Central and Eastern Europe Watch

Message to EU Meddlers: Hands Off Hungary

2012-01-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

"Thirty or 40 years ago, the way that the EU and the IMF are behaving towards Hungary would have been described as a classic example of neo-colonial pressure. Unlike Greece, Hungary is not simply being lectured about the need to sort out its economy - it has also been subjected to a veritable culture war. As far as the EU and the Western media are concerned, the real crime of the Hungarian government is not so much its inept economic strategy as its promotion of cultural and political values that run counter to what is deemed correct in Brussels".

"What the Western media overlooked was that the corrupt Gyurcsany government was complicit in creating the conditions for mass demoralisation and cynicism. It was this EU-backed regime that did much to unravel and damage public life in Hungary".

"Moreover, the Western media overlook the democratic deficit that preceded the Orban regime - namely that the earlier constitution of Hungary lacked any democratic mandate. The pre-Orban constitution was enacted on 20 August 1949 as part of the consolidation of the Moscow-dominated Stalinist regime in Hungary. No one in the EU appears to think it odd that an undemocratically enacted constitution imposed on Hungary by a former superpower should be considered morally superior to one based on a democratic mandate.

But then, the EU itself has no inhibitions about imposing its values on to its target audiences. It, too, does not want its constitutional proposals held up to public scrutiny. Sometimes it rules by decree and refuses people’s requests to hold any referenda on EU-related matters, on the basis that the issues are far too complex for ordinary people to understand".

"Opposition to the new constitution, and to the Fidesz regime more broadly, has been both opportunistic and incoherent. A placard on the January demonstration summed up the problem. Written in English, it said: ‘Hey Europe, sorry about my prime minister.’ Clearly, the author of this placard was not addressing the people of Hungary but rather the Western media".

Read the rest of Furedi's brilliant piece here for Spiked Online

Tibor Fischer on Hungary.

2012-01-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

Given the shrill chorus of condemnation against Orban orchestrated by liberal left eur0-elites, it has been left to Tibor Fischer-the British writer of Hungarian parentage- to stand up and put the case for Orban, at least as a politician and person when compared to his opponents.

Indeed the opponents now complaining about Orban appear as mere "bad losers" and come off as hardly better and, in fact, mostly, far worse with regards their corruption, control of the media and power hunger.

This is an excerpt from Fischer's Standpoint article back in March 2011 ( A Hungarian Democrat Takes on the Old Guard ),

If someone in Hungary who didn't speak English, who'd never been to Britain, who had made no study of its culture or history were to start fulminating about the state control of the media in the UK (the sinister Ofcom scouring television channels for "offensive" material at the state's behest), we'd laugh or feel sorrow at such patent lunacy. Yet that's precisely the sort of absurd and uninformed criticism that Orbán and his party Fidesz have faced.

Every country has regulation of the media and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, contained in Hungary's media law that isn't found in other EU countries or the US. Lord Annan's sparkling line that the authorities should "censure but not censor" is the ideal a democracy should work towards, but how do you achieve that? Even in Britain with a long tradition of unfettered news and opinion, we still have arguments about exactly where lines should be drawn (and who should be drawing them).

I'll take as my text the Guardian's coverage of this matter, not because I think it especially objectionable, but because it demonstrates the misjudgments that have abounded around the media law and Viktor Orbán in particular.

The Guardian calls Viktor Orbán "power-hungry". There are very few politicians anywhere who aren't. That's the whole aim of politics. Are Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Obama and Merkel not "power-hungry"? Are footballers reproached for having an unnatural interest in scoring goals?

Then a Guardian editorial (one hopes a little tongue in cheek) had as its title "Hungary: one-party rule". Orbán and Fidesz won the elections last April with 67.88 per cent of the parliamentary seats. Think about that. That's a result that's almost impossible to achieve in a democracy: more than two-thirds of the parliament.

More than half the voters (52.93 per cent) chose Orbán (and there were plenty of other parties to go for — including my favourite, the Two-Tailed Dog Party). That's almost embarrassing in a free election. That's a result that Cameron and Merkel, who barely scraped into power, would cut a limb off for. Think of the "mandate" that confers on you. Is it in the Guardian's view a crime to be popular and successful? Orbán sportingly offered his crushed opponents more seats on parliamentary committees than they were entitled to, but of course his generosity and democratic gesture have gone unrecognised.

Orbán is also styled "a right-wing populist" by the Guardian. Orbán isn't even really right-wing. Like many other anti-communists, merely because of his opposition to a totalitarian system he has been smeared as being far-right or anti-Semitic. Orbán's outlook is more Labour than Conservative (consider his rejection of IMF austerity), but because politicians and journalists in the West can only think in narrow terms of Left and Right, he is placed in that box.

The Guardian reported that the "leading daily newspaper" Népszabadság had as the headline on its front page, "The freedom of the press in Hungary comes to an end". That's accurate reporting, but the Guardian overlooked significant facts. Népszabadság is the leading daily because it was the newspaper of the Communist Party (MSZMP)and it remains the mouthpiece for the Socialist Party (the home of the ex-communists, the oligarchy that still owns and controls most of Hungary from the comfort of the Buda Hills). Népszabadság was the paper that cheered the execution of Hungarians who wanted democracy and free speech, so for it to act as a champion of free speech is like someone from the SS running a workshop on human rights.

Orbán's concern about the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries (where they have been very badly treated) is also interpreted by the Guardian as another manifestation of evil. Curiously, if you're an Arab or a Muslim anywhere in the world you're apparently entirely justified to be aggrieved about the plight of the Palestinians. The Irish are entitled to issue passports to those born in Northern Ireland, but Orbán's notion of giving citizenship to Hungarians three feet on the other side of the border is destabilising Europe.

There is a curious double standard in both politics and the media. If you've been involved at any time with the far-Right, you're a pariah, an odious sicko, no matter how much you recant, but it's OK to play far-Left (one only has to look at the number of British ministers who started off as communists, or the spectacle of Tony Blair campaigning for the ex-Communists in Hungary). One other thing hasn't been considered in the hoo-haa around the media law: the idea that the media in Hungary might need reform.

Hungary had free elections in April 1990 and the communists were out of government. They weren't out of the media. The same people who had been singing about how happy Lenin's birthday made them were still in the television, the radio and the press.

Orbán is the democrat. He risked his neck for democracy — that's more than most of us have done.

Return to Central Europe.

2011-12-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

This blog will resume again in the New Year 2012. At this moment I'm writing a book that I hope will be accepted by a publisher next year. The working title is Pipeline War: The Truth and Reality Behind the Conflict in Afghanistan.

Different Blog, A New Emphasis.

2011-04-27T06:12:00.000-07:00

This blog will not be updated for some time. Though still interested in Central and Eastern Europe, I'm now focusing a lot more on the New Great Game in Central Asia, the prospect of resource wars, Peak Oil, the interconnections between British and US foreign policy and the pursuit of secure oil supplies.

This and the emergence of Islamist movements in the West that seek to use the threat of violence in order to empower Muslims through positing an Islamic hyper identity that will force change in places such as Britain and the possibility this could have, when faced with the collapse of Western control over the Middle East, into intractable conflicts.

My contention is that the British government wants to use that threat in order to advance its foreign policy all the more from Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of "Democratic Geopolitics" which has as its ostensible aim the "war on terrorism" but which is more concerned with using this as a pretext to secure oil supplies.

That and other topics as well.

http://karl-naylor.blogspot.com/

"The New Cold War"-The Opinion of Peter Hitchens.

2011-02-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

Peter Hitchens in his latest work, The Broken Compass ( re-issued as The Cameron Delusion 2010 ), wrote scathingly of the new consensus in politics and diplomacy in Britain as regards the survival of NATO and it's expansion ( preface viii ),

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, bizarrely, continues to exist despite the complete disappearance of the Soviet opponent is was meant to deter.

When Russia recently threatened Georgia, battalions of commentators and politicians in what is still, for lack of a better term, called the West behaved as if this squalid and unimportant territorial squabble between unlovable governments was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forty years before.

Yet it was wholly different. Russia is no longer an ideological state, externally or internally. It no longer seeks global power and in some ways is less interested in the minds of its citizens than are 'Western' countries which demand increasing obedience to the formulas of political correctness. In Russia, you may hold what private opinions you like. Just do not challenge the state. In Britain your private opinions may be reported to the authorities and get you into trouble, even if you believe your actions are part of normal life and you have no wish to challenge the state

The paradox is one of the most alarming facts about the modern world, and is unfortunately too little understood. This is because of the growing conventional wisdom of a 'New Cold War' is taking place between tyrannical Russia and free Britain. This is untrue and pernicious. The invented threat abroad is used to justify a stronger state at home.

Discuss.

Belarus Compared with Latvia

2011-01-20T04:22:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting perspective on Belarus and Latvia offered by US economists Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Summers-The Myth of the Baltic Tigers, The Death of "Social Europe"-which is critical of the doctrinaire IMF neoliberal model imposed upon it in past years.

The standard mantra (as recently rolled out in The Economist) is that Latvia’s taciturn and honest prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, won re-election in October even after imposing the harshest tax and austerity policies ever adopted during peacetime, because the “mature” electorate realized this was necessary, “defying conventional wisdom” by voting in an austerity government.

What is interesting is how politics in Latvia is divided on the basis of ethnicity and how populist nationalism has dovetailed with the imposition of neoliberal economics, whereby the nationalists are a symptom of the disease of which they pretend to be the cure.

Moreover, after the economic collapse of 2009, many Latvians decided to be apathetic or follow large numbers of angry Poles in repudiating their nation and voting with their feet to go and work and live in the West. One more consequence of the mantra of 'There is No Alternative' .

While the economic crisis was deep enough to drive even Latvia’s depoliticized population into the streets in the winter of 2009, most Latvians soon after found the path of least resistance to be simply to emigrate. Neoliberal austerity has created demographic losses exceeding Stalin’s deportations back in the 1940s (although without the latter’s loss of life). As government cutbacks in education, health care and other basic social infrastructure threaten to undercut long-term development, young people are emigrating rather than to suffer in an economy without jobs. Over 12 per cent of the overall population (and a much larger percentage of its labor force) now works abroad.

A land with hardly more than a million people lost 100,000 of its youngest and most ambitious to emigration after EU accession, almost half of them to Ireland. The Latvian government then toyed with importing workers from Ghana.

This is a fact never mentioned by those Euro-Atlanticists such as Timothy Garton Ash as such facts are subversive but some facts are more subversive than others, not least if the facts are used to prove the prescriptions of an Atlanticist narrative of neoliberalism and "People Power".

One Latvian one remarked that "During the Cold War we all dreamed of leaving but the risk is that everyone leaves, then the country will disappear". Hudson and Summers compare that with performance with Belarus whilst offering no rationalisation for authoritarian rule.

Given the geographic proximity of Latvia and Belarus, it is illuminating to compare how neoliberals have assessed their respective economies. Latvia suffered Europe’s largest economic collapse in 2008 and 2009, with continuing double-digit unemployment. Its economy will show no growth until this year (2011), and its modest growth likely will remain accompanied by double-digit unemployment. A huge slice of its population has evacuated the country, leaving many children with relatives or to fend for themselves. Neighboring Belarus, with few of Latvia’s geographic advantages (ports and beaches), has a per capital GDP not too far behind Latvia’s. Belarus had a boom with double-digit growth before the crisis, and kept its economy at full employment during the crisis rather than collapsing by the 25 per cent rate that plagued Latvia. Belarus also has a GINI coefficient (inequality) roughly on par with Sweden, while Latvia’s is closer to the widening inequality levels that now characterize the United States.
Yet neoliberal Latvia is declared a success model and Belarus a failure. The CIA’s World Factbook reminds its readers that Belarus’s economic performance occurred “despite the roadblocks of a tough, centrally directed economy.” This is the standard characterization of Belarus. But one needs to ask to what degree its success may reflect its central planning. Latvia has produced greater political freedom for dissidents, but Belarus has less economic inequality and foreign debt.

Every economy in history has been a mixed economy. We are not defending Comrade Lukashenko’s media and political repression in Belarus. We simply are not going to the opposite extreme of applauding Latvia’s neoliberal model. One can criticize Belarus’ political system without endorsing the electoral oligarchy that characterizes much of Latvia’s political life. Yet win or lose on economic outcomes, in the western press and academies Latvia and the Starving Baltic Tigers will be declared the winners, while Belarus always will be declared the loser on economic performance, regardless of achievement. You will not see a measured look at both nations’ economies to examine objectively where they are succeeding and failing (including by sector) with an eye for what lessons might be derived from such an investigation. Economic comparisons are entirely political.
Our intention is not to blame the Latvian nation for the cruel neoliberal policy experiment to which it has been subjected, to question the global community of policymakers, intellectuals and some of Latvia’s own elites that persist in pursuing this failed policy and even recommend it to other countries as a path of growth rather than economic and demographic suicide.

Perhaps one day those such as Garton Ash can start to deal with the stark and depressing reality of undemocratic IMF "reforms" and the mantra of There is No Alternative, as it is one that has vastly diminished the People Power creed he continually advocates.

The Best Democratic Opposition Money can Buy in Russia.

2011-01-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

The problem with liberals lecturing Russia about the repressive measures used by Putin to disperse demonstrations is that Putin has been able to do so because few in Russia actually care about the Western backed "opposition", many of whom consistently backed a Yeltsin regime that had an appalling record on human rights in the 1990s.

Simon Tisdall writes in the Guardian today,,

The jailing of several leading opposition figures, including former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, has hammered another large nail into the coffin of free expression in Russia, human rights activists and foreign observers say.

Many Western media outlets only seem to be interested in human rights when that means the human rights of those such as Nemtsov who as Mayor of Nizhinii Novgorod and fanatical supporter of Chubais "shock therapy" plunged millions of Russians into starvation and appalling poverty whilst looting the economy.

These oligarchs are no less ruthless that Putin's new Russian state. The reason their cause is supported by those such as Edward Lucas ( "The New Cold War" ) and Simon Tisdall is that the wrong oligarchs are in power in Russia. Tisdall writes,

Anxious perhaps to dispel any impression he was abashed by the Khodorkovsky uproar, Putin sent in the heavies. Nemtsov was arrested and jailed for 15 days for "disobeying police". Three other opposition leaders – Eduard Limonov, Konstantin Kosyakin and Ilya Yashin – were also incarcerated.

There is no mention, of course, that Limonov is explicitly a Fascist who has run a movement named "The National Bolsheviks" that uses explicit Nazi and Soviet insignia and Fascist policies and threatening mob demonstrations.

There is a difference between the idea that people ought to have freedom of assembly and protest and the notion that those complaining about being restricted in their protests by having to get permission from the Kremlin are necessarily virtuous martyrs for democracy.

It is about time serious consideration was given to the way monied oligarchs and those able to project media power are able to use human rights cynically as a way of gaining influence and possibly power by exploiting the shortcomings of the current regime.

To support Nemstov and Limanov is about as much of an "ethical foreign policy" as the West supporting somebody such as Pinochet had Allende's government resorted to the repression of opponents to secure power and Pinochet had then cited human rights as a reason he should gain power.

The opposition is funded by US NGO's in a way that simply would not be tolerated in Washington on the scale it is in Russia. Russians both the new emerging middle class and the workers and peasants are not going to be lectured by Washington think tanks, "The Other Russia" or Garry Kasparov.

To promote liberal democracy in Russia means neither supporting Putin nor the opposition which is full of those ruthless ideologues who were discredited by being part of a regime under Yeltsin that forcibly closed down the Duma in 1993, shelled the building and used military force to kill demonstrators.

Western liberals need to understand how and why Putin has been able to secure power and why he is popular compared to those like Nemtsov whose Union of Rightist Forces are detested. Citing anti-semitism ( Khodorkovsky and Nemtsov are Jewish) is an evasion and does not provide the deeper reason.

For the fact is that Putin's managed democracy, whatever people think about it in the West, has delivered better living standards and has not dispersed protesters with guns, tanks and helicopters. Nemstov has been put in prison for 15 days for leading that protest, something that will make Putin popular.

The "liberal" opposition in Russia was anything but when shock therapists such as Gaidar and Chumais and Nemtsov ruled Russia. Neoliberal policies led to a collapse in living standards whilst billions enriched the oligarchs who siphoned off wealth no less than Western businesses.

The hypocrisy of those such as Lucas and Tisdall is gliding over the sordidness of the "transition" remains an obstacle to convincing many in Russia that a strong state that will protect the country from Western energy and banking corporations and mafia style oligarchs controlling it again.

The reason the energy hungry West continually supports those such as Yabloko, the Union of Rightist Forces and neoliberal shock therapy fanatics as it would ideally aim at breaking up Gazprom, to gain a stake in Russia's vast oil and gas reserves and destroy Russia as a global player.

There is no possible way that Russia would ever allow that to happen again and so the support for those as Limanov and Nemstov is not only unethical as a foreign policy but also completely unrealistic. Putin would not care less if David Cameron snubbed him or lectured him about human rights or the war with Georgia in 2008 ( which Georgia initiated ).

More broadly, there is however something increasingly ominous about how in East and West democracy is becoming controlled by the money and media power of corporations, plutocrats and oligarchs. In that sense, it seems Russia, EU states and the USA are increasingly learning from one another.

Supporting freedom of conscience and assembly is right as both are essential human rights. For that Putin has been rightly criticised. Yet it should not follow that Western figures should see the repression of certain oppositionists as proof that the oppositionists are thus rightful democracy lovers.

That would be as absurd as pretending that the Bolsheviks just because they were against the Tsar, were necessarily better due the repressive nature of Tsarism and the Okhrana. The same should apply to neoliberal Market Bolsheviks.

Increasingly oppositionists in less developed nations in post-Soviet nations are becoming only "the best democracy that money can buy" and where the considerations of ordinary people are passed over in greedy and rapacious elite struggles.

Failed People Power. 2006 Repeated in Belarus.

2010-12-27T07:43:00.000-08:00

With the protests over the elections in Minsk having achieved little, one of the most incisive commentaries written on Belarus in 2006 at the time of the abortive "Denim Revolution" was by Jonathan Steele who did not denigrate the opposition but provided an objective analysis about why its not that popular ( Europe and the US decide the winner before the vote, The Guardian, Friday 10 March 2006 )

Would you expect a European leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years, culminating in a 24% rise over the past 12 months, to be voted out of office? What if he has also cut VAT, brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region?

Of course not, you would say. In Bill Clinton's famous phrase, "it's the economy, stupid". Unless there are overriding issues of political or personal insecurity - incipient civil war, ethnic cleansing, mass arrests, pervasive crime on the streets - most people will vote according to their pocketbooks. And so it is likely to be in Belarus in nine days' time.
Why, then, are western governments, echoed by most western media, developing a crescendo of one-sided reporting and comment on one of Europe's smallest countries? Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, last year called it an "outpost of tyranny". Stephen Hadley, the US national security adviser, recently complained that "there is not enough outrage and international attention on Belarus". As if on cue, we now have thundering editorials and loaded reports in America and Europe claiming the imminent election is a farce and the regime deeply unpopular.
We saw similar conformism little more than a year ago in Ukraine, when one side was glorified to the skies, as if only a tiny minority of benighted Sovietera automatons did not support the pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. His opponent actually got 44% of the vote, and may even emerge with the highest number of votes in Ukraine's parliamentary elections in two weeks.
In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko is certainly no liberal. He manipulates state television; he bans distribution of critical newspapers from state-owned kiosks (which are the majority), and often has those that are printed abroad confiscated at the border; he makes it hard for opposition parties to hold rallies; and he uses the police in a partisan and frequently brutal way. Students fear expulsion and government employees the sack if they join protests.
This was already true in 1996 when I monitored a constitutional referendum on behalf of the European Institute for the Media and reported that the electoral climate was neither free nor fair. At that stage Lukashenko had only been in power for two years. An authoritarian populist and control freak then, he has remained true to form (not, however, a communist; Belarus has two communist parties, one of which is illegal).
The change is in the economy. Like other former Soviet republics, Belarus suffered a massive collapse after 1991, with output dropping by more than half thanks to "shock therapy" reforms. But in 12 years of power Lukashenko has righted that, as my opening statistics show (all taken from the IMF's country report on Belarus in June 2005).
I haven't been in Belarus for 10 years, but residents I speak to on the phone, as well as western visitors, report that most people are satisfied with their living standards. Many have family or other ties to Russia, their giant neighbour, and feel grateful for the stability, moderation and absence of an oligarch-dominated economy that Belarus enjoys.
Contrary to claims that Lukashenko's repression has produced an "information black hole", the choice of news is wider than in 1996. The EU-funded EuroNews channel is available on cable, which millions of people have, and access to uncensored websites is easy in internet clubs and cafes or at home.
Despite this, there is a huge campaign by foreign governments to intervene in the Belarussian poll, even more controversially than in Ukraine in 2004. While Russia is hardly engaged in this election, Europe and the US are pumping in money. According to the New York Times, cash is being smuggled from the US National Endowment for Democracy, Britain's Westminster Foundation and the German foreign ministry directly to Khopits, a network of young anti-Lukashenko activists.
Poland has reopened a state-owned radio station on its eastern border to beam programmes across Belarus, while the German government's Deutsche Welle started broadcasts to Belarus this year. Alexander Milinkevich, the main opposition candidate, has been touring European capitals and getting endorsements that amount to blatant interference in a foreign electoral contest.
Some of this foreign money will be used to fund street protests promised by opposition activists if Lukashenko is declared the winner. They have already dubbed it the "denim revolution", giving supporters little bits of the cloth as symbols to copy the successful demonstrations in Ukraine and Georgia.
But why is the US, with the EU in its wake, so concerned about Belarus? Is it because Belarus stands out as the only ex-Soviet country that maintains majority state ownership of the economy and gets good results? Is ideological deviance forbidden? (The IMF, while admitting Lukashenko's economic success, calls it "ultimately unsustainable", being based on cheap Russian energy imports and wage increases that outstrip productivity growth.) Is the problem Lukashenko's independence, his friendliness to Russia and resistance to Nato, his abrasive, don't-push-me-around style? As one Minsk resident put it to me, he's a "Slavic Castro".
The revolt against Lukashenko within Belarus is genuine, idealistic and, in some cases, courageous. As in the rest of eastern Europe, nationalist intellectuals and the urban elite, particularly in the capital, include many who want change and feel the rewards are worth the risk. They want the west's moral support and its freedom, as well as its money. But they are not the majority. A poll in January by Gallup/Baltic Surveys, and reported in the emigre Belarusian Review, found only 17% in favour of Milinkevich and nearly 55% supporting Lukashenko.
Western funders claim their motives are innocent, with help offered merely to develop "democracy" and "European values". In that case they should insist that the groups and the media they aid in Belarus are fair, accurate and intelligent, rather than one-sided demonisers of their opponents, mirroring Lukashenko's approach. But when western media, despite their vaunted objectivity and years of democratic experience, also report on Belarus in a way that is narrow and partisan, this is asking a lot.

Lukashenko and "The Chinese Model".

2010-12-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

One reason why Lukashenko was able to claim a 79% re-election victory and ignore the EU's demands for a free and fair election, even though he was offered $3bn by Polish and German ministers if he did not tamper with election results, is said to have been the deal he made with Russia,

Europe's Mugabe only dared to act in this way because, 10 days before the election, he unexpectedly secured a deal with Russia. This once again gives him subsidised oil, which he can sell on at a profit. For his part, he agreed the terms of a "single economic space" with Russia and Kazakhstan.

Before that, the boot had been on the other foot. Russia seemed to have had enough of Lukashenko: a Russian TV channel owned by Gazprom even aired a four-part series attacking him as a corrupt godfather.

Yet an interesting perspective was offered today by the Financial Times which claims that economic liberalisation will happen in Belarus in 2011, one reason perhaps why despite condemnations there is not much more from the West and why Lukashenko has been able to clamp down on what he calls "senseless democracy".

Alesia Sidliarevich writes (Belarus’ Lukashenko re-election roils but economic liberalisation key to future )

According to preliminary results announced by Belarusian authorities, Lukashenko gained 79.68% of votes at the presidential elections on Sunday. Thousands-strong protests gathered in Minsk that evening to contest the ballot result, prompting a brutal police response and detention of seven presidential candidates from opposition, according to international media reports.
Few doubt however that Lukashenko will retain the presidency and in doing so extend his 16-year rule until 2015. His major challenge then will be to liberalise the Belarusian economy and draw in foreign investment by kick-starting a stalled privatisation programme.
Welcoming foreigners
Economic conditions in the landlocked Eastern European country bordering Russia have slowly improved following the government’s decision to fully draw down a USD 3.6bn standby loan from the IMF last year. The country is projected to shrink its current account deficit from 13% in 2009 to 9.7% this year. Nevertheless, it has needed to venture into the international capital markets to bolster reserves.

On the subject of national debts the FT reported a fairly rosy economic picture in some ways compared to the notion that Belarus is some version of Zimbabwe or North Korea.

