The U.S. corporate media are in lock step lying and distorting the events in Ukraine. These are many little lies leading to another version of the Big Lie, as explained by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and used to justify U.S. aggression from Vietnam to Iraq and Libya.

The good news is that despite all the lies about Ukraine, every opinion poll shows the U.S. population wants no active involvement there.

Every news feed and articles on Ukraine here are saturated with references to “Russian dominance,” “Russian schemes” and “Russian operatives.” Those who resist the illegal Kiev coup regime might be called “forces,” “terrorists,” “separatists,” “militias” or “saboteurs,” but always with the adjective “pro-Russian” or “Russian-speaking.” They confront “Ukrainian soldiers seeking the unity of Ukraine.”

In news articles, commentators and politicians will use these terms often 10 times or more, even though all the resistance fighters are Ukrainian citizens and many have ethnic Ukrainian names. It is no accident that the media characterize workers who have lived for generations in Ukraine this way.

This ploy is accompanied by massive corporate media demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is called “scheming,” “domineering,” “secretive,” “authoritarian,” “manipulative,” “two-faced,” “overbearing,” and on down the thesaurus list of pejoratives. Pundits call Putin “solely responsible for the crisis” and demand he end it by submitting to Washington’s demands that Ukraine sign the Association Agreement and join the European Union and NATO.

They also want Putin to disarm the eastern Ukraine’s popular resistance to the fascist gangs that just burned 40 people to death in Odessa.

The Kiev coup regime — a completely illegal right-wing grouping that overturned the elected government to seize power in Ukraine — is neutrally described as the “Kiev government” or “Ukrainian government.” The corporate media call the fascist Right Sector and other neo-Nazi forces running this regime’s police and army, “government officials.”

These “officials” meet other officials in the White House, with the United Nations Security Council and with the EU to agree to austerity without the media challenging their legitimacy.

Every U.S. official who discusses the danger of Russian troop movement — within Russia — gets air time. Little to nothing is even reported of U.S. destroyers deploying in the Black Sea, NATO troop deployments eastward, jets and missile bases in eight countries encircling Russia or scheduled “U.S./NATO war games” in the region.

NATO’s expansion of military bases and interlocking U.S. dominated military commands with 28 NATO countries have been relabeled as a Russian campaign to expand its borders.

There are repeated warnings, without proof, about secret Russian agents, but little about CIA head Brennan’s visit to Kiev or the FBI agents and military advisers there.

Past Lies

U.S. imperialism has the world’s most powerful media, aimed during the buildup to war to saturate popular consciousness with justification for coming criminal actions. The challenge for corporate power in every war is that it must always hide with a saturation of slanders and non-facts repeated relentlessly this basic reality: Its endless wars are for profits, and the conquest and control of markets and resources.

The corporate media’s role is to set the terms of debate by using an unrelenting bias and a conscious distortion of even well-recognized facts, thus laying the ground for a fraudulent war provocation.

The Big Lie

The “Big Lie” that leads to military action is often exposed later, as with the fraudulent claim about “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the wild charges of “genocide” that were used to justify a “humanitarian” bombing of Serbia in 1999 or Libya 2011.

After a “Big Lie” has achieved its aim, historians, media talking heads and politicians may later complain that they were lied to. But no one is ever held accountable for lies that led to millions of deaths.

Even those who oppose the war, in an effort to sound objective, may allow the chorus of war propaganda to infect their consciousness and terminology. The most important role for the anti-war movement, regardless of its size, is to take action and refuse to give any credibility to the lies of the ruling-class media.

Majority in U.S. oppose war

This time the lie campaign is failing. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who sold the murderous Iraq sanctions and the bombing of Yugoslavia, criticized the U.S. corporate media for this failure to sell the conflict with Russia.

On April 30, she told an audience at the militarist, neocon think tank of “foreign policy and business leaders” called the Atlantic Council, “There is not enough of an explanation to the American people as to how important it is to deal firmly with Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. … I am very troubled by today’s poll published by the Wall Street Journal,” which confirms other surveys showing that “Americans want to worry about themselves” so that fewer than one-fifth of the U.S. population want more active U.S. “engagement in Ukraine.”

A USA Today/Pew Research Center Poll released on April 28 reported that the U.S. population opposed by more than 2 to 1 the idea of sending arms or military supplies to the Ukrainian government “to bolster its defenses against Russian forces.” So even with the most twisted, inaccurate and loaded wording on this poll, the best spin the media could put on these figures was that half the population would support economic sanctions.

