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Good Grief Charlie Brown! Henry Kissinger the Voice of Reason on Ukraine?!

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COMMENT: When Hen­ry Kissinger comes across as a voice of mod­er­a­tion, you KNOW things are get­ting bad. Robert Par­ry notes that this became real­i­ty when Kissinger was inter­viewed by Der Spiegel on the sub­ject of Ukraine.

Reject­ing the Par­ty Line that Putin spawned the cri­sis through his “pol­i­cy of expan­sion,” Kissinger cor­rect­ly notes that Putin act­ed in reac­tion to West­ern ini­tia­tives.

Also of inter­est in this con­text is the pres­ence of Michael Boci­urkiw, head of the OSCE’s Spe­cial Study Mis­sion in Ukraine. Boci­urkiw is the medi­a’s “go-to-guy” for the down­ing of MH 17 and oth­er aspects of the con­flict in Ukraine.

As dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 803 and 804, Boci­urkiw is linked to the milieu of the OUN/B, as well as to the milieu of the Malaysian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (which fig­ures in the dis­ap­pear­ance of MH 370.

(We have cov­ered the ascen­sion of the OUN/B heirs in the Ukraine in a num­ber of pro­grams: FTR #‘s 777778779780781782, 783784794800, 803, 804, 808, 811, 817, 818.)

“When Hen­ry Kissinger Makes Sense” by Robert Par­ry; Con­sor­tium News; 11/12/2014.

The Amer­i­can pub­lic is faced with an infor­ma­tion cri­sis as the New York Times and oth­er main­stream U.S. media out­lets have become lit­tle more than pro­pa­gan­da organs on behalf of the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive agen­da and par­tic­u­lar­ly the rush into a new Cold War with Rus­sia – so much so that even ex-Sec­re­tary of State Hen­ry Kissinger has bro­ken ranks.

MSM arti­cles con­sis­tent­ly reek of bias – and in some cas­es make lit­tle sense. For instance, Times cor­re­spon­dent David M. Her­szen­horn, one of the lead­ing pro­pa­gan­dists, wrote an alarmist sto­ry on Wednes­day about a new Russ­ian “inva­sion” of Ukraine but curi­ous­ly he had the alleged Russ­ian tank col­umn head­ing east toward the Ukrain­ian city of Donet­sk which would be back toward Rus­sia, not west­ward into Ukraine.

Accord­ing to Herszenhorn’s arti­cle, “The full scope of the Russ­ian incur­sion is not clear, [NATO Supreme Com­man­der Gen. Philip M. Breedlove] said, though the con­voys seemed to be head­ing east toward Donet­sk, an O.S.C.E. spokesman, Michael Boci­urkiw, said Wednes­day.”

Typ­i­cal of his anti-Russ­ian bias, Her­szen­horn also cit­ed Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment com­plaints that the Rus­sians had been using a shaky cease-fire to bol­ster the eth­nic Russ­ian rebels in the east, but the real­i­ty is that both sides have been accus­ing the oth­er of such maneu­ver­ing. Her­szen­horn sure­ly knows this but he wrote only:

“Ukrain­ian offi­cials have com­plained all along that Rus­sia was tak­ing advan­tage of the so-called truce to rein­force the rebels in east­ern Ukraine with more fight­ers and equip­ment.”

The real­i­ty is that there has been wide­spread alarm among east­ern Ukraini­ans that the Kiev regime was using the rel­a­tive lull in the fight­ing to resup­ply and repo­si­tion its forces for a new offen­sive like the one that killed thou­sands over the sum­mer. Though human rights orga­ni­za­tions have crit­i­cized Kiev for indis­crim­i­nate shelling of cities and unleash­ing bru­tal mili­tia forces on the pop­u­la­tion, the Times and oth­er main­stream U.S. news­pa­pers have either ignored or down­played such facts.

On Wednes­day, Her­szen­horn also com­pared the alleged new Russ­ian incur­sion with the “inva­sion” of Crimea, although there real­ly was no “inva­sion” of Crimea since the Russ­ian troops that were involved in sup­port­ing Crimea’s pop­u­lar ref­er­en­dum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Rus­sia were already in Crimea under an agree­ment with the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment regard­ing the Russ­ian naval base at Sebastopol.

