Professor Stephen F. Cohen: Rethinking Putin – a review

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DISPATCHES FROM THE SAKER

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

I have recently had the pleasure of watching a short presentation by Professor Stephen F. Cohen entitled “Rethinking Putin” which he delivered on the annual Nation cruise on December 2, 2017 (see here for the original Nation Article and original YouTube video). In his short presentation, Professor Cohen does a superb job explaining what Putin is *not* and that includes: (but, please do watch the original video before proceeding).

He is not the man who de-democratized Russia (Yelstin and the White House did)
He is not the leader who created corruption and kleptocracy in Russia (Yelstin and the White House did)
He is not a criminal leader who ordered the murder of opponents or journalists (no evidence)
He did not order the hacking of the DNC servers (no evidence)
He was not anti-US or anti-West from the get-go (Putin changed over time)
He is not a neo-Soviet leader (he is very critical of Lenin and Stalin)
He is not an aggressive foreign policy leader (he has been a reactive leader)
He is not somehow defined by his years at the KGB.

Professor Cohen ended his talk by suggesting a few things which might form a part of a future honest biography:

As a young and inexperienced leader placed at the helm of a collapsing state:
He rebuilt, stabilized and modernized Russia in a way to prevent future collapses
He had to restore the “vertical” of power: “managed democracy” (i.e. restored order)
He needed a consensual history patching up Czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras without imposing one, single, version of history
He needed Western support to modernize the Russian economy
He wanted Russia to be a great power, but not a super-power
He never favored iron-curtain isolationism; he is an internationalist (more European than 90% of Russians, at least in the beginning).

The key thesis is this: Putin began as a pro-Western, European leader and with time he realigned himself with a much more traditional, Russian worldview. He is more in line with Russian voters today.

Professor Cohen concluded by addressing two topics which, I presume, his audience cared deeply about: he said that, contrary to Western propaganda, the so-called ‘anti-gay’ laws in Russia are no different from the laws of 13 US states. Secondly, that “by any reckoning, be it flourishing inside Russia or relations with Israel, by general consent of all, nobody denies this, Jews under Putin in Russia are better off than they had ever been in Russian history. Ever. They have more freedom, less official anti-Semitism, more protection, more official admiration for Israel, more interaction, more freedom to go back and forth”.

This is all very interesting important stuff, especially when delivered to a Left-Liberal-Progressive US audience (with, probably, a high percentage of Jews). Frankly, Professor Cohen’s presentation makes me think about what Galileo might have felt when he made his own “presentations” before the tribunal of Inquisition (Cohen’s articles and books are now also on the modern equivalent of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum). In truth, Professor Cohen is simply true to himself: he opposed the crazies during the old Cold War and now he is opposing the same crazies during the new Cold War. His entire life Professor Cohen was a man of truth, courage, and integrity – a peacemaker in the sense of the Beatitudes (Matt 5:9). So while I am not surprised by his courage, I am still immensely impressed by it. Some might think that delivering a short presentation on a cruise-ship is hardly a sign of great courage, but I would vehemently disagree. Yes, nobody would shoot Cohen in the back of the neck like, say, the Soviet ChK-GPU-NKVD would have done, but I submit that these methods of “enforcing” a single official consensus were far less effective than their modern equivalents: the conformity imposition techniques (see: Asch Conformity Experiment) so prevalent in modern Western society. Just look at the results: there was far more reading and thinking (of any kind) going on in the Soviet society than there is today in the modern AngloZionist Empire (anybody who remembers the bad old USSR will confirm that to you). As one joke puts it: in a dictatorship, you are told to “shut up”, while in a democracy you are encouraged to “keep talking”. QED.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]urning to Professor Cohen’s talking points, numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 are basic facts. Nothing to be debated here – Cohen is plainly setting the factual record straight. Number 5 is much more interesting and controversial. For one thing, we are talking views/intentions, which are hard to judge. Was Putin ever pro-Western? Who knows? Maybe his closest friends know? My own belief is that this question must be looked at in combination of issue #8: Putin’s service in the KGB.

There is still a huge amount of misinformation about the old Soviet KGB in the West. To the average American a “KGB agent” is a guy called Vladimir, with steel gray-blue eyes, who beats up dissidents, steals Western technological secrets, and spies on the wives of politicians (and even beds them). He is a hardcore Communist who dreams about nuking or invading the USA and he speaks with a thick Russian accent. Alternatively, there is Anna Kushchenko (a.k.a. Anna Chapman) – a devious sex doll who seduces Western men into treason. These prototypes are as accurate as James Bond is an accurate representation of MI6. The reality could not be more different.

The Soviet KGB was first and foremost a huge bureaucracy with completely different, and separate, directorates, departments, and sections. Yes, one such Directorate did deal with dissidents and anti-Soviet activists (mainly the 9^th Department of the 5^th Directorate) but even within this (infamous) 5^th Directorate there were some Departments which, in coordination with other KGB Directorates and Departments, dealt with more legitimate tasks such as, for example, the early detection of terrorist organizations (7^th Department). Other Directorates of the KGB dealt with economic security (6^th Directorate), internal security and counter-intelligence (2^nd Directorate) or even protection of officials (9^th Directorate).

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]utin was an officer (not an “agent” – agents are recruited from outside the KGB!) of the First Main Directorate (PGU) of the KGB: foreign intelligence. Putin himself has recently revealed that he was working inside the most sensitive Department of the PGU, the “Department S” which are “illegals”. This is very important. The PGU was so separate from all the other Directorates of the KGB that it had its own headquarters in the south of Moscow. But even inside the PGU, the Department S was the most secret and separated from all the other PGU Departments (no less than 10). As somebody who has spent many years as an anti-Soviet activist and who has had personal, face to face, dealings with KGB officers (of various Directorates) I can confirm that not only did the KGB as a whole get some of the best and brightest in Russia, but the PGU got the best ones of those and only the very best ones from that select group ever made it to the legendary Department S. Now let’s look at what kind of skill-set was required from PGU officers in general (besides the obvious two: being very bright and very trustworthy).

First and foremost, a PGU officer has to be a top-notch specialist of his area of expertise (in Putin’s case: Germany, of course, but also the rest of Europe and, since Western Europe was – and still is – a US colony, the USA). While Soviet people were told that the West was the enemy, the PGU officers had to understand why and how the West was that enemy.

In practical terms, this implies not only knowing and understanding the official cultural, political, social and economic realities of the enemy’s polity, but also the real power relations inside that polity. Such an understanding is not only useful to approach and evaluate the potential usefulness of each person you interact with, but also to be able to understand in what environment this person has to operate. The notion of PGU officers being bigoted commies is laughable as these men, and women, were very well read (they had unlimited access to all the Western information sources, including anti-Soviet ones, classified reports, and all the anti-Soviet literature imaginable) and they were ultimate realists/pragmatists. Of course, like in any organization, the top leaders were often political appointees and the bureaucrats and counter-intelligence officers were much less sophisticated. But for officers like Putin to really understand the reality of the Western society was a vital skill.

Second, a good PGU officer had to be likable; very, very likable. Being liked by others is also a crucial skill for a good intelligence officer. In practical terms, this means that he/she has to not only understand what makes the other guy tick but how to influence him/her in the right direction. When dealing with ‘illegals’ that also meant being their best friend, confessor, moral support, guide and protector. You can’t do that if people don’t like you. So these intelligence officers are masters of being good friends and companions; they are good listeners and they know a lot about how to make you like them. They also understand exactly what you like to hear, what you want to see and what words and actions place you in a relaxed and trusting mode.

Now combine these two: you have a man who is top notch specialist of the West and who is superbly trained to be liked by Western people. How likely is it that this man had many illusions about the West, to begin with? And what if a man like that did have misgivings – would he have shown them?

My own gut feeling is that this is not very likely at all.

What is far more likely is this: Putin played the “West best’s friend” role for as long as possible and he dumped it when it was clearly not productive any longer. And yes, in doing that he did realign himself to the mainstream Russian public opinion. But that was just a useful side-effect, not the cause or the goal of that realignment.

Look at the Professor Cohen’s points 9-13 above (I would summarize them as “fix Russia”). They all make sense to me, even that “he was a young and inexperienced leader”. There is a huge difference between being a skilled PGU officer and being the man who rules over Russia. And even if Putin did lose some of his illusions, it would have been primarily because the West itself changed a great deal between the 1980s and the 2010s. But Putin must have indeed always known that to implement Cohen’s points 10-13 he needed the West’s help, or, if that was not possible, at least the West’s minimal interference/resistance. But to believe that a man who had full access to the real information about the two Chechen wars would have any kind of illusions left about the West’s real feelings about Russia is profoundly misguided. In fact, anybody living in Russia in the 1990s would have eventually come to the realization that the West wanted all Russians to be slaves, or, more accurately, and in the words of Senator McCain – “gas station” attendants. Putin himself said so when he declared, speaking about the USA, “they don’t want to humiliate us, they want to subjugate us. They want to solve their problems at our expense, they want to subordinate us to their influence“. Putin then added, “nobody in history has ever succeeded in doing this and nobody will ever succeed“. First, I submit that Putin is absolutely correct in his understanding of the West’s goals. Second, I also submit that he did not suddenly “discover” this in 2014. I think that he knew it all along, but began openly saying so after the US-backed coup in the Ukraine. Furthermore, by 2014, Putin had already accomplished points 9-13 and he did not need the West as much anymore.

Now let’s look at points 6 (Putin’s view of the Soviet period), 12 (consensual history) and 14 (Russia as a great power but not a super-power). And again, let’s consider the fact that officers of the PGU had total access to any history books, secret archives, memoirs, etc. and that they were very free to speak in pragmatic analytical terms on all historical subjects with their teachers and colleagues. Here I submit that Putin had no more illusions about the Soviet past then he had about the West. The fact that he referred to the breakup of the Soviet Union (which, let’s remember, happened in a totally undemocratic way!) as a “catastrophe” which was “completely unnecessary” does in no way imply that he was not acutely aware of all the tragedies, waste, corruption, degradation and general evil of the Soviet regime. All this shows is that he is also aware of the immense victories, achievements, and successes which also are part of the historical record of the Soviet era. Finally, and most importantly, it shows that he realizes what absolute disaster, a cataclysm of truly cosmic proportions the break-up of the Soviet Union represented for all the people of the former USSR and what an absolute nightmare it was for Russia to live a full decade as a subservient colony of Uncle Sam. I am certain that Putin studied enough Hegel to understand that the horrors of the 1990s were the result of the internal contradictions of the Soviet era just as the Soviet era was the result of the internal contradictions of Czarist Russia. In plain English, this means that he fully understood the inherent dangers of empire and that he decided, along with the vast majority of Russians, that Russia ought to never become an empire again. A strong, respected and sovereign country? Yes. But an empire? Never again. No way!

This fundamental conclusion is also the key to Putin’s foreign policy: it is “reactive” by nature simply because it only acts in response to when (and what) something affects Russia. You could say that all “normal” nations are “reactive” because they have no business doing otherwise. Getting involved everywhere, in every fight or conflict, is what empires based on messianic ideologies do, not normal countries regardless of how big or powerful they are. For all the sick and paranoid hallucinations of Western Russophobes about a “resurgent Russia” the reality is that Russian diplomats have often mentioned what the goals of Russian foreign policies truly are: to turn enemies into neutrals, neutrals into partners, partners into friends and friends into allies. And this is why Professor Cohen is absolutely correct, Putin is no isolationist at all – he wants a new, multi-polar, international order of sovereign countries; not because he is a naïve wide-eyed idealist, but because this is what is pragmatically good for Russia and her people. You could say that Putin is a patriotic internationalist.

And now to the homosexuals and Jews. First, both assertions made by Professor Cohen are correct: homosexuals and Jews are doing great in modern Russia. I would even agree that they are doing better than ever before. Of course, both Professor Cohen and I are being factual and very superficial when we say that. And since I discussed both of these topics in some detail in the past (see here and here) I won’t discuss them here. Rather, I would simply state that in both cases we are talking about a rather small minority of whose treatment is, for some reason or other, considered as THE measure of humanity, kindness, civilization, and modernity in the West. Well, okay, to each his own. If in the West, the treatment of these two minorities is The One And Only Most Important Topic In The Universe – fine. I personally don’t care much (especially since I don’t feel that I owe any special consideration to either one of them). This being said, I would also claim that Putin’s number one concern is also not for any specific minority. However, and that is where this is indeed very interesting, his concern for the majority does not at all imply any kind of disregard or disrespect for the fundamental freedoms and rights of the minorities but includes his concern for all minorities (and, in this case, not just two minorities which are treated as “more equal than others”).

This is where various right-wingers and assorted Alt-Righters completely “lose” Putin. The very same Putin who told an assembly of Orthodox Jews in Moscow that 80-85% of Bolshevik leaders were Jews (see subtitled video here), the same Putin who crushed the (overwhelmingly Jewish) oligarchs of the Yeltsin era as soon as he came to power, and the same Putin who completely ignored all the hysterics of Bibi Netanyahu about the Russian role in Syria is also the same Putin who went out of his way to protect Russian Jews inside Russia and who considers that Jews and Russians are forever joined in their common memory of the horrors of WWII.

[Sidebar: I personally wish that Russia would denounce Israel for what it is, an illegitimate racist rogue state hell-bent on genocide and expansion, but I don’t have relatives there. Neither am I the President of a country with very strong ties to the Russian-speaking Jewish communities worldwide. In my opinion, I am accountable to nobody else but my conscience and God, whereas Putin is accountable to those who elected him and still support him].

Guilt by association, the punishment of all for the actions of some, scapegoating, the vicious persecution of minorities in the name of some ideal – this has all been tried in the past, both in Russia and in the West. The Nazis did that and so did the Soviets. And both the Nazis and the Soviets inflicted untold horrors upon the many peoples of the Soviet Union and beyond. Putin is acutely aware of the dangers of nationalism, just as much as he is aware of the dangers of imperialism, and he said so many times: Russia cannot afford any more nationalistic conflicts as they almost completely destroyed Russia in the 1990s. Just look at modern Ukraine and you will see what a Russia torn apart by nationalist ideologies could have looked like had Putin not cracked down, hard, on various nationalists (including and mostly Russian ones).

Far from catering to (an admittedly powerful) Jewish lobby in Russia, Putin is, in fact, trying to assemble as many different peoples and minorities as possible to his project of a New Russia; and that project includes Russian Jews, not only for the sake of these Jews, but mainly for the sake of Russia. The same goes for another crucial minority in Russia – Muslims. They also very much form a key part of the project Putin has for Russia. Of course, racists, nationalists and other less than bright folks in Russia will still dream about expelling all Jews (or Muslims) from Russia. Simply put – that ain’t happening (for one thing this would be physically impossible) and Putin and those who support him will fight such projects with every legal tool at their disposal. Here again, you could say that Putin is a patriotic internationalist.

In the meanwhile, the West is still stuck in its old, ideological ways: imperialism, nationalism and messianic exclusivism on one hand, and a complete surrender to post-modernism, cultural self-hatred, petty minority politics and moral relativism on the other. It is, therefore, no surprise whatsoever that both mainstream camps in the West completely misread Putin and can’t figure out what he is up to.

Professor Cohen is right: the real Putin has absolutely nothing, nothing at all, in common with the pseudo-Putin the Western media presents to its infinitely gullible and zombified audience. Alas, nobody will listen to Cohen, at least not until the regime in Washington DC and the power structure which supports it, and whose interests it represents, come crashing down. But I do believe that Professor Cohen will eventually go down in history as the most intellectually honest and courageous Russia expert in the USA.

About the Author

The Saker, a former geopolitical military analyst of Russian descent is editor in chief of the eponymous sites now published in several languages.

On The Syria Occupation And The New Face Of Imperialism

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US forces have attacked the Syrian military, reporting over a hundred deaths. The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is calling the air strike a massacre, a war crime, and a crime against humanity.

The US is an invading, occupying force that is in Syria without the permission of its government, yet it is claiming that the air strike was an act of “self-defense” against an “unprovoked attack” upon the US-backed SDF, a mostly Kurdish militia which had occupied an area of Syrian land. No Americans suffered any injuries or deaths in the attack. The SDF suffered a single reported injury.

It’s a bit like saying you broke into someone’s house and strangled them from behind with a garotte in self-defense.

Believe it or not, it appears very likely that the US military’s latest act of butchery waged upon Middle Easterners on their own land was not about self-defense at all, but about oil. The always insightful Moon of Alabamamakes a compelling case that not only is America’s version of events full of plot holes, but that the whole thing could very well have been “a trap” to sabotage a local deal that had been made for the SDF to turn over an oil and gas field to the Syrian government in the near future.

This would fit in perfectly with comments Professor Joshua Landis made about the attack, saying that America’s plan is to keep Syria weak, poor and divided in order to disadvantage US/Israel/Saudi rivals Iran and Russia. It would also clarify US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s assertion a few weeks ago that thousands of American troops are being kept in Syria to prevent Assad from regaining control of areas that have been liberated from ISIS.

This is what the new imperialism looks like.

When the Russian Federation annexed Crimea in 2014, everyone lost their minds. Countries don’t just annex territory from other countries anymore! It’s so barbaric! It’s so… 20th century.

That’s simply not how we do things in the modern world. We don’t expand our geopolitical power by blatant land grabs, we expand it with treaties, alliances, intelligence/surveillance deals, trade agreements, corporate contracts, secret pacts, and occupations of key strategic locations under the pretense of fighting terrorism. Like civilized people.

In the old days, an empire would expand itself by invading a weaker territory, killing its people until they gave up, and planting its flag there. We’d change the maps so that everyone could see that the region was now under the control of Rome or the British Crown or Napoleon or whomever, and the power structures would align themselves accordingly. It was all relatively simple and transparent.

The new imperialism doesn’t do that. You will never see Syria made into the 51st state.

Since the end of the second World War it has been increasingly taboo for a government to overtly invade a country and add it to that government’s official territory, and many international laws were locked into place to reflect that. And yet world power has arguably never been more consolidated than it is right now. The US, the UK, the EU, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Canada, Australia and many other nations tend to march more or less in lockstep with one another on a vast array of subjects ranging from neoliberalism to surveillance to which “regime” is in need of more crushing sanctions on a given day. The alignment isn’t perfect, but it’s too close to perfect to deny.

Here in Australia we joke about being America’s 51st state, but, like Syria, we never will be. We don’t need to be. We’re already answerable to the same corporatist powers which control the US, so we trot right along into every US war, every US trade deal, and operate as a US intelligence asset just the same as we would if they’d planted the stars and stripes on our capitol buildings and called us Wisconsota. Through military alliance, intelligence alliance, corporatist agreements, and a good old-fashioned coup staged by the CIA and MI6, we transitioned smoothly from subservience under the old form of imperialism to subservience under the new. A whole continent full of McDonald’s-eating sheep.

In the new imperialism, countries keep their borders, keep their names, and on paper keep their own sovereign governments as well. Australia remains Australia, Syria remains Syria. But the power dynamics are all bent to funnel toward the favor of the same vast power conglomerate.

You can’t see the new empire on a map, so people assume that it isn’t there, but the only reason you can’t see it on the maps we were trained to read in school is because the new empire isn’t in any way limited by geography. It is unconcerned with the little lines drawn between the countries on our plastic classroom globes, or the different colors their manufacturers painted the different nations with. The nationless band of plutocrats who use governments as tools and weapons are not limited by those things. They don’t think in those terms. They don’t care about land and governments, they care about money, power, and influence. And none of those things are geographically confined.

So they’re content to control a few strategic locations in Syria to wage a disruption campaign against rivals of the empire. They don’t need to annex Syria in order to do that, or even oust Assad. They’re not interested in the country, they’re interested in the nonlocalized new empire. They’ll control a few oil fields, secure a few shady alliances, unleash a few terrorist armies, all to funnel more and more power into the new empire, one contract at a time. Corporations and banks are not limited by national borders, and neither are the oligarchs who own them.

Nations and governments don’t exist anymore. Not in the sense that they used to, anyway. The notion of meaningfully separate, sovereign governments is at this time a fairy tale told to the masses to keep us from realizing that we’re all being thrown into the gears of an exploitative threshing machine that only exists to feed the avaricious agendas of a few ruling elites.

This has all been made possible by an ongoing war on the societal concept of sovereignty. Our concept of sovereignty is now so weakened that a powerful government can get away with invading another country and claiming “self defense” when it kills the people there, so weakened that constant domestic surveillance by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies is now considered normal, so weakened that the public will ferociously defend a police officer that guns down a civilian who reached for his wallet a little too fast.

If society found some way to restore sovereignty to nations, governments, and above all to human beings, the ecocidal, omnicidal new empire which depends upon blurred lines and ignored boundaries would be unable to survive. And that would be great, in my opinion.

