There\u2019s been much celebration in U.S. political and media circles over the violent ouster of Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected president. Nearly everyone is hailing this putsch and ignoring that it was spurred on by neo-Nazi militias.<\/i><\/p>\n
There was always a measure of hypocrisy but Official Washington used to at least pretend to stand for \u201cdemocracy,\u201d rather than taking such obvious pleasure in destabilizing elected governments, encouraging riots, overturning constitutional systems and then praising violent putsches.<\/p>\n
But events in Ukraine and Venezuela suggest that the idea of respecting the results of elections and working within legal, albeit flawed, political systems is no longer in vogue, unless the \u201cU.S. side\u201d happens to win, of course. If the \u201cU.S. side\u201d loses, then it\u2019s time for some \u201cshock doctrine.\u201d And, of course, the usual demonizing of the \u201cenemy\u201d leader.<\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s ousted President Viktor Yanukovych was surely no one\u2019s idea of a pristine politician, though it looks like there are few to none of those in Ukraine, a country essentially controlled by a collection of billionaire oligarchs who jockey for power and shift their allegiances among corrupt politicians.<\/p>\n
But Yanukovych was elected in what was regarded as a reasonably fair election in 2010. Indeed, some international observers called the election an important step toward establishing an orderly political process in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
But Yanukovych sought to maintain cordial relations with neighboring Russia, which apparently rubbed American neocons the wrong way. Official Washington\u2019s still-influential neocons have been livid with Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin because he cooperated with U.S. President Barack Obama in averting U.S. wars against Iran and Syria.<\/p>\n
In both cases, the neocons thought they had maneuvered Obama into confrontations that could have advanced their long-term strategy of \u201cregime change\u201d across the Middle East, a process that started in 2003 with the U.S. invasion of Iraq but stalled with that disastrous war.<\/p>\n
However, last year, prospects for more U.S. military interventions in two other target countries \u2013 Iran and Syria \u2013 were looking up, as Israel joined with Saudi Arabia in stoking regional crises that would give Obama no choice but to launch American air strikes, against Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities and against Syrian government targets.<\/p>\n
Putin\u2019s Interference<\/b><\/p>\n
That strategy was going swimmingly until Putin helped bring Iran to the negotiating table over guarantees that its nuclear program would not lead to a nuclear weapon. Putin also brokered a deal to avert threatened U.S. air strikes on Syria over disputed evidence regarding who launched a chemical attack on civilians outside Damascus. Putin got the Syrian government to agree to eliminate its chemical weapons arsenal.<\/p>\n
So, Putin found himself in the center of the neocons\u2019 bulls-eye and \u2013 given some of his own unforced errors such as defending Russia\u2019s intolerance toward gays and spending excessively on the Sochi Olympics \u2013 he became the latest \u201cdesignated villain,\u201d denounced and ridiculed across the neocon-dominated op-ed pages of the Washington Post and other major news outlets.<\/p>\n
Even NBC, from its treasured spot as the network of the Olympic Games, felt it had no choice but to denounce<\/a> Putin in an extraordinary commentary delivered by anchor Bob Costas. Once the demonizing ball gets rolling everyone has to join in or risk getting run over, too.<\/p>\n All of which set the stage for Ukraine. The issue at hand was whether Yanukovych should accept a closer relationship with the European Union, which was demanding substantial economic \u201creforms,\u201d including an austerity plan dictated by the International Monetary Fund.\u00a0Yanukovych balked at the harsh terms and turned to Ukraine\u2019s neighbor Russia, which was offering a $15 billion loan and was keeping Ukraine\u2019s economy afloat with discounted natural gas.<\/p>\n Reasonable people can disagree about whether the EU was driving too hard a bargain or whether Ukraine should undertake such painful economic \u201creforms\u201d \u2013 or how Yanukovych should have balanced the interests of his divided country, with the east dominated by ethnic Russians and the west leaning toward Europe.