The media narrative about Ukraine — that the “Maiden revolution” was a democratic
European-values oriented revolt against a tyrannical Russian-controlled puppet
— has always been a fairytale, largely perpetrated by the Western media in
complicity with the US State Department and the European Union. Yet now that
same media is being forced to reexamine their bias in the wake of the Ukrainian
government’s banning
of 34 journalists and seven bloggers from entering the country. The list of
the banned includes journalists from Britain, Switzerland, Israel, Slovakia,
Germany, Spain, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Estonia, Bulgaria, Germany, Latvia, Moldova,
Macedonia, and Serbia.
Unlike most of the rest of the English-speaking news media, the Committee to
Protect Journalists is reporting
that the list of banned journalists represents but a portion of a larger blacklist
consisting of 388 individuals and over 100 organizations forbidden from entering
the country on the grounds of “national security” and an alleged threat to Ukraine’s
“territorial integrity.” Here is the complete list (in Ukrainian).
The Guardian is reporting
that the list also includes businesspeople and journalists from the United States.
After an uproar — not over the existence of
such a list, but over the fact that three BBC reporters were included, along
with two Spaniards who have been captured by the Islamic State in Syria, and
a German writer — the six Western journalists everyone was making such a fuss
about were removed
from the list. The rest remain.
In his statement defending the ban, “President” Petro Poroshenko averred that the move
to censor the international media was taken “in coordination with our partners
from the European Union, the United States of America and other countries.”
Which explains why we haven’t heard a word about this — not a peep of public
protest — from the US State Department, or the EU, who authored the coup that
brought Poroshenko to power in the first place.
I don’t know if I’m on the list, as I don’t read Ukrainian, but I have to say
I’ll be very much disappointed to discover that I’m not — and I’ll be
working assiduously to ensure that I’ll be added. Hopefully this column will
serve to wake the Ukrainian authorities up to the fact that I represent a threat
to their dictatorship.