The slipping position of U.S. imperialism and the growing hardships faced at home do not mean less media war propaganda, but more likely expanding it to a “Big Lie” to prepare for a serious war provocation.

May 4 — Imagine a gathering of diverse activists in a medium-sized U.S. city, representing low-wage workers, communities mobilizing against police brutality and radical organizations. It might be an Occupy Wall Street encampment, a civil rights rally or anti-war conference. You may have attended such events yourself.

Now imagine this gathering was attacked by a thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan, dispatched with government approval. Consider that the Klan members, armed with gasoline bombs, baseball bats and firearms, chased the unarmed activists into a union hall and set fire to the building.

Suppose dozens of activists died in the fire, while others were shot dead or beaten to death while trying to escape the inferno. What if police then arrested survivors and the media blamed them for the blaze, while the bigots responsible were allowed to escape?

How would the workers’ and progressive movements respond to such an atrocity?

This is the horrific scenario that played out in Odessa, Ukraine, on May 2.

Neo-Nazi gangs bused in from western Ukraine marched through the city, posing as sports fans going to a soccer match. They attacked local anti-fascist activists who tried to block them outside a shopping center.

The fascists set fire to the protest encampment set up by opponents of the U.S.-backed coup, forcing their unarmed opponents to retreat. Workers at the nearby House of Trade Unions opened their doors to shelter the activists.

Then the neo-Nazis attacked the trade union building, setting it ablaze. Paramilitary goons fired guns into windows, killing and wounding those attempting to escape. Some activists leaped from high windows and survived, only to be beaten to death on the ground.

In all, 46 anti-fascists were killed, most during the murderous attack on the trade union building. They included men and women, youths and seniors, activists and workers.

Photographs taken the following morning inside the trade union building show bodies charred beyond recognition, some having been shot, others suffocated or burned to death while half-hanging out of windows.

Some of the survivors were arrested. The killers were allowed to leave, to be used again another day.

On May 4, more than 1,000 courageous Odessans protested outside police headquarters and forced the authorities to release arrested anti-fascist protesters, including survivors of the attack on the trade union building. As they were released, the people chanted, “Heroes!”

Washington’s guilty silence

From the government of Russia to the European Left parliamentary group, angry messages of protest against the massacre and condolences for the people of Odessa poured in. But in Washington, there was silence — though President Obama did find time to praise Kiev’s attack on cities in the rebellious Donetsk region to “restore order.” So far, 13 unarmed activists and civilians in Slavyansk and 10 more in Kramatorsk have been killed in this latest offensive, falsely labeled “anti-terrorist.”

The corporate media have tied themselves in knots to avoid reporting the truth about Odessa. For example, a May 2 Reuters news agency report on the massacre never mentioned that those who died in the blaze were opponents of the Kiev regime, and only quoted pro-regime figures who blamed “Russian agents” for the violence.

Now, following lockstep with the latest fiction from Kiev, the media are trying to cast doubt on who set fire to the trade union building, or are even openly blaming the victims, despite ample video and photographic evidence of the fascist attack — much of it recorded and uploaded to the Internet by the fascists themselves!

Why are the media going to such lengths to cover up the truth?

Because the Kiev junta and its masters in Washington are responsible for the massacre.

The attack in Odessa was choreographed by Kiev. Police were deliberately withdrawn from the area of the fascist rampage to guard the Odessa headquarters of the Interior Ministry, headed by far rightist Arsen Avakov.

It also took place simultaneously with the fierce military assault on the city of Slavyansk.

Government leaders from both the Democratic and Republican parties were deeply involved in the planning and execution of the illegal February coup against the elected government. They have pushed their agents in the Ukrainian government to unleash neo-Nazi terror against the people of southeast Ukraine resisting the coup regime.

The U.S. has carried out a provocative military buildup in Eastern Europe and a propaganda war against Russia, blaming it for the anti-fascist rebellion sweeping southeast Ukraine.

Without even questioning its own support for the illegal Kiev junta, the U.S. has promised lavish loans, encouraged a multibillion-dollar IMF aid package and provided international political cover for Kiev.

Further, it was revealed by the German newspaper Bild am Sontag on May 4 that U.S. FBI and CIA agents are stationed in Kiev to “advise” the coup regime on its fight against the anti-fascist movement in the southeast.

