UKRAINE, COVERAGE AND NON-COVERAGE ARE MAKING ME NUTS

Having retired from the mainstream media, and having, I think I may claim, swum for 50-plus years within it, more or less finding my own currents, I wonder that I have so much agita about some of the recent attacks on it for coverage of Ukraine.  

I was first set off by a series of provocative, to me often provoking, articles by the formidable investigative reporter Robert Parry, who is full of rage at the alleged complicity of the American news media in official Washington’s undeniable falsification of the crisis in Crimea and Ukraine.

The articles include these:

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/02/what-neocons-want-from-ukraine-crisis/

 

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/14/neocons-have-weathered-the-storm/

 

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/15/can-obama-speak-strongly-for-peace/

 

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/16/mainstream-us-media-is-lost-in-ukraine/

 

What first got me riled up was Parry’s repeated labeling of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as “democratically elected,” as if he were Allende or Aristide, and his repeated echoing of the Russians' self-interested assertion that the Ukrainian opposition is dominated, even defined by the presence of neo-Nazis.   

His description of "the independent-minded and strong-willed Putin," set off another Rolaids roller-coaster.  Such language is disingenuous at best, willfully ignorant at worst.  Putin is a totalitarian who, in his desperation as the leader of a failing state, -- life expectancy in Russia continues to fall, industrial productivity levels are third-world, unemployment is huge, the economy is barely holding on, with the dropping global price of natural gas an "existential threat,” -- he is busy creating external enemies and manufacturing distracting international crises. Acting as if a new regime in Kiev might attack Mama Rus may boost his rating in short term, both declaring war on Iraq and claiming “success” did for George W. Bush.  In the short-term this hyper-nationalist nonsense, backed by the radical suppression of dissident voices from Russia's intelligencia and mass media, seems to be working right now.  But the Russian stock market is falling, and the threat of economic isolation may, in the long-run, prove to be much more dangerous to Putin's survival, than the now suppressed, shouted down, democratic opposition.  By 2020, Putin may be gone, and Pussy Riot still major celebrities.

Parry is correct that Ukraine’s "interim" government is an important and undercovered story, unfortunately completely buried by coverage of the conflict on the eastern fringe of the country.  But is the loony right influence the hart of that story, as Parry asserts?  I don’t think so, any more than the alleged American neocon influence on the Kiev opposition movement.  Both are, I would say, “White herrings.”  It is true the right has been given (with American approval) some important posts in the temporary government, while only a few "new oppositionists" have been placed in fringe Cabinet seats -- tourism, culture sport, etc etc.  But the real story is whether this hapless and nasty interim group is the future for Ukraine, of just the last gasp of the completely discredited old regime. This is the story I want followed, and the media story that I wish I had a better sense of is what kind of news are Ukrainians getting.  I do know that whole new generation of internet-based news media are active there and support the progressive opposition.  Have they continued their popular ascendancy at the expense of old and old regime dominated media?

Parry's attempts to discredit many of the Ukrainian oppo NGOs because they took American money is exactly how Putin outlawed many of the most valuable NGOs in Russian, attacking them for taking "foreign money," ignoring how they were using it.

And crying neocon this, neocon that is just sticks and stones, as long Parry shirks the hard work of reporting what the NGOs and their American backers have been up to, and how they have been received by their target audiences.

As Simon Orlovsky's brilliant reporting for the internet-based Vice News has showed, Russia has been infiltrating provocateurs and thugs into Ukraine to stir Russophile emotions and bully Ukrainian nationalists (who are for the most part in no way Hyper-nationalists or neo-Nazis).  Orlovsky showed video of how Russia had by the middle of last week, crossed into "mainland" Ukraine, well beyond the provincial borders of Crimea, and had set up not only heavily armed checkpoints but minefields on Ukrainian territory.  I guess Parry doesn't watch Vice News, because Russian military and paramilitary aggression simply don't appear in his copy.

I loathe the neocon politics of the Kagan brothers, and have for years, but so f--ing what?  Their influence in Ukraine, like the National Endowment for Democracy’s Carl Gershman's is small.  This is, I keep repeating, a Ukrainian story, and American kibitzing, whether helpful or obstructive is just kibitizing.  The important decisions and the important upcoming votes will be taken by Ukrainians, not neocons.

One key to Ukraine's future, I believe, is some form of debt forgiveness.  The lenders demanding their money back knew the crooks they were dealing were crooks, so when crooks do what crooks do....no one should bail their willing business partners out.  Anyone heard this idea in either the mainstream or progressive media.  It ain’t in Parry either.

Nobody elected the anti-Semitic temps in the interim government that Parry and Steve Weissman are so worried about, and it is possible, even likely, few will vote for them in the May elections to reconstitute the government.  The story in Ukraine is not whether change there is good for the Jews or the neocons, but for the Ukrainians.  These guys haven't even talked to one between 'em.

In another Parry piece, he proposes parallel "invasions" of Ukraine by the US and Russia. His charge against the US is that Blackwater (now known as Academi) mercenaries are patrolling the streets of Donetsk.

Where did he get this from?  His recommended source "For a thorough account of the uprising” is “’The Ukrainian Pendulum’ by Israeli journalist Israel Shamir."

Shamir's is a brand as authentic and multi-nonymous as Blackwater/Xe/Academi.  He is an ex-Israeli, living in Sweden and publishing under several aliases who, according to his many doubters, specializes in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.  

