Free Republic

The US is turning on old friends in Europe, writes John Laughland. Before he denounced the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" that overthrew him, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power. Originally a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa before it was adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book...

A human-rights group that defends dictators DURING the cold war, the leafy streets of north Oxford were a hotbed of anti-communism. Dons had close links to dissident and émigré outfits and spent their holidays enjoying the frisson of semi-clandestine trips behind the Iron Curtain to help subvert the evil empire. Now, at the Oxford-based British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), some veterans of that struggle are playing a rather different role: noisily defending a grim lot of east European politicians against the imperialism of western do-gooders. At first sight it seems baffling. Characters such as Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Alexander...

WARSAW, Poland -- Do unarmed protestors who risk their lives to replace murderous and corrupt regimes with law-based, liberal democracies deserve our support or not? For simple folk like you and me, this is not one of life's more demanding ethical conundrums. But then again, you and I are no match for some of the great brains at Britain's Guardian newspaper, who -- along with like minded members of the international left -- are currently mounting something approaching a hate campaign against the brave men and women fighting for democracy in Ukraine, and indeed against their predecessors across eastern Europe...

In the 1940s, as Stalinists were seizing Czechoslovakia, ex-OSS agents were running bags of money to Italy and France to ensure the communists were defeated in national elections. In the 1950s, using a rent-a-mob, the CIA effected the ouster of an anti-American regime in Iran and the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala. In the 1980s, after Solidarity was crushed by Gen. Jaruzelski, Ronald Reagan secretly aided the Polish resistance. Many of us applauded these Cold War means, as we believed that the ends – security of the West and survival of freedom – justified them. But when news broke that...

Issue: 6 November 2004 Western aggressionJohn Laughland on how the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraine’s elections A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, ‘To expel all Jews from our...

The Western media has again fallen for the dubious propaganda of US stooges in Ukraine, writes John Laughland. There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the right stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more. This week two British newspapers - the anti-Iraq war Independent and the pro-Iraq war Telegraph - excitedly announced a "revolution" in Ukraine, while in the US the right-wing Washington Times welcomed "the people versus the power". Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or Ukraine now, our media regularly peddle the...