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newthinking

(3,982 posts)
Sat May 10, 2014, 02:37 PM May 2014

(Ukraine and the) Crisis of Legitimacy

Crisis of Legitimacy
2014/05/05
ODESSA/BERLIN

The unprecedented disinformation campaign being waged by the leading German media has reached a new climax with its reporting on the murder of more than 40 people in Odessa. In the Ukrainian metropolis of a million inhabitants, the Trade Union House "caught fire" - "a catastrophe," whose cause is still unknown. This is how it was reported immediately following the fire, on May 2. Even though supporters of the putschists in Kiev could be seen hurling Molotov cocktails at those barricaded inside the Trade Union House on international press agency photos, key German media organs chose to publish the Ukrainian intelligence services' falsified bulletins claiming that "Moscow" was responsible for the crimes. Those murdered were among a group of demonstrators calling for regional autonomy. They had fled their attackers and were chased into the Trade Union House, blocked inside and left to a gruesome death by suffocation.



"Diplomats"
The way news of the crimes in Odessa are being reported corresponds to months of continuous, systematic gradation of journalistic standards, which have almost entirely been tailored to Berlin's foreign policy stipulations.[4] For example, for days, the ARD had harped on the deliberate confusion around the Bundeswehr's military operation without calling the operation by its name. The Bundeswehr had dispatched so-called observers to East Ukraine at the demand of Kiev's putsch regime. The ARD either referred to these German military personnel as "members of an OSCE mission" or called them "diplomats."



Disguised
The fact that these German military personnel were operating under a secret agreement with the illegitimate putsch regime, needing information on the deployment of insurgent forces to prepare its "anti-terror" war on Eastern Ukraine, was either considered not newsworthy or it was relegated to the nocturnal "talk shows" ("conspiracy theory&quot . Instead, the ARD network made a special broadcast (May 2), presenting an assumed non-partisan specialist for the OSCE thesis. On the screen, the specialist was identified as an associate of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). He was permitted - in the course of a minute-long monologue - to confirm the version of an alleged OSCE-sponsored mission. Is espionage behind it? This question was never even raised. The television viewers were never informed that the interview partner was Wolfgang Richter, currently a Colonel, member of the Bundeswehr's General Staff, and the section commander of these obscure military observers, whose headquarters are in Geilenkirchen, a Bundeswehr - and previously a NATO nuclear weapons - site. The ARD opened their airwaves to a disguised military officer.


http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/58746

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