Cara, the attached link is a Ukrainian news talk that occurred some weeks prior to the Russian SMO incursion. The show features a politician, Yevgenyi Muraev, who is part of opposition to the western backed govt. Of course, he’s described as basically a pro Russian puppet (Wikipedia, and most western media outlets, although Reuters has a fairly innocuous blurb about him that’s not so transparently biased).
He was a member of the Ukrainian parliament. His party has since been banned by Zelenskyy, his businesses shut down and assets confiscated, and I believe the SBU has declared him traitor. Current whereabouts are said to be Vienna/bratislava/russia. Take your pick.
Regardless, his comments are lucid, and have proven to be quite accurate. You might be interested.
The build up of Russian forces on the border prior to feb24, 2022 has been heavily reported, but the buildup of Ukrainian forces on the border of Donbas has only occasionally been noted, and when so, consistently downplayed. In the vdo link Muraev states this, and no one in the audience or panel members chose to dispute. It was an obvious true statement. This is how the news goes.
As your essay notes, the west is the most heavily propagandized place on earth, USA being home base for info management warfare, and effectively so. What is believable is also controllable. That the USA is the master of public relations and marketing, this is acknowledged; an everyday, all day long capitalist necessity. Americans are quite comfortable with the bombardment. Unavoidably acquiescent since it’s built into the fabric of every single aspect of public endeavor and social intercourse. But of course the USA doesn’t engage in propaganda, heaven forfend! …aka political PR and marketing.
As Lewis Carroll noted in The Hunting of the Snark, “whatever I say three times is true”. So it goes. Belief is an emotional condition, not a rational one. But it’s useful to review words spoken on the record. Such is the link below.
Cara, your piece is one of the more reasoned pieces on the Ukraine I've seen. But I still have issues. I put this up on The Chris Hedges Report:
"I hate to be the lone voice in the wilderness but.... I don't agree. You do a pretty good job of delineating some (but by no means all) of the outrages perpetrated by the hegemonic US on the Russian federation but then you offer them no relief. All they're allowed to do is put up with non-stop efforts by "The West" to dismember their country so that they can be violently subjugated. Your interviewee consistently uses the phrase aggressive war in describing Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. I have to call bullshit on that. What, exactly, is aggressive war? I don't believe I've ever heard anyone give a precise description of what that is, so I'll give you what I mean when I say aggressive war. It means starting wars (including economic wars, read sanctions and political wars, read subverting the target government by way of our ubiquitous NGOs) without the benefit of a provocation to you, the country that starts the war. President Putin told the UNSG that Russia's attack on the Ukraine to free the Donbass has a straight line back to NATOs bombing campaign against Serbia which provoked no similar reaction to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine but Serbia didn't have the full weight of the world's finest propaganda operation behind it like the Ukraine does nor was it trained in the uses of propaganda that Stepan Bandaras learned in his time in the German Abwehr in WWII. And before you say it, I agree, not all ethnic Ukrainians are Nazis but all the Nazis in the Ukraine are ethnic Ukrainians. It was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, that trapped some 48 people in the building in Odessa and burnt them all to death. It was also the Ukrainians who haven't investigated or punished any of the perpetrators of that crime. I could rant and rave for quite a while but the real bad boy in today's world is my country, the United States. The United States has fomented coups all over the world, overthrowing governments that we don't like irrespective of how the people of the country in question feel about things (this is not, need I point out, in conformance with the UN charter). We fomented all the trouble in HK through our subversive NGOs the foremost of which would be the CIA cutout, NED, and USAID but there are many more. We waged aggressive war against Nicaragua, arming the losing side to start a civil war. But Daniel Ortega is once again el Presidente of Nicaragua. Bolivia, the US subborned OAS went along with US lies and Evo Morales was chased out of office. The election was eventually declared fair and reasonable but Morales was out of office and the Republican... I mean the right wing crew that took over when Morales left tried to just skip an election but the people forced them to have one which they lost. They then tried to foment another coup to regain power but struck out. Chile got Pinochet and Argentina got their own military coup which they celebrated getting rid of just recently. You guys whined about Ukrainian refugees probably half of which went to Russia and got taken care of but could barely mention the much larger number of refugees created in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and parts of the former Yugoslavia by US aggressive warfare (both bombs and rockets as well as economic and political warfare). The biblical injunction of letting he who is without sin cast the first stone, I believe the US needs to stop messing with everybody on the planet. And we need to implement Zhou Enlai's five principles for peaceful coexistence."
My outrage at Chris' interviewee is the bullshit line that there is no excuse for Russia's invasion of the Donbass. The right of self defense is a concept that is deeply ingrained in many of our structures and principles. Russia has that right and the US has been attacking Russia for decades going back to the Mujaheddin that we created and supported in Afghanistan 40 years ago. Everybody in the US calls it the Russian invasion of Afghanistan but the Russians were invited in. A reality nobody wants to remember. At what point does Russia get to defend itself?