<\/p>\n But protesters from western Ukraine, including far-right nationalists, sought to turn this policy dispute into a means for overthrowing the elected government. Police efforts to quell the disturbances turned violent, with the police not the only culprits. Police faced armed neo-Nazi storm troopers who attacked with firebombs and other weapons.<\/p>\n Though the U.S. news media did show scenes of these violent melees, the U.S. press almost universally blamed Yanukovych \u2013 and took almost gleeful pleasure as his elected government collapsed and was replaced by thuggish right-wing militias \u201cguarding\u201d government buildings.<\/p>\n With Yanukovych and many of his supporters fleeing for their lives, the opposition parties seized control of parliament and began passing draconian new laws often unanimously, as neo-Nazi thugs patrolled the scene. Amazingly, the U.S. news media treated all this as uplifting, a popular uprising against a tyrant, not a case of a coup government operating in collusion with violent extremists.<\/p>\n In the upside-down world that has become the U.S. news media, the democratically elected president was a dictator and the coup makers who overthrew the popularly chosen leader were \u201cpro-democracy\u201d activists.<\/p>\n A Curious History<\/b><\/p>\n There\u2019s also a curious history behind U.S. attitudes toward ethnically divided Ukraine. During Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidency \u2013 as he escalated Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union \u2013 one of his propaganda services, Radio Liberty, began broadcasting commentaries into Ukraine from right-wing exiles.<\/p>\n Some of the commentaries praised Ukrainian nationalists who had sided with the Nazis in World War II as the SS waged its \u201cfinal solution\u201d against European Jews. The propaganda broadcasts provoked outrage from Jewish organizations, such as B\u2019nai B\u2019rith, and individuals including conservative academic Richard Pipes.<\/p>\n According to an internal memo dated May 4, 1984, and written by James Critchlow, a research officer at the Board of International Broadcasting, which managed Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, one RL broadcast in particular was viewed as \u201cdefending Ukrainians who fought in the ranks of the SS.\u201d<\/p>\n Critchlow wrote, \u201cAn RL Ukrainian broadcast of Feb. 12, 1984 contains references to the Nazi-oriented Ukrainian-manned SS \u2018Galicia\u2019 Division of World War II which may have damaged RL\u2019s reputation with Soviet listeners. The memoirs of a German diplomat are quoted in a way that seems to constitute endorsement by RL of praise for Ukrainian volunteers in the SS division, which during its existence fought side by side with the Germans against the Red Army.\u201d<\/p>\n Harvard Professor Pipes, who was an informal adviser to the Reagan administration, also inveighed against the RL broadcasts, writing \u2013 on Dec. 3, 1984 \u2013 \u201cthe Russian and Ukrainian services of RL have been transmitting this year blatantly anti-Semitic material to the Soviet Union which may cause the whole enterprise irreparable harm.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the Reagan administration publicly defended RL against some of the public criticism, privately some senior officials agreed with the critics, according to documents in the archives of the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. For instance, in a Jan. 4, 1985, memo, Walter Raymond Jr., a top official on the National Security Council, told his boss, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, that \u201cI would believe much of what Dick [Pipes] says is right.\u201d<\/p>\n This three-decade-old dispute over U.S.-sponsored radio broadcasts underscores the troubling political reality of Ukraine, which straddles a dividing line between people with cultural ties oriented toward the West and those with a cultural heritage more attuned to Russia. Though the capital Kiev sits in a region dominated by the western Ukrainians, the Russian-allied Ukrainians represent most of the population, explaining Yanukovych\u2019s electoral victory.<\/p>\n Loving a Putsch<\/b><\/p>\n Now, right-wing militias, representing those historical resentments toward the Russians and hostility toward the Jews, have seized control of many government buildings in Kiev. Faced with this intimidation, the often-unanimous decisions by the remaining legislators would normally be viewed with extreme skepticism, including their demands for the capture and likely execution of Yanukovych.