Er war z. B. Materialist und Atheist (Naturalist), schätzte aber die religiösen Traditionen des Katholizismus. Santayana kam während seines Studiums in Berlin in Berührung mit dem Werk Schopenhauers, über den er auch seine Dissertation schreiben wollte. Dies wurde ihm jedoch von seinem Doktorvater in den USA verwehrt. Die starken ästhetischen Interessen Santayanas wurden aber durch die Lektüre Schopenhauers gefördert – sein frühestes Werk, das sich auch gegen Kant richtete, unternahm bereits eine Verteidigung des Sinns für Schönheit (The Sense of Beauty, 1896).
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Nine years ago, the Orange Revolution (named after the color of Viktor Yushchenko’s banner) was launched in Ukraine with financial and political support of the government and political strategists of the United States, and with an active involvement of the U.S. intelligence and numerous non-governmental and research organizations such as the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros, Harvard University, the Albert Einstein Institute, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, etc.
This revolution was a logical continuation of the operation implemented by Washington and its European allies at the end of the previous century aimed at the “political renewal” of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, bringing to power their own puppet regimes. These regimes would erase from the memory of the peoples of this region, the gratitude to Russia they felt thanks to long-term friendship and cooperation during the Second World War and the subsequent recovery of their economies. Such were the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, as well as the attempts to start the “Cornflower (Jeans) Revolution” in Belarus in 2006, color revolutions in Armenia in 2008 and in Moldova in 2009. Significant funds for the organization of these “color revolutions” were provided through the American Support for East European Democracy Foundation (SEED), funded from the budget of the U.S. State Department.
Following the example of these “revolutions” and already proven schemes, the White House launched the “Arab Spring” a few years later, but the similarities of the schemes and “conducting” of these processes from Washington are clear. The same “leading” role of the White House in the destabilization of the situation in these countries at first, and then the provision of funding to opposition authorities through international “public and research organizations” to pay for sentiments and speeches aimed at bringing to power puppet henchmen and thus obtaining uncontrolled access to natural resources through them.
At first, the White House succeeded relatively smoothly in Ukraine. Thanks to the “Orange Revolution”, the rise to power of V. Yanukovych who oriented himself towards Russia was blocked, and then the henchman, Viktor Yushchenko, was placed in the Presidential Chair on the oppositional wave promoted by Washington in 2004. However, during the eight years of the “Orange Presidency” overseas political strategists did not manage to change completely the mentality of the Ukrainian population into becoming anti-Russian.
As a result, in 2012, like in 2004, the population of Ukraine re-elected the same V. Yanukovych as the President by a majority vote. However, such an outcome of the struggle for the former Soviet republic and the breadbasket of the Russian Empire of the 19th century obviously did not satisfy the White House. Under these conditions, overseas political strategists selected a slogan about the alleged “heavenly benefits” for the country from the alliance with the EU and the weakening of trade and economic relations with Russia – as an additional tool to destabilize Ukrainian society and to separate it from Russia. Although, in fact, the “alliance conditions” proposed by the EU lead to a clear worsening of the social and economic situation in Ukraine: the limitation of public sector wage bill and the number of employees in the public sector, an increase in gas tariffs for households and utilities, the prohibition of participation in the Customs Union. The last of these requirements is the most perceptible for the Ukrainian economy, which has been focused on the cooperation with Russia for decades, and the break of these relations will inevitably lead to the collapse of an absolute majority of enterprises and increase unemployment in the country. In order to come to the technical standards of the EU, to be competitive and to sell its products on the European market, Ukraine, according to the estimates of Prime Minister Azarov, will need about $160 billion in the next ten years. The EU is ready to allocate only a very small part of this – 1 billion, which is clearly insufficient and explains the resistance of Kiev to this European pseudo-integration.
Europe’s interest in Ukraine is quite understandable. Establishing of closer, alliance relations with it and separating it from the Customs Union will noticeably facilitate for Europe its trade and economic confrontation with Russia. Ukraine itself, with its natural resources, rich agricultural land and 46 million people was always interesting for Europe, and primarily for Germany, as a tempting target for colonization by German companies that could produce products there at prices much lower than in China. Such interest was repeatedly evidenced by the attempt to occupy this territory during the First and Second World Wars.
However, Germany, the European Union and the United States pursue not only economic but also geopolitical objectives in the struggle for Ukraine. Given Russia’s loss of influence in Eastern Europe, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the integration of Ukraine into the EU would contribute to more rapid push of Russia to the periphery of European politics and economy.