The main source for "Shamir" and Parry's American mercenary charge is a pair of anonymous short videos posted on YouTube by someone writing in Russian.  Although "Shamir" talks about hundreds of  Academi mercenaries in eastern Ukraine, the video shows fewer than 10, and aside from saying that people in the Donetsk crowd called them "Blackwater, Blackwater," there seems to be no verification anywhere Googleable that they are indeed from Academi or the US.

The most mainstream source to pick up the story, the right-wing UK newspaper the Daily Mail cites an "expert," Nafeez Ahmed, who is, oddly enough, a writer for The Mail’s despised rival The Guardian, who specializes in environmental issues.

Nevertheless, the Mail went to him and: "Asked whether the soldiers seen in the videos could be from Academi, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, a security expert with the Institute for Policy Research & Development, said: ‘Difficult to say really. It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility - Academi have been deployed in all sorts of theatres. 

'I think the question is whether the evidence available warrants at least reasonable speculation.

"‘On the face of it, the uniforms of the people in the videos are consistent with US mercs - they don't look like Russian soldiers mercs. On the other hand, why run around in public making a show of it?’

"He added: ‘Of course the other possibility is it's all Russian propaganda.’

This is not a possibility Parry addresses.  And doesn't Parry have an obligation to try to identify and explain his sources?  I think he does, and I think his choice not to when they are so shaky, is telling.

But even if Parry and Shamir have hit the covert jackpot here, a dozen, or even 300 mercenaries are not equal to a combination -- whose existence and actions are well described and widely sourced -- of Russian Army troops and equipment and Russian, Serbian Chetnik, and local Crimean "Cossack" paramilitaries occupying several cities, manning armed checkpoints all over Crimea and crossing the border to set up military posts and minefields inside "mainland" Ukraine.  Parallel "invasions", my ass.

I agree with Parry's assessment of the stupid and malign "diplomacy" of John Kerry, and loathe poor old John McCain's doddering war-mongering.  There are lots of arguments to be made against both, but Parry goes way beyond or beneath that to brand his alleged neocon conspiracy.

And still, has he talked to any Ukrainians?  Not on his own evidence.

Another good example of foolish and intellectually dishonest media-baiting is this recent piece from i24 news and University of Maryland scholar Leon Hadar: Analysis: The Good Guy, Bad Guy media narrative in Ukraine

http://www.i24news.tv/en/mobile#content/24202

Hadar acts like he's uncovering a secret that there are and have been right-wing, hyper-nationalist “bad guys” in the Ukrainian opposition.  But, this has never been a secret, even from "top 3 paragraph" readers of the conventional media.

Actually this has gotten more coverage than the "moderate, centrist, technocrat" old regime remnant “bad guys” who actually run the so-called government in Kiev.  This is because conventional media sources, most of them in government, don't like to talk about the kinds of criminals and boobs they are comfortable seeing in other people's governments. 

Conventional Western politics is to "play the cards you’re dealt” (no matter how bad they may be), rather than risk seeing in power people you do not know, and may not be able to control.

But the key word missing from Hadar's piece (and to me it is a damnable absence) is "interim."  The guys we gave the nod to are just holding the keys till May.  It is true they, and the real neo-fascist rats alongside them -- also tolerated by our "realists -- will have all the advantages of incumbency when elections are held in May, and in a place where "democratically elected" has always been enclosed in the quotation marks of endemic fraud and frequent intimidation and universal corruption, that may be decisive.

So, Ukraine may wind up with another government it is hard to condemn anyone (even the neo-soviet Russians of Crimea) for fleeing.  And the Times, the Post, the Guardian and the TV guys will all say, "democratically elected."

Of course they should say –quote-- "'democratically elected'" and wink or look faux-nauseous, but they won't.  And everyone from Obama and Kerry to Cameron and Hague and Rasmussen and Ashton will solemnly approve.

Or, Ukraine might do better, might use the electoral opportunity to replace the whole rotten lot with people who, if not guaranteed to be better, will at least be new, different, and indebted to voters rather than mafias, oligarchs or party hacks.

This is the big failure of our media, not reporting on what’s happening in the run-up to elections.  Are Ukrainian democrats organizing, or are they fading away, as they did in Egypt (though not in Tunisia)?  Have the parties of the right gathered strength among the people?  Those questions are as unasked and unanswered as the basic one – how much and what kind of governing is the interim government providing, and how is this playing with Ukrainian voters?

To smaller points:  Leon, why is it mandatory now to give Marine LePen a pass on the right-wing nationalist nutball, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic party her father raised her to run, even should she actually have a chance at power in France, but a failure not to sound the alarm about analogous rightist/nativist pols in Ukraine, who have every chance to be marginalized and out of their temporary power in May?  Le Pen has Jews in the FN?  Well Svoboda is in bed with a temporary government and an opposition movement which includes several Jews presently more powerful than their guys (or M LeP is in France).  

And the Croatian government has frequently contained people, even leaders like the noxious Fanjo Tudjman, the US' wartime and post-war ally as Prime Minister, with long ties to organized crime, the right-wing and Croatia's notably vicious anti-Semitic organizations. Slovakia, I dunno about, but the former Nazis in Croatian politics I reported on 20 years ago, and others did too and have since.

Hadar's assertions about media coverage of Egypt, that it failed "to recognize the ethnic, religious, and tribal forces driving events in the Arab Middle East," and paid too little "attention to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the ouster of Hosni Mubarak," is just plain horse-spit.  

In the first place, neither ethnic, nor tribal issues have been important in Egypt (he must be thinking of Syria and Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, in all which those issues have been prominently covered).  In Egypt the Islamist roots and continuing religious identification of the MB was covered frequently, in the months between the revolution and the coup.  

