What I Did After Police Killed My Son
PRIMARY SOURCE
By MICHAEL BELL | August 15, 2014
POLITICO
Ten years later, we in Wisconsin passed the nation’s first law calling for outside reviews.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter police in Kenosha, Wis., shot my 21-year-old son to death outside his house ten years ago — and then immediately cleared themselves of all wrongdoing — an African-American man approached me and said: “If they can shoot a white boy like a dog, imagine what we’ve been going through.”
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I could imagine it all too easily, just as the rest of the country has been seeing it all too clearly in the terrible images coming from Ferguson, Mo., in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown. On Friday, after a week of angry protests, the police in Ferguson finally identified the officer implicated in Brown’s shooting, although the circumstances still remain unclear.
I have known the name of the policeman who killed my son, Michael, for ten years. And he is still working on the force in Kenosha.
Yes, there is good reason to think that many of these unjustifiable homicides by police across the country are racially motivated. But there is a lot more than that going on here. Our country is simply not paying enough attention to the terrible lack of accountability of police departments and the way it affects all of us—regardless of race or ethnicity. Because if a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy — that was my son, Michael — can be shot in the head under a street light with his hands cuffed behind his back, in front of five eyewitnesses (including his mother and sister), and his father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew in three wars for his country — that’s me — and I still couldn’t get anything done about it, then Joe the plumber and Javier the roofer aren’t going to be able to do anything about it either.
***
I got the phone call at 2 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2004. It was my oldest daughter. She said you need to come to the hospital right away, Michael’s been shot by the police. My first gut reaction was, “Michael doesn’t do anything serious enough to get shot by a police officer.” I thought he’d gotten shot in the leg or whatever. When I arrived, I saw the district attorney huddled with about five police officers. The last time I saw my son alive he was on a gurney, with his head wrapped in a big towel and blood coming out of it. I learned that an officer had put his gun up directly to Michael’s right temple and misfired, then did it again, and shot him.
From the beginning I cautioned patience, though Michael’s mother and sister were in an uproar. They had watched him get shot. But as an Air Force officer and pilot I knew the way safety investigations are conducted, and I was thinking that this was going to be conducted this way. Yet within 48 hours I got the message: The police had cleared themselves of all wrongdoing. In 48 hours! They hadn’t even taken statements from several eyewitnesses. Crime lab reports showed that my son’s DNA or fingerprints were not on any gun or holster, even though one of the police officers involved in Michael’s shooting had claimed that Michael had grabbed his gun.
The officer who killed my son, Albert Gonzalez, is not only still on the force ten years later, he is also a licensed concealed-gun instructor across the state line in Illinois—and was identified by the Chicago Tribune in an Aug. 7 investigative story as one of “multiple instructors [who] are police officers with documented histories of making questionable decisions about when to use force.”
From the beginning I allowed the investigation to proceed and didn’t know it was a sham until many of the facts were discovered. But before long I realized a cover-up was under way. I hadn’t understood at first how closely related the DA and the police were—during his election campaign for judge, the DA had been endorsed in writing by every police agency in the county. Now he was investigating them. It was a clear conflict of interest.
The police claimed that one officer screamed that Michael grabbed his gun after they stopped him, for reasons that remain unclear though he was slightly intoxicated, and then Gonzalez shot him, sticking the gun so close against his temple that he left a muzzle imprint. Michael wasn’t even driving his own car. He’d been out with a designated driver, but the designated driver drank and was younger, and so my son made the decision to drive.
Wanting to uncover the truth, our family hired a private investigator who ended up teaming up with a retired police detective to launch their own investigation. They discovered that the officer who thought his gun was being grabbed in fact had caught it on a broken car mirror. The emergency medical technicians who arrived later found the officers fighting with each other over what happened. We filed an 1,100-page report detailing Michael’s killing with the FBI and US Attorney.
It took six years to get our wrongful death lawsuit settled, and my family received $1.75 million. But I wasn’t satisfied by a long shot. I used my entire portion of that money and much more of my own to continue a campaign for more police accountability. I wanted to change things for everyone else, so no one else would ever have to go through what I did. We did our research: In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified. There was one shooting we found, in 2005, that was ruled justified by the department and an inquest, but additional evidence provided by citizens caused the DA to charge the officer. The city of Milwaukee settled with a confidentiality agreement and the facts of that sealed. The officer involved committed suicide.
