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An Endless Fake Revolution

Seeing Yushchenko bringing Yanukovych in as prime minister, the Oranges are unhappy and may go back out into the streets to protest.  Jesse Walker at Hit and Run seems to be under the impression that this would be a good thing for Ukraine: But I’m glad to see the tents going up again. Here’s hoping they can […]

Seeing Yushchenko bringing Yanukovych in as prime minister, the Oranges are unhappy and may go back out into the streets to protest.  Jesse Walker at Hit and Run seems to be under the impression that this would be a good thing for Ukraine:

But I’m glad to see the tents going up again. Here’s hoping they can recover the momentum of ’04.

Yes, the happy momentum of 2004, when fraud and deception were the order of the day and Western audiences were willing dupes for pro-Yushchenko propaganda.  Eunomia came into existence around the time of the fraudulent “Orange Revolution,” and many of my early posts were dedicated to highlighting the evils of electing the criminal Yushchenko, who enjoyed the support of such luminaries as the unreformed socialist Tymoshenko and the borderline fascist, U.S.-sponsored “democratic” group Pora that employed the charming symbolism of a jackboot crushing a beetle to express their benevolent desire for freedom.  If you like that, you’ll love these guys (the graphic of the growing red tide engulfing all of Europe is nice and subtle), UNA-UNSO, the radical nationalists who backed the “Revolution.”  Even the umbrella Our Ukraine party works uses a slogan that, in any other context, would probably evoke worry and warnings of danger: “There is only one Ukraine for all of us!” (Ukraina u nas odna!)  If Tymoshenko and Pora, a group that Mr. Walker described simply as the “central resistance group” in his 2004 article, oppose Yanukovych’s appointment and want to return to the streets, we should recognise them as adversaries of any kind of economic and political reform in Ukraine.  We certainly shouldn’t be cheering them on, if we value the well-being, economic stability and independence of Ukraine.  

Of Pora and other old-line Yushchenko supporters from 2004, John Laughland wrote at the time:

The blindness extends even to the posters which 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.

[DL: As an aside, depicting their enemies as beetles reminds me more than a little of Hutu descriptions of the Tutsis as cockroaches prior to and during the genocide.  This is the sort of thing U.S. tax dollars went to support.  Keep that in mind the next time someone talks about “spreading democracy.”] 

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, Otpor and Kmara – 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, Moroz and their oligarch ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, 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.

Those are the people behind the “Orange Revolution.”  Furthermore, if the U.S.-backed “democrats” of Pora are prepared to go out into the streets, it means that Washington is probably pulling strings to destabilise the future Yanukovych ministry.  This is not desirable, it is not to welcomed, and it should be an embarrassment for libertarians that Reason keeps embracing ludicrous “democratic” movements that have been and continue to be little more than fronts for American influence and control.  To the extent that any of the Orange groups are genuinely “democratic” or representative of the fetid Ukrainian nationalism of the western regions of that country, there is nothing much to recommend them, either.

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