#Ukraine rally DC

[dontforgetukraine]

Today we were at ICRC office in Washington DC. Keep calling your members of Congress and make plans to vote. Join us tomorrow back at 17th NW and Pennsylvania Avenue by Eisenhower Executive office building from 5-6pm. —Ukraine Rally DC

[silverfox66]

Ukraine Rally DC/Community For Ukraine is doing amazing work again putting together a tool to boost the message #LetUkraineStrikeBack. Please if you can, contact your representatives. From their website:

Current US policy FORBIDS Ukraine from striking targets on Russian soil… even when Russia is shooting at Ukrainian cities!

Here in the US, we need to:

Allow the weapons we’re sending Ukraine to be used to maximum effect.

Let Ukraine show Russia and China what American weapons can do.

[tomorrowusa]

Trump wants Russia to attack our allies. Is it any wonder why he's Putin's favored candidate for president?

Having an ignoramus pawn of Putin as commander-in-chief is not good for national security or international stability.

Seeking a second presidency as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee, Donald Trump has said he would “encourage” Russia to attack any of the US’s Nato allies whom he considers to have not met their financial obligations. The White House described the remarks as “appalling and unhinged”. Trump made the statement on Saturday during a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, ahead of the state’s Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February. The former president has voiced misgivings about aid to Ukraine as it defends itself from the invasion launched by Russia in February 2022 – as well as to the existence of Nato, the 31-nation alliance which the US has committed to defending when necessary.

Being the dumbass he is, Trump doesn't understand that NATO is a mutual defense pact. After 9/11 NATO countries provided logistical aid and even troops when the US overthrew the pro-al-Qaeda régime in Afghanistan and took into custody many of the planners of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Trump’s remarks on Saturday quickly raised alarm among many political pundits in the US. “Sounds as if Trump is kind of encouraging Russia to attack our Nato allies,” David Corn – an MSNBC analyst and the Washington DC bureau chief of Mother Jones – said on X. Meanwhile, conservative political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Trump’s comments were “music” to the ears of Russian leader Vladimir Putin

Something Trump doesn't tell his MAGA zombie followers is that military expenditures of NATO countries have gone way up during the Biden administration.

From last July...

NATO Details Leap in Member Defense Spending Ahead of Summit

Is Trump just butthurt that Biden has had greater success at increasing NATO member defense expenditures? That does make Trump look even more like a loser.

More likely Trump is simply doing Putin's bidding in helping to weaken Europe in order to spread Russian hegemony.

Under Biden, NATO is not only growing in strength but growing in membership. Finland joined NATO last April. Sweden is set to join this year.

Many of our NATO allies have excellent intelligence services. Undoubtedly some of them have picked up "dirt" on Trump over the past dozen or so years. It would be a shame for Trump if some of that dirt somehow became public later this year. Europe should show the same love for Trump which he has been showing them. 🙂

[mariacallous]

The consequences of the 2024 US presidential election will be felt from Washington, DC to Warsaw, Illinois. But they will also be felt in Warsaw, Poland. 

The United States is, despite the many pronouncements of its decline, powerful and influential enough for its presidential election result to be felt around the world. Central and Eastern Europe is no exception to this. It is, in fact, a region where this is perhaps particularly true.

The first and most obvious way in which the 2024 presidential election will matter for Central and Eastern Europe is Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, has essentially said she would continue US President Joe Biden’s policy. She is committed to continuing to provide assistance to Ukraine. The Republican candidate, former US President Donald Trump, has, by comparison, repeatedly questioned US aid to Ukraine, and derided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “salesman” who “walks away” with billions every time he comes to the United States. 

Much has been made of Trump’s stated fondness for Russian president Vladimir Putin, but just as salient was the reason for Trump’s first impeachment: he was accused of trying to extort Zelensky by using the carrot of lethal aid to entice his Ukrainian counterpart to open an investigation into his political rival, Biden. 

We should expect Trump’s skepticism for NATO to carry into a second term, too. (Harris, in the debate with Trump, warned that if Putin is able to take Kyiv, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?”)

More broadly, Harris’s record as a senator and as vice president suggests that she would view the countries in the region as allies. She would likely continue to offer some support to those trying to, for example, protect minority rights or advocate for democratic norms in the region. 

Trump would be more disruptive. For one thing, Trump is campaigning on the most aggressive tariffs — taxes on imported goods — in almost 100 years, and is, per the Washington Post, “preparing an attack on the international trade order that would probably raise prices, hurt the stock market and spark economic feuds with much of the world.” The new tariffs would likely hurt global trade and financial flows between Europe and the United States. The European Union and the United States could very well find themselves in a trade war, the losers of which would likely be American and European businesses and consumers. 

And Trump’s potential changes to immigration could impact families from Central and Eastern Europe, too: he’s proposing making it more difficult for family-based migration and has, in the past, tried to slash not only undocumented, but also legal migration. (Trump has also complained that the United States needs more migration from certain countries, which he has deemed “nice,” like “Denmark” and “Switzerland.”)

When I think about what another Trump term would mean for Central and Eastern Europe, though, the thing I think about the most are outlets like this one. Journalism is under pressure from governments across the region. That is, in my view, something that US leadership has a responsibility to push back on. When you claim to be allies based on shared democratic values, all parties involved should try to push each other to actually uphold those values. I do not think that we can expect this under Trump, who called the press the “enemy of the people” and “just bad people” at a rally in Arizona last week. His first term was marked by attacks on journalists, and particularly women journalists. I think it will be worse for journalists here in the United States and in Central and Eastern Europe, too. 

And I think that we can extend this to those who speak up for democratic norms and minorities more generally, like already maligned NGO workers and activists. For example, in 2022 USAID announced that it was “supporting new locally-driven initiatives in Central Europe with the goal of strengthening democratic institutions, civil society, and independent media, which are all pillars of resilient democratic societies.” It is unclear to me that that support would continue in a Trump administration. (This is separate from development assistance to Europe and Eurasia region; Trump made dramatic cuts to foreign assistance the last time he was in office.) 

Trump, in his debate with Harris, said, in response to the charge that world leaders were laughing at Trump, that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban likes him. “Look, Viktor Orbán said it. He said, ‘The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president.’” And it is true that Orbán received less criticism from the United States when Trump was president. But whether that is good for Americans and Hungarians is another matter entirely. 

Having a president who believes in freedom of the press isn’t enough, of course, to magically make conditions for journalists better. Having a president who believes in liberal democracy in theory doesn’t mean that all its values are always practiced, or that democratic norms in Central and Eastern Europe will be respected. But not having one is enough to make things worse. And, in a way, the same could be said of Harris and Trump’s respective victories for Central and Eastern Europe more generally: On questions ranging from national security to democracy, she won’t magically make everything better, but he can quite quickly make matters worse.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at RWW:

If there’s anything the MAGA movement loves, it’s a rally with a bunch of speakers who can be counted on to blend “anti-wokeness,” conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism, and hero-worship of Donald Trump. The latest assemblage, traveling under the name of Rescue the Republic, will grace the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Sept. 29, with the stated mission of mobilizing Americans to save the republic and western civilization itself from “a conglomerate of industrial complexes.”

