• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In the 1983 Turkish election, held under military rule, with harsh censorship and only three parties “led by politicians sympathetic to the military government” allowed to run, the Times found that “Turkey Approaches Democracy.”47 Similarly, in Uruguay’s 1984 election, under another military regime that jailed the leading opposition candidate and also refused to allow a second major candidate to run, but organized by a government approved by the U.S. State Department, the Times once again found that “Uruguay is resuming its democratic vocation . . . the generals are yielding to the infectious resurgence of democracy in much of Latin America.”48

The Russian election of 1996 was important to the United States and its allies, as Boris Yeltsin, the ruler who was carrying out their favored policies of privatization and the integration of Russia into the global financial system, was seriously threatened with defeat. The Yeltsin government had presided over a 50 percent fall in national output and large income declines for 90 percent of the population, while the hugely corrupt privatization process provided windfalls to a small minority, including an important criminal class. The social welfare and health care systems had disintegrated under Yeltsin’s rule, contributing to a startling rise in infectious diseases and mortality rates. Just before the 1996 election campaign, Yeltsin’s popularity rating was 8 percent. That he could win re-election in such circumstances suggests—and reflects—a seriously flawed election.

However, with the Yeltsin regime strongly backed by the U.S. government and its Western allies, the New York Times once again found this election “A Victory for Russian Democracy,” and so did the U.S. mainstream media in general. For that paper of record, electoral flaws were slighted or ignored, and its editors declared the very fact of holding an “imperfect” election “a remarkable achievement.”49 The same bias was evident in reporting on the March 2000 Russian election, won by Yeltsin’s anointed heir and former KGB operative Vladimir Putin. Putin had built his popularity by conducting a brutal counterinsurgency war against Chechnya, and his electoral success rested heavily on the fact that the powerful state TV and radio stations campaigned furiously on his behalf and denigrated and gave no broadcasting time to his opponents. A September 2000 exposé of the Putin election campaign by the expatriate Moscow Times, based on a six-month investigative effort, uncovered compelling evidence of election fraud, including ballot stuffing, ballot destruction, and the creation of 1.3 million “dead souls” inflating the election rolls.50 The U.S. mainstream media, however, never found any evidence of fraud at the time of the election, and they have been reluctant to report the findings of the Moscow Times study.51 Putin is another “reformer,” like Yeltsin, supported by the West, so that it follows once again that for the mainstream media a flawed election—hardly admitted to be flawed—remains better than none.52

THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO ASSASSINATE THE POPE

During the Reagan era (1981–88), there was a concerted effort to demonize the Soviet Union, in order to support a major arms buildup and a new, more aggressive policy in the Third World and globally. The Soviet Union was described as an “Evil Empire” and accused of sponsoring international terrorism as well as abusing its own and client-nation peoples.53 When the would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981, this provided the basis for one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War era.

Although the pope’s assailant was a Turkish fascist and member of a violently anti-left party in Turkey, after a seventeen-month stint in an Italian prison Agca “confessed” that he had been hired by the KGB and Bulgarians. This confession was convenient, fitting well the interests of the dominant Italian parties anxious to discredit the powerful Italian