Belarus does not have any major short-term debt repayments to make, with its first major redemption of USD 2.5bn due in 2013, according to Siargey Chaly, a Minsk-based economist. The country’s foreign debt, which consists mainly of inter-governmental agreements, is quite cheap and pays an average of 300bps over Libor, he said.
Privatizing state enterprises through competitive tenders should bring more benefits to the government than direct sale negotiations, said Giovanni Salvetti, Rothschild‘s managing director overseeing Central and Eastern Europe. “If privatisation is handled in a ‘Western’ way [via competitive tenders] I would expect significant interest from foreign investors in certain sectors,” he added.
High stakes
But privatisation will be a painful process without measures to create additional jobs and a more liberal economic climate, said Ramanchuk. “The Belarusian economic situation mirrors the Soviet Union in the year 1985,” he added, noting that one of the chief points of his election programme was support for small and medium-sized businesses.
Lukashenko has held back from unpopular moves to privatize state enterprises until after the election, but a source close to the Belarusian government said the president will have to re-start plans next year. “Belarusian enterprises are 30%-40% over-employed. Politically speaking, privatisation is a very bad move, but the government does not have a choice. It needs to do it to get foreign funding,” the source said.
Belarus may decide to privatise companies within the financial, construction materials, consumer goods, pharmaceutical and energy sectors, among others, according to Salvetti at Rothschild.
Belgosstrakh, Belinvestbank and Belagroprombank could be up for sale, along with pharmaceutical company Borimed, refinery Naftan Novopolotsk and various cement plants, said the source close to the government. The state would consider full sales, or the disposal of majority or 25% stakes, he added. Belarus also negotiated to sell fertiliser producer Belaruskali to a Chinese buyer at the start of the year but could not agree the price.

This goes some way to explaining why Lukashenko has been able to retain power. He has played off all the global investors against one another. It also proves that there is no necessary correlation between economic liberalisation and democracy as China has proved and why he seems to be aiming at creating a European version of the "Chinese" or "Singaporean" model.

There would be nothing out of character here given that Kazakhstan is allowed to be Chairman of the OSCE despite the fact that it actually criticises the elections there as flawed as well and has a one party state run by Nursultan Nazarbayev one which is far more repressive and more obviously authoritarian than even Belarus. Then again it has copious supplies of oil and gas.

There has been no widespread criticism of Kazakhstan's human rights violations and repression and it has not been publicly referred to in mainstream papers such as The Guardian as being a brutal dictatorship in quite the same way, probably because it lies on the Asian side of Russia.

In fact, in 2009, former UK cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken released a biography of the Kazakhstani leader entitled Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan. The book takes a generally pro-Nazarbayev stance, asserting in the introduction that he is mostly responsible for the success of modern Kazakhstan.

Lukashenko has learnt the lesson that it is possible to use force to deal with protesters as there is nothing even the EU will be prepared to do if he can stave off political challenges, as weak as they are, long enough for him to get the economy booming and investment from privatisations pouring in.

"This Robert Mugabe of Eastern Europe" ?

2010-12-23T10:26:00.000-08:00

When youthful photogenic and idealistic youth activists contest the results of what seems a fraudulent election in Belarus on the streets in central Minsk, it seems like bad form to spoil that by asking questions about what the oppositionists stand for beyond getting rid of the authoritarian hardman who has lead the nation since 1994

Timothy Garton Ash has written of the protests following Lukashenko's "re-election" that the Belarussian leader is "Europe's Mugabe" (Belarus may seem a far away country, but we have to confront Europe's Mugabe, Wednesday 22 December 2010 )

"Lukashenko did not need to crack down so brutally to stay in power – as this Robert Mugabe of eastern Europe has done since 1994. Having opened up state television to opposition candidates, and made a show of meeting the EU's demands for a free and fair election, he could have rigged the vote just enough to get back in. He could have let the weak and divided opposition go on protesting for a few days in a freezing Minsk, and then quietly cleared away the remaining protesters from Independence Square while western leaders were celebrating their Christmas.
Why be so brutal? Why rub their faces in it? One answer, which invariably pops up in such circumstances, is divisions within the ruling apparatus. Hardliners got the upper hand. There may be some truth in this; but another, simpler explanation was given to me by Andrey Dynko, editor of the leading Belarussian weekly, Nasha Niva. Lukashenko, reverting to what Dynko calls "Russian autocratic tradition", simply wanted to get the levels of fear back up to a healthy (for the autocrat) level. National fear standards had fallen alarmingly over the last few years of relative liberalisation and opening to the west. Better teach his people a lesson again. National fear must be kept higher than national debt".

Yet what Garton Ash does not mention is that the debts of similar sized Baltic states are colossal too after having had 20 years of IMF adjustment programmes and austerity measures only to develop a nation with lower social provision than in Belarus, ghost villages, mass migration and yet another economic collapse after the 2008 crash.

The fact that Alexander Lukashenko resorted to brute force in getting the police to crush demonstrations in Minsk still does not mean he is a Stalinist dictator. Even without the electoral irregularities or allegations of fraud he would, according to many credible sources, still command a vote in excess of that gained by the various oppositionists.

The reason Lukashenko has remained popular and has continued in office in Belarus lies less in his use of detention without trial for days and harassment techniques, as repellent as they are, but because after he came to power in 1994 he preserved the nation from the chaos and immiseration caused by the IMF's neoliberal "freedom" in Yeltsin's Russia.

As Ben Smith in the Wall Street Journal commented,

For ordinary people in most of the former Soviet Union, the prosperity the West offered them at the end of the Cold War has failed to materialize......the bulk of the population looks to Belarus’s big neighbors to the east and south, Russia and Ukraine. What they see there is chaos.
The fear of change is particularly evident in the countryside, home to about a third of the Belarussian population. In the village of Knjazhitsy in eastern Belarus, everybody has a cousin in Russia, Ukraine or one of Belarus's sister republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Knjazhitsy is a village of 460, and there is just one shop. In the Soviet tradition, the shop is called “shop” and it is long on vodka but short on vegetables — on Tuesday, just six aging eggplants. Talking politics in Knjazhitsy means talking about how much worse it could be. The shopkeeper, Lubov Ivanova, left her home in Kazakhstan in 1992 when her factory shut down. She says that she has no regrets, and that her friends back home tell her “they are starving.”
Under Mr. Lukashenko, Belarus has closed none of its massive Soviet era factories, which hemorrhage money and produce generally shoddy equipment. Inefficient collective farms are still growing strong. Private prosperity is rare: The top 10 percent of Belarussian society is just three times richer than the bottom 10 percent, according to United Nations figures. In Russia, the top 10 percent is 23 times richer. In Ukraine, workers are owed hundreds of millions of dollars in wage arrears, and four out of five residents expect to die in poverty, according to the U.N.’s International Labor Office.
In the Belarussian countryside, the anecdotes are more powerful than the statistics. A retired teacher who came to the store to pick up bread says her sister in Ukraine needs to spend her entire pension on gas heat to survive the winter. “When my sister visits [Belarus] she tells me, ‘Take care of your Lukashenko, or else the same thing will happen to you that is happening to us,’” Svetlana Petrova says. She, like most of the people of Knjazhitsy, voted for Lukashenko.
The perception that ordinary people are doing better in Belarus’s stagnant economy than they would in a time of reform is hardly unique to Knjazhitsy. The most recent poll on Belarussians’ perceptions of their neighbors revealed that more than 50 percent of Belarussians think they live better than Ukrainians and only 10 percent say they live worse, the 1999 poll by the Independent Institute for Socio-Political Research in Minsk found.

In the "Denim Revolution" of 2006 Garton Ash was critical of those who he believed invoked the "iron rice bowl" rationalisation for the lack of freedom in Belarus, one that presupposed that this strange remnant of post-Soviet Russia had withheld freedoms for the illusion of economic security that was wretchedly low.

Yet Belarus has an income per head comparable with Bulgaria, Romania and Russia and with the maintenance of relatively good pensions, healthcare and other social provisions. That minimal social safety net is not a sufficient reason for there being no attempt to liberalise the regime in Belarus but it does help explain why he has not met the fate of Ceaucescu.

Freedom is freedom but the real question dodged by those giving full unconditional support to the oppositionists is if and when Lukashenko goes what kind of reforms would be introduced in the economy. For its a fact of realpolitik that Bat'ka plays on that fear of "instability" to gain support.

If the opposition were so popular as Solidarity undoubtedly were in Poland during the 1980s, then it is inconceivable that Lukashenko would be able remain in power or that more than 10,000 demonstrators would not appear to protest. There would be no room even for the "managed" democracy on offer there now.

That has less to do with some constant nightmare climate of fear but with indifference and the belief common in Belarus that the various democracy promotion activists are selfish individuals who care more about getting rid of the so-called "social market state" in order to get a slice of the privatisation pie once he has gone.

Fear of social change, unemployment, a collapse in living standards are not mere "fears of change" but very real. If there were to be beneficial change in Belarus, then the opposition should be more transparent in coming forth with the details of their plans to reform the economy.

There is nothing from Charter97 on this. But the Internet is not banned. Citizens there can find out what is happening in the world, even if there were disruptions to the service up to the election. People in Belarus know about what happened in Russia. The life expectancy for men is 55. In Belarus its 69.

In Poland unemployment rates were stubbornly up to 20% in many parts of the rural areas before mass migration after 2004, a stubborn economic fact of life seldom dwelt on by Garton Ash who has never really had that much critical to say about "shock therapy" once the camera had moved on from the struggle to get rid of Soviet Communism.

The Charter97 movement was modelled on Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia but its has been forgotten that many signatories back then were as scathing of Soviet command systems as they were critical of the USA's form of capitalism, something that seems absent from anything the opposition in Belarus offer.

There is no lack of logical consistency in calling for democratic freedom in Belarus and for accountability from the opposition in Belarus too, more transparency about their plans for reform, their financing, the stance on NATO entry and so on. If they are fearless champions of democracy, they need not fear being open on that.

For as Garton Ash has insisted, it is for the people in Belarus to decide. That would be real People Power and not simply a means of empowering networking activists who will align themselves with global TNCs to to act as consultants in ruthlessly asset stripping Belarus should Lukashenko be removed.

Nothing Garton Ash has written on Belarus has looked at what opposition leaders stand for beyond getting rid of Lukashenko. There have been continual reshuffles and new candidates thrown up over the years before each election. Yet none has reached a global audience as Havel or Walesa did.

There is no charismatic leader emerging from within Belarus and sincere dissidents such as Zianon Pazniak have rejected current oppositionists.

The last candidate with some appeal was supposed to have been Aliaksandr Milinkievič who gave an interview with Euronews in 2008 in which he was given a voice over in English where he said this,

"The most important thing is, apart from repression, in the economy there is no reform. In terms of investment we are the worst in Europe, our economy hasn't been modernised, it's certainly not competitive. We would need two or three years to correct this"

The problem is that, apart from the repression, that is not the truth. Investment has come in from the EU and Russia in the last few years on a scale unprecedented, even under Lukashenko, and if the economy is as bad as Milinkievic states then it would take more than a a couple of years to correct it.

Those with a conscience will not only be thinking of those battered and beaten by a repressive police apparatus but also of those who were shoved brutally into penury by shock therapy in the 1990s and how the economy would be reformed after liberation without handing control over to those who would loot the economy and cause chaos again.

........................................................................

Garton Ash responded "don't you think Belarussians should be free to choose their economic policy, even if they choose 'wrong' from your, and possibly even their point of view?"

The answer is yes. The question is which Belarussians and that should mean not just "some" Belarussians with connections and the networking skills that will allow them to profit as they act as consultants for TNC's asset stripping and robbing the country. Unless those who will be called upon to help get rid of Lukashenko can be rejected after they are no longer useful.

What Garton Ash misses is that there was no majority of people in any nation before 1989 in Central Europe who would have willingly acceded to shock therapy. That is why the opposition need to explain this time, since the last time it had such negative effects, why political freedom should not mean economic improvement as well or, at least, not a large painful deterioration.

Decide their own economic policy is what Belarussians will not be able to do if oppositionists necessarily follow the path of other states such as Latvia and Lithuania and ceding sovereignty in economic matters to Washington and the IMF. Which is why it is incumbent upon the opposition groups to outline their economic plans clearly and openly.

It as though Garton Ash thinks it is cynical to even mention the economic policies that would follow in the wake of a successful "People Power" revolution at a time when those protesting against the more obvious evils of election rigging, though its odd that he has never once mentioned Georgia's election in 2004 in this regard nor Saakashvili's record of repression.

...........................................

"In Belarus we have our own European Burma".

In fact, Belarus would be better compared with Georgia than to nations such as Burma as in Belarus, unlike Burma which has been termed "a textbook example of police state" by Brad Adams, director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, where spies are everywhere, sexual slavery is normal as well as forced labour and systemic rapes carried out by the military.

But it is curious that such comparisons with repressive states backed by the West in the post-Soviet orbit are not made. Not least as Saakashvili is an ally in the geopolitical New Great Game for control of pipelines and the pursuit of power through controlling energy in Central Asia.

Indeed in 2005, Saakashvili was an esteemed guest in Poland for a 25th anniversary commemoration where the leader of Georgia, now severely criticised by human rights groups for his aggression against South Ossetia in the war of 2008 and who was ramping up nationalist passions long before then, was feted.

Gathered to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, the presidents of Georgia and Ukraine, Mikhail Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, were greeted with standing ovations as they declared that Solidarity's example should inspire democracy activists in Belarus to topple the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, who expects to be re-elected next year.
Mr Saakashvili and Mr Yushchenko, leaders of "rose" and "orange" revolutions in their countries in the past two years, called for August 31 - the day in 1980 that the communist bloc's first free trade union was born in a Gdansk shipyard - to be declared an international day of freedom and solidarity.
To rousing applause, Mr Saakashvili said that following the Solidarity-led revolutions of 1989, the post-Soviet region was in the throes of "a second wave of liberation of Europe".
"I am sure there will be more. Freedom and democracy will prevail everywhere, including in Belarus".

To have this corrupt kleptocrat and president of a regime based on a fraudulent election in which he got 96% of the vote lecture the world on freedom, including Belarus, makes a farce of the notion of 'People Power revolutions' or "Colour Revolutions" choreographed by those with geopolitical interests in expanding the EU and NATO.

.............................

The obvious problem with 'Colour Revolutions' is that they have become a discredited brand to market to a global audience. Where people see that "regime change" necessarily means poverty and more corruption as in Georgia and Ukraine after the "rose" and "orange" revolutions then they will not buy it.

Kosovo: Ethnic cleansing, Rigged Elections and Organ Trafficking.

2010-12-21T17:01:00.000-08:00

"I did what was right. I did what was just. I did not regret it then. I do not regret it now,"-Tony Blair 09 2010

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let's start giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
It's true we'll make a better day
Just you and me

Send them your heart
So they'll know that someone cares

( We Are the World-Lyrics )

The reaction to investigations of the head of the KLA para state in Kosovo Hasim Thaci and his Drebenda gang, in being implicated in the sale of human organs from Serbian prisoners of war threatens, to call into question the nature of the Kosovo War in 1999, what Peter Hitchens has termed the "dry run" for the later disaster in Iraq.

Tim Judah, an established journalist and historian of the conflict has written in the Daily Telegraph ( Blair's Kosovo triumph turns sour 19 Dec 2010)

In a report for the Council of Europe which took two years to compile, he has accused Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of newly independent Kosovo, not only of being a mafia boss, a murderer and a drug dealer – but of having been involved with a group that in 1999 killed prisoners to sell their kidneys.

In Kosovo, which was already reeling from allegations that Mr Thaci's party had indulged in what a senior diplomat called "industrial scale" fraud during last Sunday's elections, the report has been greeted with dismay.

At the time the impact of the intervention in Kosovo could be weighted towards the NATO feeling that something needed to be done to bring closure to the Third Balkan Wars, which had been seen to have begun in Kosovo with Milosevic's speech announcing the revival of Greater Serbian nationalism in 1989.

Judah writes that with the 78 day campaign the impact at the time was at best hardly conclusively successful as a "humanitarian intervention",

.....as Serbia capitulated and its police and army pulled out, the boot was on the other foot. As hundreds of thousands of ethnically cleansed Albanian refugees returned, they exacted revenge on the minority Serb enclaves in their own territory, with the KLA playing a leading role.Moreover, Nato troops were effectively told to turn a blind eye to some of what went on.

The rest of Judah's article is here

Today Mr Clinton is immortalised in a bronze statue in Pristina, and last summer Mr Blair was greeted by thousands when he visited. He was also introduced to a group of "Toniblers", boys named in his honour. Hobnobbing with Mr Thaci, it was smiles all round.
If ever it is proved that the KLA leader whom Mr Blair backed was really a mafia boss, a murderer and traded in human organs, then the history of that campaign will have to be rewritten – and the gloss put on it by Mr Blair will vanish.

The most damning of Mr Marty's claims is that a number of Serb and other prisoners who had been moved to Albania in the wake of the war were executed and their organs sold. The claim was first made publicly by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague in a book in 2008. Subsequent investigations have failed to prove the claims, which Mr Thaci says are defamatory.

The EU's police and justice mission in Kosovo, known as EULEX, has also looked at the case of the so-called "Yellow house" in Albania where some of the organ-harvesting operations are said to have taken place. But unlike Mr Marty, it notes that "to date, our prosecutors have found no evidence or intelligence that would lead us to believe that 'organ harvesting' took place at this location."

There are, however, other allegations that are very real and very current. A courthouse in Pristina heard last week how seven Kosovars were part of an elaborate international "organs for cash" network, in which donors from poor countries such as Moldova, Turkey and Kazakhstan donated their body parts to wealthy patients on the promise of payments of up to EU 15,000 at a time.

Prosecutors named a Turkish surgeon, Yusuf Sonmez, as a conduit between the donors and the patients, with the racket operating from the Medicus clinic in a run-down suburb of Pristina until late 2008. Mr Sonmez, who has been nicknamed "Doctor Vulture", is currently the subject of an international manhunt, although he denies the allegations against him. While no connection has yet been found between the current trafficking allegations and the "organ harvesting" claims of a decade ago, some doubt whether it can be purely coincidence.

Defending his report on Thursday, Mr Marty added that he often seen "terror" in the eyes of witnesses he had talked to. "We discovered that these things were known by intelligence services from the different countries," he said. "It was known by police services. It was known by numerous people who, in private, would say 'Yes we know, but for political reasons we made the choice or we have the duty to remain silent.'"

On Belarus, Fraud and the Future.

2010-12-21T06:51:00.000-08:00

With the controversy over alleged electoral fraud in Belarus continuing, it interesting to note what one Paul Wesson, who claims to have been an OSCE election observer, has argued

The observers, despite the wild allegations against all of us, are by and large fair minded, educated. individuals from a cross section of backgrounds and, at this election, 44 different countries (precisely to deal with the allegations of bias).

Which makes it curious why the OSCE did not proclaim Saakashvili's rather high 96% election victory in Georgia in January 2004 as being flawed and why there were no serious rival opponents challenging Saakashvili after the "Rose Revolution" late in the previous year against Schevardnadze's government.

Mikheil Saakashvili 1,692,728 96.0

Teimuraz Shashiashvili 33,868 1.9

Roin Liparteliani 4,248 0.2

Zaza Sikharulidze 4,098 0.2

Kartlos Garibashvili 3,582 0.2

Zurab Kelekhsashvili 1,631 0.1

Against all 22,817 1.3

Total 82.8 % turnout, 1,762,972 registered voters 1,762,972 100.0

This was then followed by the claim,

...you seem to wish to perpetuate Lukashenko on the basis that the opposition cannot produce an economic argument, therefore they must not be voted for...the Belarusian 'books' are not open for inspection by the Belarusian people, therefore nobody can ever formulate a different economic policy to the one on offer.

There is no moral reason to "perpetuate" Lukashenko. Yet individuals outside Belarus cannot change the facts as they are overnight.

That oppositionists cannot even hazard a guess as to the kind of economic reforms they would put forward in the event of Lukashenko being removed from power. This does not make much sense. Charter97 says "no to dictatorial privatisation". But not to corrupt privatisations decided upon from unaccountable elites from above with little consent from below.

Besides Lukashenko not being a Stalin, they fail to say what sort of privatisation would happen on removing Lukashenko by peaceful methods. Given that privatisation is already happening in 2011, the chances could be that eventually the regime will cede political power as under Franco in Spain in the 1970s.

The key issue is: on what basis would Belarus move from having 70% of its industry controlled by the state sector. Would the oppositionists impose shock therapy or would they give guarantees that vital Belarus' industries would not be "downsized" and asset stripped and social provisions and pensions remain in tact? After all, it's for the people to decide.

But they cannot make a decision unless the opposition gives an outline of the sort of economic changes it would think need to be introduced. It is incumbent on the opposition to be transparent about where they get their funding from and what economic model they propose for Belarus.

The contradiction in arguing for transparency and openness whilst not disclosing what the economic plans for Belarus are once Lukashenko goes is one reason he can discredit them. If there were the groundswell of popular opinion for change then Lukashenko would not be able to defeat the oppositionists.

Even the Charter97 news agency lacks accountability, posing as a forum for dissent whilst censoring or refusing to have any comment online that asks questions about their economic policy or where many of the designer outfits agitating for change get their money from. Clarity on that has not been forthcoming.

The age of the heroic dissident seems to have died out after 1989. If there are those like Oscar Paya in Cuba who is equally opposed to the Castro junta and US style neoliberal "reforms" destroying social provision, then their voice is not being heard. It is odd that Belarus does not seem to have dissidents of the same sort.

Interestingly, Anne Applebaum, wife of Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, has argued in The Washington Post that is is precisely the failure to fund opposition enough has led Lukashenko to rig elections, batter protesters, and she accepts the claims of the Polish based Belsat that his true level of support is really around 30%.

This....is what the "decline of the West" looks like in the eastern half of Europe: The United States and Europe, out of money and out of ideas, scarcely fund the Belarusan opposition. Russia, flush with oil money once again, has agreed to back Lukashenko and fund his regime. Let's hope it costs them a lot more than they expect.

Yet this contradicts what numerous other sources have claimed about Lukashenko's popularity and Belsat may or may not be right. Moreover, Applebaum claims,

European foreign ministers cannot guarantee Lukashenko personal wealth. They cannot offer corrupt oil deals. They can talk about "freedom" - and they did - but they have to compete with others who talk about "the Chinese model," who offer more predictable forms of job security and who aren't bothered by a few arrests.

Perhaps those like Margaret Thatcher's former PR guru Tim Bell certainly are not so bothered about "a few arrests" but that applied with her governments attitude towards Chile in the 1970s and 1980s under Pinochet's right wing dictatorship which was far more brutal than Lukashenko's regime.

The fact that European ministers cannot do that much is hardly due to some self inflicted decline unconnected to neoliberal capitalism and thus to do solely with the withering of the West's confidence and belief in the superiority of its own values.

It is more due to the stalling of momentum that has resulted in the collapse of the appeal of "The West" created by the instability of neoliberal economic policies. For Belarus has weathered the global crash better in some respects than the Baltic Republics.

Back in 2002 John Laughland wrote of the inherent problems of the obsession with NATO expansion and "regime change" with regards Belarus that it was more cynically connected with power politics dressed up in talk of human rights,

The real reason why the west hates Lukashenko has nothing to do with concern for democracy or human rights. It is instead that, as a genuinely popular politician who has preserved his country from the worst ravages which economic reform has inflicted on its neighbours, Lukashenko is not given to taking orders.
In this respect, he is unlike any of the other senior former communist officials currently hobnobbing in Prague. The west's friends in eastern Europe today have their hands firmly on the commanding heights of political control in their countries, just as in many cases they personally did under communist dictatorship.
The west prefers such people because the demands it makes on post-communist countries are so unpopular. All eastern European states are required to sell off their national economic assets to foreigners, and close down their agriculture by accepting the dumping of subsidised EU food imports.
This creates massive social disruption and unemployment. In addition, they must spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, preferably on arms made in the US.
Consequently, a small country like Lithuania, whose economy has collapsed so catastrophically, has just announced the purchase of $34m worth of Stinger missiles, made by the Raytheon Corporation of Tucson, Arizona.
When Tanzania announced it was spending $40m on a new civilian air traffic control system, there was an outcry; but Lithuania, whose official GDP is not much larger than Tanzania's, will have to spend $240m on arms every year as the price for Nato membership. And Lithuania is just one of seven new member states, all of which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on arms.

If things have not worked according to plan in Belarus, part of the blame has to be attributed to the West having squandered the opportunities in 1989-1991 and replaced Communism with doctrinaire neoliberal "reforms" that failed to take into account the needs of ordinary people and so ensured that its lost its allure.

Do Most Belarussians Not Support the Opposition to Lukashenko ?

2010-12-20T10:44:00.000-08:00

Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian of the protests against Lukashenko following his election amidst claims of fraud,

Alexander Lukashenko and his black-shirted riot police reverted to type at the weekend, cracking heads and arresting opponents while fabricating a landslide election victory. This violent regression victimised the people of Belarus.
The EU blew its chance to bring Belarus in from the cold ( Monday 20 December 2010 )

Many Belarussians continue to vote Lukashenko and distrust the oppositionists. One important reason may be that they never spell out what their economic agenda actually is should Lukashenko be removed.

The financial backing of the US for the 'Denim Revolution' of 2006 and supposed "NGOs" hardly helps as all opposition per se can be smeared as "in the pay of the enemy".

As Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations has noted, Lukashenko depends on "a social contract with most ordinary Belarusians – relative prosperity in return for a relative lack of political freedom". His ability to maintain stability, order, and jobs (up to a point) was his main and possibly his only plus with voters. So when he fell out with his Russian patrons, Lukashenko sought new friends such as China, Venezuela – and the EU.

If "the West" has been to blame, then was a result of promoting neoliberal shock therapy style "reforms" instead of working towards an agreement with Belarus that did not mean it has to follow other nations the former Eastern bloc in being subjected to asset stripping, the rule of consultants and mass unemployment.

Michael Binyon, a former Moscow correspondent for The Times, has argued that Lukashenko still had support, despite the protests.

"Among many ordinary people I wouldn't say there is widespread support [for the opposition], they're pretty resigned to seeing Lukashenko continue in office..

...And he's not completely unpopular because Belarus has enjoyed a stable standard of living - it's not a high standard of living at all, but they've avoided some of the confrontations and disruptions that they've seen in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Pensioners for example still get a reasonable pension."

Lukashenko has been able since he came to power in 1994 of drawing attention to the way Belarus has been 'protected' from these negative consequences as well as the failures seldom ever mentioned in the mainstream media in Western nations with regards Poland and "katastrioka" in Russia.

What Lukashenko has realised is that China became the power to be reckoned with that it is because it rejected the Western model that Russia embraced after 1991 that was proposed as "the only option" by international financial institutions such as the IMF.

But Tisdall argues that Belarus is some sort of economic basket case and insinuates that Belarussians also partly have themselves to blame for voting incorrectly for Lukashenko without understanding the reasons why Lukashenko has been popular has lain in his curtailing of the the corruption and chaos of the 1990s.

Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, reassuringly described the post-election brutality as solely an internal matter. And Putin praised Lukashenko last week for taking "a clear course towards integration with Russia".
Whether Russia will deliver is the next big question. Having played the two sides off against each other to personally beneficial effect, Lukashenko now faces a bigger worry: an external debt of 52% of GDP, a $7bn trade gap, an unmodernised, largely state-owned economy, and rising expectations among 9.5 million Belarusians who have swapped political liberty for jam tomorrow.

The contention that Belarussians have sacrificed freedom for the illusion of security could be made about made increasingly about states even in the West. Only that Belarus is a repressive state in which elections are tampered with and opponents have gone missing.

A dangerous new development has been the increasing connection between capitalism with authoritarian state power has been to stimulate a degree of consent through consumerism and control a docile population whilst liberties pall.

Yet the direct comparisons in economic terms have to be with the neighbouring Baltic Republics. As Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers argued with regards the "Latvian Model" in The Guardian just today, (Latvia provides no magic solution for indebted economies )

Given a 25% fall in GDP during the crisis, such a growth rate would take a decade to just restore the size of Latvia's 2007 economy. Is this "dead cat" bounce sufficiently compelling for other EU states to follow it over the fiscal cliff?
The method by which the EU's creditor nations and banks would like to resolve this crisis is "internal devaluation": lower wages, public spending and living standards to make the debtors pay. This is the old IMF austerity doctrine that failed in the developing world. It looks like it is about to be reprised.
The EU policy seems to be for wage earners and pension savers to bail out banks for their legacy of bad mortgages and other loans that cannot be paid – except by going into poverty.

The fear of the practical impact of neoliberal policies clearly is not something that Euro-Atlanticists such as Tisdall want to put up for critical discussion. Moreover, the evidence has been that businesses have been attracted to investing in Belarus in recent years.

Far from it being opposed to 'the Chinese model', there seems to be increasingly a greater convergence between authoritarianism, corporate capitalism and globalisation that Western powers have colluded in where it has suited their interests and the monied elites.

The Opposition to Lukashenko goes Naked.

2010-12-20T09:38:00.001-08:00

Certain protests against Lukashenko are even more curious than those staged by the designer revolutionaries of Charter97. The Ukrainian group FEMEN get photogenic Ukrainian girls to pose naked as a protest against the role of women but also against "male power" of which Bat'ka is seen as but one example in neighbouring Belarus.

Ukrainian girls from Femen movement held a rally "Kick Batska out!" at the walls of the Belarusian embassy in Kiev and made an appeal to Belarusians. "We want to support the brotherly people, exhausted by the totalitarian regime of Lukashenko ruling, on the eve of the presidential elections in Belarus. Hey, Belarusians, take your chance! Dethrone Lukashenko," Femen statement says.

"Privatization of power is a concept, unacceptable by modern standards. The cult of personality is a relic of the long-deceased Soviet Union, and it's a sacred duty of all Belarusians to stop it," the statement says in the Blog of Art Group.( Telegraf )

What funds FEMEN ? Can "feminism" be promoted by posing scantily clad in Kiev by trading on the stereotypes of Ukrainian women as "for sale" to "sexpats"? Or could it be a cynical ruse to protest against such things in order to get noticed and advance careers ?

An Interpretation of Events in Belarus.

2010-12-20T08:54:00.000-08:00

Last night in Minsk on 19 December 2010 there were riots caused by the usual groups who contest election results in Belarus and the police acting brutally to disperse protesters after Lukashenko got just under 80% of the vote.

There are serious allegations of electoral fraud and the OSCE has regarded the election as flawed, even though the OSCE has had a history of partisan recognition with regards rigged elections ( such as with Saakashvili's in Georgia in January 2004 in which he got 96%).

The BBC carried a report that stated,

Security forces in Belarus have arrested hundreds of people who protested against the result of Sunday's presidential election.
At least seven presidential candidates were among those detained. Some of them were reportedly also beaten by police.

The OSCE called the poll "flawed" while the US and EU condemned the crackdown.

But President Alexander Lukashenko, who was re-elected for a fourth term with almost 80% of the vote, accused opposition supporters of "banditry".

"The vandals and hooligans lost their human face. They simply turned into beasts," he told a news conference in Minsk.
"You saw how our law-enforcers behaved. They stood firm and acted exclusively within the bounds of the law. They defended the country and people from barbarism and ruin."
"There will be no revolution or criminality in Belarus."

The Guardian reported, ( Alexander Lukashenko wins fourth term as Belarus president ),

The result was announced hours after riot police dispersed thousands of demonstrators protesting against alleged voting fraud.
The Belarus Central Election Commission said preliminary results showed Lukashenko had collected 79.67% of the vote in yesterday's election. The next-highest vote among the nine candidates was just 2.56%.
The announcement followed a violent night in which police dispersed demonstrators who massed outside the main government office to denounce alleged vote-rigging.
Protesters broke windows and smashed glass doors in the government building, which also houses the election commission, but were repelled by riot police waiting inside.
Hundreds more police and Interior Ministry troops then arrived in trucks, causing most of the demonstrators to flee. Some tried to hide in the courtyards of nearby apartment buildings, but many were bludgeoned by troops.
Several of the candidates who ran against Lukashenko were arrested and the top opposition leader, Vladimir Neklyaev, was forcibly taken from the hospital where he was being treated after he and two other candidates were beaten during clashes with government forces.
Neklyaev's aide said seven men in civilian clothing had wrapped him in a blanket on his hospital bed and carried him outside. His location is currently unknown.
Russia and the EU are closely monitoring the election, having offered major economic inducements to tilt Belarus in their direction.
In recent years, Lukashenko has quarrelled intensively with the Kremlin, his main sponsor, as Russia raised prices for the below-market gas and oil on which the Belarus economy depends.
His tone changed this month, however, after Russia agreed to drop tariffs for oil exported to Belarus – a concession worth an estimated $4bn (£2.5bn) a year.
Lukashenko has also been working to curry favour with the west, which has criticised his 16-year rule for human rights abuses and repressive politics.
Last week, he called for improved ties with the US, which he had cast as an enemy in previous years. However, the violent dispersal of opposition protests makes a rapprochement with the west unlikely.

Whatever irregularities there are can be challenged but that there is a strategy by Western NGOs to replace Lukashenko with a pro-US and Atlanticist group of politicians paid for and answerable to foreign powers is hardly news.

The fact is that Lukashenko does command the majority of votes in Belarus even without the stuffing of ballot boxes.

Unfortunately in recent years the proliferation of instant global news has led to designer democracy groups funded by those like George Soros to get societies more open to money power and oligarchies that support Western geopolitical strategies over creating truly accountable democracies beyond the rich and well connected.

Andrej Dynko has written an article for The Guardian today that attempts objectivity under the headline Belarus election: The last dictator in Europe.

Dynko's Nasha Niva is supported by groups like the Prague Society for International Cooperation which is sponsored by think tanks such as the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society which supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and for "Democratic Geopolitics".

A full list of "Partners and Friends" includes the Prague Marriott Hotel and Radio Free Europe. That does not mean Dynko is not credible but increasingly it has become difficult to distinguish between those wanting truth and those who advocate a propaganda line.

Dynko writes,

.......never have there been so many candidates. But the number of candidates is no guarantee of any substantial political change.

The country itself has changed a lot in 15 years, despite the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. Its economy has grown at twice the rate of neighbouring Ukraine's. This is a Chinese, or rather a Singaporean model – and Lukashenko is convinced it is the one best suited to the Belarusian mentality and geopolitical situation.

Not everyone agrees with him, however. A parallel society has grown up: rock music, samizdat and discussion clubs are all flourishing. In order to catch this wave Lukashenko is ready to commandeer what used to be the opposition's seditious slogan, "For Freedom".

Belarus has avoided the period of neoliberal shock therapy that devastated and indebted the Baltic Republics which is why Lukashenko has pointed to the freedom from unemployment and consumer pleasures.

That is no reason to downgrade the repression in Belarus but that if the only choice is between Lukashenko and neoliberal "reforms" then many Belarussians will continue to stay with Lukashenko through despairing on an alternative.

Freedom is freedom. Yet those seeing Charter97 as a successor to Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia ( many of whose supporters did not want US style capitalism, though that's in the Orwellian memory hole now ) have failed to see why the opposition is not so popular as it could be.

Lukashenko is following the Singaporean or Chinese model as he is authoritarian and the attractions of the economic model in neighbouring countries offered not much to those who would be thrown on the scrapheap by asset stripping, the rule of consultants and the "Marriott men".

Charter97 claims it opposes "dictatorial privatisation" But the privatisations after 1990 were hardly 'democratic' with using former activists their connections to act as consultants, sell off plant and destroy whole swathes of manufacturing to create a "correct" investment climate.

Few in Poland realised in 1990 that by 2004 unemployment rates would still be so high nor how draconian the neoliberal Balcerowicz Plan was going to be. Balcerowicz knew that which is why he cynically called for "extraordinary politics" to ram through his reforms by exploiting the euphoria of liberation.

In Belarus, Lukashenko's rise to be "Bat'ka" depended after 1995 in his ability to crack down on the corruption and chaos witnessed under Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s and the fear that US involvement in its economy would replicate that in Poland, a nation with a stronger economy and sense of national identity.

Reform that would benefit Belarus and the rest of Europe can happen but only if "Democracy Promotion" is no longer tied cynically to privatising the economy into the hands of investors interested only in short term profits and plundering a "liberated" economy.

Even so, that democratic reform is necessary is obvious, despite all the propaganda about Lukashenko's "social market economy", combining economic advances with a "Chinese" style state in Eastern Europe.

The harassment of journalists, police brutality and threats to close down Nasha Niva are bad and need to be condemned. A government that operates on principles of violence to its citizens to coerce conformity is fundamentally wrong.

But the question has moved since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the USSR in 1991 from freedom from one party states to one of "freedom for what ?". As if its chaos on offer, more people will be prepared to surrender their freedom to authoritarian regimes.

There is no reason why being sceptical of the tactics and objectives of oppositionists in Belarus means necessary support for Lukashenko. If democracy has not prevailed in most parts of the post-Soviet bloc the reasons go beyond simplistic notions of Lukashenko being a New Hitler.

For as important as repression has been in propping up the regime, it is not the only explanation as to why he has retained power in Minsk despite all the attempts of oppositionists to undermine his authority.

The Myths of the War in Kosovo in 1999.

2010-12-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

The myths surrounding what is termed "liberal interventionism" have been challenged by Neil Clark in The Guardian ( Kosovo and the myth of liberal intervention ) where he cites the facts about how the decision to back the KLA have had an appalling impact on people there which have been criticised by human rights groups.

'The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." So declared the neocon US senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman back in 1999 at the height of the US-led military intervention against Slobodan Miloševic's Yugoslavia.
It would be interesting to hear what Senator Lieberman makes of the report of the Council of Europe – Europe's premier human rights watchdog – on his favourite band of freedom fighters. The report, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, details horrific rights abuses it claims have been carried out by the KLA, the west's allies in the war against Yugoslavia 11 years ago.
The council claims that civilians – Serbian and non-KLA-supporting Kosovan Albanians detained by the KLA in the 1999 hostilities – were shot in northern Albania and their kidneys extracted and sold on the black market. It names Hashim Thaçi, the former leader of the KLA and Kosovo's prime minister, as the boss of a "mafia-like" group engaged in criminal activity – including heroin trading – since before the 1999 war.

Clark is correct to emphasise that the KLA and the regime that Thaci has led since NATO "intervened" is not only far from "liberal" but has been positively ghastly, being a clan based mafia style network involved in heroin trafficking to the rest of Europe supplying prostitutes from Moldova and even trade in human organs. The Guardian reported,

A Council of Europe report into organ trafficking in Kosovo linked the Medicus case to a wider criminal network in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which began trading in organs in 1999. A faction within the rebel guerilla army loyal to Thaci has been accused of overseeing a racket involving Serb captives. A "handful" were said, in the report, to have been shot in the head, then had their kidneys extracted. It is believed the kidneys were flown to Istanbul in ischemia bags.

Kosovo is a narco-state whose elites have continually been rebranded from being criminal terrorists into PR savvy slick suited politicians. But the reality has remained a state whose origin were mired in criminality and a shoddy realpolitik dressed up as "liberal intervention" from the start.

The reason why Kosovo has been so dysfunctional, so much so that many Kosovans have detested Thaci's regime, is the lack of security and the rampant corruption that has been the staple of a government in which power is sought as a means of preserving mafia interests and the economy mismanaged.

The fact is that Richard Holbrooke backed the KLA in 1999 as a means of ramping up tensions within Kosovo sufficient to create an intensified Serbian backlash and which gave the impression there was a systematic policy of Serb "genocide" that meant NATO had to prevent Milosevic as a "New Hitler".

There is no doubt Milosevic wanted to use Kosovo himself as a way of ramping up tension by increasing repression to share up an ailing regime in Serbia following the failure of his notion of a Greater Serbia. Most post communist nationalists in the former Yugoslavia sought to do the same.

Yet the notion of a selfless "liberal intervention" is an oversimplified myth as Holbrook and the CIA had given material and military aid to the KLA prior to the NATO action in 1999 when the State department had in 1998 classified the KLA as a "terrorist organisation" before they were subsequently thought useful.

The reason for this lies in geopolitics: by bringing to an end the instability in the Balkans thought to be the work of Milosevic alone, the USA could advance the plans to get the AMBO pipeline constructed. The Serbia's defeat and the creation of Camp Bondsteel near to the Macedonian border was part of that.

The consequences were immediately to bring closure on the Balkan Wars and create a new order there. But the cost was that which Neil Clark mentions here,

....ethnic cleansing and rights abuses in the region continued. Under the Nato occupation an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities from south Kosovo, and almost the whole Serb population of Pristina, have been forced from their homes.

The waffle about Holbrooke's "tough moral choices" offered by his eulogists in obituaries offered on his death yesterday ignore his role in backing the KLA and the "dirty diplomacy" behind the scenes which has far more to do than just dealing with someone as brutal as Milosevic.

At the time in 1999 those critical of Serbia and Milosevic such as Misha Glenny at the time thought the intervention would do more harm than good and a brutal conflict was accelerated into the ethic cleansing committed by the KLA against Serbs but also against the Roma in Kosovo too.

This was mentioned by even by Tim Judah in his Kosovo War and Revenge as the price of the intervention. Yet the not so hidden history of Holbrooke's diplomacy has been scarcely mentioned in the media. The cost of which was shown in the subsequent evils continued by the Kosovan state.

These include not only Kosovo becoming the European entrepot for the heroin supplied by the Taliban in Afghanistan but also extending the network for Al Qaida to further its operations in Europe too. Another consequence inherent in backing gangsters to carry out "regime change" whilst branding it "humanitarian intervention".

Khodorkovsky is Portrayed as a "Dissident".

2010-12-15T08:58:00.000-08:00

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a criminal whose Yukos oil corporation was build on force, fraud and contract killings. Yet because he has rebranded himself as a designer revolutionary, opinion in the West tends to accept him as some kind of martyr in Putin's supposedly "Neo-Soviet" regime.

Time and time again, the same repetitive propaganda tropes are recycled. A despotism in different period clothes versus the enlightened within the regime who rebel against it through some 'spiritual convertion'. Look at the assertion here by the writer Boris Akunin in The Guardian today,

Over the next few months, we exchanged letters. I asked questions, the prisoner of Siberia replied. And gradually I became aware that my curiosity for my subject was changing, at first into a deep sympathy, and latterly into a growing admiration for the sheer force of personality of this individual.

Yes, Khodorkovsky has been very unlucky in his fate, but we, his compatriots, have been unbelievably lucky: the party of human dignity is today embodied by an individual who conducts himself in a model fashion and does not bend or break under pressure. I do not rule out even that the pitiless machine of oppression will break itself on his resolve.

Akunin's banal homily and distortion of history to portray this chiselling crook as some kind of idealist is utterly unconvincing propaganda. It's absurd to portray Khodorkovsky as some successor to the Decembrists of 1825 who tried to challenge the Tsar and who had honourable intentions.

For a start, the Decembrists were aristocrats who had developed a deep love of Russia through seeing the awakening of the Russian people during the struggle to remove Napoleon and the epic events of 1812. Loyalty to nation and the narod motivated them. As it did the narod who opposed Napoleon's self interested propaganda of "liberation".

The motley array of fraudsters who back Khodorkovsky have total contempt for ordinary Russians, none of whom get a mention in this propaganda puff piece. Akunin simply does not care about them, the way oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky stripped the country and enriched themselves after 1990.

...what is striking is that the aristocrats, the party of human dignity in today's Russia, are represented not by a Solzhenitsyn or a Mandela but by a former billionaire. Although this is perhaps no more striking than the fact that his predecessor as the figurehead of the aristocratic movement was the father of the atomic bomb and a man who was three times named a Hero of Socialist Labour, Andrei Sakharov. History just loves paradoxes.

History might love paradoxes but not those simply invented purely in the heads of mendacious propagandists based on false parallels. Sakharov was a brave man who had never cheated or swindled people as Khodorkovsky had. Khodorkovsky used the freedom after 1991 to distort and pervert it.

If historians in the future will need to explain a paradox it is why freedom was distorted to mean the freedom of powerful oligarchs to defraud the public interest.

Democracy Promotion in Russia has been counter-productive. It has actually set back the possibility of Russian people supporting liberal and democratic reform by having the same opposition networks of those funded by Western NGOs and advocating the same doctrinaire neoliberal economic "shock therapy" that had catastrophic consequences in the 1990s.

For as Anatol Lieven has argued, the sheer social distance of supposed Russian liberals from the Russian people, as well as their contempt and suspicion of them, is one of the main reasons why Russian high politics remains a contest between different oligarchical factions of ins and outs.

This is a reason why "Democracy Promotion" as it exists is fake and blatantly partisan in favour of "our oligarchs".

In that struggle, favours those that will weaken the Russian state the better to get control of the oil gas and other assets, one reason Putin is the target of so much hatred by those like Edward Lucas, without understanding-or caring-about how hated these people are. And their obvious and documented criminality.

The nature of Khodorkovsky's game was shown in a short excerpt from the interview Debtor Nation: The Hijacking of America’s Economy, in which the economist Dr. Michael Hudson gave ACRES USA in January 2008 ...

ACRES: And this is what brought on the Mexican standoff, the standoff between Putin and that oligarch ...

HUDSON: Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

ACRES: Right, he imprisoned him. Was that a sort of running up the flag to tell the rest of them what was going to happen?

HUDSON: Khodorkovsky not only had been the most notorious tax evader in Russia, but having privatized Russian oil, he was then about to turn around and sell his company to Exxon so that he could take the money out of the country in much the same way that Berezovsky and other Russian oligarchs had done.

This would have essentially sold out Russia’s natural resources to its major Cold War enemy, the United States. Russia would have been economically destroyed had Khodorkovsky gone through with it. Khodorkovsky also announced that he was going to run for president and be the main funder of the right-wing Pinochetista party there. It actually was called “The Party of Right Forces.” So of course Putin threw him in jail, quite rightly.

Appendix

"[Western journalists] might begin by making a comparison between the amount of space, and outrage, devoted by the Western media to this [Khodorkovsy] trial and the limited attention and anger directed by the same Western media to the process by which Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the other "oligarchs" acquired their immense wealth in the first place. It is not just that while Khodorkovsky's trial was deeply flawed, the legal case against him was well-based and credible.

More important is the comparative damage done to Russia by the two processes. Khodorkovsky's trial has undermined to some degree Western and Russian domestic investment in the Russian energy sector. The massive theft of Russian state resources by Khodorkovsky and others in the 1990s had infinitely worse effects.

This was the single greatest example of such plundering in the whole of modern history. It crippled the ability of the Russian state to provide basic services to its population - including for long periods even wages and pensions. As for state services, the collapse of state revenues had a disastrous effect on their funding, pay and morale.
Before indulging in self-righteous denunciations of the Russian government, Westerners also need to ask themselves where Russia's stolen billions went. Jupiter? Pluto? No. The stolen funds of the Russian people largely went into Western banks, Western real estate, and Western luxury goods. Russians may have been the thieves, but Westerners were their fences.
It is universally recognized that official corruption in Russia is a disastrous barrier to that country's development. The defense of Khodorkovsky, however, essentially rests on the idea that the enormous corruption of the 1990s should now be legitimized, while ordinary Russian policemen, judges and officials should be required to live on their miserable salaries for the sake of honesty and patriotism.
This proposition is intellectually, politically, psychologically and above all morally vacuous. "

From "Is Khodorkovsky Really the Victim?", an article written by Anatol Lieven that appeared in The International Herald Tribune in June 2005 after Khodorkovsky's first conviction.

Krakow gets an Illuminated Glass Pyramid

2010-11-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

This is truly the most mindblowingly dumb thing to have foisted on Krakow's historical Rynek Glowny. It cost a staggering 3m zl to install this glowing glass pyramid, a tacky replica of the one by the Paris Louvre and equally as insensitive.

Clearly the sterility of the mindset of Krakow's Rada Mieska is reflected in the simple minded notion that if something is trendy and "Western" or Western European in origin or design then it just must be good. This in nonsense but shows a lack of confidence. Krakow does not need to import this dreck. It was lucky to avoid the planning blights on the West in the 1960s.

The Rada Miejska clearly wants to unlearn such lessons about bad architecture that those in Britain or France or Germany still have not fully learnt. People want to see Krakow because it is different and unique and beautiful. Not in making a shoddy attempt at "modernisation" that strips away its ancient charms and ambience.

This pyramid clearly violates the UNESCO World Heritage criteria. Such a repellent and ill suited innovation must reflect either corruption or incompetence or both. It is symbolic of the systemic mismanagement of Krakow and the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of the Rada Miejska and Mayor Jacek Majchrowski.
Poland needs a conservation movement and responsible citizens to put into practice vocal and consistent opposition to these increasingly pointless and expensive follies. These spineless bureaucrats can not be depended upon to preserve Krakow as a unique and beautiful city from the forces of rapacious greed.

Krakow needs to avoid the process of Disneyfication and banalisation, turning a city into a ghastly and more overcrowded version of Prague which is at least big enough to absorb large numbers. The irresponsible way that so-called planners have blighted Krakow with ugly hotels such as the Park Inn and the Hotel Sheraton is an international disgrace.

The unique ambience of Krakow is being slowly eradicated as soulless, self serving third rate bureaucrats and bland technocrats along with craven politicians genuflecting before global financial power combine to convert the city into a theme park as opposed to an organic really lived in historical centre where a cup of coffee is even more expensive than London.

The new glass pyramid is as vacuous and empty, as devoid of meaning and belonging as a branch of McDonald's or Planet Hollywood. The globe is suffering from a spreading malady of homogenisation where life is being drained of its charm and becoming ever more boring. Greed and a shoddy craving for cheap tourist lucre moulds the townscape.

There needs to be reclaim the streets of Krakow from the stupid and rapacious back to the people the politicians are meant to serve.

There needs to be vocal protest and a conservation movement to stop these moronic gimmicky innovations that serve no purpose and will only destroy the very charm of Krakow that attracts people there. Even as a feeble tourist attraction it fails pitifully. Nobody wants to go to Krakow to see an illuminated glass pyramid.

Russian's Interests in Afghanistan.

2010-10-27T18:06:00.000-07:00

The rapprochement of Russia with NATO and the USA reflects the both the interest Russia has in preventing the spread of Islamist groups in Central Asia should Afghanistan become destabilised by the victory of the Taliban and the inroads China and Iran have been making in that mineral rich land.