[dropcap]I’m not anti-cop[/dropcap]. And I am finding that many police want change as well: The good officers in the state of Wisconsin supported our bill from the inside, and it was endorsed by five police unions. But I also think the days of Andy Griffith and the Mayberry peacekeeper are over. As we can see in the streets of Ferguson, today’s police are also much more heavily equipped, armed and armored— more militarized. They are moving to more paramilitary-type operations as well, and all those shifts call for more transparency and more rules of restraint. And yet they are even less accountable in some ways than the U.S. military in which I served. Our citizens need protection from undue force, here in our own country, and now. Michael Bell is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
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The Post-Left Era
OPEDS
In 1971 Germaine Greer shook the feminist camp with her book The Female Eunuch, a witty, passionate but ultimately too personal account of politics that remained safely within the bounds of bourgeois rebellion.
By Batu Caliskan
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here exists no Left in the West in the modern age; Leftists are extant in small, isolated enclaves, but there is no genuine Leftist movement. The absence of the Left has terrible implications, not only for the future of Western nations, but also for the nations still subjected to Western hegemony through the mechanistic workings of the world governments and the duplicitous narrative of Liberalism.
I. Devolution of the Western Left
There, at one critical point in history, existed a genuine Left, a Left that was unequivocally committed to the ideals of self-determination and liberation for all peoples. For all intents and purposes, the Left, and with it the promise of an emergent revolutionary class, is gone. The historic Left, composed of dissident communists, “red” anarchists of the syndicalist persuasion, radical socialists, and the like, has been replaced by the New “Left”, a political scam of a movement that perpetuates globalism, New Class managerialism, entrenching capitalism, and atomistic individualism, all under the guise of freedom for the downtrodden. What exists now, in modern Western society, is not the Left, in any meaningful sense, but rather, a flimsy simulacrum that vaunts the rhetoric of the historic Left without understanding or committing to it.
II. The Composition of the New “Left”
In the United States, in particular, the New Left came into prominence within the late decades (60s and 70s, noticeably) of the twentieth-century. When describing the New Left, it is important not only to describe the general composition of the movement, but also the personalities that it attracts. The champions of the New Left, prime examples being disillusioned university youth, wayward pseudo-political liberal bohemians, libertine hedonists, and other marginal, effete deviants, were largely a product, and continuation, of a conservative post-war American society.
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Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, during the heady days of the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 70s. Vietnam served as a uniting force and inspiration for many leftists but the tactics and strategies for genuine revolution remained painfully elusive.
[dropcap]At the end of the World War II[/dropcap], the world was witness to the transformation of America into a global empire; it escaped relatively-unscathed from the horrors of the war, and was free to pursue its own trajectory of unprecedented economic prosperity at the dawn of the “Golden Age”. The financial security that this prosperity birthed facilitated the gradual entrenching of the New Class, a conglomeration of social engineers, white-collar managerialists, planners, technocrats, and professionals entirely detached from the realities of the working-class1. The crass materialism (in a non-philosophical sense) of suburban New Class lifestyles, and the rigidity it carried, propelled a whole generation towards a rebellion which, in a kind of tragic irony, preserved the conservative impulses of the era in a more implicit fashion.
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Germaine at 75. She has aged gracefully, and some say mellowed, but her revolutionary contribution shrinks with each passing year.
All the attempted rebellion of the New Left amounted to was a re-packaging of reactionary ideals into different forms. The energy directed towards the liberation of American racial minorities was diverted into support for the abomination of affirmative action, a policy intended to assimilate the racial underclasses into the White, Liberal majority’s institutional pathology by means of entrance into the university system, which remains as the primary point of access to a managerialist, upper-class lifestyle. The danger and intrigue concomitant to revolutionarism, particularly that of anarchism, was bottled like a commodity and sold en masse to the public in the form of the “anarchist” punk-rock bands of the late twentieth century. Women’s demands for liberation from male dominance in the private and public spheres manifested in the rise of the “sexual liberation” of the 1970s2, which only furthered women’s traditional oppression by disguising sexual humiliation as the epitome of sexual liberation.
III. The Institutional Pathology of the New Left
The Left has collapsed into a sad state of degeneracy; it is now possible for any political illiterate to advance a claim to Leftism. The reason for this is that the New Left is apolitical, non-committal, and highly unserious; it reduces politics to recreational lifestylism. This pathology is inherent not only to communist circles, but to anarchist ones, an observation the late political theoretician, Murray Bookchin, expounded upon in several of his works against the post-Left anarchists3.
