Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Kiev Burns as U.S. Propaganda Mills Churn


The tense situation in Ukraine has just erupted into a mass orgy of violence, the pictures of which are set against the dark winter nights are surreal and astounding. This certainly is a distraction for Russian leader Vladimir Putin who has to this point managed to preside over a damned good show in Sochi - aside from the cheating of U.S. men's hockey team goalie Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings that is. In a fulfillment of the prediction of Texas yahoo Mike McCaul of the House Homeland Security Committee's prediction that "...that something will detonate, something will go off" the proverbial shit has hit the fan in the streets of Kiev.
Months of street protests that started in November after Ukranian President Viktor Yanukovych chose to take a deal from Russia, which Ukraine was a part of until the fall of the USSR shunning an alliance with the European Union "detonated" in a melee of bloody violence this week. The latest figures after all Hell broke loose has the death toll at 26 and who knows how many injured as the state police and protesters (according to some accounts many are being paid by the west)  clashed in the latest escalation of what may very well end up being yet another one of those civil wars that have been breaking out - offering U.S. and foreign arms and 'security' corporations a golden opportunity to profit from arming both sides.
This has to make President Barack Obama happy as well as Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry and the rest of the stooges of the American war machine who had to endure the humiliation of Putin making them eat a nice big borscht and shit sandwich with his flagrant refusal to back the war in Syria which is now being eased back onto the front burner. Having the current carnage in the streets of Kiev as a bludgeon with to have the U.S. state-corporate media beat Putin over the head during his country's Olympic showcase is a textbook example of psychological warfare and black propaganda. The underlying benefit to Barry and the boys is that they not only get to piss on Putin's Olympic parade but also to roll out the Cold War v.2 demagoguery to further demonize Putin. 
Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda on MSNBC is pushing hard for a ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Ukraine and dishing up the anti-Putin propaganda with a near religious fervor. Last night even the increasingly vile Rachel Maddow, the Baghdad Bob of American cable television took a break from her nonstop bashing of the bullying New Jersey gasbag Chris Christie to fixate on the violence in the streets of Kiev. You know that it is getting bad when HBO's Bill Maher, a serious defender of the warfare/surveillance state calls out MSNBC and particularly Ms. Maddow on their bullshit as being as bad as FOX News with their fixation on "Bridgegate" as being the Democratic party's Benghazi". I can't argue with Maher and I except from the transcript of Maddown's show last night where her 'expert' guest was NBC's Andrea Mitchell, the wife of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan "The Maestro" Greenspan. A man who is complicit in the the economic collapse and subsequent Obama sanctioned rescue of the criminal gamblers on Wall Street.
I excerpt the following from the transcript (read at your own risk as it could induce vomiting):
MADDOW: Andrea, thanks very much for being with us.
ANDREA MITCHELL, MSNBC ANCHOR: You bet.
MADDOW: So, we got this readout tonight of Vice President Biden calling the Ukrainian president in the midst of the street battles going on right there in the capital city in Kiev.
Why, why is it that it`s Vice President Biden calling and not President Obama? Is this something you would expect to happen at a higher level or a lower level? Why him?
MITCHELL: It`s a high level but not the highest level, and in fact,the very fact that Putin has said, stay out of my backyard, would mean it would be almost to much of an out front for President Obama himself to get involved.
One of the issues here has been this tug-of-war between Putin saying this is my territory and the United States saying that we and the E.U. have a vested interest in this. Just look at what`s happening in the streets.
Look at what the pictures you have shown. I mean, these paintings -- they look like paints. They look like  (INAUDIBLE) [I listened and she said "Delacroix"]or something. These look like battles, classic battles.
It doesn`t look real what we`re seeing in the streets of Kiev. Yet, it is all too real. And the deaths are real. And the stakes are very,very high.
And think back to what happened just 24 hours ago. That`s when Putin upped the ante. He said he would guarantee these $2 billion in loans evenas the rebel leaders were in Berlin visiting with Angela Merkel and the
Germans and the E.U., and you know the frustration that America has expressed through Victoria Nuland ["FUCK THE E.U."], the top official for Europe, at the slowness of the European Union to respond with money, to try to balance itand not have Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, be completely under the thrall of Putin.
But clearly, the students, the others, the protesters and rebel leaders saw Russia offering this loan guarantee as the final blow to them that Yanukovych was indeed going to be in line with Russia and they wouldbe completely frustrated in their efforts to align themselves with the West.
MADDOW: Andrea, these images that we`re showing right now are live. It`s just -- it`s incredible. It`s about 4:00 a.m., as you can see with the time stamp there, local time. But this is happening right now. In terms of looking at the dynamics under way, does the opposition in Ukraine, either the organized opposition in terms of people who are in parliament and so forth, or the opposition leaders in the street, do theywant and expect international help? Do they see the United States as having a range of potential influence here? What are they asking for?
MITCHELL: Well, the rebel leaders have been very much in touch with American and European Union leaders, but the people in streets are not necessarily all connected.You mentioned the fact that there has been some violence. The rebel leaders have lost control of some of the people in the streets. This is not a completely unified situation, as these things never are. But theyhave been remarkably consistent given that this has been happening since December, as you pointed out.
So, the rebel leaders want help from us. They want some force to pull them back from Putin`s grasp. But Putin is not going to negotiate on this.
Lavrov, his foreign minister, made it very clear in the last couple days with the West that they consider this their territory, and it would be as though they were mucking around in Latin America, and you know how we feelabout our territory. They feel that this is not a part of Western Europe. They think that this is part of the former Soviet Union.
Regarding Andrea Mitchell as some sort of hallowed official figure what better example can be made as to the rot and incestuous permutation of power and the media that has taken place in the last few decades. Alan Greenspan's wife indeed, were Maddow a journalist and not a cheerleader and propagandist she might have asked how much that Alan and Andrea's portfolios would benefit from Cold War II.
There are people dying in Ukraine but given the long and storied history of the  dark funding opposition to the democratically elected leaders in countries that don't march to the beat of Uncle Sam's drummer that too often result in revolutions, torture, assassinations, mass murder of civilian dissidents and legitimate political opposition to western backed despots how can anyone possibly buy any of the horseshit that is being spewed by what most of us already know is a thoroughly corrupt media?
But the skulls will keep getting cracked in Kiev as Obama and the U.S. establishment continue to wage their ever expanding proxy war against the hated devil Putin for his original sin of offering amnesty to former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden; his intervention in the at one time inevitable war on Syria and most of all that column in the New York Times published on the anniversary of that oh so sanctified day September 11th where he called into question the very concept of American exceptionalism.
So the media feeding frenzy continues over  the fortuitous outbreak of violence in the streets of Kiev and the sheer ecstasy of the Russian Olympic hockey team getting knocked out of the medal chase today.
USA! USA! USA!
(Image: Reuters/David Mdzinarishvili)

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