Showing posts with label democracy in Ukraine. Show all posts

Monday, April 21, 2014

Making Russia disappear; hanky-panky in the blogosphere

On a typical day this blog can expect to get 50 or 60 page views from Russia. In the three years I've been putting out this unique combine of investment tips, political commentary, highly selective personal memoir, and downright awful offal, page views from Russia rank third in number, after only the US and Canada.

So when there are zero page views for several days in a row, I know something is going on.

My Russian readers are back, as of shortly after noon today.

It's as if a tap was turned off, and then turned on again.

Was it something I said?

Russians enjoy something lacking in much of the Western world; leadership. There's not a whole lot of folks who don't understand who is in charge in Russia.

We can disagree to the nth degree over whether the man governs for "the people" or for a mafia of oligarchs, but we can all agree that one man is in charge.

Nobody is sure who is in charge in America, but most people are agreed that it ain't Obama. The "Oracle of Nairobi" has pretty much dropped the ball on every file that he's ever handled.

Single payer universal health care morphs into the biggest profit subsidy for private health care ever imagined.

Closing Gitmo morphs into keeping that festering sore open forever, or till the last inmate dies.

Hope and change morphs into dope and rage...

"Red lines" come and go, as well they should, because most of what comes out of Obama's mouth is about political expediency that doesn't look more than 15 minutes into the future.

The Ukraine fiasco is that only because Obama couldn't decide, and still hasn't, what America's "strategic interests" are in that corner of the world. And unless you buy into the "American exceptionalism" fantasies of the PNAC crowd, you have to admit there are none.

A cursory reading of history and a glance at a map will confirm that Russia, on the other hand, does indeed have legitimate strategic interests in Ukraine, specifically in Crimea, and it didn't take Putin long to act in the interests of the nation he is leading.

The presumptuous dilettantism of Nuland and Pyatt was nipped in the bud before they were done congratulating themselves on their "revolution."

That has of course led to the most embarrassing howls of outrage from the PNAC acolytes in Washington, and also from their more devout devotees like Tusk in Poland and the incomparable Harper-Baird combination in Canada.

I don't for a moment imagine that Putin is some sort of modern day messiah who is leading his people to the promised land. But I do believe he is a hard-nosed realist who is preventing Russia from being steam-rollered by the "American exceptionalism" juggernaut that rules Washington and most of its helper-states these days.

And for that Mr. Putin should be celebrated.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The unseemly haste of Canada's mission to Ukraine

On the face of it, Canada might seem an unlikely candidate to be the first of the Nations of Virtue to send a senior delegation into the chaos of post-Yanukovich Ukraine.

While Ukraine is doing their best to put a moderate face on the new regime with the announcement that vaguely centrist Arseniy Yatsenyuk is to be interim leader until May elections, there can be no question that it was the extremist right that did the heavy lifting in the triumph over the democratically elected government of Yanukovich.

That is a cohort that features at least two prominent characteristics that are anethema to the purported values of the Canadians.

One is their rampant anti-semitism.

The other is their rampant homophobia. Don't expect gay marriages to become officially sanctioned in Ukraine anytime soon.

So the spectacle of a Canadian delegation led by openly gay Foreign Minister John Baird handing out bon-bons in Independence Square is fraught with multiple layers of irony.

This is the same crew that has embarrassed itself professing absolute loyalty to the Likudniks in Israel.

Perhaps the Canadian mission is tasked with moderating the extremist views of their Ukrainian hosts?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps it's about nothing more than brazen political opportunism. As everybody knows, there is a federal election on the horizon in Canada, and Prime Minister Harper's Conservatives are in for a tight race.

The fundamentalist religious inclinations of certain of their party notwithstanding, the Harper gang sucks up to Israel mainly to impress the Jewish vote in Canada.

They're now sucking up to Ukraine to woo the Ukrainian vote in Canada, which happens to be roughly twice the size of the Jewish vote.

That's a lot of sucking up.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Canada celebrates overthrow of democratically elected government in Ukraine

Canada Welcomes Presidential Transition in Ukraine

February 24, 2014 - Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird today issued the following statement welcoming the confirmation of Oleksander Turchinov as Ukraine’s acting president:
“The Ukrainian parliament acted legitimately in naming Speaker Turchinov as acting president pending the May 25 elections, and Canada welcomes his interim appointment during this important transition period.
“The next critical juncture will be the Ukrainian parliament’s vote to establish a new government under the leadership of a new prime minister, in accordance with the constitution passed on February 22.
“Canada supports the Ukrainian people, the constitutional process and the Ukrainian people’s legitimate leaders as they work to re-establish freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Together with our allies, we will continue to monitor the situation closely at this pivotal time in the country’s history.”

- 30 -

For further information, media representatives may contact:
Media Relations Office
Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada
613-995-1874
media@international.gc.ca
Follow us on Twitter: @DFATDCanada

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Flash mob democracy

All those news stories in today's papers trumpeting the demise of Yanukovych tend to downplay one salient factor; whatever the man's shortcomings as a leader, he was in fact elected to his position in a reasonably fair election process. His premature removal from office, on the other hand, was the result of mob violence in the streets.

A not dissimilar trajectory marked the demise of Egypt's democratically elected President Morsi last July. The major difference was that in the end the street violence in Egypt was not in itself sufficient to turn the deed, and the US sponsored military had to step in to enforce "the will of the people."

In both cases we have seen the legitimacy of the democratic process trumped by the flash mob.

Both cases are victories for US based "democracy promotion" NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy and their numerous quasi-governmental affiliates. These "NGOs" are doubly deceptive; in the first instance, they are funded virtually in their entirety by the US government, rendering the "NG" part of their labels more than a little suspect.

Secondly, when they are instrumental in the removal of democratically elected governments, it is a curious sort of "democracy" they are promoting.

The NED has for some time focussed on the uses of social media as a tool to organize opposition in the countries where it operates. It's a strategy that has now been proven effective in paralyzing the government and economy of targeted societies. What we are witnessing is the evolution of how governments are installed and maintained, an evolution driven by developments in technology.

That in itself is not new. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet have all impacted the evolution of the democratic process.

What seems to be new is that until the present time these technological changes served to democratize the process by which governments are installed and maintained. The process of choosing leadership was taken away from priests and magi and hereditary leaders. It was also taken away from angry hordes mobilizing in the streets.

The process was bureaucratized and institutionalized. We've evolved something called "the rule of law," which while nowhere perfect, did insulate the process effectively from the demands of easily manipulated street mobs. The current technology seems to be a reversal. Social media are unravelling the last five hundred years in the evolution of democracy as we know it.

One of the as-yet little-appreciated effects of this change is that by its nature, this technology is very effective in gathering a mass of disaffected individuals on a given street or in a particular square. That's the definition of "flash mob." What the technology cannot do is replace the kind of oppositional networks that grow from long term commitment to activism.

Those are the kind of networks that can effectively oppose entrenched power institutions. The overthrow of the military regime in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood was the result of several generations of activism undertaken at great personal risk by members of an organization that had a cogent set of core values and an agenda. The overthrow of the Morsi administration was the result of mere weeks of virulent anti-Morsi flash mob activism.

We know how that has turned out.

Will Ukraine be different? Or, when the smoke settles will we see a nation, or perhaps two nations, even less accountable than the hapless Yanukovych?

And what of other flash mob revolutions currently in play to a greater or lesser extent in Venezuela, Turkey, and Thailand, all of them well trod playgrounds for the "democracy promoters" of the NED?

Technology is facilitating a brand new world of democracy, and it's starting to look a lot like the bad old world of rule by rioting mob.

The era of flash mob democracy has arrived.