As my plane left Dubai for Kiev, I began browsing through an endless pile of newspapers and magazines: from the New York Times to the Economist, from the Times to several Gulf-based and Turkish periodicals, as well as Spanish and German ones.
The consensus on Putin being a villain was absolute. There were no dissident voices, but also, not surprisingly, no Russian intellectual voices. There were absolutely no editorials written by Russians attacking the Western destabilization of Ukraine and the destruction of its democratically elected government.
It was also shocking how the Arabic and Turkish press was translating and reprinting all that appeared in the West.
There were no clear, simple and logical explanations of what actually happened in Ukraine recently.
That is, that the West, particularly the greedy and desperate EU, wanted to get its hands on the tremendous natural resources of the Ukraine, on its heavy industry and cheap but highly-educated work force. They offered a deal. A very bad deal, under which, European companies would be allowed to plunder the country, but Ukrainian people would not be even allowed to enter the EU, let alone seek employment there.
The elected government rejected such farce. The West accelerated its support to ‘the opposition’, which included several clearly gangster forces, full of ultra-nationalists and Nazis. The legitimate government was overthrown. Crimea decided to leave such an illegitimate entity. People voted, democratically. Russia simply accepted the outcome.
The West began crying murder, simply because, for once, it was not allowed to rob, to loot, what it wanted. It is not used to such resistance – for centuries it has been accustomed to taking, to raping and to fleecing anything it fancies.
In the meantime, the fascist pro-Western military regime in Egypt (a regime that is actually financed by the US) sentenced 529 people to death, mostly those belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was overthrown last summer.
Egyptian students who support the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi clash with riot police following a demonstration outside Cairo University on March 26, 2014. (AFP Photo / Khaled Desouki)
There was strong language from the West, but no condemnation. Fascist, Pinochet-style Egypt is a close Western ally.
Another ally, Indonesia, a miserable failed state plundered by multinationals, with many indicators mirroring sub-Saharan Africa, has once again been poisoning the entire region, with smoke coming from its burning forest-fires: proof of a gangster-run economy. Fires are destroying forests and giving way to palm oil plantations. Again no condemnation. Not even an alarm.
Like Rwanda and Uganda, which are by now responsible for between 6 and 10 million lost lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). There, the killing is done on behalf of Western companies and governments, so it should not be discussed.
The same could be said about the present occupation of Southern Somalia by Kenyan forces, an invasion that was triggered on a ridiculous, pre-fabricated platform.
Fellow looters
The destruction of entire nations, as well as the obliteration of the environment, is not to be noticed by a fellow looter if ‘a friend’ does it.
In our recent book, ‘On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare’, my friend and mentor Noam Chomsky clarified how the West reserves the right to ruin, and even liquidate, countries that it considers uncooperative, and how it is done with absolute impunity, even with legal support.
“Take the invasion of Iraq – nothing can be discussed or potentially regarded as criminal. In fact there is a legal reason for that, which is not too well-known. The United States is self-immunized from any prosecution. When the US joined the World Court in 1946, the US basically initiated the modern International Court of Justice, which it joined but with the reservation that the US cannot be judged by any international treaty – meaning the UN charter, the charter of the Organization of American States, the Geneva Conventions. The US is self-immunized from any trial on those issues. And the Court has accepted that. So, for example, when Nicaragua brought a case against the United States at the World Court for the terrorist attacks against Nicaragua, most of the case was thrown out because it invoked the charter of the Organization of American States, which bars interventions strongly, and the US is not subject to that and the Court accepted it.”
“In fact the same happened, interestingly, at the trial where Yugoslavia brought a case against NATO for its being bombed, to the International Court of Justice, I think, and the United States excluded itself from the case and the Tribunal agreed because one of the charges mentioned was that it was a genocide, and when the United States signed the Genocide Convention after 40 years, it had a reservation saying it was ‘inapplicable to the United States’, and so therefore the Court rightly excused the United States from prosecution. There literally are legal barriers established just in case anyone dares to try to bring some charge against the powerful. I am sure you recall when the Rome Treaty was signed, and the International Criminal Court was established, the US refused to participate… but then it was more than that. The Congress passed legislation, which the Bush Administration happily signed, which granted the White House authority to invade The Hague by force, in case any American was brought there. In Europe it is sometimes called the Netherlands Invasion Act. Well, that was passed here enthusiastically, so the self-immunization is at many levels. One is the impossibility to perceive, such as when you deny what happened to the indigenous population in the United States, when you just can’t see it even if it is in front of your eyes. The other is that it’s actually fortified by legislation.”
Is such an arrangement outrageous and totally racist? It is, but it appears that most Western intellectuals and journalists are so disciplined, brainwashed or cowardly, that they hardly notice.
David Castle, the senior commissioning editor of Pluto Publishing House in London is clearly aware of the game the Western mass media is playing. Pluto is one of the major opposition publishing houses in English language.
“Most people in Britain understand international politics through television news and mainstream newspapers. Both are heavily skewed towards domestic issues and so international coverage is scanty. Major conflicts, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, barely get reported at all. Also, most of the press is notoriously right-wing – far to the right of the people as a whole, and often owned by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, who aggressively pursue a right-wing agenda through their publications. The state-owned BBC is committed to presenting a ‘balanced’ view of political issues, but its concept of balance is to present the views of both major British political parties. When they agree on an issue such as Ukraine, you can fail to find any dissenting voices,” David told me about this issue.
International gangsterism
The question is where this revisionism will take the planet? Is the West really ready to face Russia and China, two major powers, just to secure fully its dictatorial role over the world? Is its greed, is its insane Protestant desire to control and rule, truly so overwhelming?
It is all resembling, increasingly, gangsterism, not an international consensus.
