May
31, 2020
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The former Washington Post
reporter Carl Bernstein headlined in Rolling Stone on 20 October 1977, “The CIA and the Media”, and he wrote that, “The history of the CIA’s
involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official
policy of obfuscation and deception.” Subsequently, John Simkin established in September 1997 his phenomenal
website on deep history, including its comprehensively linked 6,000-word
article, “Operation Mockingbird”, which was about the CIA operation that Frank Wisner
had set up in 1948 in order to get the American public to hate and fear Russia
so that in post-World-War-II-America, the corporations that had been making all
or most of their money from selling weapons to the U.S. Government weapons
during WW II, could now continue making and selling weapons to the Government,
even during ‘peacetime’, in a now ‘purely’ ‘ideological’ war against
‘communism’, the Cold War (which was, for America’s wealthiest, really a
military and diplomatic mission to take over and control ultimately the entire
world in the first-ever total-global empire). Its basic idea was that in order to be able to
continue arms-production after the actual fighting war (WW II) was over, there
now needed to be an excuse which was purely ideological, irrespective of
whether there was any country that actually endangered us. The Soviet Union had
been crucial to the Allied victory in WW II. In order to get the American
public to hate and fear Russia so that in post-World-War-II-America the
arms-makers would continue to thrive, ideology needed to be the PR focus; and,
therefore, after WW II, the ‘enemy’ would be communism instead of fascism. But
this had to be the case despite there being no threats (much less, invasions) against
either the U.S., or any of its (non-Soviet) allies. There was nothing like the
Pearl Harbor attack by the Soviet Union. Communism did not threaten the
American people. The post-FDR CIA was rabidly against FDR’s vision of the
future of U.S. international relations — a vision which focused against there
being any imperialism, by any nation, but instead only the sovereign equality
of all nations, under the jurisdiction of the United Nations.
When FDR came up
with the idea for the U.N. late in 1941, he called it “the United Nations” so as to leave imperialism behind as being only
in the past and never in the post-WW-II world. The Axis powers had constituted
real and physical threats, of invasion, against American national security, and
not only an alien ideology — which during WW II had been fascism. What was
therefore now needed, in order to continue arms-production (despite the War’s
end) was to focus against communism as an ideology, irrespective of whether any
given communist country was actually hostile against (a mortal threat to) the
United States. Such a purely ideological ‘war’ would hypothetically last
forever until “victory,” and would thus assure continued and steady success for
investors in military armaments — the people who profit from the (as Eisenhower
subsequently called it) “military industrial complex” or “MIC.” This type of
non-national, or purportedly ideological, ‘war’ could be sold to the taxpayers
(the ultimate purchasers of the U.S. military’s weapons) as being a ‘fight’ for ‘freedom and democracy’,
instead of as being a fight to conquer some foreign land where the government
planned to conquer our land. (At the end of WW II, there was actually no such
nation.) A
fight to capture some country that posed no threat to conquer America would
have had almost no support from Americans. (America, after all, had been
established in 1776 in a war against imperialism, not as a war for imperialism.
The propagandists knew that trying to get public support which would be overtly
for a U.S. imperialism would have been a nonstarter, and this is why an
ideological excuse was therefore essential for them, in order to serve those
investors, who also controlled almost all of the top advertised brands.)
So, one of the reasons why
the CIA was established was in order to control the propaganda in order to
demonize “communism” (such as in Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union) instead
of to demonize Russians, Chinese, etc. (foreign lands, and the people who lived
on them). What the weapons-makers needed wasn’t only propaganda in foreign
countries; the CIA also very much (if not especially) needed propaganda
within the United States.
So, right from the CIA’s
very start, controlling the U.S. press was essential. It was so essential that,
even at that time, back in 1948,
the CIA established what has always since been and still remains an
off-the-books system for funding its operations, by means of skimming from
organized crime and especially from the international narcotics traffic, and
money-laundering those illicit proceeds so as to be able to fund its coups,
bribes, etc.,
which provide indispensable off-the-books, additional, and entirely secret,
backup financial support, to the MIC, and which also provide a major reason
why, for the entire “Special Operations” ‘intelligence’ operation part of the
MIC, narcotics need to be illegal instead of regulated and taxed. If narcotics
were legalized — regulated and taxed — then only prostitution and other
non-addictive, far less lucrative, organized crimes would be funding the CIA’s
“special” operations. Congressional appropriations for the CIA would then need
to soar, and this would force some of the massive “Confidential” and “Top Secret”
records of the U.S. Government to become “Public.” Government behind the
public’s back is dictatorship, not democracy, and that’s what we’ve had ever
since 26 July 1945.
