Whereas Western corporate journalists are claiming the fate of the Ukraine crises is the greatest geo-political catastrophe since 9/11, a recent Gallop poll shows that only 25% of the American people are satisfied with the direction of the United States. As our 4th amendment rights have been taken away—meaning that the police no longer need probable cause to search us because of the Patriot Act and similar policies set up by Congress—the American people no longer live in a country that is a constitutional republic.
Under current ideological conditions, particularly as it relates to the Ukrainian predicament, it is clear that the American people are politically impotent because the U.S. has become—due to its surveillance of every citizen—a soft totalitarian society.
Western journalists write for corporate interests. It does not really matter who it is—The New York Times, The New Republic, The Economist, USA Today, CNN, or Fox— but the Western media itself is the entity that is aggravating the situation in the Ukraine.
By appealing to Western-led Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian scholars and American think-tanks and universities in hopes of the establishing lesser known “facts” about the Ukraine, corporate journalism often pounces on every opportunity or rumor or idea, so it can get its story out for the U.S.’s own benefit, having had met its deadlines.
The media was originally intended to critique the government and serve the people by giving them accurate, unbiased information. All an American needed was the facts. Commentary journalism, however, is different. It is a meta-journalism: a critique of itself.
Meta-journalism is in grave crisis. More than ever independent and free presses are needed to keep mainstream media, which seems to have merged with the U.S. State Department, in check.
A corporate journalist writes their article for their corporate sponsor—wanting to get their story off to his or her editor as quickly as possible— effectively perpetuating the U.S. Military Industrial Complex and explicitly propelling the idea of WWIII.
Now, with American academic-ideologues like Thomas Snyder, who writes articles like “The Battle of the Ukraine Means Everything” for The New Republic, it should be clear that this media dragon has many heads. Americans, in turn, have to lop off each one in order to deconstruct the propaganda that feeds the hysteria within the psyche of the average citizen.
Why are U.S. corporate journalists not focusing on what is going on at home? Why are they not writing about American life and analyzing its domestic problems? Pardon the long list, but we have high unemployment, economic recession, the possible collapse of the U.S. dollar not to mention other social ills such as U.S. veterans’ transition back to civilian life. There is disillusionment with the current administration because it is out of touch with the American people.
Western corporate Journalists are the creators of WWIII because they choose to bifurcate everything for the American people. Hawk versus Dove. Democrat versus Republican. NATO versus Russia. West verses East. Is there no way to be multipolar and live in a multipolar world? Western corporate media uses split screen techniques on television and broadcasts about complex political topics that cannot be resolved by two talking heads. They present only two points of view for just two ways of understanding American culture in under two minutes.
Whereas I do not remotely trust news coverage that comes from the Russian Federation, the Western coverage of the Ukrainian predicament is deplorable and dishonest, hysteria-arousing, sometimes pedestrian, uninformative, inaccurate and most of all, propaganda. Why? Because Western corporate journalists serve the U.S.’s Military Industrial Complex.
While the corporate media cynically giggles behind its readers’ backs and Senator John McCain smiles and tweets— “I’m proud to be sanctioned by Putin”—- it revels in every hot new angle to the story about “the Ukraine situation” and gets further and further sucked into the dichotomous “clash of the titans” logic in what it first dubbed a “New Cold War,” then slowly begins using the term “World War III.”
Coverage of the Ukrainian plight is cynical, if not insensitive. Many corporate journalists are simply uninformed about the region. Many of these journalists believe the war in the Ukraine will lead to “WWIII” and that it began with ousted former President Victor Yanukovych, when he fled on February 22nd. But this is incorrect.
The Ukrainian crises, an ethnic war of Slavic subjectivity, which began prior to the inception of the Soviet Union, extended through not one, but two World Wars, the collapse of a superpower and chaos of post-Soviet economies. In fact, it goes back to medieval times.
U.S. military analysts know, as NATO knows, that the entire Ukraine could be taken by Russian armed forces rather quickly. While the Ukraine conscripts its soldiers and security forces deteriorates in the Eastern region, the Ukrainian military are weak yet somehow mysterious “victorious” too—disembodied, yet possessing an extremist singularity of purpose.
