The Big Lie in the 'News' 'Reporting' about Ukraine and Russia

Eric Zuesse

Here it is, in purest form, via a typical 'news' 'report' from CNN:

"While questions about Russia's tactics remain, its strategy has become more clear: The Kremlin appears to have decided to prevent Ukraine turning West and leaving what Russia regards as its sphere of influence."

However, did the U.S., in the early 1960s, decide to accept Cuba's having turned away from the U.S. sphere of influence that had existed under the prior, corrupt, Cuban leader, Fulgensio Batista, and Cuba's then becoming instead a new Soviet satellite, under Fidel Castro? And, in particular, how did the U.S. feel about Cuba's new Soviet ally trying to insert Soviet missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, right next door to us?

Did we like that? Did we even let that happen (which would be like Ukraine's joining NATO, and then allowing Ukraine to get U.S. missiles)?

Of course not! (It was called the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.)

Nor will Russia let that happen to them in Ukraine. Putin is the same on that matter as Kennedy was, when the shoes were on the other feet -- Soviets were the danger to the world's peace then in Cuba, but Americans are the danger to the world's peace now in Ukraine.

And this comes already after polls, such as this one, had previously shown that, globally, the U.S. is already considered to be, by far, the most dangerous nation in the world -- considerably more dangerous than Russia is.

Are the 'news' 'reporters,' and the editors and the producers and the other 'news' managers, who hire and fire those 'news' 'reporters,' really so ignorant of the relevant history on this subject (the Cuban Missile Crisis, and its reverse analogue today in Ukraine), as they pretend to be? Of course not! But they want their public to remain that way (ignorant of it, or at least not to make the link), because the people who pay them, their advertisers, want the public's ignorance to stay that way: trusting, even when it shouldn't be. And we call this (the 'journalism' that those masters of the 'press' -- or propaganda -- deliver to us) a 'free press,' as if it were, though it's actually a capitalistically controlled press, to manipulate the public in the way that virtually all advertisers want them to be manipulated: to trust the way that things are, rather than to question -- much less to oppose -- it.

The people who own and control, and hire-and-fire, the employees at CNN, The New York Times, Fox 'News,' etc., have a collectively shared agenda, to portray the United States as if this country were a democracy (so that their audience will trust them -- this 'free press' -- and so that their sponsors will thereby continue to generate income from their trusting complacent market), despite America's not being a real democracy anymore; and a crucial part of that agenda, at a time like this when the U.S. President is aiming to surround Russia with our missiles in new NATO member-states, is to portray Russia as being a dictatorship, though it's not that anymore -- it's not even the Soviet Union anymore, nor even communist, anymore. The ideological Cold War between capitalism and communism is over, and capitalism won. Yet, the 'news' establishment, and the book publishers, portray Russia as if it were little or nothing but an extension of the communist U.S.S.R. in geographically truncated form. (By contrast, here's the actual reality on that matter.)

This typical CNN fictitious 'news' 'report' about Ukraine then continues its deception, as follows:

"That means denying Ukraine membership of Western institutions like the European Union, and NATO."

Here's the relevant background on that: The U.S. tried repeatedly to assassinate Fidel Castro in order to get rid of the danger. There's no evidence, yet, that Putin is attempting any such thing in Ukraine, though we might drive him to try doing that. We might drive him to perpetrate a Ukrainian counter-coup, to overthrow the regime that Obama installed in his violent February 2014 coup that overthrew the leader Ukraine had elected in their last nationwide election, the election that occurred in 2010. (No nationwide election has occurred in Ukraine since then. The leader whom Obama installed in February 2014 there, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is still in power from Obama's February coup, though a figurehead Ukrainian President was 'elected' on 25 May 2014 in 'elections' that were held in only the areas of Ukraine that had voted in 2010 against the man whom Obama overthrew in February 2014 (and Obama now wants to cement that victory of his, by getting rid of the voters for the man he overthrew: getting rid of the people who live in that area, as a consequence of which they are being exterminated and driven out) -- so, that recent 'election' wasn't a nationwide one, even though this Obama-installed Government is slaughtering the people in those very same regions that didn't vote for it, and is claiming the sovereign right to do that and to call those resistors 'terrorists.') That's the reality of the relevant background.

The next sentence in this typical CNN (supposed) 'news' 'report' is:

"What's more, the Kremlin appears determined to achieve its goal regardless of the cost."

