VLADIMIR PUTIN AND US MEDIA BIAS
Yesterday I blogged about the possibility that the recent report of the Chinese government about U.S. human rights violations may be heralding a new stage in a stepped up propaganda war against the USA. I suggested, you’ll recall, that this may signal a heightened Chinese effort, to parallel and perhaps supplement, Russia’s considerably successful RT(Russia Today), and that if such a propaganda offensive was underway on the part of the BRICSA nations, that one might look next to similar statements from India in the future, particularly if it couples that nation’s own experience with GMOs and American companies backing them, and the issue of human rights. As most readers here are aware, I’ve been predicting that the BRICSA nations will inevitably become players in world agriculture markets, challenging American GMOs with the sale of NON-GMO seeds and crops. Couple that to the issue of human rights, and those nations would have a powerful propaganda tool on the stage of world opinion.That we are indeed in the midst of a propaganda war has always seemed evident to me from the way that Western lamestream media villifies Russian President Vladimir Putin. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t view Mr. Putin as a paragon of virtue and wisdom. But neither do I view him as a Stalinist throwback or a sock puppet. Strongman? Yes, absolutely. But an articulate one, and at least on the stage of international statecraft, an astute one. An unqualified evil? No.
Consider this article on western media bias against Mr. Putin that appeared – surprisingly! – in The Nation magazine:I link this lengthy but important article here because of its intrinsic importance after the recent events in the Ukraine and Crimean peninsula:
Distorting Russia How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine.
I want to draw your attention to three paragraphs in particular:
“The history of this degradation is also clear. It began in the early 1990s, following the end of the Soviet Union, when the US media adopted Washington’s narrative that almost everything President Boris Yeltsin did was a “transition from communism to democracy” and thus in America’s best interests. This included his economic “shock therapy” and oligarchic looting of essential state assets, which destroyed tens of millions of Russian lives; armed destruction of a popularly elected Parliament and imposition of a “presidential” Constitution, which dealt a crippling blow to democratization and now empowers Putin; brutal war in tiny Chechnya, which gave rise to terrorists in Russia’s North Caucasus; rigging of his own re-election in 1996; and leaving behind, in 1999, his approval ratings in single digits, a disintegrating country laden with weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, most American journalists still give the impression that Yeltsin was an ideal Russian leader.What really rankles the Anglosphere oligarchs and pathological plutocrats who control the Western media is that Mr. Putin put a stop to the rape of Russia by its own oligarchs, and who stands up for Russia’s national interest, including those interests on its “periphery.” The fact that the demonization of Russia is once again approaching Cold War levels – and I personally view it as already being there – should give one pause, less about the sanity and direction of Russia’s policies, but rather more about our own. There is little doubt that the USA led the charge – in spite of assurances from former President GHW Bush to former General Secretary Gorbachev – to encircle and emasculate Russia, and this too, well underway under Mr. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin put a stop to.
“Since the early 2000s, the media have followed a different leader-centric narrative, also consistent with US policy, that devalues multifaceted analysis for a relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts. (Was any Soviet Communist leader after Stalin ever so personally villainized?) If Russia under Yeltsin was presented as having legitimate politics and national interests, we are now made to believe that Putin’s Russia has none at all, at home or abroad—even on its own borders, as in Ukraine.
“Russia today has serious problems and many repugnant Kremlin policies. But anyone relying on mainstream American media will not find there any of their origins or influences in Yeltsin’s Russia or in provocative US policies since the 1990s—only in the “autocrat” Putin who, however authoritarian, in reality lacks such power. Nor is he credited with stabilizing a disintegrating nuclear-armed country, assisting US security pursuits from Afghanistan and Syria to Iran or even with granting amnesty, in December, to more than 1,000 jailed prisoners, including mothers of young children.”(Emphasis added)
I remember years ago, during the unfolding drama of the Kennedy assassination, when I was home sick from school glued to the television set, watching SeeBS news anchor Walter Cronkite reporting on a statement by one Mr. Valerian Zorin, who had been the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United Nations. (It was Mr. Zorin to whom Adlai Stevenson said the now famous words that he would wait until hell froze over on whether or not the pictures being displayed showed Soviet missiles in Cuba, or not.) But during the Kennedy assassination, Mr. Zorin issued an official statement on Moscow radio, that in the context of what has come to light in JFK research much less “propogandistic” than Cronkite’s characterization of it. Said Mr. Zorin(as read by Cronkite): “Those who know how the security of President Kennedy is organized, know that it’s not possible for such a fanatic(i.e., Oswald as lone nut) to commit such an assassination. A political crime, thoroughly prepared and planned, has taken place. It is not accidental that it took place in the southern states, which are well-known as a stronghold of racists and other fascist scum. It is precisely here that Goldwater, who is one of the contenders for the presidency, gets his support.” (Note, in his broadcast, Mr. Cronkite erroneously reports Zorin’s first name as Valentin, not Valerian).
As it now turns out, of course, that very early Russian assessment of the coup taking place within America, made by Mr. Zorin, and so contemptuously dismissed by Cronkite, is probably the truth.
Something to remember the next time you hear the talking heads on the media demonizing Russia for protecting its own interests, and creating yet another climate of confrontation and brinksmanship with a country that is not to be trifled with.
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