US Media Dropping The Ball On Ukraine 'Volunteers'

It is no secret that the US corporate or "mainstream" media is not particularly good at journalism. A majority of the American people do not trust what they report and recent stories about fabrications from star anchors have likely only dimmed an already low lit view. In truth, the mainstream media mostly just uncritically reports what the US government claims and the distrust of the government by the public is rightly mirrored in a distrust in its stenographers.

So it should be no surprise that as the US government has ramped up its rhetoric on a crisis it helped create in Ukraine the US mainstream media has followed suit, uncritically. Part of the US government's official communications strategy is to pretend that the well known neofascist militias fighting on behalf of Kiev do not exist. The US corporate media has downplayed if not omitted the presence of the neofascist militias in the debate even as respected international news organizations such as the BBC and Guardian have given detailed reports of their activities - activities that Amnesty International has labeled as human rights abuses.

Now Director of National Intelligence and Congressional Perjurer James Clapper has called for sending weapons to Ukraine where they are almost certainly going to end up in the hands of neofascist militias often called "volunteers." Where is the US mainstream media to note the dangers of this idea?

From Glenn Greenwald:

Whatever else is true, this is yet another case of the U.S. government – followed as always by its media – fabricating a Manichean morality narrative to justify U.S. involvement and militarism. Just as the U.S. spent years funding and arming the precise extremist elements it claims it wants to combat – in Libya, in Syria, and long before that in Afghanistan – arming Ukrainian forces would empower a monstrous crew of fascists and outright Nazi sympathizers. The coup itself, which the U.S. government supported, almost certainly did exactly that.

One can debate whether empowering such thugs is a feature or a bug: it’s hardly rare for the U.S. knowingly to arm and prop up fascists and other assorted tyrants which it believes will promote its interests (see this morning’s David Ignatius column arguing that Egyptian dictator Gen. Abdel Fata Sisi is as bad as Mubarak when it comes human rights abuses, but the U.S. must continue steadfastly to support him so that he preserves “stability”). But at least when the U.S. is in bed with regimes such as the Saudis or Egyptians, most people understand the kind of allies it has embraced. In the case of Ukraine, those facts have been almost entirely excluded from mainstream discourse. Now that Obama’s leading national security official is expressly calling for the arming of those forces, it is vital that the true nature of America’s allies in this conflict be understood.

There are (at least) two sides to the Ukraine story. It is time to stop this cartoonish narrative where everyone fighting the separatists has noble intentions. Neo-Nazism is not even a new phenomenon in Ukraine, a large faction of Ukrainians fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union during World War II and they and their descendants still celebrate those allied with the Nazis today - notably Stepan Bandera. Bandera's legacy became a political football in Ukraine being both officially honored then having that honor withdrawn by President Yanukovich.

How long can the US corporate media ignore neofascisim in Ukraine?