[Title change mine]
A New York Times columnist writes Americans are so “dumbed-down” that they don’t know that Russia “invaded” Ukraine two years ago, but that “invasion” was mostly in the minds of Times editors and other propagandists, says Robert Parry.
In a column mocking the political ignorance of the “dumbed-down” American people and lamenting the death of “objective fact,” New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows why so many Americans have lost faith in the supposedly just-the-facts-ma’am mainstream media.
Egan states as flat fact, “If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it — two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.”
But it is not a “fact” that Russia “invaded” Ukraine – and it’s especially not the case if you also don’t state as flat fact that the United States has invaded Syria, Libya and many other countries where the U.S. government has launched bombing raids or dispatched “special forces.” Yet, the Times doesn’t describe those military operations as “invasions.”
Nor does the newspaper of record condemn the U.S. government for violating international law, although in every instance in which U.S. forces cross into another country’s sovereign territory without permission from that government or the United Nations Security Council, that is technically an act of illegal aggression.
In other words, the Times applies a conscious double standard when reporting on the actions of the United States or one of its allies (note how Turkey’s recent invasion of Syria was just an “intervention”) as compared to how the Times deals with actions by U.S. adversaries, such as Russia.
Biased on Ukraine
The Times’ reporting on Ukraine has been particularly dishonest and hypocritical. The Times ignores the substantial evidence that the U.S. government encouraged and supported a violent coup that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014, including a pre-coup intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who should lead the new government and how to “midwife this thing.”
The Times also played down the key role of neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists in killing police before the coup,seizing government building during the coup, and then spearheading the slaughter of ethnic Russian Ukrainians after the coup. If you wanted to detect the role of these SS-wannabes from the Times’ coverage, you’d have to scour the last few paragraphs of a few stories that dealt with other aspects of the Ukraine crisis.
While leaving out the context, the Times has repeatedly claimed that Russia “invaded” Crimea, although curiously without showing any photographs of an amphibious landing on Crimea’s coast or Russian tanks crashing across Ukraine’s border en route to Crimea or troops parachuting from the sky to seize strategic Crimean targets.
The reason such evidence of an “invasion” was lacking is that Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea as part of a basing agreement for the port of Sevastopol. So, it was a very curious “invasion” indeed, since the Russian troops were on scene before the “invasion” and their involvement after the coup was peaceful in protecting the Crimean population from the depredations of the new regime’s neo-Nazis. The presence of a small number of Russian troops also allowed the Crimeans to vote on whether to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they did with a 96 percent majority.
In the eastern provinces, which represented Yanukovych’s political base and where many Ukrainians opposed the coup, you can fault, if you wish, the Russian decision to provide some military equipment and possibly some special forces so ethnic Russian and other anti-coup Ukrainians could defend themselves from the assaults by the neo-Nazi Azov brigade and from the tanks and artillery of the coup-controlled Ukrainian army.
But an honest newspaper and honest columnists would insist on including this context. They also would resist pejorative phrases such as “invasion” and “aggression” – unless, of course, they applied the same terminology objectively to actions by the U.S. government and its “allies.”
That sort of nuance and balance is not what you get from The New York Times and its “group thinking” writers, people like Timothy Egan. When it comes to reporting on Russia, it’s Cold War-style propaganda, day in and day out.
And this has not been a one-off problem. The unrelenting bias of the Times and, indeed, the rest of the mainstream U.S. news media on the Ukraine crisis represents a lack of professionalism that was also apparent in the pro-war coverage of the Iraq crisis in 2002-03 and other catastrophic U.S. foreign policy decisions.
A growing public recognition of that mainstream bias explains why so much of the American population has tuned out supposedly “objective” news (because it is anything but objective).
Indeed, those Americans who are more sophisticated about Russia and Ukraine than Timothy Egan know that they’re not getting the straight story from the Times and other MSM outlets. Those not-dumbed-down Americans can spot U.S. government propaganda when they see it.
Being true to the example of their founder Muhammad, ISIS has been making videos of themselves taking Christian girls and raping and torturing them in bizarre sexual ways and then chopping up their bodies in secret prisons throughout ISIS-controlled territory and then sending the video to the victims’ families. Some of the women have been able to escape, and those who have all have been asking where was the world when this was happening?