However, at the start of the
1990s, something unforeseen happened and Russia ended communism there.
America’s President at that time, George Herbert Walker Bush (a former head of the CIA), secretly instructed America’s allies that the Cold War was to continue on, as being a
war to conquer Russia, regardless, and the public weren’t ever to know this.
The myth that America’s military-industrial complex or “MIC” was ideological,
instead of purely imperialistic, needed to continue, because conquest was the
goal from the very outset of the ‘Cold War’, on 26 July 1945. (Get that, there: Truman, on that precise date, at
the very start of the ‘Cold War’, privately said “Russia and Poland have
gobbled up a big hunk of Germany,” instead of “the Soviet Union has liberated
Poland and much of Germany from Hitler’s racist tyranny” — which is what had
actually happened; and, so, from that exact day forward, when he came
personally to believe this, America’s actual aim was to conquer the Soviet
Union, and to grab Poland and all of Germany, including the third of Germany that the Soviets had liberated. It did not start
(not at all), like ‘historians’ say it did, from Churchill’s 5 March 1946
“Iron Curtain” Fulton Missouri speech. Such ‘historians’ are mere propagandists, not
historians.)
Though in the former Soviet
Union the Government owned the military manufacturers and so there was no
foreign-policy impact from private investors, America’s arms-makers are all
privately owned, and this provides a strong impulse (from America’s wealthiest)
for the country to be imperialistic. Even in post-USSR Russia, the
armaments-firms continue to be majority-owned by the Government, so that
private investors won’t control foreign policies. But in America, private
investors do own the armaments-manufacturers. Privatizing the
arms-makers means
privatizing the nation’s foreign policies, and especially its military
policies. It’s virtually a law of nature that any country where the arms-manufacturers
are privately owned and controlled is imperialistic.
The U.S. Government does
everything possible to hide the extent to which the MIC controls — or even has any capacity to control —
America’s international relations. For example: In August 2010, Robert Reich
somehow calculated that there were 3,833,000
U.S. military employees. That would have constituted 2.7% of the entire U.S. workforce. (The federal
statistics for August 2010 showed that there were a total of 139 million employed Americans
at that time; so, 3.8 million would have constituted 2.7% of the nation’s
entire workforce in those U.S. federal statistics. But there is no separate
category for “military” nor even for “armed forces,” shown in those statistics,
much less do they show the workers and lobbyists for the giant military
contractors. The U.S. Government hides, instead of exposes, how the giant
weapons-making firms control U.S. foreign policies.) Reich’s article was
titled “America’s biggest jobs program: The US
military”. (Of
course, in Congress, it’s a vastly higher representation than 2.7%. It is closer
to 95%, because
the money behind the MIC is immense, private, and secret. This is how an empire
functions. Corruption is at its core.)
That’s the historical
background.
TODAY’S SITUATION
The propaganda-situation
hasn’t much changed since at least around 1977.
Here will be just a quick
run-down of some recent examples displaying how today’s Washington Post carries
out its tasks for the military-industrial complex (actually for its contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, which might as well own the
newspaper) (and see Simkin’s “Operation Mockingbird” in order to understand how this control over the
mass-media functions).
On May 20th, the Washington
Post bannered “Ukrainian
lawmaker releases leaked phone calls of Biden and Poroshenko”, and opened by reporting that,
A Ukrainian lawmaker who met
with Rudolph W. Giuliani late last year released recordings of private phone
calls several years ago between Vice President Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko,
then Ukraine’s president, in a new broadside against the presumptive Democratic
nominee for U.S. president that has raised questions about foreign interference
in the 2020 election.
Andriy Derkach, an
independent member of Ukraine’s parliament who previously aligned with a
pro-Russian faction, said at a news conference in Kyiv on Tuesday that he had
received the tapes — which consist of edited fragments of phone conversations
Biden and Poroshenko had while still in office — from “investigative
journalists.” He alleged they were made by Poroshenko.
Derkach has past links to
Russian intelligence. He attended the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB in
Moscow. His father served as a KGB officer for decades before becoming head of
independent Ukraine’s intelligence service in the late 1990s. His father was
fired from that post amid a scandal over a Ukrainian journalist who was kidnapped
and murdered.
The recordings played at the
news conference Tuesday shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in
Ukraine, which were at the center of President Trump’s impeachment last year.
They show that Biden, as he has previously said publicly, linked loan
guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in
2015. But Derkach used the new clips to make an array of accusations not proven
by the tapes.
