08/15/14 – Karel Van Wolferen – The Scott Horton Show

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So now our next guest on the show is Karl van Wolferen.
And I'm sorry, I still didn't pronounce your name right.
I did try though.
Dutch journalist and retired professor at the University of Amsterdam.
And he's got this great article here at UNZ.com.
That's U-N-Z, UNZ.com.
And it's called The Ukraine Corrupted Journalism and the Atlanticist Faith.
Very interesting piece.
And we're running it in the viewpoint section today on Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Karl?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us.
And sorry, I'm a Texan.
I just can't talk Dutch, right?
I really did try to pronounce it right.
But I just, it comes out Karl no matter how bad I try.
I even practiced out loud before I went on the air.
And no, I still, sorry.
Anyway, great piece here.
I really appreciate your work that you've done.
And really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Please start, if you could, with the news.
You know, what you know.
And I guess it may be quite a bit up in the air.
But could you please tell us what you know or think you know about what's going on in the east as far as these Russian vehicles.
And Kiev government claims that they have attacked and destroyed Russian military vehicles inside Ukraine.
What I know is probably the same as what you know is what we get from the news feeds.
Maybe I'm not even up to date.
I know that these Russian supply, I think it's 200 trucks that went to the border.
And they were searched at the border.
I don't know what's happened after that.
Yeah, the government of Kiev has claimed that they have destroyed them at night with artillery.
Which didn't really sound plausible to me.
I don't know if the right sectors got that kind of aim or what.
But I suppose it's possible.
But I mean, that would be a major escalation of this thing.
If it's true.
I won't comment on that.
Because I have no idea.
The last I looked was about an hour and a half ago.
And I didn't read anything of the kind.
Oh, really?
So let us not dwell on that so much.
I mean, that's really for the wire services.
And I'm not really in the news business as such.
I comment on things.
I talk about things that I think should be our concern.
Right, I understand.
It's a much more in-depth piece than simply reporting the news here.
But I thought I better start with the emergency going on.
Bloomberg News has the developing story there.
Whether it's true or not, I don't know.
But for people who want to check Google News on that.
Obviously, it's a very complex article that you have here.
But first and foremost, can we start with the airplane then?
Or I guess secondarily, can we get to the airplane?
You see, what prompted me to write it is that I was following the way in which what happened was being interpreted in the Netherlands and also in Britain and the United States, of course, and other parts of Europe.
And I was struck by the unanimity.
They started pointing their fingers at the guilty party, which was the so-called separatists, and behind them, Putin.
And I thought, this is crazy.
Because it was all based on the flimsiest of, not even real evidence, evidence that consisted of tweets and YouTube video and nothing else.
So, as a journalist, when something is very big, especially when it's big, and when there is a kind of a consensus forming about what it is all about, and you realize that it stands on very little evidence, you become curious and you wonder, now, what is going on?
And so I started looking at this and I saw that many potential cues were not followed up.
I mean, the editors weren't interested in what could have been the cause that would have pointed at the Kiev government rather than the separatists.
So I became very interested, and that's when I started writing about this.
But I also, you know, I've been following the Ukraine story since the coup, earlier this, in February, earlier then, and what preceded it.
And it was very obviously something that was triggered very much with the help of American agents.
And it's an example of what we see also on the other side of the globe, which is my area of expertise, Japan, China, and so on.
And I thought, you know, this is a big story, because what's going on is vilification of Russia as on the other side of the globe, vilification of China, a new Cold War as it were, and an attempt to contain those former huge communist enemies.
And we should be alert, and there should be neutral reporting on it for us to get an idea of what's really going on in the world.
Right.
Well, you know, it turned out, I mean, at the very beginning, it seemed like a reasonable assumption that could have been borne out, that the rebels had, you know, maybe they got a missile that was good enough to do it, but maybe they weren't good enough at targeting, and they had made a terrible mistake here.
It sounded like such a plausible story, but like you're saying, it really hasn't held up, and what seemed like the much more outlandish story that perhaps actually the government of Kiev shot it down deliberately or accidentally, I wouldn't pass judgment on that, I don't know, but it really does seem to be the other way now, doesn't it?
Yes.