Contrary to what is thought, Afghanistan has $900bn of hard mineral reserves discovered by US geologists back in 2007. The ostensible reason for US/NATO involvement in Afghanistan has never lain primarily in bringing democracy and women's lib to a benighted land but in the New Great Game in Central Asia.

Though considered a democracy, Afghanistan is dominated by fickle elites who have proved amenable to being bankrolled by those willing to buy influence there and with China and Iran aiming to gain influence, Russia has been concerned that it would be excluded.

Russia , as Anatol Lieven has pointed out has always had a fear of China which during the Bush II years in was prepared to overlook through joining China in joint military manoeuvres via the SCO in 2001. In this Orwellian world there are only permanent interests dictating the current realpolitik alliances.

In the elites at least this is not atavistic fear of swamping, but rather a cool calculation that if China continues to grow while Russia (relatively) stagnates, then in the end Russia will naturally become little more than a provider of raw materials to China, and, in consequence, even a form of Chinese dependency.

Now Russia was not party to the construction of the TAPI pipeline was given the financial backing by the Asian Development Bank in 2008 but most of its financial backers who made up the bulk of the investment were NATO states intent on fulfilling this geopolitical ambition of blocking off Iran's rival IPI scheme.

Russia whilst prepared to work with China has proved willing to play the interests of China and NATO off against one another to maintain its status and interests in Central Asia. Russia can do that in exchange for quietly dropping plans to expand NATO into Ukraine and Georgia ( for now )

By assisting NATO in training helicopter pilots, selling aircraft to Poland and allowing arms and ammunition to be transported through Russian territory as an alternative to a Pakistani route which has come under repeated Taliban attack, the stakes in the New Great Game are clear.

NATO powers and the USA have continually had the construction of TAPI as a major war aim. By blocking the rival IPI pipeline, the West can continue to encircle and isolate Iran which has next to Russia the second largest natural gas reserves in the world.

What such alliances of convenience demonstrate is that the rhetoric of "A New Cold War " is a propaganda myth stoked up by those like Edward Lucas are inherently flawed. Afghanistan was always part of the jigsaw of geopolitics in Central Asia and with TAPI a large chunk of strategic and resource real estate.

Though TAPI was conceived of partly as one way for states such as Poland in particular to reduce its dependence upon Russia gas transit routes by diversifying supply elsewhere from landlocked gas republics such as Turkmenistan, Russia can now demand a stake in it.

As Central Asia Newswire carried the following bulletin recently, ( as did Radio Free Europe along the same lines ),

Friday, October 22, 2010 - Russia signaled during a meeting this week in Turkmenistan potential interest in working with member nations of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline.

The interest was expressed during a state visit in Ashgabat between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov. The meeting, which ended Friday, focused heavily on energy issues.

“The issue of Gazprom’s participation in the TAPI pipeline was discussed during this visit,” the Reuters news agency on Friday reported Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin as saying. Sechin, who sat in on the talks, oversees the energy portfolio in the Russian Cabinet.

“Gazprom may participate in this project in any capacity – builder, designer, participant, etc.,” Sechin added.

Few in Britain are ever given the real reason for the War in Afghanistan or the reason why some 103 British troops have died in Helmand through which the TAPI pipeline is scheduled to run, Clearly, Russia does not want to take on that kind of burden on behalf of the USA but it wants to hedge its bets.

The more paranoid in the Pentagon could see this assistance as a sinister Kremlin ruse to get the USA more even bogged down in Afghanistan, but the reality is that Russia does have certain interests in not having Afghanistan implode in such a way as to trigger off ripple effects in its neighbours.

In The West, of course, there is seldom any mention of the TAPI pipeline or the New Great Game which is justified according to public diplomacy as being wholly about the "War on Terror", nation building, "humanitarian intervention" and enlightened self interest. The facts prove this not that convincing.

Russia and Afghanistan 2010.

2010-10-27T16:24:00.000-07:00

Simon Tisdall's Guardian column represents the kind of line that supports the messianic "New Cold War" guff spouted by crude propagandists such as Edward Lucas. The very first line insinuates that Medvedev is merely a Cheka-KGB man in a suit.

Nato's Lisbon summit next month is in danger of becoming the stage for a triumphal procession by Russia's leather-jacketed president, Dmitry Medvedev. The mystery is what, exactly, Moscow has done to deserve this sudden burst of western camaraderie. It is hardly a new script: Russia comes in from the cold, again.

Actually, it is about the unmentionable aspect of post-Cold War reality-the fact that Russia is the largest gas producer in the world. According to the BP Statistical Review Of World Energy in 2007 , Russia has 26.3 % of the world total of natural gas reserves on the planet.

Germany was one of those nations even during the Cold War that supported after 1960 the policy of Ostpolitik because of the need for the gas that the Soviet Union had. The USA at the time opposed that but Cold Warriors have generally ignored that reality.

Moreover, one of the legacies of the bad diplomacy of the "New European " states such as Poland and the Baltic Republics in following a fanatical pro_US policy line against Russia is that Russia has decided to build the Nordstream pipeline which bypasses them entirely.

It's true that Medvedev appears to be about to douse Russia's previously combustible opposition to US missile defence plans. When the Bush administration first suggested the idea, co-opting Poland and the Czechs, Medvedev's patron and possible future nemesis, Vladimir Putin, was fit to be tied, as the Americans say.

Facts are entirely absent again. Medvedev is connected very much to Gazprom and Putin has also made the use of oil and gas to build up Russian national power the priority in the New Great Game for control over diminishing global supplies of fossil fuels and rising demand from powers such as China.

Russia wants to use gas and oil as a tool of diplomacy, something berated by those like Lucas despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq was based on precisely the same objective of controlling oil as a lever in global diplomacy and preserving US global hegemony.

Clever Barack Obama defused Moscow's objections by revising the Bush-Rumsfeld plan, switching missiles and platforms, and spinning it as an unthreatening European-Nato initiative with which the Russians were welcome to co-operate. This is what Medvedev now appears ready to do, albeit in a limited, vague sort of way – which is a significant victory for Obama.

In the long term , it is still part of the strategy to dominate Central Asia. To press the "reset button" implies not a fundamental change in that policy but in starting again in such a way that will be better this time. By detaching Russia from Iran, it is hoped that US interests in Central Asia can be advanced.

The opposition had little to do with Central Europe or revanchist ambitions there. Crude ideologues such as Lucas attempted to depict a resurrection of the Evil empire but it remains a messianic fantasy and propaganda. Tisdall follows that line.

Yet Obama's foreign policy advisor is Zbigniew Brzezinski who was one of the more hawkish of Cold Warriors who argued that the Russian response to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia was that it was similar to Hitler's attack on the Czech Sudetenland.

The reason is that the conversion of Georgia into a US protectorate and ignoring the claims of the South Ossetians, who must accept the boundaries that Stalin created ( whilst listening to neoconservatives prating about the evil of Stalin ) has been crucially concerned with the BTC pipeline.

It's true, also, that the Russian army has not invaded anybody lately, which is an advance on the situation that confronted Georgia in 2008. Not invading other people's countries is certainly a policy the Nato allies would like to encourage – unless of course it is them doing the invading, in which case it's different.

Obviously, its just "different" because without reference to the Great Game for resources, it is impossible to view the conflict in Georgia, Iraq or Afghanistan as having anything to do with NATO and its new mission to protect the energy security interests of its constituent nations in precisely such places.

And Tisdall might have noticed by now that Georgia started the war against Russia in 2008 and the USA started the war against Iraq in 2003. The USA was not reacting to aggression but initiating it. In that sense it was "different".

So perhaps the feting of Medvedev is justified; perhaps the stars are finally aligned and Russia's anticipated agreement to do more to help the Nato effort in Afghanistan is an earnest sign of better things to come.

Russia has little interest in anarchy in Central Asia but with the main NATO objective being the construction of the TAPI pipeline, one which looks more endangered by the increasing involvement of China and Iran in domestic politics there, Russia is open to using that to upgrade its status.

As RFE/FL reported on October 22 2010,

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin has said in Turkmenistan that the Gazprom gas giant could join in the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas-pipeline project.
Sechin, who is accompanying President Dmitry Medvedev on a visit to Turkmenistan, said Gazprom officials are in talks with Turkmenistan about possibly participating in building the nearly 1,700-kilometer pipeline that would carry some 33 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan, and then further to Fazilka, India.
Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov met with Medvedev today at the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi to discuss gas exports to Russia and the Caspian summit coming up in November.
The leaders of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan are due to meet in Baku to discuss the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which sits on huge deposits of natural gas and oil.
Medvedev said the five littoral states were able to work out the details of use of these resources without the participation of any other countries.
"The Caspian Sea is our treasure and we are capable ourselves of resolving all problems and developing cooperation in the Caspian region," Medvedev said. "And it is the responsibility of the five nations themselves to develop the legal regime with regard to natural resources."
Comments from Sechin and Medvedev indicated Russia is not interested in purchasing more Turkmen gas than it is already this year.
A price dispute led Russia to reduce its imports of Turkmen gas from more than 40 bcm to about 11 bcm in 2010.

The truth of the Afghanistan War lies in the TAPI pipeline. All diplomatic and military initiatives are determined primarily by it and the changing fortunes of the main contending Great Powers.

"Russian's Push to the West"

2010-10-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Anatol Lieven wrote an interesting column for The National Interest ( Russia's Push to the West September 19, 2010 ) which offers more evidence why Edward Lucas' messianic 'New Cold War' ideology is so fundamentally wrong. At a conference in Valdai, Lieven reported that Russia wants better relations with the West and it in their mutual interests.

This new Russian thinking has four sources: Firstly, the Obama administration’s de facto shelving of NATO enlargement, which greatly reduces Russia’s fears of the West. Given Georgia’s behavior in 2008, the Ukrainian government’s withdrawal of the request for membership, the West’s fiscal woes, European opposition and America’s strategic overstretch, most Russian analysts with whom I spoke believe that the push for NATO expansion is unlikely to be seriously renewed even if the Republicans win the presidency in 2012.
The second reason has been the economic crisis of recent years, which has underlined Russia’s continued dependence on exports of energy and raw materials, and failure to achieve a breakthrough to a modern manufacturing economy. A very widespread view is that the only way that Russia can be shaken out of its present condition is much closer economic ties with the West.

This leads to the third reason, which has always been present in Russian thinking, but is increasingly rising to the surface of discussion: fear of China. In the elites at least this is not atavistic fear of swamping, but rather a cool calculation that if China continues to grow while Russia (relatively) stagnates, then in the end Russia will naturally become little more than a provider of raw materials to China, and, in consequence, even a form of Chinese dependency.
The interesting thing about this fear is that it partially unites Russian liberals and Russian statists. The liberals deeply fear the influence of China’s authoritarian political model on Russia. The statists have no great problem with this, and indeed have used the success of China’s authoritarian development as a rhetorical club with which to beat the liberals. On the other hand, they are devoted to the idea of Russia as a great power, and dread dependency on China as much as they do dependency on the United States.

In one respect, indeed, it may already be too late for one old Russian liberal dream, which cropped up occasionally at the Yaroslavl forum: that of Russia one day joining NATO. It is almost certainly an impossible dream, but it is still cherished. When this possibility came up at Valdai, a Chinese analyst present stated quietly that such a move “would be viewed with some concern in China.” He didn’t need to raise his voice.
Given Russian strategic weakness vis-à-vis China, especially in the Far East, no Russian in his senses could ignore such a warning. Incidentally, another small straw in the wind: This formidably intelligent and well-informed individual spoke fluent Russian—but not a word of English. He obviously felt no need to do so in order either to gain information or project influence.

Medvedev’s proposal for a new European security architecture is of course very different from NATO membership, and has in part a purely pragmatic motive, which (in a more limited form) should be fully shared by the West, and implemented as soon as possible. This is to put into place mechanisms which will prevent the eruption of more local crises like the Georgia war of 2008, with Russia and the West (especially the United States) drawn in on opposite sides.
When NATO expansion was a real possibility, Russia’s interest in preventing such conflicts was limited, since—as August 2008 showed—they could be very useful in frightening the West away from taking on responsibility for the security of these areas. Today, with enlargement moribund and relations with Washington good, for the time being at least, Moscow has no interest in further crises.
The danger is that such crises may nonetheless burst upon us unexpectedly without either side wanting them. If we are not prepared for this, the automatic tendency alas will be for Russia and the United States to back opposing sides on the ground, and react to each others actions without thinking of their own vital interests or discussing what to do quietly between themselves rather than by megaphone.

Russian History Reexamined.

2010-10-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Anatol Lieven has been one of the most sensible voices in the West on Russia in eschewing the messianic rhetoric about a "New Cold War" whilst seeing clearly how much Russian liberal condescension towards their own people is counter productive.

In The National Interest recently Lieven made a number of astute observations on Russia at the Valdai Club. After going down the White Sea Canal in a boat, Lieven mused

......( it was )constructed under Stalin in the 1930s by political prisoners at an appalling cost in human life and suffering, from cold, hunger and mass executions.

This and so many other mass atrocities committed under Stalin and Lenin are only to a very limited degree officially remembered or commemorated in the Russia of today, although Russians formed a majority of their victims.

This is a subject on which non-Russians have a limited moral right to speak except where their own fellow countrymen were among the mass of victims (as with Stalin’s mass murder of Polish prisoners at Katyn)—and even then, they must be very careful to acknowledge both that this was a crime of a Communist and not a Russian national state, and that innumerable Russians were also among the mass of victims.

As to Russia, the lack of public commemoration or accounting goes beyond Stalinism, even if the immense scale of Stalinism’s crimes make this the most serious issue in modern Russian history by far.

Thus the almost two million Russian dead of the First World War have also received no public memorial, even though nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past is very common in contemporary Russian cinema.

One of the problems in dealing with Russia's Soviet past is in disentangling the victory over Nazism by the USSR between 1941-1945 and the appalling crimes of Stalin on a domestic and international scale. That makes it difficult for Russian liberals to denounce Lenin and Stalin without appearing "unpatriotic".

The danger for Russian liberals, therefore, is that in denouncing the crimes committed under Lenin and Stalin they can easily appear to be—or actually be—condemning the entire Soviet period, for which many older Russians feel an element of nostalgia—not so much for imperial reasons but because it represented a secure life, or simply for the human reason that it was the country of their childhood and youth.

This in turn can encourage the liberals to do something which they are all too prone to do, which is to express open elitist contempt for ordinary Russians and for Russia itself as a country.

.....talking this way in public about your fellow citizens is no way to get elected—in Russia or the United States.

Since this approach naturally receives no hearing at all in conservative or “statist” circles, it also continues the catastrophic pattern of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century relationship between the liberal intelligentsia and the state, which contributed directly to the catastrophe of 1917 and the destruction of both by the revolution:basically, of two moral absolutisms shouting past each other’s ears.

Lieven offers none of the crude vilification that entirely trashes the history of Russia almost in its entirety by those like Edward Lucas. He realises that the only way to improve relations between Russia and the West and to promote liberal mores lies not in conflating Russia with the USSR.

As far as the Russian government is concerned, the most encouraging thing concerning its recent approach to history has been the full and open acknowledgment of the Soviet secret- police massacre of Polish prisoners at Katyn on Stalin’s orders, which has led to a radical improvement in relations with Poland. This was made possible in part because both the Polish and Russian governments recognized that in the same forest are also buried thousands of Russian and other Soviet victims of the Soviet secret police. In other words, this became a joint denunciation of Stalinism, not a Polish denunciation of Russia.

It seems quite clear that Medvedev would wish to go faster and further than Putin in denouncing Communist crimes.

At our meeting with him, now–Prime Minister Putin snapped back quite aggressively when asked why Lenin is still in his mausoleum in Red Square, asking a British colleague why there is still a monument to Cromwell outside parliament in London. One of my British colleagues reacted quite huffily to this but I must say that being half Irish and remembering Cromwell’s crimes against Ireland (which today would undoubtedly be labeled genocide) I saw a good deal of truth in this—except of course that Cromwell ruled Britain 350 years ago, and not 90 years ago.

On the one hand, Putin’s response reflected an understandable but still often counter-productive Russian tendency to lash back at uncomfortable questions rather than taking them on board.

In this regard, Medvedev, whatever his other qualifications, is by far the better diplomat. However, Putin followed up with the sensible observation that “when the time comes, the Russian people will decide what to do about this. History is something that cannot be hurried.”

The difference between Putin and Medvedev is encouraging in this regard, because it reflects in part simply the fact that Medvedev is thirteen years younger.

It is a pity that Western discussion on Russia has been too dominated by those who correctly call for more open discussion of Soviet era crimes only to be pushing "New Cold War" propaganda tropes and expansionist NATO agenda in Georgia and NATO. Lieven's is a sane and decent voice.

Vaclav Havel on the Emerging Global "Atheist Civilisation".

2010-10-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

At Forum 2000 in Prague the ex-President of the Czech republic and leading dissident under Communism, Vaclav Havel, has criticised what he terms the world's first atheistic civilisation. Havel stated in a speech,

"Years ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey from the city centre to the signboard that marked the city limits took about fifteen minutes. Then came meadows, forests, fields and villages. These days the selfsame journey takes a good forty minutes or more, and it is impossible to know whether I have left the city or not.

What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote.

And in between all that – and this is something that bothers me most of all – are large tracts of land that aren’t anything, by which I mean that they’re not meadows, fields, woods, jungle or meaningful human settlement. Here and there, in a space that is so hard to define, one can find an architecturally beautiful or original building, but it is as solitary as the proverbial tomb – it is unconnected with anything else; it is not adjacent to anything or even remote from anything; it simply stands there.

In other words all the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.

There is more to this than merely a dislike of the aesthetic blight that has overtaken the suburbs of Prague no less than other beautiful central European cities being mindlessly blighted by moronic starchitects, tacky new buildings that might as well just exist anywhere and create a sense of disenchantment and alienation.

The same story is as true in Krakow in Poland where rapacious property developers have been throwing up junkish "class" A office blocks in elegant Austro-Hungarian period streets and repellent hotels rammed as close as possible to the Wisla in the vicinity of the Wawel castle such as the trashy and glittering metallic Park Inn.

That in Prague and Krakow such architectural junk has been mercilessly plonked down in such a way as to destroy the deep sense of home is no doubt part of what Roger Scruton calls a "culture of repudiation", a belief in globalised styles that could just as well be anywhere other than where they are and induce a feeling of living in a ubiquitous nowhere land.

Havel has suggested that a sterile materialism which puts the egotistical all consuming self at the centre of things will end up eating away at civilisation from within, to literally consume up and devour Nature, a mere site for the satisfaction of immediate wants and immediate gratification.

This is one consequence of what he calls "the first atheist civilisation" in the sense not that absence of belief in God creates a consumerism as a palliative-the USA remains religious and grossly materialistic-but that the destruction of transcendental values is the result of the collapse of faith.

Havel's ethics comes from Kant and the notion that even if the existence of God cannot be assumed, people should live "as if" there is some higher power within man to choose to do good as opposed to that which despairs of anything beyond the claims of the self to "feel good" by consuming.

To only hold to that view of life is one that both neoliberal consumer capitalism and communism have in common: a crude utilitarian cult of use value that confuses people with things and holds to deterministic economic theories that material reality only determines consciousness.

Havel has some substantial points here. Within Europe the consequences of "me first" mentality has fashioned consumerism almost into the status of a religion. The USA has gone further and commodified religion through mega churches merged into shopping malls.

Faith implies the idea of trust as opposed to mere belief which clings to dogma through fear, something that Havel would see as common to both militant religious sectarianism and totalitarianism. The problem is that Havel's astute vision of consumer society contradict his support for US power and hegemony.

At this level Havel's support for neoconservative foreign policies such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 effectively support the spread of the cult of consumerism and utility all the more as it was essentially an oil grab designed to keep the US "way of life"-i.e. high octane consumerism-going.

Havel has proved unable to connect the propagation of shock therapy and the moral corruption caused by the IMF's neoliberal creed to the extension and propagation of US power globally. To pretend that the USA was idealistic in recent foreign policy ventures is itself a form of religious belief.

In some ways thinking George Bush II was interested in promoting an ethical foreign policy has something in common with those inter war intellectuals who projected their hopes and ideals on to the USSR under Stalin, a belief that a large power block was bringing Utopia and a desire to be onside with it.

Such neurosis in a time of imminent catastrophe and moral blindness is part of a quest for certainty just as it was after the two world wars in Europe. The oceanic feeling Freud described, the hunger for dissolving the individual self in an irresistible collective wave is as strong today than ever.

If Central European intellectuals such as Havel could see the disturbing continuities between Europe's dark past and the disintegration of civil society under neoliberal capitalism and energy hungry authoritarian power states, then his critique of an "atheist civilisation" would carry more weight.

For in an atomised society "Amusing Itself to Death" through trashy and voyeuristic TV, sado-masochistic talent shows and human rights as materialistic claim to satisfaction and pleasure, there is less and less scepticism of unjustified authority, propaganda soundbites and more desensitisation.

In this way consumerism and a crude cult of utility in which people are seen as mere instrumental means to an end ( e.g the human resources of sinister neoliberal marketspeak ) a new form of totalitarianism could emerge where people rush towards their own servitude when living standards dip.

For without any values other than "me first" and in a world beset by dangers of Islamism, there will be terrifying resource wars in which its either "us" or "them", one which has already started to emerge. Havel has diagnosed symptoms but has not looked too much at causes. This is a great missed opportunity.

Even so Havel was on the right track to assert in the wake of the economic crash of 2008 onwards, one that could still lead on to a double dip recession, that it was the result of material self gratification and greed. Even if economically it has had effects larger than he seems to think.

"I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility. A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the path to hell.

"We mustn't let the lure of trade blind us to Russia's failings"

2010-09-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

During the cold war, Russian dissidents tended to be intellectuals: poets, artists, scientists. Mikhail Khodorkovsky does not fit that pattern. He is one of a post-Soviet generation of businessmen who acquired lucrative shareholdings in state enterprises in exchange for supporting the former president, Boris Yeltsin. Most Russians consider that deal a colossal theft of public assets. The beneficiaries became known as the oligarchs.
Now Mr Khodorkovsky is in jail, convicted of fraud in 2005 and facing new charges that would see him imprisoned for another 20 years. His fate reveals a lot about the direction Russia has taken in the decade since Vladimir Putin took power.
Mr Putin offered the country's media and energy barons a deal. They could keep some of their wealth if they renounced any ambitions to meddle in politics. Most acquiesced; Mr Khodorkovsky did not, seeking to fund liberal trends in an increasingly authoritarian, nationalist climate. That is why he lost his freedom.

Opines The Observer from London today in an absurd and craven editorial ( We mustn't let the lure of trade blind us to Russia's failings September 19 2010 ).

Khodorkovsky lost his freedom because he was a crook and because Putin decided to make an example of him. If The Observer was to be logical, it would demand that more oligarchs should be in prison and not only Khodorhovsky. Misha Glenny in McMafia:Seriously Organised Crime has zero sympathy for one of the worst robber barons,

"Under Putin, the Kremlin has clipped the wings of several of the most powerful oligarchs. From exile in the West or from inside prison, oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky warn that the new President is the reincarnation of Stalin. But he isn't.

He has fashioned a novel system that brings together aspects of capitalism and Soviet socialism-market authoritarianism. The oligarchs desperate attempts to portray Putin as a new Stalin seek to conceal the primary responsibility they bear for the mess in which they and Russia find themselves"

Glenny ( page 83 )

The reaction in Britain to Khodorkovsky's imprisonment reeks of sententious and pious moralising in due proportion to an unwillingness to admit that the reason it supports the former Yukos oil boss and to oppose Putin lies in it being displeased at having its geopolitical interests curtailed.

Even on its own supposedly moral grounds, the standard line from London's media and finance elites hardly holds up. Few hold up China, with the largest numbers of executions per year in the world and the death penalty for corruption, to the opprobrium Putin is for jailing Khodorkovsky, despite the fact that he was guilty of great crimes,

As Business News Europe reported on September 6th, 2010:

The trouble with this whole story is that even if the forces of law unfairly picked on Khodorkovsky, he is "guilty as charged" says Peter Clateman, a lawyer for Renaissance Capital in Moscow who has been following the case closely. To be fair most observers have criticised the first trial, but no one pretends that Khodorkovsky’s trial had much to do with the letter of the law or was about “guilt” or “innocence.”

All the oligarchs were blatantly stealing everything they could in those days, so the issue isn't whether the law was use to lock up Khodorkovsky and expropriate his company, it's why all the other oligarchs weren't arrested and locked up too.

Khodorkovsky may be a victim, or better to say loser, of the political showdown with the Kremlin, but he is also certainly not the martyr the international press and leader writers in most of the international press make him out to be. Indeed, he started his corporate life as the very worst corporate governance abuser, which in Russia circa the mid-1990s is saying a lot.

But since then, Khodorkovsky has been careful to manufacture an image by spending millions of dollars on the best law firms, lobbyists and PR that money can buy – with so much success that no one remembers the "old Khodorkovsky" when he had a moustache, wore shabby suits and big black, TV-frame glasses and would dilute your stake to zip the moment you invested into one of his companies. "

The propaganda power and legal team Khodorkovsky has been able to assemble to insinuate that he is some kind of "dissident" or political prisoner-without actually using such a word-ignores the fact that he was a corrupt oligarch who deserves to be in prison. The "political prisoner" tag is applied because other oligarchs were not charged.

