How & Why U.S. Media Do Propaganda Against Russia

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he owners of U.S. newsmedia know that in order to serve their fellow U.S. aristocrats who want to kick out Russia’s current leader, Vladimir Putin, so as to enable them to buy Russia’s natural resources (and highly educated work-forces) cheap via “privatizations,” their PR campaign for their fellow aristocrats (their major advertisers) must be led by ‘respectable’ newsmedia, such as Foreign Policy  magazine, and not by blatantly right-wing, obviously trashy, ones, such as Fox News. Overtly conservative, nationalistic, ‘news’ media wouldn’t be able to sell to anyone who isn’t already on-board with privatizations of government assets as being a fundamental “free market” principle (i.e, equating fascism — the actual originator of privatizations — with constituting ‘capitalism,’ confusing the two systems as being one-and-the-same). So: not only the fascist media are anti-Putin, but media that pretend not to be are also.

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ERIC ZUESSE

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Also important, however, is to black out entirely from all U.S. reporting, the U.S. Government’s now very active campaign to conquer Russia by installing next door to Russia, in its former buffer states (the Warsaw Pact nations), new NATO nations, such as Obama hopes to achieve in Ukraine by his February 2014 coup e’etat, which violently overthrew that nation’s then-neutralist democratically elected President, whom U.S. newsmedia very prominently reported was corrupt (in order to fool Americans into thinking that this was somehow a justified overthrow), while they didn’t report that all previous leaders of Ukraine had also been corrupt, so that this U.S. excuse for overthrowing Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych was entirely fake — not just illegitimate, but fake.

Furthermore, they didn’t report that the reason why Yanukovych had turned down the EU’s offer (which the U.S. had backed, and which turndown by him was America’s other main excuse for overthrowing him) was that it would have cost Ukraine $160 billion. In fact, U.S. newsmedia didn’t even report that the coup was  a coup, even though the head of Stratfor, the private-CIA firm, has acknowledged that it was “the most blatant coup in history,”and the President of the Czech Republic has said that“only poorly informed people” don’t know that it was a coup. He said of these “poorly informed people,” that,“They believe that there was something similar, to our Velvet Revolution … Majdan was no democratic revolution.” And, on 20 June 2015, an obscure news-release from the Ukrainian Government itself headlined“Poroshenko asking Constitutional Court to recognize law stripping Yanukovych of presidential title as unconstitutional,” and reported, as I explained two days later:

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko requests the supreme court of Ukraine to declare that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown by an illegal operation; in other words, that the post-Yanukovych government, including Poroshenko’s own Presidency, came into power from a coup, not from something democratic, not from any authentic constitutional process at all.

In a remarkable document, which is not posted at the English version of the website of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, but which is widely reported outside the United States, including Russia, Poroshenko, in Ukrainian (not in English), has petitioned the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (as it is being widely quoted in English): 

“I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as [being] unconstitutional.”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s also interesting that when Stratfor’s founder admitted that it was “the most blatant coup in history,” he was saying this to a Russian publication, which published it only in Russian, whereas when his employee recently referred to it, in a video for an American audience, she said (at 4:43 on the video) “the United States helped support the revolution [though it was no revolution, just a coup] that took place in Ukraine this past year.” Stratfor doesn’t want to go overboard to the extent of losing its big-bucks clients, some of which are the people that Obama’s foreign policies represent, but even this employee was so bold as to admit that the United States and not Russia is the aggressor between the two — something the U.S. media won’t allow to be said.

(She expressed puzzlement there at why the U.S. public have come to believe the demonization of Putin, but she’s not so dumb as not to know the answer to that, and she later even said it on the video, at 4:43: “The way that the American media has put it out there is that Russia is being the aggressor.” The video itself was even posted to youtube as, “Conversation: The U.S. Media’s Misleading Portrayal of Russia.” But the video portrayed the newsmedia as merely reflecting American public opinion, instead of as shaping  it and being paid by their sponsors to shape it their way, which everyone at Stratfor knows is the reality. The deception is all paid-for. America’s aristocrats are running both the U.S. Government, and the way it and the world-at-large are being portrayed to the public. They control the public, both coming and going.)