Perhaps the media gave too much credit to the MB narrative that it had become more secular, pragmatic, and political in the democratic sense, but then so did Barack Obama, the leadership of Europe, and a sizable portion of the MB's own, now betrayed, rank and file.

The crucial fact, that the MB was the best organized group in post-Mubarak Egypt, and likely destined for success in elections, and that this might not work out to America’s or Egypt's benefit, was prominent in most mainstream coverage.

Finally, says Hadar, "in Syria" the media portrayed anti-Assad forces “as ‘freedom fighters’ without acknowledging that many of them were reactionary Muslim fundamentalists."  This is much too simple, and mostly flat wrong.  It was as the fighting went on, after mass protests had demonstrated that many, if not most, Syrians wanted their own “Arab Spring,” -- Assad gone and a new government more lawful and democratic, -- after it became obvious that without direct aid from outside which was not forthcoming, the tyrant could not be displaced, that the fundamentalist militias started to rise in power.  This shift from Tahrir Square to Fallujah III was well and frequently reported.  Papers from Europe to the Americas to Asia were reporting on the rising power of the Al-Qaeda affilliated Al Nusra front by 2012.

And this guy calls the media "intellectually lazy."

One final rantish thought...why are Crimea and Kosovo bracketed as if their secessions were matched pieces on some kind of global chessboard?  Who, knowing anything about the last 1000 years, much less the previous dozen, of vicious and unrelenting persecution and brutalization of the 90% majority Kosovars by the 8% Serbs, would not approve of a political liberation?  Pretty much, only the Serbs themselves and their cynical allies in Moscow.

Frankly, given that Crimea has long been a military concession of Russia, granted by Ukraine, and that the Russian military not only dominates the place, but is the heart of its economy and employment, and that Russian (especially military Russia) is the majority culture, it is just posturing to pretend to be surprised at the secession.  Not only does Crimea have its reasons, but as I said above, anyone in his right mind would have doubts about continuing an association with the governments that have always, always, run things from Kiev.  

And, other than a pain in its pride, there nothing about the loss of Crimea which does great existential damage to Ukraine.

Donetsk, Kharkiv, etc –that’s another story.  But let’s hope we, and Putin, can avoid going there.

But this shadow-play of mutually falsified morality and emotion, this blustering and club-waving on both sides over Crimea, amplified on all sides by irresponsible media simply selling papers of clicks, is doing more and more serious damage to the world.

BOSNIA: HOPE AGAINST FEAR

The bitter joke in Sarajevo, during the war-torn 1990s was “Only the odd-numbered world wars start here.”

World War I, for sure, was triggered there -- by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip in 1914.  And, if you consider the spate of sectarian, tribal, ethnic and nationalist wars in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Mali, Ivory Coast, Somalia and Nigeria, over the past 20 years to be a kind of conglomerate World War III, think of Sarajevo. That's where the tone (and some of the strategies and tactics) was set during the devolutionary wars of the Former Yugoslavia, whose flashpoint and moral nadir was the Siege of Sarajevo.

Right now, this week, Bosnia balances on a knife-edge of temporary quiet, suspended between two global antagonisms, the old one of “national” or “ethnic” conflict (I use quotes because the claim that Serbs, Croat and Muslims in Bosnia represent separate “nations” or “ethnicities” is at best questionable if not largely bogus), and the newly-recognized world-wide fracture line, between self-sustained oligarchies of wealth, force and political power and the general populace who are sinking into poverty and desperation..

The present peaceful pause follows a week of violent and large-scale protest that burned significant government headquarters in Bosnia’s 4 largest cities: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica and Mostar. 

Caroline Hopper, a veteran human rights worker in the Balkans, calls the demonstrations “the largest anti-government protests since the war; unprecedented, not only in size, but also in their very nature.” 

http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2014/02/21/fueling-bosnian-protests

But, you may be surprised to hear, she adds,”These protests offer a real sense of optimism that is so uncommon for the suffering state.

“Masses have organized themselves behind universal grievances regarding severe economic woes that are the fault of both individual politicians as well as the system of government as a whole. Resolutely non-ethnic, these protests have crossed both social and physical boundaries, occurring in both the [Bosnian-Croat] Federation and in Republika Srpska, and in rural and urban areas alike. Fires lit around the country should not be seen as signals of pending warfare, but if anything, as an embodiment of the universal rejection of embedded nationalism, and with it stagnation, corruption, and nepotism.”

In Hopper’s judgment, frequently repeated by scholars in Europe and America, and citizens across Bosnia, (and yes, asserted previously in my blogs) the failures, the “stagnation, corruption, and nepotism,” are direct consequences of American diplomatic irresponsibility, or as the one time UN High Commissioner in Sarajevo, Miroslav Lajcak has asserted, Bosnia is “a prisoner of Dayton.” 

The 1995 General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Agreement, driven principally by the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ended an almost 4 year war of savage ferocity (estimates range between 100,000 and 200,000 Bosnian civilians were killed, at least twice as many driven into exile). 

Unfortunately, it did so, by handing power back to the very armed hyper-nationalists  guilty of most of the mass murders.  Dayton set in place a “temporary” governmental structure that ratified and institutionalized rivalries exploited and magnified by the crooked politicians and criminal mafias who misled and exploited Bosnia’s Serb, Croat and Muslim minorities (the Muslims, now called Bosniaks, make up an estimated 40% of the population). 

Then, with equally uncaring cynicism, the political leaders of the US and Europe looked the other way as the grafters and thugs harrowed the whole society.