Edward Lucas has been critical of those who maintain that anti-Putin propagandists as himself are portraying Khodorkovsky as a dissident. Even if the word is not used, the image is with the fallen oligarch now meant to elicit sympathy through pictures of him sitting in bare cells with a simple wooden table and a packet of L & M cigarettes on the table.

But Khodorkovsky was one of the largest robber barons and the defence coming from those like Edward Lucas and from his lawyer Robert Amsterdam, as well as uncritical and simplistic "liberal interventionists", and has ample access to the Western media as it wishes to give this crook a platform because he benefitted Western business and banking interests.

The prating about the "rule of law" now from Khodorkovsky ihnores the extent to which he was never even a businessman. As Aris put it,

Oligarchs are not businessmen, they are opportunists. They got so rich so fast because they saw – only a few months before everyone else – how the collapse of the Soviet Union could be turned to their advantage as long as they acted quickly and ruthlessly.
According to bne sources, the actual idea for the makeover was not Khodorkovsky's; a group of bankers from Brunswick (which later sold out to UBS in 1997) went to see Khodorkovsky and explained that the most he could ever get out of Yukos was the $2bn annual revenue. But if he could turn his image round, then he could make far more from the share appreciation; at the start of 1999, Yukos' shares were trading at a price/earnings multiple of 1.3x, way below its Russian peers that were trading at multiples of 6.8x.

Khodorkovsky seized on the idea and threw himself into the task of cleaning out his own Aegean stable. It is a testament to the shortness of investors' memories that he was so spectacularly successful. Within three years, Yukos was the doyen of good corporate governance in Russia and Khodorkovsky was the 16th richest man in the world. Harvard Business School wrote a paper on the "Khodokovsky effect," which saw this good corporate governance spread to other Russian companies as the country's oligarchs looked on amazed.

The reason is that Putin basically did choose to make an example of Khodorkhovsky for his fraud and tax evasion was for the reason that he could-Khodorkovsky is not a man who really believes in "fair practice" and his Yukos business used contract killings to advance its interests-is part of gaining state control over Russian resources.

Naturally, Britain opposes that as its oil interests have been adversely affected in places like Sakhalin Island where previous contracts with BP have not been honoured. Though that could be portrayed as not "fair play", Putin's state has the opinion that it has the right to control resources for the national interest.

For those railing against such nationalism as a primitive remnant of the past in Europe, it worth remembering that Scottish nationalists have fumed consistently about how Scottish Noth Sea Oil was spirited away by mostly English interests and that had Scotland been independent in the 1970s, it would now be as rich as Norway or Switzerland.

Putin's sovereign democracy has it that Russia's resources should be used for the Russian national interest and so, following the looting of the Russian economy during the Yeltsin years by the oligarchs and Western business interests, the "dictatorship of law" should be applied. A strong state would be the precondition for the evolution of civil society in Russia.

Hence continual prating from the West on the Khodorkovsky case has only bolstered Putin's credentials as he can point to the external threat from those who really would like to see a return to a Russia where the preferred oligarchs can be esconced in power once more. Not only is Western support for Khodorkovsky unethical it is also deeply stupid and unrealistic.

Hypocritical editorials from The Observer only go further to confirm that "liberal interventionism" and the anti-Russian diatribes of Edward Lucas and those like David Miliband are an ideological rationalisation of British interests at the expense of Russian power and security.

However repressive Putin's regime in Moscow appears, it is important to realise that by historical standards it is a vast improvement and living standards have risen compared to what they like during the 1990s when few in the West piped up about Yeltsin's brutal coup d'etat of 1993.

Even under the Tsars in the Patriotic War against Napoleon in 1812 or the Great Patriotic War on 1941-45, Russian people rallied to defend a repressive regime instead of anything imposed on them from abroad. With a regime that is not repressive by historical standards, most Russians will not be lectured to by those supporting Khodorkovsky.

That does not mean that the abuses and undoubted corruption should be ignored. But that realistically, those who maintain hypocritical double standards about Russia have any moral high ground upon which to lecture it and, moreover, that as part of British diplomacy it is utterly counter productive.

Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR: The Concept of "Moral Equivalence".

2010-09-16T03:13:00.000-07:00

It is often believed that you can draw a strong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin and assert that there was a double genocide perpetuated by both Hitler and Stalin. Even if their ideology was different there is it is believed a clear moral equivalence in the fact both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.

Yet the term "moral equivalence" has its problems when applied to claiming that the Communist and Fascist and Nazi totalitarian regimes were essentially the same or equivalent in murdering people on such a colossal scale.

However, it is better to see the twin totalitarianisms as morally comparable in many aspects of their functioning but very different when it came to the scale and ambitions of their mutually antagonistic ideologies.

Soviet Communism was democidal and not genocidal as was the Nazi regime which aimed to exterminate Jews in their entirety. Both regimes aimed to remove any potential check on their power and treated "enemies of the people" in similar ways.

Yet the Nazi regime was intentionally genocidal in a way that Stalin's USSR was not, as the USSR did not aim intentionally to extermine entire races simply because of their race, though Stalin did in effect transport hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Poles and Tatars to their deaths.

Morally the scale of the killing is comparable but not "equivalent" in the sense of being "roughly the same" since it is impossible to equate the number of deaths meted out by both regimes according to some moral criteria. This is the key problem with the notion of "moral equivalence".

The numbers killed were not equivalent as Stalin killed more people of all races than Hitler: he was non-discriminatory in that sense. Both regimes intended to murder as many people as it was thought to gain an empire but the Nazi extermination of the Jews went beyond what was merely "necessary".

Stalin had a certain paranoid logic for wanting to crush centres of nationalist opposition to the Red Empire whereas Hitler was always alert to exploiting that in his Drang Nach Osten, as he did in Ukraine and the Baltics when some nationalist colluded in the killing of Jews without direct supervision.

The techniques of both totalitarian regimes: nihilism, mass concentration camp systems etc were morally comparable. The danger of "moral equivalence" is that it can easily slide by default into the idea that supporting the Waffen SS and German war effort, as in Lithuania, was a "lesser evil".

Moreover, as malign as Soviet totalitarianism was even in the 1980s it is propaganda to assert that they were "equivalent" to the Nazi regime which lasted all of twelve years. It means that those asserting anti-Russian nationalism are not judged by the same criteria as Putin is in Russia.

Most empires have as their rationale the control of scarce and strategic raw materials. Killing or consenting to kill people who get in the way or control those resources for purposes of pure greed is a normal feature of human life. Ideologies are there to rationalise these rapacious impulses.

On a small scale, Lithuanians were happy to collude in murdering their Jewish neighbours if they could rationalise it according to the Jewish Bolshevik threat and thus ease their poverty at once by grabbing a flat or clothes they would have otherwise had to work for for many years.

The same trend occurred in Poland in World War Two, as documented in Jan T Gross' Neighbours, about the massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne in 1941, and Fear, which deals with anti-semitism not only during the war but also even after Auschwitz.

Thecollective dis-ease even in 2010 at the knowledge that previous generations did this and that the installation of Soviet Republics did nothing to diminish the coveting of Jewish assets is one reason why this double genocide myth is there to cosset people from the truth.

There is nothing unusual in this. Israel has encouraged similar rapaciousness in Palestinian lands by referral to some "existential threat" and justified it with narratives of victimhood.

Coveting land and assets is normal behaviour and entirely human, though still repellent. Humans are just like this when they believe greed can be rationalised in a way that soothes the claims of the conscience because of the threat "they" pose to "us".

One reason liberal humanists such as Havel have refused to take on the double genocide myth is most likely because of a residual ethnocentric distaste for Russia, resentment that such "barbarians" control resources more civilised Central Europeans have a human right to.

That is, notto be held captive by Russian control of pipelines and bullied as Georgia was in 2008, a claim made by Western politicians and worthies just three years after the same people such as Havel supported the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to grab its oil.

When liberals claim the Soviet Union was "morally equivalent" to Nazi Germany, they wish to portray Stalin's dictatorship as a Greater Russian phenomenon mingled with the nihilism of Communist ideology and not that it was an universalist Enlightenment project .

The barbarism of Stalin was created by Lenin's nihilistic revolution after 1917 and contempt for legal norms but it was in accordance with many aspects of the European Enlightenment and a distinct break with Old Russia in positing wholesale extermination as a necessary part of Progress.

A number of objections are usually made when criticising the double genocide concept,

Objection 1

..whilst far right nationalists do use the concept
of a moral equivalency between Hitler and Stalin as a tool for minimising the pure evil of Hitler and the Holocaust, many others have no such agenda. Nor have
we been misled. Some of us simply see the two as being roughly equivalent in evil and horror.

Objection 2

Morality is as much about effects as it is about intention. I doubt that those people dying in gulags in Siberia were thinking, "Well I'm going to die here, but at least it's not down to my ethnicity". People are people are people.

What people experienced in the Gulag is comparable to that of being in a Nazi concentration camp.

But that still does not mean they were equivalent, not least if a person was a Jew in Sobibor or Maidenek which where explicitly extermination camps on the frontline as the Wehrmacht advanced into Soviet territory quickly followed by Einsatzgruppen.

Ironically, it was precisely Auschwitz, the site set up as the totemic symbol of the Nazi concentration camp, that was not in fact purely an extermination centre but also a work camp for "politicals" and Poles, though it was often effectively a death camp too, just as were the Gulags.

True, at the time, it must be remembered, inmates were unlikely to have been thinking of whether life in a Nazi camp or Gulag was worse or better, though they must have thought what it was they had done that was wrong in many, if not most, cases.

Quite simply they had little or no knowledge to make the comparison.

The point, however, is this: the notion of "moral equivalence" is difficult to apply to death on such a scale if effects are mentioned and unrelated to intentions. For if this was the case, then British Imperialism can be seen as "morally equivalent" to Hitler's Third Reich or Stalin's Empire

It is, in my opinion, simply better to state that the USSR in its Stalinist period and Nazism were morally comparable in many aspects of their functioning but not "equivalent". The "equivalence" charge does make it possible by default not design to argue as far right Lithuanians do.

For if a small nation as Lithuania is faced with an "either-or" choice, then it can be argued that collaboration with the Waffen SS was a "lesser evil" as both Nazism and the Soviet Union were morally equivalent but, from a Lithuanian perspective, the Soviet Union more of a threat to "them".

Paradoxically, the charge of "moral equivalence" can be used to argue that if one just has to choose one side, it is natural to choose the one that was less of a threat in circumstances where survival overrode any normal moral considerations.

Yet, in fact, Stalin did not slate the entire Lithuanian nation to extermination as Hitler had the Jews. So by siding with the Nazis, Lithuanian nationalists made a choice that the Nazis were 'less immoral' than the Stalinists.

Willing collaboration with nationalist groups who killed Jews was not necessitated. It was still a choice.

The evidence is that in conditions where civilisation has broken down, some members of subject peoples as the Lithuanians were under the Nazis occupation after 1941 can often behave with equal evil and brutality as the occupiers.

To claim Lithuanians were thus subjected to genocide can be used to obfuscate the role of Lithuanians in the Holocaust.

Objection 3.

So in your eyes, the idea of a double-genocide is out-and-out "myth" ... because it was in fact Nazi genocide, and Baltic "democide".

Well isn't that distinction rather technical. And again you seem to be saying that killing thousands of people because of a devotion to a nationalistic or racial ideology (genocide) could never be compared to killing a 'possibly' similar number of people through political decision-making by a different creed.

It is clear that genocide and democide are comparable in actual effect but not "equivalent" as Lithuanians were not slated for wholesale extermination as the Jews across all of Eastern Europe were and thus the word "genocide" is thus wrong for obvious terminological reasons which can thus be interpreted by some to make emotive appeals.

Put simply, a genocide of Lithuanians would have meant that all Lithuanians were destined to be eradicated by Stalin. This was not so. The national "bourgeois" elite was removed and deported along with thousands of others who had committed no crime other than to get in the way of Stalin's annexation.

Those Lithuanians who died in the Gulag or in the torture chambers of the NKVD were killed by a totalitarian regime prepared to eliminate any person of any race who opposed Soviet i.e Stalin's power and so it best for that reason termed democide.

This is why it is not "equivalent", though the effects were just as horrendous in many cases where Jews died no less than those placed in Gulags, though those in Stalin's camps did have some hope that they would eventually survive whilst all Jews by being Jews were going to be exterminated as a matter of policy.

By terming Stalin's action democide and not genocide the victimhood narrative whereby the crimes of Lithuanian far right nationalist collaborators with the Nazis are rationalised can be avoided and confronted.

That can be done without drawing attention away from the enormity of the crimes committed by Stalin's USSR.

"Double Genocide" and Lithuania

2010-09-15T03:55:00.000-07:00

It is often thought that the history of the Second World War and of the twin horrors of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism has never really been laid to rest in Eastern Europe where the legacy of that experience can still resurface to cause controversy even in 2010.

With regards Lithuania, Jonathan Freedland has written in The Guardian, on the absence of any significant memorials in Kaunas to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust that it has much to do with the myth of the "double genocide" perpetuated by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes equally.

.....there are no special road signs directing visitors to make the short drive to the Ninth Fort, the place where the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators dug deep, vast pits – into which they shot almost 10,000 Jews, including 4,273 children, on a single day in October 1941, the so-called Great Action.

....the Ninth Fort includes not only a massive, Soviet-era socialist-realist memorial to the dead buried in those pits, but a newer exhibition hall, covering the oppression of the Soviet years.

.......I cannot go along with the "double genocide", especially not now that I've seen how it plays out in practice rather than in theory. For one thing, the equation of Nazi and communist crimes rarely entails an honest account of the former. The plaque at the Ninth Fort, for instance, identifies the killers only as "Nazis and their assistants".

It does not spell out that those assistants were Lithuanian volunteers, enthusiastically murdering their fellow Lithuanians. In my travels, visiting a whole clutch of sites, I did not encounter one that gave a direct, explicit account of this bald, harsh truth: that Lithuania's Jews were victims of one of the highest killing rates in Nazi Europe, more than 90%, chiefly because the local population smoothed the Germans' path. Indeed, they began killing Jews on June 22 1941, before Hitler's men had even arrived.

All of that is true. In Kaunas, the German soldiers did not need to do anything other than watch the locals beating Jews to death in the streets. As Niall Ferguson put it in The War of the World, "Between half and two thirds of the Jews were killed not by Germans but by other Lithuanians".

The reason for this was the myth of Judeo-Communism, something present in Lithuania before the Soviet invasion of 1940 following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 between Stalin and Hitler which had partitioned Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres, but given greater impetus after it was occupied.

Above-Lithuanian Jews in Kaunas being put to work in 1941

That Sovietisation was brutal and inhuman was obvious enough as Lithuania's national leaders and numerous civilians were sent off to the Gulag. Yet the conflation of Jewishness with Communism was something the Nazis were able to exploit to get nationalistic Lithuanians to kill off Jews for them when they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

The "double genocide" version of Baltic history depicted in the Museum of Genocide Victims, off Vilnius's central Gedimino Boulevard is an update of the myth of equivalence between Nazism and Communism when the two are not "morally equivalent" but merely comparable in the scale of the suffering and killing.

The danger of "equivalence" has been that it used to let off those who fought in Waffen SS units against Stalin as being thereby of a lesser evil and forced to do so by circumstances and so not as fundamentally evil in intensity and duration as the Communist experiment as far as most Lithuanians are concerned.

The destruction of Lithuanian Jewry is portrayed as something wholly separate from what befell the rest of the nation. Freedland points out,

If you wish to remember Lithuania's 200,000 slain Jews, you have to wander far from the main drag, up a side street, to the tiny Green House – which is anyway closed for renovation and whose director, under pressure from state officials, is fighting for her job.
It's the same story with a 2008 change in the law that, in the name of equivalence, banned not just Nazi symbols but Soviet ones too. As if that were not bad enough – banning a veteran of the anti-Hitler resistance from parading his medals – in May, a Lithuanian court held that the swastika was not a Nazi symbol after all, but part of "Baltic culture" and therefore could be displayed in public.

Naturally, as Freedland points out what this fails to emphasise is that Lithuanian Jews were Lithuanian citizens and not a nation within another nation and nor did many even act as though they were anything other. The problem was that Jews were disproportionately represented in the professions and were the most successful capitalists.

As Micheal Burleigh points out in The Third Reich A New History, it was, in fact, the very capitalist success of Jews that had marked them out in 1940 as a target for the Soviet regime's policy of expropriation,

"The Soviet occupation of Lithuania in June 1940 affected Jews disproportionately, while paradoxically intensifying the feeling among Lithuanian nationalists that Jews were uniquely responsible for it.Jews owned 57% of plant and 83% of businesses nationalised by the Soviet socialists".

Moreover, the continued failure to stress the shared suffering of Lithuanian Jew and Gentile alike under the Soviet occupation of 1940 exactly 70 years later in 2010 is striking considering the fact that 12,000 of the total of 60,000 Lithuanians deported East to the Gulag were Jewish and 15.2 % of all of them were actually members of the Lithuanian Communist Party.

That the Lithuanian double genocide model has not been challenged by most politicians in the West is through the desire to exploit nationalistic sentiments of those like Saakashvili in Georgia if it ties in with the geopolitical aims of expanding the US sphere on influence eastwards.

Matt Seaton comments,

The pernicious nonsense of the 'double genocide' thesis is far from merely a Lithuanian problem. Its founding document is the 2008 Prague Declaration includes, to their shame, such luminaries of the Velvet Revolution as Vaclav Havel and Jan Urban.
For those who lived and suffered under Stalinist dictatorship, a certain loss of perspective is forgivable; but these former dissidents are making themselves the 'useful idiots' of contemporary Baltic, Belorussian, Ukrainian, Polish and Czech ultranationalists – whose political forebears were as resolutely antisemitic as they were anti-Bolshevik.
The 'double genocide' thesis also entirely glosses over the fact that the Nazi project in the east was both to exterminate the Jewish population and ethnically cleanse the Slavs too: Lebensraum for the Volksdeutsche and all that.
Stalin used famine in the Ukraine as a political tool; and the elimination of the kulaks was an ideologically-motivated genocide. With cynical and criminal deliberation, both cost many millions of lives. But neither can or should be equated to the horrifying ambition of the Third Reich's racial purity project in the east.

The problem with Matt Seaton's view is that he still uses the word "genocide" for Stalin's class war against the richer peasants. It effectively killed millions but was a democidal policy. Genocide means the intention to remove and destroy a particular race. Stalin wanted to kill people of all races to advance Soviet power and centralisation.

Also the 2008 Prague Declaration that Seaton mentions can only be understood in this context of current geopolitical concerns. Yet the hypocritical reference to the double genocide myth only being something beholden to far right nationalists is itself a myth: liberal interventionists, of which there are many writing for the Guardian, accept it when expedient.

In reality there was no "double genocide". There was a democide on the part of the Soviet Union under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin between 1917 and 1953 under which the Lithuanians suffered as much as other national groups caught between Hitler's Germany and the "Red Empire".

As Mark Almond has writtten,

Stalin’s regime was undoubtedly cruel, but compared with the complete deportations of the Crimean Tatars or Chechens for instance, the scale of deportation in the Baltic States was surprisingly modest. It cannot be compared to the pretty near complete extermination of local Jews by the Nazis. Yet the myth of a “deported nation” still is widely peddled in the West. In fact, Stalin found many willing collaborators in the Baltic States and local Balts held high office throughout the period of Soviet occupation.

The far right nationalist myth is a use of history for political propaganda and to advance hatred and fear of Putin's "neo-Stalinist" Russia in order to promote an anti-Russian alliance of states, NATO and complete fealty to US policies, including the neoliberal policies that created so much poverty.

When faced with a downturn in living standards and the cost of spending money on NATO accession, politicians like President Valdas Adamkus before 2003, the last leader in Europe to have fought in World War Two on the German side, had to use nationalism as a divertion from "real" issues.

The double genocide myth thus offers a rationalisation for suffering, that all the privations Lithuanians have suffered since independence in 1991 is the malign legacy of Communism no less than Nazism and that of these Communism was just as bad because, unlike Hitler, Stalin destroyed Lithuanian freedom in 1940.

The other assumption is that the collaborators with Hitler were not "collaborators" but "freedom fighters", the very words are used consistently in museums and commemorations to those who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union in neighbouring Latvia and Estonia no less than Lithuania.

Occupation Museums routinely airbrush out of history or euphemise the scale of the collaboration with Hitler as it only lasted four years compared to the Soviet or "Russian" occupation that lasted half a century. As Nazi occupation only saw Jews murdered and not Lithuanians, it seemed relatively tolerable for the many.

Hence the rewriting of a heroic victim narrative in Lithuania that displaces guilt on to Russia, in spite of the fact the Soviet Union was not merely an extension of Great Russian nationalism. The Vilnius Genocide Museum thus not only refers to the Soviet "genocide" but also lists the names of certain 'freedom fighters'.

According to John Czaplika,

'some of these heroes of the Lithuanian resistance against the Soviets [who] may have been at the same time Nazi collaborators who cooperated or took active part in the eradication of the Jewish communities in Lithuania'.

Naturally the double genocide myth is accepted by those who promote anti-Russian racism in the West as part of a New Cold War, such as the neoliberal ideologue Edward Lucas who recommends the website La Russophobe which includes continual references to "Russian barbarians".

Now Lucas is considered a "liberal" by many but the reality is that in the Great Game for resources anything goes if it promotes the West's pipeline interests against Russia and so evidence of the racism of those in Lithuania and Georgia is routinely overlooked or called "problematic".

The real nub of this is not so much that the double genocide myth will lead to a new anti-semitism but that it represents a rewriting of history, ramps up tensions with Russia ( with appalling consequences as in Georgia's attack on Russia in 2008 ) and reveals how people will pervert history to advance geopolitical ambitions.

Matt Seaton is thus hardly correct when he argues,

My point is that only the right really has interest in promoting the double genocide thesis. It's not a neutral historical debating point; it's purpose is to enlarge the significance of Soviet occupation and oppression not only at the expense of the memory of the Holocaust, but in order to rehabilitate a nationalist tradition that was (as Jonathan Freedland rightly observes) often actively involved in Nazi collaboration with the Holocaust.

In fact, the double genocide thesis is routinely allowed to pass by those 'Democratic Geopoliticians' who advocate Liberal Interventionism, even if like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik it really boils down to a universal crusade against "totalitarianism" and they don't refer explicitly to "double genocide".

In practice, what both far right nationalists and European Liberal Interventionists have in common is that they both uncritically accept US foreign policy no matter what and pride themselves in supporting the USA from Afghanistan to Iraq. To that extent they support far right authoritarians such as Saakashvili in Georgia, as has New Labour's Denis MacShane.

The usefulness of Baltic nationalist victim narratives is that they can uncritically ratchet up blind hatred for Russia in this "New Europe". This then makes it a necessity for why the elites are clients of US power and patronage. Once a satellite, always a satellite, as the French like to remark.

Havel was a useful idiot in supporting the Iraq War, as Tony Judt argued, but he is not foolish enough to not know about Baltic nationalism: his consistent support for neoconservative foreign policy is based on fear and dislike for Russia, a hangover from the Cold War but given a new lease of life with the revival of Russian nationalism under Putin.

In the Power of the Powerless he referred to the "blind serf mentality" of the Russians, an understandable feeling given the brutality of the Soviet Union's crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 but hardly relevant in the post-Cold War era unless Putin's regime in Russia is regarded crudely as an exercise in"neo-Stalinism".

The key omission when looking at the far right Baltic nationalism is that 1) It's a form of divertion to scapegoat "the Russians" as being coterminous with "the Soviets" and 2) To big up nationalistic sentiments in order get people behind NATO and to support it's eastward expansion to control oil and gas.

After all, the 2008 Prague Declaration was accepted by leading authorities on the Holocaust such as Emanuelis Zingeris who was instrumental in fighting for the cause of Lithuanian independence and in creating the Vilnius Gaon Jewish State Museum of which he then acted as a director.

Particulary ironical then is the fact that Lithuanian political figures such as Vytautas Landsbergis in January 2005 advocated the banning of Communist insignia if the Nazi swastika was banned. Yet liberals continually advocate the cause of The Other Russia against Putin which has the Natzbol ( National Bolshevik ) Eduard Limonov as a key player.

So fervent was Landsbergis' dislike and contempt for Russia, and thus the Soviet Union, that he found a willing ally in the European Parliament-Alessandra Mussolini who opined, "To implement the proposal of the Members of the European Parliament regarding Communist symbols is our moral duty".

Yet the Russian Fascist Limonov seems to have gone one stage further as part of The Other Russia in combining both the Nazi creed and its insignia with the Bolshevik ones, a kind of new "Third Way" which sits uneasily with the presence of those regarded by Havel as model dissidents like Alexeyeva.

This shows the scale of the Orwellian doublethink: totalitarianism and its symbols are railed against in Central Europe and the Baltics and yet liberals support coalitions in Moscow that include those who explicitly support Fascism, a point never mentioned by Guardian writing "democracy promoters".

