Note, February 19, 223: I’ve tried to repair link-rot on two videos (so done) on this post, but the condition (when objects and references disappear down the memory hole) is impossible to address in all cases. Thought assembled and published in this way decays in mechanics as well as relevance. –jso
This copy posted to YouTube on February 20, 2014. 0:25:
We want to be free from dictatorship. We want to be free from the politicians who work only for themselves, who are ready to shoot, to beat, to injure people just for saving their money, just for saving their houses, just for saving their power.
I want these people who are here, who have dignity, who are brave: I want them to lead a normal life. We are civilized people but our government are barbarians.
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Deadly clashes between protesters and police in Kiev on Tuesday led to a fire-lit nighttime assault by Interior Ministry troops on the main protest encampment at Independence Square, in what may be a dramatic and irreversible turn in Ukraine’s months-long political crisis.
EU foreign ministers have called an emergency meeting on Ukraine for Thursday.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said: “We have … made it clear that the EU will respond to any deterioration on the ground. We therefore expect that targeted measures against those responsible for violence and use of excessive force can be agreed by our member states as a matter of urgency.”
Posted to YouTube, February 25, 2014.
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In the middle east: Putin-Assad-Khamenei.
In eastern Europe: hard to say.
As the late Barry Rubin has pointed out in regard to the middle east, the revolution goes with the military. Mubarak had a good run, but come time to set up dynasty, Egypt’s military countenanced the revolution (and a year later rescued the latent democracy from a fascist Islamic organization that maintained the Mubarak-era torture chambers, jailed progressive journalists, altered the constitution to consolidate power in what may well have been another “president for life”.
No dice.
With Assad’s unforgivable assaults on Syrian noncombatant constituents in mind, this news unfolding from Ukraine may well signal the end of an age of dictatorship. It may turn out a second fall of the Soviet Union, a post-Soviet challenge to the continuance of state oligarchies forged in the shadows of the Cold War.
One hopes that it is not also the start of a new era of autocratic repression, but with armed state organizations brought to the barricades, one never knows. Who is in those military and paramilitary forces? Are their senior and junior officers dissenting from the projection of state power and the arrangement of regional power?
The people have themselves: what else do they have? Who else do they have on board with them?
As Nero fiddled, so I’ve heard, Putin as host of the most expensive winter games in history, has been in his glory in Sochi.
Echoing Ukraine’s interim prime minister, Peskov told reporters that Russia saw the protests, during which deadly clashes erupted on Tuesday, as an attempted coup.
We shall soon find out, I am sure, what Ukraine’s armed forces think about that, for protest in the streets is by itself a strong signal — ask Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan about that — but it is not a coup; it is, however, revolutionary.
The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
I see no reportage of the video up top on either site, not that I’m looking too hard for that or expect that from a system invested in controlling constituent access to global information.
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If the world’s on fire, we can see it today, but no one can see it all at once. I’ve missed protests in Venezuela, a now ongoing story in major media, and am not inclined to keep up daily with the tragedy dogging the Burmese Rohingya (Malaysia, which accepts members of the Muslim tribe, would do well to attend their defense and retrieval) or the Central African Republic (CAR), where Christian militia have been persecuting Muslims, although that conflict I might well bring on to these virtual pages.
This episode well portrays the different workings of “western” and “eastern” minds. The western mind wants the protests to be about “freedom of speech”; the eastern one, apparently, wants it to be about freedom from insult.
The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
“This is not a ‘business as usual’ summit,” said one EU ambassador. “It is time to take stock of where we are in relations with Russia. We will not be discussing any of the nuts-and-bolts issues.”
Kiev may represent the edge of Putin’s reinvigorating of the Russian state as an entity made larger than itself with a ring of buffering client states.
At 5:19 in the above clip, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt notes, “We have European values, we have European principles, we have European rights, that we must uphold in each and every European country.”
President Putin’s sumo wrestling on behalf of the future of resurgent Russian empire runs into numerous modern issues, starting with the neglect of the Russians themselves outside of the circles of immediate cooperation, influence, and power, which, of course, is part of what makes an autocracy what it is. In earlier days — the good old days! — tanks may have handily quelled the rioting in Kiev; today, those tanks may turn against the imposition of a new Ukrainian-Russian cooperative in the absence of a genuinely transformed Moscow.
