{"id":159506,"date":"2015-06-18T02:15:16","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T02:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=159506"},"modified":"2018-07-08T00:47:37","modified_gmt":"2018-07-07T23:47:37","slug":"nato-lies-to-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/nato-lies-to-npr\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO Lies to NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

On 17 June 2015, U.S. National Public Radio (NPR)\u00a0interviewed<\/span><\/a>\u00a0NATO\u2019s and America\u2019s General Ben Hodges, who is the Commanding General of the U.S. Army in Europe, which is\u00a0“NATO’s most senior land forces command.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0He said (after 4:54 in the audio):<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis notion that somehow, Russia, you know, has no choice but to respond or that the West is being provocative, really, I don\u2019t think rings true at all. \u2026 We\u2019re building up on NATO\u2019s borders. These are NATO countries, these are allies of ours, that are concerned based on what Russia is doing on their borders, and they\u2019ve asked for assurance that their allies are there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The interviewer asked, \u201cPresident Putin said that only an insane person could imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO. I mean, is NATO insane for worrying about a Russian attack?\u201d Hodges replied (6:41):<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s an irresponsible question. It is completely unimaginable to me that Russia would ever invade Crimea. I mean, this was the day after the Sochi Olympics, after the Russians had spent millions and millions of dollars, and then threw away whatever goodwill they had earned the following day by invading Crimea.\u201d<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s so many lies in such a short span, so that unpacking all of them will produce a long article; but, those lies are the mainstream view in America\u2019s news media, so, here goes the reality that demolishes them:<\/span><\/p>\n

HIS BASIC \u2018HISTORY\u2019 IS FALSE<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Everything he says about what preceded Crimea\u2019s switching back to Russia (of which it had always been a part until 1954) is false. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Sochi Olympics ended on 23 February 2014. Contrary to what Ben Hodges says, there was no Russian invasion of Crimea the next day (nor actually ever, but we\u2019ll get to that later). According to wikipedia,\u00a0which is edited by the CIA<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(and so it must be right, if not far-right \u2014 like Hodges is), the\u00a0\u201c2014 Ukrainian Revolution\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0started on 18 February 2014. This overthrow of a government was occurring in the one nation, Ukraine, that\u00a0Zbigniew Brzezinski<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and others have said is the most crucial nation of all that must be turned hostile toward Russia in order for America to win against Russia. (Ending communism and the Soviet Union doesn\u2019t slake the sheer bloodthirst of people such as Brzezinski and Hodges \u2014 and Obama: Russia must simply be crushed; the communist-v.-capitalist thing was just an excuse for these psychopaths; and the only reason why Obama in 2012 denied Romney\u2019s\u00a0\u201cour number one geopolitical foe\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0remark about Russia, was in order to fool the electorate about Obama himself.) Thus, grabbing Ukraine is more important to them (and their billionaire sponsors) than getting any of the twelve former Warsaw Pact nations that the U.S. had already brought into NATO. It\u2019s not for what\u2019s in Ukraine; it\u2019s for what\u2019s in Russia. (The Warsaw Pact itself had ended when the Soviet Union itself did, in 1991. The GHW Bush Administration promised Gorbachev that NATO would move\u00a0\u201cnot one inch eastward,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0but the U.S. constantly violates that promise, and then blames Russia for responding to its brazenness, as Russia must do for its own defense. If Obama and the U.S. Congress continue this, there will be a nuclear war.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What happened five days before February 23rd, on 18 February 2014?\u00a0Here<\/span><\/a>\u00a0is video of it; and, as is obvious there, Putin must have been fully informed of these rabidly anti-Russian riots in next-door Ukraine, even while he was at the Sochi Olympics. This video is from Hromadske TV. Hromadske TV was financed by three entities as shown in their 2014 Financial Report, a snippet of which is seen\u00a0here,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0but the totality of which Financial Report was then removed from the Web because this information didn\u2019t fit the West\u2019s propaganda-line. I had read that Financial Report before it was taken down. This snippet published there is accurate. It shows that \u201cTotal cash inflows\u201d during the second half of 2013 were $2,576,596, of which \u201cIndividual contributions\u201d (by Ukrainian oligarchs) were $1,135,997; \u201cThe Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands\u201d was $793,089; \u201cThe Embassy of the United States of America\u201d was $399,650; and George Soros\u2019s \u201cInternational Renaissance Fund\u201d was $247,860. Consequently, that \u2019news\u2019 report on Hromadske favored the people who were rioting against Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych; and this Hromadske report said: “New wave of riots tonight in Ukraine…. and the president of Ukraine does nothing about it.\u201d It blamed Yanukovych, for those riots against Yanukovych.\u00a0That\u2019s as silly as Ben Hodges blaming Russia for increasing its defenses after NATO increasingly surrounds it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here<\/a><\/span>\u00a0is more from Hromadske TV about the riots on that day, February 18th.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here is the bloodshed on\u00a020 February 2014,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0BBC Newsnight\u2019s telecast about the violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is more of that bloodshed\u00a020 February 2014,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0film-footage which was never telecast by BBC, their cut-outs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is an independent video that was uploaded to the Web on\u00a020 February 2014,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0showing a sniper reloading his rifle.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here is Rupert Murdoch\u2019s Sky News, simply assuming that the snipers on\u00a020 February 2014<\/span><\/a>\u00a0are \u201cPolice Snipers,\u201d not<\/i> U.S.-paid mercenaries who were merely dressed as if they were police.<\/span><\/p>\n

