Et Tu, Frontline?

[newthinking]

OpEdNews Op Eds 1/25/2015 at 15:30:48
Et Tu, Frontline?
By Patrice Greanville


Putin by DonkeyHotey (via flickr)


Hatchet job on Putin only demonstrates the conformist spirit permeating US journalism
______________________________

Frontline sees itself as an implacable observer of political and social reality, an uncompromising witness to contemporary history. The truth is often a lot less flattering.

As a legendary liberal franchise, Frontline has frequently produced interesting and even controversial reports on a variety of topics, including the NRA's intransigence to gun control, the abortion wars, JFK's assassination, the modern KKK, "Bush's War" (somewhat critical of the Iraq War's genesis as something of a botched, incompetent affair, but not scandalized by its sheer immorality, arrogance, systemic roots or broader purposes), and a host of other issues, but when it comes to foreign policy questions in which the American empire is again competing with some invidiously designated foe (these days the villains are again Russia and China), it behaves, conceits aside, like the rest of the conformist pack, as little more than an stenographer to power.


Given that thinly-veiled script, it doesn't take long for the show to deliver an unrelenting cascade of innuendo against Putin. Apparently the show's producers could not refrain from vacuuming up and regurgitating just about every negative cliche disseminated by the Western media since the official demonization of the Russian leader began, except that in this case, Frontline being Frontline, the closest equivalent to the New York Times on television, the weapon of choice is not so much the bludgeon favored by Fox News' crude propagandists, but the scalpel and the stiletto, the half-truths and omissions of truth, and the decapitation of context, in short the far more subtle, insidious and highly effective natural tools of the centrist corporatist liberal.

The first few minutes set the tone:

ANDREY ZYKOV, Former Police Investigator: [through interpreter] Well, of course, there has always been corruption in Russia, but building it into such a meticulous system was something only Mr. Putin has managed to do. Could Putin be held criminally responsible based on the evidence that has already been gathered? Absolutely, yes.

From that point on, it only gets worse.

Students of American propaganda usually have a problem: not the scarcity of items to prove their case, but precisely the opposite, the overabundance of material. Practically everything said or shown on mainstream media that concerns American foreign policy, especially on television, is riddled with so much bias and outright falsehood that codifying and answering such outrages on a case by case basis is simply an impossible, gargantuan task, a fact that --besides their monopolizing the mainstream media--prevents any meaningful or timely response by genuinely impartial observers.

Full story, links, and transcript:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Et-Tu-Frontline-by-Patrice-Greanville-Condemnation_Journalism_Media_Propaganda-150125-684.html

[cheapdate]

1. Perfectly willing to listen to Patrice Greanville and Opednews.

Greanville has an obvious love for words and language, as he shows in this passage that talks about Frontline's "hatchet job" against Putin:

...Frontline being Frontline, the closest equivalent to the New York Times on television, the weapon of choice is not so much the bludgeon favored by Fox News' crude propagandists, but the scalpel and the stiletto, the half-truths and omissions of truth, and the decapitation of context, in short the far more subtle, insidious and highly effective natural tools of the centrist corporatist liberal.

Putin is an extremely popular Russian leader with a fiercely Russian perspective (obviously), but extremely popular doesn't mean much -- the television show "LaVergne and Shirley" was extremely popular in its time.

Greanville spares nothing in casting doubts, but he's thin on actual rebuttal.

[Octafish]

2. Frontline got with the program.

Money trumps peace.

[Nitram]

5. Not much chance of peace with Putin invading neighboring countries willy-nilly.

Europe has basically disarmed since the "end" of the Cold War. The threat of Putin's Russia could cause them to re-arm themselves. That's not my idea of "peace." Sweden reduced its army by 90%, its navy by 80% and its air force by 70%. Then a Russian submarine intrudes, Russian jets simulate a bombing run over Swedish territory, and Sweden is re-thinking its defense strategy.

[Octafish]

7. Thanks for the warning. Have you registered with your draft board?

If not, volunteer. It's the patriotic thing to do.

As for Crimea, it has been part of Russia since, uh, forever or Stalin. Take your pick.

As for a threat to the United States of America, ask what have all those trillions bought us?



SOURCE: http://humansarefree.com/2014/05/cold-war-2-has-begun-us-and-nato-are.html

As for warmongering, no thanks. I'm a Democrat who happens to disagree with the prevailing view in Wall Street on the Potomac, "Money trumps peace."

