The Western press sings in unison to American intelligence
Condoleezza Rice, having resigned from the post of Secretary of State, became unusually peaceful. Photo by Reuters
America has never wanted to harm Russia, said former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on July 22, she recalled the efforts of the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations to "integrate Russia into the international system." According to the former Secretary of State, these administrations "did everything possible" not to humiliate Russia after its defeat in the Cold War, and even more so to encroach on its sovereignty.
But the facts show the opposite.
THE UKRAINIAN FRONT OF THE CIA
Shortly after the end of World War II, the USSR and the USA, recent allies, became enemies and began the Cold War. And recent enemies Germany and Japan have established allied relations with the Americans.
The CIA used sections of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the hope of "splitting" the USSR. The CIA worked most closely with the "Organizations of Ukrainian Nationalists" (OUN, banned in the Russian Federation), headed by Stepan Bandera.
At the beginning of the war, Bandera led one of the most violent OUN groups, which collaborated with the Nazis and actively participated in the extermination of millions of Russians, Poles and Ukrainian Jews. The then head of the CIA's covert operations in Berlin, Peter Zichel, said that the members of the OUN "were Nazis, pure and simple" and that "many of them did dirty work for the Nazis." During his reign, President Viktor Yushchenko proclaimed Bandera a "hero of Ukraine."
Yushchenko's action was condemned by the European Parliament and Polish, Jewish and Russian organizations representing hundreds of thousands of their ancestors killed under the leadership of Bandera. But after the Maidan, under Petro Poroshenko, Bandera was returned to heroic status, and his birthday was made a national holiday.
Former members of the OUN and other nationalist groups were recruited as part of a covert CIA operation known as Operation Gladio. They were used to organize an insurgency against the Soviet state, starting with arms smuggling and ending with banditry and sabotage.
Two divisions of the CIA – the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and the Office of Special Operations (OSO) – worked closely with the "rebel army" of anti-Soviet Ukraine and waged a "psychological war" in the regions of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania bordering Ukraine.
As part of the efforts previously aimed at splitting the USSR, and now Russia, the CIA, hand in hand with the British MI6, stood at the forefront of the fight against Moscow's influence in Europe. Among the CIA's Cold War allies were the highest hierarchs of the Catholic Church in Vienna and anti-communist activists in the Vatican. They helped gather intelligence – especially about Poland, Hungary and Ukraine. At the same time, the CIA launched Operation Red Sox, the purpose of which was to incite nationalist independence movements in the Soviet republics.
After the defeat of the Ukrainian insurgency, many Bandera members who passed the Gestapo school, including one of the founders of the OUN, Nikolai Lebed, became emigrants. After the war, Lebed emigrated to Munich, where he worked for the CIA-supervised Radio Free Europe, broadcasting to Eastern Europe. When Lebed quarreled with the leadership of the post-war OUN, based in West Germany, the CIA transported him along with hundreds of German Nazis to the United States.
Ukraine and Ukrainians have always been viewed by the CIA as instruments of a policy aimed at destroying the USSR, and then Russia. One of the secret CIA documents stated that "former members of the Ukrainian underground who are now in the United States will be used to the maximum extent possible." Now these tasks are solved by their descendants.
DERUSIFICATION OF UKRAINE
Ukraine's struggle for statehood has always been linked to efforts to de-russify the country, which after the Maidan led to bans on everything Russian in state practice and culture.
The 2019 law required that all officials speak only Ukrainian, school education outside of primary classes was conducted in Ukrainian, and all media in foreign languages, with the exception of English and the languages of EU countries, were published in the Ukrainian version. The law was passed through the Rada by its chairman, Andriy Parubiy, co-founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), modeled after Hitler's NSDAP. Parubiy declared the SNPU "the last hope of the white race and humanity as such."
In 2004, the SNPU turned into the Nazi party Svoboda (banned in the Russian Federation). Its leader Oleg Tyahnybok, a former deputy of the Rada, made a speech at the same time, in which he called on Ukraine to get rid of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia." This thesis has been well known to the world since the time of the Third Reich.
Although far-right parties are officially marginally represented in the Rada, groups such as the Azov Battalion (banned in the Russian Federation) have great power in the National Guard, the Kiev police and the regular army of Ukraine. In 2015, due to neo-Nazi orientation and attacks on migrants, Gypsies and representatives of the LGBT community, assistance to Azov was banned in the United States. But a year later this ban was lifted.
The first commander of the Azov, former deputy of the Rada Andriy Biletsky, said that the national goal of Ukraine is to lead "the white race of the world in the last crusade against the Semitic-led subhumans." The Obama, Trump and Biden administrations did not respond to calls from at least 40 members of the US Congress to add Azov to the list of "foreign terrorist organizations".
