Propaganda on the Ukraine Thing is Going Hot And Heavy in Full Cry and Constant Loop

Richard Engel, on location, Kiev 02/23/2014 Revolution Complete

The Yanukovych regime's evacuation of Kiev has led to something akin to chest beating, fist pumping, and knuckle dragging on the part of the Establishment and its media handmaidens. I saw the spectacle of Richard Engel "live from Independence Square" in Kiev on Meet the Press this morning that was stomach churning and really rather chilling when you deconstruct it. Let's see if I can embed:



               
           

Engel was really quite smug appearing, it seemed to me, at the apparent outcome of this so-called "Revolution," and while his description of the police crackdown lacked context, as nearly every American mass media report does, his statement that "there were never more than 20,000 demonstrators in this square behind me. But in less than a week they managed to change the balance of power in Europe and Central Asia," should be chilling to anyone who might think that... erm... "it can't happen here."

It doesn't take bazillions of people -- or anything like a majority of a population -- to accomplish the ends the Ukrainian rebels sought, and rebels in several other theaters of operations are currently seeking (Caracas, anyone?) Revolutionists have known this for generations, but propagandists will tell us over and over that no "revolution" can succeed without nearly "everyone" backing it, and that's just absurd. It's not true. Never was.

The sort of thing that we saw in Kiev, like previous Color Revolutions it sometimes resembled -- without the color coordination, unless it's Tarp Blue -- requires a dedicated minority that can turn out a large enough crowd to be impressive-looking on the YouTube and on TV. The crowds that turned out in Kiev looked large, but if you followed the professional camera operations of the "official rebel livestreams" -- nothing at all like the amateur work of Occupy or even Tahrir -- you saw what amounted to three views of the rebels in the square.

There was a high and distant view that showed what appeared to be quite a lot of people gathered night and day, but it was hard to get a handle on how many there actually were because there were all these monuments, tents and barricades blocking views of the crowds. It looked like there might be a lot of people, but how many at any given time couldn't be determined.

Then there was a closeup view of the crowd in front of the giant stage that had been set up in the square by the rebels, where demagogues harangued the crowds night and day and priests conducted endless blessings and chants and various survivors testified to the perfidy of Yanukovych and demanded his ouster, world without end, amen. I don't understand Ukranian, can barely glean a word or two out of Russian anymore, but it was clear what the crowds were listening to. They were being expertly demagogued. The closeup view of the crowd showed people tightly packed in front of the stage, like at a rock concert, but fading away in the distance. It was still impossible to estimate total attendance, but a fair guesstimate would be in the tens of thousands.

The third view -- the one I saw most often when I clicked over to the livestreams -- was a tightish image of whoever was onstage at that moment, holding forth, demagoguing. And that was interesting, to say the least. There was a constant rotation of speakers and entertainers, all of them with the same message that Yanukovych must go, the government must fall, yadda yadda -- even I could tell that's what they were demanding, even though I couldn't understand the language.

None of this was like Occupy at all. Instead, it had the flavor of a Nazi rally, and I didn't watch it for more than a few minutes at a time.

Well, now that the perfidious Yanukovych has been driven out, and the not-so-sweet blonde Mädchen, George W. Bush's good buddy, Yulia Tymoshenko in Her Wheelchair has been wheeled in,  what will be will be.

Susan Rice went on at some length with David Gregory on what that might be. It is now, she said, up to the IMF to decide what kind of assistance and austerity will be imposed on Ukraine in exchange for getting it out from under the Soviet.... erm... Russian boot. Putin will have to decide whether he wants to join in helping to grind down the Ukraine under the IMF and EuroBanks, or will he stand aside? The Great Game continues.

The geo-political triumph -- and Tymoshcenko's reappearance -- must have made Brzezinski, go all sticky-wet just the same.

And Americans will be buried under ever greater torrents of propaganda about it all.