Vaccination against disinformation — take in immediately! Dear Friends,
I wrote the urgent following letter to the CBC Public Affairs department on Wednesday, November 24, after suffering from the endless so-called coverage of the so-called “people power revolution” in Ukraine. I soon afterwards read the enclosed three articles, which fill in the “story” in my letter, and would, I think and hope, make all who read them utterly immune against the brainwashing virus that is emanating from all the media, with the CBC, to its eternal shame, playing a vanguard role in spreading it. Please read and consider, and write letters, call in open line shows, contact the CBC (in particular) by phone, fax, letter or e-mail, to give them a piece of your (by then well-informed) mind. Almost all CBC programmes have a talkback feature, so you can even leave phone messages, but I recommend letters that leave a paper trail and that can be part of a dossier that I would like to send to the president of the CBC and the ombudsman, on behalf of CBC audiences everywhere, with very specific demands about ethics and professionalism in their journalism. On the CBC website, htpp://www.cbc.ca you can find all the contact information for the various national and local news and public affairs programmes. Likewise for CPAC, which has joined the pack in cheering for “people power.” It has an open line show, too, which is less controlled than CBC’s hopeless Cross Country Check-up which is an open line show in name only. If and when you e-mail to the CBC, send a copy to the PM, party leaders and your “own” MP, whoever that happens to be. All of the parties are together in their glorification of and support for the US-directed and financed “democracy show” in Ukraine. The parliamentary e-mail addresses can be found at: http://canada.gc.ca/directories/direct_e.html All the MPs should be served notice that we know what is going on and they can’t fool us! Do forward the articles below to them, as well as to all your own contacts. There is not much to add to the two John Laughland articles and to Ian Trayner’s detailing who is really running the “show” in Kiev (guess who?). These articles make it absolutely clear that all the media are guilty as sin, trying to pass on counterfeit information to the public. Your responses and comments are always greatly appreciated. Marjaleena Repo for the David Orchard Campaign for Canada Tel 306-244-9724 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================== DAVID ORCHARD CAMPAIGN FOR CANADA National office: P.O. Box 1983, Saskatoon, S7K 3S5 tel: (306) 664-8443 fax: (306) 244-3790 1-877-WE STAND (937-8263) [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: http://www.davidorchard.com ==================================== November 24, 2004 MEMO FROM MARJALEENA REPO To: CBC public affairs programmes CBC TV The National <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Politics [EMAIL PROTECTED], The Current <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, As It Happens <[EMAIL PROTECTED],> The Sunday Edition <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: Marjaleena Repo, Saskatoon, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Once again, CBC is covering a political development in Eastern Europe, with a combination of extreme bias and glaring superficiality. You have accepted, with indecent haste, that the election was fraudulent, and you jump in to urge that "something" be done about it. (No such insistence when it came to U.S. election fraud that got President Bush elected for the first time, and no investigation whatsoever of the countless misdeeds in the most recent election, so thoroughly documented and discussed on the internet. See, for instance, http://www.votersunite.org/ and http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/112304.html) The Ukrainian election is a carbon copy of two previous ones, Yugoslavia in 2000 and Georgia last year, in both cases election results were forcibly changed in a coup d’etat fashion., while mobs shouted “Democracy Now!” and “People Power.” The violent overthrow was accomplished with the aid of American dollars and the full involvement of U.S. government agencies, with significant financial and organizational help from the likes of George Soros and his “Open society,” both of which have played a significant role in the dismantling and “rearranging” of former Soviet Bloc countries, readying them for the joys of the “free market.” Just put your thinking caps on for a moment if you can find them: Can you imagine a similar situation in Canada, where the losing side does not even wait for the results to properly processed, but insists on forming the government and storms the parliament in pursuit of that goal! What would we call these people here in Canada and how would they be dealt with? Not with the kind of kid gloves that you have treated the opposition in Yugoslavia, Georgia and now Ukraine, that is for sure. You would call it by its rightful name: insurrection. (On Don Newman’s “Politics” yesterday, the Ukrainian ambassador referred repeatedly to his belief that the “Rule of Law” must be upheld in his country’s election, receiving no acknowledgment from Mr. Newman that such an animal could possibly exist in Ukraine.) For your information, I was a non-NATO approved observer in the 2000 Yugoslavian election, visiting countless polling stations and talking to the opposition party representatives, even interviewing Mr. Kostunica’s campaign manager. (He had no problem with American money completely financing all the opposition groups making up the so-called Democracy Movement, including its famed radio stations and newspapers. As he put it, “We have no other way of getting money!”) Everywhere at the polls there were scrutineers for all the presidential candidates just as we have in Canada, and yet the election was declared fraudulent by the Western media including, of course the Canadian, with CBC in the lead, even before the ballots were cast! The opposition forces prevented the second