Well, you see, when you follow controversial stories, as I have done over the years in India, in Korea, in Japan, in Vietnam, in Southeast Asia generally, etc., you develop hunches, right?
And you go on what you know.
You have a lot of tested understanding in the back of your mind about what is likely, what is possible, and so on.
You form an idea about these things.
And my initial response when I heard about this, and I heard, what was it, Biden, I think, within minutes of the terrible tragedy happening, already they were pointing fingers at Putin, which was ridiculous, of course.
So I become very suspicious.
Yeah, well, as well as all journalists should be, and that's another major part of the story that you talk about, is the American influence on the European media on this, and sort of announcing really loud, there's a narrative here, and you guys are expected to stick to it, too.
They really do fall in line, don't they?
Yes, there's a sad, really a sad side to this European journalism, and it's because the English language media, of course, dominates in the world.
There is no European news source, basically.
You have, of course, the French and the Germans have their press agencies, but also they get much of their inspiration and their knowledge from the English language ones.
So the editors in New York, as well as London, have a great deal of influence on what the rest of the world learns about everything happening in the world, and this is certainly true of Northern Europe.
So the Netherlands, where I live, is a perfect case in point.
And I was reading the paper that I used to work for for 17 years, and I was appalled at the way in which they were just copying, parroting what the American media was saying, I mean, the London-based media have gone berserk, especially in their leaders, as to what we should be doing about Russia and Putin and so on.
And then, of course, there is...
Well, I'm sorry.
Carl, let me interrupt you here.
I'm sorry, we have to take this break.
But when we come back, we can talk more about the media and about the Atlantic Alliance and all the anti-Russia narratives presumed to be true by all our media and the rest of so-called civil society.
On the other side of this break, it's Carl von Wolferin, writer for many major newspapers.
Back in a second.
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All right, and so I'm talking with Carl Von Wolferin.
And he's a reporter from the Netherlands.
And he's written for many major papers.
A serious journalist here.
Papers here and over in Europe.
And we're talking about, well, the entire narrative, really, of the war in Ukraine, Russian intentions, the shoot-down of MH17, and all the related mess, the media coverage, and the relationship between the American government and the governments of the EU, et cetera, et cetera.
It's a whole lot of fun.
And so I guess, jeez, there's so many different ways I want to go on this.
First of all, I guess if we can get back to the plane for just a second.
You mentioned an extremely important source, not necessarily definitive, but an extremely important source from the Organization for Security and Cooperation.
Saying, we're looking at the wreckage, and it looks to us like machine-gun fire has hit this plane.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
No, it was the first member of that organization who was at the site looking at the wreckage.
And he spent about a week looking at it.
And then he explained this, I think, on Canadian TV, that it looked like the plane was hit by very strong machine-gun fire.
And that could have come from a fighter plane that belonged to the Kiev military.
Now, that would, of course, confirm what the Russian radar reports say, that there were two fighter planes in the vicinity of the plane that was brought down.
And also, it would concur with eyewitness accounts that the BBC broadcast.
Eyewitnesses on the ground who saw it happening, way above their heads, of course.
And so, you know, it's the kind of thing that editors should look at.
Editors, of course, should wonder what has happened to the radar records of the Kiev control tower.
And there are rumors about foreign air controllers being sent out and being fired immediately after this happening.
There are so many fishy sides to this story.
It's incredible.
And if you are an investigative journalist and an editor interested in what really goes on, you would be following them up.
And I think that, you know, I tell you, I told my wife, the moment we heard about it, we were returning from vacation, and we heard about it in our car, and we were driving back to the Netherlands.
And I said to her, the truth, perhaps, we will never be known, because it will be politically determined.
And from the looks of it now, I fear that it's going to be the case.
We should continue to insist that, you know, we need to know more.
We want to know these things.
Well, you know, in American media, that story's already over.
I'm not sure, obviously, it's a bigger deal there in northwestern Europe.
But in the United States, they're over the plane, and it's helped to obscure the major escalation of the war against the eastern provinces.
And the story will come back, because, you know, what really is going on, of course, is an attempt by the United States, together with NATO, and NATO is an American-controlled organization, even though it's supposed to be, you know, mostly European.