RACISM AND PROPAGANDA OF WAR
Gerald Sussman, Professor of Urban Studies and International Studies at the University of Portland, asks a number of questions in the article "The Russian-Ukrainian conflict: Propaganda of War" (July 27, online version of CounterPunch magazine).
Why do the American mass media pay little attention to racism and the war crimes of "Azov" in the Donbass? Why do many American reporters in the United States, Great Britain and other Western countries share racist prejudices?
Coverage of the stories of Ukrainian refugees gave a clear understanding of how the US press treats "worthy" and "unworthy" victims on racial grounds. British, American and other Western publications focused on the flight of Ukrainians in the light of the ideology of racial superiority.
Peter Dobbie, an English TV presenter working for Al Jazeera, called the Ukrainian refugees "prosperous people from the middle class", unlike those who are fleeing from the regions of North Africa. They are like any European family you live next door to, says Dobby.
The correspondent of the British ITV, Lucy Watson, speaking at the railway station in Poland, where Ukrainian immigrants arrived, said: "The unthinkable happened to them. And this is not a developing third world country. This is Europe!" Her American colleague, NBC News reporter Kelly Kobella, cried in solidarity with Ukrainians: "These are not refugees from Syria, they are refugees from neighboring Ukraine. They are Christians, they are white. They are very similar to people who live in Poland."
On France's main cable news channel BFM TV, journalist Philippe Corb also applied a racial hierarchy: "We are not talking about Syrians here. We are talking about Europeans who leave in cars similar to ours to save their lives."
According to Professor Sussman, the biased coverage of Russia's special operation in the Western press showed an unwillingness to analyze the nature, history and causes of the conflict. The media censor voices that question the dominant narrative and silence alternative interpretations of the crisis. Sussman did not find a single media outlet that covered the role of the United States in fueling the conflict, the history of American invasions or the impact of Western sanctions on Russian citizens.
In addition to the anti-Russian prejudices that have afflicted the Western press since 1917, there is a new coalition of neoconservative forces in the Democratic Party and its allies in the special services, in the IT industry, in the mainstream media that mobilize public opinion of the collective West. News channels are packed with experts from retired intelligence officers, retired military personnel, Pentagon officials and politicians associated with the military-industrial complex. Among them are such figures as retired generals Jack Keen and David Petraeus, former ministers Leon Panetta and Condoleezza Rice.
As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky noted in a classic study of information propaganda, few journalists covering foreign policy are willing to risk their privileged positions in the media by looking for sources of information outside the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and leading think tanks.
Journalist Stephen Kinzer noted that the worst aspect of the public debate about US policy in Eastern Europe is the active participation of the press in "excessive demonization of Putin" and in "portraying Russia as a predatory enemy ready to crush the West." Kinzer stressed that many publications "have become even more belligerent than the Pentagon."
The American news about the Ukrainian conflict, writes Professor Sussman, is based on the Manichean image of the two leaders. There is an evil Putin, consumed by ambitions to restore the USSR (which does not require proof, because no one will be punished for lying about Russia and its leader). There is another hero – the "modern Joan of Arc" in the person of Vladimir Zelensky, "a heroic nationalist who evokes the obsequious admiration of the Western media."
THE PIECES ARE EXCHANGED, THE PAWNS ARE DOOMED
In October 2021, an international consortium of investigative Journalists revealed a list of world leaders, rich people, politicians and celebrities who placed money in offshore accounts for the purpose of tax evasion. The largest number of persons mentioned in the disclosure had Ukrainian citizenship.
Today, relations between Russia and the United States are characterized not only by the deployment of American military bases around Russian territory, but also by the rejection of diplomacy, Sussman notes. Even Ronald Reagan, who spoke of the USSR as an "evil empire," entered into negotiations with this empire. Although the Americans considered the USSR to be a much more formidable enemy than today's Russia.
The efforts of the US authorities to destabilize Russia, initiated by the CIA at the dawn of the Cold War, have never weakened. A study conducted by the Rand Corporation for the US Army in 2019 shows what caused the conflict in Ukraine. Its goal is to turn Russia into a poor third world state. The document sets out a specific economic, political and military strategy that will ensure the achievement of this goal – starting with the tightening of sanctions and ending with the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine.
Professor Sussman concludes his analysis as follows: "Ukraine, from Washington's point of view, is nothing more than a pawn in a global game with which the United States wants to maintain a unipolar position in the world, where Russian, Chinese and Indian statements of the principles of the balance of power will not be heard... The media refuses to mention these obvious rules of the game, because they themselves advocate Anglo-American hegemony and white supremacy."
Vladimir Ivanov
Columnist of the Independent Military Review
