The Ukraine Crisis — Some Background and Thoughts

The ongoing Ukraine crisis and the poor reporting of same have pretty much killed this week’s History Friday column for me, so I will yield to my muse and go with it in providing this background information to the Ukraine Crisis.

1. President Viktor Yanukovych was a tyrant in the pocket of President Putin of Russia. His election in 2010 saw Ukraine turn increasingly into a police state with on-going death squad actions against protestors. Political opponents like Yulia Tymoshenko have been imprisoned and beaten. American National Public Radio has reported for some months on the activities of these Yanukovych aligned death squads going into Ukrainian hospitals to “disappear” wounded protestors getting medical treatment. Tortured bodies of some of them are found days or weeks later. President Viktor Yanukovych utterly honked off the entire non-Russian speaking Ukrainian population through these actions.

2. The Euromaidan movement is not just a grass roots movement. It is a political coalition that is in part a tool of Ukrainian oligarchs that don’t want to go extinct like the Russian oligarchs did under Putin. This means they play rough. And by rough I mean they are forming road blocks and threatening anyone with high end autos on the theory they are Yanukovych supporters.

See:

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2014/02/22/ukraine-the-other-side-of-the-story-lawless-bands-of-ukrainian-opposition-with-occupy-similarities/#more-77318

Likely a good part of the reason that Ukraine police melted away from Yanukovych involved threats to police families and property. There were not enough Eastern and Crimean Ukrainians in the Kiev police units supporting the Berkut to keep it all from melting away

3. The timing of this Euromaidan takeover was no accident. The key development in this crisis was the Ukrainian Military refusing to come out of its barracks to shoot protestors with heavy weapons a la Tiananmen Square. Without the ultimate force sanction of military heavy weapons, President Viktor Yanukovych could not win a forceful confrontation without outside Russian military action. He had to hold on through the Olympics to get it, but he and his inner circle of supporters suffered a classic case of elite collapse of will. Euromaidan and its outside supporters knew that from the get-go. Which brings us to…

4. Euromaidan had outside European help. That help was Polish. See this text and the link below it for the full article:

The Polish government has been funding civil society projects in ex-Soviet countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova, with much of the aid channeled through a fund controlled by Mr Sikorski’s ministry.
 
Recipients of Polish government money include opposition television stations operating in exile from Belarus, giving Poland influence in a country that, after Ukraine, could be the scene of the next confrontation between Russia and the West.
 
Such Polish activism arouses suspicion in Moscow, where centuries of rivalry between the two big Slavic powers, Roman Catholic Poland in the West and Orthodox Russia in the East, were marked by repeated wars and invasions in either direction.
 
http://www.theage.com.au/world/in-ukraine-poland-comes-of-age-as-a-european-power-broker-20140225-hvdnm.html

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The “Deep State.”

UPDATED to correct the author of the essay.

This essay by Mike Lofgren on Bill Moyers’ web site, is interesting. It has the usual leftist slant of Moyers on the topic but also includes many good observations. Lofgren is also a very interesting guy. He spent 28 years as a Republican staffer. From 1995 to 2004, he was budget analyst for national security on the majority staff of the House Budget Committee. From 2005 until his retirement in 2011, Lofgren was the chief analyst for military spending on the Senate Budget Committee. The Democrats took The House in 2006 and the Senate Majority from 2001 to 2003 and then since 2007. If he was on the Budget Committee of the Senate, he must have been a staffer for the Democrat majority, as well.

he was “appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.” He charged that both major American political parties are “rotten captives to corporate loot”, but that while Democrats are merely weak and out of touch, the Republican Party is “becoming more like an apocalyptic cult”. Lofgren and Moyers are both leftists but Lofgren has had an interesting odyssey.

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]

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“America as we have conceived of it is done.” Really? No.

“America as we have conceived of it is done.”

Then why are we bothering to talk about it?

America as it exists today changed from something else to what it is now — and it will change from what it is now into something else again.

What the new something else is — is up to us.

Socialist ideas are wrong. Socialist policies fail to deliver. Socialist programs are value destroying. Socialist public bodies are wasteful and ruinous. Socialist promises are lies. Socialist politicians are fools or scoundrels. Socialist authority tries to coerce outcomes that it can never achieve.

Socialism cannot work.

Socialism always fails.

So as American gets more socialistic, it is simply that much closer to the exhaustion and disintegration of socialism, American style.

It is a matter of when and how, not if, a socialistically organized American public sector, or corporatist-public sector, will fail.

So, America as we conceived it is not only not done, it is going to be only alternative remaining when the people who benightedly or maliciously tried to “vote themselves rich” have imposed enough ruin on themselves.

Ronald Reagan was right about the Soviet Union, and everybody else, including me, was wrong. While earnest looking men in suits advised the President about that invincible Nemesis sprawled athwart Eurasia, Reagan would respond with a joke about how the elevators and toilets never work in Russia.

American style crony capitalism and political machine hackery will die a similar death for identical reasons.

We are having this discussion because even Rev. Sensing himself surely believes there is an America worth living in that we may yet succeed in creating — as hard as it will be to do that.

And technology is on our side.

We are near the bottom of a J-shaped curve, but the upswing is coming.

We are heading through a painful transition period to America 3.0.

Lift your chin. Be happy. Don’t give up.

Fear God and dread nought.

We are going to win this thing.

Who’s with me?

Descent of the Chioula, and GoPro

Last year on my annual pilgrimage to cycling valhalla in the Pyrenees I took my GoPro camera for the first time. Below is my descent of the Col du Chioula, headed back toward Ax les Thermes (best viewed in HD).

This was probably my best descent of last year, the road surface and weather being just right. Everything fell into place. For those wondering, my top speed on this descent was 48.2 mph.

I took an insane amount of footage with my GoPro last year, and I am glad I did. But the problem is that when you bring back these hours and hours of video, there is nowhere for you to go with it. Options are buying an external hard drive and storing them there, or uploading them to one of many websites that do this sort of thing. I am about two thirds of the way done uploading my videos to YouTube, and it takes absolutely forever. A 15 minute video takes several hours to upload. I usually start one video a night and begin the uploading process before I go to bed.

Cross posted at LITGM.

Stories

(This afternoon I am working through my archives for materiel to post on the Watercress Press website blog, and I came across this post from … well, a while back. I thought it might be relevant, in these unsettled days and in light of various Boyz reminiscing about Tolkien and heroic days of yore. It might also serve as a departing point for a train of thought, especially when we need more inspiration than ever.)

I am not one of those given to assume that just because a lot of people like something, then it must be good; after all, Debbie Boone’s warbling of You Light Up My Life was on top of American Top Forty for what seemed like most of the decade in the late 70s, although that damned song sucked with sufficient force to draw in small planets. Everyone that I knew ran gagging and heaving when it came on the radio, but obviously a lot of people somewhere liked it enough to keep it there, week after week after week. A lot of people read The DaVinci Code, deriving amusement and satisfaction thereby, and some take pleasure in Adam Sandler movies or Barbara Cartland romances – no, popularity of something does not guarantee quality, and I often have the feeling that the tastemakers of popular culture are often quite miffed – contemptuous, even – when they pronounce an unfavorable judgment upon an item of mass entertainment which turns out to be wildly, wildly popular anyway.

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