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About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

Good for the Gander: Ukraine’s Demise Accelerates (Part 2)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

This is a repost of a classic article. First published on Sunday, May 4, 2014

A further look at the Ukraine debacle, in seven pieces.

Montagueski and Capuletovitch

(Cool Photo. Remember what happened to Romeo and Juliet.)

Ukraine, Interrupted
(SEE PART 1 OF THIS SERIES HERE)

“Ukraine” means “borderland,” and if there were ever a country suffering a borderline personality disorder—barely “keeping itself together,” as we say—it is Ukraine. Suddenly, it’s been deprived of its meds (discounted gas and other Russian-provided subsidies), and goaded into a schizophrenogenic family crisis (the American-sponsored overthrow of its elected government, resented by half the country). After the maidan mania, came the Crimea depression, and now, it seems, rapid and radical decompensation.

Before the maidan winter games, if some in the country (Kiev “liberals”) were looking for the cure from Dr. America and Nurse NATO, standing by to treat the flailing patient with their straitjacket of austerity and electroshock-and-awe therapy, perhaps some are now realizing that these practitioners’ cures only increase the crazy.

Since my last detailed post, the Ukraine situation has indeed been devolving rapidly, both within the country and on the level of international geopolitics. It’s hard to see where Ukraine is going—whether it will survive as a unified state at all (even sans Crimea), and it is hard to see how seriously the world will be riven by a “new Cold (or even hot) War.” American political and media discourse is now completely dominated by the “aggressive Russia/nasty Putin” meme, but it would be wise to look carefully at the different axes of major, and lesser-included subsidiary, contradictions to see the real web of tensions which the “new Cold War” narrative is designed to occlude.

In Ukraine itself, the major contradiction revolves around the country’s social future: What will be the path of social development? Who will control it? In whose interests?

Unfortunately, the starting point for those questions in Ukraine right now is the underlying socio-economic crisis brought about by the oligarchic polity and social economy that is the result of the restoration of capitalism. As I previously pointed out, the “Western” (i.e., American)-influenced process of capitalist restoration in Ukraine involved the quick-and-dirty creation of a capitalist class via the barely-disguised theft of public property by those called “the oligarchs,” to whom the country’s wealth and political power were acceded during the last 20 years. Michael Hudson sums it up nicely:

What happened in Ukraine is what happened in Russia and all the other post-Soviet economies. American advisors came in and said “Just give away all the public property to individuals. It doesn’t make any difference who you give it to; property has its own logic.”¹

Patrick Smith points out that America’s “shock therapy” formula for the quickest possible restoration of capitalism in post-Soviet states was designed not only to eliminate public ownership of social capital (what Marxists call the “productive forces”), but also to eliminate the possibility of a decently progressive social democracy, which would itself be too discomfiting for the reinvigorated, rapacious neo-liberal capitalist order into which these countries were meant to take their subservient place.² Thus was born the Wild, Wild East. Do not pass Roosevelt. Go directly to Robber Baron. The Great Leap Backward.

Having run out of ways to hide, via international indebtedness, the full social disaster of that neo-liberal strategy, Ukraine has to decide what path to take in the immediate future. Therein lies the major contradiction in Ukrainian society and politics.

Now, I would define this fundamental contradiction as one between a model of development whose first priority is to ensure the “right” of billionaires to appropriate vast amounts of social wealth and attendant political power versus one whose first priority is to produce a decent and improving social life (jobs, housing, healthcare, education) and real political empowerment for the majority of people. If one were to focus on that contradiction clearly, the path forward would begin with something like Bogdan Danilishin, a former minister of economy, suggested:

In order to be saved, the Ukrainian economy doesn't need 35 billion dollars or even 135 billion dollars. It will be stolen anyway. They just need to check and evaluate all privatization deals made during the last years. All that has been bought for a reduced price or illegally must be nationalized or the difference must be paid to the state budget. All taxes that oligarchs have been exempt from for the last three years must be paid.³

Unfortunately—for all kinds of historical, cultural, and political reasons, ranging from the millions of [claimed] Ukrainian victims of Stalinism eighty years ago to the billions of dollars spent by America during the last five years—most Ukrainians now think this contradiction as a conflict between “European”-oriented West and the “Russian”-oriented south and east. And it is on those terms that Ukraine was brought to a political crisis point by the US-supported Kiev insurrection.

Though this kind of thinking represents confusions on everyone’s part, I have to say that the biggest fools here are the “Europeanists” – anyone who actually believes that Yanukovych did not sign the EU deal because of his love for Russia or Putin, and/or that not signing the deal compromised Ukraine’s independence or jeopardized its possibility for a prosperous and democratic future. (I suppose that mainly means Western-NGO-educated Kiev liberals.)

In fact, as a Reuters report in December emphasized, consistent with his oligarchic position as a proponent of Western capitalism, Yanukovych was a fierce advocate of integration with the EU. In a meeting in September, for example: “For three hours Yanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia. …‘Forget about it ... forever!’ he shouted at them, according to people who attended the meeting. Instead the president argued for an agreement to deepen trade and other cooperation with the European Union…. ‘We will pursue integration with Europe,’ he barked.”⁴

Indeed, Yanukovych's government was the prime teller of European fairy tales. In September, his prime minister, Mykola Azarov, painted the picture of sugarplums to come: "We all want clean air and water, safe food, good education for our children, up-to-date medical services, reliable legal representation, etc. All these are not abstract terms, but norms and rules that are already in place in the EU, which we need in Ukraine."

A couple of months later, the same Azarov, apparently forgetting that he was one of those “so-called leaders,” was telling the people: "So-called leaders tell us fairy tales about how, once we had signed, we would be able to travel to Europe without visas. Nothing of the sort. To get that we would have to fulfill a whole raft of conditions."

In fact, Yanukovych balked at finalizing the EU agreement because, when the real numbers were put on the table, it was a bad deal. A really bad deal: “[Volodymyr] Oliynyk, who is Ukraine's permanent representative for NATO, and others were furious. He told Reuters that when Ukraine turned to Europe's officials for help, they ‘spat on us.’…‘We could not contain our emotions, it was unacceptable.’”

It’s noteworthy that Azarov emphasized how the agreement would not make Ukrainians eligible for European visas—I’m guessing since the ability to get to jobs in Western Europe was one of the more enticing sugarplums for non-oligarchic Ukrainians. But it indicates a significant—though, of course, hardly publicized—point in the agreement that was a particular craw-sticker for the Ukrainians: They would be second-class citizens, inferior to “even” the Poles. “Yanukovich was also offended when he found out Kiev would not be offered a firm prospect of full membership of the EU; he felt Ukraine was being treated as a lesser country to ‘even Poland’, with which it shares a border…‘Many citizens have got it wrong on European integration. It is not about membership, we are apparently not Poland, apparently we are not on a level with Poland ... they are not letting us in really, we will be standing at the doors. We're nice but we're not Poles.’” How many Europhile Ukrainians, who might well share the sense of insult, were even aware of this condition?

Beyond this blow to Ukrainian sensibilities, the EU agreement has to be understood as an invasion, part of what Michael Hudson identifies as “today’s financial war against the economy at large”—an ongoing financial war that is as devastating to countries as any shooting war:

The weapon in this financial warfare is no larger military force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain.⁵It’s a financial war. And finance really is war by other means, the way it’s being conducted today, because the objective of finance in Western Europe is the same as that of war. It wants to appropriate land. It wants to appropriate basic infrastructure, all the monopolies. And it wants to extract tribute, and this usually in the case of debt service.…. So what Europe wants is all of the property that the Ukrainian kleptocrats, the people who rule the country and have appointed themselves the leaders, have basically stolen when they registered the steel mills, the land, the factories, everything in their own name, and they’ve kept Ukraine one of the poorest countries in Europe, very low labor.…And now Western Europe has come to them and said, okay, now we’re going to make a deal. We’re going to let you keep what you have, but you have to sell us part of what you have, and we want you now to–we’re going to encircle Russia. We want you to make a very anti-Russian move.⁶

Leaving aside the “encircle Russia” point for the moment, the EU agreement would have “captured” the Ukrainian economy. As Marilyn Vogt-Downey makes clear, in her analysis aptly subtitled, “An Imperialist Invasion Without an Imperialist Army,” its specific provisions would make “impossible any Ukrainian economic planning that did not follow the guidelines established by the IMF and other imperialist lending agencies,” would “mandate...that capitalist profits be only minimally taxed, the government provide generous financial support and tax breaks for capitalist ventures, public services be privatized, and restrictions on transfer of capitalist profits abroad be minimal.” As a result, she points out, “Ukraine would find it very difficult to ever escape the debt cycle,” and “it would be difficult, if not impossible for any Ukrainian government to raise funds for basic institutions people need to live a quality life.”⁷

As Joseph Stiglitz learned about the IMF and the World Bank, when he was the latter’s chief economist: “They were interested in one thing. They looked at the country and thought, ‘they need to repay the loans they owe to Western banks. How do we get that to happen?’…They were interested in milking money out of the country quickly, not rebuilding it for the long term.”⁸

“Anti-communist” protestors in what was known as the Euro-maidan, and their liberal supporters in the West, might take heed of what Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and supply-side guru has to tell them about the capitalism they were actually fighting for:

Ukraine will never see one dollar of the IMF money. What the IMF is going to do is to substitute Ukrainian indebtedness to the IMF for Ukrainian indebtedness to Western banks. The IMF will hand over the money to the Western banks, and the Western banks will reduce Ukraine’s indebtedness by the amount of IMF money. Instead of being indebted to the banks, Ukraine will now be indebted to the IMF.⁹

Occupy Ukraine. For the banks.

Jack Rasmus did a detailed analysis of the IMF’s Ukraine package, and found maybe a few dollars left in the county, but basically confirmed that IMF money won’t go to Ukraine, but to Western banks:

As in typical IMF deals, most of that $27 billion would go to cover payments to western bankers first, to ensure they’re protected and covered. Little would be left to stimulate the Ukrainian economy or to relieve the average Ukrainian household. Moreover, the ‘terms’ of the IMF deal (as any IMF deal has shown) would prove disastrous to the real economy.¹⁰

It sure will. As AFP notes, approvingly, it would: “impose tough economic conditions that will alter the lives of Ukrainians who have grown accustomed to the comforts of Soviet-era subsidies and social welfare benefits. [and] … herald a fundamental shift in Kyiv … to a commitment to the types of free-market efficiencies that could one day bring Ukraine far closer to the West.”¹¹ Happy day, when Ukrainians will experience the “efficiencies” we in the West have come to know so well. To cite Rasmus again: “The Ukraine in an IMF bailout would almost certainly replicate the still continuing Austerity crisis in Greece.” A 50-100% gas price hike is already in place.¹²

Gotta love that many American liberals, so quick to denounce the latest Paul Ryan budget, have been blithely supporting a far worse “Republican” program for Ukraine.

Really, the IMF demands are staggering, and include: Ukraine must raise the retirement age, raise gas and electricity prices, cap the minimum wage, reduce unemployment benefits, cancel support for childbirth, free meals and textbooks, privatize all mines, and lift the moratorium on sale of agricultural land. It’s a neat program—if your goal is to impoverish Ukrainians and sell off Ukrainian steel industry to the Germans, Ukrainian oil resources to Chevron, and the famous Ukrainian “black soil” farmland to Cargill and Monsanto. Cargill and Monsanto are chomping at the bit.¹³

Of course, all of this is the culmination, the final push into irreversibility, of a process of capitalist imperialism/invasion that’s been going on for twenty years—with, to be sure, some reluctance on the part of the political machines of the oligarchs, who have been fearful of popular pushback.

In other words, “European” Ukraine would be the IMF’s Ukraine [writes the author politely, eschewing the word for female dog]—a poor cousin within the shriveling neo-liberal austerity Europe of today, not at all the prosperous brother within the social-democratic European thing of remembered past. Crumbs of the madeleine are all that’s left of that.

Oh, yeah, the IMF agreement also “stipulates that Ukraine cannot accept any financial support from Russia.”¹⁴ That would be the Russia whose financial support, according to the head of the IMF, has been a “lifeline” that’s helped Ukraine avert disaster: "Without the support that they were getting from this lifeline that Russia had extended a few months ago, they were heading nowhere."¹⁵

As Stephen Cohen points out:

[I]t was the European Union, backed by Washington, that said in November to the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country, Ukraine, "You must choose between Europe and Russia." That was an ultimatum to Yanukovych. Remember—wasn’t reported here—at that moment, what did the much-despised Putin say? He said, "Why? Why does Ukraine have to choose? We are prepared to help Ukraine avoid economic collapse, along with you, the West. Let’s make it a tripartite package to Ukraine." And it was rejected in Washington and in Brussels. That precipitated the protests in the streets.¹⁶

Russia did not start this fight. It was not Russia that drove an already “profoundly divided” Ukraine into a “my way or the highway” choice; it was “Europe”—a word in this context that should be understood as signifying the presently conjoined projects of the EU/IMF/Western-capital and NATO.

Ultimately, the fact is that Yanukovych balked at the EU/IMF deal because it was too costly for Ukraine. Russia simply made a better offer: “[O]ne reason Yanukovich chose the Russian $15 billion offer over Europe’s lesser offer is that the EU deal was less and with more IMF austerity strings attached. Moreover, the possibility of energy relief from the Russian Federation may have appeared a better deal than the EU’s energy deprived, high energy cost, economic partnership.”¹⁷

Americans, along with Ukrainian Europhiles, might carry assumptions that make this difficult to imagine, but the fact is that Yanukovych went into the negotiations “a fierce advocate of integration with the EU,” and came to recognize that economic ties to Russia were more beneficial to Ukraine than ties to EU/neo-liberalism were going to be.

Fact is, too, that the Ukrainian oligarchs, and their present Ukrainian government, know this. They know their job is to be the compliant agents of the IMF, delivering their country into a socially disastrous austerity that is going to mean less popular democracy and less national independence. This is why the new prime minister, the man who is described in Forbes as “setting Ukraine up for ruin,” says: “I’m going to be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of my country.”¹⁸

Please notice that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, about democracy in all this. More democracy? Please, the EU/IMF program will have to be imposed on the Ukrainian people—with, likely, some electoral process that’s engineered to ignore their interests and subvert their will. And the oligarchs—as well as American leaders, who are masters of such a process—know this.

So, whoever came out to the maidan thinking that fighting for the EU/IMF deal was fighting for more democracy and independence…well, as Rasmus puts it, kindly: “It appears many Ukrainians do not yet understand the fundamental economic and political dynamics at play in the Ukraine.”¹⁹

It’s an unfortunate misrecognition that many Ukrainians (perhaps especially self-identified “liberal” Ukrainians, goaded by $5 billion of American NGO miseducation), lost sight of the main contradiction—that between the social program of the Ukrainian oligarchs and the social needs of the Ukrainian people—in favor of a confected conflict between an imaginary utopian Europe and an imaginary dystopian Russia. It’s a miscrecognition that only serves to further the real, shared, anti-populist agenda of the oligarchs and “Europe” (that conjoint project described above), and to hide the tensions within “Europe” between the EU and NATO.

Crooks and Fascists

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he other element within Ukraine that complicates the main contradiction between Ukrainian oligarchs and society is the presence of combative ultra-nationalist/neo-fascist factions that have fought their way into the center of power (and are tolerated by the democratic US and Europe in a way that no similarly radical left factions would be).

I’ve analyzed these forces in detail in my previous Ukraine post. Liberal and conservative American media want to keep pretending that these groups, who were the fighting vanguard of the insurrection, are a) not really fascists, and b) even if they are, they “don’t really matter.”

Bull. The truth is: a) These groups, Joseph Goebbels Research Center and all, follow proudly in the tradition of their mythologized nationalist heroes who fought with the Nazis in WWII. They’re the people, in other words, who are sorry the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany. That’s not fascism? And, b) However often American pundits insist these fascists don’t matter, the fascists themselves are going to keep insisting that they do. And, occupying key positions in the new Ukrainian government and security services, yes, they do. Furthermore, as we’ll discuss below, the Eastern uprising is enhancing their role. A column in Foreign Policy puts it quite succinctly: “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev's current government -- and the protesters who brought it to power -- are, indeed, fascists.”²⁰

The one thing every Ukrainian was enraged about was the corruption of the crooked oligarchs. Unfortunately, the maidan coup replaced a government of crooks with a government of crooks and fascists.

This ultranationalist right, represented in parliament by the Svoboda party and on the street by Right Sector (Pravy Sektor), is focused on restoring Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. Emmanuel Dreyfus points out that both groups want to defend “the values of white, Christian Europe against the loss of the nation and deregionalisation,” and reject multiculturalism, as “responsible for the disappearance of the crucifix and the arrival of girls in burqas in your schools.” Both want to promote Ukrainian national identity “through measures ranging from systematic glorification of the nationalist movement to reintroducing the mentions of religious affiliation and ethnicity on identity documents.” Both want de-Russification and “de-Sovietisation,” which means “purging or sidelining former SNPU cadres and KGB agents, changing street and place names, removing monuments to heroes of the Soviet Union.”²¹

Of some relevance to Russia’s reaction to the Kiev insurrection, for anyone who might want to consider such things, Svoboda, which has bullied its way into dominance in parliament, called specifically for “abolishing Crimea’s autonomous status,” and for “join[ing] NATO, rearm[ing] with nuclear weapons and leav[ing] all post-Soviet cooperative organisations.”

Regarding the EU, Right Sector wants to maintain a distance from the EU, which it describes as a “homodictatorship,” a “liberal totalitarianism in which God has vanished and values are turned upside down.” Svoboda does not disagree with that characterization of Europe, but is now willing to accept Ukraine joining the EU. This, because it sees EU membership as a bulwark against Russian influence, and because it sees accepting the EU as an opportunistic electoral tactic.

Ultimately, the European integration these ultra-nationalist groups seek is not on the terms of the Europhile Kiev NGO liberals, or of the offshore banked-up oligarchs. Svoboda and Right Sector seek alliances within, and want very much to be part of, an insurgent pan-European far-right. For them the Ukrainian uprising was a key moment in The Great European Reconquista.

As Michael Moynihan pointed out, “the ecosystem of ultra-nationalist websites seem heavily focused on supporting Svoboda’s bid for political power in post-Yanukovych Ukraine,” and Svoboda was praised on the website of the British National Party, which celebrated that “a group of our Polish comrades from the [neo-Nazi] Falange organization visited Ukraine” to support Svoboda and the revolution.

The Swedish neo-Nazi, Fredrik Hagberg, also paid a visit to Kiev City Hall, to congratulate the insurrectionists, and proclaim: “You now have the opportunity to choose and create your own future. Do not accept the trap of choosing either the West or Russia.”²²

The Ukrainian far-right is also not as fooled as the liberals about what to expect from the EU-oligarch elite social program, perhaps because they are learning from their right-populist comrades in Western Europe, who are quite aware of the continent’s real condition. Thus Svoboda, “’probably on the advice of [France’s] Front National’, according to Andreas Umland, has also drawn up an economic programme with a social dimension. This would renationalise a number of enterprises, introduce progressive taxation on business profits, and seek to reduce the dominance of the oligarchs over the political and economic systems.”²³ (Dreyfus)

Neo-fascism, meet paleo-fascism. It’s not as if neo-fascists are really going to demolish capitalism, let alone empower the people, but, history knows, they can be adept at playing the populist game, and at filling in the “national-socialist” gaps of an absent actually-socialist left. Liberal neo-liberal oligarchs—i.e., plutocrats, i.e., campaign contributors—in Europe and America, who think they can get away forever with people-crushing socio-economic policies overlaid by sweet-sounding, substance-free, identity politics and “democracy” talk, might take notice of the terrible beauty they are (re-)birthing.

So the anti-Yanukovych insurrectionary movement combined a relatively self-aware, elite EU-oligarch agenda with a relatively self-aware, populist neo-fascist agenda, spiced up with a dash of self-deluded NGO liberalism that allowed Western media and liberals, along with many Ukrainians, to swallow the concoction whole.

Many western Ukrainians, that is. Eastern Ukrainians have spit that shit out. More on that later.

On Again, Off Again

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s worth remarking here that the US was, to some extent, trapped by the excess effects of its own policy. After all, the US probably would have got what it wanted if it had enforced the agreement of February 21, a complete capitulation to the maidan, which was brokered by the Vice President himself, with his cooperative European partners. Since the agreement moved the elections up to May, and presuming Yanukovych was as thoroughly unpopular as he seemed, an IMF-friendly government would have been in place very soon. (Even though Russia was not a party to that agreement, it was willing to abide by it. Russia was not trying to save Yanukovych, who was not “their” man.) The US, however, could not resist going along with the now-popular neo-fascist forces it had set in motion. Though they were no longer under any threat and had already won their political goals, these militants forced an immediate overthrow of the government, and began to institute their “de-Russification” program by outlawing the Russian language (later rescinded) and attacking and purging members of political parties they didn’t like (Communists and Party of the Regions).

