Kyiv, March 9, 2014. For the evil Putin to triumph, it’s enough that the good Western media say nothing bad about him. This, unfortunately, is exactly what some European newspapers recently do.
On March 5, The Guardian published an article titled «The Clash in Crimea is the fruit of western expansion». Looking at the Crimean crisis through the prism of the dubious legality of the West’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the author of the article, Seumas Milne, puts forward, it may seem, a well-reasoned argument: in a world in which US, Britain, France and their allies routinely intervene in foreign countries on flaky grounds, we shouldn’t be surprised at Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Where’s the Kremlin propaganda in this?
Read the large print. The one-line synopsis of the article, printed in bold right below the seemingly neutral title, states: «The external struggle to dominate Ukraine has put fascists in power and brought the country to the brink of conflict». The author then goes on to use the terms «fascists» and «Neo-Nazis» almost every time he refers to the new Ukrainian government in his analysis. And this is what is not OK.
Firstly, because it is a manifest lie. To understand why, Seumas Milne needs to spend one day in Kyiv (or in any Ukrainian city for that matter) and read at least a Wikipedia article about the present political platform of Svoboda, the party which he so recklessly labels Neo-Nazis.
Secondly, and most importantly, brandishing «fascism» left, right and center is not OK because even if in reality the author merely intended to criticize the West for its diplomatic double-standards, what the average reader is likely to have gone away with after reading this piece is a simple (and frightening) message: «Ukraine’s new Government is Neo-Nazis, so if Putin decides to stop them – he’ll do us all a favor».
Headlines matter, because in Russia’s all-out information war against Ukraine they are the building blocks of the Kremlin’s ruthless propaganda. When Russian news channels are on a mission to convince their viewers that their war-mongering president is not the only one «seeing things» in Ukraine, they never give them the foreign media’s full picture that the foreign media usually tries to relay. They feed them headlines. Because short shocking messages based on lies fit nicer on the screen behind the news presenter and, more importantly, in the minds of the brainwashed viewers.
Yuriy Sak, PhD in Law (human rights), Civil activist
