Paul Craig Roberts

Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war. Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don’t want the deaths to have been in vain.

Consequently, wars become glorious deeds performed by noble soldiers fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Patriotic speeches tell us how much we owe to those who gave their lives so that America could remain free.

The speeches are well-intentioned, but the speeches create a false reality that supports ever more wars. None of America’s wars had anything to do with keeping America free. To the contrary, the wars swept away our civil liberties, making us unfree.

President Lincoln issued an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of northern newspaper reporters and editors. He shut down 300 northern newspapers and held 14,000 political prisoners. Lincoln arrested war critic US Representative Clement Vallandigham from Ohio and exiled him to the Confederacy. President Woodrow Wilson used WWI to suppress free speech, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt used WWII to intern 120,000 US citizens of Japanese descent on the grounds that race made them suspect. Professor Samuel Walker concluded that President George W. Bush used the “war on terror” for an across the board assault on US civil liberty, making the Bush regime the greatest danger American liberty has ever faced.

Lincoln forever destroyed states’ rights, but the suspension of habeas corpus and free speech that went hand in hand with America’s three largest wars was lifted at war’s end. However, President George W. Bush’s repeal of the Constitution has been expanded by President Obama and codified by Congress and executive orders into law. Far from defending our liberties, our soldiers who died in “the war on terror” died so that the president can indefinitely detain US citizens without due process of law and murder US citizens on suspicion alone without any accountability to law or the Constitution.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.” - The conclusion is unavoidable that America’s wars have not protected our liberty but, instead, destroyed liberty.

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Stephen Lendman

Presidential aspirants were all putschist-approved. They're fascists. Ballot choices excluded democrats. Several legitimate candidates dropped out. They were threatened. They feared for their lives.

Ukrainians chose a president, Kiev mayor, Kiev Council deputies and six regional center mayors - in Mykolaiv, Odessa, Sumy, Kherson, Cherkasy and Chernivtsi. If no presidential aspirant wins a majority, second round voting is scheduled for June 15. About 35 million Ukrainians were eligible to vote. So were diaspora ones. They number around 470,000. Scores of polling stations opened in 75 countries.

On election eve, coup-appointed prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk addressed Ukrainians. He pressured them to vote.

"Tomorrow we will prove to the whole world, and first of all to ourselves, that it is not possible to intimidate us, that we are going to decide ourselves how to rebuild our home and how to work in it," he said. "But we have fought for these elections. We are defending our land, restoring our military, rebuilding the destroyed industry, destroying the schemes that had been washing billions out of the country." "We are learning to control the power and laying the ground for further development…By our ballots we elect and thus win."

He addressed Donetsk and Lugansk freedom fighters, adding:

"I want to assure you. Not much time is left for the bandits, terrorizing your regions."

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Paul Craig Roberts

The red states are Asian and the blue states European.

Western propaganda about events in Ukraine has two main purposes. One is to cover up, or to distract from, Washington’s role in overthrowing the elected democratic government of Ukraine. The other is to demonize Russia.

The truth is known, but truth is not a part of the Western TV and print media. The intercepted telephone call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt reveals the two coup plotters discussing which of Washington’s stooges will be installed as Washington’s person in the new puppet government. The intercepted telephone call between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and EU foreign policy official Catherine Ashton revealed suspicions, later confirmed by independent reports, that the sniper fire that killed people on both sides of the Kiev protests came from the Washington-backed side of the conflict.

Fast backward: When Washington orchestrated the “Orange Revolution” in 2004, the revolution failed to deliver Ukraine into Western hands in spite of the fact that Washington had poured billions of dollars in to the country. According to Victoria Nuland, by 2013 it had poured $5 billion into the Ukraine since the early 90-ties. The money had gone to politicians, whom Washington had groomed, and to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operated as educational, pro-democracy, and human rights groups, but in fact were Washington’s fifth columns.

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