I think, too, that the US and its favorite oligarchs would have preferred to dispense with, or at least marginalize, Right Sector and other the neo-fascist forces. These forces were indispensable in overthrowing Yanukovych, but their persistent presence could seriously undermine the legitimacy of the new “European” regime—especially among, you know, Europeans. Western Europeans, particularly Germans, are not comfortable with these guys. European media notices and talks about them, and even the American media cannot hide them forever.²⁴

Thus, there have been some moves, surely encouraged by the Americans, to dress the regime up in more palatable center-right colors. There may be an attempt to peel Svoboda away from Right Sector, with the former becoming a more respectable parliamentary presence, and the latter, the militant street fighters, left behind. So Svoboda mellows its “Joseph Goebbels Research Center” and “anti-Muscovite Jew” rhetoric while playing kissy-face with the Israeli ambassador on the basis of their shared “nationalism.”²⁴

Particularly portentous in this regard was the killing in March of Oleksandr Muzychko, aka Sashko Bilyi, one of Right Sector’s most notorious and pugnacious militants. Muzychko is the star of this viral video, in which he roughs up a local prosecutor and shows him who’s the boss now, and this one, where he tells the crowd: “I am calling on the people to arm themselves. Only those who have a Kalashnikov will be respected. I’m calling all to take up arms!,” and this one, where he lectures to a regional parliament, brandishing his AK-47: "The Right Sector was armed and will be armed till the time when it will be necessary… You did not give us this weapon and you will not take it away. Who wants to take away my machine gun, my pistol, my knives? Let them try!”

Sashko Bilyi knew: The first counter-revolutionary act of every government is to collect the guns.²⁶

Notorious Ukrainian nationalist militant Muzychko 'shot dead'

Published on Mar 25, 2014

Notorious Ukrainian right-wing militant leader Aleksandr Muzychko, also known as Sashko Bilyi, has reportedly been shot dead in western Ukraine, where he coordinated actions of local groups belonging to the nationalist Right Sector movement. READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/ycj750

Muzychko was killed on March 25^th, in a raid on the Three Carp Café in Barmaky by members of the Sokil (Falcon), the interior ministry’s special task force. Some witnesses say he was pulled from his car, handcuffed, and then shot in the heart twice. The interior ministry, after saying he was killed in a shootout when police returned fire, settled on a suicide story, that “he had shot himself in the heart [twice?] as police tried to bring him to the ground after a chase.”²⁷(Here’s a link to what purports to be the killing of Muzychko captured on surveillance video. As you might expect, it’s difficult to make out exactly what is happening in it.)

Right Sector had no doubt about what happened. Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh, himself now Deputy Chief of the National Defense and Security Council and a declared presidential candidate, called it "Our brother-in-arms Oleksandr Muzychko's murder,” carried out by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov as part of the “counterrevolutionary pressure on maidan and Right Sector as the vanguard of our revolution.” Yarosh announced: "We cannot silently accept the Ukrainian Interior Ministry's active counterrevolutionary activities. In this connection, we demand Interior Minister Arsen Avakov's immediate dismissal, and we demand the arrest of the Sokil special task force commander and all those guilty of [Muzychko's] murder.”

As Andrew Higgins points out in the New York Times: Muzychko’s militancy “struck a chord with some ordinary Ukrainians, who wonder when Ukraine’s revolution will bring tangible benefits.” Right Sector and other neo-fascists stormed the parliament vowing to "take revenge on Avakov for the death of our brother," calling for Avakov’s resignation and the arrest of all agents involved in the killing of Muzychko, and for a "second maidan." As the Times put it, a lot of Ukrainians saw his killing as a “‘pre-ordered hit’ orchestrated by establishment forces,” who wanted to silence an uncompromising rebel who wanted to oust not only Mr. Yanukovych, but an entire class of politicians and civil servants he viewed as irredeemably corrupt.” Higgins quotes one “veteran Ukrainian nationalist”: “This is an unfinished revolution and he [Muzychko] wanted to carry it through to its logical conclusion.”²⁸

Avakov, for his part, held firm. His interior ministry and the SBU (Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency) had previously demanded that all maidan activists hand in illegal weapons, and he now called armed militants "bandits," suggested banning Right Sector, and ordered arrests of many of their militants.

As Interior Minister Avakov is a member of the Fatherland Party, controlled by America’s sweetheart, Yulia Tymoshenko, this looked like the beginning of the turf war in which Western-approved, well-coiffed, oligarchs of the respectable right would attempt to show their wolfsangel-wearing comrades who’s really the boss. Was prying Sashko Bilyi’s Kalishnikov from his cold, dead hands a message from Yulia, via Avakov, to Dmytro and his Right Sector: What happened in the maidan stays in the maidan. Time for a conscious uncoupling. If so, Dmytro’s response, via his street posse, was sharp: We’re still in the maidan. “Until the end.”²⁹

Did this mark the beginning of the end of the mutually-instrumental marriage during the winter games in the maidan between the western-backed oligarchic elite, whose only real goal was the EU/IMF program, and the populist neo-fascist movements, who are focused on a program of purified ethnic Ukrainian nationalism, but are quite willing to take up the fight against corruption, privilege, and social penury that is the real concern of most people? An end to this dramatic alliance, which itself diverted attention from the fundamental contradictions that affect the social future of the country?

I thought it was. I thought we were in for a hell of a fight. I also had a pretty good idea of who would win it: As Sashko Bilyi learned, and as his death was meant to teach others, guys who strut around in camo waving their rifles usually don’t stand a chance against gentlemen and women in bespoke suits, who command whole armies, and the banks that pay them. Usually, suits beat camo.

Usually. In this case, however, the neo-fascists have gained a lot of credibility and traction. Svoboda and Right Sector might be hard to break up. Both factions share the same mass constituency, based in the same stridently right-wing nationalist mythology that has been promoted by oligarchic governments themselves for twenty years. Most importantly, the populist neo-fascists have “struck a chord with some ordinary Ukrainians” who see that they share the deep suspicion that the corrupt oligarchs and international elite are only out to continue screwing the country. I wish the Ukrainian socialist left had a serious presence, but right now, who else do “ordinary Ukranians” see who might complete what they know to be an “unfinished revolution“?

So it looked like the oligarchs and their Euro-American sponsors would have to go to the mattresses, and do a whole lot of nasty wet work, mobilizing all the reinvigorated agents of state-sanctioned violence, Three-Carp style. Easy enough to portray it as a righteous campaign against fascists—who were now to be noticed and rejected—in a way that would, again, win the quick assent of Western liberals and the Western media. Of course, it would also be a diversion—another cover for the less telespectacular, but real and incessant, anti-populist and anti-democratic campaign to entrench the strict authoritarianism of the neo-liberal state, without the embarrassing wolfsangel. It’s the kind of thing we’ve seen, for example, in “anti-Islamist” campaigns in Arab countries.

It seems now, however, that the oligarch-fascist divorce is on hold. Call it a trial reconciliation, until the east is retaken. Since eastern Ukrainians are as willing and capable of occupying buildings, arming themselves, and resisting the armed forces of the state as their western compatriots, and, since the regular army—which the elected Yanukovych government was not, but the unelected new government is, wiling to send against its own people—seems to be reluctant to fire on those people, it’s necessary to call on the hard cases. Time for the suits to call on the camos.

So Right Sector has moved 150 or so militants into Slavyansk, which looks like it’s becoming the central point of contention in the east. Right Sector has also moved its main headquarters to the eastern city of Dnepropetrovsk, in order to “closely monitor” developments. There, they’ve organized a new paramilitary squadron of 800 fighters. This will link up, presumably, with the new “special battalion” of “local patriots” formed by Igor Kolomoysky, the oligarch appointed as governor of the region by the new Kiev regime. These are part of a new structure of fighting forces outside of the regular army that include a 60,000-man National Guard “recruited from ‘activists’ in the anti-Russian protests and from military academies,” under the control of Svoboda leader, Andriy Parubiy.

Right Sector leader Yarosh says: “We coordinate all of our actions with the leadership of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Security service of Ukraine.” Interior minister Avakov is on board, speaking of groups like this as comprising: “The new structure of special divisions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs…the answer to saboteurs, ‘green little men’ and to the other gangs tasked with attacking statehood and integrity of Ukraine.”

So the oligarchs and the neo-fascists are forming a common fighting strategy for eastern Ukraine. They even have a social program! Oligarch-governor Kolomoysky’s deputy, after “thinking a lot about events in Donetsk and Lugansk,” has called for “a revolution of the poor, the rebellion of tired and desperate people, unheard by the government”—by which he means paying off the “poor” rebels who turn in their weapons ($1000 for a Kalashnikov) or evacuate government buildings ($200,000). The capitalist dream: the “revolution” will be cashed in.³⁰

The Eastern World, It Is Exploding…

All of this complicated maneuvering of forces is because of scenes like this:

KievSendsTankstoSubdueNovorussia

(under 2 minutes)
Editor's Note: This video appears on Jim Kavanagh's site, The Polemicist, but its original version, on Youtube, has been withdrawn by the censors, already. The hand of thought control is now increasingly palpable throughout US social media. See below the notice that Google/Youtube leave behind after eliminating unwelcome information (for the oligarchs):

Nice, uh? Welcome to the Orwellian States of America.

^{Text by Jim Kavanagh resumes here.}

The assumption in the new Kiev government, its Western backers, and most of the world, that, Crimea aside, resistance to the new status quo would be minimal, and easily dispersed with a show of force by the Ukrainian army, turned out to be another self-delusion. Crimea might be a one-off, they thought, because Crimean resistance was purely a Russian product, an epiphenomenon of Russia’s military concerns over its naval base. Russia isn’t as interested in Slavyansk as it is in Sevastopol, so not to worry. We’ll accept a kind of neo-Yalta regarding Crimea, negotiated from on high, and show the eastern Ukrainians who’s the boss now with some armored columns and helicopter gunship flyovers. Surely eastern Ukrainians know—what Russia and all the post-Soviet states knew in the 90s, and what every Serious person in the West still knows, and every American NGO still teaches—that There Is No Alternative.

So when eastern Ukrainians stood up to it rather than laid down for it, it was clear that a lot of things had changed since email was invented. In the great movie, Burn! [If you haven’t seen it, you must.], Marlon Brando’s character said: “Ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century.” Well, the last twenty years have been a generation of learning about what can be expected from the ostensibly only alternative: wars and austerity, forced compliance (via the IMF and “the market”) to finance capital, and forced compliance (via bombers and drones) to American hegemony. For many of those years now, people have lived through, have been able to read and see enough alternative reports and analyses of the world, and are now primed to reject the purported inevitable.

Patrick Smith put it nicely in Salon: “The Western allies — and this always means the Americans with the Europeans in tow — have come up against a post–Cold War limit that has been lying out there in the middle distance since the triumphalist 1990s. The neo-liberalization of planet Earth is not a go.”³¹ At least not without a fight.

Let’s consider what we’ve seen in confrontations like the above in eastern Ukraine. Demonstrators telling reporters: “People came out of the village and stood in front of the tanks because they do not want them in their village,” and telling soldiers, “You are fulfilling criminal orders”; soldiers who “lack the heart” to fire on their own people, and who say “I am a soldier. I protect the people. I won’t shoot you.” In short, citizens disarming and turning back their national army—which was sent to crush their resistance by a unelected government that had designated them as “terrorists”—without firing a shot or setting anyone on fire.³²

Isn’t this the kind of once-in-a-generation sight that would astound with joy anyone who proclaims a belief in “democracy”? Isn’t this a remarkable display of popular resistance, at least as remarkable as anything we saw on the maidan? These eastern Ukrainian uprisings are clearly popular and widespread, and are using similar tactics of occupation and resistance as were used by the maidan insurrectionists—with less violence, and without the wolfsangel. Good for the gander, no?

^{and, wag of the finger and all, spoke thusly to Ukraine’s elected government about what Daddy “the leader of the ‘free world’” expects of them (9 seconds): (This by Obama is of course not censored)}

Then, after cringing at how sick sovereign nations must be of patronizing American leaders who lecture them like disobedient children, let’s marvel at how that same leader now has his highest diplomatic and intelligence officials endorsing his now-favored, unelected, Ukrainian government’s characterization of their citizen protesters as “terrorists,” and giving material and political support to that government’s use of its military in “a conflict that must be resolved politically,” under the guise of an “anti-terrorist” campaign. Nothing “insidious” about that. Tip of the hat, not wag of the finger.

Should we be surprised by the resistance of eastern Ukrainians? Not how we expected them to behave? The revolt of eastern Ukraine reveals, once again, the dangerously foolish arrogance of neocon American imperialism. Apparently it did not occur to the Nulands and Kerrys and other architects of the American empire, whose leader seems to have deluded himself into believing that the Kiev government was “duly elected” [!],³⁴ that eastern Ukrainians—who are not sorry the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany, have not been blessed with the education in “democracy” provided by Western billionaires and NGOs, and don’t like crooks or fascists—would be shocked and repelled by the overthrow of their democratically-elected (in a “good and competitive election”³⁵) government by a coalition of oligarchs, Kiev liberals, Europhile austerians, and neo-fascists.

Apparently, these doyens of democracy did not understand, or simply assumed they could ignore, the specific contours of Ukrainian politics and culture, including the fact that, as Patrick Cockburn points out: “Every election in Ukraine since …1991 has shown that the country is almost equally divided between pro-Russians and pro-Westerners with each side capable of winning closely fought elections.”³⁶

Apparently, American regime changers could not anticipate that eastern Ukrainians would not only reject the insult to their democratic rights represented by the Kiev coup, but would also foresee, and resist, the threat to the industrial heartland and their livelihood within, represented by the IMF program. As AFPnoted, in its paean to the new “free market efficiencies” the IMF program will produce: “One of Yatsenyuk's main outstanding worries is that higher gas prices and limited state subsidies will most dramatically impact the big steel mills and other heavy industries that dot the heavily Russified southeast.”³⁷ That’s why, as Robert Parry points out: “eastern protesters have said they are resisting the imposition of power from Kiev, which has included the appointment of billionaire ‘oligarchs’ as regional administrators, and … a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund that will make their hard lives even harder.”³⁸

Apparently, American democracy promoters figured that eastern Ukrainians would be down with the oligarchs appointed to rule them by the new unelected Kiev government, and eager to vote for presidential candidates like America’s Top Oligarch (and unindicted co-conspirator), Yulia, who, when asked: “What should we do now with the three million Russians that stayed in Ukraine?” (reportedly) replied: “They must be killed with nuclear weapons.”³⁹

I think Cockburn has it about right: “It was also self-deceptive and irresponsible for EU and US officials either not to see or not to care about the explosive consequences of backing the takeover of an unelected pro-Western government in Kiev, propelled into office by groups including extreme ultra-nationalists, and then to treat it as if it has total legitimacy.” This is another result of the “false belief by outside powers that they could win cheap victories, and a failure to appreciate that their chosen partner locally was a self-interested faction with many enemies.”⁴⁰

The rebellion in eastern Ukraine is the result of deep divisions in Ukrainian society that were dramatically exacerbated by the Maidan coup, which was itself supported—and, to a great extent, politically managed—by the United States. To pretend that the eastern uprising was conjured up by Russia is, as Cockburn describes it, “dangerous self-deception.” It’s also a way of diverting attention from the ways in which US neocon policy disrupts already-fragile societies.

American leaders were “surprised” by the tumultuous reactions in eastern Ukraine because for them, as Patrick Smith puts it: “Ukraine was never about Ukraine... Ukraine was merely the next job” in “the spread of the neoliberal order on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions.” That’s the project to which America’s “foreign policy cliques remain wholly committed,” and it doesn’t admit to much nuance about national specificities. If it we can sell it in the beltway, they figure, we can sell it everywhere.

In other words, once again, with its trademark arrogance and ignorance, America has intervened in a foreign country to achieve its agenda, and the regime change that it wants, ignoring—or, again, dismissing as insignificant—the specific internal tensions within the country it seeks to “correct.”

The Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq? The Sunni-Shia-Alawite-Christian tensions in Syria? The balance of secular and fundamentalist religious forces in Afghanistan, Libya, and throughout the Middle East? And now the West-East division in Ukraine? The ethnic differences? The (never-to-be-ackowledged) class contradictions? Not to worry. We’re here to color you democratic. We’ll dissolve all your internal divisions in the acid of “democracy”—which really means integrating you into the US-dominated neo-liberal capitalist order, an “international community” in which all US-compliant cats are painted “democratic” gray. We’re bringing you our freedoms. Isn’t that what everybody wants?

And when some significant section of the population fights back against the new, American-approved regime? Well, they’re just “dead-enders” and “terrorists.”

Mediaocrisy

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]articularly precious is the complaint, now ubiquitous in the American commentariat, that eastern Ukrainians are being fooled into their resistance by the “relentless propaganda” of Russia Today (RT). Really, the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government was achieved with the help of $5 billion of American government money and “five years’ worth of work and preparation,” and with the personal visit to and endorsement of the Kiev insurrectionists by the Assistant Secretary of State and other representatives of the American government; it was achieved after being fed years of missionary education in America’s version of inevitable capitalist “democracy” provided by Western liberal billionaires (Soros, Omidyar), congressionally-funded Institutes (NED, IRI, NDI, etc.), and the State Department.⁴¹ It was also nourished by the relentless praise showered upon the maidan rebels by the entire Western media establishment and echoed from the stages of FOX, MSNBC, and the Academy Awards, and the first thing the new American ambassador did in August was to fund an online television outlet to support the maidan uprising.⁴² After this complex propaganda matrix, whose reach and power no other country or force in the world can touch, was put at the service of the Kiev insurrectionists, the US government and media are now going to complain that RT is on the air? They’re going to say that eastern Ukrainians are standing in front of tanks because Abby Martin told them to?

This doesn’t pass the laugh test. Is RT a media outlet with a product that’s circumscribed by a particular national agenda? Yes, as is the New York Timesand the rest of that immensely more powerful Western propaganda matrix. RT has as much right to tell the story its way as does the New York Times. Kiev insurrectionists and eastern Ukrainian separatists, and a world audience, will listen to both, and their actions will be influenced, but not determined, by one or the other.

The US is complaining because there are now enough other channels of information and analysis in the world to compete seriously with those which are committed, whether explicitly or implicitly, to the American agenda. To cite Patrick Smith again, referring to outlets like RT and Al Jazeera, which he finds people around the world increasingly turning to: “The West’s monopoly on perspective is collapsing….The monopoly on consciousness the West has long enjoyed is also drawing to a close.”

Deal with it. Shouldn’t American progressives agree that: “This is a good sign. A multiple world lives only in multiple perspectives, even as multiplicity is deadly to the neoliberals”?

Really, anybody who thinks that, say, the NYT, is intrinsically more trustworthy than RT must have forgotten the outright lies the former has endorsed and propagated—from the Gulf of Tonkin to Iraq WMDs to the Syrian chemical attack, to, in this case, the NYT story last week that purported to “prove,” with photos, the existence of “masked” Russian spies in Ukraine—until two days later the photographer spoke up, and the Times had to had to admit the story was false.⁴³ RT has Abby Martin; the NYT has Roseanne Roseannadanna Judith Miller. Never mind.

Regarding the American media’s coverage of Ukraine, I must agree that: “You need a machete these days to whack through the thicket of misinformation, disinformation, spin, propaganda and straight-out lying that daily envelopes the Ukraine crisis like kudzu on an Alabama telephone pole,”⁴⁴ and that it’s “the most despicable misrepresenting in the public media of anything that I’ve ever seen.”⁴⁵ In the bizarro world of American journalism, “chaos and danger” in the Ukraine began when eastern Ukrainians took to the streets and seized government buildings. The Kiev chaos that came before “can be forgotten as irrelevant to the case,” and the only “extraordinary propaganda campaign” in play is that which results from “a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials”⁴⁶:

[A]nd it is like so totally not really fair because some people actually believe this stuff — CIA Director John Brennan being in Kiev, for instance … Subtext: Please stop believing the Russians when they mention things such as Brennan’s Kiev visit. … it only looks as if the Russians have a more sustainable account of the Ukraine crisis.⁴⁷[emphasis in original]

History and propaganda begin and end when the righteously brazen American government says it does.

Unfortunately for the American regime, too many honest observers like Smith, who has had a prestigious career in establishment journalism (The International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, five books), can see that “The more I scrutinize it, the more the American case on Ukraine is held together with spit and baling wire,” and “The Russian take in the Ukraine crisis is more truthful than the artful dodge Washington attempts.” How unfair. So we’ll refuse to answer the RT correspondent when she asks a perfectly reasonable question about the Brennan and Biden visits.