Christopher Black, a leading international criminal lawyer based in Toronto, clearly defines the possible endgame, for this report: “The Ukraine is the latest theatre of operations in the world war that erupted with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the drive thereafter by the West to dominate world resources and markets. The first theaters of operation in this global war were Africa and Yugoslavia. In Africa, America ejected France from Central Africa and turned Rwanda into a military state used to maintain a state of deadly chaos in the Great Lakes region of Africa.”
The destruction of Yugoslavia during the same period culminated in the final brutal NATO attack of 1999 and the overthrow of Milosevic in 2001, Black says. In rapid succession the NATO states attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, then Libya and Syria. The ultimate target of these wars is, of course, Russia and its vast resources, and those countries such as China, Iran, and of Latin America that insist on maintaining their independence and sovereignty.
“But these wars cannot be conducted without propaganda, and as the wars themselves are total wars – that is, wars targeting civilians as well as military forces – so the propaganda techniques used are total, using every aspect of communication and penetrating all levels of society. Important elements of this propaganda are the various war crimes tribunals whose primary function is the dissemination of false histories of the wars concerned, and criminalization of those who resist,” Black told me.
Christopher Black says that we see this technique used in Ukraine with the absurd call by the Kiev junta to have President Yanukovich charged by the International Criminal Court for crimes probably committed by members of that junta.
Legendary radio host Dr. Kevin Barrett, based in the US, described the situation in a recent article which made waves all over the world. It is called ‘USA declares war on democracy’.
“In Ukraine, Venezuela, and Thailand, as in Syria and Egypt before them, the banksters are adding violence to their ‘color revolution’ game plan for destroying democracy. This may seem incongruous, since the NWO [New World Order] intellectual hired gun Gene Sharp, the so-called ‘Machiavelli of non-violence’, designed the original color revolutions as purportedly peaceful and democratic uprisings. But Sharp’s so-called color revolutions, beginning with Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003 and Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004, were never genuine people’s revolutions. They were bankster takeover attempts from the beginning. George Soros would funnel Rothschild money to ambitious, power-hungry apparatchiks, who would inundate their target countries with propaganda and hire rent-a-mobs to dress in a particular color and make a spectacle of themselves in a public square, in the hope of duping naive young people into joining the ‘revolution’ – whose real goal is always to install a NWO puppet leader,” Barrett wrote.
But Barrett, like myself, is one of those outraged voices surrounded by a cacophony of the propaganda dissonance.
While Noam Chomsky, Christopher Black, Kevin Barrett, David Castle and so many other determined free thinkers are constantly defining reality as well as the horror of what may yet come, it appears that the great majority of the Western public is thoroughly confused by, and even shows hostility towards, the alternative voices.
Dmitry Kolesnik, a brave Ukrainian journalist, my translator and co-editor on the site of Ukrainian leftists, Liva.com.ua, put everything into context.
“What’s most remarkable in the Western coverage of Ukrainian turmoil? It’s the almost total ignoring or even whitewashing of those far-right and open Nazi paramilitary forces that played the leading role in the recent coup. There were only some rare reports in mainstream media that highlighted the Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine,” Kolesnik said.
What he is saying could be applied across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Egypt, Bahrain, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Eritrea, North Korea, Vietnam, and dozens of other places worldwide. Kolesnik continued that as usual the issue of the leading role of the far-right is dismissed as ‘Putin’s propaganda’. So the media willingly turns a blind eye to everything that Putin claims.
“If [Putin] claimed that the Earth is round, the Western media would most likely denounce it as a ‘propagandist’ statement. And Putin seems to understand it quite well, but the Western media denouncing the evident facts reveal their total servility,” Kolesnik said.
He also describes a typical message in online groups of the ‘Euromaidan’ movement and the network of Nazi ‘Right Sector’ units.
“As far as I follow some groups, I can notice that sometimes they mobilize their supporters on a certain day in a certain place so as to provide the picture needed: ‘Western journalists are coming, so we have to be in the square at… and show them our democratic intentions. Please, no Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic slogans at this time, as journalists will be there. And we can see how some mainstream media makes ‘professional’ reports,” he asserts.
Activists of the Right Sector movement and their supporters gather outside the parliament building to demand the immediate resignation of Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov, in Kiev March 27, 2014. (Reuters / Vasily Fedosenko)
Kolesnik says that when Nazi paramilitaries attack the meetings of anti-fascist forces, the rallies of the left forces, or pro-Russian protesters, the Western media never show it. But when an attack of Nazis is being kicked off, they willingly present it as ‘brutality against pro-democracy protesters’. Media dubs the unelected Ukrainian regime as ‘legitimate’ and tries not to notice its policy directed to the unleashing of a civil war or the ethnic cleansing of the country.
“Actually, we see in media coverage an example of a cynical info-war, when even Nazi thugs are being whitewashed whatever they do. Thus, we see in Ukraine a coordinated coalition of Nazis, neoliberals, some NGOs and mainstream media – all working hand in hand for the brutal demolition of the country,” he says.
I am finishing this report as my flight begins its descent to Kiev International Airport. I create a nice, neat folder that consists of several international periodicals. I am aware that soon, very soon, the reality will hit me in the face, metaphorically as well as in the real sense.
Everything will be in reverse of what is so thoughtfully written in those well-edited and designed propaganda sheets.
I look at the cover of the Economist and at the tasteless caricature of a half-naked President Putin on a heavily-armed tank. It reads ‘The New World Order’.
But it is not yet here, this New World Order. It is still the same nightmare of some dozen or so extremely arrogant, brutal and canny Western nations, tormenting the world with impunity. And it is done, they claim, in order to ‘save it’, to make it pure and happy, as was done for centuries by fanatical and cruel religions.
Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries.
