ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

i mean, yeah, party is "troubling" to use the word of the times

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_%28political_party%29

*this party

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Yanukovich estate pics are nuts.

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

― goole, Saturday, February 22, 2014 12:08 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

explained by hatred of russia

http://www.thenation.com/article/177421/letter-new-york-times

bears repeating that yulia tymoshenko is a total babe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsZIZKBqSaE

she is!

I have a Russian fb friend who has been going nuts about this for a while now & he calls the opposition Nazis and I'd been thinking he's off his rocker but the more I read about what's going on, the more I can see where he's coming from. friend claims that the opposition tried to assassinate Yanukovich but that the Western press has been suppressing this.

Between this and Venezuela (where I have a good friend in Caracas), I'm getting an impression throughout of 'no black/white sides here, total mess, watch and wait.'

this is a very vague thought, but in discussions of ukraine + venezuela (+ thailand, etc) i keep seeing writers making reference to the arab spring and i wonder if these things do exist in a continuum - that maybe they're all reverberations of the global economic downturn? it does seem like a pretty tumultuous time for a variety of seemingly unlinked governments + nationhoods.

I think that's probably right. From Iran and Egypt to Bosnia and Ukraine to Thailand, whatever ill feeling existed towards the government has almost certainly been intensified by increased economic hardship. People have more to complain about and less to lose.

http://libya360.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/syria-ukraine-and-venezuela-the-politics-of-protest/

We saw it in Syria and now we are witnessing it again in Ukraine and Venezuela; namely, using the politics of protest to engineer anti-democractic movements which seek to overthrow popular and/or elected governments in the name of democratic freedoms. And we aren’t merely talking about undemocratic groups here, but anti-democractic movements which are opposed in principle to democracy (takfiris and jihadis in Syria; right-wing fascists in Ukraine; reactionary neo-liberals in Venezuela). In all these cases, governments are being rebuked, pressured and sanctioned for exercising their constitutionally prescribed and universally recognized duty to maintain law and order and to protect national security, public safety and national unity. And as we witnessed in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring”, democracy and revolution are now redefined in the public imagination as any popular outpouring of anger irrespective of the nature of its demands, the medium through which it is expressed, or its intersection with the interests of global capital.

If Ukraine actually splits, will Georgia also?

Georgia has already split!

Oh ffs, I'm so out of touch

I mean I dunno, it looks as if whole chunks of post-Soviet states just don't want to be independent, want to be Russian still

(Abkhazia is now not part of georgia? Or was the pro-Russian part of Georgia called Ossettia?)

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.575732

there is a weird postponed momentum in the way that "nationalism", which was one of the key driving forces toward liberal, democratic Europe in the 19th century, is now continuing along its logical trajectory after a pause for the "bad" nationalisms of Nazism and Soviet expansionism, and yet is viewed thru the prism of those regimes whilst the original impetus towards free democratic nation states is being forgotten by western journos

incidentally fuck nationalism in its liberal forms too but the collective amnesia or ignorance of Euro history is piss-poor

being fascist and pro-EU is a strange combo of positions...

― goole, Saturday, February 22, 2014 1:08 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

its pretty exclusively an eastern european thing

there is a weird postponed momentum in the way that "nationalism", which was one of the key driving forces toward liberal, democratic Europe in the 19th century

Examples?

Germany, Italy, France were formed as nation states in large part due to pressure from nationalist movements - these movements on the whole were progressive and liberal in 19th century terms

France is somewhat different to the other two in terms of geographic borders and pre-existing central government but still pretty much counts in terms of the country as it exists today

basically nationalism = good when it's liberating the great Platonic nation-state from its mean old oppressor but then it's bad when it turns out the Platonic nation-state is full of smaller thwarted nation-states full of people antagonistic to the country they end up in

well i guess theres http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_a_Nation too

the end logic of nationalism is something a wee bit smaller than the city state basically

Was gonna say

yeah H4A there are always counter movements which are often explicitly totalitarian: Moseley, the Nazis that were actually effectual, Napoleon, Soviet expansionism etc

I find it p difficult to work out what to think about the nationalism of people with less money than me and who have a more traumatic political history

