Stepan Bandera torchlight procession 2020, Kyiv. Photograph Source: A1 – Public Domain – CC0

In previous essays in the real free press (the US mainstream media is currently ranked 57th in press freedom by Reporters Without Borders), I discussed the sabotage operations of the CIA directed at the Soviet Union just after World War II. In its efforts to “crack apart” (CIA’s words) the USSR, the CIA worked closely with war criminals, the wartime Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Ukrainian-founded Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a conclave of multiple European Nazi collaborators.

When the right-wing ultra-nationalist groups were crushed by the Soviets, the CIA recruited Ukrainian and other eastern European dissidents to work on the secretly CIA-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Contrary to the official story, America’s proxy war on Russia did not begin in 2022 but in fact some 75 years earlier.

Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist leaders, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, Roman Shukhevych, Mykola Lebed, and others, who are now memorialized throughout western Ukraine with statues, monuments, street names, and holidays, are well documented as Nazi assets in CIA declassified reports. Bandera’s OUN directly worked with the German SS in the mass extermination of Poles, Jews, and ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Nazi insignia are today ubiquitous amongst Ukraine’s armed forces.

The background of Ukrainian nationalism is not known by the vast majority of Americans, including those in the journalism profession. Unwilling to do proper investigative reporting, the American mainstream media (MSM) serve as little more than state propaganda organs, the main organizing tools for the manufacture of public consent, as brilliantly analyzed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky – indeed, far more consolidated today.

It is hard to find a single story on the screens or pages of the MSM that reveals the factual truth about the background of the US global warmongering project and geopolitical and economic interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe or the fictions upon which Russophobia was constructed. Hence, there is no context in their writing about Ukraine and Russia. The news angle on Ukraine is typically cast as a struggle for democracy, even though that country is widely recognized outside the MSM as an illiberal and fiercely corrupt oligarchy.

Herman and Chomsky argued, particularly with respect to international coverage in the MSM, that five structural filters organize how foreign affairs is reported: the fact of corporate media ownership; the dependence on corporate funding via commercial advertising; the reliance on sources inside the government; anti-communism or other fear-mongering ideologies; and “flak,” the ability of organized groups, such as AIPAC, to influence foreign policy.

Apart from state management of America’s news media, which are considerably less hegemonic in the present era of social media, postwar domestic Cold War organs of public persuasion, such as the Advertising Council, public schooling, conservative religious educational institutions, the publishing and film/TV industry, and other organizational forces, contributed a great deal toward indoctrinating multiple generations of Americans to hate Russia.

Even earlier, the state-engineered Red Scare of 1919-1920 following the Bolshevik Revolution, induced public hysteria and led to the Palmer Raids and massive deportations of eastern European and Russian political and labor leaders. The second Red Scare following World War II further intensified hostility toward the Soviet Union and created a vilification culture towards Russians that lasted until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. It was revived with the ascendency of Vladimir Putin’s leadership (1999 to the present).

After a disastrous decade of US “shock therapy” conversion attempts on its economy in the 1990s involving a team from the Harvard [University] Institute for International Development, Russia was in tatters politically, economically, socially, militarily, and culturally by the turn of the century. The US-financed, managed, and rigged 1996 election of the inebriate president Boris Yeltsin laid Russia open to exploitation both by domestic oligarchs who took over the most lucrative former state enterprises and by American ideologues involved in organizing the neoconservative “unipolar moment” (that is, US absolute hegemony in the world). But as dialectics would intercede, Russia awoke from its national and international humiliation.

Within a few years, according to the later Russia scholar Stephen Cohen, following his assumption of power, the Putin government turned the economy around, ended the massive unemployment crisis, radically reduced poverty and improved living standards, significantly lowered the rates of early mortality and alcoholism, helped end the national social depression, and restored a higher level of order and national self-confidence among the Russian working class. The Russian public has consistently given him high approval ratings, averaging well over 70%, 86% in May 2025. Repression of oppositional forces has been a feature of Russian politics throughout its history, the Putin era indeed representing a relatively liberal period.

Putin also arrested oligarchs or forced them out of the country, was credited with restoring a positive sense of the future, which the people hadn’t experienced in decades, and began to again return Russia to its former position of strength in the world. Although he certainly has his domestic enemies, mostly coming from the right, ultra-nationalist side of the spectrum, Putin has remained highly respected as a leader for a quarter of a century, as registered in national polling.

This perspective on Putin’s leadership is never discussed in the highly partisan MSM, which is stuck in infantile demonological stereotypes of and prejudices toward the Russian people and their leaders – from Bullwinkle to James Bond’s nemeses to Ivan Drago to Yulian Kuznetsov in Nobody and dozens of other go-to villains, spies, vodka swilling drunks, and criminals in American popular political culture. The........

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