Thursday, September 21, 2017

Rachel Maddow - And Hollywood — Rewriting the News

When Rachel Maddow reports on the latest details of the US government’s investigation into whether candidate Donald Trump conspired with the Russians in order to win the election, she almost pees in her pants with glee.  

As background to the investigation she blithely states that Russia ‘invaded Ukraine and Crimea’.  (If Crimea were really part of Ukraine, why mention it separately? Crimea only became part of Ukraine on a whim of Khruschev in 1954, meaning that it was only part of that country for sixty years. It was Catherine the Great who tore it away from the Turks. building a mighty fleet in Sebastopol.)

When I googled ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine’, this is what I found:

“On November 14, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its preliminary findings that ‘there exists a sensible or reasonable justification for a belief that a crime [my italics] falling within the jurisdiction of the Court ‘has been or is being committed’ within the Crimean and Donbas territories of Ukraine. “

Once upon a time, the job of journalists was to report facts.  Now, the ‘freest press in the world’ rewrites them.  In the following paragraph, Russia’s military, by treaty legally stationed at the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, are referred to as ‘little green men’ because they are wearing green, that is, khaki  uniforms without insignias, like all military the world over when off-duty. 

According to the Forbes narrative: “In the early hours of February 27, 2014, armed and uniformed individuals wearing no identifying insignia (“green men”) seized control of the Crimean parliament and admitted pro-Russian deputies, who appointed a new prime minister (a local gangster) and called for a referendum on the status of Crimea.”

The activities of the Russian military are enumerated without their historical context, altering the meaning of the facts:

  1. Fact one: 90% of Crimeans are ethnic Russians, however their parliamentarians are referred to by Forbes as ‘pro Russian’.
  2. Fact two: The Russian soldiers (or sailors) entered the Parliament before the representatives, most of whom are obviously pro-Russian, arrived, ensuring their access.
  3. As ethnic Russians whose language is Russian, their pride goes to the Russian Army that liberated Russia and Ukraine from Hitler’s Nazi forces.  When thanks to US dollars and advice, overseen by Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary for Eastern Europe and Russian Affairs (once Europe had been reunited, between 1989 and 1991 (when Germany was reunited — why should there still be an ‘Eastern European and Russian desk’ at the State Department?) pro-Nazi militias who had been training for months in Western Ukraine were brought to Kiev to provide the truncheons and muscle to Maidan Square filled with pro-democracy citizens, ushering in a Right-Wing government whose leaders, such as Julia Timoshenko (she with the beautiful braids wound around her head), proclaimed that the Russian language would be banned and that ‘cockroaches (Russians and Jews) should be exterminated’.  

4)    Eastern Ukraine, also known as the Donbass, which is rich in coal mines and borders Russia,  has historically been inhabited by ethnic Russians, who are viscerally allergic to Nazis, due to the fact that the grand- fathers of contemporary Neo-Nazi militiamen were allied with Hitler, killing thousands of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and Russians in World War II.  

Anyone who doubts the veracity of this account of Neo-Nazi militias could, at one time, find it on the web, in the February 4, 2014 Time which published an interview with one of their leaders who subsequently became a member of the Kiev cabinet, Dimitri Yaros.  http://time.com/4493/ukraine-dmitri-yarosh-kiev/

Now, however, it took me nearly an hour to track down this article on the internet. When I googled Dmitri Yaros I got a long list of references in what looked like Vietnamese.  The incriminating English language article has been wiped off the net, including Time’s website.  You have to scroll through hundreds of articles under the name of the article’s author, Simon Shuster, who writes for Time from Berlin and is referred to as a muck-racker, to find it here https://muckrack.com/simon-shuster

Back now to the Forbes article:
“The Russian narrative praises the pro-Russian people of Crimea for organizing their own annexation and the endangered East Ukrainians as the people’s republics organized armed volunteers to fight off the extremist rapists and crucifiers sent by the illegal Kiev junta.” (When did governments installed via a coup become ‘legal’?  Apparently, when the US says so.)

“Russia, of course, could not prevent patriotic Russian fighters from volunteering for duty on the Ukrainian field of battle, some during their vacation leaves. Russian soldiers killed or captured in Ukraine had, after all, signed papers separating themselves from the Russian army. 

“As an innocent bystander, Russia has earned a place as a peacemaker in the Minsk negotiations, but claims it has limited influence over the separatist forces. The Russian narrative claims that innocent bystander Russia wants a prosperous and peaceful Ukraine on its borders but with the peoples’ republics having a veto over Ukraine’s foreign policy. The narrative does not state that such an arrangement would spell the end of an independent Ukraine.”

The ‘alternative facts’ are that the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk want to separate themselves, not from Kiev’s foreign policy, but from its domestic policies, such as forbidding the Russian language and murdering anti-Nazi citizens.

It never seems to occur to America’s foremost journalists that if Russia had invaded Ukraine, it would have reached its capital, Kiev, on the opposite side of the country, in a day.  Real invasions by the US cannot boast such success because they encounter well-founded resistance on the part of the population and the governments they topple.

The Russian hacking story, though it is consuming millions of dollars in lawyers fees, is very fragile, so in order to keep it going, journalists like Rachel Maddow have to keep repeating that ‘Russia invaded Ukraine and took over Crimea’. Never mind that after groups of Italian and French lawmakers recently visited Crimea to ascertain for themselves that being part of Russia AGAIN was the dream of most inhabitants.  A recent Amazon search for book titles about Russia revealed only one that sounded positive, Dan Kovalik’s The Plot to Scapegoat Russia

Meanwhile, Hollywood has entered the fray.  As I tweeted yesterday, Rob Reiner (who played the ‘lefty’ son of Archie Bunker back when, then directed several progressive sounding movies), announced to valiant warrior Chuck Todd that he has organized a group of Hollywood celebrities to campaign against Russia. This morning, it was Morgan Freeman’s turn to pick up the anti-Russian cudgel.


We are truly witnessing amazing times.

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