"Nothing deals as much damage to the West as its own media”
The western media has been in a tizzy ever since the downing of Flight MH17 and the anti-Russian rhetoric has been through the roof. VoR’s Andrew Korybko, sitting in for Peter Lavelle, hosts a discussion.
VOR,
1 August, 2014
IK: “I
think you have to make a distinction between what you see in some of
the tabloid press and what you see in some of the quality press. I
think some of the tabloid press has gone over the top with some of
its coverage of the MH17 incident. But what I would say to you and to
your listeners is that Russia isn’t being singled out by tabloids
for going over the top. That’s their modus operandi. That’s what
that do, they tend to jump to conclusions and to print all kinds of
points which turn out not be based in fact later. We have a huge
debate in the UK, for example, about the quality of those newspapers
on what kind of mechanisms can be put in place to make sure they
behave responsibly and in a professional way.”
“I
think there is just honest shock about the MH17 incident and the
honest truth of the matter is that there are lots of people in the
quality press as well and lots of policymakers, who think Russia has
some sort of responsibility for what happened – not directly, but
by contributing to the conditions, and by, frankly, arming the rebels
in Eastern Ukraine with weapons that are capable of performing such
an act.”
DB: “With
all due respect to Ian, I would not quite agree on the distinction
between tabloids and quality press. I think on this matter they were
pretty much the same. I was stunned when hours after the disaster I
saw the headlines in newspapers like the Daily Mirror – ‘Putin’s
missile’, ‘Putin killed my son’, but then I opened the
Washington Post and it was even worse. The article, an editorial, was
headlined ‘Punish the new rogue state Russia’… The editorial
argued that Obama should not speak any more about the lack of
evidence and I quote the article ‘that evidence is abundant that
Russians have downed this plane’. It’s just astounding how
newspapers which were the flagships of American journalism – the
New York Times, the Washington Post are becoming a part of attacking
policy mechanisms.”
“…The
quality press – in 1999, before the attack against Yugoslavia there
were lots of articles about 500 thousand Kosovo Albanians killed in
Kosovo. It was completely false. But somehow, no one ever bothered to
find the journalists who basically lied – that lie played a very
important part in the war.”
“Now,
wars don’t start when arms start being used, wars start with lies.
You take a certain lie and then you pitch it to the volume which
becomes unbearable for the western audience and then they approve the
use of arms…”
“Other
examples are the weapons of mass destruction with Saddam Hussein –
again, repeated in thousands of publications, if not tens of
thousands… The chemical attack in Syria – it’s still not clear
and it’s very possible that it was also an invention. I think that
with flight MH17, again, I see the familiar handwriting...”
AM: “There
have been lots of cases where the media has got things disastrously
wrong and I think one of the fundamental problems is that the media
never really accepts that it was wrong. If you look at the Iraq War,
perhaps the most famous debacle in Britain, but not in my opinion the
worst, hardly anybody who was involved in misreporting the whole Iraq
problem – in fact, I say hardly anybody, I don’t think anybody,
actually paid any price for that. One journalist, I think, in the New
York Times,
who I think got things wrong, lost his job. That’s about it!”
“If
we look Libya which is now in an even worse mess than Iraq is in,
arguably, the US embassy there has just been evacuated – all the
stories told about Gaddafi, about how he was machine-gunning people,
about African mercenaries with machetes and all these things, they
turned out to be wrong.”
“I
think that we also have to accept that the situation between the
United States and its allies and Russia has been deteriorating
steadily for about ten years. My own personal view about this is that
this is based on a misunderstanding that the West has about Russia.
They see Russia as a country that was defeated, in their opinion, in
the Cold War and is not accepting its defeat. It is insisting on its
independent and its sovereign right to act independently of the
western powers, and they don’t like it.”
“We’ve
come here week after week debating various issues. A few months ago
it was the Sochi Olympics and the kind of coverage it was getting.
