02.20.2014
Q: What do you know about the Ukraine?
A: Not much.
Q: What do you know about revolution?
A: Just what I read in the history books. One size does not fit all. Some, like the American Revolution, are good. Others, like the Russian Revolution, are bad.
Q: What do you know about the current attempt at a Ukrainian Revolution?
A: The people of the Ukraine are fighting for their rights against an increasingly dictatorial government.
Q: Why do so few people know about the Ukrainian uprising?
A: Perhaps because the people of the Ukraine are struggling to come out from under the yoke of Moscow, and join the free peoples of Europe. That just doesn’t fit the narrative the mainstream media is constantly selling, does it? How can the West be so bad if the oppressed people of the former Soviet Union are yearning to adopt our economic and social values?
Q: What is the difference between the Arab Spring and the Ukrainian uprising? Why do we hear so much of one and so little of the other?
A: The Arabs were, for the most part, throwing out regimes that were sympathetic to the West and replacing them with radical anti-American forces. That meant the U.S. and European media were eager to follow the story because of their self-loathing attitude toward Western values and culture. The Ukraine, on the other hand, only makes sense in the context of the supposedly ended Cold War, which pitted the evil empire of the Moscow-controlled Soviet Union against the forces of freedom represented by Ronald Reagan and the U.S. Constitution. Since Reagan and the Constitution are frequent targets of the Western press, it would not be convenient to promote the heroic stand of the Ukrainian people against a despotic president and federal government.
Q: Why is it not convenient?
A: Because the people rising up in the Ukraine are essentially the equivalent of the American Tea Party movement. They have grown fed up with with a political system that concentrates power in the hands of a privileged few who turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the people. Corruption is the rule of the day. The government uses both its tax agencies and its court system to reward friends and punish enemies, and a strong-arm president has vowed to do whatever it takes to impose his will on the people. There are just too many echoes of problems in our own country that the ruling establishment doesn’t want to talk about. And they certainly don’t want to do anything that makes the Tea Party look good. That is why reporting the truth to the American people about the Ukraine is considered politically inconvenient.
Q: But I thought we had an independent press in this country?
A: As Ernest Hemingway wrote at the end of his first novel, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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