Peter Schwarz

The European Union and the US used last weekend’s Munich Security Conference to massively step up pressure on Ukraine. They are seeking to install a technocratic government pledged to implement harsh economic reforms drafted by the International Monetary Fund, change the constitution, curtail the power of the president and bring the opposition into power.

To achieve their aims they are planning substantial short-term financial assistance for Ukraine, as EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton reported. Ashton explained these plans to the Wall Street Journal, which wrote of “the West’s most significant move to date to reopen the geopolitical struggle for Kiev since Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych turned his back on an EU economic pact and, instead, signed a deal with Russia for $15 billion in aid.”

In contrast to most other media outlets, the mouthpiece of Wall Street refrained from euphemistic phrases about freedom and democracy and openly admitted the real aim of the Western powers in Ukraine: a “geopolitical contest for influence” and a struggle “to blunt Moscow’s ability to control Ukraine economically and politically.”

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William T. Hathaway

This photo of my parents reveals much about their personalities (hers vivacious and outgoing, his withdrawn and closed off), their relationship (little real contact), and also the times (could be captioned Gender Roles in the 1950s: The Bathing Beauty and the Soldier).

The typicality of their lives reveals much about the USA. My mother was a farmer's daughter whose father lost the farm to the banks, and they had to scrabble along in the slums of the big city, St. Louis. All her life she yearned for her bucolic childhood when everything was "nice." My father was a coal miner and the son of a coal miner from West Virginia. He hated the mines so much that after the Second World War he stayed in the military as a professional soldier.

Both were imbued with the all-American drive to get ahead of the pack, to wrest advantage over others. My mother's great-great-grandfather had gotten ahead by owning slaves, using their stolen labor to become wealthy. Although he died decades before she was born, she spoke of him with patriarchal reverence, telling what a good master he had been. His slaves loved him so much that during the Civil War they protected him from Yankee soldiers by hiding him in a well, then hauling him back up when they were gone. She admitted that not all masters were that kind, though, and she felt slavery wasn't a good thing. But it was the only way for the Negroes to come to America. Most of the Europeans could afford to pay their way over, but the Africans didn't have money, so they signed up to be slaves in order to come here.

Deep down my mother knew this wasn't true, but she repeated it as a litany to shore up the family myth that great-great-grandfather had been a good man, hadn't done anything wrong in achieving his success.

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Wayne Madsen

Make no mistake about it, Ukraine’s troubles, engineered from outside of the country by the usual troika of the European Union «securocrats» who are beholden to the interests of the United States and NATO, George Soros-funded and U.S. non-governmental organization-trained street and social media provocateurs, and the Central Intelligence Agency and its diplomat-spies, is a template for what the West has planned for Russia…

The so-called «Euromaidan» protest, so named because pro-European Union protesters turned Kyiv’s Maidan (Independence) Square into a version of Cairo’s Tahrir (Freedom) Square in the early stages of the Western-backed insurrection against the democratically- elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, was a replay of the Orange Revolution of 2004 that installed pro-U.S. Viktor Yushchenko into office. Ruling with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the Yushchenko regime was beset with scandal after scandal and finally rejected by Ukraine’s voters. But elections that go against the interests of the EU, NATO, the European central bankers, and the Soros provocateurs on the payroll of the CIA are never tolerated for long.

In keeping with the new policy of the United States to turn its embassies around the world into hives for the opposition in nations where the U.S. opposes the ruling government, the U.S. embassy in Kyiv has been headed by an interventionist ambassador.

Just as U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul has thrown open the doors of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to political provocateurs opposed to the government, the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, has done the same with so-called Maidan protesters. Pyatt, who is accredited to the government of Ukraine, promised his full support to the protesters, a hostile act, which in the past would have had any American ambassador expelled from any country to which he or she were accredited for gross interference in the domestic affairs of the host nation…

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