Before that it was the so-called anti-gay law which wasn’t actually
about gays, but that’s another story… It’s one thing after
another. The Ukrainian crisis and MH17 has brought all of that
together, so when an airplane is shot down over the Ukraine, the
automatic, axiomatic assumption is that it is something to do with
the Russians even though the evidence that says that is not there.”
AK: “I
think the question should be – what should America be doing
differently? The whole concept of how the West sees itself and Russia
should fundamentally change. America and this current crisis that we
are observing – America and the EU need their own perestroika, if I
may say, at all levels.”
“With
all due respect and without demonising Americans, we all know there
are millions of fantastic people over there, but I am talking about
the system. The American system has one embedded fault and that is
something that could be described by the Avatar film
– the infinite desire to burn and improve the world, making it to
their liking, but in its essence with a very ‘conquistadorian’
and very hostile policy.”
“I
think America is ill. The West is sick. What is going on shows
fundamental sickness. Not just the superficial problem with the
tabloids. It’s a new form of paganism which is dressed in moral
superiority. It’s lack of education and wealth that is based in
many respects on robbing the developing world and other countries,
like Iraq or Libya, which are left in a much worse state than they
were found. And then with all that wealth, claiming that the West has
a recipe for this fantastic quality of life…”
“Tabloids
are just the top layer of what we are observing. I think the problem
is quite dire and I hope America understands it has to heal itself
before it destroys the rest of the world.”
IK: “I
am perfectly willing to accept that the West’s hands, historically,
are not clean and that there are many in the West who are
hypocritical. However, and it’s a big however, I think there is a
whole kind of slightly delusional way this debate is being portrayed.
The first thing I’d say is that the point I made about tabloids is
far from superficial. Tabloids are read by millions of people in the
West. Quality press is read by a few hundred thousand. That is a huge
element of the culture. There is a problem with tabloid journalism
which I have acknowledged. But there is no single view in the West
about Russia and even if there were to be a single view, one would
have to understand that that would be driven by certain powerful
economic interests pulling the strings behind the scenes.”
“Ask
yourself, what does the West have to gain from the confrontation with
Russia? Is it Ukraine? Does anybody seriously believe that it’s
Ukraine? Ukraine has a basket case economy. It’s fundamentally
corrupt. There is no western government that is capable of putting
together the financial resources to bail Ukraine out. There is no
appetite for that. There is no appetite whatsoever and no consensus
inside NATO or in the EU to offer Ukraine membership. So what is it
exactly that the West is supposed to be getting out of this
conflict?”
“Whilst
we’re talking about the appalling state of the Western civilisation
and Western sickness – why is it that so many people in the Eastern
part of Europe aspire to be part of the West? And why is that almost
none of them aspire to be part of Russia? Russia has zero soft power
in its own neighbourhood…”
AK: “When
I said that the West has a fault and is sick, I specifically
mentioned that I didn’t want to demonise the West and the western
people. If I didn’t make myself clear, maybe I should rephrase
myself or explain. There are many wonderful people, there are many
fantastic things in the West and I would say, on a personal level, I
would never demonise any country whether it is West or East, etc.”
“I
sympathise with the layman’s view because people want to say –
look, nobody wants a war and we all want to live in peace, come on
guys! But in reality, we know that there are black ops, we know that
there are Special Forces on the ground, we know that there are
interests of very powerful military industrial companies who want to
make Ukraine unfriendly to Russia and who want to have an infinite
country. Mr Obama himself, who I believe is fed by – I wonder what
tabloids he reads! Surely, he doesn’t read broadsheet newspapers,
but he said one thing, which no US president has ever lowered himself
to say, not even during the Cold War. He said ‘we will make the
weak Russian economy even weaker’… First of all, what he said is
terribly hostile. It’s devoid of any kind of diplomatic sense.