As Bosnian scholars Aleksandar Hemon and Jasmin Mujanovic wrote in the NY Times:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/opinion/sunday/stray-dogs-and-stateless-babies.html

“[Dayton] effectively awarded to the cleansers their ethnically cleansed territories, and was practically designed to prevent the state it defined from functioning as a civic society.

“In a country smaller than West Virginia and with a population the size of Oregon’s, there exist 142 municipalities, two highly autonomous entities, 10 cantons, a special district, a national government and an internationally appointed high representative to oversee them all. It amounts to approximately 180 ministers, 600 legislators and an army of about 70,000 bureaucrats.”

This infestation of faux-governors has had one over-arching product: impunity for the political-criminal elite.  

“What the war didn’t destroy,” they wrote, “has been wrecked by Mafioso capitalism, practiced with equal zeal across ethnicities, in which private initiative is expressed in the form of corruption and cronyism. The political system’s primary function is allowing wealth to be amassed by the leaders of political parties, fully united, despite their presumed cultural and ideological differences, in their commitment to impoverish the people they lead.”

Finally, it seems, the Bosnian people have had enough.

Most important, the protests seem to include representatives of all the Bosnian peoples, Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Roma, and Jews protesting, not as oppressed and mutually hate-filled minorities, but as an oppressed majority whose hatred is focused not on ethnic groups, but corrupt government officials, violent paramilitary gangs and their beneficiaries, a cohort of super-rich oligarchs.

Predictably, the progenitors of minority abuses are the first to warn that the protests aimed at them are actually signs of ethnic pandemonium.  Equally predictably, they have been the first to call on their European and American enablers to intervene.

Council on Foreign Relations researcher Amelia M. Wolf calls out Bosnian police director Himzo Selimovic.

http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2014/02/28/diplomatic-pressure-in-bosnia-but-nothing-more/

If protests turn violent again, Wulf quotes Selimovic as saying, “The international community and the EU should consider [deploying] international military forces in Bosnia.”

Then she adds, “Selimovic resigned shortly thereafter. [He] represents the Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies, one of the institutions against which Bosnians are protesting. An estimated 62 percent of Bosnians believe the police, including Selimovic’s agency, are corrupt or extremely corrupt."

Polls show that 98% of Bosnians – that’s right, 98% -- believe corruption is a serious problem, reports Wulf, and 70% say the government has failed to control it.  The man presently on top of this despised regime Prime Minister Vjekoslav Bevanda told Reuters he’s not worried.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/24/us-bosnia-bevanda-idUSBREA1N19U20140224?feedType=RSS

The recent unrest in Bosnia is a local "fire," he told Euro-bankers he was begging for more money to misspend.  "We will be able to extinguish it very quickly."  

Maybe not.  

Hemon and Mujanovic report, “The Bosnian people have found a voice. In Tuzla, after the initial chaos and police violence, the protesters forced the resignations of the cantonal prime minister. They formed a plenum — an open parliament of citizens where everyone is welcome, and which has by now gone through a number of sessions. They formulated demands, including establishing a cantonal government of non-party-affiliated experts and a thorough investigation of the privatization process. In Sarajevo, the first plenum had to be rescheduled when the organizers were overwhelmed by the turnout.

Or as Alida Vracic, executive director of the Think Tank Populari in Sarajevo told USA Today, "The political elite feels fear and is insecure about its position for the first time in 20 years.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/27/bosnia-herzegovina-dayton-accords-eu/5706531/

“For the first time,” Vracic said, “people see that they have to take power in their hands.”

This is a perception that is also alive (and under monumental challenge) in other places around the world where government and all its political elements have failed the people: Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Venezuela, even (if less violently) in Scotland. 

As the Bosnian scholar Igor Stiks wrote in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/17/bosnia-terrifying-picture-of-europe-future

 “This is not a rebellion of discriminated and ghettoized groups, territorially contained on the outskirts of big cities. It is a rebellion of the whole population that has been subjected to economic impoverishment, social devastation and political destitution.”

The Nobel prize winning Bosnian novelist Ivo Andric, from my years in the area, still the most authoritative source on Bosnian culture, called his homeland, “the land of endless hatreds.” But he also showed in his novels what history has shown, that for every outburst of communal killing and alienation, there are intervening decades when all factions live together civilly.  

Notwithstanding expectable attempts by the political and community “leaders” who have benefited from the dissonance to push their peoples to mindless conflict again, there are signs that many people remember that history, and embrace their capability to live as a single Bosnian nation.

Some people see similar signs in Ukraine, that persistent, consistent political failure and exploitation of historic fault lines have robbed both politicians and fractional populisms of all credibility and allegiance, driving once disparate groups together in a campaign for real democratic, rule of law reform.

Please, God, let it be so.

In the new world of instant, ubiquitous global communication confronting rampant impunity, injustice and inequality, people do find themselves with lots of new, and newly collective power in their hands.  Using it against their political and economic oppressors relentlessly as well as civilly may shift the balance of yet another global struggle.  Call it World War IV (the better one): of common humanity against greed and exploitation.   

SAYING NO TO OPPRESSION: CHILE 1988; UKRAINE 2014

I recently took one of those rare “trips back in time,” when I saw the award-winning docudrama No, Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s look at the 1988 plebiscite which dealt the death blow to General Augusto Pinochet’s 15 year dictatorship.  Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays a young Ad Man who helps create the TV campaign that led Chileans to an overwhelming No vote against the dictatorship.  His ad agency boss runs the Yes TV campaign.

I was there, in Chile, between broadcast jobs, on the State Department’s dime, conferring with the country’s media elite about the future of television, pushing the idea that the coming age of satellite-driven communication was going to make everyplace equidistant from the global center stage, and make Chile’s “end of the road” self-concept an anachronism. 

