The Russians Are Coming, Again. John Marciano
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are rarely highlighted or exposed. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was characterized as “the father of Russian democracy” and compared to Abraham Lincoln when he used tank cannons to storm the parliament following a constitutional crisis he precipitated, resulting in around five hundred deaths, killed thousands in invading Chechnya, and imposed disastrous “shock therapy” economic policies pushed by American advisers—dubbed “the Harvard Boys”—that resulted in an unprecedented rise in the mortality rate. Yeltsin also allied with oligarchs who essentially bought him the presidency in 1996.40
Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury under President Ronald Reagan, points out that “the initial collapse of the USSR worked very much to the West’s advantage. The [United States and its allies] could easily manipulate Yeltsin, and various oligarchs were able to seize and plunder the resources of the country. Much … American money was part of that. When Putin came along and started stopping this and trying to put the country back in place, he was demonized.”41
There is a gap in quality between at least some of the Times reporting and the opinion pieces. In April 2016, for example, the Times ran an informative article by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger discussing the race for the latest class of nuclear weaponry between Russia, China, and the United States. They pointed out that while American officials have largely blamed escalating tensions on Putin and the Chinese for their apparent aggressive drives in the South China Sea, these two “adversaries look at what the United States expects to spend on nuclear revitalization—estimated up to a trillion over three decades—and use it to lobby for their own sophisticated weaponry.”
The article went on to point out that President Obama himself had recognized that his nuclear weapons modernization program could undermine his own previous record of progress on arms control.42 From this example we see that Times journalists are capable of first-rate analysis. However, in our assessment, instances of quality reporting have been overshadowed by the barrage of pieces painting Putin and Russia in the darkest of hues, which contribute in turn to the popular impression that the Russians are coming, again.
PART II: FURTHERING OUR CRITIQUE
In a December 2016 interview with David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, a weekly public affairs program that provides analyses and views that are often ignored or distorted in the corporate media, Stephen Cohen, the noted scholar on the Soviet Union and Russia, reminded listeners that the Russian people have a long memory of the staggering loss of human life and physical destruction brought on by the Nazi invasion during the Second World War. Their celebration of V-E Day (Victory in Europe) on May 9 is their “most sacred secular holiday.” Vivid memories of the war “awakened … ferocious reactions in Russia” over what was unfolding in Ukraine. “When you get guys who look and smell like neo-Nazis running around burning up people, as they did in Odessa in 2014, it awakens memories of World War Two and the Nazi occupation.” It was greater because the United States helped bring about the coup in Ukraine, the result of years of U.S. intervention there, aided by the Soros Foundation and the National Endowment on Democracy (NED), which worked to undermine the existing regime. Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state under Hillary Clinton, admitted before Congress that the United States spent $5 billion “building democracy” there before the crisis. What does it mean to “build democracy”? It is “to create a country aligned with us, because there’s probably less democracy in Ukraine today … than there was when they overthrew” the former president Victor Yanukovych, in February 2014.
Cohen says it is a misnomer to claim that Putin invaded Ukraine when what he did was “react” to a Western encroachment that was part of a “long-term effort to bring Ukraine into NATO. The documents are there to be read.” Putin was given intelligence information stating that there “was going to be a march on the Russian historical and strategic naval base on the Crimean peninsula” and this possibility presented “a grave danger.… We could argue that he overreacted; you can make a case. But he was reacting.” After the United States helped “to overthrow the government there or abetted the overthrow of a legally elected leader—and it was recognized that the Ukrainian election of Yanukovych had been fair—and bringing an unelected regime to power,” why wouldn’t Russia react? “Taking Ukraine over, recognizing the new government immediately, bringing these guys to Washington, with McCain and the others in the streets egging them on, did we think Russia wouldn’t react? Why is that Russian aggression?”43
Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who supported the Maidan protests and produced a film investigating the death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, concurs with Cohen’s assessment, pointing out that Putin is not a threat to world security any more than the United States, which is much more powerful. Nekrosov further stated in an interview that “there is simply no evidence of Putin’s excessive riches [as the media has reported]; not even a single evidence of some bank accounts, or a bribe he or his wife for example got from an industry or such thing [whereas] there was such evidence in Yeltsin’s case, quite specific and direct.” Though not personally enamored of Putin, Nekrosov says that he gets “elected and is hugely popular in Russia and doesn’t need to suppress democracy very much, even if he were able to.… The media apart from the big national TV channels is relatively free.”44
Robert Parry of Consortium News suggests that the broad demonization of Putin has set the groundwork for a potential “regime change” and program of isolation designed to punish Putin for blocking American machinations in Syria and Iran and to ensure control over the Eurasian heartland. The first phase of this plan was the Ukraine coup where Victoria Nuland “was caught on an unsecure phone line telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt” how they “would ‘midwife’ a change in government that would put Nuland’s choice … in power.” Parry has raised doubt about Russia’s culpability in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, based on the fact that the State Department refuses to make public radar information that Secretary of State Kerry said points to the location of the offending missile. Parry spoke to an intelligence agent who indicated that as U.S. “analysts gained more insights from technical and other sources, they came to believe the attack was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian military” with ties to hardline oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who may have been intending to bring down Putin’s plane which was flying nearby.45
In September 2016, a Dutch-led investigation provided evidence suggesting that the missile used in the shoot-down was fired from a field controlled by pro-Russian fighters in Ukraine and was brought in from Russian territory. The investigation relied heavily on Ukrainian intelligence sources with a vested interest in blaming Russia, however, and failed to mention that the Ukrainian military controlled all anti-aircraft missile batteries in eastern Ukraine. It also did not have access to U.S. radar data and said it was still trying to establish who the perpetrators were.46 The truth thus remains elusive.
Like the British and French press did in the nineteenth century, the New York Times alleges without substantiation that Russia financed political parties throughout Western Europe in an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the region. Putin also reportedly killed many of his rivals, pilfered millions in state funds and armed the Taliban, though the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate he had “not seen any physical evidence.”47 Putin was further accused of covering up Syrian chemical attacks, though it now appears it was not the source of these attacks. The Syrians struck a weapons cache that released toxic clouds of fertilizers that were magnified by dense morning air, as veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported in a story published only by a German newspaper.48
According to Edward S. Herman, the Times from January 1 to March 21, 2014, had twenty-three articles on the Pussy Riot group to signify alleged Russian limits on free speech, and gave one member of the group op-ed space to denounce Putin. The group had been arrested after disrupting a church service and were given a two-year sentence. Around the same time, eighty-four-year-old Sister Megan Rice was given a four-year jail sentence for protesting a nuclear weapons site in Tennessee, but she was mentioned only in the back pages and not given an opportunity to publish an op-ed. Nor could she meet with the Times editorial board as Pussy Riot did. Another double-standard was the great indignation