The speaker lineup includes Trump booster Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Sen. Ron Johnson, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Moms for Liberty’s Tiffany Justice, Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, anti-feminist public intellectual Jordan Peterson, anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, and journalist Matt Taibbi. Also speaking is #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka, who was sentenced to three years of probation for his role in inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. [...] Rescue the Republic claims to represent a “rebel alliance” of people “of every culture, creed, and ideology” who “are putting politics aside” to “secure peace and freedom.” Libertarian Party chair Angela McArdle is listed as a founder of the group, the latest iteration of a coalition of “COVID-19 dissidents” that rallied against vaccine requirements as “Defeat the Mandates.” They later organized a right-left coalition against U.S. aid to Ukraine under the banner, “Rage Against the War Machine,” which is holding a rally on Saturday.

This weekend’s Rescue The Republic is a motley crew of far-right activists and anti-vaxxers.

[libertariantaoist]

News Roundup 11/15/2023 | The Libertarian Institute

Here is your daily roundup of today's news:

News Roundup 11/15/2023

by Kyle Anzalone

Russia

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been trained across Europe for the war with Russia. French trainers say they are careful not to get close to the Ukrainian cadets over fears they will be killed on the frozen front lines. The AP reported that Ukrainian soldiers preparing for deployment have resigned themselves to the “grimness of the future.” The Institute 

A facility to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets was officially opened in Romania on Monday as NATO countries are working to get the US-made warplanes to the battlefield in Ukraine. AWC

China

Biden Hopes Normal Coorspondace Between Washington and Beijing Can Be Reestablished During Meeting with Xi. X

Expectations are low for the meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping that will take place Wednesday in San Francisco during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. AWC

Israel

The UN says 100 of its staff have been killed in Gaza. X

A group of US-based aid, advocacy, and religious groups sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urging the Pentagon to scrap plans to provide Israel with 155mm artillery rounds due to the massive civilian casualty rate in Israel’s war on Gaza. AWC

A State Department dissent memo obtained by Axios slams President Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, saying the US is backing Israeli “war crimes.” AWC

Dozens of State Department Employees Have Signed Dissent Cables Slamming Biden’s Support for Israel. X

More than 400 US officials from 40 government agencies have sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza in the latest example of dissent from within the US government. AWC

Hamas’s armed wing said Monday that it discussed with Qatari mediators a deal to free up to 70 Israeli hostages in exchange for a five-day ceasefire and the release of some Palestinian prisoners. AWC

Doctors at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital are pleading for help as the medical facility has ceased functioning after its power failed over the weekend amid an Israeli siege. The medical staff has refused to evacuate the hospital due to fears that the approximately 700 hundred patients they would leave behind will die. AWC

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is expected this week to introduce a bill to block an arms transfer to Israel, which will mark the first piece of legislation aimed at reining in President Biden’s strong support of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. AWC

Two members of the Israeli Knesset wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal arguing for Western countries to take in refugees from Gaza as Israeli officials continue to call for Palestinians to be pushed out of the enclave. AWC

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other members of Congress spoke at a pro-Israel rally at the National Mall in Washington DC on Tuesday, where demonstrators made clear their opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza. AWC

Dutch Defense official in Israel says violates “international treaties and laws of war” and increases the chance of regional escalation. X

Around 180 decomposing bodies at the al-Shifa hospital will be buried in a mass grave at the hospital. X

Middle East

US Forces in Iraq and Syria Targeted at least Four Times After US Airstrikes on Sunday. XAWC

A US official told Reuters on Tuesday that up to seven people were killed in the US airstrikes in eastern Syria on Sunday that targeted Shia militias. AWC

Read More

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

THE BIG SPLIT

TCinLA

The circus came to town in DC for the past four days and did a good job of displaying why the Republicans are in a lot of trouble.

The CPAC clown show, er, I mean shitshow, er, I mean conference, is proof of the difficulty the party will have in keeping their increasingly fractured coalition together for 2024.

A mere 40 years ago, the Republican Party was defined by overall ideological unity on three conservative principles: free markets, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values.

Those three pillars were the heart of the Reagan revolution. No more.

The MAGA movement, which clearly took over this year's CPAC conference, has moved the party to a protectionist, populist, belligerent outlook. The one issue that appears to still unite the GOP is fighting "wokeness," which even former House speaker Paul Ryan - called a RINO last night and targeted for “removal” by Trump in his Nuremberg Rally speech - cited as his primary reason for continuing to support and be involved with Faux Snooze in a combative interview last week with his formr friend and ally, Charlie Sykes.

No more free markets. For the past year, companies such as Disney and PNC Bank that are proud to publicly showcase their commitment to progressive values that embrace diversity have come under attack, with Governor InSanity declaring he will control the content creatd by Disney to prevent further attacks of “wokeness” on good god-fearin’ patriotic Amurrikins.

What was once the “Party of Lawn Ordure” sees Fraternity Freddie, er, I mean Matt Gaetz, call for defunding the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies if they don't “get back on our side." The goobers at CPAC gave him a standing ovation. Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist and GOP presidential candidate issued a call for the FBI to be dismantled and replaced with something else.

Trump’s keynote address last night was two hours of a vengeful indictment of the GOP establishment: "We will expel the warmongers, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, we will throw off the political class that hates our country. The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots and fools. We're never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove and Jeb Bush.” He then pledged to protect Social Security from any Republicans pursuing reduced benefits.

This from a former president and current leading presidential candidate of one of the two major political parties of this country, who pushes his political campaign with a “music video” that has the “J6 Prison Choir” - the convicted insurrectionists now in the DC jail - singing “The Star Spangled Banner” while he shouts the Pledge of Allegiance.

Can it get crazier?

Well, yes, since you ask, it can.

Friday night, Marjorie Traitor Goon targeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in her speech, telling him to "leave your hands off of our sons and daughters." When asked about former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, both unapologetic Ukraine hawks, Congresswoman Goon replied "I don't listen to Nikki Haley and I don't think she's going to do well in the primary."

The Goonbimbo is probably right.

For those who think Governor InSanity will be a threat to the Trump Party, a top Trump adviser said that the governor has "Reagan Republican" vulnerabilities the former president will exploit.

“Reagan Republicans” are now “the enemy” in the looney half of what passes for the Republican Party today.

Trump knows his audience: he dominated DeSantis in the CPAC straw poll, 62%-20%, and saw improvement from his 2022 numbers when he led DeSantis 59%-28%. “Trump has completely remade the party since he’s become president,” a Trump aide said. “He realized there’s a difference between what grassroots activists thought and what Bush Republicans in Washington, D.C., were trying to enact.”