The ideology of the New Left is dangerous precisely because it subdues all radical consciousness, usurps genuine Leftist movements, and monopolizes all claims to the revolutionary traditions of the historic Left. For the recreational “Leftist”, politics is just another game to indulge in. He is not interested in constructing the myth of revolutionary violence (used in the Sorelian sense4) necessary to liberate the working-class nor is he interested in serious subversion of the existing politico-economic structure that permeates through the Western world so thoroughly. He may complain of the excesses of capitalism here and there, but not only does he lack a reasoned, cohesive insight into the intimate workings of corporate capitalism, he is also not willing to relinquish the crass consumerism (and the lifestylism it produces) that capitalism nurtures so effectively. He touts the rhetoric of violent resistance without understanding its implications on the personal, and is content to spout any denunciations against the existing capitalist order, as long as his personal comfort and state of mind remain intact. The irony lies in the fact that the recreational Leftist who clings to this lifestylism, and who putatively champions for the underprivileged, oppressed, etc., is the bitterly-hated class enemy of the downtrodden, including revolutionaries of the criminal (and non-criminal) working class, lumpenproletariats, the racial “underclasses”, and other supposed dregs of society.
IV. A March Backwards
Never before has there been a worse historical cycle to inherent. Whatever the cause of this decline may be, one thing can be noted; the post-Left era is upon us. The New Left was never the Left, is not the Left, and will never be the Left, contrary to the shrill insistences and reckless conflations of Right-wing ideologues. It has no potential, no vision, and no spirit; it is the shell of the former Left, a crude imitation that is extant due to its intimate association with the conservative forces of modern Western hegemony and Liberal capitalism.
V. A Much-Needed Revival
This morass exists because we, those unfortunate enough to witness the emergence of this historical trend, are not serious; we were not serious when cries of “Make love, not war” substituted the slogan of “Make jobs, not war”, when anti-capitalist rhetoric was reduced to exosemantic gang-signs for pseudo-Leftists to flash on whim, or when the ravings of the post-Leftists were in vogue among the self-proclaimed “anarchist” milieu.
It is time to abandon the New Left; it is no accident that it ended up in its current state. Whatever ideological praxis may dominate after its collapse, it is clear that the intellectual stagnation we witness today is no step forward.
References
2 Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax a Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. North Melbourne, Vic.: Spinifex, 2011. Print.
3 Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh: AK, 1995. Print.
4 Sorel, Georges, T. E. Hulme, and J. Roth. Reflections on Violence. Glencoe, IL: Free, 1950. Print.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Batu Caliskan is a Turkish writer who has written for various journals, including Attack the System and RADIX, on the question of decentralization, anti-statism, race relations, and the modern Left.
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Forget ‘Fair and Balanced’
The barricades outside the Donetsk regional administration building are plastered with anti-fascist posters. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne searches almost in vain for honest reporting on the Ukraine conflict in the US corporate media, which is simply parroting the US government position, which is that the rebels in eastern Ukraine are simply tools of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Yet the murderous shelling of the people of the rebel regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine is almost certainly wholly the work of an aggressive Kiev-government led Ukraine military, which has been ramping up its forces in the east in preparation for a renewed assault on the two separatist states of Lugansk and Donetsk.
Each time there is a report of shelling of either city, Lugansk or Donetsk, the US media either completely fail to mention who might be responsible, or they report that “both sides” accuse each other of being responsible, though this is clearly absurd, since even those same media also refer to Donetsk and Lugansk as “rebel-held” or “separatist-held,” or as “rebel strongholds.” Why, one ought to ask, would the rebels shell their own territory, much less the capitals of their respective rebel regions?
The US media is not alone in its outrageous lies. The British sidekick does exactly the same, enlisting the now completely untrustworthy BBC in their mutually-reinforcing campaigns of disinformation. Click on the bar below and judge for yourselves, as the onetime gold standard of international journalism peddles the same propaganda memes emanating from Washington. Incidentally, the bombardment of Donetsk and other rebel cities by Kiev’s army has been going on for many months. A cursory look at this page of YouTube videos suffices to gauge the magnitude and persistence of this criminal tactic. —Editors
[learn_more]
Ukraine crisis: Heavy bombardment in rebel-held Donetsk
Unmarked military vehicles were spotted in a rebel area on Saturday.
Shelling has resumed in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, just hours after an intense artillery bombardment throughout the night.
An eyewitness said the overnight shelling was the worst in more than a month, lasting almost eight hours.
It appeared to be coming from both rebel and government positions. (sic)
The fighting comes a day after monitors saw large numbers of military vehicles in rebel areas. Ukraine says it thinks the rebels get equipment from Russia.
Moscow denies this, although in the past it has said that Russian soldiers on leave were fighting among the rebels. [/learn_more]
RESUME READING REGULAR TEXT
The model for how such incidents are to be reported was set on Oct. 6 by America’s version of Pravda, Voice of America. In its article that day, headlined NATO Concerned about E. Ukraine Cease-Fire Violations, it states:
The new head of NATO said the Western military alliance is concerned about the large number of violations of the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, which he indirectly blamed on pro-Russian separatists.