Actually, however, it is the United States that has expended the vast sums to install the current Ukrainian Government, and then to retain it. Obama's agent controlling Ukraine, who is Victoria Nuland, said in December 2013, three months before the coup, that we had already spent "more than five billion dollars" to establish "democracy" in that land where we soon thereafter actually ended Ukraine's struggling democracy. Then, the IMF (which is to say, mainly U.S. taxpayers) lent another $17 billion, to enable this new Government to exterminate the resistors (and to aid U.S. firms to take over the country's agriculture and gas); and, then, on 9 September 2014, the great economist Michael Hudson bannered "The IMF's New Cold War Loan to Ukraine"; and he wrote that, "Four months later, on August 29, just as Kiev began losing its attempt at ethnic cleansing against the eastern Donbas region [where Ukraine's troops are clearing away the residents so as to install gas-fracking wells], the IMF signed off on the first loan ever to a side engaged in a civil war, not to mention rife with insider capital flight and a collapsing balance of payments." Hudson noted that, "The IMF's Articles of Agreement forbid it to make loans to countries that clearly cannot pay, prompting its economists to complain at last year's October 2013 annual meeting in Washington that their institution was violating its rules by making bad loans 'to states unable to repay their debts.'"

In other words: Obama as the U.S. President is acting like the megabank presidents did who had crashed their banks in 2008 by carrying out Ponzi schemes for ever-rising sales-commissions to their employees, and for ever-higher executive bonuses to themselves, via pumping out tons of liars' 'loans' [now IMF 'loans' to an insolvent Ukraine] to people who couldn't repay those loans and who would inevitably be driven bankrupt though trying to do so -- all in order to produce then ever-growing quantities of rigged AAA-rated Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) that ended up robbing pension funds (while those megabank CEOs pocketed enormous sums in their bloated bonuses). And, as happened with the (still continuing) Wall Street bailout, U.S. taxpayers are left holding a multi-trillion-dollar debt for our children and grandchildren as taxpayers to pay, while today's oligarchs (and their agents, such as, perhaps ultimately, a retired Obama) stash secret offshore bank accounts with their essentially stolen cash, as payoffs for services rendered in these mega-heists.

But this sort of thing isn't "News That's Fit to Print" -- not even when it actually happens, as it has (since George W. Bush, at least), and as it seems likely to continue happening, because there is no accountability applied to the very biggest of thieves: they buy the government, and they own the 'news' media, and they fool the public, and blame 'democracy' (that's us) for the resulting national stagnation if not decline.

It's all a racket. The name for it is "fascism." It's actually Ponzi-scheme capitalism. And this fact is news that's not fit to print, in a fascist country -- at least not by fascist 'news' media, which benefit by perpetuating that type of Ponzi scheme -- the nationalistic type.

So: we get 'news' that portrays America's first-ever installation of an outright racist-fascist (otherwise called ideologically "nazi") regime, in Ukraine, exterminating its own ethnic-Russian population (the people who live in Ukraine's southeast), as if America were instead 'protecting' Ukraine against 'Russian aggression.'

Such 'news' is not to be believed, because it is false; it is fake 'news,' not real "news" -- not news at all, but instead mere myth-propagation. It is nothing more than nationalistic propaganda. It can equally be characterized as "aristocratic" propaganda (which is the reason why the conservatives in Britain are explicitly called "Tories"). (NOTE: There is a profound difference between nationalism and patriotism. Patriotism is democratic; nationalism is aristocratic. Patriotism used to be strong in America, but nationalism has increasingly replaced it. The very idea of 'winning' a nuclear war is nationalistic, and it is also traitorous; it is also false: it's based on myths.)

Nationalistic propaganda is what Americans are reading, and seeing on television, about Ukraine, Russia, and American foreign policy.

Here, then, is the real news about Ukraine: Obama has broken the dysfunctional Ukraine into what will now inevitably be two or more failed states, just as George W. Bush did to Iraq, but Obama used mainly the State Department and CIA and IMF to do it, rather than the U.S. military (no "boots on the ground"). Putin is trying to manage the consequences of Obama's aggression, in a way that will avoid a nuclear war with the U.S.

And so the Big Lie in the 'news' 'reporting' about Ukraine and Russia is that the Ukrainian regime and the man who installed it (Obama) are defending democracy against aggression from dictatorial Russia.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.