Washington's Role in the Ukrainian Coup & How it May Spin Out of Control

Washington may have bitten off more than it can chew in Ukraine, and there is a very real danger that the crisis could escalate into something far more serious.

Tinkering with the affairs of other nations is a dangerous and unpredictable game.

You've probably heard about the leaked audio where the Victoria Nuland from the U.S. State Department got caught saying "F*@k the E.U."., but the focus on the foul language and the apparent disrespect for the E.U. is an intentional distraction fostered by the mainstream media to draw people's attention away from something far more significant that the leaked revealed. If you listen to the conversation in full (see video below) it becomes clear that the U.S. State department is already handpicking puppets for the new government in Ukraine.

Notice how their maneuvers are calculated to prevent Russia from being able to influence the situation. This underscores the real geopolitical stakes of this coup.

Those who have been taken by the mainstream media's portrayal of the crisis might be inclined to believe that the U.S. is merely swooping in to take advantage of the situation, but had nothing to do with its inception. However that view doesn't hold water.

In the video below if you skip to 7 minutes and 27 seconds in, you will hear Victoria Nuland (the same woman caught in the leaked call) speaking at the U.S. - Ukraine foundation, expressing her support for the opposition. She goes on to mention the fact that the U.S. has invested over 5 billion dollars in assist Ukraine to help build "democracy". This all sounds fine and good if you take her flowery words at face value, but anybody who has been paying attention at all over the past decade knows by now that "spreading democracy" is a thinly veiled euphemism for empire building.

By itself this reference to funding "democracy" in Ukraine sounds innocuous enough, but if you follow the trail a bit further and connect all of the dots a very interesting picture starts to take shape.

Remember the "I am a Ukrainian" video which went viral (it has over 7 million views as of this writing)?

Very professional work (especially from a PR perpsective). So who made it? Well that's where the story gets interesting. The video was released on theawhispertoaroar youtube channel. In the description of the video they link to their official website: awhispertoaroar.com. On that website they have a"behind the scenes" section where they name the people involved in the project and a man named Larry Diamond is listed as being the "Inspiration and Executive Producer". They also display an image of Larry Diamond posing with one of the opposition leaders Yulia Tymoshenko.

Larry Diamond is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), he is a Senior Consultant at the National Endowment for Democracy, and he served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His resume speaks volumes, and for anyone who has studied the history of these organizations it should be enough to put his sugar coated talk of spreading democracy in its proper context.

If you look back through the history of U.S. regime changes and covert operations since World War II, you will consistently find CFR members involved. From the CIA coup which toppled the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 (masterminded by CFR member John Foster Dulles) to the Iran Contra Scandal (CFR member George Shulz was a key player), to the Vietnam war (CFR member McGeorge Bundy pushed for the escalation), to the sanctions and the invasion of Iraq (Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and numerous CFR members), for some reason you'll always find the Council had a person in a key position that tipped the scales in the favor of war or intervention. These wars have been sold to the American public with a variety of wrappers over the years, protecting the world from communism, fighting terrorism and now spreading democracy. Sometimes the dirty work was done by the CIA, other times the full U.S. military was called in, but in many cases much more insidious methods were employed. And this brings us to The National Endowment for Democracy.

The National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, presents itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) dedicated to spreading democracy throughout the world. However the reality of the matter is that the vast majority of NED's funding (over 135 million a year) comes directly from the U.S. Federal Government. You can verify this by looking at their yearly financial statements.

NED was formed in the 1980s to deal with the PR havoc that direct CIA interventions were reeking. To put it simply The National Endowment for Democracy operates as a front organization to fund opposition groups without it seeming like the U.S. government is directly implicated. For example The National Endowment for Democracy funded opposition to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 1999 to 2004, (and they are still pumping massive amounts of money into the country) and they have been pouring massive amounts of money into Ukraine in recent years.

The connection between the CFR and NED is deeper than just the shared mission of spreading democracy expanding U.S. corporate empire, they often share membership. Larry Diamond is one example, but if you go to NED website and look at their directors you'll find many more. Vin Weber, Elliot Abrams, Princeton Lyman, and Stephen Sestanovich, are all current directors of NED and are CFR members. Vin Weber currently sits on the board of the CFR.

When both the Council on Foreign Relations and The National Endowment for Democracy set their sights on regime change you can rest assured that the target in question has significant geopolitical importance. So why Ukraine? Well for those who have been following the backstory the answer is obvious: this is direct move to weaken Russia's position.

The U.S., Russia and the E.U. have all been fighting for control of Ukraine for some time now. Back in 2008 the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Ukraine's pro-Western Prime Minister Julia Timoshenko (the woman connected to Larry Diamond), requested entry into NATO. In response Russia to threatened to point nuclear missiles at Ukraine if they joined. Not surprisingly, Yushchenko withdrew the request.

Flash forward to 2014 and we had a new president, Victor Yanukovich who made the controversial decision to refuse E.U. membership for Ukraine in favor of closer ties with Russia. This sparked a massive backlash. Some of this backlash came from a contingent that wanted to join the E.U., but anger over the alliance with Russia was a much bigger factor. This anti-Russian sentiment played directly into the hands of Ukrainian Neo-Nazi groups such as Svoboda who capitalized on the backlash to strengthen their position and rise to power in the fray.

The Svoboda party which traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, was loosely allied with Nazi Germany. Until 2004, Svoboda had been called the Social-Nationalist Party, which critics said was a deliberate reference to the National Socialism of the Nazis.

At this point even mainstream outlets like the New York Times are having to admit that Svoboda activists played an integral role in the barricading of Independence Square and the occupation of government buildings. In many cases their aggressive posture has enabled them to edge out the other factions and take the credit entirely.

The U.S. has known for some time that Svoboda was a key player. In the first week of February Victoria Nuland met with Oleh Tyahnybok the leader of Svoboda, and in the leaked phone call she specifically mentions Tyahnybok (you might want to listen to that audio again if you missed it).

And Nuland isn't the only high ranking U.S. official that met with Svoboda leaders. In December Senator John McCain (a CFR member) met with Tyahnybok.

So clearly the U.S. government knew who they were dealing with.

To put this in perspective a bit the leader of Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, once called Ukrainian-born American film actress Mila Kunis a "dirty Jewess." and another top Svoboda member, Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn, a deputy in parliament, often quotes Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, as well as other Third Reich luminaries like Ernst Rohm and Gregor Strasser. These are real Neo-Nazis, and they have a real chance to rise to power in the chaos.

Russia has been repeatedly asserting that this is the case, calling the crisis in Ukraine a "brownshirt revolution" but the mainstream media has by and large avoided reporting on this angle.

The U.S. government has been operating under the presumption that they will be able to manipulate the outcome and position their people in key posts, but this could be a serious miscalculation. Far right groups like Svoboda have several psychological advantages over moderate (or pro-western) political figures in collapse scenarios.

1. They have a strong group identity which makes use of deep nationalist sentiments.
2. They take a very aggressive posture and are willing to make bold moves.
3. Their leaders study propaganda and crowd psychology (often through the writings of Goebels who studied Gustave Le Bon and Edward Bernays).

But there is another variable in this equation: Russia's response. There is a real concern that Russia will intervene in Ukraine. Senior Russian officials have stated that Russia is willing to go to war to protect its interests in Ukraine.

Source: 

http://scgnews.com/