To implement the conceived plans, Washington and the EU have focused on the work on the population by three “tamed” Ukrainian parties. These are the:
- All-Ukrainian Union “Batkivshchyna”, headed by the imprisoned ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. For these purposes, this Union was even given the status of a member of the Supervisory Board of the European People’s Party – the Association of Christian and democratic, nationalist parties of European countries;
- Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR), headed by heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko who lived in Germany for a long time. Not being the mouthpiece of the broad masses of the Ukrainian population, the party whose membership in 2010 was about 10,000 people was created with the participation of the Christian Democratic Party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and its analytical center – the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. This latter was engaged in undisguised interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine by organizing seminars on “training activists” of the alliance through social networks and the Internet;
- All-Ukrainian Union “Svoboda”. Even according to the conclusions of German Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, “Svoboda” is a Ukrainian far-right radical nationalist party, which previously used a symbol resembling a swastika in its logo. The anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements made by the leaders of “Svoboda” were sharply criticized both in Ukraine and abroad, and show the ideology of this party – their public declarations and rhetoric are neo-fascist and neo-Nazi. However, as we can see, the White House does not refuse from the “services” of even such an ally for the sake of the set goal, thus becoming an accomplice of the Nazis and xenophobes.
After the government and the President of Ukraine refused to agree on the obviously unfavorable terms of integration with the EU, Washington and Brussels throw increasingly greater forces into the fight for this republic, ignoring the principles of international law on non-interference in the internal affairs of a foreign state. Leading U.S. and European politicians are sent in to support the demonstrators opposing the legally elected president and the government of Ukraine. The Former Polish Prime Minister and leader of the conservative Law and Justice Party Jaroslaw Kaczynski personally participated in opposition demonstrations in Kiev. Protesters on Maydan Nezalezhnosti were visited by the U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, who apparently had forgotten that it was her agency that had to protect international law and not to interfere in the internal affairs of a foreign country! Ukrainian opposition and, in particular, neo-Nazis of form “Svoboda” were supported by the German government that had recently declared its disapproval of activities of essentially similar neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany.
If we compare the reaction of European and American politicians to the measures to restore public order in the country made by Ukrainian authorities, with the absence of any reaction of western political establishment to the recent crackdown on demonstrators in Greece, Spain and Portugal, their political bias and prejudice are obvious. The things that are happening around Ukraine now are not a struggle for democracy and rule of law, as European and American media, paid by Washington, are trying to present. This is an undisguised struggle for Ukraine, and primarily aimed against Russia. It is easy to guess further steps of the strategists in this struggle – these are an increased destabilization of Ukrainian society, bribery and increased financial support to the opposition. And, as the last option, Washington has experience in power solutions for internal conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria…
Valery Kulikov, political analysts, exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook.
, on the remainder table outside of the downtown Ann Arbor Borders during a period when I had dropped out of my classes at the University of Michigan out of despair and frustration. Colin’s writing opened up a whole new intellectual vista for me. Unlike much of what went on in my university classes, Colin’s ideas really struck a chord with me. This was no dry intellectualism or critique of the guilt of the modern West, and still less a “deconstruction” – this was a philosophy of and call to unabashed and unapologetic heroism, based upon the best (and now discredited by the mainstream) aspects of the Western tradition. It was, in part, my enthusiasm for Colin’s work that led me to finally return to and finish school. I was also inspired to set up the first Website dedicated to Colin in 1996, which soon led to me getting in touch with the man himself. We corresponded for many years, and I was fortunate enough to meet him at a conference of the International Fortean Organization in November 2000, where he was a speaker. I can’t claim that Colin was a close friend of mine, but he was certainly an acquaintance, and served as a great inspiration to me during a crucial time of my life. Therefore, the news of Colin’s death came as a blow for me, although not an unexpected one, considering his age.
Colin wrote two autobiographies: the first, 
, was published in 1969; and 
, in 2004. These are the best sources for learning about Colin’s life, but I will offer a few essentials.
.
, in 1957, the critics who had previously been so full of praise had now turned vicious. It was obvious, many of them claimed, that they had been fooled – Wilson was nothing but a pretentious, egotistical hack who was attempting to grapple with issues that were beyond his knowledge and maturity. This established a pattern in the British press that has continued up to the obituaries being published about him at present. Either Colin Wilson was to be ridiculed, or else ignored altogether.
