Paul Craig Roberts

Satisfying A National Appetite For War: Before he became the 26th
president, Theodore Roosevelt (center) led the men of the 1st Cavalry
Volunteers, known as the "Rough Riders," on San Juan Hill during
the Spanish-American War in 1898. (Hulton Archive/Getty Archive)

The Spanish-American War was caused by three people: Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst. The war, which killed a number of Spaniards and Americans, including some prominent Harvard “Swells,” was based entirely on lies and machinations of these three men and served no purpose other than their personal needs. Princeton University historian Evan Thomas calls these three monsters The War Lovers.

Hearst needed a war to build his newspaper circulation. Roosevelt needed a war to
sate his blood-lust and desire for military glory. Lodge needed a war to reinvigorate American manhood and to enlist American manhood in his “Large Policy” of American Empire. Between them, thanks to the ignorance and stupidity of the American people, they pulled it off.

Their adversary was Speaker of the House, Thomas Brackett Reed, “the Czar,” the most powerful politician in Washington. Reed, an honest and incorruptible politician, saw Lodge’s policy of “American exceptionalism” as naked imperialism that stood in total opposition and in great danger to American purposes. Reed saw Roosevelt’s war lust as a diversion of national purpose from the reconstruction of an economy that increasingly served a shrinking minority at the expense of the American people. But Hearst, Roosevelt, and Lodge made “peace” an epithet. The American people, whose gullibility is never-ending, were captivated by war-lust. Reed lost confidence in the American people whom he so well served. Reed could find no moral purpose in pushing the country toward war over nothing but fake news reports by “yellow journalism.”

More »

Keith Jones

Stephen Harper is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting for the
West on Russia, Vladimir Putin and Crimea. (canada.com)

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Kiev for six hours Saturday to demonstrate the Canadian elite’s strong support for the fascist-spearheaded coup that ousted Ukraine’s elected president.

At a joint press conference with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the interim prime minister installed as a result of last month’s coup, Harper repeatedly denounced and threatened Russia.

He hypocritically painted Russia as an aggressor, when it was the US and Germany that engineered the overthrow of Ukraine’s president, and he lauded those now wielding state power in the Ukraine for their “restraint.” In fact, Ukraine’s new government has mounted one provocation after another, including declaring the country to be at war and creating a new National Guard so as to give official sanction to the fascist militia that spearheaded the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych.

Harper vowed that the western imperialist powers will not restore normal relations with Russia until it withdraws from Crimea—a strategic peninsula that was historically part of Russia and whose majority Russian-speaking population recently voted overwhelming to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.

More »

Diana Johnstone

“I sometimes get the feeling that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing.” – Vladimir Putin

Five years ago, I wrote a paper for a Belgrade conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In that paper I stressed that the disintegration of Yugoslavia had been used as an experimental laboratory to perfect various techniques that would subsequently be used in so-called “color revolutions” or other “regime change” operations directed against leaders considered undesirable by the United States government.

At that time, I specifically pointed to the similarities between the Krajina region of former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. Here is what I wrote at the time:

Where did the wars of Yugoslav disintegration break out most violently? In a region called the Krajina. Krajina means borderland. So does Ukraine – it is a variant of the same Slavic root. Both Krajina and Ukraine are borderlands between Catholic Christians in the West and Orthodox Christians in the East.

More »