A few weeks ago I wrote a post in which I criticized the Western elites for their practice of using concepts like freedom and democracy as smokescreens to hide the true nature of their foreign campaigns of resource exploitation and financial marauding.  I also argued that the current 'crisis' in Ukraine provided a perfect example of this practice and claimed that anyone with an iota of critical awareness could see beneath the surface and understand the true nature of the events that were unfolding in Kiev. 

But I am no expert when it comes to geopolitics.  Thus, I'll leave explaining current events transpiring in Crimea and its recent referendum in the hands of an expert:

http://souloftheeast.org/2014/03/07/the-bear-roars-back/

The other day I noticed I have five unused promotion days left in my account at Kindle Direct Publishing. 

A short time ago I more-or-less vowed to stop promoting and marketing the novel through these kinds of avenues.  Having said that, it would be a shame to let those accumulated free days go to waste.

Therefore, I invite anyone who may be interested to download free Kindle versions of The City of Earthly Desire, which will be available at Amazon from March 12 to March 16.

If you ask the average person in North American what a Danube Swabian is you will inevitably get one of these responses as answers: An "eyes-as-big-as-dinner-plates" stare of utter vacuity or some timorous guess about some obscure dish in German cookery.  

The truth is few people in the world today know what a Danube Swabian is - or more correctly, what a Danube Swabian was.  As far as being a distinctive ethnic subgroup with its own culture and customs, Danube Swabians very much exist in the past tense.

Tracing the tragic circumstances of her own family, Ms. Andor's book provides a few insights as to why the ethnic cleaning of the Danube Swabians has never been, and will most likely never be, front page news or silver screen material.

As a source of information about a virtually unknown chapter of the twentieth-century, Bread On My Mother's Table is extremely valuable.  As is the case with Holocaust survivors, survivors of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Europe's ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary are dying off.  Another decade, and there won't be any left; unlike the Holocaust, the memories and events of the Danube Swabian experience do not exist in hundreds of films, documentaries, museums, books, novels, memoirs, etc.  In this context, Ms. Andor's memoir serves an important purpose - documenting and keeping alive a memory of which the world is largely ignorant.  

As a memoir, Bread On My Mother's Table is an engaging read.  At times the prose is immensely vivid and moving.  Having said this, I found the last two chapters, where the author infuses her own personal philosophy of life and war and death and everything else under the sun - somewhat annoying.  Ms. Andor aims to leave us with profound words of hope at the end of the book; what she leaves us with instead is a vision that barely rises above the message of the "It's A Small World After All" ride at Disney World.

Despite these shortcomings, Bread On My Mother's Table is a powerful and much-needed book - both as a memoir and as an historical document.  Hopefully it will help make the world more aware of Danube Swabians and their tragic history, because for the Swabians and their descendents (yours truly among them) history is all that is left.  As the subtitle suggests, all most Danube Swabians or their descendents can do is remember.  For most of us, nothing else exists.

An accurate assessment of the two sides of the Ukrainian Crisis:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2014/03/ukraine-crisis-eastern-and-western.html

For as long as I can remember the West - America and its business driven NGO's especially - have been waging a ceaseless war against anyone and anything that stands in the way of their vision of a democratic world.  During the Cold War or the Second World War the West's campaign of fighting to make the world safe for democracy may have held some legitimacy, but ever since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the West's perpetual "demo-sade" has degenerated into a shameful farce.  How is the West able to get away with glaring hypocrisies regarding democracy?  I believe the answer lies in the manner in which elites in the West have conditioned us to think about democracy and the way they use this conditioned ideal of democracy as a license to destabilize and loot any region of the world they deem "undemocratic."

Democracy has become a Pavlovian word in our culture; merely utter it and you are sure to get people salivating as their minds flash to visions of just societies, individual freedoms, voting booths, and all-you-can-eat buffet restaurants.  School textbooks, Hollywood films, flashy newscasts, and print editorials have lauded and continue to laud the indisputable moral, ethical, social, and economic superiority of democracy to all other forms of government that have ever existed in human civilization.  Though not perfect, democracy, we are told, is, and will forever be, the highest form of government human beings can ever hope to assemble on this planet.  We have been conditioned to believe that democracy is an ultimate good, something noble, something worth striving for, fighting for, even dying for.  Thus, when we are told people in other parts of the planet, like in Ukraine for example, are striving, fighting, and dying for democracy, we feel an affinity for them and their struggle.  We watch their rebellions and revolutions from the comfort of our homes and we wish for them to succeed.  We hope they will conquer the forces of oppression they face and take their place next to ours at the table of peace and prosperity.

All of this would be fine and well if the Western elites who propagate the supremacy of democracy actually believed in and honestly practiced the tenets of democracy in their own societies and in their foreign policies, but sadly, with every revolution that passes, with every "spring" that blossoms, it is becoming increasingly evident that the powerful in the West are hypocrites of the most hideous kind.  They use democracy as both rallying cry and a shield to hide their true purposes and questionable agendas in other countries around the world.  To prove this point all one has to do is imagine what the American reaction would be to a few thousand protesters descending upon the White House and Capitol Hill armed with Molotov cocktails and baseball bats intent on a little game of "regime change." Do you honestly think the president and his staff would heed calls for restraint and dialogue?  Would there be a chance in hell that the president, that any president, would give up his democratically elected power under such circumstances?  Yet this is exactly what the White House demanded of the democratically elected Ukrainian leader before he was ousted by hordes of violent rioters who looked like they were auditioning for bit parts in some upcoming Mad Max film. 

And that is just one point.  There are countless others.  Far too many to delve into here.  But my intention in this little tirade was not to pick sides in the Ukrainian Crisis, but to bring to light how Western elites use the concept of democracy as a license to pursue their often utterly unethical and undemocratic goals.  As the leaked phone conversations of top American officials revealed, regime change in the Ukraine is a goal in which the United States and the European Union is very actively involved, right down to debating the best choice of interim leader once the insurrection achieved its aim of ousting the democratically elected guy.  One person's coup is another person's revolution, I suppose. 

The most tragic part of all of this intrigue is that it often leads to bloodshed.  Over the past decade or so I have been perpetually seized by a Metternichian paranoia whenever I hear the word democracy excessively bandied about by politicians and the media.  Like Metternich, it has been my experience that a week or two of democracy talk usually precipitates a few weeks of bloodshed. 

Believers in democracy should take note and take action, but I doubt they ever will.