Exclusive: U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
It may be fitting that the U.S.-funded Radio Liberty would be the latest media outlet to join in the bashing of an American academic who dares to disagree with U.S. policies on Ukraine, which have included supporting a 2014 coup that ousted the elected president and installing a new regime in which neo-Nazis play a prominent role. After all, Radio Liberty has a history of cuddling up to Nazis.
On May 6, a Radio Liberty pundit named Carl Schreck joined the Official Washington herd in demeaning Russian scholar Stephen Cohen as “a Putin apologist” who, Schreck said, was once “widely seen as one of the preeminent scholars in the generation of Sovietologists who rose to prominence in the 1970s, [but] Cohen these days is routinely derided as Putin’s ‘toady’ and ‘useful idiot.’”
Russia scholar Stephen Cohen.
While hurling insults, Schreck did little to evaluate the merits of Cohen’s arguments, beyond consulting with neoconservatives and anti-Moscow activists. Cohen’s daring to dissent from Official Washington’s conventional wisdom was treated as proof of his erroneous ways.
In that sense, Schreck’s reliance on vitriol rather than reason was typical of the “group think” prevalent across the U.S. mainstream media. But Radio Liberty does have a special history regarding Ukraine, including the use of Nazi sympathizers during the ramping up of the Cold War propaganda by Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s.
In early 2014, when I was reviewing files at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California, I stumbled onto an internal controversy over Radio Liberty’s broadcasts of commentaries into Ukraine from right-wing exiles. Some of those commentaries praised Ukrainian nationalists who sided with the Nazis in World War II as the SS pursued its “final solution” against European Jews, including the infamous Babi Yar massacre in a ravine outside Kiev.
These RL propaganda broadcasts provoked outrage from some Jewish organizations, such as B’nai B’rith, and individuals including conservative academic Richard Pipes, prompting an internal review. According to a memo dated May 4, 1984, and written by James Critchlow, a research officer at the Board of International Broadcasting, which managed Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, one RL broadcast in particular was viewed as “defending Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the SS.”
Critchlow wrote, “An RL Ukrainian broadcast of Feb. 12, 1984 contains references to the Nazi-oriented Ukrainian-manned SS ‘Galicia’ Division of World War II which may have damaged RL’s reputation with Soviet listeners. The memoirs of a German diplomat are quoted in a way that seems to constitute endorsement by RL of praise for Ukrainian volunteers in the SS division, which during its existence fought side by side with the Germans against the Red Army.”
Harvard Professor Pipes, who was an adviser to the Reagan administration, also inveighed against the RL broadcasts, writing on Dec. 3, 1984 “the Russian and Ukrainian services of RL have been transmitting this year blatantly anti-Semitic material to the Soviet Union which may cause the whole enterprise irreparable harm.”
Though the Reagan administration publicly defended RL against criticism, privately some senior officials agreed with the critics, according to the documents. For instance, in a Jan. 4, 1985, memo, Walter Raymond Jr., a top official on the National Security Council, told his boss, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, that “I would believe much of what Dick [Pipes] says is right.”
That three-decade-old dispute over U.S.-sponsored radio broadcasts underscored the troubling political reality of Ukraine, which straddles a dividing line between people with cultural ties oriented toward the West and those with a cultural heritage more attuned to Russia. Since the Feb. 22, 2014 coup that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, some of the old Nazi sympathies have resurfaced.
For instance, on May 2, 2014, when right-wing hooligans chased ethnic Russian protesters into the Trade Union Building in Odessa and then set it on fire killing scores of people inside, the burnt-out building was then defaced with pro-Nazi graffiti hailing “the Galician SS” spray-painted onto the charred walls.
Later, some of Ukraine’s right-wing “volunteer” battalions sent to eastern Ukraine to crush the ethnic Russian resistance sported neo-Nazi and Nazi emblems, including Swastikas and SS markings on their helmets. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.”]
Targeting Cohen
But anyone who detects this reality can expect to confront insults from the mainstream U.S. media and U.S. government propagandists. Professor Cohen, 76, has borne the brunt of these ad hominem attacks.
One of the ugliest episodes came when the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies joined the bash-Cohen mob. The academic group spurned a fellowship program, which it had solicited from Cohen’s wife, The Nation’s editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, because the program’s title included Cohen’s name.