"In 2016, I declared I am your voice. Today I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country." The neverwere’s, the neverwillbe’s, the lifetime losers, the Dilberts who know they’re the geniuses but no one will recognize them, they love this, this is why they support him. He’ll “get” all those people who pointed at them and snickered.

He also knows who the average wingnut moron is: a senile old white male boomer. "We're not going back to people that want to destroy our great social security system. Even some in our own party, I wonder who that might be. That want to raise the minimum age of social security to 70, 75 or even 80 in some cases, and then a route to cut Medicare to a level that it will no longer be recognizable."

“Get your government hands off my social security!” - the battle cry of the drunks in The Villages.

Two other declared GOP candidates, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, garnered 3 and 1 percent of the vote respectively. Michigan businessman Perry Johnson, who ran a Super Bowl ad for his long-shot campaign for the GOP nomination came in third with 5% of the vote. Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, along with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, each had 1% of the vote to round out the tally board.

The straw poll also found 79% of attendees oppose U.S. military aid to Ukraine, while 74% want abortion regulated on the state (not federal) level.

Basically, Trump is prioritizing the 30% of Republicans who consider themselves "Trump-first Republicans," leaving his rivals to compete for backing among the shrinking minority who support the party first.

Trump declared he would run even if he was indicted, and the goobers cheered him. he will, too.

If four or five others enter the race and divide up that 70% who aren’t “Trump first” among them, Trump ends up with a plurality win in most of the coming GOP winner-take-all primaries, just like he did in 2016. And in that 70%, most of them already also agree with the policies Trump is promoting. For anyone else to win, they will have to adopt Trumpism hook, line and sinker, whatever they want to call it.

This morning, “moderate” “sane Republican” former Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced he is NOT running for president in 2024.

The media and the political elites want to find Anything But Trump to write about, unless it is clown shows like this past weekend at CPAC. The fact is that even the people claiming to not be Trump, like Hikki Haley, cannot find anything they disagree with him on when asked by interviewers. They announce that they too are supportive of the most recent Idiot Thing among Republicans, the way Paul Ryan defended Fox because it is “anti-woke,” though even he couldn’t describe was “woke” is and why it should be opposed, when asked. Either all of this, or they want to prove they could out-Trump Trump, as DeSantis is attempting to do with his non-campaign campaign for president.

What we have witnessed and are witnessing is a Republican party on steroids to turn the latest fringe belief or activity into the next mainstream definer of the party. This is because this is now a party bereft of ideas, that likely won’t have a convention and write a platform in 2024 because they don’t have new ideas and know that their old ideas are unpopular; this is why they no longer believe in democracy. It is now a badge of belief in the party that the Jauary 6 insurrectionists are “persecuted political prisoners,” that the footage that has been shown of the insurrection is faked.

The Republican Party is whatever a mentally-deficient, un-educable, lifelong cheat and liar says it is whenever he opens his mouth and words come out. Two hours of mendacity; malevolence; revenge fantasy; willful, chosen ignorance; and free association broadcast last night is today what the Republican Party believes and is about.

Until the next time he lets words fall out of his mouth.

People have asked, how did it happen in Germany in the 1930s - this is how it happened then and is happening now.

[TCinLA :: Thats Another Fine Mess]

[guruwithin]

Jimmy Dore RAGES Against War Machine At DC Peace Rally >

Feb 22, 2023  #TheJimmyDoreShowAt the recent Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington DC, jagoff comedian Jimmy Dore took to the state to remind the attendees that the War in Ukraine is not about “freedom” or “democracy” but rather, like practically all wars, is in service of the oligarchy that rules us and seeks to keep us divided. And those ostensibly on the left who degraded, disparaged and dismissed the rally because they objected to some of the speakers have proven themselves reliable servants to the oligarchy and mere anti-war cosplayers. For more information on the rally and other related upcoming events, visit https://rageagainstwar.com/

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 6.12 (after 1940)

1940 – World War II: Thirteen thousand British and French troops surrender to Major General Erwin Rommel at Saint-Valery-en-Caux. 1942 – Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday. 1943 – The Holocaust: Germany liquidates the Jewish Ghetto in Brzeżany, Poland (now Berezhany, Ukraine). Around 1,180 Jews are led to the city's old Jewish graveyard and shot. 1944 – World War II: Operation Overlord: American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division secure the town of Carentan, Normandy, France. 1950 – An Air France Douglas DC-4 crashes near Bahrain International Airport, killing 46 people. 1954 – Pope Pius XII canonises Dominic Savio, who was 14 years old at the time of his death, as a saint, making him at the time the youngest unmartyred saint in the Roman Catholic Church. In 2017, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged ten and nine at the time of their deaths, are declared as saints. 1963 – NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers is murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith during the civil rights movement. 1963 – The film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is released in US theaters. It was the most expensive film made at the time. 1964 – Anti-apartheid activist and ANC leader Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison for sabotage in South Africa. 1967 – The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declares all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. 1975 – India, Judge Jagmohanlal Sinha of the city of Allahabad ruled that India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had used corrupt practices to win her seat in the Indian Parliament, and that she should be banned from holding any public office. Mrs. Gandhi sent word that she refused to resign. 1979 – Bryan Allen wins the second Kremer prize for a man-powered flight across the English Channel in the Gossamer Albatross. 1981 – The first of the Indiana Jones film franchise, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is released in theaters. 1982 – A nuclear disarmament rally and concert is held in New York City. 1987 – The Central African Republic's former emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa is sentenced to death for crimes he had committed during his 13-year rule. 1987 – Cold War: At the Brandenburg Gate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. 1988 – Austral Líneas Aéreas Flight 046, a McDonnell Douglas MD-81, crashes short of the runway at Libertador General José de San Martín Airport, killing all 22 people on board. 1990 – Russia Day: The parliament of the Russian Federation formally declares its sovereignty. 1991 – In modern Russia's first democratic election, Boris Yeltsin is elected as the President of Russia. 1991 – Kokkadichcholai massacre: The Sri Lankan Army massacres 152 minority Tamil civilians in the village of Kokkadichcholai near the Eastern Province town of Batticaloa. 1993 – An election takes place in Nigeria and is won by Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola. Its results are later annulled by the military government of Ibrahim Babangida. 1999 – Kosovo War: Operation Joint Guardian begins when a NATO-led United Nations peacekeeping force (KFor) enters the province of Kosovo in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 2009 – A disputed presidential election in Iran leads to wide-ranging local and international protests. 2014 – Between 1,095 and 1,700 Shia Iraqi people are killed in an attack by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on Camp Speicher in Tikrit, Iraq. It is the second deadliest act of terrorism in history, only behind 9/11. 2016 – Forty-nine civilians are killed and 58 others injured in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States; the gunman, Omar Mateen, is killed in a gunfight with police. 2018 – United States President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea held the first meeting between leaders of their two countries in Singapore. 2019 – Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is inaugurated as the second president of Kazakhstan.