Some Chileans thought that was an interesting, if radically counter-cultural idea, but most of them were rightfully preoccupied by something else: the role television was then playing in the upcoming national vote on the political future of Chile.

It was quite eerie to see on the movie screen in Albuquerque the very spots and programs I’d seen in Santiago, in production, or as they ran on Chilean TV, to see my best Chilean friend of the visit, Patricio Banados back in the No anchor chair.

It was a fine madness, bred no doubt by a serene confidence in his own re-election, which led Pinochet to approve a perfectly fair plebiscite.  It was also plu-perfectly Chilean.  Part of the horror of America’s Henry Kissinger-led intervention in support of Pinochet’s 1973 coup was that it wrecked the most civil, democratic society south of the United States.  

Thus, in 1988, after 15 years of state violence and deadly “disappearances,” a Chilean plebiscite still had to be real and fair and open.  Even a dictator’s credibility and honor depended upon fidelity to democracy.

In TV terms, this meant that the ground rules of the plebiscite required that the 2 sides on the ballot – Yes, Pinochet rules for another 8 years; No, he doesn’t, and has to leave at the end of his term – share a half-hour of prime time, seen on every TV channel in the country, to make their cases directly to the voting public.  The order of the nightly 15 minute packages alternated, day by day.

The Yes packages argued that 15 years of economic progress (and there had indeed been some under the Dictator) equaled happiness.  The argument was made with a lot of intentionally old-fashioned images of national pride and productivity and a lot of haranguing by “important people,” including most often, Pinochet himself.  This stale concoction was hard to watch, except when the General was on screen, usually in an ornate military uniform, speaking in a voice sounded almost exactly like a chicken.  Then, even to Chileans, it was chillingly hilarious. 

The No packages were a mix of jaunty young people singing and dancing in praise of freedom, gentle reminders of a more civil time from the comfortable, confidence-building anchorman Banados, who was famous in Chile for having been disappeared from the TV screen by Pinochet, and a few moments of brilliant political video.

One of these showed a notorious newsreel of a policeman beating an unresisting demonstrator, labeling both men as “good Chileans,” and insisting that both could, as that American icon of unnecessary violence and conflict Rodney King said, “get along.”

To a foreign media observer, there was no question which was the more effective campaign, but, as I wrote in the NY Times at the time, pre-election polls had the result “too close to call.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/04/opinion/chile-waits-in-silence-for-a-verdict.html

Clearly a lot of people who didn’t feel safe telling some pollster they were against the government, did feel safe when casting their ballots.  The final score was 56% to 44% for the No.  Not even close.

At the climax of the film, after the National TV Channel’s announcement that the No had won a clear majority, there is a moment of terror at the No headquarters when there is a report that General Pinochet has summoned the heads of the security services to the Presidency.  Everyone there knows someone for whom a crackdown could mean prison or death.

People hold their breaths, until a follow up makes it clear, there will be no second strike against democracy: the Chiefs of Staff will have none of that.  They’ve told Pinochet he will have to recognize the vote and move away from power.

For many of the folks I had met in Chile on that trip, and an earlier one for The Committee to Protect Journalists to protest to Pinochet’s Justice and Defense Ministers the dictatorship’s use of military courts to suppress newspeople, that moment of personal pleasure was followed by a surge of national pride.  This is Chile, they congratulated themselves, here we prefer civility and democracy.

Which brings me (hold tight, this is something of a 180) to today and Ukraine.

One of the first scenes in the movie No, shows an early planning session of the No media team.  There are many points of view, many ideas that someone on the team thinks are essential to the campaign against Pinochet, freedom of speech, the right to organize, the crimes of military, the collaboration of the Church, (you should pardon me) blah blah blah (or as the fabulous Banados titled his first book Bla ble bli blo blu).

“No!” says the Garcia Bernal character, there is only one essential idea: gaining enough votes to win the plebiscite. 

And so it was: people voted for freedom, civility, kindness, and comfort and against oppression, violence, cruelty and discomfort.  The No won big.

Unlike Chile, whose perception that it was the last place anyone could or would go had bred not just insularity but a national identity, Ukraine is riven by an ongoing history of division and conflict, that is not just conceptual but geographic.  South and East Ukraine has a longer and closer (if not much happier) history with Russia, the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church, and more recently Sovietized industry and collective agriculture.  In the north and west of the country, the same cultural-historic lines lead more to Poland, Austria and Hungary; the Ukrainian language; the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and less mass-oriented economic and political institutions.

Those fractures are real and deep and active and were highlighted at the beginning of the current crisis when President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from a promised entente with the European Union in favor of closer collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s plan for a renewed Russian empire.  “We want our Europe,” those first protestors seemed to shout, even as they looked nervously over their shoulders to the not-necessarily-on-board East.

But recent polls suggest that those reasons for division may be receding in the face of awidely-shared national disgust with Yanukovych, his government, his predecessors, and their co-dependents, co-defendants, the powerful apparatchiks and oligarchs.

As I was told again and again during my one reporting visit to Kiev and its rural surroundings in 2008, “They’re all assholes, thieves, thugs.”

It must be said, the historical record supports this harsh judgment.  Here’s hoping it sustains to a successful conclusion today’s ongoing “popular uprising.”

