The American Conservative

Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, apparent winner of Ukraine’s rerun of a rigged presidential election, on Tuesday called on his supporters to blockade the country’s government building to prevent defiant Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych from holding planned meetings there on Wednesday.

“I want to say there should be no government meeting…. Dear friends, I ask you to strengthen a blockade of the government building tomorrow from early in the morning,” Yushchenko told thousands of his supporters in the capital Kiev’s Independence Square. ~MSNBC

What is less understood is that all of the great empires in history have been characterized by a decline of reason and an increase in super-naturalist faith, combined with a belief in the empire with the emperor holding God’s “mandate” on earth.

There are only three ultimate sources upon which derivative values such as “equality” can be based: supernatural law, natural law and statist, positive law. Empires tend to combine all of the three so that the emperor’s legitimacy flows from God, nature, and his position as head of State. The intertwining of religion and nationalism in the State is indeed a very powerful one.

Today’s unflinching, fundamentalist Christian support for the war in Iraq and U.S. global interventionism (regardless of the facts) was foretold earlier by anti-rational evangelical attempts to control textbooks, deny evolutionary principles, and block scientific research—sure early signs of the rise of a new “Age of Empire.” The most famous book-burning incidentally was not pro-war Lynne Cheney’s recent effort, or even Adolf Hitler’s in 1933, but rather that of the great Ch’in Emperor, Shih Huang-ti (a central figure in the recent film, Hero) of imperial China in 221 B.C.

In Rome, before it was co-opted by the State, early Christianity was in many ways a tax revolt against the Roman Empire’s increasing taxation burdens, ineptitude, and brutality. But instead of fighting taxes directly, which would have been quite fatal, the Christians (in keeping with Jesus’ teachings of the Golden Rule and peace) sought to evade the Roman taxes by steering clear of the State and taking care of their own and others. For example, by 150 A.D. in the City of Rome, Christians, and not the State, were taking care of 1,500 widows and orphans, and if you were captured or kidnapped by barbarians (much as in Iraq today) your only hope of ransom was if you were a Christian.

However, by the 4th century the growing strength of many diverse Christian groups (aided by their assimilation of older religious ideas from the East) and the decline of the Roman Empire had made it clear to the Roman State under Constantine that its survival would require formally merging with and centralizing Christianity. (Charles Freeman’s recent book, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason details the way in which this took place.)~ William Marina

Prof. Marina’s comments are remarkable, not because they are unusual but because they are just the sort of commonplace musings about the role of religion in history and politics that have characterised so much historical analysis. It is unclear from his article whether he believes that an increase of faith, supposedly in opposition to reason, aids in the development of empires or in their dissolution: he cites at once the Christianisation of Rome in political decline and the rise of American imperialism in tandem with fundamentalist Christian activism, and then again ties fundamentalism to the decline of the American empire.

I would also add that the secularist and liberal media swallowed Mr. Bush’s absurd lies about Iraq as readily and credulously as the average evangelical Bush voter, and indeed perhaps more readily, as Mr. Bush is far more a part of the world of those elites than he is of the world of the evangelicals who support him. The deracinated elites of the major newspapers and foreign policy institutes, hardly the bedrock of evangelical America, were the ones who believed in the ‘necessity’ of the Iraq war, just as they believe in the ‘necessity’ of American hegemony in the world.

Middle American evangelicals are acting out of the conviction, false though it may be, that supporting the Iraq war is the decent, patriotic thing to do. They are far more skeptical about grandiose theories of geopolitical leadership or regional transformation, and would be some of the first to repudiate an American empire if they were able to perceive it as such. If Mr. Bush’s supporters doggedly support him and ignore all evidence to the contrary, as indeed they do, the same might be said of any partisans of an incumbent president. The hysteria of a mob regarding its demagogue, especially in time of war, is not to be underestimated–are we to attribute this to the religion of the mob, or to the nature of mass politics and its inherent irrationality? That the demagogue uses religion to whip up the mob, and that his enemies cite the mob’s religion as something dangerous and potentially vicious, only strengthens the identity of the mob with the demagogue. The evangelical embrace of an imperialism that they would never call imperialism is highly accidental–these are the same people, by and large, who fear the idea of a New World Order, revolted in 1992 against the president who announced such an order and have become reconciled to its proponents only through the shell-game played on them by the ‘faithful’ George W. Bush.
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This past week, Putin took a gigantic step in the opposite direction to the one Cohen and O’Driscoll advocated for Iraq before the 2003 war. He presided over a colossal legal shell game whereby three quarters of the shares of Yuganskneftegaz, also known as Yugansk, the core production unit of the Yukos oil corporation, was sold to a hitherto unheard of holding company called Baikal Finans Group for the bargain basement price of $9.35 billion. And Baikal Finans Group then in its turn sold its new holding to the state-backed Rosneft oil company for an undisclosed sum. Putin had already approved the coming merger of Rosneft with Gazprom, the largest natural gas producing company in the world, to create a colossal state-controlled energy monolith.