[dontforgetukraine]

A rally held in Washington DC next to the White House to commemorate the 1000th day since russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many thanks to Ukraine Rally DC for organizing the rally along side Razom for Ukraine and United Help Ukraine.

[zooterchet]

Moonraker (Hugo Drax)

Actual Politics Revealed ("CHET", David Michael Charlebois, "DC85", "NASH"):

Supported:

CIA Analytics.

NSA Game Theory.

World Bank Hungary.

Diner's Association.

Sinn Fein.

British Labour Party.

Lucas Arts.

Korean East Asia Friendship Association (Korean Yakuza).

Chinese Communist Party.

John Warren Freemasonic Temple.

Hanoi Secret Intelligence Services.

Van Meter Specialists.

United Kingdom.

British Commonwealth.

Australian Parliament.

Berkshire Hathaway.

FBI DC Comics.

House of Saud.

Opposed:

Confederate Southern Army.

Chinese Tong.

Japanese Diet.

Nikkei Farm Average.

Hse-Sang Exchange.

Goldman-Sachs.

Iranian Worker's Rally.

Students Revolution Iran.

Ba'ath Party Judaism.

Israeli Likud.

United Nations Mossad.

Paul Revere Lodge.

Irish Pride Boston.

Law Professor's Union (al-Qaeda).

Marvel Comics.

GI Joe Magazine.

United States Marine Corps.

Los Angeles Water Department.

German Sheriffs.

Canadian Freemasons.

Hell's Angels.

Insane Clown Posse.

Russian Mafia.

CIA Russian Federalist.

Irish Republican Army.

OPEC Jordan.

Ghost Shadows Triads.

British Conservative Party.

Gueveran Labor Services.

Cuban Intelligence Services.

Chi Omega.

Phi Beta Kappa.

KGB Ukraine.

[oceansoulmatesblog]

Tennis: Pegula rallies past Svitolina to reach Washington semis

AFP, Friday 4 Aug 2023 Top-seeded Jessica Pegula outlasted Wimbledon semi-finalist Elina Svitolina 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 on Friday, holding off a late fightback to reach the Washington Open semi-finals. Jessica Pegula of the United States returns a shot to Elina Svitolina of Ukraine during Day 7 of the Mubadala Citi DC Open at Rock Creek Tennis Center on August 04, 2023 in Washington, DC. Photo:…

[mariacallous]

November 2013 seemed like an unlikely time for another Ukrainian revolution.

Nine years had passed since the Orange Revolution, a massive wave of popular protests against a massively rigged presidential election, achieved inspiring success to be almost immediately followed by bitter disappointment. In 2004, hundreds of thousands of protesters filled Kyiv’s central Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, drowning the city in orange, the presidential campaign color of Viktor Yushchenko, a liberal and pro-Western candidate, whose rightful presidency was stolen by blatant election fraud.

The Orange Revolution’s demand was ultimately granted, and the rerun of the stolen election brought Yushchenko to power. But the Orange coalition quickly fractured and in 2010, Yushchenko’s 2004 rival, the thuggish Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych, was fairly and squarely elected president. The Ukrainian government was now firmly captured by shamelessly self-enriching oligarchic interests with unambiguous ties to Russia. Staging another nationwide collective action seemed like an effort the disenchanted and resigned nation could not muster.

A sense of agency

In November 2004, I was in my kitchen in a small town in southern Maine, making apple sauce, when NPR reported about the swelling numbers on the Maidan. I dropped the apple sauce and called a friend in Washington, DC, another Ukrainian from Lviv. In a week we were on a flight to Kyiv, me with my nine-month-old daughter and she with her two toddlers. Our mothers met us in Kyiv to pick up our kids and take them to Lviv. We stayed on the Maidan.

Why were we there? What was the use of flying from the United States to stand daily on the Maidan, for a month, in December cold, where among thousands one person made no difference? For one, while the political aims were serious and legitimate, the Orange Revolution transpired in an atmosphere of jubilation. Thousands in orange paraphernalia filled the Maidan, many traveling from other cities or returning from abroad, like I did. For me, it proved the ultimate reunion with friends I hadn’t seen in years. A stage was promptly erected, and Ukraine’s best performers took turns entertaining and rallying the crowds. The Orange Revolution was the Woodstock for democracy.

But the real reason we were on the Maidan was that we believed each one of us could make a difference. In fact, to be there was to partake in a sense of collective agency, to contribute to safeguarding Ukraine’s fragile democracy, which was not only our right but our obligation.

For many Ukrainians of my generation, the belief that concerted collective action can bring about political change was probably a function of coming of age at the time of the great transformation of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. We were not passive observers of history, we were its agents of change, children of the agents of change, who found cracks in the seemingly impregnable Soviet monolith and chipped away at it from within.

It was the preceding generations of dissidents who chose, following Vaclav Havel, to do the only thing that gives power to the powerless, “to live within the truth,” and paid for this choice with persecution and imprisonment. It was the persistent, irradicable whisper of our parents and grandparents in our ears, transmitting chapters of national memory, history, and customs, omitted, distorted, and prohibited by the Soviet officialdom. It was our irreverent mockery of the geriatric Communist party bosses. It was the vast and visceral indignation over the 1986 Chernobyl debacle. It was the students’ hunger strike in October 1990 on the Maidan (then the October Square), the first Ukrainian revolution, the Revolution on Granite, against the signature of the new Union Treaty, a doomed endeavor to rejuvenate the ailing Soviet empire and keep Ukraine tethered to Moscow.

Succumbing to a thousand cuts, the crusty old Soviet edifice, built on lies and coercion, finally came crumbling down in 1991, and we knew that it was we, the ordinary people of Ukraine—joining hands with the ordinary people of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic states—who did our part in its undoing, no matter how much credit Western capitals claimed.

The first post-Soviet years were lean but filled with hope, if only because we were young, standing on the threshold of adulthood, with opportunities our parents could never have dreamed of. We were told that we were Ukraine’s future; that they, our parents’ generation, were handicapped by the permanent damage inflicted upon them by the Soviet system, the Soviet mentality. They won Ukraine its independence, but they could take it no further, and it was we who now had the torch of responsibility to guide Ukraine toward democracy, prosperity, and the rule of law—all good things that, with time, would come to be captured by a single concept: “Europe.”

Ukraine’s economic ruin and idealism of the early 1990s in time gave way to increased prosperity but also to the sinister consequences of a mismanaged transition. The continued reign of the Soviet-era apparatchiks, the fire-sale of state assets against an antiquated and unenforceable legal code, and the serious difficulty of transforming an inefficient state-run economy into a market-driven but fair system proved a perfect primordial soup to spawn a handful of fantastically rich people, the oligarchs, some controlling enormous stakes in the national economy—metallurgy, energy, banking, media. By the 2000s, having all but captured the economy, the oligarchs were jostling to capture the state.

