OpEds—
By Donn Marten
Tense standoff continues in Donetsk, with supporters of the new “Republic of Donetsk” holding firm until a referendum is approved.
The nadir of the anti-Russian propaganda campaign has finally been reached. In a lurid, rapidly spreading tale that has been seized upon by a corrupt state-corporate media in full feeding frenzy a leaflet requiring the registration of Jews was discovered in Donetsk. One may recall that back in 2006 a similar tale about Jews being forced to wear badges by Iran’s regime was debunked and retracted – as this one will be.
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In a rapidly spreading sensationalist story warning of the evils of the pro-Russian (translation: anti-austerity) opposition in East Ukraine a particularly lurid piece of vile propaganda has been launched into the US state-corporate media echo chamber. There has been an amazing discovery of some leaflets distributed in Donetsk requiring all Jews over the age of 16 to register with the authorities – shades of Hitler! The culprit behind this obvious psychological warfare operation is the vaunted bastion of dumbed down Americann journalism USA Today – which is written at about a seventh grade reading level. For those who have a functional memory this is an exact duplicate of that 2006 hoax that there was a new law in Iran requiring Jews to wear a yellow badge in Iran, a massive neocon promulgated lie that was nearly immediately retracted. As audacious frauds, both Jew baiting efforts rank right up there with the infamous fairy tale of Saddam Hussein’s soldiers yanking babies out of Kuwaiti incubators as agitprop to induce a war frenzy in the US where nothing much changes except the designated devil of the day. Back then it was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and now it’s Vladimir Putin. While the media pounced on this like a pack of starved dogs thrown a chunk of maggoty rotting meat the tale was immediately met with skepticism within the alternative media that unlike the careerist filled and bought and paid for Washington suckling presstitutes has a sense of duty to get at the truth as well as highly functional bullshit detectors.
Unfortunately the bullshit detector of one US Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry, Skull and Bones alumni and constant source of American foreign policy embarrassment either doesn’t work or he is in on the con. In another of his frantic rushes to judgement, Kerry condemned the leaflets demanding the bogus Jew registration program as “not just intolerable, it’s grotesque, is beyond acceptable” which is a statement that perfectly nails Kerry’s job performance as the most abysmal excuse for a Secretary of State in US history. The leaflet tale is so ludicrous and conveniently timed that even the neocon central transmission center at The Washington Post put up a “what we know” guide that is chock full of caveats and qualifiers including a statement that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is “skeptical about the flyer’s authenticity” although it wasn’t questionable enough to prevent Kerry’s latest outbreak of chronic diarrhea of the mouth. Kerry like the on staff WaPo neocon flacks continue to push their lies, an example being that mysterious sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb that nearly allowed for the starting of another war last summer. The missing airplane network over at CNN seems to be biting though which is not surprising – “Wolf” can parlay this into another ratings boon until the next celebrity sex scandal, murder or disappearance of a jetliner drops into their lap.
It is interesting that CIA Director John Brennan paid a visit to Kiev over the weekend. The Agency is certainly no stranger to planting false stories and disseminating propaganda but it is going to take one hell of a lot more than some phony anti-Semitic leaflets a few days before Passover to close the sale on the illicitly installed regime in Ukraine. It’s a damned good thing for the Obama regime and his neocon packed foreign policy team that Americans have been fed such a constant diet of lies about Ukraine that they have zero idea that their hard earned tax dollars are funding real anti-Semites and neo-Nazis or this latest “ham-handed” and “transparent” attempt to generate outrage could put a ding in the ongoing effort to reboot the Cold War. So Obama is once again getting his face rubbed into a big pile of sh*t thanks to his own ineptitude and his idiotic choice of people to run his administration, a failure of historic proportions that will doom this country in the long run far worse than anything that Bush and Cheney ever did. He had the chance to change course but wouldn’t for reasons that may never be truly known.