But here is\u00a0a video presenting evidence that U.S.-paid mercenaries is what they actually were.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

And\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>\u00a0is the shock that the EU\u2019s foreign-affairs chief experienced when her own investigator told her that this was a coup, and not actually a revolution at all. (And yet, the EU went along with Obama\u2019s sanctions.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, what happened, then, on the day after the Sochi Olympics ended \u2014 the day that Hodges says that Russia \u201cthrew away whatever goodwill they had earned the following day by invading Crimea.\u201d? Here is from the Guardian<\/i>, reporting on Monday, February 24th<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

As a new regime consolidated its grip over power in Kiev on Sunday, calls for secession in the pro-Russian south of Ukraine were growing louder.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

At a protest attended by thousands in the port city of Sevastopol on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, the crowd voted to establish a parallel administration and civil defence squads.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Demonstrators waved Russian flags \u2013 there was not a Ukrainian flag to be seen \u2013 and chanted “Russia, Russia, Russia” during the gathering.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

“Sevastopol is a Russian town and will always be a Russian town. \u2026 we will never surrender to those fascists in Kiev,” said Anatoly, who was handing out Russian flags and declined to give his surname. “The struggle is only just beginning.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

There was plenty of reason for Crimeans to be terribly afraid. On the night of 20-21 February 2014<\/span><\/a>, there was \u201cThe Pogrum of Korsun\u201d in which, as the Ukrainian Human Rights Organization itself documented, a Ukrainian nazi gang (specifically, of Right Sector<\/span><\/a> thugs) that had been involved in the Maidan violence to overthrow Yanukovych, attacked a busload of Crimeans who were fleeing from Kiev back to Crimea, brutally beating the occupants and burning the bus. Obama\u2019s people (Right Sector were essential to his operation in Ukraine) weren\u2019t exactly trying to make nice to Crimeans, who had voted overwhelmingly for the man Obama was overthrowing<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Here is some of the bloodshed from the prior month, leading up to all that, on\u00a0January 21st,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0then\u00a0January 22nd,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0then\u00a0January 25th.<\/span><\/a> As you can see, there\u2019s plenty of violence in it all. And it was directed against both Yanukovych and Russia. Crimeans, who had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych, and who overwhelmingly preferred Russia both to this new Ukraine, and to the U.S.A. itself, very reasonably felt threatened by these new, U.S.-imposed, rulers in Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here it is from even earlier,\u00a02 December 2013.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

And here it is from much earlier,\u00a03 October 2013<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which was well before wikipedia\u2019s article on\u00a0\u201cTimeline of the Euromaidan\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0even says that the demonstrations to bring down Yanukovych had so much as begun.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who organized all of this violence for the U.S. \u2014 violence that the U.S. and EU subsequently blamed on Yanukovych, and then on Putin; and, for which Obama established and the EU accepted the economic sanctions against Russia?<\/span><\/p>\n

Here, then, is the man,\u00a0Andriy Parubiy,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who had planned and led that violence; he was referred to, even by\u00a0wikipedia,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in this way: “From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a\u00a0commandant\u00a0of\u00a0Euromaidan.[16]\u00a0He was coordinator of the\u00a0volunteer security\u00a0corps [i.e.: of the mercenaries<\/i>]\u00a0for the mainstream protesters.[17].\u201d In addition, there were paid \u2018protesters,\u2019<\/span><\/a> to add mere bodies and voices to the crowds. And, “Parubiy co-led the Orange Revolution in 2004.\u201d That was a straightforward CIA operation. So, Parubiy was an expert at organizing a coup for Washington; in late 2013 and early 2014, he was doing it, yet again, now far better than before. And he wasn\u2019t commanding \u201cthe police,\u201d like Rupert Murdoch\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 charged as having been the malefactors. Parubiy\u2019s forces were shooting at, and were throwing firebombs into, first, the crowds of demonstrators, and, then, at the state security forces, sometimes killing the police.<\/span><\/p>\n