Herszenhorn’s use of the word “inva­sion” is just an exag­ger­a­tion like the rest of the imbal­anced report­ing that has made a ratio­nal U.S. pub­lic response to the cri­sis in Ukraine near­ly impos­si­ble.

Since the start of the cri­sis in Feb­ru­ary, the New York Times’ cov­er­age has been remark­able in its refusal to present the Ukraine sto­ry in any­thing like an objec­tive fash­ion. For exam­ple, the Times has large­ly ignored the sub­stan­tial pub­lic evi­dence that U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials and agents helped orches­trate the Feb. 22 coup which over­threw the elect­ed Pres­i­dent Vik­tor Yanukovych. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Whys Behind the Ukraine Cri­sis.”]

The Times also has buried evi­dence that extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi ele­ments played key roles in fire­bomb­ing police, forc­ing Yanukovych and oth­er gov­ern­ment offi­cials to flee for their lives, and spear­head­ing lat­er attacks on eth­nic Rus­sians. When this real­i­ty is ref­er­enced, it is usu­al­ly pre­sent­ed with lit­tle mean­ing­ful con­text or tacked on in the last few para­graphs of long arti­cles on oth­er top­ics.

Mock­ing Medvedev

Her­szen­horn him­self has been a lead­ing vio­la­tor of jour­nal­is­tic stan­dards. For instance, in mid-April, ear­ly on in the cri­sis, he penned a mock­ing sto­ry from Moscow ridi­cul­ing Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter Dmitri Medvedev for pre­dict­ing a pos­si­ble civ­il war.

In the arti­cle enti­tled “Rus­sia Is Quick To Bend Truth About Ukraine,” Her­szen­horn accused Medvedev of post­ing an item on Face­book that “was bleak and full of dread,” includ­ing not­ing that “blood has been spilled in Ukraine again” and adding that “the threat of civ­il war looms.”

Her­szen­horn con­tin­ued, “He [Medvedev] plead­ed with Ukraini­ans to decide their own future ‘with­out usurpers, nation­al­ists and ban­dits, with­out tanks or armored vehi­cles – and with­out secret vis­its by the C.I.A. direc­tor.’ And so began anoth­er day of blus­ter and hyper­bole, of the mis­in­for­ma­tion, exag­ger­a­tions, con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, over­heat­ed rhetoric and, occa­sion­al­ly, out­right lies about the polit­i­cal cri­sis in Ukraine that have emanat­ed from the high­est ech­e­lons of the Krem­lin and rever­ber­at­ed on state-con­trolled Russ­ian tele­vi­sion, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.”

This argu­men­ta­tive “news” sto­ry spilled from the front page to the top half of an inside page, but Her­szen­horn nev­er man­aged to men­tion that there was noth­ing false in what Medvedev wrote. Indeed, as the blood­shed soon grew worse and esca­lat­ed into a civ­il war, you might say Medvedev was trag­i­cal­ly pre­scient.

It was also the much-maligned Russ­ian press that first report­ed the secret vis­it of CIA Direc­tor John Bren­nan to Kiev. Though the White House lat­er con­firmed that report, Her­szen­horn still cit­ed Medvedev’s ref­er­ence to it in the con­text of “mis­in­for­ma­tion” and “con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.” Nowhere in the long arti­cle did the Times inform its read­ers that, yes, the CIA direc­tor did make a secret vis­it to Ukraine.

In this upside-down world of MSM dis­in­for­ma­tion, there has been very lit­tle crit­i­cism of the glar­ing bias­es of the main­stream West­ern media but instead con­tin­ued attacks on the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the Russ­ian media, includ­ing an adverse find­ing this week by an offi­cial British agency that mon­i­tors alleged bias in news out­lets oper­at­ing in the UK. The agency, known as Ofcom, accused Russia’s RT net­work of fail­ing to meet stan­dards for “due impar­tial­i­ty” in ear­ly Ukraine cov­er­age.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Ofcom did not judge any of the RT reports false in their descrip­tion of neo-Nazi thugs par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Feb. 22 coup, a pos­si­ble role of coup-relat­ed snipers in the slaugh­ter of scores of peo­ple at the Maid­an, and the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the new gov­ern­ment.