The lineup of hacks, political cronies, recycled incompetents and retained Bush-Cheney neocons that Obama has fielded over the last five plus years has been dismal beyond comprehension but Kerry has to be the cherry on top of the entire sh*t cake. He is the proverbial gift that keeps on giving to critics and nobody short of the insane warmonger John Bolton (or maybe Donald Trump) would have been a worst choice as the nation’s top diplomat. In great story written by Robert Parry over at Consortium News entitled “What’s the Matter With John Kerry?” he knocks it out of the park. I excerpt the following:
So, when John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton on Feb. 1, 2013, the State Department was in need of a responsible adult who would rein in the department’s penchant for stirring up trouble and then looking on helplessly as the chaos spun out of control.
But which Kerry would show up? The young Kerry who recognized how belligerent talk and playing with facts could end up getting lots of innocent people killed or the older Kerry who had trimmed his sails and learned to go with the prevailing winds, regardless of the dangers to the world?
There are times at the end of a politician’s career when the person reverts back to an earlier, more idealistic self, though more often a deeply compromised politician just continues doing what’s been learned over the decades of political survival.
It’s now clear that John Kerry fell into the latter approach. He did undertake a quixotic pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, perhaps hoping that success in such an impossible undertaking would be the “crown jewel” of his career, compensating for his 2004 defeat.
But Kerry also let himself be turned into a hand puppet for the neocons and R2Pers who had gained bureaucratic control of State and were set on escalating confrontations with Syria and Iran by essentially following the “regime change” blueprint designed by Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons in the Bush-43 administration.
Influential neocons and R2Pers took command of key positions in 2013, as Kerry moved from Capitol Hill to Foggy Bottom and Obama entered his second term. Neocon Victoria Nuland was promoted from State Department spokesperson to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Susan Rice became National Security Adviser, and Samantha Power took over as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
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Again, someone like the young Kerry might have spoken up about the danger from unintended consequences when arrogant U.S. officials interfere in the internal affairs of another country. The young Kerry might have pondered how the Nuland-Gershman strategy of destabilizing Ukraine actually helps either the Ukrainians or the American people.
So far, the scheme holds the possibility of civil war in Ukraine, disastrous economic trouble for Europe (with fallout for the U.S. economy, too) and another splurge of U.S. military spending as bellicose politicians cut back even more on domestic priorities.
The younger Kerry might have been wise enough to cool the rhetoric and redirect the narrative into a realistic discussion that could resolve the crisis. For instance, it wouldn’t have been very hard to insist that the Feb. 21 agreement be enforced — with Yanukovych possibly serving in a ceremonial capacity until new elections could select a new president, rather than the U.S. and the EU immediately embracing a neo-Nazi-led coup.
But the older Kerry is behaving much like the older generation of Cold Warriors did in the 1960s when they insisted that there was no choice other than a U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, that the lives of tens of thousands of young American men and millions of Vietnamese was a small price to pay to stop some imaginary dominoes from toppling. South Vietnam had to be kept in the “free world.”
Yet, rather than the dovish warrior of his youth, Kerry has become a hawkish diplomat in his old age, refusing to see the other side’s case and eager to take extreme positions that are sure to get more young people killed. John Kerry in his 20s was a much wiser man than John Kerry at age 70.
Note that the author’s reference to R2P is described as “responsibility to protect” or “R2P”. This story along with all of Mr. Parry’s great work – he is a dedicated investigative journalist of the type that was run out of the establishment in droves long ago and the voluminous archives at Consortium News are an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand what has gone rotten in this country over the last thirty or so years. He is truly a consummate professional who truly takes his First Amendment duty to call out corrupt and entrenched power seriously.
The real test of the Jew-baiting pamphlet hoax will be what appears in Friday’s papers. Will the neocons as they usually do, steeped in their intellectual and moral corruption and insane dogma of world domination based upon Muslim and Russia hating and warmongering double down or ignore the tale? Every day that the Washington Post and to a larger degree the entire US media continues to hammer this horseshit is another day of a very slow leak of those who believe it and one day the tipping point will arrive when it will all collapse under the accumulated weight of its own falsehoods and fairy tales.
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Submitters Website: http://carryingaflag.blogspot.com/
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Donn Marten is a free lance writer, activist and consultant who resides in West Central Florida.
I am a concerned progressive who has serious problems with the tragic turn that our society has taken. Of primary importance is the the total corruption of our institutions first and foremost our political system. This would not have been possible without the complicity of a corrupt corporate media and it is imperative to use the alternative media to circumvent the propaganda and get the truth out.
