{"id":65312,"date":"2015-10-19T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65312"},"modified":"2015-10-19T10:16:39","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T09:16:39","slug":"putin-and-the-press-the-demonology-school-of-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/10\/putin-and-the-press-the-demonology-school-of-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Putin and the Press: The Demonology School of Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, \u2018former KGB operative\u2019 and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"RIA<\/a>

RIA Novosti \/ Vladimir Astapkovich<\/p><\/div>\n

11 Oct 2015 – <\/em>He is accused of hijacking Russia from the \u2018road to democracy\u2019, as pursued by his grotesquely corrupt predecessor Boris Yeltsin; of directing the bloody repression of the \u2018freedom loving Chechens\u2019; of jailing innocent, independent and critical oligarchs and robber barons; of fomenting an uprising in the \u2018democratic, newly pro-Western\u2019 Ukraine and seizing control of Crimea; of backing a \u2018bloody tyrant\u2019 in Syria (elected President Bashar Assad) in a civil war against ISIS terrorists; of running the Russian economy into the ground; and of militarily threatening the Baltic and Eastern European NATO member countries.<\/p>\n

In a word, the media have propagated an image of an \u2018out-of-control autocrat\u2019, who makes a mockery of \u2018democratic\u2019 norms and \u2018Western values\u2019, and who seeks to revive the \u2018Soviet (aka Evil) Empire\u2019.<\/p>\n

The corollary is that \u2018Western powers\u2019, despite their peace-loving propensities and fraternal attempts to bring Russia into the democratic \u2018fold\u2019, have been \u2018forced\u2019 to now surround Russia with NATO military bases and missiles; to finance a violent coup in the Ukraine (on Russia\u2019s frontier) and arm the Ukrainian putsch government and neo-fascist militias to \u2018restore democracy\u2019 and violently suppress ethnic Russian \u2018separatists\u2019 in Eastern Ukraine. We are told that US and EU sanctions against Russia were carefully crafted \u2018diplomatic\u2019 measures designed to punish the Moscow \u2018aggressor\u2019.<\/p>\n

In reality, the Western media has relentlessly demonized Vladimir Putin in a campaign to further NATO military expansion and undermine the Russian economy and its national security. The goal is ultimately to force a \u2018regime change\u2019, restoring the neo-liberal elites who had pillaged Russia\u2019s economy during the 1990\u2019s and whose brutal economic policies led to the premature death of over 6 million Russians due to deprivation and the collapse of the healthcare system.<\/p>\n

Putin: Demon or Realist, Autocrat or Democrat, Vassal or Independent Leader?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Western media has backed every oligarch, gangster and fraudster who has gone on trial and been convicted during Putin\u2019s term in office. The propagandists tell us the reason for this affinity between the Western media and the gangster-oligarchs is that these convicted felons, who claim to be \u2018political dissidents\u2019 and critics of Putin\u2019s rule, have been dispossessed, and jailed for upholding \u2018Western values\u2019.<\/p>\n

The Western media conveniently ignore the well-documented studies on the source of the gangster-oligarchs\u2019 wealth: The violent and illegal seizure of multi-billion dollars-worth of natural resources (aluminum, oil and gas), banks, factories, pension funds and real estate. During the Yeltsin period the oligarchs controlled thousands of armed gangsters and engaged in internal warfare during which thousands were killed, including top government regulators, police officials and journalists who dared to oppose or expose their pillage and property grabs.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s prosecution of a mere fraction of the most notorious oligarch-gangsters has won the support of the vast majority of Russian citizens because it represents a return to law and order and the return of stolen public wealth.<\/p>\n

Only the Western media has dared to refer to these convicted felons as \u2018political victims and reformers\u2019. They did so because the oligarchs had become the most loyal and submissive assets in the US and EU governments\u2019 efforts to convert Russia into an irreversibly weak vassal state.<\/p>\n

The Western media constantly refer to President Putin as the \u2018authoritarian ruler\u2019, despite the fact that he has been repeatedly elected by large majorities in competitive elections against Western backed and funded candidates. His popularity is attested to by opinion polls conducted by Western agencies.<\/p>\n

In 2015, President Putin\u2019s support soared to over 85%. The pro-Western Russian neo-liberal politicians scored in the low single digits according to the same independent polls.<\/p>\n

Clearly the Russian public does not want to return to the poverty and chaos of the Western-backed gangster politics of the 1990\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Whatever reservations working and middle class Russians have over President Putin\u2019s style of decision-making, they clearly value his crackdown on gangster-controlled elections, Chechen terrorism, and his restoration of Russian military defense of its frontiers, including the annexation of Crimea, following the US-engineered coup in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Every day, the Western media recycle reports of the \u2018decline and demise\u2019 of the Russian economy, blaming \u2018statist\u2019 mismanagement of the economy by Putin. They claim \u2018declining living standards\u2019, the \u2018negative growth\u2019 of the economy and the \u2018growing isolation\u2019 of an \u2018expansionist\u2019 Russia in the face of Western sanctions.<\/p>\n