Following in lockstep with that approach, here’s what the US media had to say about the conflict in recent weeks:
A shaky cease-fire in eastern Ukraine looked ever more tenuous on Sunday as European monitors confirmed reports of unmarked military vehicles driving through rebel-held territory while Donetsk, the region’s biggest city, endured a nightlong artillery battle.
The monitoring group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that long columns of unmarked military vehicles, some towing howitzers, were spotted over the weekend. The monitors did not speculate as to the origins of the trucks or the people inside them, but Ukrainian officials said the statements bolstered their claims that Russia was again arming and training separatists.
…On Sunday, after what journalists in Donetsk described as the heaviest night of artillery shelling in and around the city in at least a month, the O.S.C.E. observers saw two more unmarked military columns. The observers noted 17 trucks in each column, some equipped with Grad ground-to-ground rocket launchers and others towing more howitzers.
Comment: Notice the focus here on the unidentified military vehicles, but not a word about who would have been firing that heavy artillery barrage into rebel-held Donetsk. A real news organization — as opposed to a propaganda organ — would have asked that question and would have sought answers. Clearly the rebels weren’t bombarding their own capital city, but the Times didn’t mention that absurdity.
Fresh volleys of artillery fire were heard across many parts of the separatist stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Sunday, a Ukrainian government statement said, after Kiev warned again of rebel preparations for a fresh offensive.
A Reuters witness in central Donetsk heard several dozen blasts of artillery fire, although it was unclear who had launched them or what was under attack.
Shelling from both sides has repeatedly punctured a ceasefire, agreed in a deal signed on Sept. 5 to end a war that has killed more than 4,000 people since April. Government forces and rebels have accused each other of violating the terms of the truce, raising fears it could collapse entirely.
Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders and NATO have accused Russia of sending soldiers and weapons to help pro-Russian rebels launch a possible new offensive, a charge the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
Before the latest reports of shelling, a Ukrainian military spokesman said on Sunday the weekend had been calmer than in previous days, but warned again of a buildup in separatist forces.
“Compared with previous days, the number and intensity (of shelling) fell, but there are signs of rebels and Russian forces preparing for an offensive,” Andriy Lysenko said in a briefing in Kiev.
Comment: Once again nowhere does Reuters (now a US news organization, after its merger with Thompson Corp to form Thomson Publishing Group, headquartered in Philadelphia), mention that the shelling of Donetsk would inevitably have been the work of the Ukraine military, not of the separatists who are headquartered there. Instead, the article keeps mentioning the claim that the eastern Ukraine rebels are backed by Russia (no crime, and certainly something the US does militarily to countless countries).
Demonstrators wave revolutionary flags at a major pro-Russia rally in Lenin Square in central Donetsk.
Two teens were killed and four others wounded when an artillery shell hit a school in Ukraine’s war-torn Donetsk region on Wednesday as a two-month truce between Kiev and pro-Russian militants appeared to be in collapse.
The BBC reports that the shell struck a school sports field where children were playing soccer, near Donetsk airport. The four teens who survived the attack are being treated in an intensive care unit at a local trauma center.
The renewed clashes appear to have been spurred by the widely condemned elections held in Ukraine’s rebel-held southeast over the weekend. Both Kiev and separatist forces are reportedly preparing for all-out conflict once again, with troops being mobilized.
Comment: Again, we see no information or even speculation as to who would have fired a shell into a Donetsk schoolyard, but it seems obvious that unless it was an errant shell fired by rebels, they would not have been targeting a playing field used by their own people.
To get any real idea as to how this conflict — really a civil war, or war of secession by a part of Ukraine populated largely by Russian speakers — one has to forget US media and turn to something like Al Jazeera. Here’s an Al Jazeera report on the conflict, headlined Moscow says Kiev ‘crudely violated’ ceasefire and dated November 6:
Russia has accused the Kiev government of violating the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, saying it has intensified its military offensive against rebels.
The accusation came as Ukraine announced the introduction of passport controls around areas held by pro-Russian separatists and heavy artillery fire erupted in Donetsk.
“It is obvious today that these agreements have been crudely violated by the Ukrainian side,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
“In place of de-escalation, Kiev has intensified the hostilities in the southeast of the country with the use of heavy equipment, which has led to thousands of casualties and large-scale destruction.”
…It was not possible to verify which side was responsible for the fire, AFP reported.
The fragility of the situation was underlined on Thursday when the Kiev government and the rebels traded blame over the shelling of a school the day before, which left two teenagers dead and four others injured.
Andriy Lysenko, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said that preliminary information indicates the shells flew into the schoolyard in Donetsk from a location controlled by separatist forces.
But the rebels blamed Ukrainian forces for Wednesday’s deadly attack, saying government troops indiscriminately target residential areas in eastern Ukraine.
