Countries invested in the Olympics — an amateur affair where sports are to enjoy contests to the side of politics with national pride second to pride in individual athletic striving and accomplishing.
The international press excoriated Sochi in regard to its encounter with substandard facilities; such as myself have tried keep Sochi and Syria in the same frame with the money front and center — i.e., a Russian pledge of $10 million for Syrian humanitarian aid while Sochi went forward with a $51 billion price tag.
Humanity is not what the Syrian civil war is about. It’s not about God either. It’s about despotism. Humanity would probably (that’s a validated probably, considering the numbers in casualties and refugees) not be in the middle of it. The obscenity of the treatment meted by both sides to the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp underscores the inhumanity displayed between contesting forces.
The world’s getting the message between Chinese and Russian Security Council complicity in relation to the Syrian Civil War.
Neither has interest in voting against a dynastic dictatorship; both have interest in containing or rebuffing Islam, which in the weird way described by Aboud Dandachi in the previous post, has both emphasizing and tacitly supporting the presence of al-Qaeda-type fighters as a demonstration of who is just as bad and promises to be far worse — and would be if they themselves were not there to block them. In essence, these undemocratic political elite are attempting to curry favor with the global war watching public by keeping before their eyes the atrocious barbaric excesses of a foe that make themselves look the little bit better choice.
It was a country where the late actor Bogdan Stupka could move audiences by playing Tevye the Dairyman—in Ukrainian. In 2004, during the Orange Revolution—triggered by protests against a fraudulent election “won” by Viktor Yanukovych—my Ukrainian friends demonstrated alongside Boris Naumovich, an octogenarian veteran of the Red Army with whom I practiced speaking Yiddish. Now, a decade later, an equally diverse coalition has turned out for the past three months again to protest Yanukovych, who over the weekend was ousted from the presidency he took over in 2010, and who appears to have fled to the Crimea.
It takes as much or more time to compile quotations and reference as it may to reflect and speak, so for this scraping post, I may say very little: Ukraine has come to the new dawn riven with internal conflicts about being Ukrainian with but one exception: being modern.
In the modern ethos, and would that I would have influence in it, those five bulwarks to the left-and-top count: Compassion • Empathy • Humility • Inclusion • Integrity.
Notably, if quite accidentally, my web surf took me first to “Ukraine, revolution, anti-Semitism” and then to “Ukraine, revolution, Jewish”, which somehow brought up another how-did-I-ever-miss-this encounter with a proper noun: “Viktor Pinchuk”.
Never heard of him.
(Quick: name Putin’s top ten oligarchs)!
I didn’t think so (but am nonetheless prepared to be surprised by the odd persnickety personality).
Pinchuk and the Jewish community of about 200,000 in Ukraine are not “Ukraine”, but they are certainly a fine and legitimate part of it, and Ukraine, rather like Hungary, hasn’t a soul more pure than any other of the world’s states, but then too, it has its language and languages are distinct and matched to culture, so whether Christian or Jewish or Muslim, capitalist or communist, far left or far right or somewhere between, Ukrainians have a common investment in land and language, a true meta-ethnicity adorned by differences.
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On the one hand, one of the three long-ago gates of Kiev was known as Judaic. On the other hand, there was Khmelnitsky.
He is the Ukrainian national hero, who led the Cossacks to power and whose massacres of the Jews were some of the bloodiest in our history.
Among the events reporte, Rabbi Margolin lists: a fire bomb thrown at a synagogue in Zhprozha, a message telling the rabbi of Krivoy Rog that he must leave the city within 72 hours, a graffito on the home of the rabbi of Blitzkorov saying “we are already near you,” another graffito near a Jewish building in Kiev saying “you are next,” and other anti-Semitic graffiti.
Protest coverage focused on the call for European integration and the struggle against the Yanukovich regime has largely glossed over the rise in nationalist rhetoric, often chauvinist, that has led to violence not just against police, but also against left-wing activists.
He called upon his supporters saying: “[You are the ones] that the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine fears most.”
It was an apparent reference to a Moscow-leaning political leadership, and the strong presence of ethnic Jewish billionaires in Ukraine’s business elite.
A number of young Jews are involved in the protests, which have drawn together a diverse coalition of liberal youth and opposition party leaders, including members of the ultranationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has freely trafficked anti-Semitic stereotypes.
