Volume 6, No. 2, February 2005

 

Orchestrating crisis in Ukraine

This article was reprinted in the Dec.8 04 issue of The Hindu, before the two elections took place in Ukraine. It exposes the fraud of the much-propagated "Orange Revolution" as nothing but hysteria orchestrated by the US and the EU (in this case they were on the same side) against the discontent against Russian domination. Though all elections in these CIS countries are normally stage-managed, and there is hardly any democracy in these countries, the US/EU forced the cancellation of the first elections saying that it was not ‘free and fair’. With thousands of western ‘observers’ swarming around the second elections the US/EU puppet won. This electoral battle saw heightened contention between the West and Russia for a rich land. Russia seeks to re-assert its ‘rights’ over its backyard! — Editor

Mark Almond

 

People power is on track to score another triumph for western values in Ukraine. Over the last 15 years, the old Soviet bloc has witnessed recurrent fairy tale political upheavals. These modern morality tales always begin with a happy ending. But what happens to the people ‘once People Power has won?

The upheaval in Ukraine is presented as a battle between the people and Soviet-era power structures. The role of western cold war-era agencies is taboo. Poke your nose into the funding of the lavish carnival in Kiev, and the shrieks of rage show that you have touched a neuralgic point of the New World Order.

All politics costs money, and the crowd scenes broadcast daily from Kiev cost big bucks. Market economics may have triumphed, but if Milton Friedman were to remind the recipients of free food and drink in Independence Square that "there is no such thing as a free lunch," he would doubtless be branded a Stalinist. Few seem to ask what the people paying for People Power want in return for sponsoring all those rock concerts.

As an old cold war swagman, who carried tens of thousands of dollars to Soviet-bloc dissidents alongside much better respected academics, perhaps I can cast some light on what a Romanian friend called "our clan-destine period." Too many higher up the food chain of People Power seem reticent about making full disclosure.

Nowadays, we can google the names of foundations such as America’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a myriad surrogates funding Ukraine’s Pora movement or "independent" media. But unless you know the NED’s James Woolsey was also head of the CIA 10 years ago, are you any wiser?

Throughout the 1980s, in the build-up to 1989’s velvet revolutions, a small army of volunteers - and, let’s be frank, spies - cooperated to promote what became People Power. A network of interlocking foundations and charities mushroomed to organise the logistics of transferring millions of dollars to dissidents. The money came overwhelmingly from NATO states and covert allies such as "neutral" Sweden.

It is true that not every penny received by dissidents came from tax-payers. The U.S. billionauire, George Soros, set up the Open Society Foundation. How much it gave is difficult to verify, because Mr. Soros promotes openness for others, not himself.

The hangover from People Power is shock therapy. Each successive crowd is sold a multimedia vision of Euro-Atlantic prosperity by western-funded "independent" media to get them on the streets. No one dwells on the unemployment, rampant insider dealing, growth of organised crime, prostitution and soaring death rates in successful People Power states.

In 1989, our security services honed an ideal model as a mechanism for changing regimes, often using genuine volunteers. Dislike of the way communist states constrained ordinary people’s lives led me into undercover work, but witnessing mass pauperisation and cynical opportunism in the 1990s bred my disillusionment.

Of course, I should have recognised the symptoms of corruption earlier. Back in the 19805, our media portrayed Prague dissidents as selfless academics who were reduced to poverty for their principles, when they were in fact receiving $600-monthly stipends. Now they sit in the front row of the new Euro-Atlantic ruling class. The dowdy do-gander who seemed so devoted to making sure that every penny of her "charity" money got to a needy recipient is now a facilitator for investors in our old stamping grounds. The end of history was the birth of consultancy.

People Power is, it turns out, more about closing things than creating an open society. It shuts factories but, worse still, minds. Its advocates demand a free market in everything except opinion. The current ideologues of New World Order ideologues; many of whom are renegade communists, is Market-Leninism - that combination of a dogmatic economic model with Machiavellian methods, to grasp the levers of power.

©Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(Mark Almond is lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford University.)

 

 

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