The entire article said
nothing at all about what was really newsworthy in the event. I recently
headlined about that, “U.S. Empire:
Biden and Kerry Gave Orders to Ukraine’s President” and documented that the excerpts which had been
selected for release by Derkash displayed an imperial relationship to have
existed between the imperial Government of Barack Obama and the vassal stooge
Government of Petro Poroshenko — not a relationship between democracies, but
instead a dictatorship by the U.S. Government, over the Ukrainian Government.
(Additional details of how the same system of U.S. international dictatorship
works were provided in Confessions of
an Economic Hit Man,
and in The Secret
Team.)
As if the Washington Post
were still a CIA front (as it is), their article “Ukrainian lawmaker releases leaked phone calls
of Biden and Poroshenko” was focused against “Russia” as being the villain. Since the
Washington Post is a propaganda-vehicle for the nominees that are s‘elected’ by Democratic
Party billionaires against the nominees that are financed by Republican Party
billionaires (who
are also investors in U.S. armaments firms such as Lockheed Martin just as much
as Democratic Party billionaires are), the WP’s article was for Biden and
against Trump, and not only for themselves and against Russia, which country
virtually all American billionaires — Democratic and Republican — want to
conquer. And this is why what the actual video had focused on (which concerned
mainly the imperialistic relationship that the U.S. Government has with
Ukraine’s Government) was entirely hidden — not even mentioned — by the WP’s
‘journalists’, simply ignored by them. That’s their ‘news’: it’s what is hidden
by them.
On February 26th, the WP
bannered “Is Ukraine caught between Europe
and Russia? We asked Ukrainians this important question.” The article’s opening provided some historical
context so as to present in a favorable light the post-2014 (post-U.S.-coup) (and here’s a video about that coup) Ukraine:
In response to Russia’s
attack on its territorial integrity, the Ukrainian government of Petro
Poroshenko made membership in NATO and the European Union strategic goals,
enshrining these aspirations in multiple laws and in the country’s
constitution. Through the NATO-Ukraine Commission, Ukraine has aligned its
security and defense sectors with NATO norms. U.S. money has modernized
Ukrainian naval facilities and provided weapons and materiel, too. The
Ukrainian military is a regular partner with NATO on military exercises, and
Ukraine recently joined NATO’s Support and Procurement Agency, enabling direct
defense-related purchases from NATO suppliers.
The actual reason why
the Crimea and the Donbass regions of Ukraine broke off from the
Obama-imposed Ukrainian Government is not “Russia’s attack on its territorial
integrity” but instead that the President whom Obama overthrew in his 20-26
February 2014 Ukrainian coup had received over 75% of the vote in Crimea and over 90% of
the vote in Donbass,
and also that immediately some of the thugs who overthrew him started pursuing the eight busloads of Crimeans
who had been counter-demonstrating against the CIA-rigged-and-organized “Maidan”
anti-corruption demonstrations against him, and they crippled some and beat to
death others of them, and phone-videos of that were uploaded
to the internet and terrified Crimeans and also the populations in other areas of
Ukraine where the people had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown and
democratically elected President.
So, that article opened with
an outright lie. However, the article’s writers weren’t entirely dishonest:
they proudly announced their support for NATO, the anti-Russian military
alliance. Furthermore, the article openly stated that “The authors acknowledge
funding for this work from a joint National Science Foundation/Research Council
UK grant (NSF award #1759645; ESRC award # ES/S005919/1).” They didn’t say that
NATO and NSF are effectively parts of the same imperialistic operation, “NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellowships
for Scientists from NATO Partner Countries (NSF-NATO)”, because the WP’s management and editors control
their operation, and they know that those executives are running a
propaganda-outfit, not a journalistic one. If their readership knew that the
arms-makers use the WP, and other ‘news’-media, to hide coups, and to pump
invasions, as part of their business-plans, so that the taxpayers will continue
and even increase their purchases of these companies’ weapons by ‘their’
Government, then what use would the WP be? Its effectiveness at controlling the
public (by means of deceiving them) would be gone.
Nowhere in their article was
any mention made, by its three NATO authors, of the extensive
U.S.-Government-financed studies that had provided the U.S. Government
before-and-after pictures of Ukrainian —
and especially of Crimean — public opinion regarding their receptivity toward
being conquered by the U.S., and specifically regarding their receptivity
toward joining NATO.
Those two prior polling-studies were predecessors to their own polling-study,
but weren’t even being mentioned (even though those were before-and-after
pictures and were therefore considerably more important than this current one).
