Eric Zuesse

13 October 2015, is the release-date of the report from the fake investigation – by the governments of Ukraine, Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and later Malaysia – into who and what and why caused the shoot-down of the Malaysian MH17 Boeing airliner over the conflict-zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014. That’s the plane which, at the last moment, was inexplicably instructed by the Ukrainian Government’s Air Traffic Control to go off the normal course avoiding the Ukrainian civil war zone over the east, and to go instead right into the war-zone. The airliner got shot down with all 298 aboard dead. Obama and his coup-installed Ukrainian Government blamed Russia immediately, and the European Union (which knew that he had actually taken Ukraine in a bloody February 2014 coup that was staged to look like a ‘revolution’) promptly caved to Obama’s demand to hike the anti-Russia sanctions that had been instituted in March 2014, when Crimea rejected Obama’s Ukrainian-coup-imposed government and held a referendum which resulted in Crimea’s switching to become again a part of Russia, of which Crimea had been a part for hundreds of years until the Soviet dictator in 1954 had it transferred to Ukraine – and so Russia is now being punished for enabling self-determination, real democracy, for the residents of Crimea.

But Western government-and-‘news’-media lying is hardly only about Ukraine. For example, look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kji6Jnuj1XY

Click onto that link right below the image of the video. Right at the start, you see CNN showing this alleged ‘ISIS training video,’ in which the jihadists’ tents are emblazoned with “US”, and yet CNN isn’t drawing any conclusion that this obviously fake video implicates the U.S. Government. No: instead, at 0:18, the announcer asserts “This is the latest ISIS propaganda.” Oh, really – ISIS is promoting the U.S.? No, that’s not what CNN is trying to convey: at 0:30 onward, you instead see military expert Anthony Cordesman calling it “a stage set,” “and this isn’t really a training exercise, it’s a video exercise.” Maybe he’s noticed the “US” on those tents? Well, that’s fine, because it really is “a video exercise” (Cordesman’s euphemism for “propaganda”), but Cordesman tactfully doesn’t assert whose propaganda this is. Instead, CNN’s ‘reporter’ does that, but lies because the truth about it isn’t what he’s being paid to report here: At 0:50, this same CNN ‘reporter’ who had, just seconds earlier, introduced the video as constituting “the latest ISIS propaganda,” concludes, again, “It’s propaganda.” Immediately then, he simply goes off onto a different tangent, about how dangerous ISIS is. He ignores the stupidity of his having presumed, at the very start of his ‘report,’ that it’s “ISIS propaganda,” when it’s obviously instead U.S. propaganda. And instead of his now correcting that lie of his, he just leaves it, uncorrected. He ignores the falsehood that he had earlier stated (and headlined), and just goes off onto an anti-ISIS tangent. That’s how much contempt the U.S. mainstream ‘news’ media have of their own audience.

They have contempt not just for the public but for the victims of the MH17 mass-murder.

This is the ‘news’ media of a dictatorship, not of a democracy. It’s propaganda, not news. It misrepresents, misdirects, misinforms, and places blame where it doesn’t belong.

And that’s why Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, discussing on October 7th, French President Francois Hollande’s suggestion that Russia should cooperate with “the moderate rebel groups in Syria,” or “the Free Syrian Army,” made reference to

the so-called Free Syrian Army. However, we do not know where it is and who heads it. But if we assume that this military wing that constitutes a so-called healthy part of the opposition, if it were even possible to combine their efforts into the fight against the common enemy, the terrorist organizations – al-Nusra and others like them – then it would create good preconditions for further political settlement in Syria.

Perhaps he was thinking that the supposed rebel fighters who were shown in that video constitute the “moderate rebels” that the West was backing, and which CNN called “ISIS”?

What can Western leaders do, except have big guffaws about how stupid their audience must be, to go for their lies?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.