According to one article released on May 4th Fars News headlined “S. Arabia Relocating Takfiri Fighters from Syria to Ukraine.” Saudi Arabia sent extremist militants against Eastern Ukrainian freedom fighters. An unidentified Arab security official told Fars News that:
“A large number of terrorist Takfiri fighters in Syria, who bear Saudi and Chechnian nationalities and receive financial and military backup from the Saudi intelligence agency, have been transferred to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on several planes to help the Ukrainian army in its fight against the pro-Russian population. The forces have been immediately dispatched to Kramatosk city in Eastern Ukraine, and are now fighting beside the Ukrainian army forces against the pro-Russians under the name of militias who support the government.”
On top of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the Ukraine (which no Western journalist talks about), Western corporate media bungled what happened in Odessa. There is no disputing that a Ukrainian extremist, right-wing group called Right Sector set the fires in Odessa of Trade Union buildings that senselessly burned alive and killed innocent people, while the U.S. State Department issued no statement that the deaths were due to Ukrainian fascists.
The Western corporate media is a collective failure as it constantly fails to realize that the Ukraine has never been a true European country. The same Western corporate media always presumes the Ukraine wants to be in all of its articles, where Ukrainian independence is concerned. Just pick up any major U.S. periodical or rather read off the Internet the presupposed rhetoric the Western corporate media utilizes.
The only time the Ukraine was tied “gloriously” to Europe in any concrete way was by its collaboration with Nazi Germany.
Russia, not too long ago, proclaimed that Ukraine’s assault in Slovyansk ended the chance for peace. Heads of State, Putin and Obama, as well as journalists are issuing statements and journalists are not citing their sources. This brings us to the issue of how the mainstream media is going to spin us right into a world war.
The questions that should be asked are numerous, but some examples would be: Who broke the story first that the Ukraine was heading for war? Who shot who first? Who burned alive who first? Isn’t it convenient how a right-wing coup occurred after “a democratically elected election”? Any form of slaughter in this case (and the prospects of U.S. or NATO involvement) is ridiculous and evil. How many more photos does one need to see of corpses for us to understand that the U.S. is in the shadows?
The Western corporate media have managed to evade talk of the money and the resources necessary for the Ukraine to even be considered a member of the E.U. and have totally hopped over the fact that the Ukraine’s ousted President Viktor Yanukovich secured “a $15 billion bailout from Russia in December 17th, 2013, offering respite for an economy heading ever closer to default but also drawing accusations he has sold his country out to its former Soviet master.”
The Ukrainian government is just as corrupt as its Russian counterpart, yet the U.S. government and the mainstream media does not seem to understand that the political and economic weakness of Ukraine itself. The Ukraine’s inability to put its house in order is a result of inner tensions within the political climate of the Ukraine.
The idea of Ukrainian independence began long ago. The capital of Ancient Rus (Russia) is Kiev, now Ukraine. The capital then moved to the medieval spiritual capital of Novgorod in the 12th through 15th centuries. Novgorod then became the epicenter of Eastern Christian Orthodox spirituality, which incidentally is aligned with the brand of “traditional Russian values” that Vladimir Putin’s wants for Russia.
If the mainstream media knows how to do anything correctly, it knows how to demonize a dictator. It knows how to do full-throttle ad homimen, straw men, slippery slope, and non sequitur attacks of puppet dictatorships that the U.S. has installed all over the world, namely in Central and South America as well as the Middle East, as it funded leaders like Osama bin Laden and mujahedin during the Soviet-Afghan war, which was a proxy war between the CIA and KGB. Many heads of state, such as Georgia, Panama, Iraq in the case of the Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi in the case of Libya, Mubarruk in the case of Egypt. But then the media flips it around for the State Department. We go in militarily and clean up “the dictatorship,” using all means possible to illuminate American exceptionalism.
Now the Western corporate media has found a head of State who is not on the U.S. payroll, who refuses to be part of the NWO, who –as stated in 2007 speech in Munich– wants a de-escalation of nuclear weapons. The facts are this: the U.S. simply does not want to de-escalate nuclear weapons tit for tat with Russia. The U.S. government wants to remain exceptional.
History will tell us who won World War II and who liberated France.
Now the Western corporate media has founds its villain: Vladimir Putin.
The Western mainstream media loves villains. They fascinate the public and make it easy to understand who is behind or appears to be behind a global problem. But hasn’t the U.S. been at war since 1945, with the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? This was not even necessary. The Fourth Estate back then presented it as a political statement. It was an ideological statement at its purest. Millions of lives were lost on the Eastern Front. Tokyo was 60% already destroyed before the dropping of those two nuclear bombs. The Fourth Estate presented the droppings of those bombs as if we punctuated the finality of the sentence of WWII. It was this journalistic event—the picture of the mushroom cloud—-that started the Cold War, not President Dwight Eisenhower warning the American people on January 17, 1961, about the establishment of a “military-industrial complex.”