The failure of oil industry privatization to even begin to get off the ground in Iraq coupled with the colossal reversal of the energy industry privatizations in Russia following the collapse of communism only 13 years ago together mean that an enormous reversal of global economic-political trends of the greatest significance has already taken place. The global oil industry is not going to be dominated in the coming decades by privately-owned international corporations largely based in and influenced by the United States, as Perle, the Heritage analysts, and Murdoch all assumed a couple of years ago. Instead, the old nationalized, left-wing model pioneered by President Lazaro Cardenas of Mexico in the 1930s and globally triumphant in the era of soaring oil prices and embargoes in the 1970s has become the dominant model again.

But like it or not, the old left-nationalization model is back. The failure of the Bush administration to create the stable, peaceful and secure conditions for privatization that it expected in Iraq opened the way for it, and Putin this week completed the job. Far from spitting in the face of history, the president of Russia is now surfing its wave. Welcome back to the 1970s, 21st century style.~ Martin Sieff, UPI

Russia’s current strength in the oil market ought to instruct Washington that antagonism with such an important oil exporter, especially in a period of high prices, is unwise in the extreme. The uncertainty and instability created by the invasion of Iraq, combined with open anti-Russian policies in eastern Europe and the Caucasus, all of which are tied to control of the production and shipment of oil, have brought us into a collision with the inconvenient fact that several of the major oil-exporting nations have become progressively more alienated from the United States under Mr. Bush on account of his reckless policies.
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Ukraine’s opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko basked in his unassailable lead today as prime minister Viktor Yanukovych refused to admit defeat, with just tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted in the bitterly-fought presidential election.

“I will never recognise such a defeat, because the constitution and human rights were violated in our country,” Yanukovych said last night.

Official results from Sunday’s vote, with ballots counted from 99.89% of precincts, gave Yushchenko 52.01% compared with Yanukovych’s 44.18%. Turnout was 77.2%. ~The Scotsman

The official results, if at all accurate, are significantly closer than the oft-cited exit polls that showed anywhere from an 11 to 20-point margin of victory for Yushchenko. The roughly 5% swing from the first run-off is curious, but if correct it represents the impact of the false reporting and rumour-mongering practiced by the pro-Yushchenko media in and outside of Ukraine. Our own experience from four years ago should remind us that fraudulent and biased exit polling can have a direct effect on the outcome of later voting, as exaggerated margins dispirit and discourage voters of one side. Needless to say, the exit polling was wildly inaccurate and reflects the profoundly one-sided nature of the exit polling agencies routinely cited in Western media reports.

Mr. Yanukovych’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the election results is perfectly understandable and ought to have been foreseen by those judges who thought it better to meddle in a political process than confirm the legitimacy of the first result. Mr. Yanukovych’s tactical mistake, but the thing that sets him apart from the ochlocracy of Yushchenko, is his refusal to call upon his numerous supporters to stage ridiculous protests of the kind seen in Kiev over the past month. The alienation of the two halves of the Ukraine, which was still fairly limited before now, may well grow in severity, and the radical Ukrainian nationalism of Yushchenko’s supporters will only exacerbate the divisions deepened by this election debacle. A Yulia Timoshenko-led government will be the worst option, yet it seems one of the most likely at this point. Between her criminality and rabid nationalism, Ms. Timoshenko embodies everything that is wrong with Ukrainian politics today.

In the future, every Ukrainian vote will be susceptible to this sort of mob-rule challenge by the opposition, and whatever government Mr. Yushchenko manages to cobble together with his selection of prime minister will have to live under the shadow of its tainted election. It will be expected by its Western patrons to follow through on supposed “reform” packages, and will find itself in the impossible situation of trying to please its hard-core nationalist backers and its foreign friends. Ironically, the relative success of Mr. Yushchenko as president and the government his prime minister will select depends very heavily on a Russia that his party and supporters have gone out of their way to antagonise and embarrass.

