[Peace-discuss] Patrick Smith: " Propaganda, lies and the New York Times: Everything you really need to know about Ukraine"

[Stuart Levy]

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.

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:

    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.

======================================================================

 From Patrick Smith, in Salon.com, March 12th, 2014 --
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/12/propaganda_lies_and_the_new_york_times_everything_you_really_need_to_know_about_ukraine/


  Propaganda, lies and the New York Times: Everything you really need to
  know about Ukraine


    The media keeps buying the American spin on what's happening in
    Ukraine. Let's cut through the fog

Patrick L. Smith <http://www.salon.com/writer/patrick_l_smith/>

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.

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.

Nice going, Victoria Nuland, you of the famous "F the E.U. tape," 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbOwfeoDX2o> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is it as of now, simplified but not simplistic, story and 
counter-story.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

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.

You cannot make a call such as this without looking closely. So let's.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe they are scared of getting sent to Kansas if the project does not 
come good.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Earlier this week, Leslie Gelb let loose with a vigorous blast 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/09/leslie-h-gelb-cut-the-baloney-on-ukraine.html> 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.

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. Read it. 
<http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/35_countries_the_u_s_has_backed_international_crime_partner/> 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.

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.

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?)

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.

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, here 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine>, 
here 
<http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/01/ukraine-haze-propaganda/> 
and here 
<http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/07/crimea-putin-vs-reality/>, 
providing you know what you are getting.

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.

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.

Simply too shabby. I cannot see how it can hold much longer.

<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/writer/patrick_l_smith/>

Patrick Smith is the author of /"Time No Longer: Americans After the 
American Century" 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300176562//?tag=saloncom08-20> /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.

More Patrick L. Smith. <http://www.salon.com/writer/patrick_l_smith/>

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