Cara, the attached link is a Ukrainian news talk that occurred some weeks prior to the Russian SMO incursion. The show features a politician, Yevgenyi Muraev, who is part of opposition to the western backed govt. Of course, he’s described as basically a pro Russian puppet (Wikipedia, and most western media outlets, although Reuters has a fairly innocuous blurb about him that’s not so transparently biased).
He was a member of the Ukrainian parliament. His party has since been banned by Zelenskyy, his businesses shut down and assets confiscated, and I believe the SBU has declared him traitor. Current whereabouts are said to be Vienna/bratislava/russia. Take your pick.
Regardless, his comments are lucid, and have proven to be quite accurate. You might be interested.
The build up of Russian forces on the border prior to feb24, 2022 has been heavily reported, but the buildup of Ukrainian forces on the border of Donbas has only occasionally been noted, and when so, consistently downplayed. In the vdo link Muraev states this, and no one in the audience or panel members chose to dispute. It was an obvious true statement. This is how the news goes.
As your essay notes, the west is the most heavily propagandized place on earth, USA being home base for info management warfare, and effectively so. What is believable is also controllable. That the USA is the master of public relations and marketing, this is acknowledged; an everyday, all day long capitalist necessity. Americans are quite comfortable with the bombardment. Unavoidably acquiescent since it’s built into the fabric of every single aspect of public endeavor and social intercourse. But of course the USA doesn’t engage in propaganda, heaven forfend! …aka political PR and marketing.
As Lewis Carroll noted in The Hunting of the Snark, “whatever I say three times is true”. So it goes. Belief is an emotional condition, not a rational one. But it’s useful to review words spoken on the record. Such is the link below.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/90189
The Reuters article about Muraev:
https://www.reuters.com/world/who-is-yevhen-murayev-named-by-britain-kremlins-pick-lead-ukraine-2022-01-23/
Cara, your piece is one of the more reasoned pieces on the Ukraine I've seen. But I still have issues. I put this up on The Chris Hedges Report:
"I hate to be the lone voice in the wilderness but.... I don't agree. You do a pretty good job of delineating some (but by no means all) of the outrages perpetrated by the hegemonic US on the Russian federation but then you offer them no relief. All they're allowed to do is put up with non-stop efforts by "The West" to dismember their country so that they can be violently subjugated. Your interviewee consistently uses the phrase aggressive war in describing Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. I have to call bullshit on that. What, exactly, is aggressive war? I don't believe I've ever heard anyone give a precise description of what that is, so I'll give you what I mean when I say aggressive war. It means starting wars (including economic wars, read sanctions and political wars, read subverting the target government by way of our ubiquitous NGOs) without the benefit of a provocation to you, the country that starts the war. President Putin told the UNSG that Russia's attack on the Ukraine to free the Donbass has a straight line back to NATOs bombing campaign against Serbia which provoked no similar reaction to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine but Serbia didn't have the full weight of the world's finest propaganda operation behind it like the Ukraine does nor was it trained in the uses of propaganda that Stepan Bandaras learned in his time in the German Abwehr in WWII. And before you say it, I agree, not all ethnic Ukrainians are Nazis but all the Nazis in the Ukraine are ethnic Ukrainians. It was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, that trapped some 48 people in the building in Odessa and burnt them all to death. It was also the Ukrainians who haven't investigated or punished any of the perpetrators of that crime. I could rant and rave for quite a while but the real bad boy in today's world is my country, the United States. The United States has fomented coups all over the world, overthrowing governments that we don't like irrespective of how the people of the country in question feel about things (this is not, need I point out, in conformance with the UN charter). We fomented all the trouble in HK through our subversive NGOs the foremost of which would be the CIA cutout, NED, and USAID but there are many more. We waged aggressive war against Nicaragua, arming the losing side to start a civil war. But Daniel Ortega is once again el Presidente of Nicaragua. Bolivia, the US subborned OAS went along with US lies and Evo Morales was chased out of office. The election was eventually declared fair and reasonable but Morales was out of office and the Republican... I mean the right wing crew that took over when Morales left tried to just skip an election but the people forced them to have one which they lost. They then tried to foment another coup to regain power but struck out. Chile got Pinochet and Argentina got their own military coup which they celebrated getting rid of just recently. You guys whined about Ukrainian refugees probably half of which went to Russia and got taken care of but could barely mention the much larger number of refugees created in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and parts of the former Yugoslavia by US aggressive warfare (both bombs and rockets as well as economic and political warfare). The biblical injunction of letting he who is without sin cast the first stone, I believe the US needs to stop messing with everybody on the planet. And we need to implement Zhou Enlai's five principles for peaceful coexistence."
My outrage at Chris' interviewee is the bullshit line that there is no excuse for Russia's invasion of the Donbass. The right of self defense is a concept that is deeply ingrained in many of our structures and principles. Russia has that right and the US has been attacking Russia for decades going back to the Mujaheddin that we created and supported in Afghanistan 40 years ago. Everybody in the US calls it the Russian invasion of Afghanistan but the Russians were invited in. A reality nobody wants to remember. At what point does Russia get to defend itself?