Lysenko said that in the latest shelling across the conflict zone, nine Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded. The separatists rarely release casualty figures.
He also repeated accusations that “Russian units and mercenaries” continued to cross into Ukraine.
Russian denies directly aiding the rebels, although Russia soldiers and equipment have been frequently spotted by journalists in the conflict zone.
Comment: Notice how differently this Al Jazeera report covers the shelling of the playground, from the way it was handled by Time Magazine. Here, the Ukrainians are quoted as blaming the rebels, but the rebels deny responsibility and point to the widespread “indiscriminate” shelling of civilians in their territory by Ukrainian forces.
That is good journalism.
The stuff being published by the US corporate media isn’t journalism at all. It is rank propaganda in support of the US government’s goal, which attempting to drive, at all costs, a wedge between America’s vassal states in Europe, and the Russian Federation.
The American public need to know that, but as long as they just obtain their news from the corporate media, whether that’s Fox or CNN or the vaunted New York Times, they’re not going to get it.
About the author
Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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Carry a Badge and Gun? Carry a Body Camera.
OpEds
Joe Giambrone
The video camera idea is an idea whose time has come. Pictured is San Jose Police Department officer Michael Ceballos wearing a video/audio recording device during a press conference at SJPD headquarters on Dec. 18, 2009. (Dai Sugano/Mercury News)
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]et a real evolutionary leap come out of this Ferguson fiasco. Police will be required to wear body cameras at all times when on duty. Their actions will be recorded and not fall into the black hole where only one side of a story remains, as dead men tell no tales.
Police are to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us for several reasons. It is their job to enforce laws, and they are given discretion as well as deadly weaponry to do so. Regular citizens have no such priviledge. Police are a special case where accountability, oversight, accuracy, and the public trust need to be maintained. Right now these are all at an all-time low.
Where cameras have been in use, “public complaints against officers plunged 88% compared with the previous 12 months, and officers’ use of force fell by 60%.”
A combination body camera radio microphone from Wolfcam is seen during a press conference at City Hall September 24, 2014 in Washington, DC. The Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department is embarking on a six- month pilot program where 250 body cameras will be used by officers. AFP PHOTO/Brendan SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
Paterson, Newark and Jersey City plan on equipping their forces with body cameras, and this is just the beginning. “The federal court in New York has ordered some police officers to carry cameras, while departments in Albuquerque, Fort Worth, Texas, and Oakland, California, have voluntarily started the practice.”
This is still a land of sovereign citizens with Constitutionally protected rights. As such we need to make sure that these rights are not systematicallly stripped away by law enforcement that operates above the law, beyond the law, outside the law. How much more difficult would it be for a dirty cop whose shifts are recorded? Think about it.
The citizens’ demand for police body cameras (along with patrol car cameras) should be universal, irrefutable, and irrepressible, implemented even in jurisdictions whose officials resist such regulations. Either by an act of Congress, or by referendum, this is a development that can no longer be denied.
In the UK, another state where police abuses are rapidly escalating, body video cameras are also being tested.
In a land where the police are turning into militarized organizations from out of 1984, or The Hunger Games, we are now at a crossroads. Either all that rhetoric about freedom, liberty, rights, law and order was meant to be taken seriously, or else we are to tolerate a fascistic system of double standards and unaccountable state power, including the wholesale murder in the streets of the poor and of minorities.
The White House has already responded to a petition demanding body cameras on police officers. Empty rhetoric so far, the usual bland say nothing, do nothing vapidity of politicians. This is going to take citizens to stand up and demand a just system of justice. It will take awareness, political pressure and local action across the land. The structures of police departments are largely local and respond to local pressure.
Even the ACLU has gotten on board the recording of on-duty police officers. While the unaccountable surveillance of the public remains a violation of the 4th Amendment, the oversight of policing falls into a different category. ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley said that, “all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints.” Interactions with police tend to be kept to a higher standard when there is a video record of everything said and done.
Google. These are not taken as seriously as an official record, from the officer’s own body camera. Yet they are all one would need to make a reasoned case that it is time to hold police to the standard of the law.
Society only works when the social contract is honored by all parties. The citizens of Ferguson are telling us this week that one party has broken this contract.
Joe Giambrone publishes Political Film Blog.
—
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Vox Populi: Readers Comments Show anti-Putin Propaganda Not Working
CROSSPOST W. COUNTERPUNCH
Stephen Harper, a naked tool of US policy and a vile rightwinger who has disgraced the office of Canadian PM, and compromised its sovereignty, had the gall to score points with the hyenas by publicly insulting Pres. Putin by asking him “to get out of Ukraine”. Putin’s crisp reply has been scrubbed from the mainstrean news: “Unfortunately it is impossible, (for us to leave Ukraine) because we are not there.” The ever Canadian whoremedia naturally applauded Harper.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nyone who follows the news regularly, knows that the media has done everything in its power to smear Vladimir Putin and to demonize him as a tyrant and a thug. Fortunately, most people aren’t buying it.
