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Finian Cunningham
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EXPOSING CAPITALISM'S MULTITUDE OF VICES AND INCURABLE PROBLEMS
Guest Editorial
Finian Cunningham
The death of former US diplomat Madeleine Albright this week was met with predictably fawning Western media tributes. Not one word referred to her actual tarnished record of promoting American imperialism and criminal wars.
Now, of course, the Western media would never tend towards such truthful reporting and analysis. Its sanitizing role is constant and standard fare. That is why the Western public is caught up today in this insane moral panic and hypocrisy over the war in Ukraine where Russia is vilified as an unprovoked aggressor and the Kiev Nazi regime (with its Jewish puppet president) is lionized as some kind of innocent victim.
The widespread Western public ignorance over what is happening in Ukraine – the violent background to the present conflict, the CIA coup in 2014, the Nazi paramilitaries attacking Russian-speaking people in the Donbass, the relentless NATO weaponizing of the Russophobic regime, training of its Nazi paramilitaries by NATO troops and so on – is largely due to the Western media’s systematic lying, omission, and distortion.
However, the brain-dead function of the Western media is especially highlighted this week by the death of Madeleine Albright and the total silence about how her career is tightly entwined with today’s conflict. The war in Ukraine is but the front line of a wider proxy war between the United States, NATO and Russia.
The former US Secretary of State was one of the main pushers in the American foreign policy establishment of NATO’s eastward expansion. Several eminent US thinkers such as Jack Matlock, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Professor John Mearsheimer, have deplored that expansion as a treacherous, fateful act leading to today’s conflict between the West and Russia.
When Albright was Secretary of State in the second Bill Clinton administration (1997-2001), she ushered in the eastward advance of NATO in spite of earlier American assurances to the contrary to Russian leaders.
Her most salient “achievement” was to launch the US and NATO war on former Yugoslavia. That war was supposedly in defense of Kosovo-Albanians. But it was really an overture for US imperialism to bomb European countries into the geopolitical shape it desired.
Albright died on March 23 at the age of 84 from cancer. The next day, March 24, marked the 23rd anniversary of the beginning of the US-led NATO blitzkrieg on Serbia and its capital Belgrade.
Twitter Reacts to Madeleine Albright’s Passing With Sorrow And Joy
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is arguably founded on the principle of self-defense given the NATO-backed Kiev regime’s eight years of aggression. That military incursion has been going on for four weeks as of March 24. There have been reportedly 1,400 Russian aerial strike sorties in Ukraine. Despite Western media hysterical reporting about alleged indiscriminate Russian bombing against civilian centers, the Pentagon has quietly admitted and corroborated what Moscow has said, that the Russian campaign has been restrained in order to avoid civilian casualties, as reported by Joe Lauria for Consortium News.
Contrast that with the US-led NATO attack on the former Yugoslavia. That war lasted for 78 days during which 10,500 strike sorties were carried out. Some 2,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed. Civilian infrastructure destroyed included 25,000 homes, 20 hospitals, 70 schools, 38 bridges, over 1,000 kilometers of road and railway, 14 airports, as well as water, sewage and power plants.
Western media decry Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as the “worst” act of barbarity in Europe since World War Two. Clearly, that is a gross distortion. The barbarism of the US and NATO in Yugoslavia has been consigned to a memory hole, as far as Western media is concerned.
Madeleine Albright paved the way for the 1999 criminal US war in Europe. The NATO operation did not have any authorization from the UN Security Council even for its pretense of “defending human rights”. The war against the former Yugoslavia was a naked act of aggression. Albright was the architect of that war. At another time she declared the US had the right to use violence unilaterally because it was “an indispensable nation”.
The path to today’s dangerous proxy conflict between the US-led NATO alliance and Russia can be traced back to the policy formulated by Madeleine Albright and like-minded imperialists in Washington. The destruction of Yugoslavia 23 years ago under her watch has culminated in the present near-war situation between the US and Russia due to relentless and reckless NATO expansionism all the way to Russia’s borders, including the weaponization of a Nazi regime in Ukraine.
It should be seen as incredible that her nefarious, paramount relevance for today’s crisis should be so blatantly omitted in Western media. All we can read about her this week were eulogies to Albright’s “brilliant” diplomacy and being an icon for female achievement.
That such a glaring omission can be made at this critically important time just shows the noxious propaganda function of Western media. Totally brain-dead. Meanwhile, alternative critical media have been blacked out as “Russian propaganda”.
The brain-dead function of Western media is what makes the danger of war even greater.
Finian Cunningham is an award-winning journalist. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he holds a Master’s degree in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry in Cambridge, England, before entering a career in journalism. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain's Independent, among others. Now a freelance commenter, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik & Strategic Culture Foundation. He is the second-time recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism (December 2020).
Finian Cunningham is an award-winning journalist. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he holds a Master’s degree in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry in Cambridge, England, before entering a career in journalism. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain's Independent, among others. Now a freelance commenter, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik & Strategic Culture Foundation. He is the second-time recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism (December 2020).
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