Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria and former C.I.A. officer John Kiriakou join Shadowproof‘s Kevin Gosztola for a conversation about the importance of alternative media during the Russia-Ukraine War.
Censorship, Commentary, Julian Assange, Media, Nuclear Weapons, Pentagon, Propaganda, Russia, Ukraine, WikiLeaks
A concrete example of alternative media and an apposite backgrounder about the neocons from a few years back ? documentary filmmaker Robbie Martin’s DVD trilogy “?A Very Heavy Agenda” (Parts: 1 A catalyzing event. 2 How we learned to stop worrying and love the new neocons. 3 Maintaining the world order.) If memory serves high risk appetite WRT Ukrainian adventures is featured in there as well. Blurb:
Post-9/11, the War on Terror had outlived its usefulness. The minds behind the think tanks that drive American interventionist foreign policy decided that the U.S. needed a new enemy, so they chose an old one ? Russia.
See averyheavyagenda dot com for more.
Excellent interview.
I would only make one correction, in response to John Kiriakou’s comment that Russians are hated because they are still thought of as “communists”.
Russia is hated because it is Christian. A strong church, a national identity, no woke intimidation, and sovereign. This is why it is hated.
Thank you for the video. But don’t you see the mainstream media’s action as a backlash against Trump’s lose grip on facts? Buying state department narratives as a reaction to the previous’ admin de-valuing of the agency… maybe
Please let us know where we can see Gabriel’s film on his brother’s case. Huge thanks for the beautiful wedding pictures. Stella is glorious and awesomely full of the most brilliant truth! Love is the greatest power of all.
We can keep letting them know we are with the truth-tellers who so love life and truth! Thank you, folks!
Wait, our power elite imagined and/or staged chemical weapons in Syria! Opec was sidelined.Why?! In order for American military to bomb…
Aaron Mate’s research & detailed PushBack uncovered the whole hoax of red lines being crossed by them using chemical weapons in Douma…poisoning their own people?! Why would that be? Ah, yeah. Not.
It’s an easy and true and simple narrative that has been nearly universally censored, and it runs something like this:
In 2013, the President of Ukraine needed help. He ruled over the poorest country in Europe, the one with the weakest currency. The IMF offered him a 12% loan, but he’d have to cut pensions, sale state assets, and halt energy subsidies to his people. Not requiring austerity, Putin offered financial help for a number of fronts, to be repaid at 5%.
Only when President Yanukovych accepted the Putin offer did all hell break loose in the streets of Kiev.
Nuland and McCain visited, Nazis in tow and cookies in hand. Yanukovych agreed to a compromise-to accelerate elections and reduce his powers. But the Nazis in the streets wouldn’t have it and ran him out of the country. The deaths they caused were never investigated by the new government they installed with the help of U.S. diplomats Nuland and Pyatt, whose plotting was caught and recorded on a clear and unmistakable audiotape.
Nuland later bragged on video that she the U.S. had spent 5 Billion Dollars to foment and foster this revolutions. Told it a Chevron group, the company who named one of its oil tankers the “S.S. Condoleezza Rice”.
Their coup accomplished, the Nazis headed East to kill the Russian speakers in the Donbass, where the coup was not accepted. Its oblasts had voted overwhelmingly for the incumbent the U.S. had just overthrown. On their way East, the Nazis managed to stop in Odessa to fry alive 47 separatists, whose only crime had been handing out anti-coup leaflets in the park near the Black Sea. The judiciary intimidated, there hasn’t been the first arrest, though the killings were a publicly witnessed spectacle, most of it filmed.
Crimea saw the Nazis and were horrified. They were happy to secede from the coup government they didn’t elect. Some here said that Putin was Hitler, ironically maintaining that Putin should have left Crimea to the mercies of the Nazis in Kiev, who had earlier that year celebrated the birthday of Stepan Bandera, who helped Hitler invade the Soviet Union and kill Jews and Poles in Ukraine. That birthday is still a national holiday in Ukraine.
That simple and unvarnished narrative is verboten in the U.S. Lamestream Corporate Media. We need to ask ourselves why.
Spot on analysis.