[Nitram]

9. I registered for the draft on my 18th birthday as required by law. What's it to you?

Russia is a far greater threat to Scandinavia and Europe than to the U.S., but instability resulting from more Putin land grabs could damage the entire world stability. Russia cannot be given free reign to take more bites out of independent countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, or she will just get greedier and more ambitious. As for U.S. military bases, I remember when Russia had bases in Eastern European countries, which put down any attempt by their people to create a democracy. Have you seen the U.S. play a similar role in Europe since WWII?

[polly7]

10. LOL. nt.

[Nitram]

3. Nice job, newthinking.

You must be a student of Fox News. Your assumption that everything in the news but your own very narrow opinion is propaganda rather than honest reporting. I suspect you are a professional propagandist for Putin.

[newthinking]

4. narrow idea

The narrative is heavily false and it leads us toward more conflict.

The fact that you have to imagine someone with a different opinion and label them protectively in your mind in such a manner... well that has happened throughout history. I hope you will consider the process that leads you to believe that someone exposing a propagandized narrative triggers such a reaction?

Informational distortions are setting up and maintaining conflicts throughout the world.

[Nitram]

6. You say potayto, I say potahto; you say tomayto, I say tomahto

You say "exposing a propagandized narrative," I say "spreading propaganda". Let's call the whole thing off.

[polly7]

13. .........................

implications of broken agreements and the former invasions that have killed not thousands, but millions in a country that's been lied to and about over and over. (And no ..... I'm not a 'Putie-poot lover'.)

Ukraine: An Analysis

By David McReynolds

March 9, 2014

Russia has no natural barrier – no river, no mountain range – to guard it on its Western border. It has suffered invasion from the West three times in recent memory – under Napoleon and then twice under the Germans. In the last invasion, under Hitler, between 25 and 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives. All the factories, dams, railroads. towns and cities West of a line from Leningrad in the North to Moscow to Stalingrad in the South were destroyed. Americans make much of 9.11 (and I don’t make light of it) but for Russia it was not just a handful of buildings in one city which were destroyed – it was entire cities, leveled. And then with the wounded to care for, the orphans, the widows.

Americans have never understood what the war meant to Russia and why, after the war, the Soviets sought to build a “protective band” of territory between itself and Germany. This was Eastern Europe, which under the iron boot of Stalin became “people’s democracies” or “presently existing socialism”.

Something Americans (perhaps including our President and the Secretary of State) have forgotten was that Russia wanted to make a deal with the West. It had made peace with Finland, which (again, memories are short and we have forgotten this) fought on the side of the Nazis. The Soviets withdrew from Austria after the West agreed that Austria, like Finland, would be neutral.The Soviets very much wanted a Germany united, disarmed, and neutral. Stalin did not integrate the East Germany into the Eastern European economic plans for some time, hoping he could strike that deal. But the West wanted West Germany as part of NATO, and so the division of Germany lasted until Gorbachev came to power.

I would have urged radical actions by the West in 1956 when the Hungarian Revolution broke out – it was obvious that if the Soviets could not rule Eastern Europe without sending in tanks (as they had already had to do in East Germany in 1953), they posed no real threat of a military strike at the West.

What if we had said to Moscow, withdraw your tanks from Hungary, and we will dissolve NATO, while you dissolve the Warsaw Pact.

But of course the West didn’t do that. The US in particular (but I would not exempt the Europeans from a share of the blame) wanted to edge their military bases to the East. When the USSR gave up control of Eastern Europe, the US pressed for pushing NATO farther East, into Poland and up to the borders of Ukraine.

http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/ukraine-an-analysis/


....."When President Gorbachev accepted the unification of Germany as part of NATO—an astonishing concession in the light of history—there was a quid pro quo. Washington agreed that NATO would not move “one inch eastward,” referring to East Germany.

The promise was immediately broken, and when Gorbachev complained, he was instructed that it was only a verbal promise, so without force.

President Clinton proceeded to expand NATO much farther to the east, to Russia's borders. Today there are calls to extend NATO even to Ukraine, deep into the historic Russian “neighborhood.” But it “doesn't involve” the Russians, because its responsibility to “uphold peace and stability” requires that American red lines are at Russia's borders."

http://www.alternet.org/putins-takeover-crimea-scares-us-leaders-because-it-challenges-americas-global-dominance?page=0%2C1&akid=11793.44541.Ck7lmV&rd=1&src=newsletter990910&t=3


Excerpts: In February of this year, US State Department officials, undiplomatically, joined anti-government protesters in the capital city of Kiev, handing out encouragement and food, from which emanated the infamous leaked audio tape between the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, former US ambassador to NATO and former State Department spokesperson for Hillary Clinton. Their conversation dealt with who should be running the new Ukraine government after the government of Viktor Yanukovich was overthrown; their most favored for this position being one Arseniy Yatsenuk.