<\/p>\n But the U.S. press corps can\u2019t get beyond its demonization of Putin and Yanukovych. The neocon Washington Post has been almost euphoric over the coup, as expressed in a Feb. 24 editorial:<\/p>\n \u201cUkraine has shaken off its corrupt president and the immediate prospect of domination by Russia \u2014 but at the risk of further conflict. The decision by Viktor Yanukovych to flee Kiev over the weekend triggered the disintegration of his administration and prompted parliament to replace him and schedule elections for May.<\/p>\n \u201cThe moves were democratic \u2014 members of Mr. Yanukovych\u2019s party joined in the parliamentary votes \u2014 but they had the effect of nullifying an accord between the former government and opposition that had been brokered by the European Union and tacitly supported by Russia.<\/p>\n \u201cKiev is now controlled by pro-Western parties that say they will implement the association agreement with the European Union that Mr. Yanukovych turned away from three months ago, triggering the political crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cThere remain two big threats to this positive outcome. One is that Ukraine\u2019s finances will collapse in the absence of a bailout from Russia or the West. The other is that the country will split along geographic lines as Russian speakers in the east of the country, perhaps supported by Moscow, reject the new political order.\u201d<\/p>\n The Post continued, \u201cWhat\u2019s not clear is whether Mr. Putin would accept a Ukraine that is not under the Kremlin\u2019s thumb. The first indications are not good: Though Mr. Putin has been publicly silent about Ukraine since Friday, the rhetoric emanating from his government has been angry and belligerent. A foreign ministry statement Monday alleged that \u2018a course has been set to use dictatorial and sometimes terrorist methods to suppress dissenters in various regions.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n So, the Washington Post\u2019s editors consider the violent overthrow of a democratically elected president to be \u201cdemocratic\u201d and take comfort in \u201cdemocratic\u201d actions by a legislature, despite the curious lack of any no votes and the fact that this balloting has occurred under the watchful eye of neo-Nazi storm troopers patrolling government offices. And, according to the Post, the Russian government is unhinged to detect \u201cdictatorial and sometimes terrorist methods.\u201d<\/p>\n The New York Times editorial page was only slightly less celebratory, proclaiming: \u201cThe venal president of Ukraine is on the run and the bloodshed has stopped, but it is far too early to celebrate or to claim that the West has \u2018won\u2019 or that Russia has \u2018lost.\u2019 One incontrovertible lesson from the events in Kiev, Ukraine\u2019s capital, is that the deeply divided country will have to contend with dangerous problems that could reverberate beyond its borders.\u201d<\/p>\n There has been, of course, a long and inglorious history of the U.S. government supporting the overthrow of elected governments: Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chile in 1973, Aristide in Haiti twice, Chavez in Venezuela briefly in 2002, Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Morsi in Egypt in 2013, and others. After Yanukovych, the next target of these U.S.-embraced \u201cdemocratic\u201d coups looks to be Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.<\/p>\n In these cases, it is typical for the mainstream U.S. news media to obsess over perceived flaws in the ousted leaders. On Wednesday, for instance, the New York Times made much of an unfinished presidential palace<\/a> in Ukraine, calling it \u201ca fugitive leader\u2019s folly.\u201d The idea seems to be to cement in the minds of impressionable Americans that it is okay for the U.S. government to support the overthrow of democratically elected presidents if they have flaws.<\/p>\n The outcomes for the people of these countries that are \u201csaved\u201d from their imperfect leaders, however, often tend to be quite ugly. Usually, they experience long periods of brutal repression at the hands of dictators, but that typically happens outside the frame of the U.S. news media\u2019s focus or interest. Those unhappy countries fade from view almost as quickly as they were thrust to center stage, next to the demonization of their elected leaders.<\/p>\n [For more on Ukraine, see Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cNeocons and the Ukraine Coup<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America\u2019s Stolen Narrative, either in print here<\/a> or as an e-book (from Amazon<\/a> and barnesandnoble.com<\/a>). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry\u2019s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America\u2019s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here<\/a>.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n