How easily are Americans fooled by the media or by politicians? Do you remember Jay Leno doing street surveys asking Americans simple geo-political questions, like, “what is the capital of the state you reside within?” Here is one from spring 2019.
Has telling lies to the public or dumbing down the truth diminished the level of informed participation in democracy?
Firstly, the Russian military operation or invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked. This war has been going on since the 2014 USA CIA-instigated Maidan Revolution to unseat a pro-Russia elected president of Ukraine.
Is there any point in sharing the truth with the masses against a state-generated wall of deception.
By Melissa Hemingway in Ukraine since March 2022
Washington has meddled in the political affairs of many of the world’s countries. Ukraine is one of them.
Do Americans know that, really? For example, media in America covered up or at least suppressed stories about the Biden money-making capers in Ukraine.
The United States has also invaded many countries with massive deaths and total infrastructure destruction being the result. These invasions are usually conducted because of the money that the military industrial complex pays to politicians and because that is how America maintains its global power. It’s all done with massive lies like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that never existed.
First the USA and its paid-off (advertising and other monetary support) media sews a chilling fear by sanctioning people; by creating imaginary horrific enemies; and by suggesting that a war will start and will bring to the whole world new terrorism or outright global carnage.
Since 2014 some 14,000 Ukrainian Russians have been killed in Donbass by Ukrainian Nazi brigades, Ukrainian regular soldiers, and the West’s state-hired mercenaries.
Why? These oppressed ethnic Russians in the Donbass area had chosen to go their own way; to break away from Ukraine and finally in 2014, two regions formed their own independent sovereign states known as Luhansk PR and Donetsk PR.
These breakaway states are only recognized by a dozen state entities. There are independent states all over the world nobody recognizes as nations. That does not make them less real. It does not make these peoples’ self-determination any less true.
The People’s Republic of Donetsk (DPR) reports that 99.23% of eligible voters voted for the entry of the Donetsk People’s Republic into the Russian Federation. 2,116,800 Inhabitants of the Republic cast a vote.
A total of 2,187,691 persons in the DPR were eligible voters and thus included on the official lists of participants in the DPR referendum. This was announced by the Chairman of the Central Election Commission of the DPR, Vladimir Vysotsky.
“All these five days we lived in a single impulse, we voted, we organized voting, we counted turnout, votes. This stage flew by like one day. I remember the very beginning and I remember yesterday’s meeting. And everything that was in between was like one big adventure, one big road home to Russia,” said Vladimir Vysotsky.
Denis Pushilin (left) accepted the final referendum report from the Donetsk People’s Republic Central Election Commission Chairman Vladimir Vysotsky (right) who reported the results of the referendum on Wednesday to the DPR president. Photo credit: Official DPR Photo. Photo is cropped. Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Luhansk PR Photo by Sputnik/Valery Melnikov
Voting poll in Luhansk PR where 98% of voters supported joining Russia.
People already voted with their feet. The referendum is pointless because those who do not choose the Russian side have fled long ago, even years ago in the case of the Luhansk and Donetsk 2014-breakaway republics.
The plebiscite or referendum as many call the 23-27 September vote in Luhansk PR and Donetsk PR is nearly 100% in favour of aligning with the Russian Federation, joining as provinces of Russia or some other arrangement, but essentially becoming part of Russia. These two Republics are on the Russian border and are Russian speakers. People who disagree with this concept in these areas left the region long ago. The people who stayed have been shelled and bombarded incessantly by the West since 2014.
Both the portion of Zaporozhye polled and the Kherson region where a referendum took place are nearly empty of their original populations. People supporting the Ukraine side have fled. People supporting the Russian side are in their glory. They are very well treated by the Russian forces and Russian humanitarian workers bringing relief aid. Officials there had processed all ballots by late Tuesday, where respectively 93% and 87% of voters backed leaving Ukraine and unifying with Russia.