In that, the fate of post-Soviet Ukraine was not dissimilar to the fate of post-Soviet Russia: a mutant system grown out of an unreformed Soviet legacy and the most ruthless exigencies of unchecked capitalism. Russia in the 2000s took a turn toward order and rule, not of law but of one man, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, who rose out of obscurity to the apex of power where he would remain to this day. The Russian system produced Putin and Putin proceeded to shape the Russian system by building a rigid neo-feudal vertical of power that turned oligarchs into state vassals and a managed democracy that preserved the ritual of elections while snuffing out all space for competitive deliberative politics. But that would become clear later. In the early 2000s, the West hailed Putin as a pragmatist and an architect of stability and order badly needed in a Russia ravaged by the democratic chaos of the 1990s.

Danse macabre

Ukrainian politics, by contrast, remained manifestly disorderly and outright messy, sending Western observers into eye-rolling bouts of “Ukraine fatigue.” Indeed, had it not been for the millions of lives and livelihoods it impacted, Ukrainian politics was the stuff of a tragicomic political soap opera.

The cast alone!

There was Ukraine’s outgoing second president, Leonid Kuchma, a former Soviet missile factory director, who took over from Ukraine’s first president, Leonid Kravchuk, a former Communist party ideologue, and who presided over the rise of the oligarchs, one of whom married his daughter, as well as over the infamous murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who investigated Kuchma’s ties to the oligarchs.

There was Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma’s last prime minister and heir-elect, who in his youth was a racketeer in the coal-mining region of Donbas and had served time for robbery and assault, before rising to regional and then national politics.

There was his running opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, a former central banker and a one-time prime minister in Kuchma’s government, whose father had survived Auschwitz and who, a month before the elections, would himself barely survive a mysterious poisoning with dioxin that left his handsome face permanently pockmarked.

Then there was Yulia Tymoshenko, the beautiful gas princess with a braided crown, bedecked in couture outfits, who accumulated her wealth by importing Russian gas to Ukraine and whose one-time business associate, another former Kuchma-era prime minister, Pavlo Lazarenko, fled to Switzerland on a Panamanian passport after embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from the Ukrainian budget and was ultimately detained, tried, and imprisoned for money laundering in California.

Tymoshenko backed Yushchenko in his 2004 presidential bid and rallied the crowds on the Maidan when the election was stolen. When Yushchenko became Ukraine’s third president, Tymoshenko became his prime minister, the highest post a woman has occupied in Ukraine to this day. The plot thickened and became difficult to follow: the Orange coalition soured, Yushchenko dismissed Tymoshenko after just seven months, and—plot twist—made a deal with his former arch-rival Yanukovych. Yet Tymoshenko came back as prime minister in 2007.

In 2010, Yanukovych ran against Tymoshenko, won to become Ukraine’s fourth president, and went on to shove her in prison. Together with his two sons and their business associates, Yanukovych and the Family, as they became known, proceeded to rob Ukraine’s coffers with unprecedented abandon. Ukraine slid from 134th place, out of 183, in the Transparency International corruption perception index to 152nd.

Curtain drop.

Post-Orange blues

Early in 2013, my family and I moved to Ukraine for six months so that I could complete fieldwork on my Ph.D. dissertation about Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament. This was the longest continuous time I spent in my home country in 13 years—and in my hometown of Lviv—in 20 years. Since leaving Ukraine in 2000, I had become a veritable global nomad, with stints of various lengths in London, Almaty, Prague, Baku, Maine, and finally Budapest, where I enrolled in a doctoral program at Central European University (since expelled by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a Putin admirer, to Vienna). I knew nothing about nuclear weapons, but I knew for certain that whatever I was to research and write would have to be about Ukraine. Cultural competency, yes, but also that darn inculcated sense of civic duty to contribute to Ukraine somehow, even if I bailed on building it in situ.

It is no secret that living in a place is very different from watching it from a distance or visiting for holidays—or revolutions. To a visitor, Lviv transformed immensely, getting a handsome facelift of its Renaissance downtown, brimming with cafes, bookstores, and fashion boutiques. There were supermarkets, DIY stores, and IMAX cinemas. Kyiv was in a different league altogether: awash in nouveau riche money, it was alleged to have the greatest number of Bentleys per capita of any European capital. Yanukovych himself was rumored to live in an ostentatious palace outside of Kyiv, featuring a private zoo, a floating galleon of a reception hall, and golden toilets.

Meanwhile, anything that relied on state funding such as education, medical services, and public agencies and works remained in an embarrassingly pitiful state. I now had three kids in the care of the Ukrainian educational system: two in elementary school and the youngest in kindergarten. I was astonished by how little had changed since I was a schoolgirl back in the Soviet days. Portraits of Lenin and red flags were gone, of course, and brown woolen uniforms were replaced with navy blue. There was, happily, a choice of much more attractive stationery, notebooks, and pens. But otherwise—the same dilapidated hallways, antiquated analog classrooms, dreadfully boring textbooks, and underpaid teachers, while simple supplies like blackboard chalk and toilet paper relied on parents’ contributions. A state whose president defecated in a golden toilet could not provide toilet paper for its schoolchildren.

Life plodded along and Ukrainians made do. Economically, Ukraine had seen worse. GDP grew 4.1 percent in 2010 and 5.4 percent in 2011, before stagnating at zero or close to it in 2012-2013. But the political malaise was palpable, and the popular mood, as much as one could gauge it, was that of apathy and resignation. That the Orange Revolution, such a monumental and inspired collective effort to rescue the country from the clutches of oligarchic dysfunction, could in the end fail so spectacularly to prevent this very dysfunction was as poignant as it was disheartening. There will never be another Maidan, I kept hearing.

The future is now

On November 21, 2013, Mustafa Nayyem, a Ukrainian journalist of Afghan descent, posted on his Facebook page: “Come on, let’s get serious. Who is ready to go out to the Maidan by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ don’t count.”

This was a call for action in response to President Yanukovych’s sudden refusal, under Russian pressure, to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union, scheduled for November 29 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Association Agreement would have forged closer political and economic ties with the EU, but at a price: the Ukrainian government had to implement a program of reforms, economic, judicial, and regulatory, as well as release political prisoners such as Tymoshenko. For many in Ukraine, it was this outside leverage on Ukraine’s extractive political and economic elites that provided a faint ray of hope for curing their country, the 21st century’s sick man of Europe.

The students were the first to answer Nayyem’s call and show up in numbers to the Maidan. This was a new generation of Ukrainians, kids born after independence, entirely untouched by the Soviet experiment, only handicapped by its aftermath. During the Orange Revolution, they would have been in elementary school, some of them might have made trips to the Maidan with their parents, others would have stayed with their grandparents while their parents protested.

