Reprinted from Facebook (2018/02/15):
It’s very uncharacteristic of the Kremlin to blatantly violate international law (they typically make sure to follow its letter). So what explains the increasingly unequivocal signs of Russian military involvement in Crimea?
The fact of the matter is that Russia has a legal right to military transit across Crimea SO LONG AS it informs the Ukrainian authorities. THE CATCH – whom does it consider to be such? Yanukovych, not the putschists in Kiev.
Reprinted from Facebook (2018/02/15):
From what I am observing on Twitter, things are rapidly spiraling beyond our usual frames of reference so far as Ukraine is concerned.
Yanukovych, nowhere to be seen, is fast becoming something of an irrelevance so far as both sides are concerned. The new government is being formed without his input, and he is nowhere to be seen at the “separatist” congress in Kharkov. The revolutionaries now apparently have a super majority in the Rada, and if that is true, his impeachment is now just a matter of time.
Meanwhile, the Rada has also passed a law illegalizing separatist movements period. Whether that will dampen or inflame the incipient centrifugal tendencies in Crimea, Donetsk, and Kharkov remains to be seen.
A discussion on Crosstalk with Peter Lavelle in which I appeared discussing the Nuland leak.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLHXpCRPo-k
I found some of the comments made by Taras Kuzio frankly surreal but judging from what I read on Kyiv Post he is pretty mainstream in Ukrainian opposition terms.
Two weeks earlier in an interview on RT I said that though the Ukrainian opposition had appeared to reject the terms of the offered amnesty law and were demanding the unconditional release of arrested protesters their anxiety to get their people released meant that if the government stuck to its position the opposition might modify theirs. See my first reply to the interview below
The news today is that the administrative buildings including the Kiev city administration centre and most if not all of the administrative buildings in the provinces have now been freed in accordance with the provisions of the amnesty law. I believe that as required by that law there has also been or will be a withdrawal from Hrushchevsky Street.
In my last Sitrep I said that the West was trying to pull off a coup in Ukraine against the duly elected President.
We now have very strong evidence in the shape of an intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They talk about how to arrange a new government and are not as supportive of the EU as they would be in public. Pretty hard to spin this as anything else but another “colour revolution”.
But, of course, such alleged intercepts are often faked and by themselves aren’t necessarily evidence of anything.
But White House spokesman, Jay Carney has (probably inadvertently) admitted the veracity of the intercept. Surely he will attempt to walk this back once he realizes that he has given away the secret, but it’s too late.
The intercept is here; the report of Carney’s press conference is here.
Get it now before it disappears down the memory hole.
So who made the intercept? Carney says Russia but Ukraine also has the capability. Whether Kiev or Moscow, they’re finally getting better at the propaganda war.
Will there be more intercepts coming?
Reprinted from Facebook (2018/02/15):
The reason the police were “barely in control” is that Yanukovych demoralized them by criticizing them for breaking up yesterday’s Maidan, in a bid to appease protesters who will not be appeased.
Apparently, the ProFFesor believes balancing between two stools is a good strategy for Ukrainian domestic politics too. What other explanation can there be?
Though in theory his position should be secure, his perennial incompetence means that actual revolution before March 2015 is a distinct, if still unlikely, possibility.
My latest for US-Russia.org Expert Discussion Panel on whether to view the recent Georgian elections, in which Saakashvili’s United National Movement lost a lot of power, as a Kremlin coup or a triumph of democracy. My view that it isn’t really either:
Two dominant themes prevailed in media coverage of the 2012 Georgian elections
(1) The people were hoodwinked, as Georgian Dream are a corrupt band of Russian stooges – as argued by neocon Jennifer Rubin and Yulia “Pinochet” Latynina (see juicy quote from her translated below):
It is possible that Georgia will get one more chance. In that one short moment, when a confused people will look on with astonishment as the band of thieves returning to power brings back its lawlessness – but at a point of time when the army and police are not yet wholly purged of respectable people, who care for the fate of their country – in that moment, Georgia will get another window of opportunity. Like the one, for instance, that Pinochet got on September 11, 1973. But maybe, this chance will never come.