Interactive Update By Author
Update 8:47 p.m. 28 September 2022 in response to reader questions. —–Melissa Hemingway
“Jane” from Iowa wrote a fairly extensive letter to FPMag. The answer to your question follows, sister.
We of The RINJ Foundation—that’s who I work for and that is our Publisher—did not have many people we could spare as volunteers to help with the referendum crowds. We tried. We sent 18 volunteers across the whole Donbass to pass out free masks and drinking water at the lineups.
We used a couple of our medivac mini buses to get around and to resupply workers. Basically, we took on a purely public health role. Some voters were in line for a long time. The people doing the polling were inexperienced although diligent and enthusiastic. On the negative side, they were slow and fastidious. Many people had impatient little kids with them because they could not find sitters but still wanted to have their say. Our workers are skilled in managing groups of children at our shelters and did a wonderful job of creating little play-pods along the lines where kids could blow up balloons, meet each other and play supervised games like hopscotch, tag, and word games.
The other question from some other people, was about bullying the people being polled. We did not see any of this, but we do not ever get involved in that side of things. Our workers were told to stay completely away from the voting.
We did however hear about polling teams going into some rural areas where the citizens were angry and rude and yelled at the pollsters to go away. They had no ID in some cases. Many people had not heard about the poll because they lived in a busy war zone area. Those people were rare but apparently very loud. A few polling persons were scared, and one quit after being yelled at, we heard. Apparently, she regained her nerve and went into a better area the next day and was happy to have her issues addressed.
Maybe there was not enough security for the ‘bean counters’ as we affectionately referred to many who were actually accountants and bookkeepers who had been enlisted for this work. Many tended to be focused on their job, not skilled in meeting the public, and very shy. The only requests we offered authorities were about safety of the workers. But there were no mishaps despite there not being enough security people to accompany every poll captain hence it is a moot point—it’s done, and we saw no grave mishaps.
Were people urged to get out and vote? Well, yes, I think people are pushed to vote in every election everywhere. We did not see any kind of coercion however, It was more like the opposite. People were insisting on the chance to vote. Some were impatient but when they complained, radio calls were made, and more polling clerks arrived and started a new line.
“The people got the idea that they were not being excluded, and that made many people very happy,” Alona, one of the supervisors told me. Many voters said they came out, instead of waiting at home, to see the other people in the line and also because in some neighbourhoods the election workers could not reach every area.
In Donetsk, president Pushilin reacted to the shelling of a polling station by saying “Get out to the homes,” but folks wanted to go and meet up with neighbours and actually see who was still around—“who was alive,” said one elderly women I saw, and she was crying but being comforted. Apparently many seniors have passed during the past eight years of this damn war. One of the RSAC workers, Alona, is a psychology major and always stresses goodwill and positive thinking when dealing with patients and sheltered folks. She trained the public health workers that way. These NGO workers are amazing people. Rare, but amazing.
Finally, was this a fake or illegal referendum? Well, we don’t know what that is. That is not our expertise. I am a nurse doing double duty as a nurse and a reporter for FPMag. The public here is desperate for more medical workers and so is our organization. All people who work for The RINJ Foundation are trained to meet the public.
What I saw of the referendum was a chance to include people who had been living in their damn basements during the Ukrainian and American shelling for eight and a half years. We have been here since longer than that. Ukraine is the rape and HIV epicenter of the world. This area for women and girls has been a bloody nightmare. Kidnappings and rapes are common. The referendum I think personally, and this is only my personal opinion, is a deliberate effort to be inclusive of the public, and that is good medicine here. I don’t know or care anything about the politics. I loathe war and see with my own eyes that war is the creation of men in a sick patriarch. I have not met one woman or girl who favours war. I have seen Russian soldiers, especially the older guys, jump off their machines and go hug whole families and start yakking away in Russian and spreading the love. I keep going because I see that love is still alive here.
—Melissa Hemingway