“It’s no secret that there were swirling controversies surrounding Professor Cohen,” Stephen Hanson, the group’s president, told the New York Times.
In a protest letter to the group, Cohen called this action “a political decision that creates serious doubts about the organization’s commitment to First Amendment rights and academic freedom.” He also noted that young scholars in the field have expressed fear for their professional futures if they break from the herd. Cohen mentioned the story of one young woman scholar who dropped off a panel to avoid risking her career in case she said something that could be deemed sympathetic to Russia.
Cohen noted, too, that even established foreign policy figures, ex-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, have been accused in the Washington Post of “advocating that the West appease Russia,” with the notion of “appeasement” meant “to be disqualifying, chilling, censorious.” (Kissinger had objected to the comparison of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler as unfounded.)
So, as the United States rushes into a new Cold War with Russia, we are seeing the makings of a new McCarthyism, challenging the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t get in line. But this conformity presents a serious threat to U.S. national security and even the future of the planet. We saw a similar pattern with the rush to war in Iraq, but a military clash with nuclear-armed Russia is a crisis of a much greater magnitude.
One of Professor Cohen’s key points has been that Official Washington’s “group think” about post-Soviet Russia has been misguided from the start, laying the groundwork for today’s confrontation. In Cohen’s view, to understand why Russians are so alarmed by U.S. and NATO meddling in Ukraine, you have to go back to those days after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Instead of working with the Russians to transition carefully from a communist system to a pluralistic, capitalist one, the U.S. prescription was “shock therapy.”
As American “free market” experts descended on Moscow during the pliant regime of Boris Yeltsin, well-connected Russian thieves and their U.S. compatriots plundered the country’s wealth, creating a handful of billionaire “oligarchs” and leaving millions upon millions of Russians in a state of near starvation, with a collapse in life expectancy rarely seen in a country not at war.
Yet, despite the desperation of the masses, American journalists and pundits hailed the “democratic reform” underway in Russia with glowing accounts of how glittering life could be in the shiny new hotels, restaurants and bars of Moscow. Complaints about the suffering of average Russians were dismissed as the grumblings of losers who failed to appreciate the economic wonders that lay ahead.
As recounted in his 2001 book, Failed Crusade, Cohen correctly describes this fantastical reporting as journalistic “malpractice” that left the American people misinformed about the on-the-ground reality in Russia. The widespread suffering led Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin, to pull back on the wholesale privatization, to punish some oligarchs and to restore some of the social safety net.
Though the U.S. mainstream media portrays Putin as essentially a tyrant, his elections and approval numbers indicate that he commands broad popular support, in part, because he stood up to some oligarchs (though he still worked with others). Yet, Official Washington continues to portray oligarchs whom Putin jailed as innocent victims of a tyrant’s revenge.
After Putin pardoned jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the neocon Freedom House sponsored a Washington dinner in Khordorkovsky’s honor, hailing him as one of Russia’s political heroes. “I have to say I’m impressed by him,” declared Freedom House President David Kramer. “But he’s still figuring out how he can make a difference.”
New York Times writer Peter Baker fairly swooned at Khodorkovsky’s presence. “If anything, he seemed stronger and deeper than before” prison, Baker wrote. “The notion of prison as cleansing the soul and ennobling the spirit is a powerful motif in Russian literature.”
Yet, even Khodorkovsky, who is now in his early 50s, acknowledged that he “grew up in Russia’s emerging Wild West capitalism to take advantage of what he now says was a corrupt privatization system,” Baker reported. In other words, Khodorkovsky was admitting that he obtained his vast wealth through a corrupt process, though by referring to it as the “Wild West” Baker made the adventure seem quite dashing and even admirable when, in reality, Khodorkovsky was a key figure in the plunder of Russia that impoverished millions of his countrymen and sent many to early graves.
In the 1990s, Professor Cohen was one of the few scholars with the courage to challenge the prevailing boosterism for Russia’s “shock therapy.” He noted even then the danger of mistaken “conventional wisdom” and how it strangles original thought and necessary skepticism.
“Much as Russia scholars prefer consensus, even orthodoxy, to dissent, most journalists, one of them tells us, are ‘devoted to group-think’ and ‘see the world through a set of standard templates,’” wrote Cohen. “For them to break with ‘standard templates’ requires not only introspection but retrospection, which also is not a characteristic of either profession.”