There is no subtlety at all! When I say sick, I don’t mean just
sick towards Russia. And we can talk with the same vigour, as our
colleague in London, about who will benefit from turning Ukraine into
an anti-Russian state…”
DB: “What
is the West going to gain from Ukraine? My answer is – nothing. It
is going to lose a lot. Unfortunately, in the history of the West we
have many cases when the West lost huge amounts of people and money
for nothing. Right now we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
Tonkin incident which got the United States involved in the war in
Vietnam. The problem was that the United States got involved in
Vietnam because of a phantom menace. The American strategists talked
themselves into believing that Chinese communists could unite with
Vietnamese communists and then this ‘Red Giant’ would threaten
the United States… They did not know the history of the region and
that the Chinese and Vietnamese have been fighting each other for
hundreds of years. So immediately after the Americans left Vietnam in
1975, in 1979 you had a war between communist China and communist
Vietnam…”
“After
Vietnam, a lot of people were punished politically. Lyndon Johnson
did not run for president again. After the war in Iraq, and after the
disaster which we are already having in Ukraine, I bet no one will be
punished…”
IK: “It
[the Iraq War] ended the political career of Tony Blair! It is the
primary reason why he lost office.”
DB: “But
we still hear from him that he did everything right and that in Syria
too little has been done instead of too much.”
“The
West is now losing money in Ukraine and it will continue to lose,
Russia will lose even more, Ukraine will be devastated – no one
will gain anything! This is a lose-lose situation which was,
unfortunately, started by people in the West who supported this
violent takeover of power – and you may call it whatever you want,
tentatively called Maidan.”
AM: “The
reason we have a civil war in Ukraine is precisely because there is
an awful lot of people in the Ukraine who want to be with Russia as
opposed to the European Union. One of the fundamental problems of
this whole Ukraine situation and why we have the debacle that we have
there is because there are many people in Europe who find this very
difficult to accept and to understand, and who assume, when they see
things happening in the Eastern Ukraine specifically but previously
also in the Crimea, that this is all somehow controlled from Moscow,
when on any objective assessment of the situation that is obviously
not so. I would add that this is also true of other places – it’s
certainly true in Moldova and it’s probably true in Georgia too.
The problem is, again, this isn’t properly understood.”
“Are
there any moderate voices in Europe and the United States? Yes there
are. I think there are more in Europe than there are in the United
States. I think Europe does have a different perspective on this –
at least many people in Europe have a different perspective towards
this than do the people in the United States. The United States has
not had much experience in its history of dealing with equal
partners, of powers that are equal and equally strong to itself and
so, it has a habit of dictating and setting out what it sees to be
the correct policy. This has led to all the problems that we have
had.”
“Europe
has a different tradition. The problem at the moment in Europe is the
level of political leadership here isn’t particularly strong at the
moment, and they are all following to a great extent in the wake of a
policy that is made elsewhere because they do not have the
self-confidence to go against it.”
DB: “There
is this difference of perception… For a lot of people in Russia and
I think they are right, the war in Ukraine is a civil war. But for
the westerners, because of the media, they think that there is no
civil war, there is just a Russian intrusion – there are some
mercenaries who crossed the border and who wreak havoc on Ukraine. So
it’s enough to put pressure on Putin, he will pull them back and we
will have peace. But this is simply not true! A lot of fighters in
the east of Ukraine are locals…”
“There
are moderating voices even in the United States. For example,
yesterday I read in the National
Interest an
article by Thomas Graham, a former foreign policy aid to Clinton,
where he asked a very simple question – ‘what do we want to
achieve in Ukraine and how is Ukraine going to survive? We want
Ukraine to cut all of its ties to Russia – okay, it will, but how
can it survive without Russian energy and without the Russian market?
It simply won’t be able to exist.’ And then we hear from Mr Kerry
statements such as – ‘we want Ukraine to cooperate with Russia’,
which sounds very strange after all the insults, all the terrible
propaganda that we heard from him before...”
To
hear the interview GO
HERE
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