......................................................................................................................................................................

A Response to Criticism that the Double Genocide thesis in relation to the Idea of Morally Equivalence between the Totalitarian Regimes.

....far right nationalists do use the concept of a moral equivalency between Hitler and Stalin as a tool for minimising the pure evil of Hitler and the Holocaust, many others have no such agenda. Nor have we been misled. Some of us simply see the two as being roughly equivalent in evil and horror.

The point is surely to what end is the double genocide myth put and conveniently it is pretty much the same as the idea of equivalent totalitarian systems: uncritical support for US hegemony and promoting "Democratic Geopolitics".

The idea that only the far right collude in the illusion that there were two genocides is wrong. Terminology matters. The issue is no longer really about Jews, as there are sadly so few left in the Baltic Republics. It is about uniting people against Russia which is why Israel is a staunch ally of Baltic republics and Georgia.

Cutting through the rhetoric of victim politics to the real interests being advanced is essential. The historical record is important, of course, but equally true is the use of logic to work out why such nations as Lithuania are using the double genocide myth.

To promote the Soviet Union=Big Russia Myth is an attempt to try to divert attention away from the failures of the post-Communist transition which immiserated so many people through shock therapy, something seldom mentioned as the coda to the victory over the Soviet Union in the media.

It is possible to bear two things in mind: that the demise of Communism was one of history's Good Things and yet that the IMF and the US dominated institutions of the Wahington Consensus subsequently used that moral impetus to justify imposing a terrible neoliberal economic model that was once again an "experiment on a people".

That the crude monetarism with the same prescriptive elements meted out as historical inevitability by the "Marriott Men" caused appalling poverty is seldom mentioned in the West. It is often downplayed by erstwhile liberals and The Guardian has not carried a substantial report of the economic hardships in countries such as Lithuania.

It was in such a situation that in the 1990s, politicians resorted to the easy option of blaming Russia for everything and conflating Russia with the Soviet Union in order to co-opt support for Euro-Atlanticism. The same nationalism was promoted under Yushchenko in Ukraine after 2004.

Using history as nationalist propaganda is only vilified when Putin does it: when pro-Western politicians groomed in Washington do it, it is routinely ignored or downplayed. This was quite clearly the case with the racist demagogue Saakashvili who was termed "hotblooded"or "reckless" for attacking Russia in August 2008.

In Lithuania, agriculture collapsed leaving ghost villages not reported by Luke Harding who has, however, gleefully reported on dying villages in Russia, the alcoholism rates, the prematurely dying men and disappearance of the young-as if that was only Putin's fault and had not happened in the Baltic states.

Meanwhile the EU continually protected its agriculture as both Western nations and the US asset stripped the economies. In such a situation where people need somebody to blame even those liberals like Vytautas Landsbergis started piping up about Russian reparations.

Nationalism became the trump card across what was known as "Eastern Europe". Liberals seldom refer to the economy and shock therapy as the driving force of this resentments because of the simplistic triumphalist narrative of 1989-1990 and because they can't bring themselves to admit what went wrong.

Power to the Powerful in Russia is Bad.

2010-09-10T03:53:00.000-07:00

The confusion over Russia in a Guardian editorial today ( Power to the Powerful ) reflects a profound ignorance of Russian history and an utter lack of realism as well as bad faith, repellent double standards.

With regards this summer's destructive forest fires and the failure to provide a proper fire service, the Guardian cites the official who,

....said it was up to each owner to have their own fire bucket. Why should the state help those who could not, or would not, help themselves? The narod are mugs.

This is actually very much what some Russian liberals think of the Russian narod or the plebs in neighbouring Ukraine where on the election of Yanukovych in elections earlier this year Yulia Latynina opined in a Moscow Times article that "Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous".

When Hurricane Katrina hit the USA, Western liberals did not suggest that regime change should be imposed or that EU nations should preach to the USA about its democratic deficits. Nor that the failure of the neoliberal economic model to guarantee security to its citizens was a major failure and that the EU should call for the funding of civil society activists to challenge the monied oligarchies that control the US.

This is not to say that deficiencies in "the West" mean that continued failures in Russia as regards should be simply excused because "we" are in no position to criticise. Yet a wider perspective is needed beyond the crude impulse to exploit humanitarian catastrophes to make one dimensional political swipes at Putin.

For a start by any standards Britain has become less of a participatory democracy in recent years and more of a "virtual" one that is staged and choreographed in a way that converges with the Russian model of a democracy mixed with authoritarianism. It is just that Britain's ailing civil society can provide real opposition to the oligarchy there.

In Russia there has not existed such a tradition that grew up in Britain over many centuries and the idea of "civil society" in the West is declining as states become more intent on circumventing it and ceding power to unaccountable transnational organisations such as the IMF and large corporations and media.

Indeed Britain has provided succour to the exiled Russian oligarchs that New Labour or New Conservative politicians have reflexively supported, despite their criminality, and have never condemned as explicitly as they have Putin who has never been forgiven for disproving the idea that Russia needed neoliberalism.

The crude belief that economic liberalism leads inexorably to political liberalism is rehashed in the Guardian and shows a curious economic determinism of the sort that certain Marxists would have approved of when it states,

God forbid that economic liberalisation should lead to political change, the creation of real political parties, a functioning civil society, and institutions independent of the governing elite. There is no exact equivalent in English of Putin's "soft autocracy", and that may be telling in itself. Even benign despotism implies a will to improve the lives of ordinary people.

There might be no exact equivalent in English for "soft autocracy" but to blame Russian for linguistic difficulties in articulating what Guardian "liberals" think is more a problem for them. Putin's hybrid of autocracy and democracy is intent on creating a powerful state that can create the conditions for Russian capitalism.

The very nature of Russia requires a degree of centralisation and the creation of a functioning state. Oppositionists in The Other Russia hold Putin to account for his authoritarianism and yet never state what they would do instead to curtail oligarch power and root out corruption.

The reason is that many Russian "liberals" still support the notion that the global "transition" from Communism to Liberalism was never completed and ignore the traumatic impact of shock therapy and the millions of Russians who died, as documented by an important Lancet study.

There was little concern for the Russia narod back in the 1990s when only the tradition of peasant cultivation and plots saved them from an actual famine and greater levels of death and starvation. This fact is airbrushed out of nearly everything that Guardian liberals such as Luke Harding write on Russia.

That corruption persists and the spoils of office still fall to FSB operatives is hardly a good thing but the experience of the 1990s and the realities of Russian politics bear out the fact that the "democratic" opposition is still financed by those wanting power and wealth they had under Yeltsin in the 1990s.

Putin's task has been first to consolidate the Russian state an impose what he calls "the dictatorship of law". It's a vision that Michael Stuermer argues, in Putin and the Rise of Russia, suggests owes much to Hegel's notion of a machtstaat and that is held to be needed in order to avoid the chaos and anarchy created by the policies of the IMF.

Before lecturing Russia on its deficiencies it is about high time many in the West admitted the culpability of policies that originated mostly in the USA-the Washington Consensus-in creating the mess that Putin is responding to and stopped naively buying into the messianic New Cold War guff spouted by neoliberal ideologues like Edward Lucas.

The problem, as evidenced by Russian nationalist responses, is that "Democratic Geopolitics" is seen as having those double standards inherent in the New Great Game for control of the pipeline matrix, of which Russia is still a central part in post-Soviet space, and is also evident in the Guardian's Milibandite propaganda trope here,

Russia itself is languishing. Its economy contracted by nearly 8% last year, its worst annual economic performance since 1994, and – despite being so dependent on the stuff – it is producing less oil now than the Soviet Union did in the 1970s.

Soviet oil accounted for 35% of global production in 1985. Oil from Russia accounts today for just 17% – a marked decline even after the partial loss of oil from the Caspian basin is factored in.

Russia's economy has shrunk twice in the last decade, and deindustrialisation is making itself felt in Russia's mono-cities – those reliant on a single industry. It is against this background that the billions of dollars thrown at baubles like Skolkovo and Sochi should be judged.

That oil production is declining is obvious enough globally, one reason that Miliband still supports the invasion of the oil grab that was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 just four years after North Sea Oil peaked back in 1999 and Blair and Bush saw Iraq as a panacea to guarantee Western hegemony.

The contraction of the Russian economy is serious but hardly on the scale of the previous decade i.e the 1990s, when shock therapy laid waste to whole swathes of Russian industry and that is conveniently omitted in the Guardian's shrill and one dimensional worldview, one consistently repeated in what can only be considered forthright propaganda.

The shrinking of the Russian economy back in 1998 was a result of the inappropriate nature of the IMF's neoliberal policies and one important reason why Putin was able to consolidate power after 1999 when NATO was extending its control over pipeline routes from the Black Sea through the Kosovo Conflict and Russia seen as weak and powerless.

The New Cold War mantra is hinted at by the way Russia's declining oil base is evidenced by contrasting it to the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, as if Russia under Putin was some seamless successor to the Soviet Union but a weaker version that Democratic Geopoliticians could still alter.

Yet the over dependency of the USA and UK, indeed the West as a whole, on oil lying in unstable lands riven with ethnic irredentism and conflicts is equally as evident. If Russia still did not control a large amount of oil and resources the West wants a stake in it would care less for Russia.

It could be argued that a mutually beneficial partnership between the West and Russia would be in the interests of both and can only be gained if Putin is removed in favour of a more "open" political system. Yet the evidence of the 1990s is hardly encouraging and political thinking in the West remains the same.

The Democratic Geopoliticians of The Other Russia are financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs who aim at "regime change", something that Putin can exploit to shore up popular support for Russian nationalism and which Other Russian ultra-nationalists such as Limanov's Natzbols are mobilised to challenge in the streets.

In such cynical conditions it is highly unlikely that pro-Western liberals are going to count for much in Russia as few of them have any regard for Russian interests beyond exploiting the deficiencies of Russia's record on freedom to advance their own designs to get their hands on Russia's resources.

Democracy was hardly encouraged when Yeltsin launched a coup d'etat against the Russian Parliament in 1993, invaded Chechnya and when the West had little or nothing to say about that, only becoming interested in human rights when Putin thumbed his nose at Western geopolitical interests.

Those ex-Soviet nation states that have joined the US geopolitical orbit, such as the Baltic Republics, have , moreover, suffered incredible poverty and de-industrialisation as a result of neoliberal "reforms" imposed by the IMF. The economy of Latvia declined by 15% after the 2008 crisis.

That is hardly a great advert for "joining the West" and both the EU and the US will just have to accept that Russia and a goodly number of Russians and Ukrainians are not going to be interested in sacrificing what meagre material benefits they have got since shock therapy was rejected.

Despite the folly of "the billions of dollars thrown at baubles like Skolkovo and Sochi" that "should be judged", the Russians can come back with the West's financial sectors profligate irresponsibility, massive debt fuelled consumerism in the UK and US, the billions squandered on Iraq.

Billions of pounds are squandered in London by the exiled oligarchs who robbed Russia in the 1990s, like Roman Abramovich snapping up Chelsea to make it his plaything. London alone generates most of the UK's income in a dysfunctional economy based on rentierism and money transactions alone.

The New Russian elite knows these weaknesses and it is hardly going to be lectured by those who colluded in the robbery of Russian assets in the 1990s to a tune of $300 billion.

Russia is simply not going to go along the road mapped out for it by the West, that Democratic Geopolitics often sacrifices democracy to coalitioning new oligarchic elites ( as in the Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" of 2004 ) . Russians will continue to prefer a strong leader who can keep those who want to sell out Russia's national interests to foreign ones.

The damage done in the 1990s will not be forgiven very quickly and events will move on further along the path towards large power blocks fighting to control oil and gas and trying to install elites to further these ends, something that will lead to a greater pathology of competing power interests that could become lethal.

With regards democracy, the perception of double standards on the part of the West and the fact that "liberals" in Russia seem more intent on pursuing their own interests in tandem with US help will be resented and, as a consequence, resisted. And that the West's mistakes ( and greed ) are to blame for that.

Communist Theme Park Tours Want You to "Feel the Power" of an AK 47

2010-09-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Turning a catastrophe into profit is the hallmark of a civilisation that is increasingly insensitive to the claims of those killed in them. Before me I have a pamphlet advertising Communist Tours in Krakow by so-called "Crazy Guides". Communism there is now nothing but a joke.

This group are not to be confused with Crazy Tours, another bunch of rapacious money grubbing dolts who believe that treating Communism as "crazy","wacky" or "zany" is one way of laughing away this grim era of austerity and repression by getting foreigners to chuckle at it.

The Pamphlet states their Communist Tours are supported by Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor, The Guardian, Reuters. Michelin, Newsweek, The New York Times, TVN, the Financial Times and RMF FM.

In short, by corporate media outlets who, by their own supposed standards and fact they are very much a product of capitalism, really ought to know better when the nature of the tour is revealed and there is no historical context is provided about Nowa Huta in Krakow.

Nor does the Communist Tour mention the era when the Armii Krajowe who had been crushed by both the Nazi's whilst Stalin's Red Army watched over the Wisla and in Krakow AK members rounded up and tortured in the Montelupich Prison.

Now that no longer matters.

Only late "Commie" kitsch is valued for its voyeuristic ability to bring in cash. Any educated individual can learn about the inhumanity, torture and show trials that led to the set up of the Communist system in Poland. Get on Tram 4 and it takes any person there.

Reading a history book like that of Norman Davies will provide the overall picture of the enormity of what was done to Poland in general under Communism and Jan T Malecki's History of Krakow For Everyone tells the story of it imposition in Krakow in particular.

Anne Applebaum, despite he misjudgements about contemporary Russia and Putin's regime as a "Neo-Soviet threat" or as part of a "New Cold War" ( Lucas ), makes the appropriate moral position clear when in her introduction to Gulag: A History she asks

"the lesson could not be clearer:while one symbol of mass murder fills us with horror ( i.e Nazism ),the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh"

Applebaum perceived this double standard whilst walking across the Karlov Most in Prague where all manner of Soviet paraphenalia was on sale-caps, badges, belt buckles and little pins, the tin Lenin and Brezhnev images that Soviet schoolchildren once pinned to their uniforms.

The explanation for these double standards were well explained.

By the end of Communism the system was seen as a joke and, of course, some dark humour about Brezhnev being "dead from the neck up" after numerous strokes but still put on parade to show "business as usual" seemed to represent a system falling crummily to bits.

The era of James Bond films like For Your Eyes Only ( 1981 ) where the Soviets and Bond's rivalry had become more jovial.But, as Applebaum, suggests, "the passage of time" from the immediate Stalinist period of repression meant few cared or were scared of Brezhnev or General Jaruzelski.

Despite the fact comfortable consumers contrived to ignore events in Poland, they now go to have a jolly jape in a Trabant and chauffered to Nowa Huta to voyeuristically look around a residential area where Solidarity activists in the 1980s were dispersed by ZOMO's batons, tanks and beaten up ( sometimes to death ) in police cells.

Nothing that the Communist Tour repackaging of the so-called "Communist experience" does could not be done by knowing that Poles eat pickled cucumbers ( ogorek ), drink vodka and that some places can be found that look like "authentic" communist flats.

However beyond that patronising sell out, surely the crassest part of the Communist Tours "Other Stuff" that you can do for "fun" is go on a Kalashnikov Shooting outing which is advertised thus-

"The Famous AK47 is the most popular assault rifle, used by all the Soviet storm troopers to Afghan shepherds-and now it's your turn to feel the power".

Now anybody with a decent memory will know that the Cold War saw the mass export, often without money being received by the USSR and Communist China, of AK-47s to pro-communist countries and guerilla groups such as the Viet Cong.

The AK design was spread to over 55 national armies and dozens of paramilitary groups, many of which would not hesitate to shoot decadent Westerners dead with their AK 47s, whilst on Communist Tours, thus getting them to feel " the power" of this weapon.

The AK is a symbol included in the flag of Mozambique and its coat of arms, a reminder that the country's leaders gained power in large part through the effective use of their AK-47s and retain power through state sanctioned terror and violence.

It is also found in the coat of arms of Zimbabwe, where the mass murdering Mugabe is in control, the flag of Hezbollah, and the logo of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. It was an iconic emblem for the RAF terrorists in West Germany in the 1970s too.

Perhaps those idiots who want to "feel the power" of a Kalashnikov can go on an "authentic" tour of Afghanistan just like drugged up and terrified Soviet conscripts had to in that graveyard of Empires called Afghanistan.

They might then get a real adrenalin rush when they "feel the power" of being fired at by an AK 47.

The Problem with the Poor being Allowed to Vote in Ukraine.

2010-08-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

Trawling through the information on the Internet about the supposedly democratic opposition of The Other Russia, I chanced upon a quote from a certain Yulia Latynina who stated in an article for the Moscow Times on 10 February 2010, in regards to the Ukrainians returning the anti-Yushchenko candidate Viktor Yanukovych, that

Letting Poor People Vote Is Dangerous

Some quotes have appeared here and it is, perhaps, necessary to get the quotes from the Moscow Times which one has to subscribe to. The article was once available but has disappeared from view. Many people put it on their websites because they were surprised at the fact an advocate of democracy in Russia could argue this.

It is an astonishing admission by a journalist who is supposedly "liberal". As if democracy is only good if it gives the result that its ostensible promoters actually desire.

It could be one thing for certain parties to be banned as wanting to overthrow democracy, as did the Nazi Party.Yet few who take democracy seriously would say that in the USA in 2010 the low level of educational attainment of many American citizens should bar them from being able to vote, not least given the level of poverty in some parts of the USA too.

Yet in accordance with doublethink, Latynina's sort are 'democratic' because she believes in democracy and those who fail to measure up to the requirements of voting the correct candidate in what was a free and fair election simply should not be able to exercise the right to vote,

"Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in Sunday’s presidential election — not unlike the victories of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler — once again raises doubt about the basic premise of democracy: that the people are capable of choosing their own leader.

Unfortunately, only wealthy people are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner. Poor people elect politicians like Yanukovych or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Poor people are capable of feats of bravery and revolution. They can storm the Bastille, overthrow the tsar or stage an Orange Revolution. But impoverished people are incapable of making sober decisions and voting responsibly in a popular election.

In other words, if the people vote the wrong candidate or against those preferred by the West, in particular the USA where she received on December 8, 2008 the Freedom Defenders Award by the US Department of State, then perhaps they should not be allowed by her standards.

Interestingly, Latynina has also been a member of the 2008 Committee since its inception, a group that includes Garry Kasparov of The Other Russia, a group that sees no problem in having active Fascists such as the National Bolshevik Eduard Limonov as a key strategist.

That makes farce somewhat of Latynina's democratic credentials no less than it does with Kasparov who, like Latynina, is essentially a fanatical neoconservative devoted to the cause of "regime change" by Machiavellian fraud and force across the globe.

An alternative take on events has been provided by Paul Robinson, a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa who wrote,

"While many will no doubt see it as a source of consternation, the election of Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine is really a cause for celebration. The defeat of the leaders of the Orange revolution, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, is actually good news.

In 2004, Yanukovych briefly triumphed on the back of electoral fraud. In 2010, he has beaten his opponents honestly in an election deemed by international observers to be free and fair. This alone amounts to a significant political change for the better.

For Ukrainians, the constant squabbling of the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko years will finally come to an end. For the West, the Ukrainian election offers a welcome opportunity to reassess the nature of the "colour revolutions" of the early 2000s.

The Orange revolution in Ukraine, the Rose revolution in Georgia, and the Cedar revolution in Lebanon gave rise to a myth of democratization in which the "masses" were rising up against corrupt elites. The ongoing protests in Iran have similarly encouraged some to believe that a Green revolution is also in the offing. But the colour revolutions were never quite what they seemed.

In Ukraine, for instance, the "revolutionary" leaders, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, were high-ranking members of the existing system. Furthermore, even in the final election that defeated him in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych still managed to gain over 40 per cent of the vote.

The Orange revolution was decidedly not an uprising of the entire Ukrainian people against its government, but rather a temporary victory by one party in a political struggle within a deeply divided nation.

The Orange revolutionaries proved to be incompetent rulers. The same goes for their colleagues elsewhere. In Georgia, for instance, Mikheil Saakashvili's government has proven disastrous, provoking war with Russia and what is almost certainly the permanent loss of two of the country's provinces.

This seems far more balanced than the unhinged diatribe of Latynina. Yet how on earth she can be seen as a liberal is beyond belief, at least by the standards of "Democracy Promotion" that the USA has put forth as Russia's destiny through the National Endowment for Democracy.

Latynina might well have despaired of the Ukranians voting the wrong person but comparing Yanukovych was hysterical and does nothing to promote liberal democracy: if anything it proves the shrill intolerance of such supposed "liberals": if indeed they are that.

To date Yanukovych has not since his election proposed embarking on a universal racial war like Hitler did and it is bizarre that Latynina put Salvador Allende in the same category of "mad dictator" as Hitler when he was one of the few left wing romatic "revolutionaries" to come to power through the ballot box who did not have dictatorial ambition in 1973.

Yet General Pinochet did when he was backed by the USA in its global war against Communism and despite the fact Allende received no aid from the Soviet Union: curiously it was some supporters of Yeltsin in 1993 who called on him to be another Pinochet in 1993 when crushing popular protests against the ruinous effects of shock therapy.

It is curious that Latynina did not link Hitler together with Pinochet, as both have been termed Fascists, though Pinochet was not a radical and would be better compared with somebody such as General Franco and his regime in Spain.

Why somebody such as Yulia Latynina can be put forward as some sort of youthful face of Russian liberalism simply discredits the term, as well as newspapers such as Novaya Gazeta which once was the home of Anna Politkovskaya.

Such people are a total embarrassment, do nothing to promote liberty and only discredit the concept as something that can be used as a ruse of the oligarchs to unseat those who do not let them have greater control: hardly democracy and hardly likely to appeal to people in Ukraine or Russia.

Designer Revolutionary Frauds-Strategy 31, Eduard Limonov and a Gigantic Phallus.

2010-08-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

On The Observer article by Susan Richards, a Russian blogger called Alexey Kovalev, a contributor to The Guardian and student in London who popped up to defend The Other Russia went offline in a huff after trying to defend the claim that Strategy 31's plan to cause trouble for Putin was a good thing at public protests, sulkily moaning that,

Alright, this is a waste of time. I should be back to my Russia-hating, Western-funded grind.

However, it is very difficult to get a completely clear picture of the political forces at work within Russia or where people's interests lie, so corrupted is the political process there and very much so even amongst those in opposition to President Medvedev and PM Vladimir Putin.

To be fair he was accused without evidence of being in the pay of the CIA by more paranoid critics, something that gives online "discussions" a very Orwellian tone to them. And gives him the opportunity to play at being hard done by instead of answering more searching criticisms such as why people should support a group which includes Limanov, the Natzbol Fascist.

Yet the Strategy 31 initiative he supports is just not one that is going to be supported by those who remember the oligarchs and the last time pro-Western interests controlled Russia and saw a massive collapse in living standards, something apparently not discussed in terms of human rights at all.

The Other Russia is supported by a weird coalition of interests and by the National Endowment for Democracy which absurdly claims to be a non-partisan NGO and independent whilst receiving money from Congress. Most people championed by The Other Russia have close association with the oligarchs and are utterly unpopular leftovers of the Yeltsin period.

As Ron Paul, a potential Presidential candidate in the USA wrote in 2003,

What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), would be rightly illegal in the United States.
The NED injects "soft money" into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other.
Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections "promoting democracy.
How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?

In opposition to Paul, it could be claimed that China is not a democracy and, in fact, would not support the means for countries to develop democracies as the USA does that, in theory, would be hostile to its interests. Yet, in practice, "democracy promotion" has been channelled to those with a scant interest in it, not least The Other Russia.

Garry Kasparov has consistently supported nearly everything the USA has done globally in recent years and supports the USA in return for continued funding, something bound to annoy large numbers of Russians who. perhaps, just did not share his view the Russia's opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was wrong only because Russia did so in its interests.

As for Limonov, even the BBC, which tends to misunderstand the supposed liberal nature of oppositionist movements in Eastern Europe, reported in 2005 that he was,

...an anti-establishment leader with a strong youth following - Eduard Limonov, head of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) - told the BBC openly that his supporters would meet violence with violence.

Both sides, the fronts aligned to The Other Russia, and the Putin regime have reacted in the past with accusations and counter accusations that its opponents are the real "Fascists" with Limonov claiming to be a supporter of leftist anarchism or national defence when it suits him. In reality he is nihilistic and unprincipled.

As the BBC report revealed,

NBP leader Eduard Limonov told the BBC his supporters would join any velvet revolution in Russia.
Like Mr Yashin, he is deeply sceptical about Nashi, but unlike him he says the NBP is ready to respond to violence with violence.
"It is an invitation to a civil war. Such organisations are characteristic of a fascist state. Our country begins to resemble the Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s when fascists were attacking communists," he said.
"But we are not afraid of this. If the authorities want such clashes then we will provide for adequate resistance. We will be happy, because we can't fight with police, but with them - we can."

Naturally, whilst being a Fascist, Limonov can claim that the Kremlin is dominated by Fascists and appear to be a Communist, though why on earth the USA would want to support such an idiotic figurehead is at first apparently very odd, unless it is remembered that the only use of The Other Russia is to advance US interests and weaken Putin from within.