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Yes, I’ve seen the polls that say that Putin and Russia are viewed “less favorably” than they were prior to the crisis in Ukraine. In fact, here’s a clip from a recent PEW survey which seems to prove that I’m wrong:
“Across the 44 countries surveyed, a median percentage of 43% have unfavorable opinions of Russia, compared with 34% who are positive.
Negative ratings of Russia have increased significantly since 2013 in 20 of the 36 countries surveyed…
Americans and Europeans in particular have soured on Russia over the past 12 months. More than six-in-ten in Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the U.S. and the UK have an unfavorable image of Russia. And in all but one of these countries negative reviews are up by double digits since last year, including by 29 percentage points in the U.S., 27 points in Poland, 24 points in the UK and 23 points in Spain.” (Russia’s Global Image Negative amid Crisis in Ukraine: Americans’ and Europeans’ Views Sour Dramatically, PEW Research)
These results strongly suggest that the public blames Moscow for the fighting in Ukraine and (presumably) agrees with the prevailing storyline that Putin is a vicious aggressor who seized Crimea in order to rebuild the Soviet Empire. The problem with the PEW survey is that the results are based on random samples of nationwide face-to-face or telephone interviews.
Why is that a problem?
It’s a problem because the man-on-the-street hasn’t the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Ukraine. All he knows is what he’s heard on TV. So, naturally, when he’s asked to offer his opinion on the matter, he’s going to regurgitate some variation of the official version, which is that Putin is responsible.
But try asking someone who’s actually been following events in Ukraine that same question, and you’re going to get an entirely different answer. Among the people who follow the daily developments in Ukraine, roughly two out of three support the Russian position. This isn’t something you’re going to find in the survey data, but if you take the time to comb the comments lines in the international media, you’ll see what I’m saying is true.
I hadn’t figured this out until last week’s G-20 Summit in Brisbane when Canada’s PM Stephen Harper brusquely greeted Putin saying, “I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine.”
The incident immediately became headline news around the world as journalists for all the major media heaped praise on Harper for courageously “shirt-fronting” the dastardly Putin. What was left out in the media’s account of the exchange, was Putin’s crisp retort, which was, “Unfortunately it is impossible, (for us to leave Ukraine) because we are not there.”
Touché. As you might expect, Putin’s response did not fit with the media’s narrative, so it was scrubbed from the coverage altogether.
The Harper incident was a particularly big deal in Canada where all the newspapers ran gushing articles lauding the prime minister for his righteousness and fortitude. Oddly enough, however, only a small percentage of the people who commented on the dust-up, saw Harper as the hero. Here’s a few samples of what ordinary people had to say. This is from BobsOpinion:
“Harper embarrasses Canadians again on the international stage. It will take years for Canadians to re-build our international relationships and to re-build our reputation.”
This comment is from redondex:
“Harper made a childish and baseless remark to Putin and walked off with a grin of a proud five year old spoilt kid. All Harper achieved was to ridicule himself in front of the rest of the world. That is our leaders usual behavior.”
This is from Makman1:
“I was under the impression that a proper democracy would first use negotiating as a way to understand the divergent groups involved in the Ukrainian revolution and then apply a political solution, if possible. The present Ukrainian government immediately used force. PERIOD! The Harper government, instead of using its “influence” to attempt to defuse a complex situation blindly followed the actions of the USA. If Harper really cared at all he would ask his foreign minister to get directly involved with Russian and Ukrainian counterparts and help reach a compromise…. Hopefully, Harper is not supporting Ukrainian right wing fascists?”
“When all the western oligarchs hate someone as much as they hate President Putin, you know he has to be doing something right.”
This is from Jörð:
“It’s not wise for Harper to follow America’s lead on every foreign policy. The USA government has a terrible track record when it comes to getting things right in foreign lands. Also Putin was correct when he responded to Harper’s comment by saying “It’s impossible, we are not there.” Technically Russia is not “In” the Ukraine.”
This is Time4Change:
“This is another example of Harper BLUSTERING backed with NO SUBSTANCE! Why are there NO SANCTIONS on the Russian Energy Giants Rosneft and Rostec? Could it be the hundreds of billions of $s the Russians have invested in the tar sands have caused Harper to be the SOFTEST on ACTIONS while shouting the loudest.”
And this is from Mt Athabaska:
” …one day Harper will reach puberty on global affairs.”
