ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

"someone as skilled in the art of reading social nuance when it comes to cataloguing the daily slights that come with being a white American guy in Austria"

Fuck you, asshole.

I am not talking about strawmen who fit your preconceptions, you insufferable weed, I am talking about friends of mine. Sorry if they do not fit in the confines what you think you know, you piece of shit.

"partly at least, in good faith"

Partly at least, I wish you no harm.

jesus

http://s-ak.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/terminal01/2010/4/16/17/enhanced-buzz-27355-1271453393-15.jpg

TWU crossing a fairly bright line here. Flagged post, fwiw.

Shouldn't really need to point out that observations based on ten years of visiting both countries for leisure and work, having numerous friends and colleagues in both countries who hold similar attitudes and which are broadly backed up by any number of western and Russian analysts (not least the Kremlin's own strategists who are counting on rural resentment to win votes) aren't specifically aimed at TWU's social circle, but there you go.

it should also go w/out saying that SV is one of ilx's best posters

I will try to code my contempt in clever witticisms in the future. That seems to be cool here.

xpost: if you were not saying that I am failing to recognize classist attitudes in my friends, than what were you saying other than "let's remember this is the silly white American who thinks he could ever experience anti-foreigner sentiment, ho ho ho"?

I'm saying that if you spent much time in either country outside of your specific friend group you would probably have picked up threads of classist sentiment pretty quickly. I hear it all the time, often from people who I get on extremely well with. It doesn't make them terrible people but it does present a real problem when Russian / Ukrainian liberalism in its current form is offered as a simple solution to the longstanding political problems of both countries and does feed into the othering of, for example, the people of Donetsk and Lugansk.

I will try to code my contempt in clever witticisms in the future.

Well, if this tactic helps you to avoid your calling other ilxors a piece of shit and telling them to go fuck themselves, I can get behind it, even if the witticisms aren't really all that clever.

TWU i still have no idea what your position on ukraine & russia is, even

we need a rolling russia thread next year i think. until then:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s705no

I was not talking about everyone, nor was I presenting "Russian / Ukrainian liberalism" as a solution to everything. I simply find your "correctives" to be terribly reductivist, uncritically accepting of Euro-Leftist stereotypes, and more in line with the Putin spin than you have been willing to admit, so I am telling stories about a small (5-6) group of people I have regular contact with.

Your comment about "American in Austria", what was that, Mr. Good Faith?

goole -- my position is it's an awful shitstorm, that there are good and bad people who are interested in saving Ukraine as a nation with very little hope of success, and that Putin, whose intentions are not good, has taken advantage of the mess by pushing a lot of the European Left's anti-fascist buttons.

ok, clear enough

That was obviously much snarkier than it needed to be but given that you have been relentlessly uncivil throughout the thread, I wasn't particularly minded to tone it down.

The original point I was referring to was Gessen's question about the division between urban liberals / the rest which I assumed you were taking issue with in your initial throwaway ad hom. No hard feelings by any means, happy to buy you a beer in Vienna when I'm over next time.

Kazakh article very interesting, Mordy.

goole -- my position is it's an awful shitstorm, that there are good and bad people who are interested in saving Ukraine as a nation with very little hope of success, and that Putin, whose intentions are not good, has taken advantage of the mess by pushing a lot of the European Left's anti-fascist buttons.

― Three Word Username, Wednesday, September 3, 2014 12:47 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh cool, reactionary handwringing with appeal to good vs evil intentional fallacy *ignores all twu posts in the future*

Buy me a beer? Hold the dioxin, please. (I kid.) I point out only that my ad hom. attacks against you have been to question your motivations with regard to Ukraine, where yours here (and the earlier deleted attack by another) was, shall we say, more general in nature and thus, to my purportedly tone-deaf ears, more in the nature of a "fuck you". It is a fine line, but it is a fine line that matters to me.

If mattresslessness were still reading, I would invite him to read the words "Putin, whose intentions are not good" as "Putin, who in is in no way motivated by interest in the well-being of the inhabitants of Ukraine", but as it is I shall try to get along without his attention.

it should also go w/out saying that SV is one of ilx's best posters

― Mordy, Wednesday, September 3, 2014 1:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agreed!

the stuff about urban liberals' contempt for country cousins rings true, of course, but makes me wonder if i've been mistaking the kyiv (etc.) liberals for left-wingers. is there a viable left in ukrainian politics and did they play any role in maidan?

I don't think there is, and (for the purposes of clarity) I think it is bad that there is not.

It's not huge. Or at least not well organised. There's still a fairly large communist contingent, some of whom were involved in the protests, but they're often written off, with some justification, as sentimental old ppl. None of the credible political leaders challenging Yanukovich were from what we would call the centre-left. Green party might be closest but they are not influential.

I have one acquaintance from kyiv who belongs to some kind of socialist (but explicitly anti-soviet) group, but she's an uber-intellectual and i suspect her political affiliations are shared by very few in ukraine.

one of the most frustrating thing about post-cold war politics is that the "good guys" aka the liberal democratic activists in the former soviet countries as well as china etc. so often seem to be naive when it comes to the nature of liberal western economic and political institutions... and play into a false binary whereby the alternatives are nationalist autocracy and IMF-style neoliberalism. obviously there are plenty of smart people who don't fall into this trap but they don't seem to have the momentum. as a result foolish people (like one of my closest relatives) can actually think that putin represents some kind of principled resistance to Western hegemony.

also this is unrelated but ukraine's prime minister is a real hothead. he never fails to put things in the most manichean and hyperbolic terms (even if the situation sometimes calls for loud, angry rhetoric). who is this guy? he is not helping things.

he also looks to be about 30 years old....

