Ukraine on Fire (2016)
This is one of the most important films you can see, with the crucial missing history that has been censored from western corporate media. Ignorance is not okay.
My consistent view going back to the early 1980s has been that the public’s willful ignorance is not okay, and it is indeed the problem. Ignorant people are easily marshaled into groups, their identities stripped away, their thoughts supplanted by propaganda, and talking points inserted into their mouths by others. It is a severe and widespread problem, perhaps intractable. I meet a dozen per day on social media, and I can say with some authority that they don’t care for sources or facts.
Ukraine on Fire is not a perfect documentary. Better footnotes and citations might have helped to deflect the inevitable criticisms. Slick graphics help the flow visually, and they do keep the pace quick. Oliver Stone was deeply involved and on camera talking directly to participants relating to the 2014 Maidan coup.
I have also written about these events since they occurred documenting each stage for historical accuracy.
One of the main points for western audiences to come to terms with is that Viktor Yanukovych was not the usual “brutal dictator” from the standard script of US regime change color revolutions. He wasn’t nearly brutal enough in going after violent, organized coup leaders right in the center of Kiev. There were no raids on their headquarters, no arrests, and certainly no assassinations of those foreign-backed neo-fascist insurgent leaders. Few “revolutions” elsewhere could have succeeded along those lines without risking severe reprisals by armed authorities.
The film shows how sophisticated the coup plotters were, what challenges they faced, and how they used violence to create martyrs and exploit the media channels, including no fewer than three new television stations that instantly popped up as the protests began in November of 2013.
The filmmakers present the history of Ukraine, its western provinces collaborating openly with Hitler and turning war criminals like Stepan Bandera into national heroes. It shows the history of color revolutions, their ties to US NGOS, that aren’t all that “N” and are pretty much undeserving of the name. The National Endowment for Democracy (sic) opposes democracy around the world wherever the democratic leader denies some US corporate interests. USAID is another alleged “NGO” undeserving of the “N,” which has taken on foreign missions that the CIA used to handle. This color revolution blueprint is consistent, repeats itself, and it relies on a deception that foreign populations are rising up, when it only requires a tiny minority of a given population to make that appearance. The peaceful protests begin, and then the trained violent rioters move in, after some smiling images of solidarity have been produced for American news consumers. It’s happened in Bolivia and Venezuela recently as well. Color revolutions are the American empire’s game plan around the world — to take over with proxies, stooges, lapdogs, puppets.
Nationalism is exploited by extremists on the right, domestically and around the world in targeted nations. The US likes to partner with, train, fund and empower these violent extremists in order to get footholds for US corporations. It’s the main job of far too large a portion of the US government today.
These destabilizations and US belligerence have escalated a new Cold War. Russia is on notice and has modernized its nuclear arsenal. China is on notice, with US support for Hong Kong rioters as well as the “breakaway province” of Taiwan, and its incursions into the South China Sea. These provocations are a source of eternal hostility, an arms race, and hair-trigger alerts.
The US and its allies, particularly NATO, continue to stir up as much trouble as they can, while their own populations know next to nothing about what is going on with their tax dollars. That’s a problem.
Americans suddenly have a lot to say about Ukraine with the new Impeachment inquiry. Try asking a few of them if they know about any of this, or if they can even locate Ukraine on a map?