“If the nationalists are in favor of a regime change in the country, and I am also, then they won’t prevent me from going out into the Maidan with everyone and expressing my opinions,” Evgenia Talinovskaya told JTA. “The EuroMaidan movement is primarily identified with the educated youth. And Jewish youth in Ukraine primarily fall under that description.”
He has spent the years since the Orange Revolution working to build a profile as a philanthropist. He recently pledged half his fortune, estimated by Forbes at $3.8 billion, to charity and has underwritten large-scale AIDS campaigns, opened up a free museum of contemporary art in central Kiev, and teamed up with Steven Spielberg to produce a documentary about the Holocaust in Ukraine. As pro-European reforms have stalled, Pinchuk has emerged as his country’s top advocate in the West, using his annual Yalta summits to push for Ukraine’s closer integration with the European Union.
Victor Pinchuk said: “A peaceful solution must be found, it is imperative to refrain from the use of force and find a compromise. Ukraine since its independence has avoided bloodshed. We must return to this tradition immediately. From this minute, this is the responsibility of everyone – those in power, the opposition, civil society, business. It is time for all sides to take courageous steps towards compromise that they may not yet have been ready to take even this morning. For each of us, love for Ukraine must be immeasurably more important than any other feelings and interests.”
We never had in our newest history even one drop of blood on the streets, but today we already have four or five people who were killed. I’ve never been so worried about my country, about the future of my country. I don’t want to bring politics in here but I want to ask you to share …here are hundreds of people from more than 50 countries from 5 continents, I want to ask you to share silence for 60 seconds in which we send our thoughts to Ukrainian people and we pray for peace, reason, compromise and reconciliation.
In a hectic round of voting in the chamber, near where triumphant but wary protesters remain encamped on Kiev’s main square, lawmakers stripped the still missing president of his abandoned country home. Its brash opulence, now on display, has fuelled demands that the Russian-backed, elected leader and his allies be held to account for corruption on a grand scale.
Piratical uber-capitalist Vladimir Putin may yet succeed at accomplishing what the Soviet Kremlin could never achieve: the establishment of socialist societies and welfare states inspired by appalling state corruption and determined to do a few things about it, not that as much creates cause to applaud steps forward for nationalist socialism. However, this post-Soviet denouement that may also cap a revival of 19th Century aristocracy funded by energy sales and abetted by patronage spinning off the “vertical of power” may turn emerging leaders toward accountable, democratic, responsible, and responsive governance.
It’s good for a nation to have its wealthy, its monumental in private and institutional structures from estates to museums to resorts, but let that wealth not ride on the backs of whole constituencies and further reside in wickedly defended and untouchable halls of mirror.
After Yugoslavia, Ukraine ? – 2/14/2014: “. . . Washington’s goal is not to push the country into the arms of the European Union, but to deprive Russia of its historical partners.”
I was in the KGB . . . I’m retired now . . . President is nobody to me . . . Nobody. Honestly. I voted for my grandchildren. I have two. I voted for the sake of the future.
The two dimensions in the Ukrainian conversation: 1) decency in governance; 2) economic survival.
Putin appears to believe in the ultimate power of money.
🙂
Money, of course, is the mafia god, and that god is no different in Caracas than it is in Damascus or Kiev: whatever they may have to do to get it, the “men of respect” get it and get it to work for them to get more of it.
Where the getting is piratical, the business is protected against the development of sufficient challenge, a large part of which begins with the control and spin of information likely to reach a constituency about to be captured, made dependent, infantilized, inhibited, patronized, and subjugated in the cause of the greater aggrandizement of the dictator.
It appears Ukrainians (and Russians) have approached a fork in time and must choose between a complacent acceptance of piratical dictatorship and its capricious and centrally manipulated governance or a more vigorous embrace of democratic governance with its uniform legal codes and fair and equal enforcement, open courts subject to expert and open review, tolerance of a broad and independent press, and, ultimately, governance responsive to the needs and will of whole cultures and the complex societies in which they must thrive.
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Undated links correspond with the date of the post.
No need to date links in this compilation: I believe all were published today, and some within a few hours or an hour of this news watching typing that goes on around here most days.
Footage of violence in the Ukrainian capital was beamed almost non-stop into Russian homes by state television on Wednesday, accompanied by apocalyptic warnings of civil war next door and accusations of meddling by foreign states.