Limonov's vision for what The Other Russia should look like is pretty horrid though,

"We will have to leave Russia, to build a nest on the fresh central lands, to conquer them there and to give rise to a new, unseen civilization of free warriors united in an armed community. Roaming the steppes and the mountains, fighting in southern nations.

"Many types of people will have to disappear. Alcoholic uncles Vasias, cops, functionaries and other defective material will die out, having lost their roots in society. The armed community could be called ‘Government of Eurasia.’ Thus the dreams of the Eurasians of the ’30s will be realized. Many people will want to join us. Possibly we will conquer the whole world. People will die young but it will be fun."

Whether those engaged in more sedentary occupations such as chess, such as Mr Kasparov, would share this alternative vision for a Russia where many types who might not like riding out into the steppes or actively supporting this Manifest Destiny is not especially clear but it hardly sounds like "fun" to get killed in a war for global domination.

Thee rest of the creepy people in The Other Russia sound marginally better or sane. Sergey Yurievich Glazyev of the Rodina Party ( The Motherland ) claims to be "nationalist" and "socialist", despite having former Central Bank members and those close to Yukos Oil such as Viktor Gerashchenko as leading lights.

Glasyev retired in 2007 but the former adviser to Putin was on record for criticising in 2005 according to one source that "’certain forces‘ that are appropriating natural rent and ‘spending billions of dollars in order to have a lobby in the State Duma.’". Gerashchenko was formerly an erstwhile ally of Putin, even winning the Order of Merit for the Fatherland in 2000 off Putin.

His switch to The Other Russia and potential bid to be President in 2008 was only occasioned by his annoyance at the way Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil empire Yukos was taken off him in such a way as to damage his stake in it, despite the fact that Khodorkovsky was a colossal crook who stole Russia's assets from it and whose goons used contract killings to get their way

Now the idea that liberty should not be traded off for any illusory security provided by Putin is also mendacious as the oligarchs partook is a massive fraudulent rip off of Russia's wealth and resources during the 1990s when mafia power was at its height, as documented by Misha Glenny in his McMafia:Seriously Organised Crime.

So Yeltsin was no better when it came to providing security or maintaining human rights, apart from those of the oligarchs, despite Edward Lucas' feeble attempt to praise him for liberating Russia and blaming the failure to "de-Sovietise". Russia, in fact, was put through a very Bolshevik experiment under neoliberal shock therapy which went badly wrong.

It was the reaction to the devastating social and economic costs of that which has determined politics ever since, though it is routinely ignored by many Western liberals, more than the legacy of the Soviet Union. It seems some liberals are no less deluded about Yeltsin's Russia than they were once about Lenin's.

The fact that The Other Russia and Yabloko ( apple ) is dominated by pseudo-liberals, who will often resort to supporting even worse demagogy than Putin's supporters, is both craven and a travesty of what liberalism is supposed to be. It is necessary to deal with that reality when looking at Russia.

If The Other Russia is really committed to democracy and freedom in Russia, then it is incumbent on its supporters to deal with the facts and to refute convincingly allegations that it is merely a front for oligarch interests at the expense of disenfranchised Russians who have little real choice.

All the continual spats over the right to protest in one particular square in Moscow amounts to is a sordid power struggle. If Russia is to make progress with human rights then double standards really do need to be addressed because this game is seen as an irrelevant abstraction being played over the heads of the vast majority of Russian people.

Mr Kovalev, however, was unable to deal with that at all. And his response was interesting in its evasion of any understanding, whether intentional or not, of what had befallen his nation since the end of the Soviet Union, shock therapy or even what backers of Strategy 31 in The Other Russia stand for.

He simply retorted that,

I don't care a single bit about Limonov. It's a very common question: "So what are you protesting against? Would you like to see Limonov/Kasparov/whatever as your president?" No, and it's not the point. I just don't like being lied to. I'd be fine if somebody just came clean and said "OK, you're right, the constitution doesn't work and we're not a democracy"

Yes it is the point. Supporting a group aligned to thuggish Neo-Nazis using explicitly fascist and communist insignia and to give a platform to Limanov in a way that would, in fact, be severely monitored even in Germany and other Central European nations that got rid of totalitarianism, is craven and hypocritical.

As for "Former dissident" Alexeyeva, she was furious that The Other Russia excluded Limonov, not because she agreed with him but just because she did not like the Kremlin deciding who could march. Yet in the Baltic Republics such insignia is banned by law. This, again, is a double standard.

In a joint statement put out by Alexeyeva she attempted some damage limitation,

“To agree to force out anyone else from these rallies would be a capitulation. But an agreement to hold the rally…with different applicants for the event is by no means a disgraceful agreement. This is a success all the same. Yes, not an entire one, but a success.”

The fact that it was the Kremlin that had to ban neo-Nazis parading in Natzbol insignia is not good for freedom of speech but they could have been excluded from protesting alongside other members The Other Russia before the Kremlin acted as it did whilst maintaining that they thought it was wrong.

It did not need to give Limonov a platform but it did. It could have upheld opposition to the banning of Limonov's party whilst refusing to associate with directly with him or, most obviously, by expelling him completely.

Yet The Other Russia has never condemned Limonov because he was useful in mobilising xenophobia and far right nationalist against Putin in an attempt to out rival him in his nationalist appeal. Limonov is leading figure in The Other Russia. By refusing to take a moral stance on this until forced by the Kremlin's tactics, The Other Russia has shown its cynicism.

Clearly, The Other Russia certainly now has little moral high ground from which to prate about human rights if it has as one of its key backers a man classified as a Fascist. Nor do those who fail to challenge oligarch power such as Kovalev. If this is the future of "liberalism" in Russia, then liberalism has no future there.

Now Kovalev claims that "he loves his country". So much so that he supports in an online student rag called The Free Pint those who fake indignation about the Russian masses and those who are aching to free them by drawing gigantic penises on drawbridges in Moscow. How radical.How transgressive. How likely to bring about beneficial change in Russia.

He opines, in an article written under the name The Angry Russian,

Even when we’re not fighting the bloodiest war in history or staging a revolution against whatever corrupt, unelected government that is lining its pockets with our taxes, the people of Russia have never really known the quiet life of prosperous Western countries. Save for the tiny elite, of course, who keep their money in Switzerland and kids in private schools in London.

But there’s one thing that we do really well: that’s sticking it to The Man in various creative ways. Radical political art in Russia has been flourishing since the early 90s.

That reads rather like a self-promotional corporate advertisement spiel. Yet Designer revolutionaries like Kovalev have no real chance of influencing anybody: the tactics of "young democrats" are pure 1968: to enrage the authorities and gain PR coups and portray Putin's Russia as some authoritarian nightmare.

The absence of real political analysis is the preserve of spoilt brats who think it is witty and clever to indulge in such banal pranks as The Angry Russian Phallus, which fakes indignation and a fake idealism that sees Russians as being too materialistic under Putin and not caring for freedom whilst having nothing to say about neoliberal shock therapy.

Old dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn too complained about the materialism of the New Russians but obviously would not approve either of the kind of nihilism exhibited in the so-called "performance art" of the poseurs who think unfurling a banner over the Mausoleum in Red Square stating Fuck You is particularly intelligent.

Designer revolutionaries like Kovalev have no real chance of influencing anybody in Russia, though he can play to a fawning gallery in the West. The tactics of "young democrats" in Eastern Europe are pure 1968: to enrage the authorities, get disproportionate reactions and gain PR coups in presenting Putin's Russia as some quasi-Soviet authoritarian nightmare.

The absence of real political analysis is equally as true in neighbouring Belarus where students, when they aren't holding up placards supporting the US invasion of Iraq, are trying on futile pranks which the authorities play into the hands of by trying to ban instead of just ignoring them.

Rather than offering a moral critique of Putin's regime or, indeed, the oligarchs, the nexus of money and privilege has led students to advance Russia as a trendy fight through "artistic collectives" and coming out with specious designer propaganda. Pure self promotion with minimal artistic merit. And boring too.

This is proved by looking at The First Pint's website when Kovalev opines on Russian history and culture ( after first feigning concern for the hungry masses ),

....it became apparent that nothing had really changed, and the content and satisfied life was still an illusion. Scratch the surface – and you still saw a country on the verge of hunger riots, with an incredibly corrupt and ineffective government on all levels and, as of recently, rising religious fundamentalism . The correct artistic response? To draw a gigantic penis.

Wow, now that's really going to get bread on the table and challenge the power of the rich and raise the living standards of Russia's poor isn't it ? Why did it become "apparent" that "nothing had changed" only under Putin and not under the radical market experiment under Yeltsin and with the approval of the IMF ?

A lot of things actually changed in the 1990s, such as the massive collapse of living standards and a plummeting life expectancy. Clearly, the arty Voina group does not have such a great memory of such trivial events as that. Perhaps a gigantic penis on a drawbridge should be better remembered.

The collective behind the most hilarious and ballsy artistic stunt is called Voina, or War, and they’re also behind the recent rise of radical political action that seems to draw much more attention than conventional protests which inevitably end in everybody being batoned down and arrested. Well, of course, you also can’t expect courteous treatment from the police when you paint a massive penis on a drawbridge that faces the windows of the most powerful law enforcement agency, but still the latter definitely gets your point across much better than standing on a square with placards. Alexey Plutser, the group’s ideologist and spokesperson, says: “What we are doing is not trying to communicate with the power. We are just shoving a dick in its face. A dick that is 65 meters tall, 23 meters wide and weighs about 400,000 tonnes.”

Hilarious stuff.

Gullible Western Liberals and The Other Russia

2010-08-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

Opinion in the West on Russia tends to support those who oppose Vladimir Putin on the absurd basis that fronts such as The Other Russia are sterling and heroic democrats fighting a new dictator or authoritarian hardman by recourse to a selfless commitment to promoting human rights.

Susan Richards writes in The Observer today,

In Soviet times overseas support for "dissidents" acted as a significant restraint on the authorities. But today, western governments offer no support to opposition figures: they have agreed a Faustian pact with Putin, over energy (in Europe) and the "war against terror" (in the US).
In this context Strategy 31 – a civic movement bringing together old-style dissidents, intellectuals and young people fresh to politics – has emerged to defend article 31 of Russia's constitution on the right to free assembly. Supporters convene at 6pm on the 31st of each month, in a number of Russian cities.
In Moscow, they have been assembling in Triumfalnaya Square, from which they have been repeatedly banned.

They might have been banned from the square but, then again, they target places they know they will be banned from simply to make the point in front of the camera and on the Internet that Putin is some evil Soviet style leader against whom they are fighting for freedom.

Western liberals uncritically lap up that agenda without much questioning of the hidden agenda behind it and the reality that most "oppositionists" are working for the return of oligarch power and a "liberalism" that really means freedom for the wealthy and privileged.

In short, The Other Russia is a front for moneyed oligarchs to advance a power game, often supported by politicians who have worked for Putin in the past and did not oppose human rights abuses or freedom then or under Yeltsin but suddenly liked the idea when it could be used to support their ambitions and interests.

Strategy 31 is not exactly what is appears and is yet another fake designer revolutionary initiative tied to The Other Russia which does receive funds from the USA and is led by Garry Kasparov whose mission it is to make Russia safe for the oligarchs again. He is a chess playing tactician and work to promote US interests and, in the process, his own.

Sadly, the idea that the average worker would get anything should these people even stand a chance of power is farcical-the result would be simply anti-Putin oligarchs and a return to the 1990s. There is no doubt that anybody who understands the reality in Russia knows that, though opposition parties pretend that they are for 'the workers'.

Western Liberals such as Susan Richards need to understand that because no matter what workers in Russia might hope for, a network of NGOs and think tanks are essentially promoting nihilistic strategies in wanting power at any price and have no more regard for Russian people than under Yeltsin.

This is one reason why respected political commentator and historian Anatol Lieven has termed such people who turn up to staged demonstrations dressed as Santa Claus ( witty student style pranks that do not go down well with Russians ) and, who are funded by the USA, as "limousine liberals".

Even worse, Richards fails to mention something that would shock the average Guardian liberal in the UK: The Other Russia has been allied with Eduard Limonov of the Natzbols or National Bolsheviks and he remains a key supporter.

The Natzbols are a neo-Nazi group with explicitly parades in fascist insignia with their flag being red with a white circle and a hammer and sickle inside it.

Why it is that "liberal movements" in Russia are still led by those in Yabloko and other political fronts dominated by family members connected to those who rammed through shock therapy in the 1990s such as Maria Gaidar ( daughter of Anatoly ).

The neoliberal reforms that led to colossal mortality rates, that is premature deaths, and which entirely merits the title "Market Bolshevism" both for its callousness and contempt for the lives of Russians who, as so often in history, were treated as nothing but dirt.

All of this has been documented in Peter Reddaway's and Dmitri Glinka's Market Bolshevism: The Tragedy of Russia's Market Reforms.

The greed to grab Russia's riches for themselves again and to serve the agenda of "democratic geopolitics" motivates those in The Other Russia: the weakness of Putin's record on human rights is seldom contrasted to Yeltsin's despite his crushing of popular protests in 1993 with military force in a coup.

The sheer hypocrisy of these shrill reedy voices piping up about human rights when they always defend the record of Yeltsin or, at best, euphemise or glide over his record shows the pervertion of truth that follows wherever "pro-Western liberals" are willing to serve US funded fronts at the expense of the majority of people in their own country.

The Other Russia has Limanov positioned in a major role and only recently agreed to ban him at the Kremlin's behest, proving the idiotic propaganda that Putin is a "Fascist" was silly, though the Edward Lucas peddles this drivel in his propaganda "The New Cold War".

Yet a Russian blogger Alexey Kovalev appeared yesterday to defend The Other Russia on this basis,

... let people say whatever they please and hang around wherever they find suitable. And we don't actually need anyone's support, thank you. The point of the 31 protest is to show that freedoms of speech and assembly exist, and they are not what Putin thinks they are.

This is nonsense, even if Kovalev might want to believe, at least if he does actively support The Other Russia. He lives in London, after all, and has not set up another rival group nor done much constructive other than support pseudo-arty groups in his homeland such as Voina which protests at Putin by putting huge graphic images of penises on draw bridges in Moscow.

The Other Russia is funded by US based NGOs filtering money from the National Endowment for Democracy. It's "the best democracy money can buy" and it has no real organisational roots in any labour movement nor grassroots activistm as did once genuinely democratic opposition in Central Europe like Solidarity.

There is no reason why groups opposed to Putin could not protest against the Kremlin without allying with those promoting "National Bolshevism", a term which was first used by those who supported a more "left" wing version of National Socialism in Weimar Germany. It's bizarre that Western liberals just ignore this.

In other words, Strategy 31 is not what some people, especially in the West think it is. Indeed it is curious, moreover, that veteran human rights supporter Lyudmila Alexeyeva of The Other Russia decided that the move to exclude Limonov could be accepted only very reluctantly. Indeed she was very much against the decision.

Strategy 31, as its desperate sounding name implies ( best to think of another PR technique there ) reflects the same interests represented by waves of protests choreographed by US funded groups who use Orwellian doublethink in exploiting Putin's record on human rights to advocate the return of the oligarchs.

Yet Russia needs its own domestic opposition to be free from the national power ambitions of the USA or too much meddling. It needs to be genuinely committed to human rights and democratic accountability: The Other Russia never tells people what it actually stands for other than 'not being lied to' as Kovalev puts it.

Unfortunately, The Other Russia itself seems to operate on the principle of falsehood, evasion, dissimulation and the cynical use of human rights failings to advance the power and ambition of those who want power at all costs at the expense of most Russians: its a power game using human rights as a pawn.

It is curious that Lydmila Alexeyeva was against Limonov being banned. Perhaps this shows her devotion to freedom of speech. But clearly the Kremlin used this demand to put The Other Russia on the defensive to prove its anti-fascist credentials and some decided he was a liability in this respect.

The point to note, however, is why The Other Russia should ever have allowed the Natzbol leader to feature as part of their struggle. Perhaps they were pleased to have his "populist" presence as just anything that could mobilise people against Putin was welcome. Hardly ethical.

In a statement posted Saturday on her blog, former Soviet dissident and Strategy 31 rally co-organizer Lyudmila Alexeyeva indicated, albeit inadvertently, that she and fellow former dissident Sergei Kovalyov have decided to exclude National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov from the group of organizers who regularly apply for sanction with the Moscow mayor’s office.

The concession would fall in line with a proposal made by the presidential administration earlier this month to exclude Limonov and receive sanction as a result. At the time, opposition leaders – including Alexeyeva – strongly denounced the proposal.

No doubt these "debates" are meant to show, or can be interpreted, as evidence that Strategy 31 agreed on by The Other Russia ( though which "other" in Russia remains wide enough for people to think there are huddled masses yearning for their agenda if necessary ) is really "democratic".

Yet if these weird manoeuvres are part of the "democratic opposition" in some "New Cold War", it is odd that Alexeyeva is described as a "former dissident": why she is not still just a dissident if Putin really is some "neo-Stalinist" is strange. At best, she is just anti-Putin. That could co-exist with a defence of liberal democracy but not in allying with Limonov.

The Other Russia has called the accusation that Boris Berezovsky funded The Other Russia a "Kremlin lie" but the opposition is shadowy and hardly abides by the criteria of "transparency" it recommends for everybody else in Russia and excludes itself from. Orwellian doublethink indeed.

The Independent in 2007 reported

There is speculation now that Gary Kasparov's opposition grouping The Other Russia may be among the beneficiaries of the financial support Berezovsky says he gives to opponents of President Putin. Berezovsky is careful not to name the recipients of his largesse, however.

Essentially, The Other Russia is a front for those who want a return of oligarch power or who have fallen out with Putin. It has little to do with any genuine commitment to anyone other than the moneyed influence of the privileged who are chafing at Putin only because they are not benefiting as much as they think they should be .

One of its backers is Viktor Vladimirovich Gerashchenko of the Rodina Party who once received The Order of Merit for the Fatherland from Putin but then later decided his interests lay elsewhere. Of course, people have the right to oppose Putin later if they decide they oppose his policies.

Yet the way Russian politics is determined by the "ins" and "outs" or who has control of the media through money is hardly democracy in the way Western nations such as those in the US or UK understand it, though both nations have seen their own democracies change more in the direction of oligarchies.

The Rodina Party is yet another fake party which proclaims to be nationalist and socialist ( the " motherland party" ) but which has got in to difficulties as in 2005 when it put out an advert with dark-skinned Caucasian immigrants throwing watermelon rinds to the floor and ended with the slogan, "let's clear our city of trash".

Whatever one thinks of Putin it is important to note that oppositionists are hardly pleasant people themselves and will do about just anything to gain popularity: including xenophobia and racism, simply to outmanoeuvre Putin and pose as "real" patriots.

The cynicism is shown in the career of Dmitry Olegovich Rogozin, now Russian ambassador to NATO, who was condemned by Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya for supporting a front originally,

'created by the Kremlin’s spin doctors specifically...to draw moderately nationalist voters away from the more extreme National Bolsheviks'

Former allies of the Putin keep popping back up as opponents of Putin depending on where their interests presently lie and are then hailed as sterling democrats by the West which wants more influence over Russia. Human rights are used to discredit Putin by those who do not give a fig about them either. They remained silent during Yeltsin's 1993 military coup.

In Leninist terms, "former dissidents" such as Alexeyeva are merely "useful idiots" who have long lost any moral high ground they could once claim. The Other Russia is a mere charade. It merely reflects oligarchs jockeying for power and the West's tactics to get rid of Putin. The cynicism of the means clearly belie the cynicism of the ends.

Indeed British historian and journalist Anatol Lieven, himself a liberal and an ethical realist, has condemned the "Limousine Liberals" in Russia in The National Review and said of those "liberals" attacking any reapprochement between the Medvedev and Putin led Russia with the USA that,

.....their criticism serves as a mouthpiece for the agendas of the most bitterly anti-Russian and geopolitically aggressive liberal interventionists and neocons who help maintain tensions between Russia and the West-and actually between the United States and the rest of the world.
And these tensions are extremely damaging to any hopes of the long-term liberalization and Westernization of Russia which these liberals want to further.
Do Piontkovsky, Shevtsova and the others seriously think that the U.S.-Russian rivalry in the Caucasus, and the war over South Ossetia which resulted, helped the cause of liberalism in Russia? Do they ever actually talk to any ordinary Russians, one wonders? Or do their duties briefing Americans simply leave them no time for this?
....figures like Igor Yurgens, a leading businessman and adviser to President Medvedev, are playing an extremely valuable role in resisting moves to further authoritarianism, centralization and nationalization in response to the economic crisis. They could do much better if they had bigger support within the population at large.

Groups such as The Other Russia only alienate many Russians, as does the fact that so many oppositionists still have their origins in the government and supporters of Yeltsin, a point made forcibly by Lieven who comments,

Tragically however, many Russian liberals in the 1990s-through the policies they supported and the arrogant contempt they showed towards the mass of their fellow Russians-made liberals unelectable for a generation or more across most of Russia; and to judge by these and other writings of liberals like the ones under discussion, they have learnt absolutely nothing from this experience.
They think that they form some kind of opposition to the present Russian establishment. In fact, they are such an asset to Putin in terms of boosting public hostility to Russian liberalism that if they hadn't already existed, Putin might have been tempted to invent them.....people who blindly back a U.S. democracy-promotion line are doing an injustice to the very liberalization they seek.

Lieven's case is similar to the one I have put forth here,

The truth of the matter is that like Ahmed Chalabi and other "democracy promoters" who have sought U.S. aid, these writers care neither for American nor for Russian interests, but only to enlist U.S. help in trying to bring themselves and the groups they represent to power and influence.

The Other Russia cares certainly for US interests in so far as they coincide with their own. Yet this is bound to backfire as Putin can portray liberals as traitors and Natzbols and by extension The Other Russia as Nazis, hardly an edifying image in a land that makes much of its sacrifice in World War Two.

With regards some liberal think tankers Lieven comments,

They may well wish for democracy-but not always or necessarily if it comes with unconstrained capitalism and the assumption that to be a democrat means sacrificing your national interests to those of the United States. In the case of Russia, these American assumptions in the 1990s helped lead to the reaction of Vladimir Putin. And Putin's Russia isn't the worst we could see by a very long chalk.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski's Peculiar Notion of "Martyrdom"

2010-07-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

More evidence is becoming available that Lech Kaczynski was in some sense to blame for not only his own death in the Smolensk Air Crash but for all those other 90 passengers on board whilst his bother tried to run on the platform that it was a "Second Katyn" or martyrdom.

The Krakow Post has reported, that,

Polish television network TVN24 has released new materials that are reportedly recordings from the black boxes of the crashed Tu-154 plane that killed President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others in April.

The station is reporting that the transcript from the cockpit recording is incomplete, and a previously unreleased part of the recording is stirring up controversy about the entire investigation of the plane crash.

According to the television station, the doomed plane's captain, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, said during the flight, "If [we or I] don't land, [they or he] will kill me".

The recording is said to be unclear, and the exact pronouns used could not be determined. The context itself is also unknown. This part of the recording was said to be unintelligible during the initial investigation.

While the Polish government announced that they had recently deciphered previously incomprehensible parts of the recordings, Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, who spoke to the press yesterday, declined to confirm the accuracy of TVN24's report.

If the report of the recording is indeed accurate, it stirs up disturbing questions of who this "he" or "they" was that was putting pressure on the pilots to land in what had been described to them as dangerous conditions.

Some Polish media have speculated that Kaczyński himself might be the "he", as in August 2008, the late president had threatened his pilot when he refused to land under dangerous conditions in Tbilisi, Georgia.

This would make a total farce of the decision to bury Lech in the Wawel. Far from being a hero, he was clearly a foolish person who let down the Polish nation through his stubbornness anda plane of journalists that had landed shortly before at Smolensk told them not to try landing.

This did not stop Jaroslaw Kaczynski making the rash statement after catching up with his PO Presidential rival Komorowski following previously slumped ratings, that,

“I would like to mention here the man, the people who are the reason for our being here: my brother and all those killed in the Smolensk catastrophe. Let us remember them because this result grew out of their martyr-like deaths.”.

If Lech had a death wish, he should have gone somewhere near Kandahar in Afghanistan to get himself killed and not endangered the lives of so many others as he has by acceding to the USA's request to send another 3,000 extra troops to fight a futile war in that benighted land.

There was no "martyrdom" in these deaths and Poland should hold a public and open enquiry into the crash. That might convince naive martyr obsessed sections of the Polish population he was not a martyr but a reckless fool who caused the smouldering wreckage near Smolensk.

The New Rapacious Destroyers of Berlin.

2010-07-04T05:04:00.000-07:00

Roger Scruton was entirely correct in the concluding chapter of England : An Elegy ( 2000) to remark that the "culture of repudiation" had not just affected Britain but also places like Germany as the,

"The loss of traditional virtue and local identity has occurred throughout Europe and is diaspora...which was struck by enlightenment and died. The global economy, the democratisation of taste, the sexual revolution, pop culture and television have worked to erase the sense of spiritual identity in every place where piety shored up the old forms of knowledge and custom."

Apart from London, which lost so many totemic landmarks of beautiful architecture in the 1960's, Berlin was inevitably more affected as it was flattened and razed by the Soviet capture of the city in 1945.