Who Didn’t Start The Fire

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merica’s regime-change architects also dismissively ignore the inevitable effects of their projects on the countries and peoples that neighbor or have close relations with the country being “corrected.” Changing one regime means changing a web of geopolitical relationships. As Cockburn remarks: “[S]tates do not exist in isolation. Occupy them – as happened in Kabul and Baghdad – or become the predominant influence, as the US and EU have been doing in Kiev, and you transform the political geography of a whole region.”

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian regime, Iran did not start the Iraq war. It gained by it, and adjusted its geopolitical strategy in reaction it, but it was reacting, as any nation would, to profound changes that were forced upon the region by the United States and its Allies. To say that is not in any way to endorse the Iranian regime.

Similarly, despite the bizarre narrative now being pumped out by the American media, Russia did not start the Ukraine fire. It is ludicrous to believe that “chaos and danger…would not exist except that Russian propaganda created them.”Russia did not spend five billion dollars over many years to produce the regime change it wanted in Kiev. It did not send its diplomats and parliamentarians to cheer on, and literally feed, a rebellion. It did not spend twenty years adding America’s neighbors to its military alliance, and encroaching that alliance steadily towards America’s borders. It’s the US and western capital that “induced a convulsion to shake a nation loose.”⁴⁸ Blaming Russia for the consequences of this policy is like blaming Iran for the Iraq war.

Russia is now reacting to events in a neighboring state, part of its historical territory, that is crucial to its defense and energy industries, the home of millions of its citizens. Any nation—and certainly the United States—would reactvigorously to such upheaval:

There is no question that if the roles of the United States and Russia were reversed, Washington would be threatening to intervene against a pro-Russian regime in its neighborhood. …Is there any question that if Russia somehow backed a putsch to install a client regime in Mexico City, which sent the army to crush opposition protests along the US-Mexico border and threatened to annihilate US citizens with nuclear weapons, Washington would intervene?⁴⁹

The US, let’s not forget, has brazenly claimed the right to prevent any political changes that threaten its energy interests in the Middle East, thousands of miles away. Good for the gander?

Is Russia trying to steer events in a radically-changing Ukraine in directions that minimize harm to itself? Is it politically and materially supporting the pro-Russian population of eastern Ukraine? It would be astounding if it weren’t! Let’s see: British MI6 and Defence Intelligence agents are “on the ground” in eastern Ukraine, although—pinky swear—“unarmed.”⁵⁰ The CIA—the head of the CIA—made an attemptedly clandestine, but he assures us non-interventional, visit to the new unelected Kiev government a few days before it launched its first “anti-terrorist” offensive. It may just be that he was the only CIA agent to show up in the last few weeks, and that the Kiev government is not coordinating its strategy closely with American and British intelligence. And the mercenaries from Greystone (aka Academi, aka Blackwater) who have been reported arriving in eastern Ukraine may have come to visit the Potemkin Steps.⁵¹ So, is every vaguely concerned party from countries thousands of miles away permitted to see after its interests in Ukraine, while we expect Russia to watch from the sidelines, obediently passive?

This has nothing to do with whether Russia is wonderful or Putin evil. These are childish distractions. Putin is watching Russia’s defense and energy interests being undermined, and its citizens, ethnic confrères, and historical supporters coming under the rule of a regime that they oppose, and that hates—I mean despises—everything Russian. Here’s the darling of western liberals, Saint Yulia, again, in an undisputed rant:

It’s about time we grab our guns and kill go kill those damn Russians together with their leader… I will use all of my means to make the entire world raise up, so that there wouldn’t be even a scorched field left in Russia…[I’m ready to] grab a machine gun and shoot that motherfucker [Putin] in the head.⁵²

Again, change “Russians” to “Americans,” “Putin” to “Obama,” put those words in the mouth of the influential leader of a pro-Russian coup in Mexico who was attacking Americans and their supporters as “terrorists,” and tell me the US government wouldn’t get all up in it. Intellectually-honest, adult observers should be able to understand, as Michael Hudson puts it:

You can be a bad guy and still have your position forced and you can still be attacked. … even if you don’t like Vladimir Putin, you can say Vladimir Putin can also be …forced into a situation where he has to protect himself and his own position….It’s absolutely crazy. It’s as if Obama has decided to reinvigorate class war by taking the side of the Nazis in World War II, by these neo-Nazi groups that said “We’re sorry, the wrong side won World War II. We wished Germany conquered Russia”. Well, you can imagine the effect this has on the Russians.⁵³

Russia hasn’t had an elaborate, decades-long program for regime change in Ukraine, or for invading eastern Ukraine, but it may well find it difficult to stand by and watch the regular Ukrainian army and/or neo-fascist militias overrun what it considers to be the righteous resistance of ethnic Russians to an undemocratic and aggressively unfriendly regime that’s a stalking horse for NATO.

It’s the US and the West who have bitten off more than they expected, and created a mess they do not know how to solve. They’ve got a government that’s hated by half its people, is losing a lot of its territory to separatist movements, and is rated at risk of “imminent default.” The IMF has no answer to this except austerity, subsidy cuts, and more debt. The US has no answer except sanctions that will hurt its European partners more than anyone,⁵⁴ and some American companies (Boeing, for example) quite a bit. And it can of course make empty—or worse, serious, and in any case, dangerous—military threats. The US is very good at that. It’s going to be a little difficult, however, to persuade Americans, who are fed up with wars based on packs of lies, and who can’t get a $10 an hour minimum wage, to fight with their lives and/or treasure for Yulia and Right Sector.

In fact, the US and the West need Russia—to whom Ukraine owes a lot of money, which the IMF will have to pay off—to help solve the Ukraine problem they have created for themselves. And they are, unbelievably, demanding that Russia do so, at whatever cost to its own interests. A little harsh in tone, but Michael Hudson and Paul Craig Roberts are on point:

So Mr. Obama and the Secretary of State [tell] Russia [it] must give its gas free to the Ukraine. It must give a half-a-billion dollars a month free and not charge anything so that Ukraine will have enough money to buy military arms and invite NATO in to put hydrogen bombs on our border, so we can bomb you if you don’t do what we say.⁵⁵ (Hudson)

Washington is demanding that the Russian government pull the rug out from under the protesting populations in eastern and southern Ukraine and force the Russian populations in Ukraine to submit to Washington’s stooges in Kiev. Washington also demands that Russia renege on the reunification with Crimea and hand Crimea over to Washington so that the original plan of evicting Russia from its Black Sea naval base can go forward. In other words, Washington’s demand is that Russia put Humpty Dumpty back together again and hand him over to Washington. This demand is so unrealistic that it surpasses the meaning of arrogance. The White House Fool is telling Putin: “I screwed up my takeover of your backyard. I want you to fix the situation for me and to ensure the success of the strategic threat I intended to bring to your backyard.”⁵⁶ (PCR)

The hubris here is matched only by the confusion. While Obama & Co are trying to play some kind of liberal-interventionist-neocon-neoliberal 10-dimensional chess on the Starship Free Enterprise (ignoring the Prime Directive), Putin is calmly gathering his forces at the center of the board on planet Earth.

I have no brief for Putin or his Russia, which is mired in what I consider its own defects of oligarchy-lite capitalism and reactionary if not-so-fascist nationalism. This is more like the pre-World War I tension between competing great powers than any epic battle for democratic socialism or national liberation. Of course, that means there’s still a risk of a serious conflict. And I do think that Andrew Levine is onto something, when he says that: “Putin is no less pro-capitalist than anyone else in the liberal fold.” I also agree with Levine’s shrewd perception that “he is as fine a conservative leader as one can be in today’s world,” perhaps “the closest approximation the world now has to the great conservative leaders of the past.”⁵⁷ Within the world of capitalist power, we’re seeing an object lesson in political realism versus the neocon imperial delusion that drives the American leadership.

Too bad that “No one can entertain any illusion … that America’s conduct abroad stands any chance of changing of its own in response to an intelligent reading of the emerging post–Cold War order.”⁵⁸

Blind Man’s Bluff

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he idea of a hot war with Russia seems surreal, and yet the danger becomes more palpable every day. A situation has arisen in which “sides” have been formed, and it looks like one side will have to suffer a clear setback, something that the parties involved are loathe to accept.

On one side is the Kiev government, allied with the EU/IMF-US/NATO—a very complicated relationship.

It’s important to recognize how the “US/NATO” part of that “side” represents a surplus of American hegemony, in excess of the economic conditions required by the EU/IMF. The US is enforcing a marriage of the NATO agenda of military encirclement of Russia with the EU/IMF economic agenda. It’s a conflation that the EU accepts, even though many EU countries find it in serious tension with their independent economic and security interests (as well as their conflict-averse populations),⁵⁹ because the EU accepts its own submission to American hegemony.

The US insists on the sanctity of this marriage precisely because it wants to keep EU countries from succumbing to the allures of forming dangerously independent liaisons with the rising economic powers of Eurasia. Everyone should be aware, and wary, of the harsh particularity of the American agenda, which should be obvious by now. As Pepe Escobar says, the US is “trying to scotch the full economic integration of Eurasia.”⁶⁰ Mike Whitney warns: “This is about military expansion into Eurasia, this is about pipeline corridors and oil fields, this is about dismantling the Russian Federation and positioning multinational corporations and Wall Street investment banks in Asia for the new century.”⁶¹ John Pilger refers to the US pursuing a new "manifest destiny," its “longstanding ambition to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe.”⁶²

These guys did not dream up this “longstanding ambition.” They can trace it back to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In it, Brzezinski’s identified Eurasia as “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played,” and Ukraine as a “critically important geopolitical pivot” that the US had to control, because “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America.”⁶³ Because American primacy is imperative.

The US may be particularly insistent about enforcing the marriage vows between EU and NATO interests because, pace Zbig, it’s not 1997, and America’s own prodigious potency has been flagging lately. For example [continuing the metaphor], the, um, block it experienced in Syria, which has held so far, was, as I discussed in a previous post, a serious interruption in the imperial agenda. Neocons seethe with jealous rage against Putin, who was instrumental in preventing the consummation of their Syrian plans, even though adamant popular resistance, starting with England just saying No!, was the real deal-breaker. The US does not want the impasse in Syria, along with the hesitation over Iran, along with the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with its economic decline, along with its seeming inability to actually win anything, to add up to the real turning point in imperial karma many of us hope it is. It needs to know that Europe is committed to this relationship.

At any rate, the Kiev provisional government is both entirely dependent on, and fundamentally undermined by, this EU-NATO ménage, into whose embrace it has thrown itself. One the one hand, the oligarchs have cast their lot with the EU-IMF agenda, and absolutely need the backing of NATO to maintain their precarious hold on power; on the other hand, they absolutely need that backing because the insurrection that brought the EU-IMF program into power has infuriated half the country, and it won’t be too long before the EU-IMF program itself will infuriate the other half.

It’s too bad, because another destiny for Ukraine might have been possible. As Escobar suggests, Ukraine could have developed its “borderland” identity in quite productive ways: “In a sane, non-Hobbesian environment, a neutral Ukraine would only have to gain by positioning itself as a privileged crossroads between the EU and the proposed Eurasian Union – as well as becoming a key node of the Chinese New Silk Road offensive.” But that’s not in the American primacy program, and, “Instead, the Kiev regime changers are betting on acceptance into the EU… and becoming a NATO forward base.” Another pawn on the Grand Chessboard.

So the Kiev regime “side” is likely to be forced by US/NATO, as well as by the ultranationalist tendencies within, to forcibly defeat any separatist uprising, and crush even any “federalist” demands—or anything that smells like a concession to “Russia.” We have to understand the word “Russia” now as Ukrainian-nationalist- and American-media-speak for anything that might allow some regions to wriggle out of either the IMF neo-liberal austerity program, or the American/NATO Eurasian primacy agenda. It’s looking like the US is intent on a confrontation that will demonstrate the continued viability of its big stick, and stanch any perceived bleeding of its imperial power.

This is going to require the Kiev government to crush the eastern uprisings with all the force necessary, including unleashing the otherwise embarrassing neo-fascists and accepting overt NATO military support (arms, munitions, intelligence, drones, and special ops including mercenaries). It will be ugly and deadly—much more so than the maidan. It will severely damage the Kiev regime, and result in a broken state, with a sullen population, no part of which will get anything for it.⁶⁴

But, hey, for the US, it was never about Ukraine. Sure, the US would like—and Europe would really like—to have Ukraine as a stable, passive, and compliant field of exploitation, but if that’s not in the cards, they’ll take a broken state. The US does not want a full-on war with Russia, but civil war in Ukraine, a chaotic polity, constant tension with Russia, even sporadic guerilla actions—all that craziness can well serve the neocon imperial agenda. It will help to prevent the formation any kind of strategically significant Eurasian bloc. Better a Ukraine that’s a broken borderland than a Ukraine that’s a “privileged crossroads” in a network of Eurasian economies not subject to American primacy. Cook the goose to spite the gander.

Besides, another broken state will also justify military spending, American exceptionalism, opportunistic demonization of the Eurasian devil-of-the-day, and divert Americans’ attention from their real social problems and enemies at home. It’s a strange effect of the neocon strategy: America “wins” when everybody else loses.

Haven’t we seen this time and again—in Iraq, Libya, Syria. It’s not an accident.

I’m not saying this will really “work,” in some “sane, non-Hobbesian” way, but from their point of view this kind of upheaval has always worked to their “Hobbesian” advantage, and they are fairly convinced it will continue to do so.

On the other “side” are the eastern Ukrainian dissident populations and their only possible patron, Russia. Russia may support them, but it does not control the situation on the ground. They want to resist the government of crooks and fascists. The depth of Russia’s commitment to those people will be a key factor in what happens next. The Russians, too, are trapped by the excesses of US policy.

Putin doesn’t want or need war of any kind. He knows he would lose a direct confrontation with the US military, and any serious invasion or sustained support of an insurgency would drain Russia economically and politically. Whatever faults or ambitions Russia has, they do not produce anything like the neocon agenda.

There is an argument that Russia cannot afford to let the EU destroy and cannibalize Ukrainian industry and agriculture, or allow the US and NATO to tighten its indisputably threatening grip around the country—that now is as good a time as any to have the fight that’s inevitable, if Russia doesn’t want to agree to be a subsidiary of the American empire.

There’s the counter-argument, of course, that Russia would do just as well to let the Kiev government and its American patrons deal with a hateful and rebellious eastern population, let the costs of IMF austerity sink in across Ukraine and Europe, and let its own reasonableness pay off in the long term.

Both arguments are plausible. Neither course of action would make for a particularly “evil” Russia, and or a particularly “good” result.

The first option would require a military move to defeat any Kiev government offensive that threatened to crush the eastern protesters. It would be a strong defense of an arguably legitimate principle of self-determination and, more importantly, of the people fighting for it. It would call what may be America’sand Europe’s bluff, and be a strong challenge to America’s assumption that it can dictate the terms of primacy in Eurasia. If it’s a bluff. It would be extremely dangerous for Russia.

The second would require standing by while a Kiev government military offensive crushes the eastern protesters. It would be an immediate bloody disaster, and a long-term social disaster, for the eastern Ukrainians in revolt. (Can American liberals, who cheered on Obama’s bombing the crap out of Libya, not recognize that if there were ever a case for “humanitarian intervention,” Russia has it here?) It would also undermine Russia as a Eurasian, let alone world, power. Would it also involve a NATO-Ukrainian recapture of Crimea? Could Russia stand for that?

Since a new Kiev offensive has already begun, we will soon find out.

In any case, Ukraine loses. It was never about Ukraine.

[As this is being posted, a new Kiev offensive against the east has already begun. In a particularly horrific incident, at least 38 people have died in Odessa when the “Trade Unions House was set on fire by pro-Kiev radicals after they surrounded and destroyed the tent camp of anti-government activists that stood in front of the building.” Thirty died, “suffocated to death with smoke,” and many burned bodies were found on the upper floors. Eight were killed jumping out of windows. According to some reports, “those who jumped and survived were surrounded and beaten by football ultras and the Right Sector.”

Using an insulting term for eastern dissidents, pro-Kiev nationalists gloated on Twitter that “Colorado beetles are being roasted up in Odessa.”⁶⁵]

Of course, there was a third alternative: Negotiate a political reconciliation in Ukraine that does not privilege the Kiev insurrectionary government, that acknowledges it was in fact the result of a movement that was not thoroughly representative. Recognize that it will have to be replaced by a regime that issues from the democratic consent of all regions, even if that means some form of federalization. Allow Ukrainians to build a new regime that is not dominated by crooked oligarchs, no matter who their foreign patrons are; that is, in fact, willing to strip the oligarchs of their political power and of the wealth of the county they have stolen; that rejects any integration with NATO and any part in a “new Cold War”; and that commits itself to negotiating economic deals that are transparent, explained carefully in advance, and designed to serve the best interests of the majority of Ukrainians, not foreign financial institutions.

Such an alternative is perfectly reasonable, and would help Ukraine. Of course, that would require the United States to relativize its own actions, to recognize that maybe it was a tiny bit reckless with the fire it lit in Ukraine, and to dampen rather than to double down on the accelerant. Unfortunately, “No one can entertain any illusion … that America’s conduct abroad stands any chance of changing of its own in response to an intelligent reading of the emerging post–Cold War order.”

It was never about Ukraine.

__________________________________
[See previous post on Kiev uprising, at Charge of the Right Brigade:Ukraine and the Dynamics of Capitalist Insurrection]

Notes and Links

Michael Hudson Interview,If You Can’t Tap Their Phone, How Do You Know Who To Shoot?, renegade economists | Earthsharing

Patrick L. Smith,Thomas Friedman, supreme toady: Also, shameless! - Salon.com

‘Western financial aid won’t save Ukraine’ – former minister of economy - Reality Check - The Voice of Russia: News

Elizabeth Piper, Special Report: Why Ukraine spurned the EU and embraced Russia | Reuters. Many quotes in following paragraphs from this article.

Michael Hudson,America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff

Michael Hudson,Anti-Russian sentiment a resource play diversion

Marilyn Vogt-Downey,Whither Ukraine? An Imperialist Invasion Without an Imperialist Army » CounterPunch

Joseph Stiglitz – an interview – Johann Hari

Paul Craig Roberts,Western Looting Of Ukraine Has Begun -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org.

Jack Rasmus,The Ukraine Economic Crisis » CounterPunch, and see his detailed analysis of the IMF Standby Agreement with Ukraine of March 27, Ukraine’s IMF Deal Means Greece-Like Depression. In fact, some of the IMF money would go to Russia, to which Ukraine owes a ton for gas.

The IMF’s $14-$18 billion bailout for Ukraine is tied to unpopular reforms | GlobalPost

Ukraine to hike domestic gas prices by 50 percent to meet IMF demands | Reuters

IMF demands and occupation Putin - LB.ua(From an Anti-Russian Deputy)

Yatsenyuk agrees to onerous IMF terms | Новости Украины

Crimean leaders blame Kiev for selling Ukraine off for IMF loans - The Voice of Russia.

The story of how oligarchs and transnational capital have been taking over the rich black soil farmland is tragically emblematic, and a good account of it from 2013 can be found here. That takeover will accelerate dramatically when the new IMF-approved Ukrainian government allows foreigners to buy the black soil farmland that made Ukraine known as the “breadbasket of Europe.” See: Land Grabs in the Black Earth: Ukrainian Oligarchs and International Investors | Heinrich Böll Foundation. See also, A free land market will destroy the Ukrainian village | Foundation for Effective Governance, and JP Sottile, Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch | Consortiumnews

Marilyn Vogt-Downey, op. cit.

Ukraine’s Economy Would Have Collapsed Without Russian Aid – IMF Chief | World | RIA Novosti

A New Cold War? Ukraine Violence Escalates, Leaked Tape Suggests U.S. Was Plotting Coup | Democracy Now!

Rasmus,The Ukraine Economic Crisis

Kenneth Rapoza,Washington’s Man Yatsenyuk Setting Ukraine Up For Ruin, Forbes.com

Rasmus,The Ukraine Economic Crisis

Andrew Foxall and Oren Kessler,Yes, There Are Bad Guys in the Ukrainian Government Foreign Policy.com

Emmanuel Dreyfus,Ukraine beyond politics - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

Michael Moynihan,The Swedish Neo-Nazis ‘Volunteers’ of Kiev - The Daily Beast

Emmanuel Dreyfus, op. cit.

History News Network | Why Germans are More Ambivalent About What’s Happening in Ukraine than Anybody Else,

Anna Rombach, Popular Discontent Grows with German Media Lies in Ukraine Crisis | Global Research

Max Blumenthal,Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine? | Alternet

See my,The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights.