I would add that the US also set up the Orange Revolution and made their puppet Yushchenko President in a re-vote back in 2004/5. His wife, no surprise, was a US State Department official (possibly a CIA agent) at the time. Yushchenko courted the EU, big loans (poof!) with usurious interest rates. He was booted out polling at 5% when he reran in 2010, when his rival Yanukovych won (under Election supervision of the UN).
Yushenko and later VP Biden’s puppet Poroshenko glorified Ukrainian NAZIs and led to NAZIfication of Ukrainian police, military and security forces (although a small 5-10%, one later acknowledged that the Maidan Coup would have been “a gay parade” without them). Poroshenko outlawed Russian language and culture, although 16% of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians and a third speak Russian as their first language. Zelensky, who ran as the “Peace with Russia” candidate, garnering ~75% of the vote, immediately fell in line as another US puppet, continuing Poroshenko’s NAZIfication, slaughtering of ethnic Russians in Ukraine (~14,000 in the Donbas) and refusing to honor the Minsk II accords or even negotiate in good faith. Biden and Ukraine clearly want war.
State Media emphasizes that since Zelensky is a (non-practicing) Jew, there can be no NAZIs in Ukraine. A bit laughable, as Zelensky’s rich Jewish Oligarch protector, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, has funded NAZI organizations (Azov, Svoboda, C14, Right Sector, Banderas, etc) throughout Ukraine; he hates Russia. While many collaborated with NAZIs in WWII to survive, Ukrainians volunteered to be guards in the NAZI concentration camps. They (at least the Galicians and West Ukrainians near Kiev) are proud of their anti-Russian history and their collaborations with the CIA since the 50s. Some of Victoria Nuland’s ancestors were Ukrainian Jews (you wonder why the US has people in Government with close family legacies, such as Ukraine (and Israel and others) in position to put their ancestrial homelands in front of American interests. Of course most American politicians are corrupt, putting their family interests ahead of America, and are at home in Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe.
All I hear from friends who follow State Media is that crazy Putin started this all when he, unprovoked, seized Crimea. They have never heard of the Maidan Coup which triggered Putin’s actions (bad but understandable). Just as the US replacing Ukrainian independence and sovereigncy with a puppet government is also bad but expected nowadays.
Well done Kevin. I appreciate all your reporting.
I’m getting kind of tired of the obligatory condemnation of the Russian invasion. “Unless there’s an immediate threat…” invasions are wrong, basically. But there was an immediate threat to Russia. Ukraine was building up their American trained, American-armed nazi forces in preparation for incursions into Russian territory. Said nazis were already terrorizing ethnic Russians in Ukraine. NATO was already moving forces into Ukraine. The obvious plan was to invade Russia through Ukraine as has been done at least twice before. How long were they supposed to sit there and let it happen? U..S./NATO has steadily added military bases and nuclear weapons to countries closer and closer to Russia’s border – should they sit there and let the same happen to Ukraine – literally their front yard?
I know you’re already being accused of being “Putin lovers” and I understand the desire to push back against that, but further smearing Russia isn’t the way to do that – it only plays into the western narrative. Unless you have a definitive idea of what you think Putin could have done differently with Russia surviving as a nation, I don’t think you should condemn his actions.
Who exactly are your directing these comments to?
I’m getting kind of tired of people who don’t think the same proportionality that we demand of the US government should be shown by the Russian government in the war in Ukraine. The fact that they had legitimate grievances over NATO expansion or the violence in eastern Ukraine does not equal a threat large enough to warrant a massive military offensive that displaced millions of Ukrainians, destroyed buildings and infrastructure (aside from military targets), and killed thousands of Ukrainians. I recognize the restraint that Russian forces have shown, which as Joe Lauria pointed out is acknowledged by US military officials. I understand what Russia set out to achieve, but as someone who resents every think tank, lobbying group, and political faction intent to expand US hegemony at whatever cost, I cannot cheer what Russia has done. It only emboldened the worst and most dangerous and influential people in the US government. And before you get to any “What about…” questions on US wars, my track record is one of opposing interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, as well as drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia that represented clear violations of the sovereignty of those states.