The Price of People Power

The "revolution" in Ukraine is funded by the West to serve western interests. Mark Almond writes:

People Power is, it turns out, more about closing things than creating an open society. It shuts factories but, worse still, minds. Its advocates demand a free market in everything - except opinion. The current ideology of New World Order ideologues, many of whom are renegade communists, is Market-Leninism - that combination of a dogmatic economic model with Machiavellian methods to grasp the levers of power.

Today's only superpower uses its old cold war weapons, not against totalitarian regimes, but against governments that Washington has tired of. Tiresome allies such as Shevardnadze in Georgia did everything the US wanted, but forgot the Soviet satirist Ilf's wisdom: "It doesn't matter whether you love the Party. It matters whether the Party loves you."

Georgia is of course a link in the chain of pipelines bringing central Asian oil and gas to Nato territory via Ukraine, of all places. Such countries' rulers should beware. Fifty years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that the "politics of the permanent purge" typified Soviet communism. Yet now he is always on hand to demand People Power topple yesterday's favourite in favour of a new "reformer".