Oleksandr Muzychko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mystery Surrounds Death of Ukrainian Activist - NYTimes.com,

Anna Nemtsova, Ukraine’s Unfinished Revolution, Foreign Policy,

Ukraine’s Police Crack Down on Nationalist Right Sector After Death Threats | News | The Moscow Times,

Ukrainian radical group demands Avakov’a dismissal, task force members’ arrest for killing its activist, Interfax Ukraine

Jeanne Whalen,Protesters Still Hang Out Around Kiev 'Maidan,' Hanging On to Weapons Too - WSJ.com

Right Sector arrives in Slavyansk to suppress protests - The Voice of Russia,

Ukraine’s far-right leader moves HQ to the east, forms new squadron — RT News

Patrick L. Smith,Liberal media myth officially dead: Brazen propaganda, historical amnesia and the New York Times - Salon.com
Ukraine Push Against Rebels Grinds to Halt - NYTimes.com

Obama Calls On Viktor Yanukovych To Remove Security Forces From Kiev Immediately| AP via Huffington Post

Obama Calls Coup Government in Kiev "Duly Elected" - YouTube

Ukraine's presidential election meets most international commitments | OSCE

Patrick Cockburn,Ukraine: From Crisis to Catastrophe » CounterPunch

The IMF’s $14-$18 billion bailout for Ukraine is tied to unpopular reforms | GlobalPost

Robert Parry,Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre. See also, In Ukraine, a crisis of bullets and economics - The Washington Post

Time to grab guns and kill damn Russians – Tymoshenko in leaked tape — RT News.

“Reportedly,” because Tymoshenko has acknowledged the conversation took place, but has denied making this particular statement about the three million Russians. She claims it was the one element of the tape inserted by the FSB. Decide what you think is credible regarding that. Her interlocutor, parliamentarian Nestor Shufrych, told another story, saying: "The conversation didn't take place." So, at least one of these Kiev government figures is lying.

Note here, also, the echo of Svoboda’s nuclear rearmament fixation. I think that restoring the Ukraine as a nuclear power is a another key element, within revanchist Ukrainian nationalism, of restoring national pride.

Patrick Cockburn,Ukraine: From Crisis to Catastrophe

See Steve Weissman’s great analysis of the intense and continual American nurturing of Ukrainian regime change, inMeet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev.

Patrick L. Snith,Liberal media myth officially dead

Robert Parry,NYT Retracts Russian-Photo Scoop | Consortiumnews

Patrick L. Smith,Propaganda, lies and the New York Times: Everything you really need to know about Ukraine - Salon.com

Michael Hudsoninterview, op. cit.

David M. Herszenhorn,Russia Is Quick to Bend Truth About Ukraine - NYTimes.com

Smith,Liberal media myth officially dead

Smith,Thomas Friedman, supreme toady

Alex Lantier,Kerry’s statement on Ukraine: A lying brief for war - World Socialist Web Site

Ukraine crisis: Head of MI6 warns military intervention in Ukraine risks spiralling into ‘all-out war’ with Russia - Mirror Online

US mercenaries deployed in Southern Ukraine, and Lanier,Kerry’s statement on Ukraine | WSWS

Time to grab guns and kill damn Russians – Tymoshenko in leaked tape — RT News

Michael Hudsoninterview, op. cit.

France Plays Russian Roulette: Why Europe Is Scared Of Sanctions Against Russia | Zero Hedge

Michael Hudsoninterview, op. cit.

Paul Craig Roberts,Moving Closer To War -- PaulCraigRoberts.org

Smith,Thomas Friedman, supreme toady

Ukraine Crisis Exposes Gaps Between Berlin and NATO - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Pepe Escobar,Robocop NATO Dreams of War » CounterPunch

Mike Whitney,Directing War Strategies from the Shadows » CounterPunch

John Pilger,John Pilger: Nato’s Action Plan in Ukraine is Right Out of Dr Strangelove

www.takeoverworld.info/Grand_Chessboard.pdf, See also: Whitney and Escobar, and Chris Ernesto,The Eurasian Chessboard: Brzezinski Mapped Out “The Battle for Ukraine” in 1997 | Global Research

Notice, I did not mention the western Ukrainian, EurophileMaidan liberals. That’s because they count for nothing. Their purported concerns will be subsumed within the real Western neo-liberal agenda, the oligarchs who actually run the country will ignore them, the NGOs will go away, the western media will forget about them, and a whole lot, if not most, of the Ukrainian people will end up hating them and what they have wrought. Ask the Russian liberals how they’ve fared since the Yeltsin “revolution.”

38 People Killed As Radicals Set Office On Fire In Ukraine's Odessa, InformationClearingHouse.info

About the Author

JIM KAVANAGH, Contributing Editor

Jim Kavanagh, a native and denizen of New York City, is a former cab driver and college professor. His articles have appeared on Counterpunch, The Greanville Post, The Unz Review, Z, and other sites around the net. He blogs at his website, thepolemicist.net, from a left-socialist perspective.

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JIM KAVANAGH’s classic analyses of the Ukraine coup: Charge of the Right Brigade (part 1)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

We are happy to repost here Jim Kavanagh's analysis of one of this century's most cynical political sleight of hands pulled by Washington and its EU stooges to replace a Russia-neutral or favorable government with one subservient to Washington's interests and anti-Russia agenda.

Arch Neocon Victoria Nuland —Washington's hand in Eastern Europe's coups— greeting Poroshenko and other neofascists in Kiev.

Charge of the Right Brigade:
Ukraine and the Dynamics of Capitalist Insurrection

A treatise on the upheaval in Ukraine, in eight takes.
First published on march 14, 2014
(SEE PART 2 OF THIS SERIES HERE)

The money shot:

As tensions rose on the streets of the Russian-speaking eastern portion of Ukraine, the response of the new government in the capital on Sunday was not to send troops, but to send rich people. The interim government, worried about Russian efforts to destabilize or seize regions in eastern Ukraine after effectively taking control of the Crimean peninsula in the south, is recruiting the country’s wealthy businessmen, known as the oligarchs, to serve as governors of the eastern provinces. The strategy, which Ukrainian news media are attributing to Yulia V. Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and party leader, is recognition that the oligarchs represent the country’s industrial and business elite, and exercise great influence over thousands of workers in the east, which is largely ethnically Russian.The office of President Oleksandr V. Turchynov announced on Sunday the appointments of two billionaires — Sergei Taruta in Donetsk and Ihor Kolomoysky in Dnipropetrovsk — and more were reportedly under consideration for positions in the eastern regions….The ultra-wealthy industrialists wield such power in Ukraine that they form what amounts to a shadow government, with empires of steel and coal, telecoms and media, and armies of workers. Persuading some to serve as governors in the east was a small victory for the new government in Kiev.¹

Has there ever been a more pathetic postscript to a putative “revolution”? This act by Ukraine’s new-old rulers encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the phony “democracy promotion” advanced by American “regime changers,” everything that’s wrong with the recent history of the post-Soviet republics, and everything that was wrong with Soviet Stalinism. It’s a sorry symptom of the sad state of politics and ideology in Ukraine, and in the whole wide neo-liberal world. More on that later.

Let’s take a careful look at what has happened in Ukraine.

It was an insurrection

What occurred in Ukraine is the overthrow of a democratically-elected government and the subversion of parliamentary democracy by an insurrection. There can be no serious argument about this. According to the extant standards of bourgeois democracy, Viktor Yanukovych was freely and fairly elected. There was and is no dispute about that. His party, the Party of the Regions, was elected as the largest in the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament). He was driven out of office and out of the country, and his party was effectively overturned in parliament, by an armed insurrection.

Yanukovych was so corrupt

Yulia Tymoshenko, the corrupt oligarch and fascist beauty being hailed by the new leaders as a "democrat". Don't expect the US media to explain what her true political lineage is.

He certainly was, before and after his election. But so are his political opponents, all of whom are in the pockets of one oligarch or another. This includes his former nemesis, and the woman some in the West see “almost as a modern-day saint,”²Yulia Tymoshenko, who is a corrupt oligarch in her own right. She made a fortune in sweetheart natural-gas deals in the 1990s with then-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko—deals for which Lazarenko was prosecuted and convicted, and Tymoshenko named as a co-conspirator, in the United States. This earned her the nickname of “The Gas Princess,” and because she was very cozy with Russia in these deals—before, fortune made, she became all anti-Russian and pro-Western—she is also known on the street as “Putin in a skirt.³”

As one commentator remarks:
In a country with endemic and rather extraordinary corruption—which is really the most important issue for many Ukrainians—Tymoshenko’s best hope may be that Yanukovych has left behind such obvious symbols of his stupid cupidity.⁴ Now, The Economist reckons: “One [clear thing] is that the government is going to be controlled by Yulia Tymoshenko… She has no official post, but Mr [Alexander] Turchinov [speaker of the parliament and acting president] is her right-hand man and Mr [Arseniy] Yastsenyuk [the new Prime Minister] is the leader of her party, Fatherland.” Actually, I think this may be true in the short run, but it’s not a sure bet to last.

The Economist also points out that, behind the public theater on the maidan:
A less visible battle has been going on between various Ukrainian oligarchs and the members of Mr. Yanukovych’s extended family who took their place at the trough. These oligarchs used their money, influence and political fronts to pile on pressure.”⁵The Economist’s analysis is echoed by Denis, a member of the Autonomous Workers Union (a revolutionary syndicalist group) in Kiev, in an interview published in mid-February:

The hapless Viktor Yanukovych

Since 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, who had initially been just a puppet of powerful oligarchs, has become an ambitious businessman himself. His elder son has accumulated vast powers; “The Family” occupied important positions in the government, monopolized control over capital flows, and started fighting with Rinat Akhmetov, Dmitry Firtash and other oligarchs who had been their sponsors previously. Naturally, the traditional oligarchic clans didn’t like this, so the current protest has also an elite dimension.⁶

Yanukovych, then, is only the nouveauist of the rich oligarchs, squeezing his snout into the trough with “stupid cupidity.” That made him a target of the USDA-approved smartly greedy swine, and a convenient scapegoat to throw under the bus of popular discontent. The Western media won’t be featuring shocked, shocked corruption-morality-play tours of Akhmetov’s, or Firtsah’s, or Tymoshenko’s, personal palaces, in Ukraine and elsewhere, with America’s Top Designers judging how gaudily or elegantly appointed they are.

So, corrupt indeed. Everyone accuses everyone else of corruption, and they are all right. Transparency International ranks Ukraine 144^th (of 177) on its Corruption Perception Index, tied with Nigeria. Corruption is endemic in the Ukraine, and the overthrow of Yanukovych does nothing to overturn that. Even the Rada, now the seat of all power in the new, Yanukovych-free, democratic, Ukraine, is, as The Economist recognizes, “itself the product of this corrupt system, its seats bought and sold by the oligarchs’ factions for years.” So, “a corrupt, cowardly and thuggish president” has been overthrown, “but the post-Soviet order which prevailed in Ukraine over the past two decades has not been uprooted.”

Only in a bizarre—but unfortunately real and elaborate—ideological construct, can a round of oligarchic musical chairs be sold as a victory for “democracy.”

It was the “endemic and extraordinary” corruption, the theft of the wealth of society, that, more than anything else, infuriated the people of Ukraine. The Economist correctly notes that “The oligarchs and their political place-men are creatures of the dysfunctional state that Maidan rejects.” Yet, it’s the oligarchs—“ultra-wealthy” billionaires with “empires of steel”—who are now being sent to rule over, and soothe/placate their “armies of workers.” Goodbye, Yanuk, hello, John Galt-ovich.

That anybody thinks billionaire oligarchs are just the ticket to soothe the savage breasts of discontented workers, marks how deeply entrenched capitalist, allied with nationalist, ideologies have become in the post-Soviet states. In Ukraine, and in western Ukraine particularly, Stalin’s crimes gave rise to a nasty strain of nationalism that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII (discussed below). This, combined with a visceral rejection of anything calling itself “socialism,” has led to a hardening of Ukrainian identity in “nationalist” terms, promoted by Ukrainian educational and institutions. As Denis remarks:
[T]he crash of the “real socialism” also brought about the crash of the progressive values which had been officially promoted in that society (atheism, feminism, internationalism). The gap has been promptly filled by the wild mixture of nationalism and conservatism (and New Age charlatan philosophy, for that matter). This shift was eagerly supported by the state ideological apparatus. Actually, in many universities at the beginning of 1990s the departments of “scientific communism” were rebranded into “scientific nationalism”! Later they became the departments of “political science” though.It has also led to a host of illusions, reinforced by the messages of Western mass media, about what’s on offer in the capitalist West:
[Y]ou should understand that from the very beginning people had a very peculiar understanding of “Europe.” They pictured a very utopian ideal – society without corruption, with high wages, social security, rule of law, honest politicians, smiling faces, clean streets etc. – and called it “EU”. And when one tried to tell them that actual EU has nothing to do with this pretty picture, that people there actually burn EU flags and protest against austerity etc. – they retorted: “So would you better live in Russia then?” So, yes, from the very beginning the protest was driven by the false consciousness of “civilizational choice”, by nationalist ideological patterns which didn’t leave any room for the class agenda. These are the results of the bourgeois cultural hegemony, in Gramscian terms, and this is the main problem we should fight in this country over next years (or even decades).

Capitalism, Socialism, Nationalism: Post-Soviet Confusions

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n their anti-Russian fury and nationalist rejection of “Bolshevik” class politics, people in the maidan may think they’re getting the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but they’re going to end up with the real homeless of Camden. The Yanukovych regime itself promoted these Europeanist illusions. Here’s Denis again:

EU hysteria [was] provoked by the government itself! For the whole year 2013 they were constantly talking about how Ukraine is going to sign that agreement with the EU. They’ve roused the expectations of the “pro-European” part of the population, and then, when suddenly they made a U-turn, people were extremely frustrated and angry. That was the initial impulse.Indeed, Yanukovych dug his own grave in many ways, including his attempts to institute the neo-liberal austerity measures that were demanded by the EU deal:
.
[T]here are very real reasons for people to hate the government, too. When Yanukovych became president in 2010, he started pushing for unpopular neo-liberal steps. The natural gas tariffs were growing; the government launched medical reform which will eventually lead to closure of many medical institutions and to introducing the universal medical insurance instead of the unconditional coverage [Yanukocare?]; they pushed through extremely unpopular pension reform (raising pension age for women) against the will of more than 90% of population; there was an attempt at passing the new Labour Code which would seriously affect workers’ rights; the railway is being corporatized; finally, they passed a new Tax Code which hit small business. But eventually this assault wasn’t very successful, and the government had to back off. … They saw they can’t move on with such low levels of support. But still, the welfare of the working classes, as well as the general state of the economy leaves much to be desired, and people have all legitimate reasons to demand better living standards. Sadly, these grievances are dressed in the false consciousness of nationalism.

Whatever one thinks of Yanukovych, the idea that, by not signing the EU deal in November, he committed some horrible, treasonous act that compromised Ukraine’s independence, is the opposite of the case. Indeed, as Marilyn Vogt-Downey says, in her excellent analysis, Yanukovych “would have severely dampened enthusiasm for this Agreement,” if he “had summarized the terms of only one part of it—the Agreement’s ‘Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area,’ and explained what it would mean to the Ukrainian people—namely, ”convert[ing] Ukraine into one big ‘free trade zone’, where the anti-environment, anti-labor, and pro-business laws would prevail.” ⁷

He could not, however, because: “during his time in power, he—like all the Ukrainian rulers since Ukraine became independent with the collapse of the USSR in 1992—had already been pursuing measures similar to those the IMF would impose.” So, the popular discontent generated by EU austerity measures led to a popular movement which overthrew Yanukovych, in favor of a government that vows to institute those same EU austerity measures! Discontent against an unpopular elected president has led to his overthrow in favor of an unelected government whose prime minister says: “I’m going to be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of my country.”⁸

As someone who lives a few blocks from Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the Ukrainian National Home, the Ukrainian Museum, the Ukrainian-American Youth Association, restaurants named Kiev and Veselka (“probably the most famous Ukrainian restaurant in the world”⁹), whose sister married a Ukrainian-American, and who is a denizen of joints where owners, patrons, and friends are speaking Ukrainian, I humbly submit that: Ukrainians who think the government produced by this insurrection, with the EU-IMF initiative it adopts, is going to solve these problems are confused. This “revolution” is not about making Ukraine more democratic or less corrupt; it is about creating a government whose “main responsibility … will be to carry through a social onslaught against the Ukrainian working class at the behest of international capital.”¹⁰ These measures include the cuts in pensions and crucial fuel subsidies, as well as things like the large-scale fracking deal with Chevron that was announced last week. Economists predict a 10% collapse in GDP; Greece lost 25% in 5 years with the program the new prime minister wants to emulate [see below]. Rest assured, however: Rimat, Dmitri, and Yulia won’t lose one estate or one hryvnia.

Along with a lot of other people, Ukrainians need to recognize that the “endemic and extraordinary” corruption of their polity is the necessary prerequisite and inevitable result of the restoration of capitalism—of the shock-therapy transformation of post-Soviet Ukraine into a crony capitalist playground.

The new government knows it will have a few months, while everybody’s all warm and cuddly in the afterglow of “democratic revolution,” to inflict the plague of austerity, before popular anger is turned against it. Arseny Yatseniuk, the American-favored prime minister calls it a “kamikaze government.” Oleksandr Turchynov, the president, says: “This government is doomed. Three, four months and they won’t be able to work, because they have to make unpopular decisions.”¹¹

It’s not just wacky socialists who understand things this way. Here’s an excerpt from a Forbes article, cogently titled, ”Washington’s Man Yatsenyuk Setting Ukraine Up For Ruin”:
Vladimir Signorelli, president of boutique investment research firm Bretton Woods Research LLC in New Jersey. “Yatsenyuk is the the kind of technocrat you want if you want austerity, with the veneer of professionalism,” Signorelli said. “He’s the type of guy who can hobnob with the European elite. A Mario Monti type: unelected and willing to do the IMFs bidding,” he said. [Mario Monti is an Italian “technocrat”—i.e., IMF stooge—who brought austerity to Italy.] …Yats had friends in high places and while he does not have strong support of the electorate, and would have no chance of winning an election, he is pro-IMF austerity and apparently the bulk of parliament is as well. “Yatsenyuk was saying that what the Greeks did to themselves we are going to do ourselves,” said Signorelli. “He wants to follow the Greek economic model. Who the hell wants to follow that?”…For economists who think austerity is a disaster, Ukraine is on a path to ruin.

OUR MAN IN KIEV Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk making the thumbs up after voting at the Parliament during a session. Ukraine's Parliament on August 14 approved a law paving the way for a string of sanctions on Russian businesses and nationals accused of backing a separatist uprising in the east of the country.

This ruin is going to compound “the scorched earth economics of capitalist restoration” to which Ukraine has already been subject. Ukraine now boasts the highest maternal mortality rate in Europe, and is the 80th poorest country in the world, (based per capita GDP), behind Iraq and Tonga. Since it became “free” in 1991, 15% of its population has emigrated, its birth rate declined, and its population shrank 11%--classic hallmarks of a moribund and dependent “third-world” social economy.¹²

Along with a lot of other people, Ukrainians need to recognize that the “endemic and extraordinary” corruption of their polity is the necessary prerequisite and inevitable result of the restoration of capitalism—of the shock-therapy transformation of post-Soviet Ukraine into a crony capitalist playground. To turn Ukraine (and the Soviet Union itself) into a capitalist society required the creation of creatures that had not existed: capitalists. It required, that is, transferring the industrial “armies” that constitute the capital wealth of the country from public ownership (however well- or poorly-managed) into the hands of private individuals, who can now own and control the wealth of the country for their private gain above all. (You know, those oligarchs who have managed things so much better over the last twenty years.) The only way to do that was by various forms of semi-disguised theft that handed industries over—i.e., sold them at bargain-basement prices—to various candidates, often functionaries of the old regime, who were likely to be compliant with the foreign capital and capitals that were subsidizing and pushing this whole process—no matter what the cost to ordinary Ukrainians. That’s capitalism.

Isn’t “endemic” corruption a structural feature of capitalism itself? It’s quite common in the capitalist world, I’ve heard, that wealthy billionaires capture the political process, functioning as “what amounts to a shadow government.” You say “oligarch” and I say “plutocrat.” It’s also quite common to think that the problems of capitalism will be solved by better capitalists enforcing more austere capitalism, which will only actually exacerbate inequality, social misery, and corruption itself. Let’s call the whole thing off.

