Democracy Now has the interview “We Are Not Beginning a New Cold War, We are Well into It”: Stephen Cohen on Russia-Ukraine Crisis.

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I think you’ve emphasized the absolute flaw in at least the American—because I don’t follow the European press that closely—the American media and political narrative. As a historian, I would say that this conflict began 300 years ago, but we can’t do that. As a contemporary observer, it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, that “Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with Russia, too.” In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: “Choose, and divide your country further”? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos, this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise ultimatum.

In my previous post Investigation Finds Former Ukraine President Not Responsible For Sniper Attack on Protestors, I admitted to the possibility that the speaker was going overboard in his analysis. What I have been reading since then, and this interview seems to strengthen the case that the previous speaker was far from alone in his analysis.

Your assessment as to who is giving you the straight poop and who is just giving you poop, depends somewhat on which media you trust. However, there are certain things you can assess for yourself.

STEPHEN COHEN: You left out one thing that he said which I consider to be unwise and possibly reckless. He went on to say that Russia wouldn’t go to war with us because our conventional weapons are superior. That is an exceedingly provocative thing to say. And he seems to be unaware, President Obama, that Russian military doctrine says that when confronted by overwhelming conventional forces, we can use nuclear weapons. They mean tactical nuclear weapons. I don’t think any informed president, his handlers, would have permitted him to make such a statement. In fact, depending on how far you want to take this conversation about the Obama administration, I don’t recall in my lifetime, in confrontations with Russia, an administration—I speak now of the president and his secretary of state—who seem in their public statements to be so misinformed, even uninformed, both about Ukraine and Russia.

In my own judgment, I think that a lot of the statements from Obama are extremely reckless.  Earlier I heard Obama dismisses Russia as ‘regional power’ acting out of weakness.  Why would you go out of your way to tweak the nose of your adversary who has major economic powers over Europe because of the amount of energy that Russia supplies to Europe?  I don’t need anybody to point out to me that such talk is reckless.

It wouldn’t surprise me if I have to headline a post in the next few days, “Obama has gone completely bonkers”. He is rapidly going in that direction. Who will save us?

The Daily Kos has published the cartoon It’s a Scandal.

Now you understand why Lois Lerner has contempt of Congress. That contempt is well earned.

New Economic Perspectives has a wonderful video of the lecture Turn That Frown Upside Down by Professor Stephanie Kelton.  New Economic Perspectives has also posted the slides that go with the lecture.  It’s not essential, but you might appreciate the lecture more if you print the slides before you watch the video.  The video is pretty good about showing the slides if you watch it on a big enough screen. (The audio, well not quite so good. The coughers have a better microphone than Kelton does.)

As I added the word to the title of this blog, so that it would make the subject of the article more obvious, it came to me in a flash how appropriate the title is. See if you can find the point in the lecture where she turns the frown upside down.

Her presentation is so clear and obvious that you can hardly fail to get the point. The only thing that might interfere with your understanding of what she is saying might be that little voice in your head sputtering “This can’t possibly be right, can it?” If you can suppress that little voice for 45 minutes, you will instead see that “This can’t possibly be wrong.”

Actually, there is another thing that could interfere with your understanding. She explicitly tells you the things that she is not saying that your preconceived notions might have you believing that she did say. If you are constantly jumping to the conclusion that you heard what she did not say, then this will interfere with your understanding what she is actually saying.

If you suffer either of these blockages, you might have to listen to the lecture again to actually hear what is being said.

To her explanation of idle factories, I always like to add “What part of no freakin customers do you not understand?”

Consortium News has the story Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass.

Whose Propaganda?

However, on the Times’ front page on Wednesday was a bizarre story by David M. Herszenhorn accusing the Russian government of engaging in a propaganda war by making many of the same points that you could find – albeit without the useful context about Parubiy’s neo-Nazi background – in the same newspaper.

In the article entitled “Russia Is Quick To Bend Truth About Ukraine,” Herszenhorn mocked Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev for making a Facebook posting that “was bleak and full of dread,” including noting that “blood has been spilled in Ukraine again” and adding that “the threat of civil war looms.”

The Times article continued, “He [Medvedev] pleaded with Ukrainians to decide their own future ‘without usurpers, nationalists and bandits, without tanks or armored vehicles – and without secret visits by the C.I.A. director.’ And so began another day of bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies about the political crisis in Ukraine that have emanated from the highest echelons of the Kremlin and reverberated on state-controlled Russian television, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.”

This argumentative “news” story spilled from the front page to the top half of an inside page, but Herszenhorn never managed to mention that there was nothing false in what Medvedev said. Indeed, it was the much-maligned Russian press that first reported the secret visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Kiev.

