Western Disinformation Never Rests: Deconstructing CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s Portrait of Putin
Dispatches from Deena Stryker
ZAKARIA’S PUTIN ‘DOC’
Everyone knows that Zakaria has been accused of plagiarism, and his film shows that be didn’t stop with appropriating other journalists’ work: he has copied the Hollywood gangster film playbook instead of providing a real portrait of the man who so enrages America. The Russians did that, in an excellent portrait that you can see here: https://www.greanvillepost.com/?s=The+Quiet+Russian so Fareed’s, of course, had to bring something new to the discussion.
First off, the only biographical information concerns his father’s participation in the Great Patriotic War — with no context, such as the fact that, with 27 million killed, the war against Hitler left its mark on every Russian living today. Nor does Fareed tell us that before joining the KGB, Putin was required to graduate from law school, where he majored in international law.
Like a lazy script writer, Fareed relies on Putin’s association with the Soviet Union’s version of the CIA to define him as a threat to the world — overlooking the fact that Poppy Bush, still a gentlemanly icon, headed the shop in Langley. (Quoting Hillary, “He’s a former KGB office, so by definition he can’t have a soul!”) While admitting that his approval rating hovers consistently in the eighties, Zakaria reduces the Russian president to a mafia don who has his enemies bumped off, either with exotic poisons or bullets (while America, always in the forefront of progress, does it with drones…).
Fareed relies on the testimony of David Browder, the son of famous American Communist leader Earl Browder, who made up for his father’s sin by being the American to have made the biggest fortune in newly ‘democratized’ Russia under Boris Yeltsin. Browder tells us he believes Putin to be the richest man in Russia, a supposition buttressed by a reported ‘belief’ that he ‘owns’ dozens of homes, cars and yachts, feebly contradicted by a parenthetical remark that, like all Presidents around the world, he is entitled to ‘use’ properties owned by the nation, such as Air Force One and Camp David.
Fareed did not shoot this film, he just strung together clips from other films and a few interviews. By the time you get to the end you realize he has only one explanation for Putin’s success: he was a lowly KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany when the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Alone at the spy co’s headquarters, with an angry crowd outside, and Moscow not answering the phone, he frantically shoveled papers into a basement furnace, then went out all by himself to face the crowd and told them that there were guards inside who would shoot them if they tried to storm the place. AND SINCE THEN Putin’s great fear has been unruly crowds, like the ones who protested over the 2011 announcement that he would trade places with his Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev in order to get around term limits, which Hillary roundly criticized. As Fareed admits, contradicting the ten previous minutes of the film, Putin’s gamble paid off. He resoundingly won the March, 2012 election and duly appointed Medvedev as his Prime Minister. Supposedly contrary to type, he is shown with tears in his eyes, acknowledging the results. No one living in the US could possibly imagine that strong leaders are actually determined to change their country for the better, a task that takes time.
APPENDIX: The Zakaria “Doc”: The Most Powerful Man in the World
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
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REMEMBER: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.
For media inquiries contact us at greanville@gmail.com
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
MAIN IMAGE:
Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com
We apologize for this inconvenience.
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?
=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable
Please see our red registration box at the bottom of this page
For media inquiries contact us at greanville@gmail.com