But, again, don’t take a socialist’s word for it. Here’s Bogdan Danilishin, a former minister of economy in Yulia Tymoshenko's government (and a former target of “abuse of power” inquiries himself):
In order to be saved, the Ukrainian economy doesn't need 35 billion dollars or even 135 billion dollars. It will be stolen anyway. They just need to check and evaluate all privatization deals made during the last years. All that has been bought for a reduced price or illegally must be nationalized or the difference must be paid to the state budget. All taxes that oligarchs have been exempt from for the last three years must be paid.¹³

Of course, there’s no chance for such a real reform process. It would require a genuinely democratic re-nationalization that would retrieve the wealth of the country stolen by the oligarchs, and the neo-liberal government installed by this putatively democratic insurrection will never consider that. As one commentator wrote on Investment Watch: “The new government might go after a few oligarchs who ended up on the wrong side of the fence. But those who’d backed the uprising directly or indirectly and who are now backing the new government would be able to hang on to their property, their ill-gotten wealth, and their tax privileges.”¹⁴

You don’t have to be a socialist to recognize the problem. (Only to solve it.) I have to agree with our Ukrainian syndicalist, Denis, that the predominance of what he calls “bourgeois cultural hegemony,” and the displacement of class with nationalist politics, which makes it so difficult for Ukrainians to see what’s happening in these terms, is “the main problem we should fight in this country over next years (or even decades).” Otherwise, they’ll be rearranging the deckchaise longues of the oligarchs over and over again. Kamikaze revolutions for kamikaze governments.

Yanukovych was so authoritarian

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne can certainly say that Yanukovych had authoritarian tendencies, and that they were getting worse. On January 16^th, in the midst of militant anti-government protests that had been going on for two months, he passed a set of harshly repressive anti-protest laws. Predictably, these laws only further inflamed the rebellion, and most of them were repealed or diluted by the parliament on January 28^th. No question that the Interior Ministry police, Berkut, were also brutal in their attempts to break up or limit demonstrations and occupations. Of course, as we’ve seen time and time again, repression – if images thereof are widely broadcast and insistently framed with outrage – only builds popular support for protestors. Protestors’ injuries and deaths only intensified the conflict (particularly the deaths from sniper fire on February 20^th, more on that later), drew more people into what was incontestably a massively popular movement (in Kiev and the western Ukraine, at least), and intensified protestors’ resolve to settle for nothing less than the immediate ouster of Yanukovych.

Whether Yanukovych’s police, and attempted legal, repression was unusually more brutal than that of any president in any country, elected or not, who was besieged by a militant movement, no matter how popular, seeking his immediate deposition, I’ll leave as an open question. What is unusual in this instance is that the protestors fought back, fiercely and from the get-go. They defended their positions, built strong barricades, prepared for battle, armed themselves with everything from makeshift weapon to firearms (as they thought appropriate), and did not hesitate to go on the offensive when they could. Beatings, and bullets, were flying both ways.

It was a insurrection in which force trumped electoral and constitutional legitimacy

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has taken to Democracy Now and the New York Review of Books as a leading intellectual voice arguing that American liberals should wholeheartedly support the Ukrainian “revolution” and condemn the Russian “invasion” of Crimea. He likes to portray the maidan movement as a kind of utopian, even classical, space of enhanced dialogue, a place where liberal-minded Americans watching Amy Goodman can feel right at home:
But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agorameans in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet, but a place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society.¹⁵

Pass the talking stick, Plato.

Well, yes, revolutionary uprisings – of which the Paris Commune has been the socialist prototype, after all – are, importantly, that kind of space, the one where people work out how to build a new “political society” with their comrades. They are also, necessarily, this (circa Jan 25^th):

And this (circa Jan 21^st):

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the language of revolution, agora means battlefield.

Do not get me wrong: I do not present these images as dispositive evidence that discredits the maidan protestors. These kinds of forceful actions – not just defensive, but aggressive actions that advance one’s position – are often necessary to fight and win game-changing political battles. It is not I who wants to pretend that revolutionary struggles can and/or must always be won by purely non-violent means. I find the methodical advance of the protestors into the administration building in the first clip quite instructive, for example. Their fierce determination to keep pressing forward, not resorting to firearms as long as the police don’t, but using every makeshift weapon they can get their hands on, stripping the police of their armor and pulling them out of formation until they break ranks and retreat – these people didn’t come out to express themselves; they came to fight and win. Good for them, depending on what they’re fighting for.

As someone who finds it insulting to go to demonstrations in America’s most liberal cities, where protestors are literally penned in like cattle, I’d just like to ask those Americans who have seen what happened to their fellow citizen protestors in Seattle, and Pittsburgh, and Wall Street: If protestors from Zuccotti, or Central, or Lincoln, or Lafayette Park, tried to seize and occupy a nearby civil administration building, exactly how many inches do you think they would advance into that structure, exactly how many cops would they set on fire, before they would have the living shit beaten out of them? Before any means that were necessary to stop them were deployed against them?

And exactly how many words of praise and support would American politicians and media personalities have to say about them? How many cookies would they be served?

Yes, the Ukranian protestors were protected by their numbers and by their large base of political support, which served to buttress their fierce determination. Mass political strength is a powerful weapon. Still, insistent deployment of near-lethal riot-control agents and technologies (sound cannons, etc.), let alone concentrated lethal firepower from the automatic weapons and tanks of an army, can, at least temporarily, overcome even that. Are the Berkut not as heavily militarized as average American urban police department have become? Was the Yanukovych regime reluctant to employ more heavily militarized police weaponry, or to call on the army – whether out of respect for the people, respect for the political costs, and/or fear that orders would not be followed? Is there a high horse here that the American regime can ride on?

As the more trenchant intellectual voice of Stephen Cohen puts it:

But let me ask you, if in Washington people throwing Molotov cocktails are marching on Congress—and these people are headed for the Ukrainian Congress—if these people have barricaded entrance to the White House and are throwing rocks at the White House security guard, would President Obama withdraw his security forces?....We wouldn’t permit that in any Western capital, no matter how righteous the cause.¹⁶

Let’s not forget (if by some chance you were ever made aware) that in the final week of confrontation, it was the protest movement, feeling its increasing power, that repeatedly initiated violent confrontations to get immediate satisfaction of their demands.

As the AP reports:

The latest street violence began Tuesday [February 18^th] when protesters attacked police lines and set fires outside parliament, accusing Yanukovych of ignoring their demands to enact constitutional reforms that would once again limit the president's power.¹⁷

By Wednesday evening, a truce was announced, but it:

appeared to have little credibility among hardcore protesters. One camp commander, Oleh Mykhnyuk, told the AP even after the alleged truce, protesters still threw firebombs at riot police on the square. As the sun rose, police pulled back, the protesters followed them and police then began shooting at them, he said.

Who’s on the offensive?

By Thursday, the 20^th, AP cites the Ukrainian Health Ministry as saying that “28 people have died and 287 have been hospitalized this week.” In a slightly earlier report, discussing the theft by protestors of 1500 guns, RT says that at “At least 26 people, including 10 police officers, have been killed and some 800 injured since the start of violent riots in Kiev on Tuesday.” The AP avoids any mention of police causalities, and avoids any mention of protestors’ firearms. They had them and can be seen here using them.¹⁸

On Thursday, the worst day of violence:

Fearing that a call for a truce was a ruse, protesters tossed firebombs and advanced upon police lines … in Ukraine's embattled capital. Government snipers shot back and the almost-medieval melee that ensued left at least 70 people dead and hundreds injured, according to a protest doctor. ..In addition, one policeman was killed Thursday and 28 suffered gunshot wounds.

Snipers. They seem always to appear at key moments in protests like these, raining sudden and arbitrary death from above – a particularly vicious tactic, certain to infuriate the protestors and harden their resolve. The new Interior Minister has called the sniper shootings “the key factor in this uprising.” Let’s remark that, despite the figure in the AP article, there was more than “one” policemen killed by sniper fire, and, despite the presumption of the AP, as well as of Obama and Kerry, it is not all clear that these were “government” snipers. In fact, according to what Estonian Foreign Minister, Urmas Paet, recounted in a phone conversation with EU foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, "What was quite disturbing, this same Olga [Olga Bogomolets, a doctor on the maidan] told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides… So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition." “Gosh,” says Ashton. We’ll return to the sniper issue later.¹⁹

Sure enough, this violence catalyzed a political breakthrough, and on Friday, as the AP reported, “a representative from Russia” as well as the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland—met with “the opposition leaders,” then with Yanukovych for five hours, then with opposition leaders again, as US Vice President Joe Biden “placed repeated calls to both Ukrainian negotiating sides.”²⁰As a result of this intense mediation a radical new agreement was worked out that represented the regime’s virtually complete surrender to the opposition’s position. The agreement, which the Russians did not like and “pointedly skipped … signing,” called for a unity government, early elections, a return to the 2004 Constitution, and amnesty for arrested protestors. As Vladimir Putin characterized it, implying his dislike: “I would like to stress that under that agreement (I am not saying this was good or bad, just stating the fact) Mr Yanukovych actually handed over power… Moreover, he issued orders to withdraw all police forces from the capital, and they complied.”²¹ Even a Russian leftist critic of Putin, who came to the maidan, remarked: “The president even asked the opposition parties to appoint the prime minister.”²² Furthermore, the parliament immediately sealed the deal, enacting laws that would allow for the release of Julia Tymoshenko, curb presidential powers, and make it easier to reverse Yanukovych’s decision about the EU economic agreement that had been the original catalyst for the protests.

And, sure enough, that did not satisfy the protestors either:

Militant anti-government activists in Ukraine on Saturday threatened to storm the president’s palace and shatter a fragile peace deal to end the ex-Soviet country's bloodiest crisis since independence…

"Elections in December are not enough -- he has to leave now," said 34-year-old Oleh Bukoyenko as he joined 40,000 protesters to hear the peace pact's details announced on the square late Friday….One ultranationalist speaker grabbed the stage on Independence Square late Friday to call on protesters to storm the president's office at 10:00 am (0800 GMT) Saturday should Yanukovych fail to relinquish power overnight.

The call was met with cheers and rounds of applause. Several top opposition leaders meanwhile were booed for signing the compromise agreement allowing Yanukovych to keep his post until snap elections are called by the December deadline….

So, by end of day Saturday, the 22^nd, protestors had taken control of the presidential administration buildings “without resistance,” and Yanukovych had fled.

Let’s put aside for the moment the “content” of this protest and uprising, its ultimate political point and program, and acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that it was an extra-legal, extra-constitutional action that imposed its political will and achieved its one immediate goal – the ouster of Ukraine’s elected President – by force. It succeeded by the force of popular pressure and armed resistance and assault on the streets of Kiev, helped along greatly by international pressure, with no real concern for what was legal or constitutional or electorally legitimate. “Coup” is a perfectly reasonable word for what happened, though, in recognition of its significant popular base, I prefer to call it an “insurrection.”

In Kiev, with the blessing of virtually all the world’s political and media missionaries of capitalist democracy, force trumped elections. This movement deposed a President who had been chosen in a 2010 election that, according to European and NATO observers, “was a good and competitive election and very promising for the future of Ukraine's democracy.” It was an election in which there was “a genuine democratic choice between a large number of candidates,” and “Open access to information about the candidates and their programmes [that] allowed the Ukrainian voters to make a well-founded choice.” It was an election that, as the NATO representative summarized, “the Ukrainian voters won.” Sounds to me like an election that was no less “free and fair” than elections held in these VoterID-Electoral-College-Florida-Ohio-Citizens-United States.²³

In the parliament, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was “the most widely supported Ukrainian political party…hold[ing] nearly forty percent of the seats in the Rada. No other political party even comes close to holding this type of support in the Ukrainian political landscape or the Rada.”²⁴ Furthermore, this movement deposed a President in defiance of the extant constitutional electoral process that had him facing a new election in less than a year, an election no one had any reason to believe would be less fair than that of 2010 – especially since, as we saw above, the President had effectively ceded all of his effective power before the movement’s final assault. According to the rules of parliamentary democracy, the proper way to get rid of a corrupt and despised elected leader is to vote the bastard out. If Yanukovych were widely despised, and the Kiev opposition widely supported, throughout Ukraine, he could easily have been removed by electoral means. On the other hand, it may not have been quite so easy, and some serious adjustment to the constitutional-electoral order might have been necessary, precisely because the Kiev opposition still has this to contend with this:

Half the country, it seems, may not be so joyful about the new adventure in insurrectionary democracy.

To pretend that the ex-post-facto parliamentary maneuvers that ratified the result of this insurrection actually confer some kind of retroactive constitutional legitimacy on it is ludicrous. As Nicolai Petro points out, these actions were taken by “a Parliament that rules without any representation from the majority party – since most of the deputies of the east and the south of the country are afraid to set foot in Parliament… [and] all across the country, headquarters of parties are being sacked by their opponents,” by a parliament that outlawed the only effective remaining opposition party (the Communists) and that “consolidate[ed] the powers of the speaker of the Parliament and the acting president in a single individual, giving him greater powers than allowed under any Ukrainian constitution,” in a context where “Vigilante militias routinely attack and disperse public gatherings they disapprove of.”²⁵ Please, let’s recognize these parliamentary acts as what they are – the ratification of an insurrection, in defiance of the extant constitutional order. Call them the first steps in a new, post-insurrection constitutional order if you want, but recognize the radical break they represent.

And why not call this what it is? Isn’t that what revolutionary change is all about – a radical break with the old order? To reprise what I said in a previous post on Egypt: An electoral process can be a thin facade of democracy and, effectively, a tool of disempowerment, justifying militant extra-electoral politics, or even insurrection. A serious revolutionary conjuncture, a real break into a new social order, usually involves both. It’s an unapologetic, forceful, seizure of power that seeks to be definitive and irreversible. (Of course, not every insurrection is a revolution, or even a step forward, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.)

As someone who accepts the revolutionary socialist argument, I do not object to extra-legal, extra-parliamentary, insurrectionary politics per se. And guess what? All the self-proclaimed liberal, conservative, moderate, non-violent, constitutional, parliamentary democratic thinkers, politicians and commentators who are proudly and loudly supporting what happened in Ukraine also do not object to extra-legal, extra-parliamentary, insurrectionary politics per se – they just don’t want to admit it. Like me, they will support an insurrection, depending on what it’s about. Unlike me, they will pretend it wasn’t really an insurrection at all, just another, maybe somewhat “messy,” but fundamentally non-violent, constitutionally-authorized transition within the rules of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. And that’s because, as the man said: We wouldn’t permit that in any Western capital, no matter how righteous the cause.

It’s quite amusing, until it gets sickening, to watch American leaders—who cling to the notion that a thin, corrupt, disempowering electoral process legitimizes them—embrace the forceful overthrow of a democratically-elected leader in a functioning parliamentary democracy while insisting they are doing no such thing.

Let’s recognize that virtually nobody really supports or opposes what happened in Ukraine, or anywhere else, because it was an insurrection, but because of what kind of insurrection it was – what it’s explicit and implicit socio-political objective was, what different kind of society and polity it was moving toward creating. And let’s recognize that the US would denounce, and help to crush, any insurrection, no matter how popular or righteous the cause, in which leftist forces played anything close to the prominent fighting role that right-wing, neo-fascist forced played in this one. If revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists had been the vanguard of the maidan, Yanukovych would have been America’s “democratic” hero.

As for “democracy” (along with “nonviolent,” one of the most dishonestly abused words in the American political vocabulary), it certainly does not just mean having an election. It means power to the people. Neither Ukrainian oligarchs, nor the EU-IMF neo-liberal “technocrats,” nor the American government, nor NATO, want that. They have too much to lose.

It was a right-wing, imperialist insurrection, powered by fascist groups and permeated with fascist ideology

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he overthrow of Yanukovych was an insurrection accomplished by a political movement that was driven by popular socio-economic discontent and thoroughly imbued by “ultranationalist”—i.e., neo-fascist—ideology.

It was decidedly not a revolution, in the strong sense of the word. A revolutionary insurrection marks the beginning of a change in the social order. This movement did not, will not, and, given its foundations, could not, establish a popular government that will create anything like more widespread prosperity and deeper democracy, let alone a new social order.

It was a regime change, fuelled by popular discontent, powered by neo-fascist militants, and surreptitiously managed by American intelligence diplomats, with Ukrainian oligarchs maneuvering for ultimate control behind the scenes—factions that have different, sometimes internally contradictory, agendas. It will create a government that will be controlled by and benefit some Ukrainian oligarchs at the expense of others, that will benefit European and American capitalism at the (acknowledged, indeed promised!) cost of austerity and immiseration for Ukrainian working people, and that will benefit American and NATO plans for an ever-tightening military encirclement of Russia at the expense of possible war and perpetual tension for Ukraine.

The only possibility for a more serious, “revolutionary” break from neo-liberal standards of oligarchic-imperial rule in the near future would come from the neo-fascist groups, who indeed imagine themselves to have a radically different agenda. But guess what? Faced with any popular uprising against its policies, from the right or the left, the new neo-liberal, Euro-facing, Russia-hating, America-loving, Ukrainian government, and its international supporters, will trot out the bourgeois democratic principles that its leaders, of course, never reallycontravened, and insist, Berkut (by any other name) and all: We won’t permit that in our democratic, European capital, no matter how righteous the cause.

Is there anybody who honestly doubts any of this?

Brendan O’Neill makes the point quite nicely:

For what we have in Ukraine is not revolution, but regime change …As for the word ‘revolution’ … its deployment in Ukraine takes its bastardisation to a new low: there has of course been no replacement of one social order by another in Ukraine, or even the instalment of a people’s government; instead various long-established parties in parliament, some of which are deeply unpopular among certain constituencies in Ukraine, are forming an interim government. Revolutionary? Hardly.The Western debate and coverage … has certainly made externally generated regime change seem revolutionary, and the Western-assisted anti-democratic removal of an elected leader seem like an act of people’s democracy. It has exposed a severe dearth of independent critical thinking among the Western commentariat. …The truth of what has happened in Ukraine is this: the EU and Washington have effectively brought about regime change, replacing an elected pro-Russian regime with an unelected, still-being-formed new government that is more amenable to the institutions of the West.²⁶

Regarding the “fascism” question, Max Blumenthal’s Alternet piece, and Per Anders Rudling’s detailed scholarly study are indispensable sources. Rudling understates considerably, when he says: “The far-right tradition is particularly strong in western Ukraine.” The fascist currents in the Kiev movement are undeniable. They are represented in the parliament by the Svoboda (Freedom) Party (originally called the Social National Party). In December, 2012, the European Parliament condemned Svoboda for its “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views,” and urged other Ukrainian parties “not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.”²⁷

As Blumenthal notes, Svoboda’s leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, defines his mission as freeing his country from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” His deputy, Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn founded a think tank named after a historical figure he admires greatly: The Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center. Svoboda’s – and, unfortunately, much of western Ukraine’s – “nationalism” is embodied in the revered figure of Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Nazi collaborator who led the pro-fascist Organization of Ukrainian (OUN), which helped to form a Ukrainian division of the Waffen SS to fight with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. From 1942-1944, Yaroslav Stetsko, the “Prime Minister” of ONU-B (Bandera’s wing), who supported “bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine,” oversaw the killing of “more than 90,000 Poles and thousands of Jews” in western Ukraine. Banderists in Lvov circulated a pamphlet telling the city’s Jews: "We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet.”²⁸

After the war, Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) continued its fascist campaign for “a totalitarian, ethnically pure Europe,” engaging in a futile armed struggle against the Soviet Union, until KGB agents assassinated him in Munich in 1959. Nothing “neo” about this Nazi.

Viktor Yushchenko, the president produced by the last American-supported Ukrainian uprising, the “Orange Revolution,” put the full weight of the ideological apparatus of the Ukrainian state into reinventing the history of Ukrainian complicity with Nazism into a “national liberation” mythology. He “tasked a set of nationalistically minded historians” into “disseminating a sanitized, edifyingly patriotic version of the history of the ‘Ukrainian national liberation movement,’ the leaders of which were presented in iconographic form as heroic and saintly ﬁgures, martyrs of the nation.”

Thus, in 2010, against the protestation of the European Parliament—which he accused of having a “historical complex”—Yushchenko awarded Stepan Bandera the title of "Hero of Ukraine."²⁹ As Rudling notes: “There was little protest from intellectuals who identify themselves as liberals.” It was the government of big, bad Yanukovych that later annulled the award.

And thus, still satisfied by their political research, Svoboda led a 15,000-person march in honor of Bandera in Kiev on January 1^st of this year, with chants of “Ukraine above all” and “Bandera, come and bring order!”³⁰

Now, as a result of the insurrection, Svoboda, which won about 10% of the vote in the last election, has effectively muscled the much larger (34% of the last vote) Party of the Regions out of parliament, and seeks nationally to outlaw it and the Communist Party (13% of the vote), whose leader’s house was burned down. With the help of its Right Sector allies, these parties have already been banned in a number of regions. Svoboda now holds “key leadership positions in the parliament and law enforcement, four ministerial portfolios in the new government [including Prosecutor General and Deputy Prime Minister] and several appointed governorships.” Svoboda’s co-fouder, Andriy Parubiy, is head of the National Security & Defense Council of the new, democratic, government of Ukraine.³¹

So, fourteen months after denouncing Svoboda for its “racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” European governments are gushing over the new “democracy” in Ukraine over which Svoboda presides. And, as the BBC reports: “Inside the columned central hall of Kiev's city council, an activist base of operations, hung a giant banner with a Celtic cross, a symbol of ‘white power,’ and an American confederate flag….and an immense portrait of Stepan Bandera.”³²

Kiev's city hall adorned with Bandera's symbols and insignias.