Nor is it characteristic of U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty, which has gone from promoting the views of Nazi sympathizers in the 1980s to pushing the propaganda of a new Ukrainian government that cozies up to modern-day neo-Nazis.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
From the article:
“He also noted that young scholars in the field have expressed fear for their professional futures if they break from the herd. Cohen mentioned the story of one young woman scholar who dropped off a panel to avoid risking her career in case she said something that could be deemed sympathetic to Russia.”
Isn’t this just US. Spend years getting your credentials to the end parroting the party line. Of filling a role, of just doing your job. It’s one hell of a mystery that we’re so screwed up.
For me, the ignorant group think that we see nowadays about Ukraine, Syria, Iran etc. are allowed to perpetuate because of the impending ignorance of even the US’ own history – the real history not the revisionist “red menace” history which supposedly justifies so many wars. The Ukraine Crisis did not start with Russia trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire but rather with the United States pulling off a coup against a “democratically elected” government – historically the US has done this many times where quite often it has overthrown a democracy and installed a dictatorship friendly to US interests (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973 etc.). Since the 1980’s the US largely changed from installing dictators but instead now use NGO’s such as USAID, National Endowment for Democracy etc. to fund opposition parties within the country, fund protesters, fund opposition media and create revolution. Victoria Nuland even says of the $5 Billion that the US spent in Ukraine since 1991 and she picked the government which would take power after the coup. It amazed me that the media did a little smoke and mirrors on her leaked call instead focusing on the “F*** the EU” comment rather than the evidence of a coup d’état.
Basically my overall point is that this “group think” only exists because of the ignorance at our own history. It takes people like Stephen Cohen, John Mearsheimer, Robert Parry, John Pilger to reminds us of our history and hopefully people with use “logic” instead of Cold War inspired “emotion” to define their perceptions on any given subject. I highly recommend that people watch some of John Pilger’s documentaries such as “War on Democracy”, “Stealing a Nation” etc. to realize more of what our western government’s are doing in the world meanwhile our leaders are self-righteous hypocrites pointing fingers at others.
During a recent Munk Debate in Canada Professor Cohen addressed this very subject of his being a Putin Fan. (If you YouTube the 2015 Munk Debate you may listen and watch to what I am referring to). Professor Cohen actually brought up the fact of how to much was being made of Putin. He went on to explain how the West should focus on Russia, not mainly on Putin. He made sense since after all we are talking about starting trouble with a whole country, and not just picking a fight with one man. The stakes are way to high to just be making fun of a country’s leader who goes shirtless and rides bears. The outcome of a war with Russia would be a catastrophic to say the least.
Here is a portion of Putin’s speech he gave at the 70th Anniversary of the end of WWII celebration;
We are grateful to the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the Victory. We are thankful to the anti-fascists of various countries who selflessly fought the enemy as guerrillas and members of the underground resistance, including in Germany itself.
Here is a portion of what Putin had to say at the 70th Anniversary of the end of WWII
“We are grateful to the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the Victory. We are thankful to the anti-fascists of various countries who selflessly fought the enemy as guerrillas and members of the underground resistance, including in Germany itself.”
Here is a link to the whole speech;
http://praguepost.com/world-news/47701-full-text-putin-s-speech-for-the-70th-anniversary-of-victory
Now after you read Mr Putin’s speech you tell me if this sounds like a Hitler Madman….
Sorry for the double post but I accidentally hit the post comment button.
During a recent Munk Debate in Canada Professor Cohen addressed this very subject of his being a Putin Fan. (If you YouTube the 2015 Munk Debate you may listen and watch to what I am referring to). Professor Cohen actually brought up the fact of how to much was being made of Putin. He went on to explain how the West should focus on Russia, not mainly on Putin. He made sense since after all we are talking about starting trouble with a whole country, and not just picking a fight with one man. The stakes are way to high to just be making fun of a country’s leader who goes shirtless and rides bears. The outcome of a war with Russia would be a catastrophic to say the least.
Here is a portion of Putin’s speech he gave at the 70th Anniversary of the end of WWII celebration;
We are grateful to the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the Victory. We are thankful to the anti-fascists of various countries who selflessly fought the enemy as guerrillas and members of the underground resistance, including in Germany itself.
