The Ukraine crisis has its roots in a policy that dates back nearly 20 years. The origins of the policy can be traced to a 1997 article in Foreign Policy magazine by Zbigniew Brzezinski, titled “A Geostrategy for Eurasia.” The article makes the case that the United States needs to forcefully establish itself in Central Asia in order to maintain its position as the world’s only superpower.
During frantic post-Second World War planning sessions in the West, the British Foreign Office noted its fears of “ideological infiltration” from the Soviet Union, a terrifying possibility it described as “something very like aggression.” This near-hysterical fear of independent nationalism has been the hallmark of Western foreign policy ever since. Lately it has been restored to its natural fever pitch by the crisis in the Ukraine.
Editor’s Note: Intifada Palestine is republishing this article in remembrance of the late Patrick Seale who passed away yesterday April 11, 2014 at the age of 83 after suffering from brain cancer. He had many skills – as author, journalist, broadcaster, Middle East historian, arts aficionado and dealer and literary agent. But most notably he was the English-speaking world’s foremost chronicler and interpreter of Syria, its troubled modern history and its leadership during the past 44 years that of the al-Assad family, father Hafez and son Bashar.
I doubt where the official numbers come from, those that say that Ukraine is evenly divided between those who support the West, and those who feel their identity is closely linked with Russia.
Maybe this might be the case in western Ukraine, in Lvov, or even in the capital, Kiev. But western Ukraine has only a few key cities. The majority of people in this country of around 44 million are concentrated in the south, east and southeast, around the enormous industrial and mining centers of Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and Krivoi Rog.
During the mid-1980s, right-wing Americans loved to invoke President Reagan’s observation about the Soviet Union: “They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat,” in order to attain a one-word Socialist or Communist state. The Soviet Union was the “Evil Empire.”
The world today is in the midst of the most monumental social, political and economic upheavals in human history – a state of continual protests, uprisings and what may be considered inevitable revolution on a global scale. Power that had been centralized for roughly 500 years among the Atlantic powers of Western Europe and North America is rapidly shifting to include the rise of the East, as China, India and others operating within established, institutional frameworks of power get wooed by the former Western imperial managers to become colluders in empire, instead of competition.
The evolution of the long road to world revolution
Zbigniew Brzezinski has – for years – articulated a concept of what he calls the “global political awakening,” referring to the growing restlessness and political activism of the masses of mankind as representing the central challenge to global power structures. This episode goes over many of Brzezinski’s speeches and writing on the global awakening, and analyzes his [elite] perspective, but also what that means from the other direction, that of the population of the world (the ‘awakened’ or ‘awakening’ masses).
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.