Keep in mind, too, Rudling’s point that the whole Banderist “national liberation” narrative “was well received in western Ukraine but was received coldly or met open hostility in the eastern and southern parts of the country.”

As Svoboda represents fascism in the parliament, Right Sector (Pravy Sektor) represented fascism in the maidan, and continues to do so with its intimidating tactics in the streets and administrative offices of Kiev and the regions, as well as from its new positions in government. Right Sector is a confederation of far-right groups such as Patriots of Ukraine, the Social-National Assembly, White Hammer, Stepan Bandera’s Trident, and the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian People's Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO). Their favorite ensign is the wolfsangel--a favorite, too, of the Waffen SS--which was on display all over the maidan:

Ukraine Neonazis proudly sporting shirts with the "Totenkopf" insignia, the feared SS symbol.

As Ukrainian journalist Oleg Shynkarenko points out, Right Sector leader, Dmytro Yarosh defines the group's creed thusly: “We are against degeneration and totalitarian liberalism, but we support traditional morals and family values, against the cult of profit and depravity.” Right Sector’s websites rail against the “liberal homodictatorship” of modern Western society.³³ Blumenthal points out that Right Sector is: “linked to a constellation of international neo-fascist parties,” and “through the Alliance of European National Movements (AEMN), Right Sector is promising to lead its army of aimless, disillusioned young men on ‘a great European Reconquest’.” In some ways, the neo-fascist right does want power to the people—just the morally and ethnically pure people.

BBC did a decent report on the “Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine.” Again, maybe not so “neo.” The reporter, Gabriel Gatehouse, interviews Svoboda and Right Sector militants, meets a group called C14 (apparently an armed wing of Svoboda) under a portrait of Lenin in the Communist Party headquarters they had taken over, and shows two Svoboda MPs displaying “14” and “88” tokens. These numbers, which are often displayed in combination, and which appeared in graffiti throughout the maidan, have special fascist significance: “14” stands for from the Fourteen Words coined by an American white supremacist: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children” (there’s an alternate version, about “the White Aryan woman”); “88” represents a double of the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, HH, for Heil Hitler. [I cannot make this stuff up.]

Yes, it depends what you’re fighting for.

My favorite is this 2½-minute tidbit from a young Right Sector gentleman, explaining the group’s, and his, affinity for “National Socialist themes,” and assuring his interviewer that they want a society that’s just “a little bit like” that “under Hitler”:

NOTE: This video is now "helpfully" accompanied with this Youtube/Google alert:
RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government

The leader of the Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, is now the deputy head of the National Security Council, and is running for President, of Ukraine’s new, democratic, government.

You might also take a look at this video, where Right Sector leader Aleksandr Muzychko roughs up a local prosecutor to show him who’s the boss now, and threatens to have him lynched: “Shut the fuck up, you bitch! Your fucking time is over… If you think I am goodie because I’ve come without my rifle, you are gravely mistaken. I’ve come with a pistol. There are a few choice videos of Muzychko, who is also identified as a member of the "Wiking" unit of the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO), another post-Banderist right-wing paramilitary group.

So there’s no question that fascists were part of the insurrection, and there is no question that they were crucial to its success. As Oleg Shynkarenko insists, the scenes of fighting resistance and advance were led by Right Sector and allied groups:

[I]t was the far right that first started to talk back to Yanukovych in his own language. They were the first to throw Molotov cocktails and stones at police and to mount real and well-fortified barricades. They were amongst those who burned two military troop carriers that attacked the barricades on February 18. The Euromaidan won thanks to the resoluteness of people who were ready to fight rather than to negotiate in parliament when any negotiation became pointless.

Nicolai Petro agrees, and points out the political ramifications:

I ascribe a much greater role to the Right Sector…the spearhead of the revolution. … [T]he actual coup was accomplished thanks to the armed intervention of extreme nationalists, led by the Right Sector. And the fact that they were so instrumental in accomplishing this change of power has put them in the driver’s seat. From now on, whatever political decisions are arrived at will really be at the sufferance of the Right Sector.

Let’s be clear, also, that these neo-fascist groups not only fought and defeated Yanokovych’s police, they attacked and drove away any political group from the left that tried to establish a presence in the maidan. The fascists made sure they controlled the radical politics of the square. Sascha, a member of AntiFascist Action Ukraine, a group that monitors and fights fascism in Ukraine, recounts in an interview published in mid-February:

A group of 100 anarchists tried to arrange their own self-defense group, different Anarchist groups came together for a meeting on the Maidan. While they were meeting a group of Nazis came in a larger group, they had axes and baseball bats and sticks, helmets, they said it was their territory. They called the Anarchists things like Jews, blacks, Communists. There weren’t even any Communists, that was just an insult. The Anarchists weren’t expecting this and they left. People with other political views can’t stay in certain places, they aren’t tolerated.³⁴

And Mira, of the same group, adds:

One of the worst things is that Pravy has this official structure. They are coordinated. You need passes to go certain places. They have the power to give or not give people permission to be active. We’re trying to be active but we have to avoid Nazis, and I’m not going to ask a Nazi for permission!...

Early on a Stalinist tent was attacked by Nazis. One was sent to the hospital. Another student spoke out against fascism and he was attacked.

Pravy Sektor got too much attention after the first violence, the media gave them popularity and they started to think they’re cool guys. Pravy existed before but now it’s growing and attracting a lot of new people.

Ilya Budraitskis, a Russian Socialist who came to the maidan in January, tells ushow the “ultranationalists” brutalized and evicted everyone from leftish Europhiles to anarchists:

Another part of the left repetitively tried to join the movement, even after they were repetitively kicked out of it. Some of the “euro-enthusiastic” leftists came to Maidan in November with red (instead of blue) flag of the EU, with banners for free healthcare and education, and with feminist slogans. They were brutally attacked by Nazis. Then there was an episode when the far-right attacked the tent of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine near the Maidan. A man on the stage said that there were some “provocateurs” and said that “men know what to do”; as a result, a mob of Nazis has broken ribs of the trade union activists, tore their tent with knives and stolen their property. The victims hadn’t been doing anything “leftist” per se, but they were members of the left movement, known to their political adversaries, and that was enough….

[T]here is also another group of people who are often confused with the radical left. …who call themselves anarchists but actually have a very conservative political agenda full of machismo and xenophobia. After the protests have begun, they shifted to the right dramatically; they reached truce with the nazi groups and showered Molotov cocktails at the police together. Eventually, they parted ways with left movement finally.

A week ago they, together with some actual leftists who wanted to “act”, decided to form an “anarchist sotnia [defense unit]” in the Maidan self-defence. In order to do that, they were prepared to give an oath to [Svoboda leader] Andriy Parubiy. But when they formed their ranks to do this, they were met by approximately 150 Svoboda fighters with baseball bats and axes. The fascists accused them of being racially impure and politically irrelevant and forced them out of Maidan.³⁵

So much for Professor Snyder’s agora.

Of course, the great majority of the people in the square are not fascists, but, for all the reasons of history and ideology discussed above, a lot of people in western Ukraine are susceptible to their charms. As Denis, from Kiev Autonomous Workers Union says: “[I]n the long run the rightist political hegemony is being reinforced,” because “That’s what happens when you don’t have a developed left movement and your liberals are too corrupt and ugly!” Here’s how he describes the rightward political momentum on the maidan:

[Far right] ideology has really become more acceptable in the mainstream (which had initially been leaning to the right!). ... Of course, most protesters really say they want political pluralism, bourgeois democracy. … But at the same time the crowd at the Maidan revives some deeply buried pre-modern, medieval social practices like whipping post, lynching, reinforced traditional gender roles. This scary readiness to slip into barbarism is born from the general disenchantment with parliamentary politics and the ubiquitous nationalist mythology about the golden past, imposed in schools and media.

The original Euromaidan agenda in November was a right liberal one, standing for the EU, “economic liberties” and bourgeois democracy. But even then the issues of multiculturalism, LGBT rights, workers’ rights and freedoms were severely repressed by the politically conscious far-right activists … [whose] political programme had always included critique of the EU’s “liberal fascism”. … The attackers didn’t represent the majority of protesters, but the majority was very susceptible to their political agenda which they had been aggressively pushing through…

[P]eople are new to politics, they just “know” they are rightists and nationalists. And therefore they trust the more politically experienced leaders to express their views and formulate their programme for them. It just so happens that those leaders are nationalists or even Nazis. And they shift the centre of the political discourse even further to the right.

But, first of all, their ideas are welcome among the apolitical crowd; second of all, they are very well organized, and also people love their “radicalism”. An average Ukrainian worker hates the police and the government but he will never fight them openly and risk his comfort. So he or she welcomes a “vanguard” which is ready to fight on their behalf; especially if that vanguard shares “good” patriotic values….And since the basic “common sense” had long ago been established on the nationalist fundamental assumptions, the radicalization goes only further in that direction.³⁶

As we all know, fascists don’t have to be a majority to determine outcomes, and their power to do so can increase very quickly under favorable conditions. Perhaps the most telling, and disturbing remark of the leftists cited in these interviews was this, from Sascha of AntiFascist Action Ukraine, a couple of weeks before the head of Right Sector became deputy head of the National Security and Defense Council: “If Pravy [Right Sector] has positions in a new government that would be really dangerous but that isn’t possible, they aren’t powerful enough.”

Oh, yes they are. Consider the stunning turn of events we have just witnessed: “the ascension of a genuinely fascist mass movement into the corridors of power” in a European country for the first time since WWII, greeted with a stunning non-chalance—nay, embraced as an exemplar of democracy—by the Western liberal democracies. University of Ottawa political scientist Ivan Katchanovski specifies: “The paramilitary right sector has de facto power at least in some Western Ukrainian regions,” and “The far right in Ukraine has now achieved the level of representation and influence that is unparalleled in Europe.”³⁷

Then imagine, please, Professor Katchanovski’s last sentence with “left” substituted for “right,” and consider how unthinkable it is that any American government would be so welcoming of such a “democratic” outcome. The United States and its allied liberal democracies are, in other words, willing to accommodate very hard swings to the right in order to secure and/or extend the neo-liberal capitalist, and US/NATO imperialist, order, but will abide not an inch of movement toward resistance from the left—no matter how righteous or democratic the cause.

The “liberal-nationalist” alliance, the American role, and what it portends

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ight we interrupt the rejoicing over the rebirth of democracy in Ukraine to ask: Have the US and European governments given a thought to how their embrace of a government including Svoboda and Right Sector in Ukraine implicitly legitimizes and emboldens the far-right and neo-Nazi movements in Britain, and France, and Sweden, et. al.? Because those movements have.³⁸ Ukraine now has a government that is, as Eric Draitser puts it, “essentially a collaboration between pro-EU liberals and right wing ultra-nationalists.” Israel Shamir is on to something, when he remarks that “a union of [right-wing] nationalists and liberals” has become “the trademark of a new US policy in the Eastern Europe.” As he reminds us: “[L]iberals do not have to support democracy. They do so only if they are certain democracy will deliver what they want. Otherwise, they can join forces with al Qaeda as now in Syria, with Islamic extremists as in Libya, with the Army as in Egypt, or with neo-Nazis, as now in Russia and the Ukraine.”³⁹ Or, as Pepe Escobar puts it:

Everyone remembers the "good Taliban", with which the U.S. could negotiate in Afghanistan. Then came the "good al-Qaeda", jihadis the US could support in Syria. Now come the "good neo-nazis", with which the West can do business in Kiev. Soon there will be "the good jihadis supporting neo-nazis", who may be deployed to advance U.S./NATO and anti-Russian designs in Crimea and beyond.⁴⁰

Lest one think this is a fanciful compilation, be aware that Right Sector leader and new deputy head of the National Security and Defense Council, Dmitry Yarosh, has called upon Caucasian jihadi, Doku Umarov, to “support Ukraine now,” “to activate his fight” against Russia, and “take a unique chance to win.” Doku Umarov calls himself ‘Emir of the Caucasus Emirate’. He has claimed responsibility for attacks that killed dozens of Russian civilians—including the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings and the 2011 Domodedovo International Airport bombing. He is on the UN Security Council’s Al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions list, and the US government has a posted a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.⁴¹

It does get confusing. The frenemy of my frenemy, or something like that.

This has become a formula, and a favorite part of it involves street protests that begin as democratically-inspired movements against corruption and/or authoritarianism, and turn sharply violent when the standard scenario of water-cannon and tear-gas police repression vs. rock- and Molotov-throwing protestors gets brutally escalated by something like….snipers.

Snipers are a vicious weapon. I think whoever is responsible for their use in the maidan protests deserves the world’s condemnation. I also know that nobody knows who is responsible, and no one should accept the pure assumption that they were “government” snipers. The leaked Estonian foreign minister’s phone call, mentioned above, which raised the “stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers ...was somebody from the new coalition,” has cast widespread doubt on the “government sniper” assumption.

According to the AP, the new Interior Minister, Arsen Avakov, asserts: "I can say only one thing: the key factor in this uprising, that spilled blood in Kiev and that turned the country upside down and shocked it, was a third force…And this force was not Ukrainian." Commanders of police sniper units have denied receiving orders to shoot anyone, and the new Deputy Interior Minister seems to believe them. Imputing a rather complicated motive, he thinks the sniper shooting were “intended to generate a wave of revulsion so strong that it would topple Yanukovych and also justify a Russian invasion.” The new Health Minster thinks Russian special forces were involved.⁴²

An American analyst, on the other hand, claims that, “According to veteran US intelligence sources, the snipers came from an ultra-right-wing military organization known as Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO).”⁴³

One might also keep in mind the hacked emails of opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko, leaked by Anonymous Ukraine (or Russian intelligence), discussing plans for “destabilization,” “radical escalation,” and the arrival of “colleagues” whose “services may be required”:

“Our American friends promise to pay a visit in the coming days, we may even see [Victoria] Nuland or someone from the Congress.” 12/7/2013

“Your colleague has arrived ….his services may be required even after the country is destabilized.” 12/14/2013

“I think we’ve paved the way for more radical escalation of the situation. Isn’t it time to proceed with more decisive action?” 1/9/2014⁴⁴

Every scenario is crazy in one way or another, including the one in which the Yanukovych government, ignoring all the clear lessons of recent history regarding the effects of sniper fire during protests, stupidly thought that killing protestors and policemen would calm the waters. I hope those who are responsible for the sniper attacks are identified and punished, and I do not rule out any possibility. The Russians claim to want the same thing, and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has called for a full OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) investigation, which Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin insists, would draw "a completely different picture …compared to what is being depicted by American media.” Let’s see if there is a real investigation, and who will support it. In the meantime, we should remember the Syrian chemical attack, and refuse any argument for aggressive action based on a false assertion of certainty about who is responsible for this.⁴⁵

Let’s also take a look at the role of the US in the Ukranian liberal-“ultra-nationalist” alliance, keeping in mind what I said above about all the actors in this drama having different, sometimes clashing, and sometimes internally contradictory, agendas.

The point is not that the US controlled everything in the Ukrainian uprising. It does not control as much as it thinks, and, as we’ve seen repeatedly, it often gets surprised when it gets what it asked for. It already has been surprised in this case, as we’ll discuss below. But the US, especially when acting in concert with its allies, can significantly affect the course and outcome of events. It has enormous powers, and uses them relentlessly, in public and private, to get what it wants. Not least of these powers is its ability, through its influence on ubiquitous Western media outlets, to withhold and confer a sense of legitimacy. It did just that in Ukraine, with considerable success. Brendan O’Neill makes the incontrovertible point:

The regime change that occurred [in Ukraine] would have been unthinkable without something else, without an additional force - outside pressure. ..

[Western governments] both undermined the legitimacy of the Yanukovich regime and conferred political and moral authority on to the protest camps. They did this firstly through issuing statement after statement over the past three months about the out-of-touchness of Yanukovich,… and secondly through imbuing the protest camps effectively with the right to rule Ukraine. The camps were visited by leading European and American politicians, who told the protesters theirs was a ‘just cause’ and that they have ‘a very different vision for the country’ to Yanukovich – a better one, of course. The consequence of such ‘mediation’ (meddling) was to isolate Yanukovich and embolden the protesters, creating the space for anti-Yanukovich politicians to manoeuvre themselves into positions of power.

Let’s recall the name of arch-neocon Victoria Nuland (wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan), Assistant US Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, whose leaked “Fuck the EU!” conversation with the American ambassador in Ukraine brought her out of the shadows as the behind-the-scenes point person for US management of the Ukrainian “revolution.”

In December, 2013, after her third trip to Ukraine in five weeks (including the one where she passed out cookies to maidan protestors), Nuland reminded ameeting of the International Business Conference that the US “had ‘invested’ more than $5 billion and ‘five years worth of work and preparation’ in achieving what she called Ukraine’s ‘European aspirations.’” She also said she “made it ‘absolutely clear’ to Yanukovych that the US required “immediate steps” …to ‘get back into conversation with Europe and the IMF.’” As Renee Parsons puts it, it was “As if [Nuland was] intent on providing incontrovertible evidence of US involvement in Ukraine.”⁴⁶

In regard to the leaked phone conversation, American media focused on the Nuland’s salty language, but the more important substantive point of her remarks, as Peter Lee points out, “was that Nuland was calling for the EU to be sidelined because it was not being sufficiently aggressive on the issue of threatening pro-Russian figures with sanctions.” She also wanted the more popular Vitalyi Klitschko and Svoboda leader Oleh Tiahnybok to step aside and allow the more “economically experienced” (i.e., IMF-friendly) Arsenyi Yatsenyuk take the leading role in the new Ukrainian government. She also specifies the supporting role the UN is being assigned. She got everything she asked for.⁴⁷

Nobody who hears this tape can credibly deny that the United States, through Nuland, was intimately involved in micro-managing the outcome of this independent, nationalist, Ukrainian movement:

Yats is the guy that who’s got the economic experience the governing experience he’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tiahnybok on the outside he needs to be talking to them four times a week you know.

Ok. He’s now gotten both [Dutch diplomat Robert] Serry and Ban ki-Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. That would be great I think to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU.

But anyway we could land jelly side up on this one if we move fast.⁴⁸ [all quotes from Nuland]

Throughout the crisis, the US was pushing hard for the EU to take punitive measures against the Ukrainian government, and to impose sanctions on its key officials and oligarchical backers. Peter Lee describes Nuland’s strategy as an effort “to remove the initiative in Ukraine negotiations out of the hands of Germany and the EU.” He speculates—reasonably, I think—that this had to do with accommodating the American military, as well as the neo-liberal economic, agenda: “Victoria Nuland, in allegiance to her neo-con roots, aggressively facilitated a government that was simultaneously pro-US, anti-Russian, and non-EU-oriented and would therefore see no problem with facilitating a cherished US objective—evicting the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Crimea.” The Germans were certainly pissed off about the high-handed American attitude.⁴⁹

So the Americans may have been attempting a delicate triangulation, in which the hard anti-Russian sentiment of the ultranationalist Ukrainian right was instrumental for their military agenda, without being so obvious as to lose any support of less confrontational Euro-liberal parties.

But they may have been too clever by a third.

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that Russia saw what was going on, and acted pre-emptively to stop it. The scent of brewing trouble between Ukrainian neo-fascists and their cosmopolitan patrons in the Euro-American politico-economic elite wafts forth from Right Sector’s rejection of the “cult of profit and depravity” as well as what the English captions of their video clumsily describe as “any integrations on terms that dictates not Ukraine.” The Ukrainian right, embodied in both Svoboda and Right Sector, is, after all, ultra-nationalist, and has a very good idea of the national serfdom that awaits Ukraine in the EuroAmerican-IMF neo-liberal global village. Ukrainian rightists, too, are ready to say “Fuck the EU!” They want Ukraine to be a strong, morally and ethnically pure, a brick in the wall of the GRE—the Great European Reconquest.

As Jack Rasmus points out, however:

Both the EU and USA want reliable (and pliable) capitalist politicians in Parliament and the Ukrainian government. That means politicians who will follow their economic policies and integrate the Ukraine into the western economic orbit. In other words, politicians that respond correctly when threats to freeze their personal assets in Switzerland and Luxembourg are raised, as has been the case in the days immediately preceding February 20.

The west’s gamble is their hope they can exclude the radical, ultranationalist and proto-fascist forces on the ground that served as the battering ram to bust down the door of the Yanukovych regime; or at least minimize their influence in the government. But that task that will not prove so easy, they may find.⁵⁰

The far-right has its claws deep in the new political order in Ukraine. After all, it considers that it has the right to rule. It may not be so easy to co-opt or push aside, and it is capable of causing a lot of trouble.