However, as one friend has reminded me several times this winter, Russia (Putin) owns the cash and gas supplies and has used them for political leverage. Kiev’s own heavy-handed laws (who taught them how to be so tough and stupid?) have mightily encouraged the hard line in the state’s opposition:
“Everyone here’s looking at a 10-year jail sentence — the laws are in place,” said Vladimir, a 53-year-old entrepreneur from Kiev who’s been at the camp from the start and declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal. “We’ll be here until we win, otherwise our fate is sealed. There’s no third option.”
The conversion of Ukraine’s discomfort into stark black-and-white terms devolves directly to the government, which by imposing draconian measures eliminated the Ukrainian people’s post-Soviet customary sense of freedom of speech.
The new law, which bans all forms of protests, was published in the official Golos Ukrainy, or Voice of Ukraine, newspaper, raising fears that the government would use excessive force to quell dissent.
The opposition and the West have condemned the bill, demanding that it be reversed, but the Interior Ministry said at least 32 protesters had been arrested in the most recent round of demonstrations.
As he has with Syria, Putin has handily kept himself out of the spotlight. Of course, RT’s in no position to pursue this line of analysis, and then too . . . what’s he done but helped Ukraine with money and kept the gas supply moving?
In an open letter to President Obama, the two featured in the video, Fiona Hill and Steven Pifer, stated the following:
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine look to the United States, not just the European Union, for support. A joint U.S.-EU stance has the greatest prospect of countering Russian actions. We recommend that you instruct the State Department to coordinate policy steps with the European Union and key members, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, to bolster the “targeted” states and assist them as Russia increases its economic and political pressures.
Batkivshchyna – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The party wants to prosecute “Law enforcement involved in political repression”[79] and to impeach current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his “anti-people regime” to “return Ukraine to the path of European integration”.
There’s a mighty page ahead of the statement quoted.
My impression is that the Soviet Era really is just ending and it has brought Ukraine — as it has Syria — to a crossroads. Ukraine’s position is much easier than Syria’s, of course, but The Bear isn’t going away either although by way of Putin the leadership has taken a detour (the big one step backwards) into the 19th Century, God bless him, and that leaves Russia’s future — the two steps forward! — quite open as regards its becoming a responsible state genuinely devoted to internal pan-Slavic interests.
According to party leader Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda is not an ‘extremist’ party; he said that “depicting nationalism as extremism is a cliché rooted in Soviet and modern globalist propaganda”.[46] He also stated that “countries like” Japan and Israel are fully nationalistic states, “but nobody accuses the Japanese of being extremists”.[46] According to Tyahnybok, the party’s view of nationalism “shouldn’t be mixed with chauvinism or fascism, which means superiority of one nation over another”, and that its platform is called “Our Own Authorities, Our Own Property, Our Own Dignity, on Our Own God-Given Land”.
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When I sat down post on BackChannels this morning, I thought I would wrap up global turmoil in a page, starting with Ukraine but moving swiftly to Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on, and one might do that from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, which is the World Wide Web, but in depth and expanse, even the smallest conflict in the world turns out incredibly rich, and what the reader-writer is going to get is a snapshot, a glimpse along the surface of political reality.
In schematic, to say Putin –> Ukraine : Ukraine <–> Europe might prove out and be all one needs, but oh the devils in the details! Nonetheless, I believe it has fallen to Vladimir Putin to return Russia to Russian glory in a Russian manner — and we’re going to see that extraordinary effort and expense in some Bond movie glamour at Winter Olympics in Sochi very soon (not “hot off the press” these days, but one-hour cool on the web: Welcome to Sochi, the security Games – CNN.com – 1/27/2014) — and to question the democratic socialist values of the west with an assertion about feudal power and aristocracy.
KIEV, Ukraine — The European Union on Sunday broke off talks with Ukraine on the far-reaching trade deal that protesters here have been demanding for weeks, and a top official issued a stinging, angry statement all but accusing Ukraine’s president of dissembling.
“Words & deeds of President [Viktor Yanukovych] & government regarding the Association Agreement are further & further apart. Their arguments have no grounds in reality,” he twitted on Sunday.
While the European Union insists that the door is still open for Ukraine to join the EU, President Viktor Yanukovych is walking the tightrope between appeasing the wishes of his people and keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin happy.