Though the White House has since confirmed that report, Herszenhorn cites Medvedev’s reference to it in the context of “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” Nowhere in the long article does the Times inform its readers that, yes, the CIA director did make a secret visit to Ukraine last weekend. Presumably, that reality has now disappeared into the great memory hole along with the on-ground reporting from Feb. 22 about the key role of the neo-Nazi militias.

The neo-Nazis themselves have pretty much disappeared from Official Washington’s narrative, which now usually recounts the coup as simply a case of months of protests followed by Yanukovych’s decision to flee. Only occasionally, often buried deep in news articles with the context removed, can you find admissions of how the neo-Nazis spearheaded the coup.

Of course, you never know who you can trust to report anything, if indeed there is anyone you can trust. However, it is that accusations like the one in this article against The New York Times have been proven to be true in the past.

It makes me think I may have been right in my opinion of The New York Times story in my previous post Investigation Finds Former Ukraine President Not Responsible For Sniper Attack on Protestors.

This is the story I woke up to today.

The Real News Network has the interview Investigation Finds Former Ukraine President Not Responsible For Sniper Attack on Protestors .

HUDSON: The big news is all about the Ukraine. And it’s about the events that happened in the shootings on February 20. Late last week, the German television program ARD Monitor, which is sort of their version of 60 Minutes here, had an investigative report of the shootings in Maidan, and what they found out is that contrary to what President Obama is saying, contrary to what the U.S. authorities are saying, that the shooting was done by the U.S.-backed Svoboda Party and the protesters themselves, the snipers and the bullets all came from the Hotel Ukrayina, which was the center of where the protests were going, and the snipers on the hotel were shooting not only at the demonstrators, but also were shooting at their own–at the police and the demonstrators to try to create chaos. They’ve spoken to the doctors, who said that all of the bullets and all of the wounded people came from the same set of guns. They’ve talked to reporters who were embedded with the demonstrators, the anti-Russian forces, and they all say yes. All the witnesses are in agreement: the shots came from the Hotel Ukrayina. The hotel was completely under the control of the protesters, and it was the government that did it.

So what happened was that after the coup d’état, what they call the new provisional government put a member of the Svoboda Party, the right-wing terrorist party, in charge of the investigation. And the relatives of the victims who were shot are saying that the government is refusing to show them the autopsies, they’re refusing to share the information with their doctors, they’re cold-shouldering them, and that what is happening is a coverup. It’s very much like the film Z about the Greek colonels trying to blame the murder of the leader on the protesters, rather than on themselves.

Now, the real question that the German data has is: why, if all of this is front-page news in Germany, front-page news in Russia–the Russian TV have been showing their footage, showing the sniping–why would President Obama directly lie to the American people? This is the equivalent of Bush’s weapons of mass destruction. Why would Obama say the Russians are doing the shooting in the Ukraine that’s justified all of this anti-Russian furor? And why wouldn’t he say the people that we have been backing with $5 billion for the last five or ten years, our own people, are doing the shooting, we are telling them to doing the shooting, we are behind them, and we’re the ones who are the separatists?

What has happened is that the Western Ukraine, the U.S. part, are the separatists trying to break up the Ukraine, in keeping, pretty much, with what Brzezinski advised in his book some years ago when he said breaking Ukraine off from Russia would be the equivalent of blocking any Russian potential military power.

Now, the only American who’s spoken up against this was, last Friday, very quickly, President Carter. And Jimmy Carter said in an interview with Salon he’s very worried. He says, quote, “The rest of the world, almost unanimously, looks at America as the No. 1 warmonger. That we revert to armed conflict almost at the drop of a hat–and quite often it’s not only desired by the leaders of our country, but it’s also supported by the people of America.”

Now, the next day in The Financial Times they did an interview with Singapore’s prime minister, Lee. And the prime minister, Lee, said, I think you–to the Financial Times interviewer, “I think you should have thought of that before encouraging the demonstrators on the Maidan.” I think some people–meaning the U.S.–didn’t think through all the consequences. Can you take responsibility for the consequences? And when it comes to grief, will you be there? You can’t be there, since you have so many other interests to protect.

Many of the comments on this story are vehemently protesting what Michael Hudson, a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, is saying.

I have not been following the news closely in the last 24 hours. The headlines I did see seemed to indicate that we had come to some sort of agreement with Russia and the Ukraine.

I was led to this story by an item in Naked Capitalism Ukraine: Is Obama Channeling Cheney?

I will probably have to do some researching to see if there is any corroboration of this interview. If Jimmy Carter really did say what Hudson claims, then it is going to be harder to disbelieve this report.

The New York Times article Pro-Russia Militant Leader Balks at Terms of Ukraine Pact talks about the agreement between the US and Russia signed yesterday. This report is in The New York Times, so I am not sure how much credibility it has. It has a history of bending the news to suit what fits the neocons preconceived notions.