TheMillerCircle.org

As we have been basking in a new sun that will soon be setting on the U.S. horizon, we forgot about other matters of importance, which may seem hard to believe.  But, take for example the “Russian invasion of Georgia” and all the hype we heard about how a new cold war was setting in and how Putin was becoming a new form of evil, maybe hyperevil!   Our news media denounced the devil Russians for picking on a small newly formed democratic state, one which we hope will someday be a member of NATO.  But, as soon as that conflict began, if you tuned into the non-mainstream media, almost exclusively through the blogshpere, you knew immediately that mainstream USA news exercised its ever present option of getting things all screwed up again. Their first act of editorial policy is generally that of supporting our maniacal administration as the decider about the right set of rose-colored glasses we should all be wearing for that occasion, on that day.  The trouble with these glasses is that they don’t fit more than a day or two.

More knowledgeable people like William Pfaff got it right from the get-go, as did many others. It was Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, a U.S. backed (and educated) President, who directed his inexperienced army to invade South Ossetia. His growing unpopularity in Georgia, achieved by his actions of shrinking democracy, apparently served as the stimulus to lift his popularity by unifying the country through war. Georgia’s democracy is not one of the more illustrious successes, as the country ranks rather low on the human rights scale.  But, to further clarify his motivation, Saashkavili’s army was infused with American advisers, so it’s quite possible that he was encouraged to take the war option by choosing the brand known as “stamped in the USA.” He started the war by attacking Tskhinvali, the capital of breakaway Ossetia, with what is now understood by some NYT writers (Chivers and Barry) to include “indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.” In other words, Georgia was the aggressor! Their initial attack generated thousands of refugees who fled into Russia, not back into Georgia.

Reporters, such as Mark Ames, a seasoned Russian observer, went into Ossetia just as the war was winding down and reported on parts of Tskhinvali that were devastated by the Georgian attacks. He described several encounters with American “stringers.” Stringers are young reporters sent into trouble spots to obtain direct information and photographs. But, before they begin to look around and see things for themselves and perhaps try to establish an objective set of interpretive tools, they are told by their editors what to look for. In other words, the editor, sitting in his/her desk, sometimes thousands of miles from the conflict,  tells the young reporter what they should see and how to interpret it. So, the stringers do their level best to find what they are asked to report out of fear of losing their jobs or not getting promoted. They ask the tough questions at the Russian press briefings, but indiscriminately accept everything said by the Georgians.  This mechanism is how the editors control the story, and the reporters confirm it, even if they have to interview someone far removed from the battlefield (“I didn’t seen nothin”). The editors are usually far enough away from the battle scene, such that their primary influence is through the ideological–domestic version. Hence the bullshit!  If you have wondered how it is possible for one newspaper to have its editorial pages advocate one interpretation, while at least some of their  reporters come to just the opposite conclusion, this is how its done–the editorial page writers may have an ideological bent and put a firewall between themselves and the reporters from the news section. The news section reporters may also be bitten by the ideological mosquito, but once in a while, you have a breakthrough from a more senior reporter who doesn’t listen to the editors and hence strikes out on his/her own. Now that reporter probably doesn’t last very long if he/she works for Fox News (if Fox News has any one out on international issues), but aperiodically, a breakthrough happens, as it did in the NYT last Thrusday, when a front page story tried to pin the tale on the correct donkey, by putting the blame for the invasion more squarely on the shoulders of the Georgians and Saakashvili.  But how low have our news outlets sunk, when they cannot agree, in times of conflict, on whether any given country is an enemy or an ally? That’s what happens sometimes when an industrial nation starts to manufacture its own enemies! It’s all in the packaging glitter box and the marketing.
Ames describes a situation in which he took reporters to a region of Tskhinvali and showed them the devastation of the Georgian attack, but they turned away from that to seek scenes more compatible with their mission, to find evidence that Ossetia was not attacked, because their editors told them that the Russians were the aggressors and assaulted poor democratic Georgia. One only wonders if this is all taking place at some subcortical level where normal brain waves seem out of reach.

When the United States participated in the shock economic doctrine that allowed the oligarchs of Russia to take over the Russian economy in the 1990s, coupled with our abandoning nuclear arms reduction talks, we devastated Putin and gave a boost to the hardliners behind him. It may sound very odd to anyone who has swallowed the medicine offered by our administration, but Putin is a fairly liberal Russian leader–there are far worse behind him. And, unlike most European countries and the USA, Russia has not been historically an aggressive imperial country, seeking client countries in all conceivable parts of the globe, such as the conquests of imperial France, Britain and the USA.  Until we started putting missiles in Russia’s backyard and began to crowd them with new NATO nations (we had previously agreed with Gorbachev during the Bush I Presidency, that we would not encircle Russia by bringing satellite countries into an expanded NATO, but we broke that promise and Bush has been busy trying to get other countries like Georgie into NATO in order to tighten the circle). Thank God Georgia was rejected its for NATO membership–otherwise we might be currently engaged in  WW III, which seemed to be OK with Sarah Palin.  Well, what the Hell, she was probably thinking of it as a good stimulus for the economy, right?