This fits a long pattern of U.S. imperialist collaboration with fascist murderers to achieve its ends, from Indonesia to Chile to the former Yugoslavia.

‘Remember and fight’

Alex Albu, local coordinator of the leftist Union Borotba (Struggle), an elected member of the Odessa Regional Council, and candidate for mayor, was badly beaten while escaping the fire. Another Borotba member was shot in the stomach but survived.

Among those killed was Andrew Brazhevsky, a young Borotba member. His comrades report that Brazhevsky tried to escape the inferno by jumping from a high floor of the trade union building. He survived the fall, but was beaten to death by neo-Nazis waiting below to attack survivors.

“Andrew was a staunch communist, who devoted a lot of time to self-education, read the Marxist classics and modern leftist authors,” his comrades recalled. “The Odessa left remembers that this modest, intelligent guy tried not to miss a single political action, and has always been at the forefront.

“When the neo-Nazi forces came to power in Ukraine, Andrew enrolled in Odessa militias to defend their city from the Nazis. Unfortunately, that day the superiority of the forces was not on the side of the defenders of Odessa.

“Andrew, your death will not remain unavenged. Neo-Nazis are not masters in our cities, in our streets. We promise to remember you and fight.”

The criminal attack on Odessa by the fascist gangs has the potential to galvanize the people of southeast Ukraine to fight back with even more determination to destroy the fascist junta and push back U.S. imperialism’s drive to war against Russia.

It is the responsibility of workers and all progressive forces in the U.S. to tell the truth about what happened in Odessa, and to stop the imperialists from carrying out further war crimes against the people of Odessa, Ukraine and Russia.

May 4 — U.S. imperialism has orchestrated and approved a new military offensive against the anti-Kiev resistance in towns and cities of the populous, industrial region of eastern Ukraine. This is playing with fire.

The offensive included an unspeakable massacre in Odessa, attacks on defenseless checkpoints around towns and cities, sudden helicopter raids and indiscriminate killing of civilians.

This offensive, underway now, aims at pumping some credibility into the discredited, illegal junta that Washington put in power by unleashing fascist violence against the elected Viktor Yanukovich government. These same fascists just carried out the Odessa massacre.

Besides trying to damage the resistance, the offensive is also aimed at provoking Russia’s government, which has repeatedly warned against launching violent attacks on the popular forces in Ukraine’s east.

Washington’s aim is to goad Russia into countermeasures that could serve as a pretext for a further escalation, either by wider sanctions, increased military pressure or both.

Aim is to stop incipient dual power

A more fundamental way to view this latest U.S.-backed “anti-terrorism offensive” is that it is a desperate attempt to break the momentum of a developing, incipient dual power in Ukraine’s southeastern region — especially to undermine the planned May 11 referendum in the east on federalization and autonomy.

This prospect became frighteningly evident to Washington after Kiev’s first offensive ended in ignominious collapse. The coup regime sent two columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers to oust the armed popular forces occupying government buildings. Local anti-Kiev authorities were widely supported by the population, who greeted the armored columns and prevailed upon them to refuse to attack their own people.

The result: Tanks, armored personnel carriers and ammunition were at day’s end in the hands of the resistance in Donetsk and Slovyansk. The Kiev putschists’ authority totally dissolved in the area. Two poles of authority were developing:  Kiev’s putschists, backed by imperialism and fascist forces, on one side; the resistance on the other. In a growing number of cities and towns of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the anti-Kiev and anti-fascist forces had established local authority.

This first April 12 offensive came after a visit to Kiev by CIA head John Brennan. His strategy failed and his advice came to naught. The defeat was not only Kiev’s, but Washington’s.

The collapse of this offensive gave further impetus to the resistance, which took over more cities and towns.

This latest May 2 offensive, while inflicting some losses on the side of the resistance, has so far left the strategic centers under control of popular forces.

To get beyond the lying propaganda in nearly all the capitalist media — including the New York Times itself — that government officials and politicians were spouting daily,  and to better understand these popular forces, the Times sent two of its reporters to Slovyansk to get a real assessment of the forces on the ground.

Their article in the Times of May 3 focused on a key unit of military defense in Slovyansk — the 12th Company of the Peoples Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Its commander was an “ordinary eastern Ukrainian” named Yuri, who was a former Soviet special forces commander in Afghanistan. He served four years in Kandahar fighting counterrevolutionaries who eventually overthrew the pro-socialist government in Kabul.

