The Digger

There was no excuse for Congress’ ignorance of Ukraine. Here is a guide to help. By   Ray McGovern Special to Consortium News A t Wednesday’s debut of the impeachment hearings there  was one issue upon which both sides of the aisle seemed  to agree, and it was a comic-book caricature of reality. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff led off the proceedings with this: “In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire…” Five years ago, when Ukraine first came into the news, those Americans who thought Ukraine was an island in the Pacific can perhaps be forgiven. That members of the House Intelligence Committee don’t know — or pretend not to know — more accurate information about Ukraine is a scandal, and a consequential one. As Professor Stephen Cohen has warned, if the impeachment process does not deal in objective fact, already...

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: To Celebrate or Not to Celebrate? By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels Global Research, November 13, 2019 Region: Europe , Russia and FSU Theme: History   38   3   1     43 It is impossible to be against the disappearance of walls that segregate people, and it is therefore impossible not to applaud the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or, for that matter, not to look forward to the fall of other walls that today, thirty years later, still stand or are being built. But it is legitimate to inquire if the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been a triumph for democracy. In doing so, it should be kept in mind that democracy has not only a political but also a social face: it is a system in which the demos, the great mass of ordinary people, not only may provide some input, e.g. via elections, but also recei...