ballot from taking place, as was required by Yugoslav’s election regulations, and the rest is unpleasant history, now repeating itself in the Ukraine. I know from experience that my memo to you will have no effect, but I do hope against hope that SOMEONE who reads this might get “second thoughts” on the kind of rah-rah coverage you are giving to all the U.S. sponsored so-called Democracy Movements around the world, while ignoring and dismissing the authentic ones in Canada and elsewhere. It is clear that CBC has strayed far from its mandate in providing reliable and factual information and analysis to Canadians. Instead it has now become a steady and major source of misinformation and its more sinister cousin, disinformation. Marjaleena Repo Saskatoon (306)244-9724 201 Elm Street, Saskatoon, S7J 0G8 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================ The Spectator, November 6, 2004 http://www.bhhrg.org/pressDetails.asp?ArticleID=29 Western Aggression in Ukraine by John Laughland A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from the Western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative Party. When they produced a manifesto containing fifteen pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, "To expel all Jews from our country." It is in the West of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being vigorously promoted by the USA as the country's next president, the former Prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko. On a rainy Monday morning in Kiev, I met some young Yushchenko supporters, druggy skinheads from the Western city of Lvov. They belonged both to a Western-backed youth organisation, Pora, and also to Ukrainian National Self-Defence (UNSO), a semi-paramilitary movement whose members enjoy posing for the cameras carrying rifles and wearing fatigues and balaclava helmets. Were nutters like this to be politically active in any country other than Ukraine or the Baltic states, there would be instant outcry in the US and British media; but in former Soviet republics, such bogus nationalism is considered anti-Russian and therefore democratic. It is because of this ideological presupposition that Anglo-Saxon media reporting on the Ukrainian elections has chimed in with press releases from the State Department, peddling a fairy tale about a struggle between a brave and beleaguered democrat, Yushchenko, and an authoritarian Soviet nostalgic, the present Prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych. All facts which contradict this morality tale are simply suppressed. So, for instance, a story has been widely circulated that Yushchenko was poisoned during the electoral campaign, the fantasy being that the government was trying to bump him off. But no British or American news outlet has reported the interview given to the Austrian magazine, Profil, by the chief physician of the Vienna clinic which treated Yushchenko for his unexplained illness, who said he had been subjected to such intimidation by Yushchenko's entourage to doctor the medical report that he was forced to seek police protection, fearing for his life. It has also been repeatedly alleged that foreign observers found the elections fraught with violations committed by the government. In fact, this is exclusively the view of highly politicised Western governmental organisations like the OSCE - a body which is notorious for the fraudulent nature of its own reports, and which in any case came to this conclusion before the poll had even taken place - and of bogus NGOs like the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a front organisation exclusively funded by Western (mainly American) government bodies and think-tanks, and clearly allied with Yushchenko. Because they speak English, the political activists in such organisations can easily nobble Anglophone Western reporters, who in any case are happy to eat out of their hand. Contrary allegations - such as those of fraud committed by Yushchenko-supporting local authorities in Western Ukraine, carefully detailed by Russian election observers but available only in Russian - go unreported. So too does evidence of crude intimidation made by Yushchenko supporters against election officials, proof of which I personally obtained in Odessa. Far from being authoritarian, indeed, Prime Minister Yanukovych seems to be doing nothing to prevent fraud by his challenger. The depiction is so skewed, indeed, that Yushchenko is presented as a pro-Western free-marketeer, even though his fief in Western Ukraine is an economic wasteland, while Yanukovych is presented as pro-Russian and statist, even though his electoral campaign is based on deregulation and the economy on his watch has been growing at an impressive clip. The cleanliness and prosperity of Kiev and other cities have improved noticeably in the last two years alone. There is, however, one thing which separates the two main candidates, and which explains the West's determination to shoe in Yushchenko: NATO. Yanukovych has said he is against Ukraine joining, Yushchenko is in favour. The West wants Ukraine in NATO to weaken Russia geopolitically; to have a new big client state for expensive Western weaponry, whose manufacturers fund so much of the US political process; and to have a large pool of young men who can be conscripted into fighting the West's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Yanukovych has also promised to promote Russian back to the status of second state language. Since most Ukrainian citizens speak Russian, since Kiev is the historic birthplace of Christian Russia, and since the current legislation forces tens of millions of Russians to Ukrainianise their names, this is hardly unreasonable. The continued artificial imposition of Ukrainian as the state language - started under the Soviets and intensified after the fall of communism - will be a further factor in ripping Ukraine's Russophone citizens away from Russia proper. That is why the West wants it. The Guardian, Friday, November 26, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5072082-115040,00.html US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev Ian Traynor With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev. Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again. But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko. That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev. The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections. In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire. They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing. In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered. Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful. Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged. In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border. The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute. US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy. The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American. In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister. In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency. Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m. Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes. There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups. Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed. The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond. The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election. In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression. If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world. The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia. The Guardian, Saturday November 27, 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1360811,00.html The revolution televised The western media's view of Ukraine's election is hopelessly biased By John Laughland There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the right stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more. This week both the anti-war Independent and the pro-war Telegraph excitedly announced a "revolution" in Ukraine. Across the pond, the rightwing Washington Times welcomed "the people versus the power". Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or Ukraine now, our media regularly peddle the same fairy tale about how youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime, simply by attending a rock concert in a central square. Two million anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be "the people", while the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression. The western imagination is now so gripped by its own mythology of popular revolution that we have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double standards in media reporting. Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are not shown on our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters are denigrated as having been "bussed in". The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous. Or again, we are told that a 96% turnout in Donetsk, the home town of Viktor Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of over 80% in areas which support Viktor Yushchenko are not. Nor are actual scores for Yushchenko of well over 90% in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved only in two. And whereas Yanukovich's final official score was 54%, the western-backed president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled 96.24% of the vote in his country in January. The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it "brought the country closer to meeting international standards". The blindness extends even to the posters which the "pro-democracy" group, Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a jackboot crushing a beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its opponents. Such dehumanisation of enemies has well-known antecedents - not least in Nazi occupied Ukraine itself, when pre-emptive war was waged against the Red Plague emanating from Moscow - yet these posters have passed without comment. Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister organisations in Serbia and Georgia, Otpor and Kmara - Pora is an organisation created and financed by Washington. It gets worse. Plunging into the crowd of Yushchenko supporters in Independence Square after the first round of the election, I met two members of Una-Unso, a neo-Nazi party whose emblem is a swastika. They were unembarrassed about their allegiance, perhaps because last year Yushchenko and his allies stood up for the Socialist party newspaper, Silski Visti, after it ran an anti-semitic article claiming that Jews had invaded Ukraine alongside the Wehrmacht in 1941. On September 19, 2004, Yushchenko's ally, Alexander Moroz, told JTA-Global Jewish News: "I have defended Silski Visti and will continue to do so. I personally think the argument ... citing 400,000 Jews in the SS is incorrect, but I am not in a position to know all the facts." Yushchenko, Moroz and their oligarch ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, meanwhile, cited a court order closing the paper as evidence of the government's desire to muzzle the media. In any other country, support for anti-semites would be shocking; in this case, our media do not even mention it. Voters in Britain and the US have witnessed their governments lying brazenly about Iraq for over a year in the run-up to war, and with impunity. This is an enormous dysfunction in our own so-called democratic system. Our tendency to paint political fantasies on to countries such as Ukraine which are tabula rasa for us, and to present the west as a fairy godmother swooping in to save the day, is not only a way to salve a guilty conscience about our own political shortcomings; it also blinds us to the reality of continued brazen western intervention in the democratic politics of other countries. John Laughland is a trustee of http://www.oscewatch.organd an associate of htpp://www.sandersresearch.com Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
