WORLD SOCIALIST WEBSITE
By Joseph Kishore and David North
04/04/2014
The historical background, the economic interests, the political context and the geo-strategic calculations that underlie Russia’s actions are ignored. No facts are allowed to get in the way of the programmed message. No lie is too absurd or ridiculous. The purpose of the propaganda campaign is not to convince public opinion, but to intimidate it.
Monday’s lead editorial (“Russia’s Aggression”) in the New York Times does not contain a trace of analysis. It consists entirely of denunciations, saber-rattling and limitless hypocrisy.
With breathtaking cynicism, the Times demands that Obama tell Putin that Russia “has stepped far outside the bounds of civilized behavior, and that this carries a steep price in international standing and in economic relations.”
Who is outside the bounds of “civilized behavior?” The United States has intervened in country after country—from Panama, Grenada and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Its military operations over the past quarter-century have resulted in the deaths of at least a million people.
Cohen’s Times column consists of a string of insults and epithets. Ukraine’s deposed leader Yanukovych is described as a “bungling, sybaritic, trigger-happy president,” and Putin as being “obsessed” with Russia’s “imperium.”
Putin’s actions are portrayed as incomprehensible. Why should he feel threatened by “NATO’s expansion into the Baltic states;” “the European Union’s embrace of the likes of Poland and Romania;” “the humbling by NATO of Serbia;” or “the West’s perceived manipulation of a United Nations mandate to have its way in Libya?” Clearly, Putin is mad!
Cohen then refers without explanation to the “corpse-filled ravine of Babi Yar.” Readers unfamiliar with history might assume that Cohen is referring to a Stalinist atrocity. He does not inform his readers that the Babi Yar ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev was the site of the horrific massacre of 33,000 Jews by the Nazis on September 29–30, 1941.
This event occurred just three months after the start of the Nazi “war of extermination” [Vernichtungskrieg] against the Soviet Union. The operations of German imperialism included the murder of six million European Jews. Approximately 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in the struggle to defeat the onslaught of Germany’s fascist regime.
The Svoboda party is the major political force in the protests that overthrew Yanukovych. It was formed in 2004 as part of a rebranding effort by its predecessor organization, the Social National Party of Ukraine (SNPU). This party, whose members wore insignias that had been used by the Waffen SS, was compelled to change its name because its close association with fascism complicated the US effort to integrate it into the “Orange Revolution,” which was finally carried out in 2005.
Oleh Tyahnybok is the long-time leader of Svoboda and participated in the meetings with US and EU officials that prepared last month’s regime-change. In 2004, Tyahnybok gave a speech on Mount Yavoryna in which he lauded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the World War II era. The UIA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) “fought against the Russkies, fought against the Germans, fought against the Yids [Jews] and other filth that wanted to take from us our Ukrainian state,” he said. Tyahnybok praised his listeners as the force most feared by “the Russkie-Yid mafia that controls Ukraine.” In 2005, Tyahnybok signed a petition demanding the banning of Jewish organizations in Ukraine.
The line of the New York Times is identical to that of the Wall Street Journal (which editorializes that Russia’s “brazen aggression brings the threat of war to the heart of Europe for the first time since the end of the Cold War”), the Washington Post (which insists that the Obama administration “spell out the consequences for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”) and the Nation magazine (whose chief foreign policy correspondent and ex-Larouchite Robert Dreyfuss writes that “Vladimir Putin must back down.”)
The coordinated character of the US media response makes clear that one is not dealing with the writings of individuals, but rather the unfolding of a quite deliberate plan aimed at indoctrinating the public to accept actions previously considered unthinkable.
Such a war would have catastrophic consequences. The fight against war requires an unrelenting struggle to expose the lies of the media. We urge our readers to build up the following of the World Socialist Web Site among workers and youth. Share and distribute our articles. The people of the world must be alerted to the grave danger that exists.