This wikipedia article also mentions the following about Parubiy\u2019s background, prior to his being hired by the CIA in 2004:<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1991 he founded the\u00a0Social-National Party of Ukraine\u00a0together with\u00a0Oleh Tyahnybok;[8]\u00a0the party combined\u00a0radical nationalism\u00a0and some\u00a0neo-Nazi\u00a0features (by its name and the “Wolfsangel”-like sign).[5][9][10]\u00a0In 1998\u20132004\u00a0Parubiy led the paramilitary organization of SNPU, the\u00a0Patriot of Ukraine.[10]\u00a0Parubiy left these organizations in\u00a02004.[9]<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

2004 was when the U.S. started its subversion of Ukraine. Parubiy finally had a sponsor that could devote big bucks to the fascistification of Ukraine \u2014 Parubiy\u2019s lifelong cause. George W. Bush was the U.S. President then. Obama was picking up from where GWB left off.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine was built upon the basis of the extensive political movement in Ukraine during World War II that passionately supported the National Socialist Party of Germany, and that joined in the extermination of Jews and Poles, and that adopted much of the Hitler operation’s symbolism,<\/span><\/a> and held a very similar\u00a0ideology,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0except that they wanted to kill all Russians, even more than they hated Jews and Poles; whereas Hitler\u2019s party wanted to kill all Jews, above all else. So, this was a superb ideological background for a CIA that was out for American conquest of, specifically, Russia \u2014 not merely an ideological war to end communism (which turned out to have been basically just a ruse:\u00a0the CIA is actually a fascist operation<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The great independent investigative historian Brandon Turbeville revealed at activistpost on 9 April 2015\u00a0the deeper history of this Ukrainian coup,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0going all the way back to U.S. President Bill Clinton\u2019s Administration. But this coup was shown there to have already started in the Spring of 2013 (months before the official \u2018histories\u2019 in the West say it started), with this announcement from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv in partnership with Microsoft Ukraine hosted TechCamp Kyiv 2.0 on March 1, 2013 at the Microsoft Ukraine Headquarters. TechCamps support the U.S.\u00a0State Department\u2019s Civil Society 2.0 initiative that builds the technological and digital capacity of civil society organizations around the world.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

During the full day interactive workshop, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv paired leaders in the technology community with civil society organizations to provide in-depth exposure to low-cost and easy to implement technologies. More than 60 civil society leaders from throughout Ukraine came together to get hands-on training in a variety of areas ranging from\u00a0fundraising using crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, PR tools for NGOs, Microsoft software and programs for NGOs, and more. These civil society organizations will be poised to\u00a0use new technologies to grow their networks, communicate more efficiently, and keep pace with the changing world.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

To date, State Department sponsored TechCamps in Ukraine have trained more than 200 civil society organizers from throughout the country and Belarus.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So: Parubiy had lots of backing. However, he actually delegated the management of the coup to\u00a0Dmitriy Yarosh,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who headed Ukraine\u2019s other<\/i> nazi party, the \u201cRight Sector.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0The reason for this is that whereas the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine did not have its own force of highly trained paramilitaries, Right Sector did \u2014 and Yarosh had trained them all: he had always led them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here<\/a><\/span>\u00a0is a conversation that Yarosh \u2014 the actual muscle-man of \u201cMaidan\u201d \u2014 had on 25 February 2014, in which Yarosh was speaking privately with Oleg Tyagnibok, who was the co-founder (with Parubiy) of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, now called the \u201cSvoboda\u201d or \u201cFreedom,\u201d party (at the CIA\u2019s suggestion \u2014 and the name of the U.S. Government\u2019s\u00a0Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, in their Russian and Ukrainian services<\/span><\/a>, is\u00a0svoboda.org<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 even nazism is now renamed \u201cfreedom\u201d and an \u201corg\u201d suggesting that it\u2019s charitable). He was very open there about his intense nazi racism, because he was speaking there with a fellow nazi, only from the other nazi party in Ukraine. (Only Ukraine has two nazi parties.) Ben Hodges is on their side. He represents President Barack Obama. Don\u2019t be surprised that a Black can also be a racist fascist; in Israel, there are plenty of racist-fascist \u2014 i.e., ideologically nazi \u2014 Jews. It\u2019s the ideology that won in the United States, imposed upon it by the American aristocracy, who finance almost all major national politicians. The U.S. Government has been take over by them, not by the U.S. public \u2014 it\u2019s no longer a democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