Another aspect Western journalists have failed to mention is that after World War I, Ukraine was divided into three parts, not two halves: most of the Central and Eastern Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) in 1921—the ethnic Russian population of the Ukraine that wants to separate from Western part whose capital was Kharkiv, not Sevastopol, the latter which is a federal port city in the Crimea, militarily and strategically important to the Russian Federation.
Also, what many corporate journalists have failed to mention is that the majority of current Western Ukraine became part of the Second Polish Republic (which was Catholic). This Second Polish Republic included the city of Lviv, which was the center of Ukrainian Nationalist activity. This means that Poland’s support of Western Ukraine is not just a political statement, but is grounded in cultural and religious solidarity.
Also, what the Western corporate media never talks about, nor knows about is the small part of current far Western Ukraine (the population that hopes that NATO “saves them”), that is, Zakarpattia, was once part of Czechoslovakia. I have no doubt this will be a site of contention in future articles.
Let’s face it: The coverage of the Ukrainian predicament is the worst journalistic failure since the Fukashima Disaster. Incidentally both journalistic failures involves nuclear power; the former in relationship to Russia’s nuclear arsenal against its foes and the latter, the aftermath of a broken nuclear power plant. The mainstream media–once called the Fourth Estate of the American Government and its allies–has not been straight up with its readers. The Ukraine is a country that is in a civil war because of political deadlock and/or failure of the propaganda war between the Western Media and Russian media. Why does the Western mainstream media need to obfuscate things and set Western agendas by generation of their propaganda? Because it has to fight Russian propaganda.
Moreover, the Western mainstream media has already demonstrated that it has next to no knowledge of the history of Russia, Kievan Rus, the Great Schism of the West and East Church in 1054 (a factor no journalists even touches), not to mention its weak understanding of anti-Semitism in the Ukraine, let alone Ukrainian Nazi collaboration under the auspices of one Stepan Bandera.
After the capture Lviv, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state as early as June 30, 1941, hoping the Nazi Germany would help them. During the German campaign against Poland, the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists were already “a faithful German auxiliary.” The 3rd paragraph of text of The Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood from the front page of the Newspaper “Samostiyna Ukraina” published in Stanislaviv, July 1941 reads:
“The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Moscovite occupation.
The Ukrainian People’s Revolutionary Army, which has been formed on the Ukrainian lands, will continue to fight with the Allied German Army against Moscovite occupation for a sovereign and united State and a new order in the whole world!”
Why is this Ukrainian Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood never mentioned? Why?
Because the “analysis” and “treatment” of the Ukrainian predicament has now finally confounded the masses completely—with people making YouTube videos about “the coming of WWIII” and the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy— all the while the Western media meanders in its analyses of a Eurasian subject in formation and, instead, shoves supposed “facts on the ground” down our throats on a daily basis, so that we can remain satiated and startled.
The Western mainstream media itself sustains propaganda.
Case in point: U.S. corporate journalist flip-flop after getting the skeptical disapproval of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) on the “authenticity” of the leaflets that demanded that Donetsk Jews in Ukraine were to identify themselves, their property, their assets, etc. The story was an outrage, even brought up by Secretary of State John Kerry, then the skeptics came in, checked out the leaflet, decided it was not the real thing and called it ”a hoax.” Calling something a “hoax” is often in itself “a hoax.” Which does one prefer? Authentic propaganda or inauthentic propaganda?
The Western corporate media amplifies Russian propaganda. Everything that is revealed is cloaked in the belief that if the “facts” come forth, then everyone will know the truth, but here “lies” are weaponized then held up on pedestals, so everyone can “cry wolf” in unison and say “wow, it’s really Russia, not the Ukraine, that hate Jews in the Ukraine.” Yet people tend to forget the greatest massacre of Jews in the history of WWII took place in a ravine in Kiev, Ukraine called Babi Yar on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation by rifles and pistols, not gas chambers or bombs. The point is Jews have always been subject to revulsion throughout history, whether this was in Egypt or Babylonian Captivity or in Iran or in Germany or in the Soviet Union. The assumption that just because the leaflet debacle was a “hoax” that the Donetsk Jews in Ukraine were to identify themselves we can be now able to move on is morally repugnant and intellectually dubious.