It’s worth noting that these comments were lifted from an article that was published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I was shocked at how harshly Harper was criticized by his own countrymen. I was also surprised that the author’s obvious anti-Putin bias had virtually no impact on the opinions of the people who commented on the incident. In fact, it appeared to make many of them mad.
I should also mention that I omitted all of the comments that lambasted Harper for hiding in a broom closet “while a gun battle ensued in a nearby hallway of the Parliament building in Ottawa” in early October. (See here: Needless to say, Harper’s comical performance at the G-20 hasn’t convinced anyone that he’s the courageous leader he imagines himself to be.)
The media is increasingly worried that it’s losing its ability to persuade people to support policies that only serve the interests of elites. The media has rolled out all the heavy artillery in its campaign to demonize Putin, but the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s backfired quite badly leading some publications to cancel their comments section altogether.
And the response from readers has been huge too, mainly because the standoff between two nuclear-armed adversaries has galvanized the publics’ attention. For example, in the CBC article I cited above, more than 2,500 comments have been posted already, while many of the other articles on Ukraine or Putin have exceeded 6,000 comments. This just shows how closely people are following events and how passionate they feel about the policy.
And, as we said earlier, this isn’t just a Canadian phenom either. For example, here are a few of the comments I picked up from an article in the conservative UK Telegraph in an article titled Global economy to suffer as Putin quits G20 early.
Zeug Gezeugt:
“The US supports the neo-Nazi ethnic cleansing campaign in east Ukraine, Russia supports the Russian speaking Ukrainian majority in the east against it. Pretty simple really, and the US enforced sanctions can only harm EU Russian relations, a win-win all round for the neoconservative hawks.”
Pamela Cohen:
“So, the media tells us in the Title that Putin is to blame when the Global economy suffers, because he left the G20 early. What stupidity. And what a statement in bringing warships as their targeted President attends yet another meeting. Good for Putin. Blame the US-backed coup and looting and 4000 deaths on Putin, and blame the Ukrainian plane that shot down a passenger flight on him, too. Then shun him at a world meeting, as if he doesn’t have the right and responsibility to defend his country’s borders, Naval base, pipeline and brothers in the Ukraine as they are shelled and killed by US manipulation.
Instead of shock and awe and intruding where they didn’t belong like the US in all the Mid-Eastern countries according to long-ago made plans, Putin sends humanitarian aid and the people vote in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Putin-not all Americans are stupid sheep. My apologies for the onslaught of ignorance and imperialism. You are standing up to bullies of the worst kind. The world needs peaceful solutions to restore the harm of NWO fanaticism and corrupt bankers. Hold the line.”
MP Jones: “The US never ended the cold war and the ‘useful idiots’ in this context are us in Europe and the UK.”
Richard N:
“Most British people are deeply unconvinced by the flood of US and EU propaganda over Ukraine, trying to cast Russia as the villain – when the civil war there was caused directly by the US and their EU side kicks backing a coup to overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country, Ukraine.”
timepass:
“With due respect to the author, you say that his (Putin’s) popularity will rise at home as a consequence of this. Please read the message boards North American and European, you will find his popularity seems to have increased everywhere.
Guess the Brains behind 5 eyes and snooping will now have to move into the new reality of the power of the internet to provide information which they would not like others to get. Just a question of time before they make their next move – Censorship!”
Busufi:
“If, the ‘Seven Dwarfs’ (US, UK, EU, Japan, Australia, Canada, and South Africa) like bullies, weren’t so obsessed with beating Russia or China into a corner, rather than bringing Russia or China into their corner; the world would be a better place. Co-operation works better than devastation.”
John Derbyshire :
“Why all this Anti Russian propaganda. The fools who run the West keep creating bogeymen Bin Laden, ISIS, oddly both had connections to Western Powers. So as we face an economic down in the world economy we need another bogeyman, and up pops Putin in the Capitalist controlled media!
People seem to have short memories of pre Putin era, when Yeltsin backed by the West led the country to economic meltdown. Maybe he has scant regard for democratic institutions, but do Western governments support the views of the people!
All of this came about when the United States pushed Nato’s borders eastward and involved themselves in the Ukraine, particularly Mr Kerry. Russia felt itself threatened not by demands of democracy a device used by the worlds superpower, but the growing influence of the United States in the region. The fact that the USA exploited ethnic tensions only shows what was their intention in the region.”
petergardener:
“If the objective is to make Mr Putin appear isolated on the world stage in order to make him less popular at home, it isn’t working and also shows a profound misunderstanding of the Russian mind-set. ‘
Our Western political leaders also have a profound misunderstanding of strategy. Just about everything they do in relation to Russia is wrong and gains the West nothing. But they do like willy waving. Just a pity they do so much damage while they are at it.”