[Nicholas] Kristof is selling to the liberals what the neocons have been retailing to the American right-wing: the story that Russia is rising, reverting to Stalinism (or “progressing” to fascism). The next step will be to raise a hue and cry over Russian “rearmament” as we encircle the Kremlin from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian, fomenting “democratic” revolutions on the periphery while moving inexorably toward the center. A renewed arms race and the return of the cold war – all launched under the rubric of exporting “democracy” and “free markets.” This new Russophobia has something for everyone.

If Russia is not headed for fascism, then the neocon-progressive alliance of Russia-haters is determined to push them into it – or, at least, to raise such a ruckus over the alleged rise of Russian national socialism that the American public will fall for it long enough to get a new war of civilizations going.

The great danger in Russia – and for the Russian people – is that free-market ideology has been completely discredited, intellectually and politically, on account of the rigged “privatization” that led to the wholesale looting of the economy. Yet Putin must marketize, or else lose the economic advantage of having the largest oil company in the world on Russian soil.~ Justin Raimondo

Mr. Putin’s critics have been warning of neo-Stalinism ever since he took office, even though the possibility of such a development is both miniscule and entirely unimportant to Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin is a Russian nationalist and patriot, who perceived the privatisation rape of Russia as a serious symptom of Russia’s precipitous economic and political decline in the 1990s, and who regarded the increasing decentralisation of power as a threat to the unity and integrity of the Russian Federation. There has never been a state that extended across so much territory and yet was fundamentally a unitary nation-state. Pretensions of autonomous regions and limited federalism aside, Russia has been and will continue to be a centralised, unitary state, and the constitution of such a state is typically authoritarian.

Mr. Putin’s success, for which Western critics supposedly interested in democracy should be thanking him, has been to combine the necessary authoritarianism for such a peculiar territorial and political situation with legitimate elections and reasonably representative government. What infuriates his critics more than anything else is his sheer popularity and, thus, the total repudiation of the dreadful “reform” on offer from Russian liberals and their oligarchic backers: liberal democrats hate no people so much as those who refuse to embrace the liberal democratic creed, as all good people are supposed to do.

Unlike the real admirer of Stalin, Mikhail Saakashvili, dictator, er, president of Georgia, Mr. Putin has not replaced the national flag with that of his own party, nor did he begin his rise to presidential power beneath a statue of Stalin himself. If Mr. Putin is nostalgic for the past, it is the past where Russia was one of the preeminent world powers. Whether or not this is the best goal or not is for Russians to decide–what is certain is that it is perfectly normal and no clear threat to the United States or Europe. Vladimir Putin undoubtedly has flaws, but whatever his penchant for secrecy and cult of personality it is clear that Mr. Bush and his supporters indulge in these things even more. It is the Bush administration’s members and admirers who espouse mad doctrines of world revolution, not the present resident of the Kremlin. Before we cast accusations of Stalinism or dictatorship at anyone, we might look to our allies and our own country first.
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More than 1.7 million Iraqi Kurds have signed a petition calling for a referendum on independence.

A Referendum Movement in Kurdistan spokesman says a delegation from their organisation has travelled to the United Nations headquarters in New York to hand over the petition.

“The signatures were collected in towns across Iraqi Kurdistan,” spokesman Karwan Abdullah said.

The movement’s campaign is not supported by Iraq’s two main Kurdish former rebel groups – the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – which have long limited their demands to autonomy within a federal constitution for fear of offending Iraq’s powerful neighbours.

The independence campaigners charge that the two factions, which ran three northern provinces in defiance of Saddam Hussein before last year’s US-led invasion, are unrepresentative and that most Iraqi Kurds want to break away.~ ABC News

It is instructive to remember that many proponents of the Iraq war would usually minimise the desire of Iraqi Kurds to establish their own independent state to the point of The Wall Street Journal‘s outright denial. This has been partly an opportunistic argument–the consequences for the region from Kurdish independence were serious enough that even otherwise irresponsible war supporters had to take them seriously and provide assurances that such consequences would not be forthcoming. It was also partly based in the real interests of the government and the major media in the Iraq war, which can only be an extension of hegemony.