Why is the U.S Military Industrial Complex using the media as its vehicle of propaganda? Because corporate interests are now part of the U.S. economy as geo-politics. I would not be surprised if the major news networks were briefed in advance as to what was about to happen in the Ukraine.
So for those Western journalists who are writing stories like the one in The New Republic, which exposes how the “the Ukrainian anti-Semitic pamphlets” are “a hoax,” one must consider how the propaganda machine of the U.S. Government, the mainstream media itself can take its “journalist points,” and bury their head in the sand for they have leaped over the Truth. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in the Ukraine and in Russia as well as in the U.S. Hating a people is easy and journalism is rather effective in making it more possible for it blurs the distinction between fantasy and projection, fiction and non-fiction, truth or lies, let alone injustice for justice.
NATO should get out of Russia’s backyard and mind its own business. What country would not defend its own borders? The European Union and the U.S. are opportunists who are trying to economically pillage the Ukraine, given that the largest gas company in the Ukraine is headed by U.S. Vice President, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
If one does not recall, NATO struggled in the summer of 1997 to decide who belonged to the “West” during the altered political economy of the 1990’s. Given that NATO, a militaristic alliance formed as a counter-force to Warsaw Pact countries—that Warsaw Pact no longer existed, and the fact post-World War II Europe had supposedly had enough of war—-political-economic solidarity as exemplified by the European Union seemed inevitable. Nonetheless, many have claimed that the real risk for an enlarged European Union was certainly not the chasm between old European coordinates and Donald Rumsfeld’s New European coordinates.
Instead, amid a changing set of shifting alliances across different policy issues, Europe will fail to find strategic direction. Why? Because it would be naïve to say that the NATO vision and European Union was simply a question of who was in and who was out.
A U.S.-EU led corrupt Ukrainian oligarchy wants the Ukraine to become part of Europe because of resources. The difficulty in arriving at a conclusion to the fate of Europe brings to the forefront three questions that have plagued Europe for thousands of years: ‘who is European, what does it mean to be European, and most importantly, what do Europeans envision themselves to be?’ If the crises in the Ukrainian teaches anything at this point is that skepticism towards binary logic, old and new, towards intellectual constructivism, towards tireless debates between the idea of Europe and the culture of Eurocentricism, even “reality” itself eludes the fundamental dilemma. At the center of all such inquiry, subjectivity, drenched in a multiplicity of ideological, religious, conceptual, social, and economic factors, unflinchingly, ruptures into a series of political moments that are ambiguously correlative to those conditions that provoke them to exist. The West’s direct relationship to fascism is superabundant, well-known, and well-documented. Nobody one can stomach the coming slaughter except psychotic Western journalists from the United States.
Human bloodshed is a loss to everyone on this planet. Russians and Ukrainians are brothers. Yet the Western mainstream media facilitates the propaganda of the U.S. Empire. Why? Because the Ukrainian pipeline, natural gas and oil are resources for U.S. imperialist interests and the corporations fear the advent of New Science. That’s why, billionaire Candy-Maker Petro Poroshenko is a Ukrainian puppet chosen by the United States.
Paul Rogov studied Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley and Social Work at USC. His literary work has appeared in Danse Macabre, Exterminating Angel Press, Social Justice Solutions, Femicatio Magazine, Cultural Weekly and others.
“The Fallen Years,” his debut novella, about a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war, was released in October 2011.
In 2013, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
NOTES
“Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe,” by John A. Armstrong in
The Journal of Modern History Vol. 40, No. 3 (Sep., 1968).
http://www.gallup.com/poll/169295/satisfaction-direction-remains.aspx\
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930214000824
https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/446681086979211265
http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate http://www.telusplanet.net/public/mozuz/ukrainophobia/oliphant20100125RussiaProfile.html
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~mes/russia/moscow/history.html
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117415/relax-ukraine-not-ordering-its-jews-register
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/17/us-ukraine-idUSBRE9BF11U20131217
http://rt.com/news/156548-west-reaction-ukraine-odessa/
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/protzion/DelaCruzProtocolsMain.htm
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/russian-threat-ukraine-0
http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/zwoje16/text11.htm
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/pages/O/R/OrganizationofUkrainianNationalists.htm
http://www.tol.org/client/article/24195-a-rorschach-test-in-the-east.html
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/04/jews-told-to-register-in-eastern-ukraine-facts-still-murky/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-western-media-decyphers-the-neo-nazi-code/5381849