After all, Ukraine already had its “Orange Revolution,” 10 years ago, in which today’s Russian-leaning President Yanukovych was booted out, after a clumsily cooked election and replaced by the European-leaning Viktor Yushchenko.  Yuschenko, who doctors believe was not-quite-fatally poisoned by his opponents, was less Soviet than his predecessors, but not more effective.  Worse, he left office with wealth and real estate that could not have been purchased from his official earnings. His replacement, also regarded as pro-EU, Yulia Tymoshenko has been imprisoned by Yanukovych’s people, who charge her with making billions in corrupt dealings in natural gas with Vladimir Putin.  The judicial process in the Tymoshenko case has been widely judged to be deficient, but not absent of apparently damning evidence that she was a grafter.   

The guy before them, President Leonid Kuchma lost his hold on his notorious kleptocracy when audiotaped evidence tied him to the murder of Georgiy Gongadze, the popular and respected investigative reporter who had made Kuchma’s crimes notorious.  President Kuchma’s greatest accomplishment was creating a national consensus that he had to go.

Polls in the past week or 2, taken in all regions of Ukraine, suggest another consensus is building: they all have to go.

A moment of great opportunity is at hand. 

If that 99 to 1 consensus can be kept together, if the un-powerful 99% can put those traditional disagreements, even temporarily aside, national unity to start over, with a new constitution, new leaders, and very new adherence to democracy and of rule of law, might be a real possibility, and Ukraine might be saved.

You can read that possibility, ironically enough, in the hostile analyses of mostly-Russian “experts” quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, and echoed in the Washington Post, which propose – in headline form in the Monitor, less brashly in the Post – an alleged threat of civil war. 

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0129/Amid-civil-war-talk-Kremlin-keeps-wary-eye-on-Ukraine-video

“Amid ‘civil war’ talk, Kremlin keeps wary eye on Ukraine,” is what sits atop Fred Weir’s report in the CSM, which cites 3 Moscow sources.  Alexei Vlasov, director of the Center for the Study of the Post-Soviet Space at Moscow State University says, "The most dangerous variant for Russia is the threat of destabilization in Ukraine. If the situation goes out of control there, it could lead to civil war." Meanwhile, Alexander Konovalov, president of the independent Institute of Strategic Assessments in Moscow projects an even greater threat: "The idea that people can take to the streets and force changes in government and policy orientation is something Putin worries about all the time,” he says. “Though the Ukrainian example is not spreading in Russia at the moment, that doesn't mean it won't have any effect."

These fellows sound like the advisors who told Pinochet he should reject the No vote and “:save Chile from chaos.” 

They are referenced and reified by Max Fisher, the WaPo foreign policy blogger: “There is chatter among analysts,” he writes, “ in Moscow as well as Washington, that if Yanukovych panics and calls in the military to disperse protesters it could lead to a civil war.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/30/9-questions-about-ukraine-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/

Would civil war in Ukraine (with or without some implicit threat it could ignite rebellion in Russia, too) provoke intervention by Putin?  “No way,” says the man himself.  “Not yet,” murmur his local analysts.

“Russia has no intention of ever intervening,” Putin declared at a Russia-EU summit in Brussels. Then he accused European leaders of butting in themselves. “I can imagine how our European partners would react if at the height of the crisis in Greece or Cyprus, say, our foreign minister turned up at one of the anti-European Union meetings there and began making appeals to the crowd."

The reference, Weir writes, is clearly “a dig at EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and other EU officials who have addressed protesters on Kiev's Independence Square, or Maidan, over the past two months.”

Weir quotes “Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist with the pro-business Moscow daily Kommersant: ‘Putin seems to have come to the conclusion that Ukraine is like a volcano that will erupt from time to time. It's a natural disaster and you just have to get used to it. That's why he comes off looking far more pragmatic, even phlegmatic, than he did [in 2004].’”

So, is this war talk to sell papers, or paper the way to Russian intervention?

I don’t think it matters because I don’t think civil war is coming to Ukraine. 

This is not a country or a culture in love with violence.  It is the government’s resort to force and to repressive legislation that has discredited the Yanukovych regime with this growing majority of Ukrainian citizens.  And by the way, the use of violence attributed to the opposition produces only popular denunciation and disconnection.  The provocateurs are widely suspected of acting for the government, or of being useless nutballs.  Ukraine today, like Chile 25 years ago, has a civil opposition.

In Ukraine, there is a near monopoly on violence that resides in the state and its institutions.  There is no popular army to oppose them, and no popular wish to translate the political battle into literal bloodshed.  Ukrainians will neither support nor sustain terrorism, even to oust their political oppressors and economic exploiters.

Furthermore, as there was in Chile, there is a strong suspicion inside Ukraine’s security services and on its streets, that the state’s violence monopoly cannot successfully be used, because significant numbers of troops and cops would side with the people against their bosses, the generals and politicians.

Putin’s so-called calm in the face of the Kiev uprising may actually be his Obama moment, in which realizes that in Ukraine, as for Obama in Syria, he has no good option.  Russian interference would only trigger Ukrainian resistance and raise the possibility of truly dangerous instability and chaos.

Hence, today’s standoff continues in Kiev’s Independence Square and in provincial offices around the country.  Hence, the possibility exists that tomorrow could bring real political change to Ukraine. As a media guy said to me about Chile, “It could all happen, if we can just get enough people to say No.”

Certainly from what we see reported from Ukraine, no one there is saying anything better.

 

JOURNALISM AND INFORMATION IN CHINA AND UKRAINE

The news about the news in China is anything but good.  I first learned about it close to 2 weeks ago, when my China mentor, and the former Assistant Dean of the Journalism School at Shantou University where I taught the fall semester in 2008, sent the following news clip, a story by Teddy Ng in the authoritative Hong Kong-based newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP)

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1385380/propaganda-officials-head-top-tier-chinese-journalism-schools

“The Communist Party's propaganda authority is planning to tighten its control over major journalism schools across the country and increase Marxist education at the universities,” Ng reported.