When this coup \u2014 which the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor once referred to as\u00a0\u201cthe most blatant coup in history\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 was over, the new regime was planning to kick Russia\u2019s navy out of Russia\u2019s main naval base ever since 1783, which was in Crimea, which had always been part of Russia until the Soviet dictator in 1954 simply transferred Crimea to Ukraine, despite the wishes of the Crimeans.<\/span><\/p>\n

RUSSIA DID NOT INVADE CRIMEA<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Obama himself phrased the entire \u2018justification\u2019 for his economic sanctions against Russia, on the basis of\u00a0\u201cthe annexation of Crimea,\u201d via a \u201cconquest of land.”<\/span><\/a>\u00a0 So, Ben Hodges is merely repeating Obama, using a clearer phrase (\u201cinvade Crimea\u201d), in order to \u2018justify\u2019 American responses that are even more aggressive: military, not just economic, against Russia. However, just as I had headlined in that article,\u00a0“The Entire Case for Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure\u00a0Lies.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0The reality is:\u00a0\u201cThe International War-Criminal Is Obama, Not Putin.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If that doesn\u2019t sound correct to you, please click on the links here wherever you question what\u2019s being said, and on the linked sources within those linked articles, and try to find a way to reconstruct from that evidence the viewpoint that the West\u2019s newsmedia present of these matters. People shouldn\u2019t wait until a nuclear war before they start to check what the actual facts are. If they do that, then they will simply die with their illusions (and, because those illusions have fooled so many other people). But those illusions have been imposed upon them by extremely bad people (they are manufactured illusions), and then taken upon those people\u2019s followers by their not caring enough to investigate things on their own \u2014 not investigating in order to identify whom the world\u2019s mega-criminals actually are. What\u2019s involved here is not merely justice, but even survival. Of the world, as we know it.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

CONCLUDING NOTE<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Among the news media to which have been submitted for publication every article I have written, and so all of which are well aware of the facts that have been documented here and in the articles that are linked-to here, are: ABC New, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, The New York Times, <\/i>the Washington Post<\/i>, Wall Street Journal<\/i>, Guardian, Independent<\/i>, The Atlantic<\/i>, Harper\u2019s<\/i>, The Nation<\/i>, Progressive<\/i>, Mother Jones<\/i>, American Prospect<\/i>, Foreign Policy<\/i>, National Review<\/i>, Forbes<\/i>, BusinessWeek<\/i>, New York Review of Books<\/i>, Rolling Stone<\/i>, Alternet, Common Dreams, Truthout, Salon, Huffington Post, Slate, and many others. If you had not previously known the facts and documentation that has been presented here, it\u2019s not because those news media haven\u2019t had it presented to them; it\u2019s because they have turned it down. If you want to find out why they don\u2019t publish this information, then you might want to write to them and ask why they are keeping this information and documentation secret from their readers, viewers, and listeners. Are the companies\u2019 owners, and\/or big advertisers, making that decision, so that their \u2018journalists\u2019 are largely just PR-spreaders, or stenographers to power? <\/span><\/p>\n

Is this America\u2019s \u2018free press\u2019? Is this America\u2019s \u2018democracy\u2019? But in fact, the U.S. was recently discovered to be, and long to have been, a dictatorship, in which the people who are not in the richest 10% have no impact whatsoever on the nation\u2019s policies.\u00a0A brief video<\/span><\/a>\u00a0accurately summarized\u00a0that study (by Gilens and Page)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and explained why its findings are that way. It\u2019s most likely the people in the top 0.01%, even above that the billionaires, who are actually being served by this dictatorship. But, anyway, the objectives of the bottom 90% don\u2019t at all affect federal policymaking. That\u2019s clear from the data. <\/span><\/p>\n

People such as Ben Hodges are placed where they are, because they serve the top 0.01%, or maybe even less. This is why they can lie to the public with total impunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of \u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse On 17 June 2015, U.S. National Public Radio (NPR)\u00a0interviewed\u00a0NATO\u2019s and America\u2019s General Ben Hodges, who is the Commanding General of the U.S. Army in Europe, which is\u00a0“NATO’s most senior land forces command.\u201d\u00a0He said (after 4:54 in the audio): \u201cThis notion that somehow, Russia, you know, has no choice but to respond or that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":140643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,519],"tags":[115,30,32,96,974,535,59,757,1480,526,524,523,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-159506","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-newswire","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-cover-up","13":"tag-democracy","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-military","16":"tag-nato","17":"tag-npr","18":"tag-propaganda","19":"tag-russia","20":"tag-ukraine","21":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":368459,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159506\/revisions\/368459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}