But Ofcom fault­ed RT for not meet­ing the fuzzy con­cept of “due impar­tial­i­ty” and threat­ened reg­u­la­to­ry sanc­tions against RT if it didn’t shape up. Ofcom defined “due impar­tial­i­ty” as “impar­tial­i­ty ade­quate or appro­pri­ate to the sub­ject and nature of the pro­gramme.”

The image of a British reg­u­la­to­ry body threat­en­ing RT with sanc­tions for not toe­ing the pro-West­ern pro­pa­gan­da line that near­ly all UK and U.S. news out­lets do has an Orwellian feel to it, sin­gling out one of the few sources of news that doesn’t accept the pre­vail­ing “group think.”

It would be one thing if the same stan­dards were applied to West­ern media out­lets for their one-sided report­ing on Ukraine, but that appar­ent­ly would ruf­fle too many impor­tant feath­ers.

Kissinger’s Dis­sent

Curi­ous­ly, one of the few promi­nent West­ern­ers who has dared ques­tion the pre­vail­ing wis­dom on Ukraine is for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Hen­ry Kissinger who said, in an inter­view with the Ger­man news­magazine Der Spiegel, that the West was exag­ger­at­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of the Crimean annex­a­tion giv­en the peninsula’s long his­toric ties to Rus­sia.

“The annex­a­tion of the Crimea was no bid for world dom­i­na­tion,” the 91-year-old Kissinger said. “It is not to be com­pared with Hitler’s inva­sion in Czecho­slo­va­kia” – as for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton and oth­ers have done.

Kissinger not­ed that Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin had no inten­tion of insti­gat­ing a cri­sis in Ukraine: “Putin had [spent] tens of bil­lions of dol­lars for the Olympic Win­ter Games … in Sochi. Rus­sia want­ed to present [itself] as a pro­gres­sive nation. … It does not make sense that Putin, a week lat­er, [launch­es] the Crimea attacks and a war for Ukraine begins.”

Instead Kissinger argued that the West – with its strat­e­gy of pulling Ukraine into the orbit of the Euro­pean Union – was respon­si­ble for the cri­sis by fail­ing to under­stand Russ­ian sen­si­tiv­i­ty over Ukraine and mak­ing the “fatal” mis­take of quick­ly push­ing the con­fronta­tion beyond dia­logue.

But Kissinger also fault­ed Putin for his reac­tion to the cri­sis. “I do not want to say that Russia’s response was appro­pri­ate,” Kissinger said.

Still, Kissinger told Der Spiegel that “a new edi­tion of the Cold War would be a tragedy. … We must keep in view, that we need Rus­sia to solve oth­er crises, such as the nuclear con­flict with Iran or Syria’s civ­il war.”

When Hen­ry Kissinger starts to sound like the voice of rea­son, it says a lot about how crazy the New York Times and the rest of the MSM have become.

Discussion

2 comments for “Good Grief Charlie Brown! Henry Kissinger the Voice of Reason on Ukraine?!”

  1. The ter­ri­fy­ing part of this is that the “new cold war” could morph into a “hot war”, ie, WW3:

    At a meet­ing of Rus­si­a’s nation­al mil­i­tary coun­cil announc­ing the deci­sion, Defense Sec­re­tary Sergei Shoigu said:

    “In the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, we have to main­tain mil­i­tary pres­ence in the west­ern Atlantic and east­ern Pacif­ic, as well as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mex­i­co. Due to that, as part of the drills, Russ­ian long-range bombers will con­duct flights along Russ­ian bor­ders and over the Arc­tic Ocean.”

    “In many respects, this is con­nect­ed with the sit­u­a­tion in Ukraine, with fomen­ta­tion of anti-Russ­ian moods on the part of NATO and rein­force­ment of for­eign mil­i­tary pres­ence next to our bor­der,” he explained.

