The New York Review of Books as Propagandist on Ukraine's Civil War

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-zuesse/56209/the-new-york-review-of-books-as-propagandist-on-ukraines-civil-war

The New York Review of Books as Propagandist on Ukraine's Civil War
by Eric Zuesse | June 3, 2014 - 9:19am

The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has "reported" on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia's Vladimir Putin -- a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other mainstream “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously focused on about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth -- and it's key to understanding the current situation there. And it’s even more key to understanding the real situation here, inside the United States, as we shall see.)

So: by digging into an example, the rot in U.S. “news” media will be dissected here, and the truth in both Ukraine and the U.S. will be exposed here.

On 28 April 2014, NYRB's reporter Tim Judah headlined from Donetsk in the south, "Ukraine: Hate in Progress." He (falsely) analogized the opponents against that coup as being similar to the separatists in Yugoslavia whose ethnocentrism had produced the atrocities during the civil war that broke up Yugoslavia. Judah wrote:

"Talk to people manning the anti-government barricades and taking part in the demonstrations against Kiev (in the north) here, ... and one thing in particular is scary. After a day or two you realize that they all say more or less the same thing. ‘We want to be listened to,’ people say. The government in Kiev, which took power after the pro-European revolution there, is a ‘fascist junta’ backed by Europe and the US. It is as though the Russian media -- which is widely watched and read here -- has somehow embedded these messages into the heads of people and they have lost the ability to think for themselves. ... All that seems to be registering right now is a nationalist and hysterical drumbeat from Russia about the new Nazis of Kiev and their NATO masters. (Judah’s article provides no evidence against that ‘Nazis of Kiev’ viewpont; he simply ignores it, as if it’s not even worth checking out -- and he’s supposed to be a ‘reporter.’ Instead, he goes immediately into his mere assumption that the rejectionists of the coup are the source of his alleged ‘Hate in Progress.’) This is ominously reminiscent of what the Serbian media and other bits of the former Yugoslav media did when Yugoslavia collapsed. Then, Serbs were subjected to endless documentaries about Croatia’s wartime fascists, whom they were told were coming back. Now the Russian media says the fascists have returned."