Here is a portion of what Putin had to say at the 70th Anniversary of the end of WWII
“We are grateful to the peoples of Great Britain, France and the United States of America for their contribution to the Victory. We are thankful to the anti-fascists of various countries who selflessly fought the enemy as guerrillas and members of the underground resistance, including in Germany itself.”
Here is a link to the whole speech;
http://praguepost.com/world-news/47701-full-text-putin-s-speech-for-the-70th-anniversary-of-victory
Excellent blog Mr. Perry. I remember quite well the cogent answers given by Russian scholar and Professor Cohen on CNN when Ukraine was first up nightly news. He was the only guest who actually explained what was going on in historical terms. I never got that he was a Putin apologist at all, but a realist who could provide insight and connect the dots, including reference to the “shock therapy” of “disaster capitalism” described by Naomi Klein. Keep up the good work. I don’t know how you do it.
‘“The notion of prison as cleansing the soul and ennobling the spirit is a powerful motif … ”
Back in the USSA, a little prison time introspection and retrospection would appear salutary for our Bushist putschists, beginning with Zer0bama, back up through his Cheney precedents and burning Bushs to his patron, Poppy!
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Oleg Deripaska have interesting co-investors in Yukos and Rusal. Lord Jacob 4th baron Rothschild and his son and future 5th baron Rothschild Nathaniel Philip Rothschild are both major investors. And when President Putin put Mikhail Khodorkovsky in jail, the Yukos shares became the property of Lord Jacob Rothschild.
And the son has cornered Rusal:
What scares me is how much of the Fascist,socialist, Nazi era machine is being used in the current American governments war on it’s own people for the even more diabolical push towards world domination and control.. Hasn’t anything from the history of the world registered with these leaders regarding domination and control? or is that why they are actively trying to rewrite it?
Stephen Cohen: How America Misremembers Russia’s Central Role in World War II
http://www.thenation.com/blog/206465/stephen-cohen-how-america-misremembers-russias-central-role-world-war-ii#
The NATO-instigated so-called “Ukrainian Revolution†and Kiev’s “anti-terror” operation, a terror war on the Donbass region, were specifically timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Soviet operations that cleared the German troops from Ukraine:
the Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive (24 December 1943 – 14 April 1944),
the Crimean Offensive (8 April – 12 May 1944), and
the Lvov–Sandomierz Offensive (13 July 1944 – 29 August 1944).
Soviet Storm: World War II in the East (Russian title: СоветÑкий Шторм: Ð’Ñ‚Ð¾Ñ€Ð°Ñ Ð¼Ð¸Ñ€Ð¾Ð²Ð°Ñ Ð²Ð¾Ð¹Ð½Ð° на ВоÑтоке) is a 2011 17-episode Russian television World War II documentary series.
Episode 10: From the Dnieper to the Oder documents the Soviet liberation of Ukraine from Nazi occupation. The exploits of the Nazi collaborationist Ukrainian 14th SS Grenadier Division ‘Galicia’ are documented at minutes 26:50-28:50.
Soviet Storm: Battle of Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lTiJ4BLLNQ
Thanks for reference. I appreciate it Abe.
A real danger with issues which have become subject to group-think is that policy is developed using bad information. In Canada, the federal parliament recently spent an afternoon discussing Canadian responses to Ukraine, whereby the opposition parties largely supported the Harper government’s firm support of the Kiev regime.
Shockingly, it appears that the main source of information for all the MPs was a briefing document drawn up by the Canadian Ukraine Congress. This document presents a one-sided and factually challenged version of events and asserts: “Thousands of regular and irregular Russian troops are in Ukraine”; “Kremlin-backed terrorists have indiscriminately shelled villages”; “five thousand people have been killed and tens of thousands more have been injured and wounded as a result of Russian aggression.” The document calls for complete isolation of Russia from world political and financial infrastructure; lethal military support for Kiev; designation of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
http://www.ucc.ca/2015/02/09/briefing-note-to-members-of-parliament-the-situation-in-ukraine-and-canadas-response/
I find it stunning that policy can be developed with such consequence based on such bad information, yet in a group-think scenario it is much easier to get along than to stand out against the crowd, even if the crowd is wrong. The virulence and nastiness of the insults and attacks on the integrity of people like Cohen are necessary to maintain the group thinking.
