Your Friendly Neighbourhood Liberals 

     UNA-UNSO’s Charming Emblem

For our friends who are under the impression that Pora! and other Orange Revolutionaries are admirable people fighting for freedom, I cite this and John Laughland’s revealing article from the 6 November 2004 issue of The Spectator:

It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being vigorously promoted by America as the country’s next president: the former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko. On a rainy Monday morning in Kiev, I met some young Yushchenko supporters, druggy skinheads from Lvov. They belonged both to a Western-backed youth organisation, Pora, and also to Ukrainian National Self-Defence (Unso), a semi-paramilitary movement whose members enjoy posing for the cameras carrying rifles and wearing fatigues and balaclava helmets. Were nutters like this to be politically active in any country other than Ukraine or the Baltic states, there would be instant outcry in the US and British media; but in former Soviet republics, such bogus nationalism is considered anti-Russian and therefore democratic.  

Update: I mentioned the similarity between Hutu anti-Tutsi rhetoric (“cockroaches”) and the depiction of Pora’s enemies as a “beetle,” which is how I had always seen the insect from the poster described.  Once I saw the picture of the poster itself, I realised that said “beetle” looks an awful lot like a cockroach, so the parallels are even closer than I originally believed.  Nice people, great values.  Here is a little item about how Pora lads handle disagreements.