Propaganda, lies and the New York Times:

Everything you really need to know about Ukraine

The media keeps buying the American spin on what's happening in Ukraine. Let's cut through the fog

You need a machete these days to whack through the thicket of misinformation, disinformation, spin, propaganda and straight-out lying that daily envelopes the Ukraine crisis like kudzu on an Alabama telephone pole. But an outline of an outcome is now faintly discernible.

Here is my early call: We witness an American intervention in the process of failing, and the adventure’s only yields will be much pointless suffering among Ukrainians and life for years to come in the smothering embrace of a justifiably suspicious Russian bear.

Nice going, Victoria Nuland, you of the famous “F the E.U. tape,” and your sidekick, Geoffrey Pyatt, ambassador in Kiev. Nice going, Secretary of State Kerry. For this caper, Nuland and Pyatt should be reassigned to post offices in the bleak reaches of Kansas, Khrushchev-style. Kerry is too big to fail, I suppose, but at least we now know more about what caliber of subterfuge lies behind all those plane trips, one mess following another in his jet wash.

On the ground, Vladimir Putin continues to extend the Russian presence in Crimea, and we await signs as to whether he will go further into Ukraine. This is very regrettable. Viewed as cause-and-effect, however, it is first a measure of how miscalculated the American intervention plot was from the first.

Pretending innocent horror now is a waste of time. The Ukraine tragedy is real estate with many names on the deed. This must not get lost in the sauce.

On the diplomatic side, the big charge now is intransigence. Washington calls Moscow intransigent because Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, decline to talk to the self-appointed government in Kiev, which Putin refuses to recognize. Moscow calls Washington intransigent because Kerry declines to meet Lavrov unless the latter agrees first to meet the Kiev provisionals.

The American line: The provisionals are legitimate, they are democrats worthy of support, and there was no coup when they hounded President Viktor Yanukovych from office Feb. 21. The protesters behind them with clubs, pistols and bottle bombs are democrats, too.

The Russian line: The provisionals are illegitimate, they took power in a coup driven in considerable part by nationalist fanatics with a fascist streak evident in their ranks, they are now dependent on same, and they merit neither support nor recognition.

This is it as of now, simplified but not simplistic, story and counter-story.

It is difficult but not impossible to interpret these narratives. The first step, admittedly hard for many Americans, is to drop all Cold War baggage and see beyond the West’s century-and-a-half habit of demonizing Russia as the emblematic power of the inherently autocratic East. “Oriental despotism” was a passing fad conjured by a scholar-stooge named Karl Wittfogel in the late 1950s. It died a deserved death — around the time of hula hoops, I think — but the prejudice lingers, remarkably, in many Western minds.

Here comes the bitter bit. The Russian take in the Ukraine crisis is more truthful than the artful dodge Washington attempts. The above forecast of the outcome rests on the thought that the dodge is simply too flimsy to last.

You cannot make a call such as this without looking closely. So let’s.

Read More At . . . http://www.salon.com/2014/03/12/propaganda_lies_and_the_new_york_times_everything_you_really_need_to_know_about_ukraine/