It seems that Ukranian Nazis have quite some influence there. They managed to kick out one of the most online–watched musicians (V. Lisitsa) from the Toronto orchestra for her expressing her views on the Donbass events… http://rt.com/news/247297-canada-orchestra-pianist-ukraine/
Professor Cohen explains history for anyone who wants to know,
others impose mafia lies with techniques such as if the truth were a commercial product.
Truth is the first love of Liberty.
Indeed Prof. Cohen is to be admired to stand up for his convictions. However, it shows again and again how powerful MSM propaganda is financed and supported by the US State Dept to demonize people or even whole populations with their lies paid for by the American taxpayers.
Thank God we have Robert Parry to open our eyes!
Zionism,Americas bane.
All our disasters have sprung from the head of dual citizen traitors.
Go Putin!
Yankee Come Home!
Radio Liberty! What a fine name… but what does it really mean? Just a moment while I find my decoder booklet. Ah yes, here it is! Liberty, liberty, liberty…
“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”.
Well, I suppose “liberty” is more or less synonymous with “freedom” – so it must mean “slavery”.
Professor Stephen Cohen’s biggest crime in the eyes of some people is that he has appeared a number of times on RT (formerly Russia Today). The western mass media is terrified that there is a media organisation that offers an alternative to their own uniformly pro-western coverage.
A senior editor of The Economist, Edward Lucas even called for ostracism of RT journalists if they apply for jobs elsewhere.
http://rt.com/op-edge/230315-rt-responds-lucas-munich/
RT is also seen as a threat by Andrew Lack, chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors which oversees Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, VOA and other stations. He puts it in the same catagory as the Islamic State and Boko Haram:
“We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram, “ he said. “But I firmly believe that this agency has a role to play in facing those challenges.â€
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/us/broadcasting-board-of-governors-names-chief-executive.html
It’s not surprising that RT’s guest Stephen Cohen is being attacked by various people in the USA. It’s no surprise either that, as Robert Parry points out, the US media prefers oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who finances the pro-western, anti-Kremlin Interpreter Mag and whose son is the president of its parent company, IMR.
Stephen Cohen is certainly no “Putin Apologist”, as he is described in the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headline. Cohen even said in an interview this year that that Putin was “abetting the east” and “He may be threatening”, even though Putin denies offering anything more than humanitarian aid to eastern Ukraine.
If Stephen Cohen is an apologist for any president, it’s for Barack Obama. He seems to be in denial about his leader’s involvement in the Ukraine crisis:
“Obama lost control of the situation. He didn’t know what was going on.” and “it is completely unclear to me—I voted for him twice—whether President Obama understands what’s going on in Ukraine”.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/3/is_ukraine_a_proxy_western_russia
Cohen is being attacked because he points out that the West played a part in creating the conflict in Ukraine, that it was not all Russia’s fault and that Putin is not Hitler. Comments like that seem controversial only to people who have only been fed with the western version of events in eastern Europe.
I suspect that people like Cohen are either trying hard to be unbiased – and overcompensating – or simply aware that if they tell the full unvarnished truth their tenure will disappear like a puff of smoke. They keep trying to find excuses for the Washington aggressors, when the historical record is perfectly plain. The richest and most powerful leaders of US political thought have hated Russia and its culture ever since the 19th century. Teddy Roosevelt urged the Japanese on against Russia, and celebrated when he heard of the destruction of the Russian Far East Fleet (incidentally, without a declaration of war) in 1904. Anti-Russian hysteria was multiplied many-fold with the Bolshevik Revolution, after which American and British armed forces spent several years actually fighting in Russia itself to stamp out the new dispensation. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s it is perfectly obvious that Washington greatly preferred the Nazis and Fascists to the Soviets. And then, with the defeat of the Axis, it was free to turn almost all its hostility against Moscow – with a little left over for China. The dissolution of the USSR made practically no difference – military confrontation merely gave way to a serious effort at economic and financial takeover. Now that Russia, under Putin, has demonstrated that it is unwilling to bow the knee to the USA, it is in the military crosshairs once more – and God help us all if anyone makes a mistake.
0bama’s own have a coined epithet for him: “FOOL!”