American resistance to Kurdish independence, which the U.S. government will not support on account of Turkish opposition to the idea, reflects both the fundamentally unrepresentative sort of state that Washington hopes to create in Iraq and highlights the profound cynicism with which Washington will discard the perceived self-interests of a people to serve the interests of the cliques that curry favour with the West.

There are undoubtedly those in the War Party who prefer instability and political disunity in the Near East, for whom an Israeli interest in supporting an independent Kurdish state may be more compelling. However, nothing better illustrates the lack of commitment to the erstwhile democratisation of the region (and therefore the profound dishonesty of the entire policy) than the continued official opposition to Kurdish independence in the main Kurdish parties, the interim government in Baghdad and in Washington.
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Except Yushchenko could not have been admitted to the Rudolfinerhaus Clinic in Vienna for dioxin poisoning. And the medical records obtained from that clinic do not indicate that diagnosis. In fact, Viktor Yushchenko’s problem is likely much more severe than record blood levels of dioxin. His problems are in all probability so severe and of such import for him and his party that he and the Rudolfinerhaus medical claque chanced a daring and bold gambit in order to hide the truth and simultaneously implicate his opponent. The truth is, Viktor Yushchenko may well be the victim of two poisonings, the more severe of which his physicians have yet to reveal…

It was the next day, after drinking beer, vodka, and cognac at dinner, that Yushchenko developed the symptoms that drove him to Rudolfinerhaus four days later. The doctors at that Vienna clinic surely knew immediately what we can also deduce now: Yushchenko’s symptoms indicate pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas), and the cause was binge drinking on the night of Sept. 5.

Pancreatitis is caused 65-80 percent of the time by either alcohol or gallstones. Yushchenko did not have gallstones. Pancreatitis – which can be caused by chronic alcohol consumption or by one night of heavy drinking –causes severe stomach and back pain and can occur shortly after the alcohol ingestion.

Newly discovered documents, including Yushchenko’s official medical records, obtained from the Rudolfinerhaus clinic show conclusively that Yushchenko had pancreatitis. The Viennese doctors themselves flatly state that there is pancreatitis, and the laboratory and diagnostic test results shown are all consistent with that diagnosis. In addition, the test results show that Yushchenko also has an enlarged liver. This indicates that his drinking pattern is probably chronic and, because of that, he is on the road to developing severe liver disease. ~Thomas Boyle, M.D., Antiwar.com

I have heard it said that American journalists are phenomenally lazy and will sometimes run with almost any story as long as it gives them something to print. This seems to be an excellent example of journalistic apathy throughout the Western media, among other things, producing a false and widely accepted report that Mr. Yushchenko was poisoned by the Ukrainian government. There is undoubtedly also ideological bias behind this easy acceptance of Mr. Yushchenko’s ridiculous story, but even biased journalists would have qualms about propagating a story they knew to be proveably false, if only for reasons of their own reputations and self-interest. Only journalists uninterested in the facts of the case, on account of sheer lack of curiosity, could have missed such a clearly falsified story, much less having treated it as the truth.

If any Western journalists have discovered the likely truth behind Mr. Yushchenko’s ailments, pancreatitis brought on by excessive drinking, it is not surprising that they have failed to report it–it will hardly do to have a chronically ill man with a penchant for overdrinking as “the West’s man” in the Ukraine. Unpleasant memories of Yeltsin, that great and daring pro-Western reformer idolised for years by the Western media, must come rushing back to the Yushchenko propagandists in the Western press when they find that their new Trojan horse in the Orthodox world is yet another intemperate, dying man. It is at that moment that they remember that Yeltsin’s presidency was a disaster for Russia in no small part because of the man’s frequent incapacitation, however good it was for the Berezovskys and Khodorkovskys of the world, and that their absurd hopes for “reform” (read alignment of the Ukraine with policies dictated in Washington and Brussels) rest with someone who cannot guarantee the stability and certainty that foreign businesses will want to have.
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Ukraine’s Transport Minister Heorhiy Kyrpa has been found dead at his holiday home near the capital Kiev.

The minister is reported to have gunshot wounds and officials said a gun was found near his body.

Mr. Kyrpa, 58, appointed in 2002, was a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. ~BBC News

It is too soon to know whether Mr. Krypa’s death was suicide or murder, but it does seem likely that his death had roots in the current political turmoil of the Ukraine. In the pro-Yushchenko hysteria in the West and among Yushchenko’s supporters themselves we may find the causes of what may be the first act of political violence to come from this farce.