These media claims are laughable. Readily available data demonstrate that living standards of the vast majority of Russian citizens have significantly increased under President Putin\u2019s administration, especially after the utter collapse under the free marketers of the1990\u2019s. Russian workers receive their pay, pensioners their pensions, enterprises their loans \u2013 on time. During the \u2018free market\u2019 days of Boris Yeltsin, workers went up to a year without pay, pensioners were selling their heirlooms in the street to survive and enterprises paid extortionate interest rates to oligarch-gangster controlled banks! Comparative data, easily obtained, are deliberately ignored by the mass media because it doesn\u2019t fit the demonological narrative.<\/p>\n

The mass media present the neo-liberal \u2018opposition\u2019 and \u2018liberal critics\u2019 as Russian democrats defending \u2018Western values\u2019. They forget to mention that these \u2018liberal critics\u2019 have been directly funded by Western foundations (National Endowment for Democracy, Soros Foundation, etc.) and Russian non-governmental organizations (NGO\u2019s) with longstanding ties to US and EU governments, intelligence agencies and exiled Russian billionaires. The so-called \u2018Russian\u2019 democratic opposition revealed their abject servility to Western interests when they openly supported the Ukrainian coup and Kiev\u2019s bloody assault on ethnic Russian-Ukrainians in the eastern \u2018Donbas\u2019 regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Odessa. Whatever shreds of respectability and credibility the \u2018democratic opposition\u2019 retained with the Russian public, up to that point, was lost. They were seen for what they are: propaganda arms of Western imperialism and mouth-pieces for neo-fascists.<\/p>\n

The Western mass media charge Putin\u2019s government with the same crimes that their own governments commit. After the US State Department\u2019s Victoria Nuland admitted to channeling $5 billion to fund the 2014 coup in Ukraine and after the Polish regime boasted of training far right street fighters, whose mob violence served as a pretext for the coup, and after neo-fascist coalition partners in Odessa of burned alive four dozen ethnic Russian-Ukrainian citizens opposed to the coup, the Western mass media accused Putin of \u2018intervening\u2019 in Ukraine. This was because Russia had convoked a referendum in Crimea, in which over 80% of the electorate voted to secede from the illegitimate Ukrainian coup regime and rejoin Russia.<\/p>\n

In truth, the Putin government is a victim of the Western power grab in the Ukraine, with Russia having to absorbed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russian refugees driven out of the Donbas, yet the Western media portray Putin as the executioner. Meanwhile the Western coup-makers and their far-right allies are depicted as victims\u2026 forced to bomb and decimate the Donbas region.<\/p>\n

The charade continued. The Western media portray the subsequent punitive, economic sanctions imposed by the expansionist US and EU on Russia as a result of Putin\u2019s \u2018aggression\u2019, referring to Russia\u2019s defense of Crimea\u2019s self-determination and the rights of the millions of bilingual ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

The absurdity and convoluted nature of Western demonological propaganda has reached new even more bizarre heights with their hysteria against Russia\u2019s military support of the secular Syrian government against ISIS and other jihadi terrorists.<\/p>\n

The Western mass media have launched a global campaign charging that the Russian air force bombs \u2018non-ISIS military bases\u2019, presumably the bases of Western-backed \u2018friendly\u2019 jihadi terrorists. This ridiculous \u2018reportage\u2019 and its accompanying \u2018photos\u2019 were published before the Russian air strikes even took place!!<\/p>\n

Apparently timing doesn\u2019t matter in Washington\u2019s \u2018alternative universe of lies\u2019!<\/p>\n

NATO passed its political line to the media that Russian support for the legitimate regime of President Assad must be discredited; that the Russian presence is \u2018provocative\u2019 and responsible for \u2018creating tensions\u2019 in the region \u2013 after years of Western-sponsored jihadi terrorism against Syria!<\/p>\n

Obedient to its masters, the Western media breathlessly \u2018reported\u2019 that the Russians were \u2018really\u2019 engaged in Syria in order destroy the pro-Western \u2018fighters\u2019 leaving ISIS alone.<\/p>\n

No credible evidence for this propaganda was ever presented. They trotted out aerial photos of wreckage, which had likely been lifted from previous US bombings.<\/p>\n

The media\u2019s clumsy execution of the Pentagon\u2019s line managed to embarrass even the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, who backed off of such claims and called for an explanation from Russia. Even Secretary Kerry, who now seeks to secure Putin\u2019s military support for the US against ISIS while withdrawing Russia\u2019s political backing of President Assad, has cautioned the media to modify its line, now that the US favors \u2018greater coordination\u2019 with Russia – but under US leadership. The media has recently conformed to this line, although it has not managed to explain how Washington could now work with the demonic President Putin.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Western media is engaged in an intense long-term propaganda campaign to demonize President Putin. Its role is to convince world public opinion and world leaders to blindly follow the US and EU, as well as their \u2018allies\u2019 and vassal states, in a campaign to degrade and undermine Russia, and consolidate a unipolar empire under US tutelage.<\/p>\n

The Western mass media is important; but it must be remembered that the media is an instrument of imperial state power. Its lies and fabrications, its demonization of leaders, like President Putin, are one part of a global military offensive to establish dominance and to destroy adversaries.<\/p>\n

