Article: NYT's Orwellian View of Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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In George Orwell's 1984, the leaders of Oceania presented "Two Minutes Hate" in which the image of an enemy was put on display and loyal Oceanianians expressed their rage, all the better to prepare them for the country's endless wars and their own surrender of freedom. And, now, in America, you have The New York Times.

Surely the Times is a bit more subtle than the powers-that-be in Orwell's Oceania, but the point is the same. The "paper of record" decides who our rotating foreign enemy is and depicts its leader as a demon corrupting whatever he touches. The rest of us aren't supposed to think for ourselves. We're just supposed to hate.

As the Times has degenerated from a relatively decent newspaper into a fount of neocon propaganda, its editors also have descended into the practice of simply inventing a narrative of events that serves an ideological purpose, its own version of "Two Minutes Hate." Like the leaders of Orwell's Oceania, the Times has become increasingly heavy-handed in its propaganda.

Excluding alternative explanations of events, even if supported by solid evidence, the Times arrogantly creates its own reality and tells us who to hate.

In assessing the Times's downward spiral into this unethical journalism, one could look back on its false reporting regarding Iraq, Iran, Syria or other Middle East hotspots. But now the Times is putting the lives of ourselves, our children and our grandchildren at risk with its reckless reporting on the Ukraine crisis -- by setting up an unnecessary confrontation between nuclear-armed powers -- the United States and Russia.

At the center of the Times' propaganda on Ukraine has been its uncritical -- indeed its anti-journalistic -- embrace of the Ukrainians coup-makers in late 2013 and early 2014 as they collaborated with neo-Nazi militias to violently overthrow elected President Viktor Yanukovych and hurl Ukraine into a bloody civil war.

Rather than display journalistic professionalism, the Times' propagandists ignored the evidence of a coup -- including an intercepted phone call in which U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussed how to "mid-wife" the regime change and handpick the new leaders. "Yats is the guy," declared Nuland, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk who emerged as prime minister.

The Times even ignored a national security expert, Statfor founder George Friedman, when he termed the ouster of Ukraine's elected president "the most blatant coup in history." The Times just waved a magic wand and pronounced that there was no coup -- and anyone who thought so must reside inside "the Russian propaganda bubble." [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine."]

Perhaps even more egregiously, the Times has pretended that there were no neo-Nazi militias spearheading the Feb. 22, 2014 coup and then leading the bloody "anti-terrorist operation" against ethnic Russians in the south and east who resisted the coup. The Times explained all this bloodshed as simply "Russian aggression."

It didn't even matter when the U.S. House of Representatives -- of all groups -- unanimously acknowledged the neo-Nazi problem when it prohibited U.S. collaboration in military training of Ukrainian Nazis. The Times simply expunged the vote from its "official history" of the crisis. [See Consortiumnews.com's "US House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine."]

Orwell's Putin

Yet, for an Orwellian "Two Minute Hate" to work properly, you need to have a villain whose face you can put on display. And, in the case of Ukraine -- at least after Yanukovych was driven from the scene -- that villain has been Russian President Vladimir Putin, who embodies all evil in the intense hatred sold to the American public.

So, when Putin presents a narrative of the Ukraine crisis, which notes the history of the U.S.-driven expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders and the evidence of the U.S.-directed Ukrainian coup, the Times editors must dismiss it all as "mythology," as they did in Monday's editorial regarding Putin's remarks to an international economic conference in St. Petersburg.

"President Vladimir Putin of Russia is not veering from the mythology he created to explain away the crisis over Ukraine," the Times' editors wrote. "It is one that wholly blames the West for provoking a new Cold War and insists that international sanctions have not grievously wounded his country's flagging economy."

Without acknowledging any Western guilt in the coup that overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014, the Times' editors simply reveled in the harm that the Obama administration and the European Union have inflicted on Russia's economy for its support of the Yanukovych government and its continued backers in eastern and southern Ukraine.

For nearly a year and a half, the New York Times and other major U.S. news organizations have simply refused to acknowledge the reality of what happened in Ukraine. In the Western fantasy, the elected Yanukovych government simply disappeared and was replaced by a U.S.-backed regime that then treated any resistance to its rule as "terrorism." The new regime even dispatched neo-Nazi militias to kill ethnic Russians and other Ukrainians who resisted and thus were deemed "terrorists."

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