Mr Yanukovych had already sent his skullcrackers in once to Independence Square in Kiev, centre of the protests that erupted in November after he rejected an association agreement with the European Union, in favour of an opaque economic deal with Russia. That needless brutality brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets.
All of the conflicts BackChannels has been watching have to do with the despotic versus the democratic.
In some instances, the despotic force is sufficient to repress and silence the latent organizations and personalities arrayed against it; in others, there’s yet opportunity to assert a popular will on behalf of human dignity and human rights against mafia-style state-based machinations and privilege.
Ukrainians, of course, have just found The Bear once again climbing aboard their own back.
The “new nobility” not only have their hands in the gushing revenue stream associated with Russia’s energy industry, but they may have also their hands on the spigot, and with winter yet to begin — hard to believe this year that ice and snow have arrived so early everywhere in the northern latitudes — the same could give them the cold treatment.
A glance at the reading tells me Ukrainians owe Moscow some money too for energy already consumed. That will give Moscow some whining room in the coming negotiations.
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Joseph Stalin’s decision in 1928 to seize privately held agricultural land and transform it into collective farms caused massive hardship for all Soviet peasants. When authorities expropriated peasant grain stocks and farm animals, hunger broke out in much of the USSR. In Ukraine, where close to a million peasants actively rebelled against collectivization, such expropriations were especially severe, leading to widespread starvation that the state both refused to alleviate and purposely aggravated until millions had died and a massive crackdown on Ukrainian political, cultural, and religious elites had been completed. At the height of the Holodomor, 25,000 Ukrainians starved per day; cannibalism was rampant.
Ukrainians know well the Soviet part of the post-Soviet Russian story, and one would think it doubtful the same should now entertain a return to all of that, especially absent the cover of socialist concern that accompanied the theft.
Related: Oleh Tyahnybok – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “[You are the ones] that the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine fears most”[11] / and / “They were not afraid and we should not be afraid. They took their automatic guns on their necks and went into the woods, and fought against the Moskali, Germans, Kikes and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.”[10]
Next Ukrainian headache: resurgent anti-Semitic eastern European nationalism.
How is it that the potentially despotic engaging the established despotic cannot recognize in themselves the same idiotic malignant ambitions?
Yanukovych backed off the agreement on the grounds that the EU was not providing adequate compensation to his economically struggling nation for potential trades losses with Russia. Russia, which for centuries controlled or exerted heavy influence on Ukraine, wants the country to join a customs union, analogous to the EU, which also includes Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The opposition says that union would effectively reconstitute the Soviet Union and remain suspicious that Yanukovych might agree to it when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz said it agreed with Russian gas giant Gazprom to defer payments for winter gas supplies until early 2014. With Ukraine embroiled in protests, and Europe making headway on energy diversification strategies, the move signals a tilt by Kiev back to its former Kremlin patrons.
European officials are in discussion with the IMF, the World Bank and other major financial bodies on ways of helping the ex-Soviet republic should it decide to sign the free-trade agreement with the EU after all.
Putin had threatened to respond to such a deal with economic sanctions against Ukraine, which has huge debts and unpaid gas bills outstanding with Moscow. Ukraine’s ultimate decision could be decisive to Putin’s Eurasian Union plan.
Putin’s comments made clear his continued designs on Ukraine and that “by hook or by crook” he will seek to try and drag it into the so-called Eurasian Union, his long-cherished idea “of reincarnating some semblance of the Soviet Union,” said Boris Tarasyuk, Ukraine’s ex-foreign minister.
The agreement could have clinched a tumultuous shift by the strategic former Soviet republic in the past decade toward embracing Western economic and political values. Mr. Yanukovych’s sudden decision to turn his back on the deal late last month infuriated the nation’s opposition parties and sent millions of pro-Western, pro-democracy demonstrators into the streets of Kiev.
Ukrainians today find themselves in a bind between alliance with the developing pseudo-democratic, post-Soviet, Putinist state developing in Russia, or radiating from Moscow as much of Russia has been left to suffer as well, and their humanist drift toward the compassionate and inclusive values of the open democracies of the European Union.
Stefan Meister, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr Putin had lost room for political maneourve as he entered his presidential third term since 2000. “He has isolated himself from the proactive part of society and the elite,” he said. “He has surrounded himself with hardliners from the security service who promote Russia’s “modernisation” through the country’s military-industrial complex.”