“Three people familiar with the plan said senior local propaganda officials would become heads or high-level officials of journalism programs at 10 top-tier universities, in an attempt to ensure their teaching is in line with authorities' directives.”

Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have hardly hidden their plan, which is to spread soon from 10 elite J-schools to all places where Journalism is taught in China.

The story had actually been reported by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency almost a week earlier.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/131222/china-tighten-control-universities-journalism-schools

Kyodo’s story cited a party source on what triggered the J-School takeover.  “President Xi Jinping senses a crisis ‘at universities and in the mass media where reformists (who support such values as democracy) have the most influence.’”

Several reports agree that officials from the party's Central Propaganda Department will, in Kyodo’s words, “take over the top posts of their journalism schools, and also beef up the media's role in serving as the ‘throat and tongue’ of the Communist Party.”

Herford, whose long career in journalism education was preceded by a distinguished record as a senior producer and bureau chief at CBS News, was properly horrified.

“I feel for our former students and those who might have been our future students,” Peter emailed.  “This latest step cements changes that have been creeping forward. They include the seven "no’s", a list of basics that are no longer to be taught in Chinese universities. These include Human Rights concepts and many of the foundations of literature and history (expunging foreign and particularly Western influences).”

According to SCPM’s Ng, the creeps have been advancing since 2001, when party hard-liners took control of journalism education at Shanghai’s Fudan University.one of the top schools in the country.  Back then, Ng reported, “Jiefang Daily quoted then Shanghai deputy party secretary Gong Xueping as saying the arrangement would ensure local propaganda authorities utilized their strength in leading and organizing the mass media.”

And sure enough, today, Ng said, “The current head of the university's journalism program is Song Chao , who is a deputy propaganda director for Shanghai.”

But today, a dozen years after the CCP put its foot down at Fudan, the party propagandists’ plan for control is widely predicted to be ineffective.

Ng quoted Li Datong, a former editor with China Youth Daily: "’The journalists will memorise some lines of Marxist thought but in the end they won't care too much about it,’"    

5 days later, Ng wrote that the CCP crackdown would extend beyond Journalism, to everything taught at China’s universities, and to what the Chinese people will see on their major broadcast networks “specific programmes for spreading socialist ideologies, as well as more public service advertisements.”

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1389382/communist-party-orders-core-socialist-values-curriculum

But will President Xi’s dictates make a difference? Ng cited another skeptic, Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University, another top university in Beijing, "’The question remains whether the public will buy it. It is impossible to carve them into the brain’."

Xi’s problem is simple: the world of information is complex, even in China, where the government and Party are just 2 of thousands of would-be sculptors, carving away at the public brain.  Cracking down on J-Schools or all schools, lobotomizing the content of mass media, is a sad old story, and a lot of the sadness and frustration is inside the government/party power structure, which still feels besieged. 

Still, like Peter, and some other former visiting teachers at Shantou, I was pretty disheartened by the news.  Until I saw the following response my wife Amy got from a Chinese friend who is both a professional translator, and a volunteer in a 20-year campaign to give all Chinese access to the significant ideas current in the world, by publishing translations on the internet.

He wrote:  The crackdown is “routine, rather than news.”  CCP policing of the media, “particularly in terms of politic issues,” he wrote, has turned “most Chinese journalists into mere zombie followers who retweet everything the Party says.

 

“Luckily,” he added, “we are not living in North Korea. The best thing that ever happened is the internet. I don't have a TV and I subscribe to no newspaper. I look out to the world through my optic fiber, in which way I can get information from both sides and make my own judgment.”

 

Which was, he said, “I am sure the CCP, no matter how hard they try to tighten their grip on journalism, has weaker influence today on intellectuals and the economically advanced areas in this country.  For journalists, it is just one more test to pass, for which they have already been inoculated during their school days.”

 

Which reminded me of my own wonderful experience at Shantou, and left me convinced he’s got it right. Even 5 years ago, the Journalism school, like every school at the University, had a Party Secretary, who was largely unseen and unheard, but could pop out at any moment with some annoying judgment or admonition.  I was warned (and had already assumed) every class had an assigned Party snitch.

 

Kyodo reported, as early as last May, “university officials in Beijing and Shanghai were saying that Chinese authorities had banned the discussion in university classes of seven subjects (Peter Herford’s “7 No’s.”)  including "freedom of the press," "citizen rights," "universal values" implying respect for human rights and democracy, and "historical mistakes of the Communist Party."

In 2008, there was no such explicit ban, and I regularly discussed journalism’s role in society using all those forbidden concepts, except the last one, on which my students had nothing to learn from me: they were already experts.  Clearly, someone ratted me out to the Dean, who counseled me to “stop talking about China and human rights, and just teach them what you know about journalism.”

I kept to my prior teaching plan, and never heard another word.

Here are 2 things my students taught me (here I paraphrase and combine sources): 

(1) “Journalism in China is a regulated profession.  To work, you must be a member of the Party and go regularly to meetings on party policy and propaganda.  This is true for us as students and will be true for us as journalists for as long as we work.”

“How do you deal with that?” I asked several students.  Their answers made for Lesson  (2)  “It’s all bullshit and everyone knows it.  You join the Party.  You go to meetings.  You nod your head, and go home or back to the office.  Then you do your best to give people real information and hope you don’t piss anybody off too much.  The whole thing is a pain, and it hurts us and the country, but you’d be surprised how much gets through.”