But in November 2013, it was this generation’s future that was on the line with the EU association decision. For them, Ukraine’s place in Europe was not so much a matter of common historical and cultural heritage. They cared little that the medieval Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kyiv married off his daughters to the royal houses of Hungary, France, England, and Norway, becoming the “father-in-law of Europe”; even less that the Ukrainian lands were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—once the largest and mightiest kingdom in Europe—for far longer than they were under Russian rule; and not at all that Europe’s geographical center allegedly lay somewhere near the town of Rakhiv in western Ukraine.

For the Ukrainian students on the Maidan, “Europe” was about the future, from which their corrupt leaders had barred them. “Europe” was about not having to pay bribes to petty bureaucrats. It was about going on an Erasmus exchange to another European university. It was about crossing Schengen borders without visas. It was about not being run over by a Bentley, whose driver would go unpunished. It was about living with clean air and drinkable water, about recycling and picking up dog poop. It was about public funds channeled toward public goods, not into private pockets. In short, Europe was about the freedom of choice and living in dignity.

Over the next few days, the students continued to gather on the Maidan under a sprouting of the EU’s blue star-studded flags and slogans like “Ukraine is Europe!” The Maidan became Euromaidan. The students sang and listened to speeches by activists and artists, but it looked as if the protests might fizzle out before too long.

At 4 a.m. on November 30, with only a few hundred still encamped on the Maidan, the Berkut riot police, armed with tear gas and truncheons, moved in and began dispersing the protesters by force. Dozens of students were cruelly beaten, some ended up in hospitals; others took refuge a short distance from the Maidan in St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, rebuilt by Yanukovych’s former patron Kuchma, in place of the original that had been demolished by Stalin in 1937.

As the morning of November 30 dawned, the fog of events was still thick. One thing, however, was clear: that night, something critically important shifted in Ukraine. As Marci Shore, a Yale historian, wrote in her book The Ukrainian Night: “Yanukovych had broken an unspoken social contract: in the two decades since independence, the government had never used this kind of violence against its own citizens.” The Berkut pogrom marked a point from which the student-driven Euromaidan began its transformation into the nationwide Revolution of Dignity, setting in motion events that would change the course of history.

Learning civics

Max Weber, a German sociologist and political thinker, famously defined the state as possessing a monopoly on the use of legitimate force. The events in Ukraine in the winter of 2013-2014 turned Weber’s definition on its head. The use of violence on the Maidan authorized by Yanukovych as the head of state turned a huge portion of the Ukrainian society against him and ultimately cost him his legitimacy as president.

After the assault on the Maidan, the number of protesters swelled to the hundreds of thousands: the parents of the beaten students came out, the generation of the Orange Revolution, as well as those who never protested before. For all, the brutality police inflicted on defenseless students, who exercised their right to peaceful protest, touched a nerve already rubbed raw by a government that absolved itself of any accountability to the people who elected it. The protesters’ demand was no longer just the association with Europe; it was the resignation of the Yanukovych government and the return of the 2004 constitution that curbed the power of the president.

In the coming weeks, the numbers on the Maidan only increased, reaching nearly 1 million on December 8. That day, the statue of Lenin in central Kyiv was toppled. The coming months saw what Ukrainians came to call Leninopad, Lenin-o-fall, with more than 500 Soviet-era monuments demolished. Ukrainians were cleansing their country of the Soviet debris.

Not only did the Maidan grow bigger, but it dug in deeper. Miraculously swift and effective feats of self-organization produced food, shelter, and medical care for the population of the Maidan, as well as a library and a university, offering free lectures, a press center, and a security force. There was, of course, the stage and performances, but this new Maidan was markedly different from the Maidan of 2004. It was a city within a city, a polis. The protesters were no longer protesters, they were citizens of the Maidan, sustained by common purpose and gift economy, as noted by another Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. The Maidan welcomed an eclectic procession of foreign dignitaries, from the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévi to U.S. Senator John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who famously partook in the gift economy by handing out chocolate chip cookies.

Most important, perhaps, was that in this polis Ukraine’s civic nation was born. Russian propaganda attempts, grasping at the presence of right-wing groups on the Maidan, to portray the protest as an ultranationalist revolt were laughable to anyone who set foot at the Maidan in Kyiv and other cities across the country. The Maidan’s citizens were Ukrainian and Russian speakers from all walks of life and every ethnic background. They were united not by language, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, but by a commitment to shared civic values.

There would be no more eloquent vignette for this remarkable development than the flash mob at the Privoz fish market in Odesa, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian port city with prominent Jewish heritage, where musicians of its famous Philharmonic Orchestra, led by a Venezuelan conductor, sprung up, among the portly ladies presiding over heaps of fish carcasses, with violins, cellos, flutes, and trombones to triumphantly join in Beethoven’s 9th symphony, Ode to Joy, the EU anthem.

The truth of power

Yanukovych’s attempt to disperse the protests by force backfired spectacularly, as did his attempt to outlaw protests and other civil freedoms by draconian laws, modeled on Russia’s and promptly passed by the parliament he controlled on January 16, 2014. The Maidan stood firm, exposing Yanukovych’s powerlessness.

The concept of power is central to politics, yet it remains surprisingly muddled and overstretched. Power tends to be treated as synonymous with authority, force, violence, and coercion, all of which denote ways in which one man (and it’s usually a man) can bend others to his will and make them do something they wouldn’t otherwise. This, no doubt, is how the Yanukovychs—and Putins—of the world see it, too.

Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany and one of the most original minds of the 20th century, was among the few political thinkers who attempted to draw meaningful distinctions between the various terms we conflate with power. In her essay On Violence, Arendt recognized that while power and violence often come in tandem, they are actually complete opposites.

Power, she argued, is not the ability to impose the will of one man over another, but the ability to act in concert. Power is the property of the collective, and a single actor can be powerful only in as much as he has the following of many. Power is generated through persuasion and demonstration. Because the support for power is granted through free choice and can just as freely be withdrawn, power comes with accountability.

Violence, on the other hand, is the property of a single actor, individual, or institution. While power is the end in itself, violence is always instrumental and requires implements: physical strength, soldiers, and guns. Violence distorts equality between actors and obliterates the freedom to choose, which is so essential to power and the responsibility it entails. Power relies on support, violence commands obedience. Power needs no justification but does need legitimacy; violence can be justifiable but never legitimate.

Arendt acknowledged that, in practice, all forms of government, including democracies, rely on a combination of power and violence. All forms of government, including tyrannies, rely on the general support of society, too. To forge this support, a tyranny sooner or later turns to coercion, which necessarily diminishes its power and makes it, in the words of Montesquieu, the most violent and the least powerful form of government. Thus, the resort to violence is nothing else but a symptom of eroding power, an Arendtian lesson Yanukovych—and Putin—would have done well to learn.

Pride and premonition

By the time the Revolution of Dignity started in November 2013, I had moved back to the same small town in Maine where I met the Orange Revolution. I was a Ph.D. student with three kids in elementary school, one chapter of my dissertation half-written, a horde of archival document scans and interview transcripts in my computer, and not a single contact in U.S. academia. No work on the dissertation would be accomplished through the winter of 2014.