), in which a character is a sexual deviant. Thinking that these notes were Colin’s own beliefs, Joy’s father immediately went over to his apartment, bursting in on them while they were having dinner and famously crying, “The game is up, Wilson!” As he refused to listen to Colin’s explanations, the police were called, and although the incident quickly came to an end, the reporters were already on their way, and soon the story about the young literary celebrity getting his comeuppance was in every newspaper in Britain. The fate of Colin’s reputation was sealed.
, which, although it failed to garner the critical acclaim of Colin’s book, became very popular with audiences, and was seen as a sign of the British Zeitgeist. As a result, the press decided to lump Wilson and Osborne together with several other writers, including Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, Harold Pinter and others, and dubbed them the “angry young men.” Although their specific styles and ideas had little in common, these writers were young and discontented with British society of the 1950s, and came from lower-class backgrounds. So, Colin was now part of a literary movement. Another of the angry young men was Bill Hopkins, a lifelong friend of Colin’s, who in later years befriended Jonathan Bowden. Although Hopkins was soon to abandon his writing career in favor of becoming an art dealer, he did publish a single novel, The Divine and the Decay (later republished as The Leap!), which explores fascistic ideas. (See Jonathan Bowden’s excellent 
. This was the book that launched what came to define the second part of his career: the mystical and the supernatural, which Colin believed provided further evidence for the coming change in human consciousness. Colin’s interest in such matters wasn’t motivated by any interest in demonic powers or such things, but rather his view that such phenomena are manifestations of unsuspected powers of the human mind, which he thought we would eventually learn to control and exploit. The Occult became the first of many books that Colin would write on the subject. Beginning in the 1990s, he also wrote a series of books which I personally found fascinating on the evidence for an advanced, worldwide civilization on the Earth in prehistoric times (along the lines of Graham Hancock’s 
). Even these books tie into his interest in consciousness, since he believed, along with Julian Jaynes, that the ancients possessed a different form of it than we have today.
, although he began writing much more on the subject beginning in the 1970s. Murder is also something that occurs frequently in Colin’s novels. Colin was always fascinated by it, and by serial killers in particular. He viewed serial killers as a sort of flawed type of outsider – he believed they were artists whose creative powers had become misdirected into violence, and that the thrill they got from transgressing the moral order (which he thought induced a type of peak experience in the killers) became addictive. Colin thought that some criminals could be successfully rehabilitated by offering them an artistic outlet while they were in prison, and he helped to design experimental programs that were used in prisons in the United States.
, his book on one of his greatest loves: wine (and I can report that we polished off several bottles at his insistence on the evening that I was fortunate enough to join him for dinner). There is 
, his survey of one of his other greatest loves: classical music. There is 
, a book he wrote on sex to accompany a series of erotic photographs. And there are also his many novels, including several written in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft; but trying to do a survey of them goes beyond the scope of this essay.
. It is an anthology of essays opposing Marxism which includes one by no less a person than Margaret Thatcher, as well as contributions from Arthur Koestler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A. L. Rowse, and Milton Friedman, as well as from Colin himself. How this book came about or why Colin chose to do it, I don’t know, but it is an interesting footnote to his otherwise total disinterest in politics.
(an abridged edition was published in the United States as The Stature of Man), 
, and 
. A seventh volume, variously published as 
and 
, presents the ideas from these books in brief, and can serve as a good summary for those uninterested in reading the entire series.
is probably Colin’s most important work of literary criticism. In it he discusses his conception of “Existential Criticism,” in which he held that a work of literature should be evaluated first and foremost on the basis of the ideas and worldview it presents.
are his two primary works, of many he wrote on the subject. 
seems to have been an attempt by Colin to reconcile his later interest in the occult with his earlier, existential ideas.
is undoubtedly Colin’s most important work in the area of criminology. 
was the product of his interaction with Maslow, and it examines the idea of the “peak experience” at length.
, which is about a young mathematical prodigy, Hugh Greene, who becomes dissatisfied with the intellectual world and becomes attracted to violence, becoming embroiled in a criminal gang, guns and the hunt for a serial killer. And then there is 
, which is set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos. Colin was enticed into the Lovecraftian world by August Derleth, who had challenged Colin to write the earlier novel 
, also a Cthluhu Mythos story. Derleth praised Colin for his efforts. 
. Colin also regarded a survey of his work written by Howard F. Dossor, 
to have been the best and most comprehensive to date.
