By Barry
Grey
The
New York Times has been spearheading a media campaign to demonize
Russian President Vladimir Putin and create an atmosphere of
anti-Russian hysteria. This is in preparation for a sharp escalation
of US military violence in the Middle East and stepped-up
preparations for war against Moscow and Beijing.
Using
unsubstantiated assertions, political amalgams and outright lies in a
manner reminiscent of McCarthyism, the Times has published virtually
daily articles, editorials and columns asserting, along with Russian
“aggression” in Syria and Ukraine, that the Kremlin organized the
hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers in order
to embarrass Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and
tip the election in favor of Republican Donald Trump.
The
claim—presented by the Clinton campaign, the Times and much of the
US media as indisputable fact—is that Trump is a political ally, if
not a direct agent, of Putin. This allegation has become the focus of
an attack by Clinton and the Democrats on the fascistic Trump from
the right. It has been used to line up former CIA officials and
Republican neo-conservatives deeply implicated in the invasion of
Iraq, torture and other crimes of the Bush administration, along with
an expanding list of billionaire financiers and CEOs, in support of
Clinton.
There
are precedents for such exercises in state propaganda in the guise of
journalism. They have all ended with mass killings, the toppling of
governments and, in many cases, the murder of government leaders
portrayed as the incarnation of evil—Saddam Hussein and Muammar
Gaddafi, for example.
In
this case, the targeted leader presides over the second biggest
nuclear arsenal in the world. Regime-change in Russia poses the very
real threat of a nuclear holocaust.
On
Sunday, the Times ratcheted up its propaganda campaign, publishing a
front-page article by its Moscow correspondent, Andrew E. Kramer,
under the headline “More Enemies of the Kremlin End Up Dead: A
Pattern That Suggest State Involvement.” One might think that the
so-called newspaper of record would make sure it had an airtight case
before branding the president of Russia a mass murderer. Instead, it
has published, with contempt for the most elementary principles of
genuine news reporting, an example of the worst sort of yellow
journalism.
The
first thing to be said about the lengthy “news” article is that
it contains no news. The author does not cite a single recent event.
Why was it published? Why does it appear as a news piece on the front
page? The answer: To advance the anti-Russian, pro-Clinton
warmongering agenda of the Times and the ruling class forces for
which it speaks.
The
article is a classic amalgam, stringing together a series of cases of
Russian oppositionists who allegedly were either poisoned but
survived, who fled the country or who died. Some are named, many are
not. In no case is medical evidence presented substantiating the
claim that foul play was involved. No actual facts are presented
proving Russian state involvement.
It
is impossible from the article to determine whether or not the Putin
government is guilty of the crimes alleged. The World Socialist Web
Site holds no brief for Putin, the representative of a criminal
oligarchy that enriched itself from the theft of state property
during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of
capitalism in Russia. We call on the Russian working class to deal
with him and the rest of the Russian bourgeoisie with the methods of
the class struggle and the fight for workers’ power. But one thing
is clear: Kramer’s article is pure propaganda.
Before
dealing in greater detail with the actual substance of the article,
two points must be made.
First,
even if one assumes that all the allegations made are true, when it
comes to mass murder, Putin is a small-time amateur compared to
President Barack Obama.
To
this writer’s knowledge, no one has reported that Putin holds
weekly meetings with top spies and professional killers to decide who
is next in line to be assassinated by drone missile strikes, carried
out extra-judicially on the say-so of the president. But as we know,
based on the Times’ own reporting, Obama has presided over such
“Terror Tuesdays” for years.
As
a result, thousands of men, women and children have been obliterated
across a swath of territory stretching from Central Asia to the
Middle East to North Africa. The death toll includes at least four
American citizens.
In
his article, the Times’ Moscow correspondent expresses particular
indignation over the fact that “Killings outside Russia were even
given legal sanction by the nation’s Parliament in 2006.”
Presumably, he prefers the modus operandi of the White House, which
does not bother to secure passage of a law sanctioning its
assassination program.
“Other
countries, notably Israel and the United States, pursue targeted
killings, but in a strict counterterrorism context,” Kramer writes.
“No other major power employs murder as systematically and
ruthlessly as Russia does against those seen as betraying its
interests abroad.”
