Re: [Marxism] Valuable article on Ukraine

["Bob Wood" <bobwood1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1362333,00.html
provides some background on the author, John Laughland, which makes his
credibility suspect.
Bob Wood

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom O'Lincoln" <suarsos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 11:24 PM
Subject: [Marxism] Valuable article on Ukraine


> >From the Melbourne "Age", 30 Nov 2004
>
>
<http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/The-West-closes-its-eyes-to-the-trut
> h-in-Ukraine/2004/11/29/1101577415208.html?oneclick=true>
>
> Note: I'm posting the full text because the URL is very long and I'm not
> confident it'll work.
>
> The West closes its eyes to the truth in Ukraine
>
> Did you know enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the
> Prime Minister, asks John Laughland.
> ***
>
> There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the
right
> stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more. In the
> past week, two British newspapers - the anti-Iraq war Independent and the
> pro-Iraq war Telegraph - excitedly announced a "revolution" in Ukraine,
> while stateside, the right-wing Washington Times welcomed "the people
> versus the power".
>
> Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or
> Ukraine now, the Western media regularly peddle the same fairytale about
> how youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime,
> simply by attending a rock concert in a central square. Two million
> anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be
> politically ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are
> proclaimed to be "the people", while the Ukrainian police, courts and
> government institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.
>
> The Western imagination is now so gripped by its own mythology of popular
> revolution that we have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double
> standards in media reporting. Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in
> support of the Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are rarely
shown
> on our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters
> are denigrated as having been "bussed in". The demonstrations in favour of
> Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound
> systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange
> clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.
>
> Or again, we are told that a 96 per cent turnout in Donetsk, the home town
> of Viktor Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts
> of more than 80 per cent in areas that support Viktor Yushchenko are not.
> Nor are actual scores for Yushchenko of well over 90 per cent in three
> regions, which Yanukovich achieved in only two. And whereas Yanukovich's
> final official score was 54 per cent, the Western-backed President of
> Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled 96.24 per cent of the vote
> in his country in January. The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian
> election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it "brought the
> country closer to meeting international standards".
>
> We have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double standards in media
> reporting.The blindness extends even to the posters that the
> "pro-democracy" group, Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a
> jackboot crushing a beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its
> opponents.
>
> Such dehumanisation of enemies has well-known antecedents - not least in
> Nazi-occupied Ukraine itself, when pre-emptive war was waged against the
> Red Plague emanating from Moscow - yet these posters have passed without
> comment. Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students
> having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister organisations in
> Serbia and Georgia - Pora is an organisation created and financed by
> Washington.
>
> It gets worse. Plunging into the crowd of Yushchenko supporters in
> Independence Square after the first round of the election, I met two
> members of Una-Unso, a neo-Nazi party whose emblem is a swastika. They
were
> unembarrassed about their allegiance, perhaps because last year Yushchenko
> and his allies stood up for the Socialist party newspaper, Silski Visti,
> after it ran an anti-Semitic article claiming that Jews had invaded
Ukraine
> alongside the Wehrmacht in 1941.
>
> On September 19, 2004, Yushchenko's ally, Alexander Moroz, told JTA-Global
> Jewish News: "I have defended Silski Visti and will continue to do so. I
> personally think the argument . . . citing 400,000 Jews in the SS is
> incorrect, but I am not in a position to know all the facts."
>
> Yushchenko and Moroz, meanwhile, cited a court order closing the paper as
> evidence of the Government's desire to muzzle the media. In any other
> country, support for anti-Semites would be shocking; in this case, our
> media do not even mention it.
>
> Voters in the United States, Britain and Australia have witnessed their
> governments lying brazenly about Iraq for more than a year in the run-up
to
> war, and with impunity. This is an enormous dysfunction in our own
> so-called democratic system. Our tendency to paint political fantasies
onto
> countries such as Ukraine that are tabula rasa for us, and to present the
> West as a fairy godmother swooping in to save the day, is not only a way
to
> salve a guilty conscience about our own political shortcomings; it also
> blinds us to the reality of continued brazen Western intervention in the
> democratic politics of other countries.
>
> John Laughland is a trustee of http://www.oscewatch.org and an associate
of
> http://www.sandersresearch.com
>
>
>



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