    Posted by ironcloudz | November 14, 2014, 12:54 pm
  2. http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/20/listen-to-kissinger/?print=1
    Maybe They’ll Lis­ten to Kissinger
    David P. Gold­man On Novem­ber 20, 2014 @ 9:42 am I

    For­mer Sec­re­tary of State Hen­ry Kissinger has been try­ing to explain to the ado­les­cents in charge of Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy in both par­ties that our Ukraine pol­i­cy has been a dis­as­ter. As he told the Ger­man news orga­ni­za­tion Der Spiegel Nov. 13:

    Crimea is a spe­cial case. Ukraine was part of Rus­sia for a long time. You can’t accept the prin­ci­ple that any coun­try can just change the bor­ders and take a province of anoth­er coun­try. But if the West is hon­est with itself, it has to admit that there were mis­takes on its side. The annex­a­tion of Crimea was not a move toward glob­al con­quest. It was not Hitler mov­ing into Czechoslovakia….Putin spent tens of bil­lions of dol­lars on the Win­ter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Rus­sia is a pro­gres­sive state tied to the West through its cul­ture and, there­fore, it pre­sum­ably wants to be part of it. So it doesn’t make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine…

    We have to remem­ber that Rus­sia is an impor­tant part of the inter­na­tion­al sys­tem, and there­fore use­ful in solv­ing all sorts of oth­er crises, for exam­ple in the agree­ment on nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion with Iran or over Syr­ia. This has to have pref­er­ence over a tac­ti­cal esca­la­tion in a spe­cif­ic case. On the one hand it is impor­tant that Ukraine remain an inde­pen­dent state, and it should have the right to eco­nom­ic and com­mer­cial asso­ci­a­tions of its choice. But I don’t think it’s a law of nature that every state must have the right to be an ally in the frame work of NATO.

    Now, of course, we have West­ern pan­ic over a new Sino-Russ­ian rap­proche­ment. This was obvi­ous from the out­set of the Ukraine cri­sis. What did the West think Putin would do?

    Regard­ing Iraq, Kissinger had this to say to Der Spiegel:

    SPIEGEL: In 2003, you were in favor of over­throw­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein. At that time, too, the con­se­quences of that inter­ven­tion were uncer­tain.

    Kissinger: I’ll tell you what I thought at the time. I thought that after the attack on the Unit­ed States, it was impor­tant that the US vin­di­cate its posi­tion. The UN had cer­ti­fied major vio­la­tions. So I thought that over­throw­ing Sad­dam was a legit­i­mate objec­tive. I thought it was unre­al­is­tic to attempt to bring about democ­ra­cy by mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion.

    SPIEGEL: Why are you so sure that it is unre­al­is­tic?

    Kissinger: Unless you are will­ing to do it for decades and you are cer­tain your peo­ple will fol­low you. But it is prob­a­bly beyond the resources of any one coun­try.

    The good news is that Kissinger is speak­ing about these issues; the bad news is that the only major inter­na­tion­al news orga­ni­za­tion to inter­view him at length is Ger­man, not Amer­i­can. A few are lis­ten­ing in the U.S. George F. Will, a Rea­gan­ite rather than a Kissin­ger­ian back in the 1980s, is now lis­ten­ing to the old statesman’s com­mon sense, as in his Nov. 13 Wash­ing­ton Post col­umn.

    My Repub­li­can col­leagues like to deride Oba­ma for being weak rather than assertive. Where we set out to be assertive, though (as in the State Department’s over-the-top sup­port for the Maid­an Rev­o­lu­tion in Ukraine and the prospect of tak­ing Crimea away from Russ­ian con­trol), we got our heads hand­ed to us, just as we did when we set out to build democ­ra­cy in Mesopotamia. We have been stu­pid­ly assertive where it got us nowhere, and we have been stu­pid­ly weak when we should have wield­ed an iron fist — as with Iran. That was true of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion as well as the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, for a sim­ple rea­son: We could not pro­mote Shi’ite major­i­ty rule in Iraq and make war on Iran at the same time. Then-Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen told Char­lie Rose on March 16, 2009: “What I wor­ry about in terms of an attack on Iran is, in addi­tion to the imme­di­ate effect, the effect of the attack, it’s the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences. It’s the fur­ther desta­bi­liza­tion in the region. It’s how they would respond. We have lots of Amer­i­cans who live in that region who are under the threat enve­lope right now [because of the] capa­bil­i­ty that Iran has across the Gulf. So, I wor­ry about their respons­es and I wor­ry about it esca­lat­ing in ways that we couldn’t pre­dict.”

