ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM BLUM is one of the United States leading non-mainstream experts on American foreign policy. He left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to what the US was doing in Vietnam. He then became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first alternative newspaper in the capital. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the US, Europe and South America. He currently sends out a free monthly newsletter, The Anti-Empire Report. To be put on Blums mailing list, send him an email. Previous issues of the report can be read on his website.
email
website williamblum.org
OTHER BOOKS BY WILLIAM BLUM
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions sinceWorld War II
Rogue State: A Guide to the Worlds Only Superpower
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Americas Deadliest Export: Democracy the Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else was first published in 2013 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK
This edition was first published in 2014
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Copyright William Blum 2013, 2014
The right of William Blum to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
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ISBN 978-1-78032-448-7
PREFACE TO THE 2014 EDITION
Who is able to threaten United States domination? Who can challenge the Empires hegemony? Only Russia and China, if they were as imperialistic as Washington. (No, the Soviet Union wasnt imperialistic; that was self-defense. In the twentieth century Eastern Europe was used three times by the West as a highway to invade Russia; tens of millions of Russians were killed or wounded; it should not be surprising that after the Second World War Moscow was determined to close down the highway.)
Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been surrounding Russia, building one base after another, ceaselessly looking for new ones, including in Ukraine; one missile site after another, with Moscow in range; at the same time NATO has grabbed one former Soviet republic after another. The White House, and the unquestioning American mainstream media, have assured us that such operations have nothing to do with Russia. And Russia has been told the same, much to Moscows continuous skepticism. Look, said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO some years ago, is this is a military organization? Yes, its military. Is it moving towards our border? Its moving towards our border. Why?
The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscows bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russias border. Kievs membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but perhaps no price is too great to pay to for being part of glorious Europe and the West!
The Ukrainian insurgents and their Western-power supporters didnt care who their Ukrainian allies were in carrying out their coup against President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. thugs who set policemen on fire head to toe. all manner of extreme right-wingers, including Chechnyan Islamic militants. neo-Nazi protestors in Kiev who have openly denounced Jews, hoisting a banner honoring Stepan Bandera, the infamous Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on February 24 that Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman advised Kievs Jews to leave the city and even the country. Edward Dolinsky, head of an umbrella organization of Ukrainian Jews, described the situation for Ukrainian Jews as dire and requested Israels help.
All in all a questionable gang of allies for a dubious cause; reminiscent of the Kosovo Liberation Army thugs Washington put into power for an earlier regime change, and has kept in power since 1999.
The now-famous recorded phone conversation between top US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, wherein they discuss which Ukrainians would be to Washingtons liking in a new government, and which not, is an example of this regime-change mentality. Nulands choice, Arseniy Yatseniuk, emerged as interim prime minister.
The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washingtons foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website listed sixty-five projects that it had supported financially in recent years in Ukraine. The descriptions NED gave to the projects didnt reveal the fact that generally their programs impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized.
The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.
NED receives virtually all its financing from the US government ($5 billion in total since 1991 agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO. Its long-time intervention in Ukraine is as supralegal as the Russian military deployment there. Journalist Robert Parry has observed:
For NED and American neocons, Yanukovychs electoral legitimacy lasted only as long as he accepted European demands for new trade agreements and stern economic reforms required by the International Monetary Fund. When Yanukovych was negotiating those pacts, he won praise, but when he judged the price too high for Ukraine and opted for a more generous deal from Russia, he immediately became a target for regime change.