“The EU offers a token package, which is not of any interest to the Ukrainian government,” Alexei Pushkov, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia’s Parliament, told CNN’s Hala Gorani, who was sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.
“That’s why Mister Yanukovych has initially rejected it,” he said. “Then all these demonstrations started with the participation of the European ministers…who were speaking on the Maidan [Kiev’s Independence Square], joining the protesters, and so on.”
No state in the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence needs reminding who has the energy supply plus a massive and vulgar army (presented in the video at the base of this post and represented by memories of its appearance in Georgia a few years ago).
In Russia, power hasn’t to do with the liberation of independent spirits and the productive energies of a people: as with its superficially mirror opposite in Islam’s mix of military and theocratic dictatorships, “political power” refers to absolute control.
In essence, the causes and the talk may be wildly different, but similar personalities construct their societies in response to their own internal needs.
Putin’s claim to moral superiority as regards the west would seem well demonstrated by Russia’s continuing and supportive relationships with both the Bashar Assad’s bomb-happy reign of terror in Syria and Ayatollah Khamenei’s iron grip (not to mention about $90 billion in personal accumulation) on Iran. Those three plus President Kadyrov would seem to be “in it” — the money, at least — together.
As much may be known to educated and web-enabled and still recently politically liberated Ukrainians who have taken to the streets braving bone-chilling cold and potentially bone-breaking state paramilitary to make their views count.
A day after a face-to-face meeting with President George W. Bush in Beijing who expressed ‘grave concern’, Mr Putin accused the U.S. of siding with Georgia by ferrying Georgian troops from Iraq to the battle zone.
‘It is a shame that some of our partners are not helping us but, essentially, are hindering us,’ said Mr Putin. ‘The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing.’
They have frequently shifted the boundary south of the previously accepted course – Mr Makhachashvili says Russian troops around Dvani were using maps dated 1921 – in effect grabbing hectares of extra land.
Moscow has said South Ossetian authorities were merely demarcating its true boundary, using Soviet-era maps.
Tamarod Gaza’s main demands, as presented in different declarations, including a letter to the secretary-general of the Arab League, include requiring Hamas to immediately allow the formation of an elections committee, “without any delay or obstacle,” to pursue speedy general elections under international Arab and Islamic supervision. The expiration of Tamarod’s ultimatum of sorts has been set at sundown of November 8.
Being “caught between a rock and a hard place” might start looking pretty good to anyone who has long been caught between a rock and a rock.
Since 1948, Arabs abandoned in the field by Arab armies have with their generations been sequestered, more or less, in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
The same have been subject, differentially, to the diminishment of their human rights — notably, Mahmud Abbas received Jordanian citizenship around February 9, 2011, but even that story has been complicated by the middle east’s screwy loyalty x mafia flavored politics — from the preceding link: “The officials received citizenship at the same time they urged Jordan to stop giving Palestinian Jordanians citizenship, so they could consolidate their Palestinian identity, the Arab language newspaper said”; a little more than a year later, one reads (as if living in a very bad Orwell novel), “Jordan’s King Abdullah II is planning to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials, The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday. It is unknown if PA President Mahmoud Abbas will also be stripped of his citizenship” — source: Jordan Continues to Strip Palestinians of Citizenship – Jewish Policy Center – 4/12/2012).
Others, who may have considered themselves lucky to have remained defiant of the State of Israel within its territories, admittedly contested, on the West Bank and Gaza (from which Jews were purged wholesale in 2005 in a faked out Arafat land-for-peace arrangement) have instead had to weather the abuses of Fatah-related cronyism and corruption and, in 2006, with soldiers of the same Fatah thrown from the rooftops of buildings in Gaza, the bizarre and deeply narcissistic Islamist control of Hamas.
To this day, the same have nurtured a surreal alternative narrative of the events of 1948, cultivated an absurd and ugly and wholly counterproductive anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist hate, treated childhood and adolescent educations as preparation for a war of conquest, and have complained incessantly and with great preoccupation of an “occupation” that has provided them with basic utilities, trade market exchange and throughput, educational services at the university level, and emergency medical services, trade partnerships, and jobs.