Russians well know this form in lying through accusation.
They have been through it right to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, about 24 years ago, and here they have again arrived captive (fewer than 7 percent of Russians speak English) to state media and “covered” by a state security apparatus employing more than 400,000 of their neighbors.
I cannot yet vet videos, much less receive them independently. Nonetheless, one may see through them to the contact point between worlds of deception reliant on narcissistic manipulation for wealth and the self-aggrandizement it affords and the other of integrity that insists on speaking truth to power and on political conversation in the open.
President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in separate messages felicitated the anniversary of victory of the Islamic Revolution to President Hassan Rouhani and First Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri.
In his message, President Ader underlined the efforts of both countries in expansion of bilateral cooperation in all fields, which secure interests of the two countries.
There have been additional references to Hungary in relation to other subjects, e.g., European reparations to the Jewish community, but it’s the drift into nationalism that catches play here and with it movement within the European aligned NATO state to cement relationships with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
As as happened over the course of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s tenure, drift toward fascism may draw a strong liberal response from the middle and thereby stall a conservative state movement.
Similar dynamics have also surfaced in Kiev — Ukraine protests take center-stage at EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels | News | DW.DE | 10.02.2014 – which population has found itself in The Bear Trap, i.e., aesthetically, politically, and spiritually aligned with European modernity and its social values but beholden to a state in which the “vertical of power” — the Autocrat — determines the character, position, and values of the state and states it makes its buffer.
Hungarians may express themselves, take to the streets, and throw fits, but Papa Putin with the checkbook and gas tap has sufficient clout for leaving the Ukrainian government to shrug off its liberal critics.
That particular Bear has also aligned itself with Iranian interests — the better to drum up defense and nuclear sales business — and to the extent that it also holds Hungarians in its paws by way of energy supply and sales, it may stalls Hungary’s westward inclinations and, possibly, encourage those who feel comfortable with thuggish mafia-style Putinesque Russian politics.
The effects of the axis — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — made visible by the collapse of Syria, a lingering post-Soviet artifact may be just emergent in the discussion eastern European politics.
If I had budget plus swift graphic arts I would do this with clusters, but a linear verbal illustration might suffice:
Where tanks may once have been dispatched, cash and energy may suffice — and money gets around without conscience.
Additional Reference
Hungary
Viktor Orbán in Moscow: “Putin’s new little kitten”? | Hungarian Spectrum – 2/1/2014: “Moreover, one must keep in mind that for Hungary Russia is a much more important partner than vice versa. In trade relations the Hungarian share of Russian imports is only 2%. On the other hand, Hungary because of its dependence on natural gas and oil is heavily dependent on Russian goodwill.”
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “The deal shows Putin’s ability to use Russia’s control over energy resources to extend his sway beyond the former Soviet Union. Last month, he pledged a $15 billion bailout and a cut in the price of natural gas to Ukraine and promised to lend as much as $2 billion to Belarus.”
From the above cited BBC news link: “Washington’s European envoy Victoria Nuland was heard using an expletive to disparage the EU’s handling of the crisis and revealing Washington’s determination to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian struggle.”
Obama cancels meeting with Putin amid Russia tensions – NBC News.com: “Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the White House said.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union left Soviet business and political relationships as well as Soviet style in place: at least as much would seem embodied in the post-KGB, now FSB person of Russian President Putin who has accepted the defeat of Russian communism — or the armored covering of it — but not of Russian empire and the idea of a Russian way of doing things, even if regress to a 19th Century stance with class empowerment through patronage and equal footing with despots similarly endowed becomes the price paid by Russia’s constituency for the privilege of being different, quintessentially Russian, and now as in the Romanov-then, also cut out of the money but restored in pride.
SOCHI, Russia — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.
And that’s just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to be.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the world will in about eight to ten hours bear witness to peaceful competition among nations by way of the winter Olympic games in Sochi; however, while they are doing that, Bashar al-Assad and forces beneath his command may continue prosecuting their war as they have since spring 2011; the other side may be mixed with forces still loyal to Idris — there’s a Quixote story somewhere down there in that beleaguered company — but they too will be at play in the killing fields, and one cannot make such as al-Nusra or ISIS / ISIL (I get so confused) look better than they have proved themselves in battle against bakeries and truck drivers.
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