After all the propaganda insisting that Russian forces were behind the rebellion in the east, the reporters were forced to conclude that “the rebels of the 12th Company appear to be Ukrainian” who were veterans of the Soviet, Russian or Ukrainian armies.  They share a “passionate distrust of Ukraine’s government and the western powers that support it.”

The fighters shook their heads when asked if they were paid by Russia or the oligarchs to fight. “This is not a job. It is a service,” said a fighter named Dmitri. If Russia were behind them, they would have new weapons. The weapons they have were “taken from police buildings and a column of captured Ukrainian armored vehicles or bought from corrupt Ukrainian soldiers.”

The unit has widespread popular support. It has a network of spotters who track Ukrainian armed forces and fascists.  The Times reporters witnessed a crowd laboring to build a barricade and a bunker beside a bridge over a canal.

The population feeds them with healthful food. A volunteer’s mother set up a company kitchen, stocked by the people. There are barracks in a garage and an armory in a shed. The local police accept the militia’s authority and go about their patrols normally.

The fighters denounced the fascists and right wing in Kiev because “in western Ukraine they showed their faces: Nazis, fascist. … They destroyed monuments to Lenin, attacked our history.”

This is a clear picture in microcosm of incipient dual power. The anti-Kiev forces still have no central regional body to represent them politically. They have no centralized, regional military command yet, nor have they agreed upon common political demands. There is a long way to go.

But these obstacles can be overcome in time. If they succeed in holding the May 11 regional referendum in the east on federation, this can be a step toward regional autonomy or even regional separation.  This is precisely what imperialism and its right-wing stooges in Kiev are trying to forestall, disrupt and destroy, by any means necessary.

Where are the ruling class ‘doves’?

Just days before this second offensive, Secretary of State John Kerry declared at the Atlantic Council, “We will defend every inch of NATO territory.” In almost the same breath he mentioned Ukraine.

In fact, no NATO nation is under attack or under threat by Russia or anybody else. So this belligerent statement implied that NATO had military responsibility for Ukraine. By using ambiguous language, Kerry had virtually inducted Ukraine into NATO for purposes of military defense, without actually saying so.

This was a highly provocative pronouncement by the U.S. secretary of state. It was preceded by a statement from the Obama administration that its new doctrine was the “containment of Russia” and an end to dealing with the Putin administration.

The lack of any opposition to these provocations from any significant quarters in the U.S. ruling class is telling and ominous.

In fact, the present scenario is reminiscent of the run-up to the U.S. war on Iraq. The most adventurous sectors of the capitalist state and the political establishment seized the initiative to push U.S. imperialism’s aggressive expansion. President George W. Bush was backed by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as they engineered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

They promoted the doctrine of “preemptive warfare.” They lied repeatedly about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.” “Shock and awe” followed, and U.S. troops marched to Baghdad and accomplished the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration predicted that the war would be over and Iraq reorganized in three to six months.

Eight years of violent U.S. occupation and the current unstable puppet regime themselves document the strategic blunders and monumental miscalculations of the Bush administration.

In the same way, the adventurist wing of the present U.S. capitalist state seems to be running U.S. policy in Ukraine. These elements engineered the seizure of the government in Kiev and dragged Ukraine into the EU and closer to NATO. They thought the Feb. 22 Kiev coup would end the conflict. But, as with the invasion of Iraq, it was just the beginning.

The differences between 2003 and 2014 are two-fold. First, the stakes involved in a conflict with Russia are potentially far greater than in the Iraq occupation. Second, the ruling class, the political establishment and its brain trust have all lined up and are marching in lock step behind the new war drive without even a discussion. This contrasts with the fears expressed in the ruling class before the war on Iraq, especially after the massive anti-war demonstrations of January and February 2003, before the March invasion.

In the past decade, the political moderates who might have been expected to express alarm over the present belligerent posture toward Russia have either retired or been pushed out of most of the significant political and administrative positions in the state. To be sure, no moderate ruling-class opposition ever stopped an imperialist war. But open debate in the ruling class can awaken the masses to the danger and help give impetus to an anti-war movement.

The working class must be made aware of the potential danger of the current situation, and the movement must mobilize without waiting for a bourgeois imperialist opposition, which may not develop until the direct conflict with Russia sharpens. The time to fight against this war is now.

Fred Goldstein is the author of “Low-Wage Capitalism” and “Capitalism at a Dead End,” which has been translated into Spanish as “El capitalismo en un callejón sin salida.” Website and blog: lowwagecapitalism.com