Around The Preoccupation has grown an immense online and print disinformation industry, including a “Pallywood” sector for the film propaganda buffs.
In association with the middle east conflict, who is really oppressing whom?
That question has been in the air a long time.
Lately, perhaps, with the Hamas’s six-year record of abuses in Gaza, it is finding some answers that may actually hold up to reason, not that it will hold up to Hamasfia’s intimidation backed by its history of paramilitary and military barbarism and brutality.
As events in Syria force the mini-Jihad and majestic cabal in the region to turn up their cards, i.e., make their true values, language habits, and behavior irrevocably visible, one may expect the roles of archaic pan-Arab nationalism and barbaric Sunni and Shiite extremism to show their bones beneath the pools of blood in which they have been bathing for decades.
As part of that process, the refugees of Israel’s 1948 successful struggle for survival may soon get an honest reappraisal of their legitimate identity and needs and that in terms accessible to the greater collection of humanity that inclines to regard itself as less special but altogether more dignified.
The 43-page report, “Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza,” documents extensive violations by Hamas security services, including warrantless arrests, failure to inform families promptly of detainees’ whereabouts, and subjecting detainees to torture. It also documents violations of detainees’ rights by prosecutors and courts. Military courts frequently try civilians, in violation of international law. Prosecutors often deny detainees access to a lawyer, and courts have failed to uphold detainees’ due process rights in cases of warrantless arrest and abusive interrogations, Human Rights Watch found.
The UN, which has run the camps for all those years, is tired of the job. Balata’s alleys are caked in filth, a cash-for-work programme has all but collapsed, almost half the working-age adults have no jobs, and the UN’s once-prized classrooms are as overcrowded as the rooms where families live. Children sometimes leave school unable to write their names.
Even before this refugee crisis, Palestinians in Lebanon were not legally allowed to work in most professions. They continue to live in cramped spaces in 12 refugee camps or rented apartments. Half of the Palestinians from Syria are concentrated in two areas, Tyre and Saida, which includes the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Ein el Hilweh, established in 1948. They’re living with 13 individuals per residence, on average.
. . . As an ex-Gaza refugee without a national ID number, Abu Sulayman has long lived without access to healthcare, full education, representation or any jobs aside from blue-collar labor. Now he also lives without teeth.
Abu Sulayman is one of 16 Gaza Camp refugees who were detained for two weeks in October following a weekend-long clash between the Palestinian camp, neighboring village al-Haddad and Jordan’s public security forces.
The PA was less than totally honest when it tried to justify the raid; it was, it claimed, to round-up corrupt individuals and outlaws. While some of the camp’s residents may well be so described, it is wrong to say that all of them are, and to treat them as if they are. The collective nature of the raid was actually intended to terrorise all of the residents. It is odd that such a show of force has never been attempt against the illegal Jewish settlers across the occupied West Bank.
“All of Palestine from the (Mediterranean) sea to the river (Jordan) belongs to us, to us Muslims,” it states, in accordance with the beliefs of the militant Islamic group, which refuses to recognize Israel.
While the main protests were peaceful, at least one Mursi supporter was shot dead and 37 people injured in fighting in the town of Beni Suef, south of Cairo, and dozens suffered gunshot wounds during an attack on a Muslim Brotherhood office in Housh Eissa, in the northern Nile Delta.
Clips from Alexandria, Egypt (posted about 12 minutes ago):
*****
All four dead were shot in Nile Valley towns south of Cairo, one in Beni Suef and three in Assiut. Across the country, the Health Ministry said, 174 people were given medical treatment as a result of factional fighting in the streets.
I’ve got a different kind of storm arriving soon at my location, so enough. For Egypt today, something ended and something began — what those may be, we’ll find out as the turmoil clarifies what Egyptians decide they have really in common.
Colored by my obsession, President Morsi has fit the profile of the “malignant narcissist” from his first days in office, and, predictably, he’s proven himself a grandstanding peacock in his political behavior and attitudes toward others, including the State of Israel, and that, whether or not Egyptian’s “get it” overnight, is what the demonstrations and related turmoil are about.
To be more brief, they are about the power of power to attend to constituent immediate and practical needs — for development, security, and trade — from one edge of the writ of state to the other, and the failure to care to do that and instead invest in self-aggrandizement and false causes induces first humiliation and need across so large a constituency — and then massive political expression.
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