(2) The elections were a genuine victory for Georgian democracy, with Saakashvili’s very defeat vindicating his historical status as a democrat and reformer. Two headlines from democratic journalist Konstantin von Eggert summarize this viewpoint: “Georgians are no longer a mass, but a people“; “Saakashvili accomplished the authoritarian modernization that Russian liberals only dreamed of.”
The Kremlin is in confusion: A state, which they practically denounced as a fascist dictatorship just three years ago, has become a democracy… And the oft-ridiculed and cursed Georgian President, known for his chewing of ties, became practically the most successful reformer in the post-Soviet space, barring the Baltics.
I think both viewpoints are substantially wrong, but to see why we have to consider this history in more detail.
In his first elections in 2004, Saakashvili won 96% of the votes. It was fairer than it looks, but only because of a complete absence of credible candidates at the time. In his second election, in 2008, not only did turnout correlate positively with the Saakashvili vote, but its graph had what is called a “long tail”, becoming suspicious after the 80% mark and registering quite a few stations with 100% turnout. This is remarkably similar to the pattern of falsifications in Russian elections under Putin (though needless to say, Georgia doesn’t attract a fraction of the same attention).
Here’s the video. Big thanks to the guys at RT, the channel that has been at the forefront of covering OWS for providing me with this opportunity.
I was contacted by RT after they noticed my post on why OWS isn’t happening in China and Russia. As befits a program aimed at an American audience, however, the conversation revolved around the prospects for OWS solely in the US. In particular, as winter approaches and media attention wanes, will the Occupy movement be able to remain relevant to its 99% constituency?
Unfortunately, as it was my first time on live TV, I did not manage to make the best impression – as the interview went on, I could not prevent stammers and pauses from beginning to infest my conversation. So apologies for that.
As repeatedly noted by Mark Adomanis, the Russian liberals and the Western media have predicted about 10 of the last zero Russian revolutions. Likewise, the “Jasmine Revolution” in China that was the subject of so much talk about a year ago has fizzled out like a wet firework. Meanwhile, the Arab world remains in the midst of convulsions, and political instability is spreading into the West – most visibly in Greece and the Med, but also in the guise of Occupy Wall Street and associated movements in the US.
This is no doubt disturbing and aggravating to Western supremacists (it is telling that that the media organization providing the most detailed coverage of OWS, RT, is both non-Western and the object of venomous bile from the American exceptionalism culture warriors). Doesn’t the West (and the US in particular) have democracy, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, free media, economic opportunities, equality under the law, etc. – things that are all starkly and completely absent in countries of the Other, e.g. Russia and China? What the hell are the hippies and liberals protesting? Are they doped up unemployed losers, useful idiots of Leninist agents of influence, or both?
I think the answer is far simpler than it seems. In Russia, younger people tend to be both higher earning (their skills are better fitted to a capitalist economy) and more economically optimistic than their parents, not to mention their grandparents. They are also far more pro-capitalist, and substantially more supportive of Putin and Co. than the older generations (who have not done as well under capitalism, and who have fonder memories of communism). In fact, in the minds of Russian youth – and in stark contrast to the picture drawn by uninformed commentators – capitalism, prosperity, and the Putin era are closely linked. Hence, no real Russian equivalent of OWS (at least for now).
Riding on the apathy of the masses, crony Communists rig the elections in a small, corrupt post-Soviet backwater to retain their iron grip on power. But their dastardly plans to crush democracy and draw benighted Moldova back into the Eurasian darkness are foiled by the heroic students of Chisinau.
Inspired by their boudiccan (and photogenic) figurehead Natalia Morari, heroine of past struggles against corrupt authoritarianism, they flutter out into the city center and Tweet their nation back into the light of Western iCivilization, toppling the old guard under a colorful cascade of fruits and flowers.
This is the kitschy Western narrative of color revolutions, in which electronic networking technologies marry the springtime national aspirations of peoples suppressed by corrupt satraps from Muscovy to produce a verdant and fertile liberal democracy – Atlantean outpost and bulwark against Eastern tyranny.
