Even DemocracyNow! Fudges It on Ukraine
Or, What the Americans Are Not Being Told
Even Democracy Now!, like the PBS, can’t bring itself to tell the American public their army is now training neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
As we reported on April 17, the 300 U.S. troops belonging to 173rd Airborne (stationed in Vincenza, Italy) had arrived that day at the Yavoriv military base in the Lvov Region to begin training not the Ukrainiain regular army or, as DemocracyNow! puts it their “Ukrainian counterparts” — but specifically members of the National Guard.
Even Voice of America admits as much, in its otherwise shameless propaganda piece which omits to tell its readers who the “Right Sector” group actually are. In the same article, a piece worthy of Goebbels’s own propaganda machine, VOA describes Andriy Parubiy, the co-founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) as “a ramrod-straight figure who led Maidan self-defense forces and became Ukraine’s effective head of security as secretary of the National Defense and Security Council.” That VOA, an organ of the U.S. state, does its best to deliberately conceal Parubiy’s high standing in a neo-Nazi party is understandable since it was the U.S., represented by its State Department officials such as Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, American ambassador to Kiev, who engineered the February 2014 coup in Kiev which brought a coalition of fascist and neo-Nazi parties to power in Ukraine.
That DemocracyNow! does the same is far more disturbing because it demonstrates the degree to which self-censorship and the practice of tacit concealment of embarrassing truths is becoming the norm in American progressive and some alternative media circles, too.
The truth, unpalatable to both the PBS and DemocracyNow!, is that the National Guard of Ukraine, as we and many other alternate media outfits have been reporting, is made up of the notorious Azov Battalion, Praviy Sektor neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalist paramilitary groups Kiev has decided to bring under its wing and use in its ethnic-cleansing campaign in Donbass.
Thus, the real news is that the American military is now training self-identified neo-Nazi troops in Lvov, where Svoboda, the party which the American-Jewish newspaper the Algemeiner had described as anti-Semitic and Nazi in its ideology two years ago, i.e. before the EuroMaidan “popular” revolution, has most adherents and greatest popularity. Here’s the Algemeiner on Svoboda in May 2013:
In Ukraine, the noisiest anti-Semitic group is the Svoboda (“Freedom”) party. Established in 1991 as the “Social-National Party of Ukraine” under the SS-era symbol of the Wolfsangel. In 2004, with new leader Oleh Tyahnybok, the party renamed itself and adopted innocuous symbols.
That, however, didn’t change the Nazi characteristic of the party.
As to who the Right Sector paramilitary group that’s now part of the National Guard being trained by the U.S. Army is may be gleaned from the fact that even the conservative British paper The Telegraph refers to it as “the far-Right Pravy Sektor.” Back in January 2014, the liberal Guardian had this to say about Praviy Sektor:
Pravy Sektor, a murky grouping of nationalist and far-right groups, has said it is co-ordinating the violence, and the coalition represents very different ideals from the initial protest goal of closer links with the European Union.
Far-right, of course, is the politically correct NATO and EU euphemism for “fascist” and “neo-Nazi”. It’s not a term The Telegraph can bring itself to apply to the Azov Battalion, now also part of the National Guard, whom it describes straight-forwardly as a “neo-Nazi brigade.”
These, then, are the people whom the U.S. soldiers from 173rd Airborne have now begun training how to better kill and drive from their ancestral lands the people of Donbass.
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News and western politicans go hand in hand. Both are selected for the benefit of the selectors.
It is never about what ‘they’ say, it’s always about what ‘they’ leave out…
I find this deeply disturbing, and it is not just a phenomenon of Democracy Now:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/04/ukraine-trench-warfare/
One possibility with respect to Democracy Now! is that a good number of its subscribers might be Jewish with family members who died or suffered in WW2 concentration camps, and any suggestion that pro-Israeli individuals and organisations in the US, Israel and other countries might be linked directly or indirectly with the neo-Nazis in Ukraine has to be suppressed for their (the subscribers, that is) supposed benefit. People would object and withdraw any support or loyalty they have to the pro-Israeli lobby and the politicians it funds if they were to know that the US and its allies, Israel among them, were funding and arming neo-Nazis.
That sounds entirely plausible.
There is a lesser known history that relates to this:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/24/zionism-in-the-age-of-the-dictators/
The suppression of these facts can’t possibly be for the benefit of those whose family members perished at the hands of the first generation Nazis.
Both they and the rest of America have every right to know what the U.S. government is doing in their name and whom their own tax dollars are supporting and helping train in Ukraine (or anywhere else).
Dear Vaska,
Perhaps I should have explained my thinking more clearly: because a number of subscribers to Democracy Now! might be Jewish with family members who died during the Holocaust, DN! might feel compelled to suppress facts about the neo-Nazis in Ukraine, in order not to offend these subscribers who might stop contributing to the blog. DN! contributors may also be supporters of Jewish causes in the US, many of which are actually supporting the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with money and advice, and which their supporters aren’t aware of. There is the very real possibility that if DN! did reveal the facts, they would lose their subscribers. When people’s beliefs are challenged by facts, most often the reaction is denial, manifested in shooting the messenger by dumping it. (Psychology calls this cognitive dissonance.) This is unfortunate but true.
The other thing too is that the pro-Israel lobby does support the Poroshenko regime and Israel is sending arms (or preparing to send arms) to it. You know that Russia has lifted its ban on supplying S-300 missiles to Iran and Israel deems Iran its biggest competitor for power and influence in the Middle East. Anything that might divert Russian support away from Iran will be grasped. So there may be pressure coming from DN!’s corporate sponsors to deny the true nature of the neo-Nazis.
Dear Jen: I do understand the “shooting the messenger” fear that might be behind the DN!’s suppression of the facts about what’s going on in Ukraine. My point is that once we start basing our decisions about what to report and how — about what in effect to suppress and, by doing so, distort the public’s understanding of the events — once we start basing such decisions on our projective anxieties about how our readers might react to the facts we have to report, we’re already engaging in self-censorship and are already in the realm of un-freedom.
Worse still: by suppressing the relevant facts and misrepresenting the situation as that of the U.S. army training its Ukrainian counterparts, as DN! did in the item I cited, we are actively misinforming the public on what’s going on.
DemocracyNow! decided that reporting accurately on Ukraine is not worth the potential loss of some of their public and some of their sponsorship funds. Unfortunately, the effect of their decision is also the distortion of the historical record. A better way to deal with the situation they find themselves in would be, in my opinion, to have a panel of expert historians and reputable analysts who would openly discuss the U.S. government’s seriously troubling and politically unacceptable support of fascist and neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine.
Democracy Now obviously has advertisers and sponsors who would not like the truth about the U.S. armed forces mission in Kiev. That would be a step too far; especially as it’s obamas govt doing it.