Tell
that to the families, loved ones and friends of the thousands of
people who have been turned into headless and limbless corpses by
Obama’s missiles!
Second,
Kramer has a record of “reporting” for the Times that makes
anything he writes worthy only of contempt. He has been caught
penning fabrications and the crudest sort of historical
falsifications and lies. A reputable newspaper would have long ago
showed him the door.
In
April of 2014, following the US-backed, fascist-led putsch that
toppled the elected pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych in
Ukraine, Kramer co-authored an article plastered across the front
page of the Times purporting to present photographic evidence that
Russian troops were in eastern Ukraine, leading the pro-Russian
separatist rebellion against the right-wing regime in Kiev. The US
State Department and the Kiev government had given the photos to the
Times, which, in line with its role as a de facto state propaganda
organ, immediately published them.
It
took less than one day for the photos to be exposed as doctored and
the article to be discredited as a fabrication. The Times was forced
to retract the article, publishing a clumsy attempt at damage control
under the headline “Scrutiny Over Photos Said to Tie Russia Units
to Ukraine.”
The
following year, shortly after the government in Kiev enacted a law
rehabilitating the World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist and Nazi
collaborator Stepan Bandera, Kramer published an article whitewashing
Bandera’s role in the mass murder of Jews and Poles as part of
German imperialism’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
The article was another propaganda piece, written to justify
Washington’s backing for its rabidly nationalist puppet regime in
Ukraine.
A
compendium of half-truths and lies, the article sought to foist the
blame for the crimes of German fascism and its Ukrainian nationalist
accomplices on the Soviet Union and the Red Army.
In
his August 21 article on alleged Russian government killings, Kramer
writes: “Muckraking journalists, rights advocates, opposition
politicians, government whistle-blowers and other Russians who
threaten that image are treated harshly—imprisoned on trumped-up
charges, smeared in the news media, and, with increasing frequency,
killed…”
Much
of this is an apt characterization of the repression meted out by the
Obama administration to those who expose the crimes of American
imperialism. Kramer and his superiors at the Times seem oblivious to
the fate of whistle-blowers and genuine journalists such as Julian
Assange (holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for four
years), Chelsea Manning (serving a 35-year term at a US military
prison) and Edward Snowden (forced to live as a fugitive in Russia).
At
one point, Kramer cites approvingly the role of multi-millionaire
financier William F. Browder, a fanatical opponent of Putin who
campaigned for the passage of the Magnitsky law, named after a lawyer
Browder employed while he was making hundreds of millions of dollars
as a financial player within the Russian oligarchy from 1995 to the
late 2000s.
Magnitsky
was jailed by the Russian government on tax evasion charges and died
in prison in 2009. The law, passed by Congress in 2012, enables the
US government to deny visas and block access to American banks to
Russians accused of committing human rights abuses.
Indicative
of Kramer’s journalist methods is what he leaves out about Browder.
The grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party USA
during the 1930s and early 1940s, Browder allied himself with Putin
when setting up his hedge fund in Moscow. They had a falling out
related to Browder’s investments in Gazprom, and the Kremlin shut
down his Russian operation.
Thus,
Kramer’s heroic fighter for human rights against the Kremlin is the
heir of a Stalinist hack who made hundreds of millions off of the
dismantling of state industry and theft of state assets and later ran
afoul of his former protector. This is the man Kramer quotes to
support his allegations of Kremlin poisonings and killings. “Captains
of industry and lawyers are not dying left, right and center like
this in the West,” says the former Putin ally.
Kramer
and his fellow pseudo-journalists and accomplices of US imperialism
at the Times are scoundrels. Critical to the political education of
workers and youth coming into struggle against the growing threat of
world war, dictatorship and mass poverty is a clear-headed awareness
of the fundamentally reactionary role of the corporate-controlled
media and the class interests it serves.
The
Times, in particular, is fully integrated into the state. Its top
personnel are state people. Kramer takes his orders from people such
as the newspaper’s editorial board editor, James Bennet, a former
White House correspondent who served later as the Times’ bureau
chief in Jerusalem. Bennet’s father, Douglas Bennet, is a longtime
Democratic operative who has held high positions in the State
Department, was head of the US Agency for International Development,
a CIA front, and oversaw National Public Radio.
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment