Former U.S. Treasury Official: The Fault In Ukraine Is Not Russia’s, It Is The US’

– The fault in Ukraine is not Russia’s, it is the US’ – US former Treasury official (Voice of Russia, March 5, 2014):

The fault in Ukraine is not Russia’s, it is the US’. The US is the one who organized, financed and provoked the coup, and the US was incompetent and lost control of the coup to the ultranationalists who threat to the Russians in the Crimea. So, it is purely normal for the Russian government to react as Ukraine is not an area of the United States’ strategic interests, Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and a contributor to Global Research, told the Voice of Russia.

Why do you call the US media portrayal of the situation as the absence of integrity?

Well, the American media, since the final years of the Clinton regime, is a propaganda ministry for the government. We no longer have independent print or TV media, they are owned by five large firms. They are no longer run by journalists, they are run by former government officials and corporate advertising executives. And the value of the firms is they have federal broadcast licenses. They can’t go against the government because they wouldn’t be able to retain their licenses. So, the free and dispersed independent American media ceased to exist around 1997.

And in your opinion, why did that happen?

I don’t know if they were getting ready to control the information, or whether it was just a favour to campaign donors. The campaign donors gave the Clintons a lot of money and they wanted to monopolize the media. So, that’s probably the reason, but the consequence is that the media is no longer independent. And if it goes against the government, first of all, the reporters lose their government sources, the editors get disciplined. And so, they don’t try to go against the government, they do not challenge the government’s position.

If you noticed, in the American media there is no challenge from the print or TV media to the government’s interpretation of what is happening in Ukraine or Syria, or anywhere. So, it is essentially a propaganda ministry. I’m the former editor of the Wall Street Journal and I can no longer recognize the American media as a media. It has nothing in common with the media that I had a permanent position in.

And what are the drawbacks of John Kerry’s policy towards Ukraine?

It is propagandistic, it is extremely provocative, it demonizes Russia, it demonizes the Russian President and the Russian government and it prepares the American public, which has no independent source of information, it prepares them for a war. They are being prepared to accept all sorts of punitive moves against Russia, any one of which could provoke a war. So, it is a very dangerous situation when the Secretary of State stands up and tells public lies.

The fault in Ukraine is not Russia’s, it is the US’. The US is the one who organized, financed and provoked the coup. And the US was incompetent and lost control of the coup to the ultranationalists. And these ultranationalists have threatened the Russian populations of Ukraine and threatened the Russian strategic interests. So, it is purely normal for the Russian government to react. Ukraine is not an area of the United States’ strategic interests.

And none of this information is conveyed to the American public by the official print and TV media. And so, you have a public which is in the dark about what is really happening and the Russian government is being demonized, and presented as a new Hitler or something. So, this is dangerous, it can get out of hand. In other words, there was no public constraint on the actions of the United States government, because the public is completely in the dark.

In that case, how dangerous can Kerry’s diplomacy regarding, for example, Ukraine be?

I think that Washington is embarrassed that it lost control of the coup and that these fanatical ultranationalists have come to the forefront, and have provoked the secession movements in Crimea and the eastern Ukraine, which are the traditional Russian provinces that Khrushchev stuck into Ukraine in the 1950es. These are not traditional Ukrainian territories.

And so, when these Russian-speaking areas see the threats being issued from Kiev, see the ban on the use of the Russian language in any official way, see the destruction of war memorials that celebrate the liberation of Ukraine by the Russian troops from the Nazis, when they see these hostile actions, it scares them, they don’t want these people coming in and threatening them the way that videos showed this ultranationalists threatening the American stooges that Washington intended to put in as the government.

You could see these videos where these Nazi-type thugs go in and shout, and scream at the alleged government in Kiev and drag people by their neckties, and slap them around, and carry brandish AK-47s – this is not a very amenable picture for people in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine to accept. They don’t want any of that and they are saying – we really are Russians and we want to go back to where we belong. That is just a natural response to this type of brutal behavior on the part of these ultranationalists.

So, that’s the whole purpose of the coup in Ukraine. It was part of Russia for 200 years and half of Ukraine was always part of Russia. So, the whole thing is madness and when the country behaves this reckless, it is a serious thing. It is like the fools who took the world to the WW I.