What is obvious is that the West’s preference for Yushchenko stems not from his democratic credentials or his championing of the rights Ukrainians, but precisely the opposite: from his contribution to increasing the cost of living in Ukraine. Prime Minister Yushchenko succeeded in selling off several regional electricity distribution enterprises (oblenergos) in western Ukraine to foreigners, including to the American company AES. Those familiar with AES’s history in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia will know that the privatization had disastrous results for the electricity sector there, and left many Georgians in the dark and cold in winter. This sort of change – privatization, scarcity, increased prices – is why Yushchenko’s candidacy is really valued in the West, not for democracy, “civil society,” or any of the other slogans the West trumpets. Apparently, despite Yushchenko’s support among the “enlightened” urbanites of Kiev who long to be “cool” and “Western,” and despite the control that pro-Yushchenko supporters have been able to exercise over the electoral process and machinery in Kiev and much of western Ukraine, a majority of Ukrainian voters in the 2004 election nevertheless remembered Yushchenko’s true legacy, and chose not to return to it.

As with Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia, Washington has clearly groomed Viktor Yushchenko for the Ukrainian presidency for many years. Yushchenko’s wife, Yekaterina Chumachenko, is an American citizen from the Ukrainian Diaspora, her parents having emigrated from Ukraine at the time of the Second World War. In the 1980s, Ms. Chumachenko worked as assistant to the US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, then in different capacities in the White House Office of Public Affairs and the Department of the Treasury. From 1994-99 she was head of the Ukrainian representation at Barents Group LLC, which acted as a consultant to the National Bank of Ukraine when Yushchenko was chairman. It was at this time that she met Yushchenko and her influence over her husband is said to be enormous. While increasing numbers of Ukrainian politicians are denied visas to America, Yushchenko has little to worry about if he ever wishes to visit the United States.

In the final analysis, Yushchenko fits the New World Order bill like a glove. Can it be any wonder that George Soros – reviled in Ukraine – has offered his support so heavily to the pro-Yushchenko cause? The Soros world agenda centres largely on the idea of a financial-administrative elite and a global central bank, or World “Gosbank,” whose commanding heights will be the new nomenklatura. Who could be better suited for such a role than former Soviet Gosbank apparatchik Viktor Yushchenko? Unless something goes seriously wrong with the West’s plans in Ukraine, Yushchenko can be expected to appear shaking hands with George W. Bush in the White House in a matter of months. His ally, the gas industry oligarch Yulia Timoshenko (rumored to be a billionaire from Russian gas sales), should be joining him. For although she is wanted on an Interpol warrant in Russia for bribery, her name has recently disappeared from the Interpol website, presumably due to her vigorous support of the Orange Revolution. Evidently the Western scales of justice can be tipped by piling enough cash onto them. ~ British Helsinki Human Rights Group

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The Doxa [illusion] is the source of disorder; renunciation of Doxa is the condition of right order, Eunomia. When man overcomes the obsession of his Doxa and fits his action into the unseen measure of the gods, then life in community will become possible. This is the Solonic discovery. At the core of Eunomia, as its animating experience, we find the religiousness of a life in tension between the passionate, human desire for the goods of exuberant existence and the measure imposed on such desire by the ultimately inscrutable will of the gods…He passionately loves the magnificence and exuberance of life; but he experiences it as a gift of the gods, not as an aim to be realized by crooked means against the divine order. Through openness toward transcendence, the passion of life is revealed as the Doxa that must be curbed for the sake of order. ~Eric Voegelin, The World of the Polis

Shortly after this passage in World of the Polis describing Solon’s idea of Eunomia, Prof. Voegelin perceived Solon’s conception of the polis in Plato’s Republic, where the order of the polis “embodies the Eunomia of the soul.” As Voegelin sees the development of the idea of order in Athenian history, the union and balance between passion and order, Doxa and Eunomia, that Solon had conceived “dissociated into the passions of the demos and the order that lives through the work of Plato.” (p. 199)

I would venture to add that Prof. Voegelin perceived in this dissociation of passion and order the failure of Athens, which is its preference for the Doxa and so its basic departure from the eternal order, the perception of which fundamentally distinguished a people from those who viewed the world in predominantly temporal terms.
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