Those percentages in Crimea, displayed by those earlier surveys, showed clearly
that even prior to Obama’s coup, most of the residents in Crimea wanted to be
restored to being part of Russia, as Crimea had been from 1783-1954 when the
Soviet dictator arbitrarily switched them to “Ukrainian” in 1954. But after the
U.S. coup, “During the
intervening year [between the two polls], Crimeans’ favorability toward America
had plunged down to 2.8%, from its year-earlier 6%.” Furthermore, as I further explained on 4 November
2019, even
Ukrainians (and not only Crimeans), prior to the coup, did not want to be in
NATO:
There was no question as to
whether Ukrainians wanted to be in NATO: they did not. During
2003-2009, only around
20% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians
considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat
to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend.
But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of
the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” The coup turned what remained of Ukraine sharply
against Russia. NATO is the key; the EU is more like an excuse for Ukraine to
be admitted into NATO.
Support for joining NATO
wasn’t even asked-about in the 2013 poll, because the U.S. regime already knew
that that would be a non-starter, but in the May 2014,
post-coup, poll (page
32), which was taken only outside Crimea (because Crimea had already broken
away), support for joining the European Union (a pre-requisite to Ukraine’s
joining NATO) was above 50% (53.2%) in only one of the country’s remaining five
regions, the far-western region that had passionately supported Hitler during
WW II; and in all others it was below 40%, and in the far southern region
(including Odessa) it was only 10.3%, and in the far-eastern region (which at
that time still included Donbass) it was only 13.1%.
So: the three authors of
this 26 February 2020 WP article were clearly sympathetic to the only region of
Ukraine that had strongly supported Hitler in WW II (the 53.2% pro-EU region).
They reported that
Our results show that
Ukrainians want good relations with NATO and Russia. Joining a military
alliance with either is a minority position, but only slightly so for NATO, as
shown in the figure below. Similarly, most Ukrainians do not agree that their country
should host foreign troops and military bases. On this last point, Ukrainians
we surveyed have a stronger aversion to Russian troops and bases, an
understandable position given that Russia annexed Crimea and actively shapes
the military standoff in the Donbas.
After the February 2014
coup, Ukraine’s ‘news’-media turned sharply anti-Russian, as a consequence of
which, there exists far more support, in this remaining, rump-Ukraine, for
joining NATO, than was the case prior to that anti-Russian coup.
This article was interrupted
by a teaser-squib, “[Why Russia
starts so many conflicts on its own borders],” which linked to additional anti-Russian
propaganda, which presumed that Russia has been moving too close to NATO’s
borders — not that NATO has been moving right up to Russia’s borders (which is
what has happened). In fact, the only border-change in Russia has been its
absorption of Crimea, the part of Ukraine which even the U.S. regime’s own
polls of Ukrainians had shown, both in 2013 pre-coup and in 2014 post-coup,
over 90% wanting to become part of Russia. Meanwhile, after the ‘end’ of the
‘Cold War’ in 1991, America’s NATO anti-Russian alliance has already added:
(1999) the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland; (2004) Bulgaria, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia; (2009) Albania and Croatia;
(2017) Montenegro; and (2020) North Macedonia. The sanctions against Russia are based on lies. The sanctions should be against America,
certainly not against Russia, and NATO should be disbanded entirely, and should
have ended at the very moment when the Warsaw Pact ended in 1991. The post-1991
NATO is simply a scandal, but the immense propaganda-operation keeps the public
still supporting it. There should exist a global organization “End NATO Now!”
NATO needs to be publicly shamed, until that MIC scam no longer exists. That’s
editorializing in this article about American propaganda, but the WP’s
‘news’-reports about Russia are constantly editorializing, and America’s
mainstream media don’t criticize that. Some ‘news’-media!
Obama,
starting by no later than June 2013, was already implementing a plan for the
U.S. to seize Russia’s largest naval base, which was and still is on Crimea,
and to turn it into yet another U.S. naval base. Any ‘news’-medium (such as the Washington Post)
which still allege that what happened in February 2014 in Ukraine was
‘democratic’ and a ‘revolution’, instead of having been a bloody imperialistic
coup that ended Ukraine’s brief democracy and installed a fascist regime there,
and then goes on (such as the Washington Post does) to blame Russia instead of
America for the resulting war in Donbass and reabsorption of Crimea into
Russia, is extremely evil, and is publicly recognized as such by any remaining
honest journalistic entities (such as are not among the many which are listed
in Simkin’s “Operation
Mockingbird” article).
That article from the WP is
the kind of black-is-white, white-is-black, ‘news’-reporting which is so
typical in U.S.’news’-media — especially in their international or foreign
‘news.’