Yet one would have to wear rose-tinted spectacles (or read fantastic literature to excess) to subscribe to this interpretation. The Rose Revolution in Georgia withered away and died under the chill of Saakashvili’s quasi-authoritarian rule and the heat of aggressive war against Russia in summer 2008. Meanwhile, the Orange Revolution putrefied into mush, succumbing to the sickly moist of endemic chaos, corruption and economic decline that characterized Ukraine after 2005.
A dispassionate analysis of the “Grape Revolution” in Moldova reveals that its fruit was rotten from the beginning.
The Centrality of Romanian Nationalism in the Moldovan Opposition
Although it is true that many of the protesters were genuinely disaffected university students and migrants, it is also clear that certain elements were Romanian nationalists, liberast provocateurs and common hooligans.
The three parties which won 35% of the vote have a “distinct nationalistic flavor”, according to Natalia Sineaeva-Pankowska writing in Moldova: Torn between the Communists and the far right1. The nationalists criticize the Communist plans to revise ethnic Romanian-centered history textbooks to better reflect Moldova’s multi-ethnic identity and extend the Holocaust interpretations taught in schools to include the role of Romanian collaboration, from its current limitation to the “German extermination of Jews and Roma”. They favor closer ties to and reunification with Romania.
The classic Marxist argument holds than an emerging bourgeois class, its wealth based on commerce, industry and capital accumulation, was constrained and frustrated in its political ambitions by the nobility. France was divided into Three Estates, the Third Estate which bore the taille (the main direct tax), the nobility (subject only to the capitation poll tax and viengtième) and the clergy (only required to donate a pre-negotiated don gratuit). The ‘privileged’ orders maintained monopolies, held the right to collect the tithe or seigniorial dues and enjoyed many exemptions, e.g. on military service, the corveé and most taxes. L.S. Mercier in his Tableau de Paris succinctly summed up the many grievances against the aristocracy – “The castles…possess misused rights of hunting, fishing and cutting wood…[and] conceal those haughty gentlemen who separate themselves effectively from the human race…who add their own taxes…beg eternally for pensions and places…[and] will not allow the common people to have either promotion or reward”. The last point was expounded on by the Abbé Sieyès, in the heady atmosphere of 1789, when he wrote, “All the branches of the executive have been taken over by the caste that monopolizes the Church, the judiciary and the army. A spirit of fellowship leads the nobles to favor one another over the rest of the nation”. These illustrated the main complaints of the Third Estate against the nobility – they were perceived as venal, reactionary and parasitic, a foreign blot on the French nation.
Yet the above view that 18th century France saw the bourgeoisie superseding the old nobility economically but being frustrated in their social ambitions by them is a flawed and simplistic narrative. The arguments of the revisionist school, which challenged the French Marxist interpretation of the Revolution as the replacement of the nobility by the bourgeoisie as the dominant class, are many and covering all major revisionist historians (Cobban, Taylor, Doyle, etc) is futile in an essay of such length. However, Schama’s Citizens encompasses their arguments in one book, albeit one we have to treat with caution due to its constant and unwarranted bias against the revolutionaries, harkening back to historical dramatizers like Carlyle, Dickens and Baroness Orkzy.
In a nutshell, Citizens considers the old regime to have been surprisingly modern – progressive, prospering, addicted to science and change. Old-style feudalism was supposedly already pretty much vanished from the countryside – most dues were equivalent to money rents. French state-funded pure science was the equal of any in Europe and was translated into many useful applications, particularly in military technology. Economic growth proceeded at 1.9% per annum in the late 18th century, a rate only matched during the era of the Empire and its artificial Continental System. Transport (from 1760 to 1780 travel times by coach from Paris to Bordeaux fell from fourteen to five days), communications and trade) were developing rapidly, unifying the French market. Industry burgeoned, growing at an impressive average of 3.8% per annum from the 1760’s to the Revolution) and was the most developed in Europe outside Britain. Growing literacy and the rise of a public opinion fueled an explosion in newspapers, pamphlets and encyclopedias.
