Back Story: Orwellian-speak

There is no censorship in Ukraine. Ukraine has an open society.

The economy of Ukraine is stable and will continue to be so as long as this administration is in power or until the end of time, whichever comes first.

There is absolutely no corruption at the highest echelon of Ukrainian government. The existence of high-level corruption is a myth.

If you believe those statements to be true, I have hectares of prime farmland in the Chornobyl dead zone to sell you. In the administrations Orwellian-speak, black is white and white is chartreuse.

In fact, the official pronouncements often make the famous Twilight Zone seem as normal as Sunday morning pancakes and kefir. The truth is out there, perhaps hidden in a far-off black hole, but there. The sad thing is that at times the administration seems so earnest in its feel-good proclamations that one would think they actually believe it themselves.

It reminds me of some Ukrainian advertising contests, where the agency that bought first place convinces itself it won first place. Otherwise, why would they have been handed the gold-plated statuette?

I think this whole very translucent spin game is a remnant of the Soviet era. I was once in a meeting with the late Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Moscow in which he earnestly proclaimed interest in a nuclear arms limitation treaty (SALT II). He was passionate about it.

Four months later, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, thereby ensuring that the treaty, negotiated by several administrations, would not even be brought up in the U.S. Senate.

What sparked this discourse was the silent protest at the World Newspaper Congress in Kyiv recently where some 16 editors and journalists held signs reading: Stop Censorship and Media Oligarchs Serve the Authorities during President Viktor Yanukovychs address.

The irony is that as the president boasted about Ukraines open society and asserted that it was free of censorship, his security guards were trying to take away the protest signs, knocking around a couple of journalists in the process.

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Back Story: Orwellian-speak