Of course, the more astute neo-fascist leaders will make various purring sounds to persuade their anxious Euro-American patrons that they can play nice. Thus, as Blumenthal recounts, Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok—eager to deflect any notion that their anti-“Muscovite Jew” Banderist ideology has anything to do with anti-Semitism, and knowing that there’s no better way to please the American government than to show one’s belly to Israel—recently hosted the Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine. In what, for those who have a “historical complex,” is one of the saddest of ironic moments, Tyahnybok appealed for solidarity thusly: “I would like to ask Israelis to also respect our patriotic feelings… Probably each party in the [Israeli] Knesset is nationalist. With God’s help, let it be this way for us too.” Birds of an ultranationalist feather, and all.⁵¹

The showdown will likely come, however, over whether the neo-fascist right will be tame enough to roll over for the IMF-friendly neo-liberal oligarchs and their political henchpersons. To prepare for the eventualities, the US and friends will want to shower the interim government with beefed-up police equipment and training, in order to make sure that no street protest can get anywhere near the traction of the maidan of the last few months. You know, to protect the now-democratic (unelected) government against an undemocratic popular insurrection.

On the other hand, as Julie Hyland reports, the far-right is now entrenching control of its own national military force, in the form of a 60,000-strong National Guard, “recruited from ‘activists’ in the anti-Russian protests and from military academies.” This force was just established by the Ukrainian parliament, and will be overseen by Svoboda’s own Andriy Parubiy.⁵² Ukraine’s neo-fascist right may have been a tad too well nourished on Victoria’s baked goods, and the US’s neo-liberal plans may not get swallowed so easily. These guys are ready to fight. They may be inclined to be independent of, and resistant to, an EU-IMF agenda. The Russian reaction in the Crimea has already taken the US off-guard, and the new armed forces of the Ukrainian right can now create a lot of trouble throughout the Ukraine, which could provoke the wider conflict with Russia that they are itching for, and that Europe, and even the US, can ill afford.

I’ve got no happy ending. As I said above, possible war and perpetual tension is what’s in store for Ukraine. And America’s cookies may land jelly-side down.

Russia and Crimea

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] hold no love for Russia under Putin, although I do not consider him the comic-book villain he is now being cast as. Russia has its own problems with post-Soviet oligarchic capitalism and a confused nationalist mythology. The re-annexation of Crimea is a dangerous gambit, and arguably, but not certainly (see below), in contravention of international law. Nothing here to celebrate.

It’s also true that, in this situation, the US is being hoisted on its own petard of utter disregard for what I previously called “the carefully-constructed and delicate post-war architecture of international law and institutions.” It’s the United States (along with its ward state, Israel) that has routinely ignored issues of national sovereignty and international law, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, over decades—and has suffered no sanction for doing so. Its actions, more than anything else, have rendered the always-fragile construct of international law practically a dead letter. You can’t bomb and/or invade Lebanon, Cuba, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, et. al., to install your favored government (all but one thousands of miles from your territory), and then stand in politico-moral judgement over another country’s incursion into and recapture of a contiguous region that had been part of its national territory until 1954.

Especially when that happens with the consent of ithe people in that territory, and without a single casualty. Neither the Russians, who lost 20 million people to fascism in WWII, nor the Crimeans (Crimea being part of Russia at the time), have any mythologized confusions about fascist historical heroes, or any reason not to fear and reject the resurgent fascism at the door. Western countries, in fact, could use a little of that anxiety.

In the global context they have created, American leaders can’t think they’ll be taken seriously when they say: “You just don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th Century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”

Furthermore, US foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union has been particularly contemptuous of Russia. Bush I promised Mikhail Gorbachev that the US would not expand NATO to take in the Eastern European and Baltic states, and he, Clinton, and Bush II proceeded to do just that. They took it for granted that Russia—under the leadership of their corrupt and drunken stooge, Yeltsin, and economically devastated by the American-led shock-therapy restoration of capitalism—could do nothing. With his war on Russia's close ally, Serbia, Bill Clinton (proving that NATO never was a defensive alliance) announced that, henceforth, NATO was free to attack any country on Earth--its concept of right trumping the United Nations process and all other notions of international law; he, too, presumed Russia could do nothing about it. In Libya, the US lied to get the Russians (and Chinese) to vote for a “humanitarian” mission, and then blatantly disregarded the terms of the UN resolution and bombed the crap out of Libya for the purpose of “regime change”—assuming Russia could do nothing about it. G. W. Bush and Obama have pushed NATO forward more aggressively, and moved to station “missile defenses” in Eastern Europe that everyone with half a brain, and certainly Russia, knows are weapons designed to enable US first-strike capability—taking for granted that Russia could do nothing about it.

Well, today, in Crimea, Russia—which has every reason to suspect US/NATO plans for Ukraine and for its only warm-water port—can do something about it. It’s not something very nice, but nor is it a hundredth as destructive as what the United States has been doing, or certainly would do in the same circumstance. Putin can cite the Obama administration’s own statement to the UN International Court on Kosovo:

“Declarations of independence may, and often do, violate domestic legislation. However, this does not make them violations of international law.” End of quote. They wrote this, disseminated it all over the world, had everyone agree and now they are outraged. Over what? The actions of Crimean people completely fit in with these instructions, as it were.⁵³

And he can then go all Victoria Nuland on the US. There’s really nothing the US can do, or even credibly say, about it. Fortunately, nobody has the stomach for war.

Like a lot of us, the Russians may have thought something else was possible after the break-up of the Soviet Union. But, for the past twenty-some years, the United States was content to ignore international law, and re-create that Great Power world in which one country could invade another country on completely trumped-up pretext—because it took for granted that it was the only Great Power.

No happy ending, for Americans or Ukrainians. It’s a very dangerous world we now live in; somebody could get the stomach. It was Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama who created this world. The Russians have only decided they’re going to live in it. And so will we all.

_________________________________
[See follow-up post on Ukraine developments at: Good for the Gander:Ukraine's Demise Accelerates.]

[Updated on 8/3/2014 to correct some pronoun inconsistencies.]

Notes and Links, and Coda

Ukraine Turns to Its Oligarchs for Political Help - NYTimes.com

²Yulia Tymoshenko is back centre stage in Ukraine – but not all want her there | World news | The Guardian

³Ukrainian Protesters See Too Many Familiar Faces in Parliament After Revolution - NYTimes.com

⁴The Dubious Businees of Ukraine President Yanukovych and His Clan - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Christopher Dickey, Yulia Tymoshenko: She's No Angel, Daily Beast

⁵Ukraine: The February revolution | The Economist

⁶Ukraine: The left and the movement to overthrow Yanukovich: two interviews | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, reposted from Pratele Komunizace

⁷Whither Ukraine? » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

⁸Washington’s Man Yatsenyuk Setting Ukraine Up For Ruin, Forbes.com

⁹The Restaurant Veselka Is a Beacon for Ukrainian Immigrants - NYTimes.com

¹⁰Julie Hyland, What the Western-backed regime is planning for Ukrainian workers - World Socialist Web Site

¹¹Economist, op. cit.

¹²Hyland, op. cit.

¹³Valentin Mândrăşescu, ’Western financial aid won’t save Ukraine’ – former minister of economy - The Voice of Russia

¹⁴Wolf Richter Aid For The Ukraine “Will Be Stolen” – Former Ukrainian Minister Of Economy | InvestmentWatch

¹⁵Timothy Snyder, Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine | The New York Review of Books

¹⁶A New Cold War? Ukraine Violence Escalates, Leaked Tape Suggests U.S. Was Plotting Coup | Democracy Now!

¹⁷Medic: At least 70 protesters killed in Kiev - Yahoo News

¹⁸LiveLeak.com - Ukrainian protesters with guns caught on tape

¹⁹Ukraine crisis: bugged call reveals conspiracy theory about Kiev snipers | World news | The Guardian

²⁰Militants threaten to shatter fragile Ukraine truce - Yahoo News

²¹ Vladimir Putin Talks To Reporters About Ukraine – Information Clearing House

²²Ukraine: The left and the movement to overthrow Yanukovich: two interviews | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

²³Ukraine’s presidential election meets most international commitments - Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights

²⁴Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, The Road to Moscow Goes Through Kiev: A Coup d’Etat That Threatens Russia | Global Research

²⁵A Coup or a Revolution? Ukraine Seeks Arrest of Ousted President Following Deadly Street Protests | Democracy Now!

²⁶Ukraine: This Isn’t A Revolution – It’s Regime Change

²⁷Max Blumenthal, Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine? | Alternet

"The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda," in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.) Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 228-255. | Per Anders Rudling - Academia.edu

Nicolai N. Petro, Threat of Military Confrontation Grows in Ukraine | The Nation

²⁸Blumenthal, Petro, and Justin Raimondo, A Monster Reawakens: The Rise of Ukrainian Fascism -- Antiwar.com

²⁹ Yushchenko: European Parliament has ‘historical complex’ with respect to Bandera

³⁰15,000 Ukraine nationalists march for divisive Bandera

A lot of Ukrainians like to convince themselves that, as one of the January demonstrators insisted, "Bandera never was on the Germans' side," and that he was just about national independence. They’ll cite the fact that he was imprisoned by the Germans in 1941, when his faction of the OUN (OUN-B) “came to control the OUN's Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and declared an independent Ukrainian state … as a satellite of Nazi Germany,” which apparently was a little too assertive (or perhaps oxymoronic) for the Germans. But Bandera was back in German favor by 1944, and actually “set up a headquarters in Berlin and oversaw the training of Ukrainian insurgents by the German army.” Bandera’s “younger and more radical” OUN faction (ONU-B) was somewhat more ambivalent about the Ukrainian Waffen SS division than the “older, more moderate” (OUN-M) of Andriy Melnyk, but the ONU-B “did not interfere in i[the division’s] formation and once the division was formed it sent some of its members, a number of whom would obtain prominent positions.” Both factions of the ONU “were enthusiastically committed to a new fascist Europe.” And it was the UPA, under Bandera’s “top deputy and acting ‘Prime Minister,’” Yaroslav Stetsko, that “killed tens of thousands of Poles in 1942-44.” The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists portrayed Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Jews — most of the minorities in western Ukraine — as aliens and encouraged locals to destroy “Poles and Jews.” All this goes to show is that Bandera was as ardently racist and anti-Semitic as he was nationalist. Ukrainians who imagine that Bandera was not an outright fascist are kidding themselves. It’s a little like believing that Confederate statesmen weren’t really racists, just proponents of “states’ rights.” Read the Per Anders Rudling article to get the full flavor of it.

The French were responsible for a vicious imperial occupation of Vietnam. Nonetheless, when given the easy opportunity, Ho Chi Minh did not confuse an alliance with Japanese “fellow-Asian” imperialism with a worthy strategy for Vietnamese nationalism. Stalin’s many horrible crimes committed against Ukraine (at the same time he was murdering thousands of Russian revolutionaries) are no excuse for a nationalism that wants to lay the heads of Jews, and prostrate itself, at Hitler’s feet.

For a taste of the US partnership with Ukrainian fascists, see the recent interview with Russ Bellant, "Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America's Dirty Little Ukraine Secret," based on his 1991 book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics. [Reference added 5 May 2014]

³¹Nazemroaya, op. cit., and Brian Becker, Who’s Who in Ukraine’s New “Semi-fascist” Government: Meet the People the U.S. and EU are Supporting | Global Research]

³²BBC News – Ukraine's revolution and the far right

³³Oleg Shynkarenko, Can Ukraine Control Its Far Right Ultranationalists? - The Daily Beast

³⁴An Interview with Mira, Andrei, and Sascha of AntiFascist Action Ukraine

³⁵Ukraine: The left and the movement to overthrow Yanukovych: two

interviews | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

³⁶Ibid.

³⁷Shynkarenko, op. cit.

³⁸ Michael Moynihan, Neo-Nazis Pour Into Kiev - The Daily Beast, and Raimondo, op.cit.

³⁹Eric Draitser, Ukraine, Intervention, and America’s Doublethink » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names Israel Shamir: The Brown Revolution of the Ukraine

⁴⁰Ukraine Now Headed by Fascists and Neo-Nazis | Alternet

⁴¹Ukraine nationalist leader calls on “most wanted” terrorist Umarov “to act against Russia” — RT News

We must add to the list Venezuela, where US liberal and conservative politicians and media—in the name of “democracy,” of course—are supporting another bunch of right-wing street fighters attempting to overthrow a government that they have failed to dislodge in election after election. Garry Leech, Behind the Lies About Venezuela’s Protests » CounterPunch, and Suren Moodliar, No Middle Road on Venezuela » CounterPunch

⁴²Russia, Ukraine feud over sniper carnage - Yahoo News

⁴³F. William Engdahl, Ukraine: Secretive Neo-Nazi Military Organization Involved in Euromaidan Sniper Shootings | Global Research

⁴⁴Anonymous Ukraine releases Klitschko e-mails showing treason - News - World - The Voice of Russia

⁴⁵Russia calls for OSCE probe into Kiev sniper deaths - Yahoo News Russia, Ukraine feud over sniper carnage - Yahoo News

⁴⁶Renee Parsons, Chronology of the Ukrainian Coup » CounterPunch

⁴⁷Peter Lee, Skullduggery in Ukraine | Counterpunch

⁴⁸Washington’s Objective: Install a Political Puppet in Ukraine, “F— the EU” says Victoria Nuland in Leaked Tape | Global Research

⁴⁹Germans not amused by Victoria Nuland gaffe - The Washington Post

⁵⁰The Ukraine Economic Crisis » CounterPunch

⁵¹Israel Hayom | Israeli ambassador holds friendly meeting with notorious anti-Semite, and Blumenthal, op. cit.. And try this for crazy: Israeli militia commander fights to protect Kiev | The Times of Israel “Delta, a Ukrainian-born former IDF soldier, heads a force of 40 men and women, most of whom are not Jewish, against gov’t forces."

⁵²Hyland, op. cit.

⁵³Address by President of the Russian Federation - Putin Slams West, Calls For End to ‘Cold War Rhetoric’

Coda

Mr. Jelly Roll Baker, Can I please be your slave?

I couldn't help thinking about this, my favorite (Tom Rush) version of the Lonnie Johnson song “Jelly Roll Baker.” “Jelly Roll” is a well-known blues trope, that’s used to refer to either the male and female genitalia—an apt coda, I think, for all that's represented in the supremely dickish discourse of Victoria “Jelly-Side” Nuland. (See also: Lacan, “phallic mother.”).

About the Author

Jim Kavanagh edits The Polemicist. His reporting and commentary appears in many leading left online publications, including Counterpunch, The Greanville Post, OpedNews, and others.

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The tragedy of Yemen—the contorted, official views vs. straightforward ones (Videos)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

CBS' Holly Williams (r) sort of reporting from Yemen. Downplaying the central truth of the story.

PATRICE GREANVILLE

The tragedy of Yemen, under assault by the US, Britain and Saudi Arabia, with ancillary support by the usual cast of vassal nations, has become so massive that not even the US media are able to disfigure and cover up its truth entirely, although they certainly try. The most frequently used argument is the old canard, that this is really a "brutal" (and apparently inexplicable) conflict between two equally ruthless and often barbaric sides, the Saudis and the Houthis—the latter the "upstarts" in the perennially reactionary imperial POV, the rebels who merit by definition little sympathy. Observe in this report—unusual in the sense how CBS correspondent Holly Williams, embedded with the US side of the conflict—delivers (for US tv standards) as close to a semi-decent report on the situation as her handlers will allow. That said, the poor woman must still perform literal contortions to give a facsimile of truth while still hiding the big pink elephant in the room, the fact that it is Washington and London who are the chief enablers of those doing 9/10s of the barbaric killing in Yemen, while the US public doze on. Each of the videos below is preceded by their official intros. Note that CBS casually acknowledges whose side they are supporting: "Holly Williams got access to the war-torn country from the Saudi Arabian government to see its version of the war." This is propaganda in broad daylight, in your face, but few Americans notice and fewer care.

A second US mainstream tv report was filed on the same topic by PBS Newshour. This is far more balanced and detailed (as usual) than the more normal mainstream report filed by CBS, and is also unusual in that it does present the picture with fewer distortions favoring the imperial side. This is noteworthy because PBS, despite its claims to quality unbiased journalism, is not exempt from shilling for the plutocracy, on whose largesse and political will it depends for survival. In that sense, this report must be seen as the exception and not the rule, even if the "exception: occurs more frequently with PBS than with the openly commercial networks. The degeneracy of PBS as quality medium for investigative journalism is mirrored by the transformation of its onetime award-winning Frontline series into little more than a thinly disguised propaganda outlet for Washington's hegemonic pursuits. Anyone who has watched its tendentious portrait of Vladimir Putin will have little doubt about that.

• By the way, CBS is controlled by the Sumner Redstone clan, who control Viacom and National Amusements, the umbrella corporation. Leslie Moonves is Chairman, CBS Corporation. Sumner Redstone (Sumner Murray Rothstein) serves as Chairman Emeritus. These are the main people responsible for what CBS does or doesn't do.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he other side of this coin is represented by the uncompromising independent journalism exemplified by intrepid figures like John Pilger, Vanessa Beeley, and the equally stubborn pursuit of truth and justice on the part of correspondents and Middle East experts like Felicity Arbuthnot. Their brave dispatches from the very fracture lines of imperial aggression whether directed at China, Russia, Iran, or Syria, or other tormented regions and nations, aid the public in comprehending the real vital issues of the day. To this we must add the invaluable presence—under attack by the empire, of course, under all sorts of calumnies—of state-backed resources such as RT.com (Russia), PressTV (Iran) and Sputnik (Russia). They almost invariably offer the starved-for-truth American public a type of coverage and viewpoint rarely or never seen on the homeland's tv or newspaper venues.

—PG

1. Washington establishment coverage (note these two instances are among the best we could find. The norm is much worse.)

CBS This Morning

On the frontlines of Yemen's deadly civil war

Published on Feb 6, 2018

More than 10,000 people in Yemen have died during a three-year civil war and millions more are threatened by famine and disease. Yemen's government, backed by Saudi Arabia, is fighting rebel forces backed by Iran. Holly Williams got access to the war-torn country from the Saudi Arabian government to see its version of the war.

PBS NewsHour Nov 13, 2017

Cholera, hunger and war are ravaging Yemen. What role does the U.S. play?

A brutal, three-year civil war in Yemen has drawn in regional and global powers, led to the fastest growing cholera epidemic and, perhaps soon, famine. A Saudi coalition is lifting a recent blockade on the country after aid groups warned it would trigger a humanitarian disaster, but millions remain vulnerable. P.J. Tobias offers an update on the conflict and what the U.S. is doing there.

2. Counter-establishment coverage

The Truth About Yemen - With Vanessa Beeley

RonPaulLibertyReport

Streamed live on Aug 17, 2017

More than two years after a Saudi-led coalition began attacking Yemen, the country is a wasteland. Thousands of airstrikes, scores of children killed, epidemics, misery. Who's really responsible and what can be done?

RT America

YEMEN: The Neglected War

Published on Sep 6, 2017

Thousands of civilians have died and millions more have been displaced in the ongoing hostilities in Yemen. What began as a civil war now extends far beyond Yemen’s borders. Brigida Santos hosts RT America’s special coverage of the neglected conflict. Find RT America in your area: http://rt.com/where-to-watch/ Or watch us online: http://rt.com/on-air/rt-america-air/

Peter Lavelle, has also tried to bring this topic to the forefront with the urgency and truth it deserves. Watch this report/dscussion filed in 2015.

Published on Sep 4, 2015

CrossTalk: Annihilating Yemen

Getting scant media coverage in the West, Yemen as a state and society is being destroyed. The Arab world’s poorest country is being systemically annihilated by one of its richest – Saudi Arabia. What does Riyadh hope to achieve in this conflict, and why is Washington fully backing this war of choice? CrossTalking with Mohammad Marandi, Joseph Kechichian, and Catherine Shakdam.

About the Author

Patrice Greanville is editor in chief of The Greanville Post.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

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Professor Stephen F. Cohen: Rethinking Putin – a review

On The Syria Occupation And The New Face Of Imperialism

Good for the Gander: Ukraine’s Demise Accelerates (Part 2)

A further look at the Ukraine debacle, in seven pieces.

Notorious Ukrainian nationalist militant Muzychko 'shot dead'

JIM KAVANAGH’s classic analyses of the Ukraine coup: Charge of the Right Brigade (part 1)

Charge of the Right Brigade: Ukraine and the Dynamics of Capitalist Insurrection

The tragedy of Yemen—the contorted, official views vs. straightforward ones (Videos)

On the frontlines of Yemen's deadly civil war

Cholera, hunger and war are ravaging Yemen. What role does the U.S. play?

The Truth About Yemen - With Vanessa Beeley

YEMEN: The Neglected War

CrossTalk: Annihilating Yemen

Charge of the Right Brigade:
Ukraine and the Dynamics of Capitalist Insurrection