The western media

"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

Joining Andrew Korybko are:

Dr Ian Kearns, director of the European Leadership Network

Alexander Mercouris, legal expert and commentator

Dmitry Babich, VoR's political analyst

Alexander Korobko, journalist and television producer, CEO at Russian Hour TV in London

Soundbites:

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...”

“In many ways, nothing deals as much damage to the West as its own media.”

(VoR)

To hear the interview GO HERE