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merica’s aggression against Russia first became overt when the U.S. aristocracy’s President, Bill Clinton (who killed FDR’s Glass Steagall Act and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society AFDC program, and so was one of the best fake ‘Democrats’ until Obama came along and turned Heritage Foundation ideas into U.S. national policies), rejected Russia’s request to join NATO, and he instead invited into NATO three former members of the Warsaw Pact: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Clinton used the cooked-up excuse against Russia that Russia was then trying to retain Chechnya, though that’s a part of Russia which serves as an essential buffer against possible invasion by Islamic tribes to the south, from Georgia, Dagestan, and Azerbaijan; and so Chechnya’s breakaway movement actually did constitute a national security threat to the rest of Russia. Chechnya was none of the United States’s business, but Clinton needed an excuse, and it served that function for him. The Toledo Blade’s Mike Sigov even headlined on 7 November 1999, “Clinton’s Appeal to Halt fighting in Chechnya Falls on Deaf Ears,”and he wrote: “‘Why does the United States keep humiliating us?’ they often ask. My friends in Russia,… periodically ask me this question. It happened when the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies denied Russia’s request to join NATO and instead admitted Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.” The U.S. aristocracy had wanted, actually, to conquer Russia; they didn’t want merely for the Cold War to end — this was now clear. They want to keep it going until Russia itself is conquered. Obama is doing the same thing at the end of his Presidency that Clinton had done at the end of his, but maybe even worse, because Obama has placed Ukraine into control by rabidly anti-Russian nazis, who are also nowteaching the children.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]espite the general blockade against truth, a few American newsmedia have reported, throughout this summer, that Ukraine’s far-right leaders (such as Dmitriy Yarosh) are threatening another “Maidan,” to overthrow the present President of Ukraine, but they don’t report that those same leaders (including Yarosh himself) were instrumental in Barack Obama’s coup in February 2014: the CIA had arranged payments for Yarosh and his people, and, without this U.S. organization and financial backing (including even the establishment of a major TV station to propagandize for overthrowing Yanukovych and for mass-murdering the people who had voted for him), there would have been no coup. None of this information appears in U.S. newsmedia. The American public are widely ignorant of the reality about Ukraine. There are plenty of reports that stenographically transcribe and transmit to the American public the official ‘facts’ about Ukraine, but nothing that exposes the reality, which would be to expose the U.S. aristocracy itself (and this extends all the way from George Soros on the left, to the Koch brothers on the right: virtually the entire aristocracy are committed to defeating the public, not only at home, but abroad).

Therefore, Poroshenko is, in effect, telling Yarosh and his supporters: If you do this again, this time to me, then there will already be a decision from our highest court saying that what you did last time was illegal. And, Poroshenko had already acknowledged, just as the coup was ending, when the EU’s investigator asked him how the overthrow had occurred: We did it, the snipers who shot both the demonstrators and the police were ours; it was a set-up job so as to appear that the violence had been initiated or perpetrated by Yanukovych’s forces, which were actually performing a defensive function, not offensive at all. So: he was already privately on record as having acknowledged this. But that, too, was not published in the American press, even though the evidence for it was first posted online on 5 March 2014, just a week after the coup. Basically, it has all been kept secret from the American people, just as the coup itself has been, and just as theethnic cleansing to get rid of Yanukovych’s voters has been.

And this has been a thoroughly bipartisan operation of the U.S. Government, not merely Democrats, and not merely Republicans. Both Parties are in the aristocrats’ pockets. (The man whom Congress applauded there was then overseeing the nazi operation.) This has not always been the case; it certainly wasn’t so when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was America’s President; but it is today.