My dear, and recently departed, Washington friend, John Judge, liked to say that if you want to call him a “conspiracy theorist” you have to call others “coincidence theorists”. Thus it was by the most remarkable of coincidences that Arseniy Yatsenuk did indeed become the new prime minister. He could very soon be found in private meetings and public press conferences with the president of the United States and the Secretary-General of NATO, as well as meeting with the soon-to-be new owners of Ukraine, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, preparing to impose their standard financial shock therapy. The current protestors in Ukraine don’t need PHDs in economics to know what this portends. They know about the impoverishment of Greece, Spain, et al. They also despise the new regime for its overthrow of their democratically-elected government, whatever its shortcomings. But the American media obscures these motivations by almost always referring to them simply as “pro-Russian”.

An exception, albeit rather unemphasized, was the April 17 Washington Post which reported from Donetsk that many of the eastern Ukrainians whom the author interviewed said the unrest in their region was driven by fear of “economic hardship” and the IMF austerity plan that will make their lives even harder: “At a most dangerous and delicate time, just as it battles Moscow for hearts and minds across the east, the pro-Western government is set to initiate a shock therapy of economic measures to meet the demands of an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund.”

Arseniy Yatsenuk, it should be noted, has something called the Arseniy Yatsenuk Foundation. If you go to the foundation’s website you will see the logos of the foundation’s “partners”. Among these partners we find NATO, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs in the UK), the German Marshall Fund (a think tank founded by the German government in honor of the US Marshall Plan), as well as a couple of international banks. Is any comment needed?

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/128

Also validated are the fears of many of the 'pro-Russian' people of Ukraine.

He could very soon be found in private meetings and public press conferences with the president of the United States and the Secretary-General of NATO, as well as meeting with the soon-to-be new owners of Ukraine, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, preparing to impose their standard financial shock therapy. The current protestors in Ukraine don’t need PHDs in economics to know what this portends. They know about the impoverishment of Greece, Spain, et al. They also despise the new regime for its overthrow of their democratically-elected government, whatever its shortcomings.

[polly7]

8. “The Russians are coming … again … and they’re still ten feet tall!”

By William Blum – Published May 9th, 2014

So, what do we have here? In Libya, in Syria, and elsewhere the United States has been on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. But not in Ukraine. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in Ukraine the United States is on the same side as the neo-Nazi types, who – taking time off from parading around with their swastika-like symbols and calling for the death of Jews, Russians and Communists – on May 2 burned down a trade-union building in Odessa, killing scores of people and sending hundreds to hospital; many of the victims were beaten or shot when they tried to flee the flames and smoke; ambulances were blocked from reaching the wounded. Try and find an American mainstream media entity that has made a serious attempt to capture the horror.

And how did this latest example of American foreign-policy exceptionalism come to be? One starting point that can be considered is what former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates says in his recently published memoir: “When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, [Defense Secretary Dick Cheney] wanted to see the dismemberment not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.” That can serve as an early marker for the new cold war while the corpse of the old one was still warm. Soon thereafter, NATO began to surround Russia with military bases, missile sites, and NATO members, while yearning for perhaps the most important part needed to complete the circle – Ukraine.

In February of this year, US State Department officials, undiplomatically, joined anti-government protesters in the capital city of Kiev, handing out encouragement and food, from which emanated the infamous leaked audio tape between the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, former US ambassador to NATO and former State Department spokesperson for Hillary Clinton. Their conversation dealt with who should be running the new Ukraine government after the government of Viktor Yanukovich was overthrown; their most favored for this position being one Arseniy Yatsenuk.

My dear, and recently departed, Washington friend, John Judge, liked to say that if you want to call him a “conspiracy theorist” you have to call others “coincidence theorists”. Thus it was by the most remarkable of coincidences that Arseniy Yatsenuk did indeed become the new prime minister. He could very soon be found in private meetings and public press conferences with the president of the United States and the Secretary-General of NATO, as well as meeting with the soon-to-be new owners of Ukraine, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, preparing to impose their standard financial shock therapy. The current protestors in Ukraine don’t need PHDs in economics to know what this portends. They know about the impoverishment of Greece, Spain, et al. They also despise the new regime for its overthrow of their democratically-elected government, whatever its shortcomings. But the American media obscures these motivations by almost always referring to them simply as “pro-Russian”.

Full article: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/128

[Nitram]

11. Tell that to the Georgians and the Ukranians.

Is Sweden next? Poland?

[polly7]

12. noooo .......... I think probably Propagandistan is 'next'.

Although in the grand scheme of things, it seems Iran and Syria are the real invasion goals. 7 countries in 5 years, remember?