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

Thursday, May 22, 2014

West promotes election held at gunpoint in Ukraine

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.

Empire directors are experts at creating demonstration elections. They've done this many times before and have perfected the political technology. (See this, this, this, and this.) 
Washington and its Western European allies are promoting Sunday’s election as a means of legitimizing the Western-backed, neo-fascist-led coup which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and installed an illegal regime whose leaders were handpicked by US officials.
The idea that a legitimate election could be held, as the army employs tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships to suppress political opposition in large portions of the country, is ludicrous.
Though similar in many ways, I don't think we can classify elections held here in the US as demonstration elections--they are managed by the ruling class, but they're much too institutionalized, too much embedded in the 235 year history of the US.

It just occurred to me that the high priest of protests, Chris Hedges, has been completely silent on the Empire-promoted violent takeover of Ukraine. Strange how violence against elected governments in foreign lands seems to be okay, but here at home even breaking a few bank windows cannot be tolerated by liberals such as Chris Hedges. In the article published in 2012, he condemned anarchists who broke windows and fought with police while defending their comrades from police brutality as "the cancer of the Occupy movement.”