So, some typical examples of their propaganda-operation are:

Bruce Stokes headlines in Foreign Policy  on 6 August 2015, “NATO’s Rot from Within,” and concludes his analysis of polling in the 9 major NATO countries by noting a lack of public support for NATO in all countries except “the Americans (56 percent) and the Canadians (53 percent) stand ready to go to the defense of a NATO partner against Russia.” His implicit viewpoint is that all NATO countries need to tool-up for a war against Russia; Russia is surrounding NATO, NATO isn’t surrounding Russia.

The mainstream The Daily Beast headlines on 14 August 2015, “Pentagon Fears It’s Not Ready for a War With Putin,” and Nancy A. Youssef opens: “The U.S. military has run the numbers on a sustained fight with Moscow, and they do not look good for the American side. A series of classified exercises over the summer has raised concerns inside the Defense Department that its forces are not prepared for a sustained military campaign against Russia, two defense officials told The Daily Beast.” Again, the underlying assumption is that Russia is the biggest national security threat to the United States, and so there need to be increases in U.S. ‘defense’ spending, to counter Russia’s ‘aggression.’

U.S. News headlined on 23 June 2015, “Top GOP Lawmaker: US Must Consider Building New Nukes,” and Paul D. Shinkman opened: “America needs to replace a rotting arsenal of nuclear weapons and counteract an increasingly boisterous Russia, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. For these reasons, it must consider the long-taboo prospect of building new nukes.”

The U.S. already spent 55.2% of its discretionary federal spending on its military. More money than that would transform the national economy into national impoverishment, because one can’t eat, nor live in, bombs and tanks, nor in any of the other machinery of destruction.

Why even watch ‘the news’ on television, or read about it in magazines or newspapers?

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut there are a few honest news reports even in the U.S. major newsmedia: On 24 February 2014, just as the U.S. coup in Ukraine was ending, NBC News bannered, “U.S. Military Spending Dwarfs Rest of World,” and they showed that “The U.S. spent more on defense in 2012 than the countries with the next 10 highest budgets combined.” It was about 8 times what Russia had spent, and this amount didn’t even include the additional spending by other NATO countries, all of which have mutual-defense treaties with the U.S. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the Warsaw Pact, which was to Russia what NATO was to the U.S., simply terminated; Russia has since been all alone; and it should have been brought into NATO if NATO weren’t to disband as the Warsaw Pact had done. But the U.S. didn’t do likewise; instead, it rejected Russia. Instead, to the exact contrary, the U.S. invited and brought into NATO seven of the eight former Warsaw Pact countries. That’s aggression. But the U.S. calls “aggression” anything that Russia does to protect itself. Only suckers would believe that, but there’s a sucker born every minute — no, every second! (How could the aristocracy even survive, otherwise?)

In February, President Obama issued his “National Security Strategy 2015” and it used the word “aggression” 18 times, of which 17 referred to Russia as the alleged “aggressor.” If this is merely a mental illness that Obama has, then why are the U.S. ‘news’ media in lockstep behind it? But this strategy isn’t directed only against Russia, it’s directed also against the rest of Europe, even against other NATO countries.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] 2013 Gallup poll of 65 countries that was co-sponsored by the U.S. Government and thus never fully published, reportedly found that among people worldwide, “The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%).” (Russia wasn’t even there, in the top 5; and nothing below the top 5 was mentioned.) And Obama hadn’t yet perpetrated his coup and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine.

But there was no report of any such poll made afterwards, none at all. Perhaps the U.S. Government didn’t want another, because they now knew that they and their press would need to do a lot more work in order to get Russia to be #1 on that list. Maybe this is what they’ve been working on.

However, it’s already clear that the Nobel Committee should abolish their ‘Peace Prize,’ after their having given it to Kissinger, and then to Obama. Maybe they should replace it with a Hypocrisy Prize. Obama would certainly qualify for that. Maybe they could get him to trade in his old prize for that new one, so as to reduce their embarrassment (if they’re not just psychopaths, anyway, like Kissinger and Obama).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.