That article, in turn, was
interrupted by a squib, “[Russia used to
see itself as part of Europe. Here’s why that changed.],” linking to another WP article, which was written
by the director of the Russia and Eurasia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson
Society. Henry Jackson was the U.S. Senator who founded neoconservatism and was
commonly referred to as being the “Senator from Boeing.” Of course, the reason
“why that changed” had actually nothing to do with Russia but everything to do
with America’s rejecting Russia’s immediate post-Cold-War requests to join
NATO. The U.S. regime wanted NATO to be the anti-Russian alliance, not an
alliance with Russia.
This Henry Jackson article
praised Boris Yeltsin, whose corruption and incompetence had run Russia into the ground, and it blamed
Vladimir Putin for having done what he could (which is a hell of a lot) to
raise Russia’s economy from the dead and to remove Russia’s umbilical cord
which had attached Russia’s aristocracy to America’s and siphoned off trillions
into offshore bank accounts.
If this sounds like a bit
too much black-is-white, white-is-black, ‘news’-reporting from that ‘news’
paper, there’s yet more: That Henry Jackson Society article is itself
interrupted by a squib, “[Remember the
Cold War? Putin has brought it back.].” One of its two co-authors was Stefan Wolff, who is “funded, among others, by the Carnegie
Endowment“ which was pro-U.S.-empire
going all the way back to 1893 when Andrew Carnegie, a follower of the
then-young Cecil Rhodes, first championed Rhodes’s up-till-then secret plan for England to
re-absorb the United States as its main colony and to serve the British Empire
as its subterranean or underground beachhead to spread the British Empire
throughout the entire globe. The other author was Tatyana Malyarenko, who is a scholar at the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze
School of Advanced International Studies, which is practically a branch of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the
Bilderberg organization, both of which are themselves offshoots from the Rhodes
Trust. (In fact, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from Donald Graham
after meeting with him in private at the 2013 Bilderberg conference.) This article says, “since late 2013, Russian policy
toward Ukraine has become ever more aggressive.”
If Russia had perpetrated a
coup in Mexico and installed a rabidly anti-U.S. government there on America’s
border, which aspired to host Russia’s nuclear missiles at America’s southern
border, and then Russia’s media alleged that “American policy toward Mexico has
become ever more aggressive,” would it be laughable, or would it be a lie, or
would it be both. And, especially, would it be evil?
CONCLUSION
The more that one reads such
‘news’ media, the more set the reader becomes in the international propaganda
beliefs that are funded by the Democratic Party’s billionaires. They are not a
bit more progressive than the Republican Party’s billionaires are. In fact,
they, just like the Republican Party’s billionaires (and perhaps all
billionaires), are downright evil, and no country that (like the U.S.) is
controlled by its billionaires can even possibly be a democracy. To call it a
democracy is to insult democracy.
Things haven’t changed at
all, but have just been updated, and the Washington Post is — along with the
New York Times — still one of the two essential news-reads in America’s
newsrooms, and is doing its job for the people who control the CIA and the
Pentagon, unchanged since 1948, to keep the hate going against not only Russia
but any nation that’s friendly toward it, such as Chile 1973, Iraq 2003, Syria
2011, Ukraine 2014, Venezuela 2012, and China. All of that U.S. aggression was
based on lies, but, apparently, the American public never gets the important
message, which is that we’re now
living in a dictatorship and it constantly lies. The myth in all cases, against all of
those Governments, is that “We’re against a tyrannical government, not against
its public, whom we must protect against that tyranny”; but, actually, it’s
always instead a war against the target-country’s legitimate government, and
the results are always disastrous for the attacked country’s population — and
the United States Government NEVER says it’s sorry; it just keeps on lying, and
perpetrating coups, and invading, and imposing sanctions (the first step toward
invading a country), and its ‘news’-media keep on ‘justifying’ what it did and
does, because the tyranny is right here, at home, and its reach is global.
The 1991 end of communism in
Russia made no real
difference on the American side, though Russia’s Government didn’t learn for sure
that America’s Government still was aiming to conquer it until in 2014 the U.S.
Government carried out what the head of Stratfor called “the most blatant coup in history” against Ukraine; and Ukraine, on Russia’s very
doorstep, was finally set onto a track to become a member of America’s
anti-Russian military alliance, NATO — like publicly declaring “Checkmate!”
So: that brings us to today.
And this is history; it
contradicts — instead of repeats — the myths, the lies.
Eric ZUESSE
American writer and
investigative historian
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