But now with all this mention of nationalism, how many of the protesters in Ukraine are actually full nationalists, as opposed to 'opponents of Russian influence'

who knows? i'm not thinking about why people react to oppression, i'm thinking about how that reaction gets represented within our media and how it gets subsumed into reactionary channels

history is full of ideas that serve a useful purpose right up until the point where they do the opposite

xp Oh yeah NV, wasn't meaning to contradict you there. I agree, 'nationalist' is often dropped in scare quotes by newsreaders etc as if, like you said, France, Germany and Italy were not products of nationalism themselves

ok and now i realise the question you was raising is the difference between "Ukrainianism" and "Russia gtf"

http://i.imgur.com/bdoyF5v.jpg

Gandhi was a nationalist who believed in a pluralistic, multi-cultural India free of British control. He was murdered by a completely different set of nationalists who didn't. I don't think the Scottish nationalists are seen as Scottish exceptionalists, they just want full self-determination. That's what I mean when I refer to nationalism in its broader sense in Ukraine. It's when nationalism turns to exclusionary nativism that you have the biggest problems.

Abkhazia is now not part of georgia? Or was the pro-Russian part of Georgia called Ossettia?)

The Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia are both independent of Georgia, in effect, but have very limited international recognition.

yeah i appreciate the complexities, i may have had a few cocktails yesterday evening. still i think my point broadly stands re: western hypocrisy

I think that you are probably right in a European context - in that the (generally leftist) view that the self-determining state could be more liberal than the superstructure of the EU has been on the wane for a long time.

It might be making a mild comeback in the era of austerity, though. The reaction to the EU threatening Switzerland with the exact kind of economic reprisals Russia holds over Ukraine went almost without comment in the liberal press but I get the sense that there is more sympathy towards the popular groups in Ireland, Spain, Greece, etc who reject the idea that national economic policy should be dictated from outside the country, as long as those groups don't explicitly code as right-wing.

there's the added complexity created by those who still view the EU as "Greater Germany" which the EU itself cd be doing a lot more to dispel

Good to know that Ukraine's new acting President is a guy dogged by persistent allegations, backed up by Wikileaks files, that he destroyed police records of collusion between Tymoshenko and Semiyon Mogilevich, long-term star of the FBI's Most Wanted list.

As a continuation of the debate regarding 'nationalism' then and now: I'm pretty tired of people saying The Arab Spring and other revolutions 'turned sour' as if they were thereby bad or pointless. France still celebrates Bastille-day, even though The French Revolution led to terror, massacres and then decades of repressive regimes. Europeans still think fondly of 1848 - well, if they ever think of it at all - even though it only really worked in Denmark, and led to counter-revolutions everywhere else. These things never work completely, there are always set-backs. However, they create opportunity for change, where before there was none. Sometimes the change is good, sometimes it really doesn't go anywhere. And sometimes, as in Syria, the change is quite clearly bad.

But the problem isn't 'revolution'. The problem is repressive regimes closing down every other avenue for change, until the uncertainty of a revolution seems like the only possible way forward.

Yes, I think that's true.

Back to Ukraine and the government has officially voted to de-list Russian and Crimean Tatar as national languages. It almost looks like they're trying to promote a split.

Good to know that Ukraine's new acting President is a guy dogged by persistent allegations, backed up by Wikileaks files, that he destroyed police records of collusion between Tymoshenko and Semiyon Mogilevich, long-term star of the FBI's Most Wanted list.

― Ramnaresh Samhain (ShariVari), Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:01 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ouch. is there anyone of the political class in ukraine that isn't a criminal? i guess that explains the appeal of klitschko (sp?).

But the problem isn't 'revolution'. The problem is repressive regimes closing down every other avenue for change, until the uncertainty of a revolution seems like the only possible way forward.

i'm not sure that really matters, even in the long run. modern "revolutions" have as much or more carnage to their names as old-school monarchies/autocratic regimes. basically, i'm not much of a believer in political "progress" in a world-historical sense.

but of course it's the autocrats and despots who create the conditions that make revolution not just attractive but inevitable. so it's not like i'm blaming revolutionists per se.

http://i.imgur.com/mCdqJvr.jpg

i went to NYT.com this morning and the front page story was about Russia conducting military drills on the Ukraine border - and then all the columns switched to cyrillic and i was like wtf and then the entire screen dissolved and it turned out to be an ad for The Americans which is some bizarre synchronicity w/ reality there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25910834

Great, the acting Chief Prosecutor is from Svoboda, the neo-Fascist party. Fair trials all round.