More About 'Fake News'

The noise about ‘fake news’ that has been stirred up by the fake accusations of Russian interference in the US presidential Election of 2016 on behalf of Donald Trump, begs further elaboration on this issue.

The US has a shameful history of peddling fake news dating back to the yellow journalism-the equivalent of 'fake news' today-of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randall Hearst in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was Pulitzer's newspapers that helped stir up war fever against Spain after the 1898 explosion on the ship USS Maine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba.

What was a simple explosion caused by the overheating of the gun powder storage room on the ship due to the high tropical temperature outside, was turned into an act of sabotage perpetrated by the Spanish.

This, like US wars of the future, served as a convenient excuse to declare war on Spain, and seize Spain's colonial territories, including the Philippines, where the US military committed genocidal atrocities on the Filipino population, and operated some of the world's first concentration camps.

Another instance of fake news that history seems to ignore is the so-called Holodomor-the great hunger of Ukraine of the 1930s.

Popular Ukrainian nationalist and anti-Soviet propaganda the world over, states that this starvation of millions of Ukrainians was a deliberate policy of Joseph Stalin to kill off Ukrainians, and constitutes genocide.

The facts of the situation are quite different, and far removed from the genocide propaganda. What was/is being falsely labeled ‘genocide of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union’ wasn’t at all that dramatic.

The so-called hunger was caused by a famine brought on by drought and bad agricultural policies instituted by the Soviet Union at that time. The failure of crops caused food shortages in some parts of the Ukraine, and in Southern parts of Russia as well.

For a detailed account of the Holodomor genocide myth, read the book by Douglas Tottle titled ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism-The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard.’

It was William Randall Hearst, who was an ardent anti-communist, who through his newspaper and money, made up the story of the ‘Holodomor.’ He sent ex-cons and other persons of ill-repute to the Soviet Union on his dime to bring back stories of mass starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviets, and had the accounts published in his paper.

But the accounts have been proven false by none other than American workers who were in the Soviet Union at that time, some in areas supposedly ravaged by starvation.

These workers were confused by these accounts. They saw no mass starvation or bodies strewn out by the roads, as was falsely reported in western press.

The entire Holodomor story was concocted, and the pictures of so-called starving and dead Ukrainian peasants turned out to be pictures dating back from WW1 in Western Europe.

This propaganda was also a desperate attempt to make the Soviet Union look bad in the eyes of Americans at a time when the US itself was being ravaged by the Great Depression.

The powers-that-be, especially the wealthy industrialists and monopolists like Hearst, were afraid that the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, and the generally better working conditions there as compared to the US, would both attract and anger the US public, who would then start thinking about a Soviet-style system on US soil.

This was a dire threat for the wealthy US industrialists. They had to do something to prevent the erosion of the ‘American way of life,’ regardless of how bad it was.

So they seized up on misfortune caused by a drought-caused famine in the Soviet Union, and turned it into a genocide against Ukrainians by the Soviet Union to scare the US public, and hopefully extinguish any thoughts of proletarian revolutions in their minds.

The Nazi government of Adolf Hitler also seized upon this myth for their own anti-Soviet propaganda reasons after they seized control of Ukraine during WW2. After the war, rabid western cold warriors used the myth to paint the Soviet Union as an absolute evil.

The current Ukrainian garbage Banderite junta still clings to the fake Holodomor atrocity propaganda story, and uses it as a rallying call against Russia.

There are surely many other instances of fake news before and after these two examples. But the power of these myths still endures.  

We also have Udo Ulfkotte, the now-deceased German journalist who exposed a long-running CIA program of planting propaganda and fake news against Russia and other countries and individuals which the US ruling establishment and their European allies didn’t like, which were dutifully published by western newspapers, as another instance of fake news.

The western media remains one of the most pernicious purveyors of fake news in the world. From the USS Maine in 1898 to the Russian election hacking of 2016, western fake news still abounds, and is sure to do so in the future.