Putin's Counter Revolution

[David Morris]

It seems the only violence in eastern Ukraine is inflicted upon pro Ukraine
demonstrators. And the earlier pro EU demonstrations were peaceful until
they were met with brutality and murder.  The early protestors weren't
looking to oust Yanukovych either. The were just pro EU. It wasn't until
they started getting brutally countered that they determined Yanukovych
must go. And Putin thinks Yanukovych was too soft on the protestors.  The
pro EU folks want a semblance of law. The pro Russians like dictatorial
force.  It seems a clear contrast to me.

David Morris

On Saturday, March 15, 2014, Joseph Tracy
<brook7 at sover.net<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','brook7 at sover.net');>>
wrote:

> Some truth to that but maybe just a teency bit oversimplified to propose
> as a given the benign influence of western democracies and the Neo-liberal
> project and the backwardness of Russia.  I have heard several middle class
> Ukrainians who do not fully endorse either Putin or the EU. The idea that
>  a large majority of Ukrainian people have changed their minds that much
> since the last election seems far fetched and certainly cannot yet be
> proven.
>  The worst and largest scale  cross border violations of human and
> national rights in recent history have come from the US and UK, not Russia.
> I would like to see you or Meek refute that in a convincing way.
> On Mar 15, 2014, at 4:37 PM, alice malice wrote:
>
> > Putin's Counter-Revolution
> >
> > James Meek reports from Ukraine
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > When Putin spoke of 'chaos' in Kiev and Ukraine as a whole, in his
> > press conference a few days after the Crimean invasion, he must have
> > realised that his foreign audience, as well as the citizens of Kiev
> > and all the people of Ukraine who favoured the revolution, knew there
> > was no chaos. His audience were those who both believed and wanted to
> > believe the 'Banderite' revolution had brought anarchy: neo-Soviets on
> > both sides of the border who yearn for an enlarged Russophone space -
> > socially conservative, militarily strong, inheritors of the cherished
> > myths, martyrs and achievements of imperial and Soviet times - but who
> > nonetheless don't feel bound by the old Soviet restrictions on travel,
> > Orthodox Christian piety or consumerism.
> >
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > The Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s were able to temper regret at
> > the collapse of the USSR with their own knowledge of the dismembered
> > country's shortcomings. A generation later, this is less and less the
> > case. Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians and
> > Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of Soviet life
> > and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved abroad, gone
> > into a small business or been intimidated: in any case they have been
> > taken out of the political arena. In Russia and Russophone Ukraine the
> > stage is left to neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion
> > of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly
> > ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire,
> > disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom 'the west' are heirs and the
> > only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after 1985 you have
> > no remembered reality to measure against this false vision, just as
> > you have no way to situate those charming Soviet musical comedies of
> > the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic portrayals of an idealised Russophone
> > socialism, brightly coloured and fun, propaganda now in a way they
> > weren't when they were made. This is the context that has made it
> > possible for Vladimir Putin and his government to sell Russia's
> > opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own people and to Ukrainian
> > neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what should never have been done,
> > an artificial division of Russian-speaking Eurasia by fascists/the
> > West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists - in neo-Soviet discourse,
> > avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.
> >
> >
> > http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/james-meek/putins-counter-revolution
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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