A California-based human rights activist and lawyer, who has been helping minorities and women across the Middle East for over a decade, recently testified at the United Nations, narrating incidents such as parents in Syria being sent a video of their kidnapped daughters being raped and tortured by Islamic State, and the dismembered body parts of their daughters in bags. U.S. media chose not to report on it.
Jacqueline Isaac, vice president of the humanitarian group Roads of Success, began her testimony by saying that she is not speaking as a lawyer or an activist, but as a “fellow human being.”
“I stand with the beautiful, brave, resilient survivors that I spent extensive time with in Iraq – those that saw their parents killed before them and then taken by ISIS and categorized like merchandise based on whether they thought they were beautiful or not, their age, and whether they were virgins. Like merchandise,” Isaac said at the U.N. on April 28, according to CNS News.
“And as if that were not enough, they were raped, they were tortured, many committed suicide and died,” she continued. “And others may have attempted [suicide], but they survived, and they’re standing before us today.”
She added that the victims are crying out and asking, “Where are you, world? Where are you, world?” (source)
We at Shoebat.com have known the answer since last year, when we exposed how public, open-source documents confirm that ISIS is a creation of the US and Saudi Arabian governments intended to consolidate control over the region, especially for oil access. While these survivors are asking where America was when ISIS was destroying Iraq, the answer is plain. We were supporting ISIS and giving them the means to destroy the Christians.
If the stories that we have done are not enough, remember that under “big bad Saddam” Iraq had between 800,000 1.5 million Christians and growing in population. Christians were employed in Iraq’s government, such as with former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. Yet after 13 years of war, beginning in 2003, the Christian population now stands at between 200 and 450 thousand. This is a precipitous drop, turning a nation once ruled by a small dictator into a dangerous cesspool of Islamic poison.
The women have every right to be upset, but to ask where America was is a simple question. We were right there watching this horror happen and for reasons of money and power we did nothing, but let it continue just like how we refused to stop and even punished our soldiers for trying to stop Muslim men from raping little boys while they screamed for help.
May God have mercy on what has become of our nation.
Replacing the beatific vision of Christianity is a new universal, but secularist world order ushered in; an order in which human beings’ allegiance is to a global City of Men ruled by elite priests who act as gods for the masses. Preachers of the globalist vision present an ersatz kingdom that is the opposite of the City of God.
Like the Christian vision of the universal Kingdom of God, the religion of secular globalism claims universality, but is an earthly minded substitute for the Church universal. The Christian vision sees the Church universal as God’s kingdom ruling the earth. The religion of globalism sees an earthly, utopian world order in which all men pay allegiance to elite priests who rule over a World City without national borders.
Sometimes the substitute beatific vision is expressed in terms of a “global village,” a mystical entity that takes the place of the family of God. The globalists’ family of humanity is without distinction of country, tribe or creed. The ideal human being, like Phillip Nolan, is seen as detached from country and faith. He is exiled from everything that gives his life meaning in order he become an abstraction, a tabula rasa on which a new program might be written by those who are superior. The universal citizen of the new secularist world order does not know yet what he will be. But rest assured he will be told by those who know better than he.
The world citizen adrift in a sea without horizons will come to know this much: Anything to which he has been or is attached must be and will be demolished. The secularist vision requires complete destruction of the old; including nations, institutions, faith and even historical memory itself; hence, for instance, the constant attacks on the Christian Church and on the reality and concept of nation and the human being. Devotion to faith, family, nation is not only suspect, but considered positively injurious.
In sum, the ideology of globalism involves stripping humanity of its former and unique status as beings created in imago dei and the substitution of the idea of humanity as genderless units.
“To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctiveness. He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan, or Tadao -- a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by assimilation of the individual into a collective body. The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings…To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair.
“The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough. In every act, however trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring form the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than from his individual prospects and abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone. (Must always be watched by the group.) The individual is absorbed into the collective.”
Globalists embrace what Hoffer recognized as an “unbounded contempt for history.” The erasure of history inevitably means attacking the past and established institutions possessing history; institutions such as the Church and documents such as the U.S. Constitution. Only the future matters. The present is busy with wreckage of what exists, even if what presently exists has a thousand year or more heritage.
That is because for globalists, the present is a shadow and illusion -- merely a “passageway to the glorious future.” It is a meagre “way station on the road to Utopia…The radical and the reactionary loathe the present.”
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