And it's an attempt to get closer and closer to a longer and longer stretch of the Russian border to place missile, you know, to do a Star Wars, but then all along the Russian border, which is extremely dangerous.
I am convinced that, in that respect, the American side is playing with fire.
Yeah, extremely dangerous is very polite of you to put it that way, what it is that they're risking.
And that leads me to the question of whether there's any real split, whether even Germany or any other part of NATO can, are they in any position to resist America's policy here?
Well, that's a very good question.
And really, that should be, that should have our, that should have our attention, of course.
Sometimes I think, yes.
Sometimes I think, for example, the sanctions, in most of these European countries, were not at all eager to join the United States in sanctions against Russia.
Then this happens.
And they felt more or less forced to do this, to join in, because there was so little in the way of alternative opinion, alternative news.
And so they thought, okay, this is, it is only the Russians and Putin in particular who is behind this, and therefore we must do something.
And that is what, of course, made them decide a week and a half ago to do this.
But nobody likes this.
And they realize that sanctions are stupid.
And they are, in the long run, a disadvantage to everybody, including, by the way, the United States, of course, because the United States is not working for its own interest at all.
It's just, you know, this is another interesting story.
Why were they so eager to get this regime change in Kiev?
Why are they so eager to go all the way with their Star Wars equipment to the Russian border?
That's the questions we should be asking.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, if the answer is, well, they really thought they were going to replicate the Orange Revolution only even better this time, and they were going to, I don't know, make Crimea an American base, as Putin put it, I'm sorry, but Putin couldn't stomach the idea of going down there to visit our NATO friends at our old bases in Crimea.
That was a bridge too far for us.
Is that what they thought they were going to do?
And how could they have thought that they would get away with that without provoking exactly what happened instead?
The Russians saying, no, thank you.
Of course, Scott, you're perfectly right.
What I think, you know, you have tactics and you have strategy.
Tactics, what, you know, Victoria Nuland, who is the head of this European desk at the State Department, she is very clearly part of that responsibility to protect people and those neocon-linked characters in Washington who want to do all this.
But it is an entity that's out of political control.
They're doing their thing, they live their own, that is living a life of its own.
Like the, you know, the military industrial complex lives a life of its own.
The NSA lives a life of its own.
It's not under central political control.
Obama doesn't have control over it.
That's how I see it.
So you get these people who are going to extremes doing these things, but it is not attached to an overall global strategy that makes any sense.
Just a bureaucratic, kind of a narrow parochial interest of the actual bureaucrats at NATO.
Yes.
Another thing, NATO, what I thought about a year ago, well, you know, with its disasters in Iraq as well as Afghanistan, where of course part of NATO participated alongside the United States, you know, NATO is way past its sell-by date and it has no credibility, it's on its way out.
But this thing, NATO in the Ukraine, has reinvigorated it.
Well, you know, these military people in Western Europe, they were brought up in Cold War, with Cold War rhetoric and everything, and that's what they know.
That's what they must believe.
But I imagine there is a lot of doubt.
I imagine there's also a lot of disagreement there within the ranks of these outfits.
That's what I think.
And that'd be very interesting to see how this...
But it's dangerous.
I mean, you can really make a huge mistake.
Imagine the situation, look at from...
Imagine you are in Putin's shoes.
You have been the object of vilification, a demonization campaign that's been going on for years and it's really accelerated in this past half year since the coup in Kiev.
And what do you do?
What can you do?
My impression is he's played it very coolly, diplomatically.
And he continues to insist on diplomatic.
But at some point, he may feel he has to move.
All right, well, I've already kept you a bit over time here, but I certainly agree with that.
It's a scary place to leave it, but I don't know what more we know than that.
We can start speculating about the dark future from here, but we'll let it go.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Carl.
Okay, Scott.
My pleasure.
All right.
That is...
And I'm sorry I can't say your name right for the life of me.
Carl Van Wolferen is the best I can do.
Here he is at UNZ.com A very well done piece here.
It's called The Ukraine Corrupted Journalism and the Atlanticist Faith.
And he is a Dutch journalist, former professor at the University of Amsterdam, has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The National Interest, Le Monde, and his career, I believe, was mostly at Henselblad, one of Holland's leading newspapers.
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