I spent all available time glued to the computer, following daily developments on the Maidan and pouring over countless articles, many of them written by pundits who suddenly woke up from Ukraine fatigue to opine on developments in a country they knew little about and understood even less. I pitched op-ed after op-ed but got rejection after rejection. I contemplated going to Ukraine, but I did not want to be a revolution tourist and felt that if I were to go, I’d have to stay and see it through—an option I could not square with responsibilities to my family. The Ukrainian diaspora the world over mobilized and raised money and supplies for the Maidan, and I took part. I also volunteered for an online news portal, Euromaidan Press, one of those miraculous products of self-organization, that promptly translated real-time news from the Maidan into English.

I watched the events unfold with a mixture of pride and premonition. There was the resolve: ordinary people’s commitment to defend civil rights and freedoms against arbitrary brute force. There was the resourcefulness: millions of Ukrainians managed to create something great out of limited resources. There was the creativity and humor: the merciless taunting of Yanukovych and the oligarchs. There was also the benign irreverence toward all politicians, including opposition figures like the heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, the liberal technocrat Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and the dour nationalist Oleh Tyahnybok. This also extended to the EU delegations that shuttled between Brussels and Kyiv to try and mediate the crisis but were said to have brought a baguette to a gun fight (a sentiment less delicately echoed by Nuland—“F-ck the EU!”—in a conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, clandestinely intercepted and generously leaked to the public by Russian intelligence).

But something more ominous was in the air. Reports emerged of disappearances and the torture of Maidan activists, some of them snatched from hospital beds where they were recovering from police beatings. In freezing temperatures, the Berkut surrounded the Maidan and began subjecting the protesters to water cannons, tear gas, and stun grenades. The Maidaners donned balaclavas, ski goggles, and construction helmets; armed themselves with baseball bats and ply-wood shields; dug up paving stones; mixed Molotov cocktails; and erected barricades of sandbags, ice, and tires which were burned to create smoke screens. This was no Woodstock.

On February 18, 2014, the Berkut riot police received orders to “clean up” the Maidan and moved in en force. Images of a wall of shields and police helmets, water cannons, black smoke, men in orange hardhats with Molotov cocktails, sullen volunteers in a make-shift hospital treating gory wounds from live bullets and stun grenades were transmitted around the world. By February 20, some protesters were being picked off by snipers installed on nearby rooftops. When the smoke of the Battle for the Maidan cleared, over 1,000 were injured and 108 protesters and 13 police were dead. From then on, the fallen protesters would be honored as the Nebesna Sotnya, the Heavenly Hundred, the first casualties in the struggle for Ukraine’s European future.

It was an unthinkable toll for a society that treated the beating of the students as an unacceptable red line. The slaughter on the Maidan was a step too far even for Yanukovych’s own political party, which moved to distance itself from the man who now had blood on his hands. Yanukovych first lost legitimacy, then power, and now authority. Hastily packing some papers and belongings, Yanukovych fled to Russia, leaving behind his gaudy mansion, golden toilets and all.

Rejected, Russia strikes

While the standoff on the Maidan was nominally between the Ukrainian protesters and the Ukrainian government, Russia’s heavy, dark shadow hung over the ordeal. It was not only that Yanukovych was swayed by Putin’s promise of a $15 billion bribe not to sign the EU Association Agreement; not even that many in Yanukovych’s cabinet, especially in the defense and security apparatus, had Russian passports, allegiances, and business ties. Rather, it was that Yanukovych tried to institute in Ukraine what Putin had managed in Russia.

But the Maidan revealed just how different Ukrainians were from Russians. The Ukrainian society rejected the kind of social contract with its rulers that the Russian society accepted—whether gladly, begrudgingly, or defeatedly—with theirs. Neither the relative prosperity nor pockets of personal freedom that seemed sufficient to lull the Russian society into submission and to surrender its political agency entirely to the Putin-managed vertical of power would suffice for Ukrainians. They were willing to fight and die for the rule of law, for their political rights and liberties, and for their collective agency to shape their future. The Russian post-Soviet model of governance failed to generate a following in Ukraine, and Yanukovych failed to impose it by force. Russia proved powerless in Ukraine.

Where power is in jeopardy, Arendt observed, violence appears and, if unchecked, takes over. As Ukraine mourned its fallen and reconstituted its government, Russia, portraying the events in Ukraine as an “illegitimate fascist coup,” pounced. At first, the Kremlin did so stealthily, sending “little green men” to take over Crimea, which it would promptly and illegally annex; then more brazenly, mobilizing and arming proxies to instigate a war in the Donbas that would claim over 10,000 lives; and finally, dropping all pretense, with an overt large-scale invasion.

Putin, loath to accept his impotence in Ukraine, would go on to violate her. “Nravitsia, ne nravitsia, terpi, moya krasavitsa/Like it or not, put up with it, my gorgeous,” Putin quoted with a smirk from a lewd Russian folk song on February 8, 2022, in a conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, who was in Moscow trying to ascertain that the 190,000 Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s borders would not really invade. In just over a fortnight, Ukrainians woke up to Russian tanks and missiles. Four days into the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine applied for EU membership.

To live free or die

With their resolve, resourcefulness, self-organization, and the gift economy, first honed during the Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainians would go on to mount a valiant resistance to the Russian onslaught, once again surprising themselves and the world. While repelling a larger, richer, better-armed adversary, Ukraine, prodded by its civil society, would continue to ferret out corrupt operators, steadily improving its Transparency International corruption perception index ranking from 152nd place in Yanukovych’s days to 104th in 2023 (while Russia slid down to 141st). On December 14, 2023, the European Council would vote to open membership negotiations with Ukraine.

Ukrainian politics would also not lose its theatrical flair: in a life-imitating-art twist, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a comedian who played a Ukrainian president bent on fighting corruption in a satirical TV show, would be elected in 2019 as Ukraine’s sixth president, defeating the incumbent, Ukraine’s fifth president, Petro Poroshenko, a diabetic chocolate magnate. When Russia invaded, Zelenskyy the comedian would turn into a steadfast wartime leader, using his communication skills to keep up morale and rally international support for Ukraine’s defense effort.

By that time, I had defended my dissertation and published a book about Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament, a topic made suddenly relevant by Russia’s aggression and its attending nuclear threats. Although I am no longer a voiceless Ukrainian Ph.D. student from an obscure European university struggling to find a publisher, I now struggle to find the words to convey the unfairness and horror of the war Russia unleashed in Ukraine. If tear gas and truncheons were unacceptable in 2013 and the death of a hundred was unthinkable in 2014, the slaughter of many thousands, the displacement of millions, the mass graves, gang rapes, child abductions, and torture chambers that followed in the wake of the Russian troops since February 2022 are unspeakable.

