[rad-green] Charlottesville and Ukraine: the Parallel s That Mainstream Media Don’t Want You to See

*https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/16/charlottesville-and-ukraine-the-parallels-that-mainstream-media-dont-want-you-to-
<https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/16/charlottesville-and-ukraine-the-parallels-that-mainstream-media-dont-want-you-to->Strategic
Culture Foundation                   November 16, 2019Charlottesville and
Ukraine: the Parallels That Mainstream Media Don’t Want You to See*

*W**hy blame Trump for saying nice things about ultra-rightists in
Charlottesville while dishing out even more extravagant praise for
neo-fascists in Kiev? If it’s wrong to attack Jews and blacks in one
locale, why is it permissible to attack Jews and Muscovites in another?*



*By Daniel Lazare*
[image: image.png]
*© Photo: Wikimedia*

If the only people you listen to are TV talking heads or government
spokesmen in Kiev, you’d think that rebel-held provinces in eastern Ukraine
are groaning under the yoke of Russian oppression – occupied, ripped off,
and tortured at every turn.

After all, it was only four years ago that then-Vice President Joe Biden
told
<https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/09/remarks-vice-president-joe-biden-ukrainian-rada>
the
Ukrainian Rada, or parliament, that “Russia continues to send its thugs,
its troops, its mercenaries across the border” and that “Russian tanks and
missiles still fill the Donbas.” Russian-backed rebels “deny humanitarian
aid,” he said, they “keep out organizations like Doctors Without Borders,”
and they steal “lifesaving medicine to sell on the black market. That’s not
a future. That’s not a future I believe any Ukrainian wants for their
children.”

So Biden said, but it’s not what people who live in such areas report. Not
only do they not blame Russia for their woes, but they consider themselves
lucky to live in rebel-held territory, far away from the incompetents and
fascist sympathizers who are making a mess of things up elsewhere in the
country.

This is not Kremlin propaganda. Rather, it’s the findings of a new poll
conducted by New Image Marketing, a private research firm in Kharkiv, some
three hundred miles east of Kiev, and  Dzerkalo Tyzhnia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzerkalo_Tyzhnia> (Weekly Mirror), a
nonpartisan Ukrainian and Russian-language broadsheet that the BBC has
described <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4073375.stm> as “Ukraine’s
most influential analytical weekly” and one “widely read by the Ukrainian
elite.”

The survey, based on face-to-face interviews with more than 1,600 people in
rebel-held portions of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, found that 76 percent
view the conflict as a civil war rather than a Russian invasion and that 86
percent believe that it was not the Kremlin that started it. Roughly the
same percentage defend Russia’s 2014 takeover of the nearby Crimea as an
effort to “legally defend Russian-speaking citizens alienated by Ukraine.”

Instead of Russia, the three groups respondents blame, according to the Kyiv
Post
<https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/survey-population-of-occupied-donbas-believes-russia-not-involved-in-war.html>,
are the Ukrainian government, the United States, and protesters who took
part in the fascist-spearheaded 2014 coup d’état that toppled Viktor
Yanukovych, the legally-elected president, and brought in a replacement
regime hand-picked by Washington. Asked who should pay for the cost of
rebuilding, 64 percent said it should be the Ukraine, but that
reconstruction should take place under local control.

Finally, only five percent said they would consider moving to
Kiev-controlled areas, mainly because they think economic conditions there
are stagnant or worse. (Per-capita income in the Ukraine has fallen by
better than 25 percent since the February 2014 coup according to the World
Bank <https://data.worldbank.org/country/ukraine>.) The two people they
said they most respect are Vladimir Putin and Russian TV personality
Vladimir Solovyov, a Putin supporter who has denounced
<http://www.yarongamburg.com/p/russian-media-review.html> Kiev as a “Nazi
regime.”

This is not what the corporate media want us to believe or, for that
matter, Democrats like Biden or Adam Schiff, the neoconservative in charge
of impeachment in the House, who was an early voice in favor of lethal
military aid for anti-Russian forces. No less hawkish, Biden pushed for
lethal aid as well and strongly championed Petro Poroshenko when he took
over as president two months after Yanukovych fled the country, but who
recently suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Biden, of course, is fiercely anti-Trump and has attacked for, among other
things, his remark that there “were very fine people on both sides” of a
fatal clash between leftists and white nationalists in Charlottesville,
Virginia, in August 2017. Such words “shocked the conscience of this
nation,” Biden said in a campaign video
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbOU2fTg6cI>, because they imply “a moral
equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to
stand against it.”

Quite right. But it begs the question of why Biden didn’t speak up when the
same forces were rampaging through Kiev. After all, Oleh Tyahnybok, a
leader of the anti-Yanukovych protests, is notorious for railing against
the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” allegedly squeezing the Ukraine dry and for
leading torchlight parades in honor of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan
Bandera, a Nazi collaborator whose forces killed thousands of Poles and
Jews during World War II. Tyahnybok’s followers and other neo-fascists
hoisted
<https://www.salon.com/2014/02/25/is_the_us_backing_neo_nazis_in_ukraine_partner/>
Nazi
SS insignias and white-power signs and for good measure hung a Confederate
flag inside Kiev’s occupied town hall.

So why didn’t Biden denounce them the same way he denounced ultra-rightists
in Charlottesville? Why, in fact, did he praise as “peaceful patriots”
reigniting a “flame of hope”?

“Amidst fire and ice, snipers on rooftops,” he said in his December 2015
speech before the Rada, “the Heavenly Hundred paid the ultimate price of
patriots the world over. Their blood and courage delivering to the
Ukrainian people a second chance for freedom.

So why blame Trump for saying nice things about ultra-rightists in
Charlottesville while dishing out even more extravagant praise for
neo-fascists in Kiev? If it’s wrong to attack Jews and blacks in one
locale, why is it permissible to attack Jews and Muscovites in another?
Trump is currently going through the fires of hell for temporarily
withholding $391 million in military aid for the Ukraine’s fascist-tinged
government. But his real crime was not holding the money up, but relenting
and eventually allowing it to go through.

If don’t believe it, ask people in Donetsk and Luhansk who are on the
receiving end of US-supplied bullets and Javelin missiles. They’ll give you
an earful about what Ukrainian government forces they call “Naziki
<https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/01/world/europe/ukrainians-in-the-battered-east-scramble-in-darkness-as-winter-nears.html>,”
or little Nazis, are doing. And it won’t be what the parade of State
Department witnesses are saying in the impeachment hearings on CNN or MSNBC.

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