The more intense the imperial campaign, the riskier the power grab, the greater the need to demonize the victims.<\/p>\n

This explains how the escalation of the rabid anti-Putin propaganda campaign coincides with the single biggest Western power grab – the Ukraine coup (\u2018regime change\u2019) – since West Germany annexed East Germany, and NATO and the EU incorporated the Baltic States, Eastern Europe and the Balkans into the West\u2019s strategic alliance. The West\u2019s bloody break-up of the Yugoslav federation was part of this strategic program.<\/p>\n

The problem with the Western demonization of adversaries, whether it is Russia, Iran and China today, or earlier Cuba, Libya and Yemen in the past, is that Washington and the EU face severe economic crises at home and military defeats abroad by armed Islamic and nationalist resistance movements.<\/p>\n

The US had invested hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up a shaky puppet regime in US-occupied Iraq, yet the US-trained and supplied Iraqi Army fled as the Baathist-Islamist \u2018ISIS\u2019 quickly over-ran half the country.<\/p>\n

US troops have occupied Afghanistan for fourteen years, losing tens of thousands of lives and limbs and yet the nationalist-Islamist Taliban can easily take over Afghanistan\u2019s third largest city, Kunduz (population 300,000), and occupies three quarters of the rest of the countryside.<\/p>\n

Libya and Somalia are a disaster. And still Washington allocates a half billion dollars to train pro-Western mercenaries to overthrow Syria\u2019s President Assad \u2013 mercenaries who give up their arms or join ISIS the moment they cross the border from Jordan or Turkey. The US trained mercenaries have handed over untold millions of dollars worth of heavy and light weapons and armored carriers to ISIS and Al Qaeda. The EU and the US face the dismal reality that Libya, Somalia and Syria are over-run by anti-Western Islamic fighters.<\/p>\n

In Asia, China is demonized in the Western media, portrayed as being on the verge of collapse, facing a hard landing, even as China grows at 7%. The Western media wring their collective hands over the crisis in China while Beijing finances two new international development banks for $100 billion, raises its contribution to the IMF and brings 50 countries, including most of the EU but minus the US and Japan, into a new infrastructure lending institution.<\/p>\n

Two big questions face the US and EU:<\/p>\n

Why do the Western media launch a campaign of demonization that doesn\u2019t correspond to reality? What is the goal of such demonization, which objectively undermines the possibility of forming tactical alliances to end the US\u2019 military losses, political defeats and diplomatic isolation? The US needs Russia to defeat ISIS.<\/p>\n

For Moscow, the fight against ISIS is crucial to Russian national security: Thousands of Chechen terrorists (some trained by the US) are fighting with ISIS and threaten to return to the Caucuses and terrorize Russia. Unlike the US public\u2019s opposition to Washington\u2019s role in forcing \u2018regime change\u2019 in Syria, the Russian public supports Moscow\u2019s military support for the Syrian government because the Chechens\u2019 campaign of terror within Russia, especially the 2004 massacre of hundreds of school children, teachers and parents in Beslan, is seared into their memory \u2013 a fact conveniently ignored by Western media when it \u2018sympathizes\u2019 with Chechen \u2018freedom fighters\u2019.<\/p>\n

In reality, Washington should have a common interest to ally with Russia in the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. However Obama is committed to ousting Assad (Russia\u2019s ally) to expand US dominance in the Middle East in partnership with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Clearly there are insurmountable contradictions between short-term military objectives (fighting ISIS) and strategic imperial political imperatives (consolidating US-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East and Iran).<\/p>\n

Washington has moved to end its isolation in Latin America by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. Meanwhile, Washington retains the economic blockade of Cuba and its huge US military base in Guantanamo. Cuba is seen as a tactical political ally in \u2018moderating\u2019 the leftist government of Venezuela and pressuring the Colombian FARC to disarm, even as Washington deepens its military presence in the continent.<\/p>\n

Obama signed off on a nuclear agreement with Iran (but the crippling sanctions and blockade remain in place) in order to secure Tehran\u2019s support for the war against ISIS in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Temporarily, the Western mass media has \u2018toned-down\u2019 its demonological reporting on Iran and Cuba, for tactical purposes.<\/p>\n

The Obama regime has adopted a \u2018good cop\/bad cop\u2019 (or schizophrenic) posture with Russia on Syria \u2013 Secretary of State John Kerry speaks of joint co-operation with Moscow while Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter proposes to militarily confront \u2018Russian aggression\u2019. The media hasn\u2019t made the switch because they don\u2019t know which orders to obey or which line to \u2018parrot\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the domestic economic crisis deepens, ISIS advances, the Taliban approaches Kabul, the Russians are arming and defending President Assad and millions of refugees, fleeing the war zones, have over- run Europe. European border wars are raging. And Obama wrings his hands in impotence. Demonology offers no allies, no solutions and no positive path to peace and co-existence.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, <\/em>La Jornada<\/em>, and previously, for the Spanish daily, <\/em>El Mundo<\/em>. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 petras.lahaine.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, \u2018former KGB operative\u2019 and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}