    It isn’t enough to crank up the vol­ume for the theme from Rocky and feel the testos­terone surge. One also has to look dis­pas­sion­ate­ly at the chess­board and think more than one move ahead.

    Maybe they’ll lis­ten to Kissinger. He has real cre­den­tials. They sure­ly did not lis­ten to me. My voice is metaphor­i­cal­ly hoarse from shout­ing, as in the extracts below:

    On March 26, 2014:

    A specter is haunt­ing Europe, and that is the specter of a Russ­ian-Chi­nese alliance at the expense of Europe. Chi­na is dynam­ic, and its dynamism is trans­form­ing the “Silk Road” coun­tries that lie across Russia’s south­ern bor­der. Chi­na is build­ing high-speed rail and high-speed inter­net south to Ran­goon and east­ward to Istan­bul, intent on trans­form­ing its neigh­bors into an export mar­ket for high-val­ue-added man­u­fac­tur­ing and high-tech prod­ucts. It’s one of the most remark­able ven­tures in world eco­nom­ic his­to­ry, and the most under­re­port­ed sto­ry of the year. My con­ser­v­a­tive friends have been pre­dict­ing China’s eco­nom­ic demise every year for the past dozen, and have been wrong each time. They notice the ele­phant dung, but ignore the ele­phant.

    On March 16, 2014:

    The West had the chance to spon­sor a con­sti­tu­tion­al ref­er­en­dum that would have giv­en the peo­ples of the Ukraine a fair chance to decide whether they wished to become a Ukrain­ian peo­ple, or sep­a­rate peace­ably. Now we have a Russ­ian fait accom­pli.

    We know what comes next; we saw it in Egypt. The U.S. Con­gress and Euro­pean par­lia­ments will hand the mat­ter of bail­ing out Ukraine to the IMF, the IMF will pro­pose aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures that the hodge­podge Maid­an gov­ern­ment can’t sell, the Rus­sians will raise gas price and col­lect back debts, and Ukraine will stay in chaos. Maybe Putin will pick up oth­er pieces; maybe he won’t. Sad­ly, it will depend on his whim.

    Putin is rid­ing a wave of pop­u­lar sup­port at home, which also should be no sur­prise. Remem­ber that Putin threw his Serb allies under the bus dur­ing the wag-the-dog war of 1998 when NATO backed the seces­sion of Koso­vo. We lied about Ser­bian geno­cide then, just as Putin is lying about fas­cist threats to Russ­ian nation­als today. Call it the soft big­otry of low expec­ta­tions, but I don’t expect the truth from Moscow–I do expect it from Wash­ing­ton. Putin stood back on Koso­vo pre­cise­ly in order to let NATO set a prece­dent for the seces­sion of provinces with large eth­nic minori­ties. It doesn’t mat­ter what we think. From the Russ­ian way of look­ing at things, the takeover of Crimea was jus­ti­fied.

    And on March 20, 2014, quot­ing Nor­man A. Bai­ley, pres­i­dent of the Insti­tute for Glob­al Eco­nom­ic Growth: “The reac­tion of Europe and the U.S. to the Russ­ian takeover of Crimea ensures no Russ­ian coop­er­a­tion on any mean­ing­ful agree­ment with Iran con­cern­ing their plans to achieve the means to pro­duce nuclear weapons. Indeed, Rus­sia has just agreed to pro­vide Iran with anoth­er nuclear pow­er plant.”

    Arti­cle print­ed from Spen­gler: http://pjmedia.com/spengler

    URL to arti­cle: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/11/20/listen-to-kissinger/

    Posted by Vanfield | November 27, 2014, 11:41 pm

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