If you are an Antiwar.com reader like me, you are no doubt fed up with the lies, both of commission and omission, that pour out of the NYT, NPR and lesser mainstream media outlets, when it comes to Ukraine.
And if you are like me, you are worried over the political health of your many friends, who are swallowing the journalistic poison put out by the Mainstream Media. So here is a quick antidote with suggestions for a longer term cure.
The antidote is a 39 minute interview with Stephen Cohen, emeritus Professor at Princeton and NYU, a scholar on Russia, whose word is good as gold. It can be found here. More often than not, getting people to open up to new ideas is a matter of the source rather than the arguments. Who says something often outweighs what is said. And Cohen is an unimpeachable source, coming from the halls of the Ivy League and the author of many books and articles including Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold WarandThe Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin.
This interview is part of a continuing series with Cohen on the unfolding crisis in Ukraine on the John Batchelor Show. They can all be found here. I chose the one above, even though it is not the most recent, because it is a great summary leading up to the recent elections in Ukraine. Read it first. The most recent at the time of this writing is here.
At this point one may also recommend for continuing health a daily dose of RT.com ("Russia Today"), which gives coverage of the unfolding crisis in one or two brief stories or videos a day. We can challenge friends and ourselves to read these accounts from the "other side," to compare them to the mainstream media which inundates us daily and to decide for ourselves which rings truer. (The ever pompous John Kerry is horrified and outraged, his basal state it would seem, by the specter of Americans reading RT and, worse, deciding for ourselves what is true!)
Once the ice is broken with your friends by the Cohen interview, they will be prepared for the next step. You can now convince them to ascend to the journalistic heights of Antiwar.com where daily, accurate coverage and penetrating analysis by Justin Raimondo and many others will greet them. The final step is for you and them to donate to Antiwar.com so that these Olympian heights can endure. We owe no less to humanity with our nation now threatening to plunge the entire world into war in its unnecessary confrontation with Russia, China and Iran.
John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com
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