
politics. Right Sector’s leader, Dmytro Yarosh, intends to run
for president. The New York Times just described him as “an
expert with firebombs” during the street protest period.</p>
<p>These people are thugs by any other name. One cannot see how
this can be in question — or why the Times suggests that
Russia’s descriptions of them as such amount to “a fun house
mirror.”</p>
<p>And it is no good pretending their influence does not
continue. They remain in the street and maintain the
barricades, and they are happy to tell you (as one told a
network correspondent last week) that they could take down the
new government, too, if they so chose. You can stop wondering
why the provisionals show zero interest in conducting promised
investigations into the origins of the violence that toppled
Yanukovych. Washington seems to have lost track of that idea,
too.</p>
<p>On the other side of the piles of tires, ultra-rightists hold
three portfolios in the 18–member provisional cabinet. Yarosh
is deputy director of the security council. (I suppose he
would be assigned to investigate the violence were anyone to
get the job.) It is near to preposterous that Kerry would
insist that Moscow officials meet with this man or others like
him.</p>
<p>I read Ukraine as a case of what happens when so much of
policy, in all kinds of spheres, is conducted in secret.
Ordinary citizens cannot see events and are left to judge them
blind. And the media are not going to help you. However, there
have been notable exceptions to the media’s cooperation in
keeping things from us instead of informing.</p>
<p>Earlier this week, Leslie Gelb let loose with a <a
href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/09/leslie-h-gelb-cut-the-baloney-on-ukraine.html">vigorous
blast</a> in the Daily Beast, calling on the Americans (and
others) to “stop their lies and self-destructive posturing or
pay costs they’re loath to admit.” Gelb is a longtime presence
in foreign policy cliques — former Times columnist, former
State Department official, now president emeritus at the
Council on Foreign Relations. The critique reveals a
significant breach in the orthodoxy.</p>
<p>Not to root for the home team, but Nicholas Davies just
published in Salon an inventory of 35 cases wherein Washington
has split the sheets with fascists in the interest of
intervention. <a
href="http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/35_countries_the_u_s_has_backed_international_crime_partner/">Read
it.</a> Splendidly timed, it demolishes all argument that
what is in front of our eyes is somehow not. History so often
does the job, I find.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, things go from bad to execrable. Here I have to
single out Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian, who froths at the
mouth in a three-part blog series published by the New York
Review of Books. This guy should be brought up on charges
under toxic waste laws.</p>
<p>You get lies: Yanukovych refused to sign the February
compromise with his opposition. (It was signed in his office
so far as I understand.) You get bent logic: The new cabinet
includes three Jews, proving (somehow) it is legitimate. The
ultra-right has only three cabinet posts. (Only? That is 16
percent of it. Why any?)</p>
<p>And you get radical miscalculations. Snyder compares Putin
with Hitler — unwise given the composition of the government
and the barricades people he wants to say are fine. In trying
to persuade us that the extremist bit is Moscow’s propaganda,
he produces lengths of propaganda, some of it — no other word
— extremist.</p>
<p>I carry no hatchet for Snyder, though the Yale professorship
causes me to wonder. But in bravely defending every aspect of
the Washington orthodoxy, Snyder gives a faithful map of all
its fault lines. So it is useful reading, <a
href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine">here</a>,
<a
href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/">here</a>
and <a
href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/07/crimea-putin-vs-reality/">here</a>,
providing you know what you are getting.</p>
<p>Next Sunday Crimeans will vote in a referendum as to whether
they wish to break with the rest of Ukraine and join the
Russian Federation. The semi-autonomous region’s parliament
has already voted to do so, and good enough that they put the
thought to a popular vote.</p>
<p>But no. Self-determination was the guiding principle when
demonstrators and pols with records as election losers pushed
Yanukovych out and got done via a coup (I insist on the word)
what they could not manage in polling booths. But it cannot
apply in Crimea’s case. The Crimeans are illegitimate and have
no right to such a vote.</p>
<p>Simply too shabby. I cannot see how it can hold much longer.</p>
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<div class="writerMeta"> <a title="Patrick L. Smith"
href="http://www.salon.com/writer/patrick_l_smith/"> </a>
<p> Patrick Smith is the author of <em><a
href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300176562//?tag=saloncom08-20">“Time
No Longer: Americans After the American Century”</a> </em>was
the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and
then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote
“Letter from Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four
previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York
Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other
publications. </p>
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