I was surprised at the results of a game my students and I played every week.  I would name a story that had appeared on a portion of the internet which I could see because I was a visiting professor, but which never appeared on a server they could use, and ask them to have read it by my next class.  Every time, every student passed the test.  For them, as for hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens every day, the news does get through.

Which brings me to another country where the government is trying desperately to control information and citizens alike: Ukraine.

Over the past year, the Soviet-style governance of President Viktor Yanukovych has asserted increasing direct and indirect control over the nation’s news media, and, recently, has stepped up thuggish violence against opposition reporters and demonstrators.  But all this wave of authoritarianism has produced is a backlash of  popular commitment to opposition, and widespread use of new and old communication networks.  Yanukovych, like President Xi in China, is not just failing to cut the flow of ideas, he is failing to suppress the demand for reform.

In Kyiv, the worse the government behaves, the more people know about it.  It has now been documented; the government’s own violence produces bigger crowds of demonstrators and more definitive demands for reform.  

A recent blog post in the Washington Post by Oxford University political scientist Olga Onuch passed along the results from ongoing polling of demonstrators in Kyiv.  They  suggest that a lot of journalists and activists have been mis-describing what’s going on there. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/02/social-networks-and-social-media-in-ukrainian-euromaidan-protests-2/

For one thing, Onuch reported, more than 1200 interviews show, the protests are not a youth movement.  “While many reports have championed Ukrainian students and youths for being the predominant actors in the protests, the majority of the respondents (69 percent) are in fact older than 30. The average age of the Ukrainian protester in Kyiv is closer to 36, with approximately 24 percent of participants older than 55.”

What the crowds are is diverse: students, academics, workers, and retired people; Orthodox and Catholic believers and atheists.  One characteristic of the people on the streets of the Ukraine capitol that should be shockingly bad news for the government is how many of those polled are newly declared dissidents.

Onuch reported, “A surprising 38 percent of current protesters did not participate in previous protests, and 37 percent did not participate in the “Orange Revolution” [of 2004.] 

“This is, of course, not to say that students, youths and activists are not a significant group,” Onuch reported, “but they do not represent the majority of participants.”

The diverse protesters against the government have, Onuch’s poll revealed, definably diverse goals.

“The students and youth under 30 use more media savvy language of ‘EU accession,’ ‘global human rights’ and employ abstract concepts such as ‘freedom.’

But, Onuch wrote, “The 30 to 45 year-old protesters focus more on practical matters like ‘economic security,’ ‘better opportunities for their children,’  and their desire to live in a ‘normal, European democracy.’  They insist that their presence lets the regime known the ‘voters are here.’

“The protesters over 55 explain that they ‘have lived through many injustices’ and that because they are ‘retired, [they] can protest in the place of the young, who have to work and raise families.’ Thus, they see themselves as guardians of the protests, when others cannot be there.”

And while social media are important, informing people about the time and place of manifestations and framing issues, they are just part of a diverse set of communications inputs Ukrainians draw on, inputs that, as in China, are moving more and more from the policed official media to the internet. 

Asked how they follow the protest campaign, 48% of those polled said they watched on broadcast TV; but, already 41% said they have shifted their allegiance and now watched internet news channels instead.

Internet influence could be seen in the way personal contacts outweighed media contacts, including social media. Almost everyone told the pollsters they got political information from their friends, most of it from computers, tablets and mobile phones: 46% by text messages, 30% via email, versus 23% by telephone.  Asked if they responded to protest invitations posted on social media, 10.4% said yes, they had responded to an invitation on Facebook, 14% from Russian competitor VKontakte.

It is in a form of “elite communication,” that Onuch said the polls showed important influence from the social networks. “Our analysis of demands (as reflected in slogans and signage), is still very preliminary, [but] it does seem to follow certain patterns of words mentioned on Twitter, Facebook, chain e-mails and internet news sites. We have noticed a pattern whereby a sign or slogan first goes viral on Facebook, and then seems to show up more often in protester signs. While making any serious conclusions from this method is complicated, first impressions point to an “Internet-to-the-streets” directionality of claims and framing of demands.”

In China, this pattern has long been observed, although the word patterns are closer to coding than sloganeering.  Although mass media coverage of the Arab Spring was long-delayed and closely-crimped in China, it soon acquired an internet code name, “Jasmine,” which soon became a banished word from the Chinese internet.  Banished, but not forgotten.

As the world changes, communication, social and journalistic, changes with it.  Usually, it is the repressive government that can’t keep up.

Will that mean political change?  The attitude I get from people in China is typically patient and confident.  Just as most your people assume it is inevitable that the 21^st Century will be China’s (just as the 20^th was America’s), they also assume, slowly, the unstoppable spread of popular knowledge about the ideas and options available outside China will force the government in Beijing to serious reform.

Right now, most of the global evidence suggests, the coalescence of public recognition of the realities of the world into greater public participation in political and economic power is a long way off.

Great troughs of information, most of it introduced to the region by Al Jazeera (Arabic), and the implicit imperative for viewers to sort it out for themselves, are what set off the Arab Spring.  Today, a few short years later, “people power” in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria is being crushed, the old-fashioned way, under the boot heels of unpopular state force (except in Libya, where the state, as well as the people, are prey to the new-fashioned pandemonium of well-armed, poorly-disciplined independent militias.)

Long-term, I’m betting on information and the innumerable ways people devise to obtain it

The master-pessimist Herman Melville unforgettably wrote: “What like a bullet can undeceive?”

To which I reply, “What like a tyrant can unleash communication?”