RedBaron9495: “With the public, the effect is rebounding and probably starting to gain Putin more support and worldwide sympathy. This British news forum is good example of that. They made the mistake of going into overkill…..and the public are wising up to the propaganda. They seen this all before prior to Iraq 2003 invasion…and again with Gaddafi.”
Circle of DNA :
“Well, the lives of average folks in Russia has been drastically improved since Putin took the reins of power. He defends Russian interests, fights the empire of chaos, and is massively supported by his people. He is also well educated and a first class statesmen. What is there not to like about him?”
Alltaxationistheft: “The Russian people appreciate how lucky they’ve been for Vladimir Putin to be around at the right time to resist the Neocon supremacist Wolfowitz doctrine…
Since the 1990s , the war mongering maniacs in the West have been planning to asset strip, and plunder Russia via ”liberal democracy”, claiming its natural resources while funding serial inter-ethnic tribal wars via US allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia…
In the 1990s, Russian people were driven into starvation ,prostitution and suicide under pro American ”Liberal” US corporate puppet Yeltsin… but Putin kicked the CIA EU Mossad lunatics out and has been re-building a Russia into a world power ever since.”
anonymous:
“The classless western free (loading) world that produces very little except paper currency, lies and bullshit. I am surprised Mr. Putin came and surrounded himself with such low life scum.
When all the western oligarchs hate someone as much as they hate President Putin, you know he has to be doing something right.”
There’s no need to be selective. Curious readers should go to any editorial platform that covers the crisis in Ukraine and judge for themselves if what I’m saying is true or not. The comments above are in no way extraordinary. What they do show, however, is that the media is losing the propaganda war in pretty stunning fashion, and that’s a huge victory for ordinary people. It’s very difficult for elites to prosecute their criminal wars or implement their rip-off economic policies when people can clearly see what they’re up to.
Now check out this article in the German paper Zeit Online where the author bemoans the media’s loss of influence. The article is titled “How Putin Divides”:
“Why do so many German citizens judge the crisis in Crimea in a completely different way than politicians and the media?
In my 30 years of experience with debates, I have never seen anything like what is now happening in Germany in the dispute over Russia and Crimea….
Unless surveys are misleading, two-thirds of German citizens, voters and readers stand opposed to four-fifths of the political class – in other words, to the government, to the overwhelming majority of members of parliament and to most newspapers and broadcasters. But what does “stand” mean? Many are downright up in arms. And from what one can gauge from letters to the editor, the share of critics seems significantly higher now than what was triggered by Sarrazin’s inflammatory book back then.” (Zeit Online)
Did you catch that part about the “two-thirds of German citizens.. stand opposed to four-fifths of the political class…and to most newspapers and broadcasters”?
That’s a triumph in itself, isn’t it? And what is the issue they disagree about?
They disagree “about the conflict between an aggressive autocrat (Bad Vlad) and Western democracies.”(the Washington-led troublemakers)
Here’s more from the same article:
“…the legitimacy of international law is being questioned in an offensive manner, while the legitimacy of Putin’s nationalist-imperialist ideology is being seriously considered….. It doesn’t do any good to accuse the majority of sheepishness or base economic selfishness, even if that seems to be the driving motive of some business leaders… The issue goes deeper, much deeper.” (How Putin Divides, Von Bernd Ulrich, Zeit Online)
“The legitimacy of international law is being questioned”?!?
Have you ever read such crybaby gibberish in your life?
Why is “the legitimacy of international law is being questioned”? Because people don’t accept blindly what they read the papers and hear on the news anymore? Because corporate editors no longer control how people think about issues? Because people are using their critical thinking skills to see through the lies and bullshit that idiots like the author ladle out in heaping doses every day? Is that why?
It seems to me that that’s a positive development, that people should question whatever they read in the papers and look for other sources of information before they form an opinion.
Speaking of questioning what the corporate media serve, especially the normally defiantly ignorant and vicious conservative press, here’s a collection of insidious cartoons collected by The US News & World Report, approvingly, of course. The thrust of the cartoons rework the usual anti-Soviet/anti-Russian clichés: Russia is a dangerous beast bent on swallowing the world, Putin is a megalomanic dictator, the Russian media are slaves or whores, Crimea did not have true elections, Putin has the gall to bribe the EU with his gas supplies, Putin is a Nazi, Putin is a two-faced commie, Putin is BOTH a Nazi and Commie, and is also Hitler, and so on. The world upside down, but when was truth or elementary decency an ingredient of American propaganda? (Click to enlarge images)
Trust in Media (is at an) All-Time Low. It’s because the corporate media is the most perfidious, double-dealing, hypocritical institution in the country today. That’s why the anti-Putin propaganda has fallen on deaf ears. It’s because most people know you can’t believe anything you read in the news.
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.
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