Meanwhile, amid air raid sirens, Russian missiles, and unending fresh graves, a new generation of Ukrainians is coming of age. These young people no longer hail from a country known only for its corruption, they hail from a country known for its valor, from a country where ordinary people are wresting, in an unequal battle, their freedom from a vicious foreign tyrant, while continuing to put their own messy house in order. These young Ukrainians will no longer awkwardly linger on the threshold of “Europe,” waiting to be admitted: they are part of the polity that pays the highest price to defend everything Europe stands for. And like me, when I see a New Hampshire license plate, they now know what “Live free or die” truly means.

[xtruss]

Joe Biden, The Ultimate American Snake-oil Salesman — Scott Ritter

© AFP 2023/Nicholas Kamm

The second Summit for Democracy kicks off in Washington, DC today, with President Joe Biden gathering representatives from around 120 countries vision of in hopes of breathing life into his vision “restoring” American leadership on the world stage after four years of Donald Trump

According to the US State Department, Biden’s American vision seeks to “prove democracy still works and can improve people’s lives in tangible ways,” adding that “democracies have to come together—to rejuvenate and improve our open, rights-respecting societies from within; to stand together in defending against threats from autocracies; and to show we can address the most pressing crises of our time.”

It is notable that two NATO allies—Turkey and Hungary—are absent from the list of invited nations.

The Summit for Democracy is, in fact, anything but. Genuine democracy is a by product of the domestic political realities of a sovereign state, where its constituent population builds institutions and values derived from their own collective experiences.

The American vision of “democracy” being promulgated by the Biden administration, however, ignores this reality. What the Biden administration is seeking to do is to further the span of control of what it calls the “rules based international order”, an unwritten “standard” imposed by the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War which, at one time, was seen as the necessary mechanism for which to oversee global post-conflict reconstruction efforts, but which eventually was used a the means for sustaining American economic, political, and military hegemony over the world.

Devastating Quakes? Don’t Care Must Rob: US Continues Oil Looting of Quake-Hit Syria! Syrian UN representative Bassam Sabbagh blasted Washington’s effort to politicize the humanitarian response in Syria in the wake of last month’s devastating earthquakes, pointing out that the US’s “illegitimate dominance on oil and gas wells in the northeastern part of Syria and the smuggling of petroleum outside the country” constitute a special form of cruelty which “deprived Syrians from these materials and billions of dollars in estimated income.”

Like any “system”, the rules based international order requires an antagonist from which it can generate the fear necessary to compel people and nations to rally to its cause. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this antagonist was the forces of international communism embodied in the form of the Soviet Union and Communist China. When the Cold War ended, rather than adapt the rules based international order to meet the needs of the newly-emerging multi-polar world, the US opted instead to use the cause of “democracy” as a means of imposing its will not only on its former ideological opponents, but also to compel conformity among those nations of the world who had espoused non-aligned points of view.

The American definition of “democracy” had more to do with imposed subservience, and less with genuine empowerment of sovereign goals and aspirations.

In the decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, however, the reality of imposed “American” democracy has been exposed as a false promise, buried in the ashes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and, most recently, Ukraine. The inconsistencies of a US foreign policy built on the premise of “human rights” which are selectively embraced depending on the needs of American national security, combined with the glaring inadequacies of the American democratic model as practiced at home, have removed the rose-colored lens behind which America had shielded its vision of “democracy” from the rest of the world, leaving the moribund reality of the American enterprise laid bare for all to see.

Joe Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” is little more than a modern-day manifestation of the American snake-oil salesman of old, a seedy profiteer trying to exploit an unsuspecting public by selling it quack remedies. In this case, however, it isn’t just the cure that is fake, but also the underlying ailment for which the cure is offered. To make the cure-all of the American democratic model more palatable, the Biden administration has had to resurrect the demons of old—Russia and China—portraying them as the forces of “autocracy” (i.e., the new communism) for which the only cure is American-directed “democracy”—the ultimate snake oil.

China Urges US to Stop Interfering in Other Countries' Affairs Under Pretext of Democracy. Chinese Foreign Ministry, Mao Ning, said! "What our world needs today is not to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs under the guise of democracy, but to advocate genuine democracy, reject pseudo-democracy and jointly promote greater democracy in international relations," the diplomat said. (March 28, 2023)

"We have stated our position on the so-called 'Summit for Democracy' on multiple occasions. Despite the many problems at home, the US is hosting another 'Summit for Democracy' in the name of promoting democracy, an event that blatantly draws an ideological line between countries and creates division in the world. The act violates the spirit of democracy and further reveals the US’ pursuit of primacy behind the façade of democracy," Mao added. (March 28, 2023)

One of the problems facing Joe Biden and the coterie of erstwhile “democracy” proponents with which he has populated his foreign and national security team is that not only does the United States not have a cure (“democracy”) for a non-existent disease (“autocracy”), but Biden, by overplaying his hand through publicity stunts such as the “Summit for Democracy” has inadvertently opened up American-style democracy for diagnosis by the other nations of the world who, while finding no cure, have actually classified the American snake-oil as a disease, the cure for which is the very force the US is seeking to isolate and weaken through its actions—Russian and Chinese “autocracy.”

While the Biden administration can bully, cajole, intimidate, and bribe nations to attend his Summit for Democracy road show, at the end of the day nations vote with their feet, and it is to institutions like the Shanghai Security Organization (SCO) and BRICS that the global collective is gravitating to in increasing numbers, rejecting the failed policies and false promises of the core institutions that comprise the so-called rules based international order that serves as the key ingredient of the snake-oil cure being offered by Joe Biden.

Increasingly the IMF and World Bank are being viewed by the developing world as the extensions of the foreign and national security arms of the US, the EU, NATO, and the G7—the so-called “collective West” that have so openly aligned themselves against both Russia and China. By joining the SCO and BRICS, many nations have made it clear they want no further part with a “rules based international order” which can, on a whim, violate or make moot the very rules it advocates for by illegally seizing foreign assets, sanctioning nations in violation of international law, and controlling through economic manipulation.

One only need look to the example of Saudi Arabia, a long-time stalwart American ally, which has openly divorced itself from the rules-based international order it had served for many decades, aligning instead with Russia and China. More and more nations are positioning themselves to follow in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia, opting to become part of a global multi-polarity which is successfully challenging the antiquated and decrepit system built around the flawed premise of American singularity.

Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy is simply the modern version of the scam perpetrated by the ultimate personification of the American snake-oil salesman, Clark Stanley, who plied his trade at the turn of the 19th century.

Like Stanley’s customers of old, who had been misled into buying a cure that contained none of the ingredients he claimed it did, and as such cured nothing, the world is seeing through the overhyped claims regarding the benefits of American “democracy”, exposing it as little more than false promises and outright lies which, if embraced, leads to only suffering, death, and destruction. The real threat to the world, it seems, isn’t the forces of “autocracy” for which American “democracy” is intended as a cure, but America itself, especially in the form of politicians such as Joe Biden who seek to continue the scam for as long as possible, regardless of the consequences for both the salesman and the customer.

— Wednesday 29 March, 2023