We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, April 21, 2014

‘Kiev desperately pushing for greater conflict with Russia’

Click here to access a 4:37m interview (with transcript) with German investigative journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter posted on RT.

Ochsenreiter argues that the right sector in Ukraine is trying desperately to bring on a wider war in Ukraine by violating any agreements reached by international parties. He poses the worrying argument that this is a deliberate ploy by Western agents so that they can have deniability for their aggressive agenda to bring all of Ukraine under NATO control. 

This argument is very bewildering to me because I do not see that the present US regime or their counterparts in Europe are prepared for the dangerous potential such actions have to bring about a wider war. To be sure there are right-wing elements in the the West who have a very arrogant attitude toward Russia and believe they can intimidate Russia, but there have been official statements coming from the Obama administration that suggest a desire to dissipate the crisis in Ukraine. So, what are the real policies informing US Empire actions? If the German journalist's argument is correct, then Western agents are playing a very dangerous game in Europe. He writes in reference to the new regime brought to power by the violent overthrow of the government: 
 It’s a failed state, so the government in Kiev is nothing else as satellite government. It’s a mix of oligarchs and organized crime, and of course terrorists – the Right Sector. We should see it as a terrorist organization, activists of the Right Sector fought in Chechen wars against Russia alongside Islamism terrorists. So we should see that Kiev doesn’t have a will as well as the power to crack down on those people [in Eastern Ukrainian], and that long since [for several] weeks other people telling [them] what to be done, what not, we have to see that American advisors already active there, that there are NATO advisors, we have to see this in a context that Poland is asking for 10,000 US troops on their soil. Something big is going on and the Right Sector’s aggression against the Eastern Ukrainian is just a little pretext of what we will maybe expect within the next weeks.