All three of those posts are right on, I think.

and play into a false binary whereby the alternatives are nationalist autocracy and IMF-style neoliberalism.

this is why it's easy to cheer for brazil and some other latin american countries, they seem to be among the only countries successfully offering a third route to pride and prosperity.

i'm not naive about that either, though

part of the issue i think is that Putin represents some kind of unprincipled resistance to Western hegemony and it's easy to become sick and tired of the gormless white hat/black hat picture of the opposing forces painted by a lot of the media in my country and presumably the other Western hegemons

ISIS also offers resistance to Western hegemony

not implying equivalence of the two regimes, and I'm not accusing you of anything... just that the folks (and again, I know one well) who are rooting for putin b/c he opposes the forces of Western liberal globalization are guilty of really simplistic thinking.

i'm trying to say that of course "enemy's enemy" is bullshit but the simplified, propagandist representations that Western media seem to be gleefully falling back on make it hard to fully commit to the idea of "evil megalomaniac who won't stop until he's forced to". not so much with ISIS. maybe.

To some extent Poland and the Baltics states have managed a transition to democracy without going entirely down the sell-your-grandmother-to-the-World-Bank route but they weren't really put in the same position as Russia / Ukraine by the privatisation process. Going from communism to proper representative democracy is arguably easier than going from the kind of oligarch control Ukraine's now in to representative democracy.

but the simplified, propagandist representations that Western media seem to be gleefully falling back on

i don't watch TV, so i think i must be missing some of this stuff. the news sources i read don't seem to be this way.

i think a problem is that the person i know who is "pro-putin" is reacting primarily to 24-hr MSNBC, CNN, etc.

I have no problem handing out black hats in the post-Cold War era; it's the idea that you can put a white hat on any global actor at the moment that is tough to take.

correction: I do watch TV, I don't watch TV news

Kyiv is such a gorgeous city but literally everything about it underlines the horrific inequality of the country. I couldn't get over the huge amount of ads for luxury goods when we were there, in a city where the average salary is $400/month, and we passed so many gorgeous, empty shops staffed by seven or so women that were sustained only by an oligarch's wife rolling up once a week or so. Russia's similar; from perspective of ordinary Russian or Ukrainian, all the choices are bad, if you're going to have the wealth bled from the country regardless does it really matter who's running things? Couldn't even begin to imagine how you would wrest either country from oligarch control at this stage.

feel like I'm in this weird situation where I go to work and several women from Ukraine are constantly forwarding anti-Putin links, but I'm also staying right now with my in-laws, Ukranian Jews who basically think all Ukranians are anti-semites, and I hear at dinner time how Chris Cuomo of CNN is pro-Nazi for taking the Ukranian government line, etc.

i think the ukrainians and the russians have a lot to answer for in the anti-semitic dep't.

Putin, whose intentions are not good, has taken advantage of the mess by pushing a lot of the European Left's anti-fascist buttons.

― Three Word Username, Wednesday, September 3, 2014 7:47 PM (Yesterday)

I don't see that Putin has either managed to gain the approval of the European left here, or that it would even matter if he had- the 'European left' is hardly a driver of policy towards Russia/Ukraine. It'd be more accurate to say that Putin has taken advantage of the mess by pushing a lot of the European Right's don't give a fuck about poor-ass Ukrainians buttons.

Kind of lol but mainly sad that the transition to capitalism in the ex Soviet Union has panned out pretty much as Soviet propaganda suggested it would.

the stuff about urban liberals' contempt for country cousins rings true, of course, but makes me wonder if i've been mistaking the kyiv (etc.) liberals for left-wingers. is there a viable left in ukrainian politics and did they play any role in maidan?

there are, afaik, a number of autonomist / anarcho / workers' union groups but they are small in numbers and not "viable". but they provided what I think of as good, critical accounts of the composition & makeup of Maidan as well as of gov't forces' violence during the protests.

wrt to liberal contempt for the non-middle ("creative") class and those outside of major cities, I don't know what it is like in Ukraine, but that is absolutely the case in Russia (and is also reflected/echoed by Western press coverage of politics there).

also important to note that many liberals in the former Soviet bloc countries often didn't have many qualms about working together with fascists and nationalists (for a current example look at Navalny in Russia, which is really shitty because this means there's not much of a viable opposition to Putin atm, but that's for another thread...)

"European Left" = mainstream continental Social Democrat parties, feel free to put scare quotes around "Left".

Kind of lol but mainly sad that the transition to capitalism in the ex Soviet Union has panned out pretty much as Soviet propaganda suggested it would.

― intelligent, expressive males within the greater metropolitan (Bananaman Begins), Thursday, September 4, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe it wasn't propaganda.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/05/ukraine-catastrophic-defeat/

awful. kiev and moscow have a lot to answer for, though one doubts they will ever answer for it.

The lack of accountability in Russia / Ukraine is underlined by the fact that Leonid Kuchma, who sparked Maidan-style mass protests (involving Tymoshenko and others) when he was caught on tape discussing the murder of a journalist in 2000, is Poroshenko's chief representative at the peace talks. Fairly safe to assume that Yanukovich is beyond the reach of the law too, let alone the yahoos both sides have farmed the actual fighting out to.

who controls mariupol now that the cease-fire has been called?

I think Ukraine has pulled troops back, so presumably the DNR.

rightwing US columnist Krauthammer blames Obama:

Which makes incomprehensible Obama’s denial to Ukraine of even defensive weapons — small arms, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Indeed, his stunning passivity in the face of a dictionary-definition invasion has not just confounded the Ukrainians. It has unnerved the East Europeans. Hence Obama’s reassurances on his trip to the NATO summit in Wales.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-at-nato-summit-ukraine-abandoned/2014/09/04/ce45f13c-3467-11e4-a723-fa3895a25d02_story.html

news at eleven