What has continued to happen is that elegant remnants have been blighted by asinine plate and glass kitsch or "starchitecture" which is even ruining areas that might have been at least preserved as they once had been.
Not only that the beautiful Art Gallery in what had been East Berlin, was restored only to have a huge tacky piece of trash that looked like a large football T-Shirt onto which someone had vomited, plastered on the front.

Lenin in Krakow 1912 to 1914.

2010-07-02T13:54:00.001-07:00

The PZPR used to make much of the fact that Lenin lived and worked in and around Krakow between 1912 and 1914. Yet Jan T Malecki's claims that he merely "had sojourned through the city" in his A History of Krakow for Everyone is a somewhat inaccurate assessment.

The wave of iconoclasm that met the deserved demise of the Polish People's Republic in 1990 was entirely understandable and, in the case of the statues in Nowa Huta Square on Roz Avenue and museums lauding him in Ulica Topolowa, the removal was justified. Communism was never wanted in Poland.

Yet, paradoxically, the iconoclasm against Communism and the Soviet imposed People's Republic itself has involved rewriting the story of Communism to serve propaganda purposes and in it's own way to distort and eradicate the real history in place of history as propaganda for politicians in Poland fighting a "New Cold War" against Russia.

Denying Lenin ever existed in Krakow as though a mere emigre on the run only opens up the way for the kitsch version of Communism that treats it all as a bit of a joke with Goodbye Lenin Hostels and Cool Tours regarding Nowa Huta, built in the 1950s under Stalin's Polish puppet regime, as being Lenin's 'favourite' part of Krakow.

That claim, of course, despite the fact Lenin was dead by 1923 and his attitide towards Poland never directly as hostile. For PiS, and other rightists, he was a Russian and an atheist, the worst twin forces of influence possible on the course of Polish history and it's struggle for independence.

This was undoubted revenge for the fact Communism was never wanted in Poland and the Krakow Communists had removed the apostles statues outside the beautiful baroque Sw Peter and Paul's Church on ulica Grodzka and destroyed the legends and commemorations surrounding Pilsudski's legions.

Yet it distorts the past to eradicate Lenin from Krakow as Robert Service's Lenin :A Biography shows that his period in Krakow, then just a few kilometres from the border with the Russian Empire was essential for him to keep in contact with the comrades fighting the system there.Moreover, Lenin was one of the some 12,000 refugees from Tsarist Russia, most of whom were Poles but a good deal too who were Russians who hated Tsarism and wanted the destruction of the Russian Empire with as much fervour as Pilsudski of the Polish Socialist Party.

Whether nationalist or internationalist, radicals were pining for the coming of the Great War that was long awaited and which would reconstruct Central Eastern Europe free from imperialism and that was Lenin's idea as much as Pilsudski's.

In March 1887 Pilsudski was arrested by Tsarist authorities on trumped up charges of plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III and exiled for five years to eastern Siberia. Lenin's politics of destroying the Tsarist Empire. Their tactics were the same before the war.

Moreover, Bronisław Piłsudski, who had been friends with friends of Vladimir Lenin's brother, was similarly sentenced to hard labor (katorga) in eastern Siberia, for fifteen years for the assassination attempt.

As Robert Service emphasises,

"Such was Pilsudski's hatred for the Romanov Empire that he was willing to assist any virtually any other opponent of Tsarism. Thus his men helped with the dispatch of messages to Russia on behalf of the Bolsheviks"

Moreover, both Lenin and Pilsudski shared the idea of breaking up the Russian Empire into it's constituent parts, a strategy still aimed at by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security advisor, who admired Pilsudski and wrote a biography on him.

The differences came out only after the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsarist regime and wanted to export revolution to Germany through Poland with some Bolsheviks actually being Poles e.g Dzierzynski which was unsurprising given the multinational nature of the Soviet Union.

Lenin at no time showed any nationalist hostility to Poland but tended to think of it as no less ripe for revolution as the entire continent, though he tended to think of it in geopolitical terms as a fragmented state that would become part of a large expanding continental wide imperium.

The fact is that Lenin was a genuine fanatic with an apocalyptic and sincere view of exporting Communism as an idealistic Utopia, even if the aim was so lofty that any ruse or tactic was permissible to bring it about.

When Lenin stayed in Krakow he felt very much at home and enjoyed the freedom to write and smuggle letters of instruction to the Central Committee in Russia under conditions of freedom and no censorship under the relatively liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The retrospective view that Lenin was a Russian nationalist mingling Russian imperialism and Communism is one that appeals to PiS politicians, the populist right wing rump of the Solidarity movement which undermined the People's Republic. Yet it is not the truth. Nor did liberation in 1989-1990 come from Heaven with Catholic piety winning over Evil Atheism.

Lenin was tolerated by a Catholic monarchy based in Vienna as he was acting to help undermine the rival Russian Empire. In return, Lenin could plot with freedom the destruction of the old order and regain control over the Bolshevik movement which had been difficult in Paris.

Moreover, Lenin thought of the peasants of Bialy Dunajec, Poronin and Zakopane where he climbed the Tatras as similar to those in Russia and felt at home there, despite not speaking Polish, and he was friendly with a great number of the most prominent Polish intellectuals of the time.

For if out of 150,000 Krakowians, some 12,000 were refugess and many, including the Russians, received material help from the Union of Asssistance for Political Prisoners. Lenin lived at 218 Zwierzyniecka, has access to the Jagiellonian University reading room and felt at home.

The Cafe intellectual scene was much to his liking and as Service states "Lenin greatly enjoyed Krakow....and the way it reminded him of home. The peasants who swarmed into the city on market days were recognisable types".

Kazimierz was similar to a Jewish shetl and Lenin wrote home to his mother that in being in Krakow it was,

"Almost Russia! The Jews here are like the Russians and the Russians and the Russian frontier are only eight versts away ( it's two hours away by train from Granica, nine from Warsaw) : there are bent nosed women in colourful dresses-it's just like Russia"

Lenin did not "hate" Poland. So the nationalist version of Lenin as some atheist Russian barbarian like the rest of the Bolsheviks who had no place in Polish history is a myth; he was tactically allied to the founder of the Second Polish Republic and, in fact, he liked Poland and fely at home in Galicia.

Reading history backwards for nationalist purposes is one reason a museum to Lenin is needed in Krakow as it stresses the dangers of his blend of Utopianism and realpolitik made him a self righteous zealot but it did not mean he hated or wanted to subjugate Poland because he was really a "Russian nationalist" in disguise.

In actual fact, Lenin tended to like Galicia so much that he spent much time hiking in the mountains, producing polemics against anyone who deviated from his infallible role as leader of the party whilst virtually doing nothing else nor preparing for the Great War of 1914 which he did not expect.

This had been the war, what he was to call "the mighty accelerator of events" that would bring upon the collapse of bourgeois civilisation and a new world order of universal Communism, a vision based on his own creed but in line with what even most Polish intellectuals thought with regards the impending crash of the dynastic European Empires..

As this account explains,

Lenin, his wife, and his mother-in-law spent long summers in 1913 and 1914 in Poronin, just outside Zakopane, at a new house belonging to Teresa Skupien. The household left Cracow at the beginning of May and, the first year, did not return until the end of October.
In Zakopane, according to this account, Lenin hung out with such Polish writers as Zeromski, Strug, Orkan, and Witkacy. He sat in the sunshine in front of the Zakopane post office reading his letters and newspapers, played chess in the open air, and went for walks in the Tatry. Dr. Podleski, a dentist in Poronin, treated Lenin in the spring of 1914 and entered the patient's name and fee, 8 koron, in his account book.
In 1914, the entourage left Cracow for Poronin on May 9. On August 8, the Austrian police arrested Lenin as an enemy national: Austria and Russia had declared war. Lenin and his family returned to Cracow on August 19 after his release from the prison in Nowy Targ. They left for Switzerland a few days later.

As Service contends, Lenin had actually become complacent in Galicia and did not realise how serious the situation was when the Habsburg police stated rounding up Russians as potential enemies with Catholic Priests claiming Russians were poisoning the wells to kill the barbarian semi-oriental Russian hordes.

In fact, it had been Priests telling parishioners to poison the wells that led to typhus outbreaks, a thing mentioned with verve and satire by Jaroslav Hasek in Good Soldier Schwiek when the Austrian Imperial Army reach the battle lines in Galicia only to get dysentry-including Polish troops serving as Galician regiments.

Given that's the kind of sabotage PiS would approve of, a museum for Lenin explaining this cultural and intellectual milieu would be better than the kind of idiotic bans proposed by the Sejm in 2009 which called for the banning Communist insignia or the marketing of such symbols.

Communism had little support in Poland amongst Gentile Poles and mostly among post-ethnic Jews like Isaac Deutscher ( the hagiographer of Trotsky born in Chrzanow ). Lenin was subsequently astounded when in 1920 the Bolshevik forces were not welcomed as liberators as others like Stalin, the Commissar for the Nationalities, had warned him they would not.

What any new museum of communism or of Lenin must do is avoid propaganda. Lenin and even Stalin, though he resented Poland for repelling Bolshevism and humiliating him as a military leader in the war between the Reds and "the Pans", were not Greater Russian nationalists.

The Soviet Union bore marks of the brutality encouraged by the repression of Tsarism but as Anne Applebaum stresses, the Tsarist prison was rather comfortable compared to the slave camp network of the Gulag which was part of the attempt to frogmarch and hurl "the people" towards Utopia.

Even when Stalin got his revenge on Poland by being ceded Poland to the USSR's sphere of influence after 1945 those who installed the UB and the apparatus of repression were multinational-Mikoyan was Armenian, Beria was Mingrelian, Stalin was Georgian as were many of his henchmen.

Lastly, even Lenin was of Mongol-Tatar, Russian, German and Jewish mixed ancestry from Kazan and who detested Russia and the lazy Russians he wanted to drive towards happiness by force. Claiming Bolshevism was Russian is propaganda as history useful in the notion of a "New Cold War".

That propaganda notion is one put forth by those who still want the Russian Empire broken up into smaller parts so as to gain control over the oil and gas wealth for the benefit of the Great Powers in the new Great Game, the renewed struggle between Empires over resources which was occurring before 1914

Unlike before 1914, the main focus of Imperial rivalry is between "the West", Russia, China and the West over Eurasia rather than between the dynastic Empires of Europe and breakaway states motivated by ethnic irredentism and the stakes are not only minerals but today oil and gas pipelines instead of railways.

Bibliography

Robert Service, Lenin : A Bibliography.
Jan T Malecki, A History of Krakow for Everyone.

( A essay on Lenin in Exile with be forthcoming soon based on a review of Helen Rappaport's Conspirator: Lenin in Exile. )

The Outrage of the Defenders of Leon Trotsky

2010-07-02T12:59:00.001-07:00

It is slightly weird that there are still some Trotskyists in Britain who still hero worship Leon Trotsky after the reams of evidence that have come from archives in Moscow in recent years that have confirmed that Trotsky was a brave bad man, though with certain qualities, such as charisma and the ability to write rather well.

More than any other leading Bolshevik, Trotskyists have been fulminating at Service's supposed "hatchet job" on Service's excellent Trotsky: A Biography. In turn each of these ideologues will be dealt with for their cheap invective, cherry picking of quotes and blatant distortion of what Service has written about this mass murdering ideologue.

To begin with here are some hack propagandists I intend to precision skewer for their utter bitterness and outraged self-righteousness and misplaced faith in this supposed revolutionary hero. Most of which seems to pun rather childishly on the name "Service" as merely assert faith in Trotsky rather than deal with the facts.

Peter Taafe, A Dis-Service to Trotsky The Socialist Party/Socialist Alternative.org
Paul Hampton, A Hatchet Job on Trotsky ( Worker's Liberty )
David North, In the Service of Historical Falsification ( WSWS )
David North, Historians in the Service of the “Big Lie”: An Examination of Professor Robert Service’s Biography of Trotsky
Hillel Ticktin, In Defence of Leon Trotsky.

Peter Taafe

This rather tedious and unintelligent man does nothing to engage with the substance of Service's biography other than express common places that re-iterate the mythology of Trotsky as well as moaning about how long the book is, as if that was somehow in itself an argument against it.

"This book is very thick - running to 600 pages - but is very thin when it comes to an honest political examination and analysis of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the subject of Service's tome".

The only thing which is very thick is Taafe who seems to think that anything Service writes should be treated with scepticism simply because he conducted a debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Hoover Institute which is considered parts of the US Establishment and hence necessarily invalidates anything he has to say.

To this fool, debating Trotsky at the Hoover Institute means he must be a tool of "the ruling classes" to smear Trotsky and thereby deny hope to those yearning working masses for whom Trotsky was a beacon of working class militant struggle. Yet as Service points out, Trotsky regarded the proletariat as a means to his ideological ends of destroying the system.

Taafe whines pitifully that,

"This is a mild example of the epithets Service flings at Trotsky. He presented "serious inaccuracies" in his writings, he was an "intellectual bully"; he was "vain and self-centred". Two lines after making this charge Service says that Trotsky "disliked boasting"!"

Well , that quite possibly because it was true of Trotsky. A person who feels no reason to boast can feel so arrogant that he feels no compunction to engage with tedious politicking. Like Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Trotsky used to sit out boring committee meetings in silence.

Trotsky would usually doodle on bits of scrap paper, yawn, read newspapers ostensibly in front of dull speakers. Had the slow witted Taafe been alive then at committee meetings then , Trotsky would have treated him no doubt as an elephantine bore. The fact is Trotsky was not a pleasant man and very condescending to those of lower intellect than he.

Service is revealing his self centred arrogance and to do so by quoting primary historical sources is not "boasting". It just means Taafe lacks the intellectual capacity to engage with Service who has obviously riled him into making highly embarrassing You Tube videos that reveal his own lack of capacity for critical thought.

"He is accused of base motives in allegedly "abandoning his first wife" and his two daughters, who Service nevertheless concedes urged him to escape from Siberia in order to link up with Lenin and the RSDLP leaders who were producing Iskra (The Spark), the revolutionary paper of the time. On virtually every page there is at least one distortion, and often more, of Trotsky's ideas, his personal life, etc."

If Trotsky is accused of such behaviour, as fully documented by Service, then it is no use ignoring what Service says with regards Trotsky being a charming egotist who was always willing to put ideological imperatives before basic care and concern for his first wife, with women seen as subordinate to his world historical mission.

Unwilling or more likely incapable of challenging Service, Taafe reacts with scorn and sarcasm typical of those motivated by idolatry for the man and not concerned with all those people he betrayed in his rather unpleasant way, whether they were personal relations of the Kronstadt Sailors,

"There is not one relevant new fact which adds to our picture of Trotsky in this book... apart from learning that Trotsky's children acquired a "Viennese accent", surprise, surprise, when they were living in that city".

So they did and how does that detract from Service's biography? Answer: it does not. If Taafe is so fundamentally unwilling to react intelligently, it is hardly surprising Service has refused to debate with him any more than one would bother with a cranky religious fundamentalist standing on Hyde Park Corner.

Taafe deliberately distorts and cherry picks his way through Service's biography to find things he finds offensive and objectionable. For example,

" Incredibly, we learn, for instance, that prior to 1914, Trotsky was not a "Marxist theoretician"! Unfortunately for Service's "self-serving" account, there is the small, 'unfortunate' detail of Trotsky as the chairman of the Petrograd soviet during the 1905 revolution !"

In fact Service mentions the period "before 1914" prior to 1905, when Trotsky had converted to Marxism, when he was more a narodnik or more in tune with the Social Revolutionaries in the 1890s before he became involved with the leading Marxist grandees like Martov and Plekhanov.

Taafe's comment shows he has not even bothered to read the book at all but has just scented someone who calls Trotsky somewhat of an opportunist and so projects that sin back on to Service in some desperate struggle to prove Service is "lying". Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists are known for believing that opposition to their worldview is proof they are right.

This is proved by Taafe quoting Trotsky to prove Trotsky was right and Service must be wrong.

"Service goes on to argue that Trotsky was "not original"; this theory was really the intellectual property of Alexander Helfand, better known as Parvus, who collaborated with Trotsky. Unfortunately for Service, we have the admission by Trotsky himself that Parvus contributed the "lion's share" of this theory. But Parvus stopped short of drawing the bold revolutionary conclusion advanced by Trotsky".

Again this is tedious. An admission by Trotsky is just an admission by Trotsky who would have every reason to think he was an especially original theorist which he was not: Trotsky picked up those ideas he believed would be of Service in furthering his status and image as a unifier and unique leader of the revolutionary masses.

Which is why Taafe rationalises Trotsky's own justification for the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 without providing historical evidence to the contrary to the established fact that Trotsky ordered the repression of the sailors and that they were the same sailors.

And even if they had not, having disposed of the democracy of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, there was by then no means of redress against forced grain rquisitioning, repression of a free press, lack of pay and conditions. Taafe pathetically repeats again Trotsky's self serving justification as a matter of faith and truth by authority.

"Trotsky, for instance, is accused of "omitting" in My Life any mention of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. Trotsky himself explained when he replied to the "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the 1930s that this was for the simple reason that this was not considered to be a major event until resurrected by latter-day critics such as anarchists and, unfortunately, by Victor Serge in the 1930s".

Why it was unfortunate for Serge to keep reminding Trotsky of it has nothing to do with his being an "anarchist", as Serge has become a Bolshevik by 1918 and had subsequently developed an independent mind of the sort Taafe lacks entirely as he parrots out the ideological line as Pure True Gospel.

"Trotsky was accused of "suppressing" the Kronstadt sailors", the "same ones" who participated in the October revolution. In a forensic analysis, he showed that this was not the case - he played no direct role in the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt but accepted full "moral responsibility" for the actions that were taken".

Trotsky did not take full "moral responsibility" for crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny. He lied about it consistently or used casuistry and sophistry to conceal his crime.

"The Kronstadt 'rebels' demanded "soviets without the Bolsheviks", which was applauded by the counter-revolutionaries in Russian and worldwide.Service just repeats falsehoods - without any evidence whatsoever - to try and convince us that the sailors of 1921 were the same as the heroic insurrectionists of the October revolution, which they were not. The vast majority of Petrograd workers supported the action taken against them".

Which "counter revolutionaries" supported the Kronstadt rebels is not supported by evidence. The method of argumentation is using what Orwell knew in Politics and the English Language as a term used meaninglessly to mean that those who did not support the Bolsheviks were all part of a seamless and sinister imperialist plot.

Moreover, the pathetic reference to putting the Kronstadt rebels in scare quotes is a feeble line of argument designed to presuppose in advance, without evidence, that they were in league with the Imperialists, a claim later made by Stalin who claimed they were receiving money from Washington.

A claim which precisely was facilitated by the kind of paranoid conspiracy theory Taafe wheels out in defence of this act of brutality for which Trotsky was responsible

"Using independent sources Trotsky showed that the leaders of the revolt, for their own selfish ends - during the civil war - demanded special privileges. They even threatened to take over the Red Fleet which, with the thawing of the ice between Russia and Finland, would have opened the gates to an imperialist attack at the very heart of the Russian state. Reluctantly, therefore, the Russian workers' government, after the mutineers refused to negotiate and withdraw, quelled the revolt".

Again Taafe provides no evidence Petrograd workers supported its crushing.

The evidence is copious that most Petrograd workers were fed up with the Bolsheviks repression by 1920 as many were rebelling, going on strike and demanding an end to the appalling way they were being treated under the Bolshevik regime. Maybe they were the 'wrong kind of workers'.

After all Taafe conflates the Bolshevik elite with "the workers government" , so naturally those who dissented were not real workers but enemies of the people.

If this dull ideologue had anything that could pass for analytical skill, he would be able to cut a swathe through the murderous verbal fictions used by the Bolsheviks and unclog the drivel clogging his own brain from thinking constructively and objectively.

If they had not been 'real workers' valued by the workers, there would have been no need for regular Red Army conscripts to be shadowed by blocking detachments ordering those who retreated to be shot. And even if these sailors were not "the same" but mere peasants as Trotsky claimed, it was hardly ethical to demand they be "shot like partridges"

Paul Hampton

"Robert Service has long advocated the "continuity thesis" - the claim made by cold-war historians and by Stalinist apologists that Lenin (and Trotsky) led to Stalin"

This is the most stupid conflation, as if Stalinists and those who regard Communism in the Soviet Union as a catastrophe are two peas from the same pod. Hampton blethers on that Service,

"...is explicit about this in the book, but with an added twist. He makes Trotsky an even greater villain than Stalin or Lenin. Trotsky "lived for a dream that many people found a nightmare", claims Service".

This is, of course, absolutely true as all Utopian zealots assume that some abstract Historical entity, in Trotsky or Stalin's case the proletariat, represent a mathematical X in History which is unified in one singular movement towards a single vision of Paradise on Earth.

In that sense Service is entirely correct that such visions can only but polarise opinion as no one person, be it a commissar such as Trotsky nor the eventual dictator Stalin, can have a monopoly of what this illusory vision at the End of History would look like.

All societies contain millions of people with their own individual dreams, hopes and aspirations and any God Society allows for a pluralism in which people are best left alone to their own devices subject to some amount of necessary state power and government.

Hampton warbles on that Service is just wrong to maintain that,

"[Trotsky’s] ideas and practices laid several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political, economic, social and even cultural edifice. Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin shared more than they disagreed about".

This is true as all of them from the outset of the Revolution sought policies of mass collectivisation and breakneck industrialisation in which the peasantry were going to be forced to work on collective farms whether they liked it or not,

"If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased... The point is that whoever governed the USSR effectively stood in need of deeply authoritarian methods to conserve communist power"

This is true as after 1918 there was going to be no open democracy after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. No free press, apart from continuous polemics from Trotsky, and no liberty for individual thought outside The Party. That's what totalitarianism means.

Hence those workers and peasants who did not understand this would be in need of large doses of re-education.

It did not matter that most of them voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries, When they did Trotsky was a key figure in dissolving it and saying they had been consigned to the "dustbin of History". So true, as Service puts it,

"[Trotsky’s] lust for dictatorship and terror was barely disguised in the civil war. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people including the industrial workers"

Hampton, rather like Taafe, is trying to rally the faithful in defence of Trotsky as he distorts, misinterprets what he writes and muddles up the whole point of history which in the hands of professionals depends crucially on chronology

"For Service, Trotsky’s role in the flowering of working-class democracy in 1917 scarcely figures. He omits important matters such as the democratic votes in Duma elections and in the Petrograd Soviet itself in the autumn, when the most democratic bodies in Russian history voted overwhelmingly for Bolshevik representatives and for Bolshevik resolutions calling on the Soviets to take power from the highly undemocratic, warmongering, pro-landlord and anti-working class Provisional Government".

But that came before the workers stated chafing at what Trotsky was later in 1921 to offer-"militarised labour armies" and the obsession against the Workers Opposition. even in the Bolshevik Party, that Trade Unions were no longer necessary as the Bolshevik regime was a 'workers state'. All this is comprehensively documented by Service.

Hampton then states,

"Service can barely bring himself to recount the threat present by the right-wing general Kornilov, who attempted a proto-fascist coup in August 1917. He suggests that if only the Bolsheviks had left alone, Russia would have evolved smoothly towards a bourgeois democratic republic".

The use of the word "hardly bring" is a venomous pathetic little snipe that suggests Service is "concealing" key facts and id, naturally wholly unlike the witless and banal Hampton, a mere propagandist. It was the leader of the Provisional Government Kerensky who called on the SRs and Bolsheviks to defend it against Kornilov's action.

Skipping merrily across the repressive measures and introduction of the Red Terror, Hampton then spews out this nugget of utter wisdom,

Rather than explain the terrible circumstances of the civil war, and register that Trotsky’s intervention was critical in winning it against 21 armies from 14 countries, Service focuses on Trotsky's decision to have the Bolshevik Panteleev shot after the battle of Kazan in August-September 1918.A scandal previously suppressed? Not at all. There was a Politburo enquiry in April 1919. It found that Panteleev was shot as a deserter.

If by 'desertion' Hampton means this previously erstwhile Bolshevik decided to take a steamboat up the Volga to avoid the civil war between the SR's and the Bolsheviks, then that is a curious way of putting it.

And ,of course, a Politburo enquiry in a non-democratic regime was really going to go against what Trotsky had decided when he had those on board summarily executed. With no separation of powers, no independent judiciary. A Politburo was hardly going to be objective.

But it only suffices to crawl cravenly back to the sacred texts to find a rationalisation for Trotsky's cruelty. Ignoring what Service maintains all along about how selective Trotsky was in his memoirs, as all politicians are, with the exception of the secular saint Trotsky, Hampton opines,

'The incident was recounted by Trotsky in his autobiography My Life in 1930 and discussed by Isaac Deutscher in his biography published in 1954. As Trotsky put it: "I appointed a field-tribunal which passed death-sentences on the commander, the commissary, and several privates – to a gangrenous wound a red-hot iron was applied. I explained the situation to the regiment without hiding or softening anything."

That's nice of him. If that is what "socialism" is, then it would difficult to see how Fascism could be much different, only that it was only after Trotsky's suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 Fascism did come to power and self consciously emulated Bolshevik theory and practice.

As for the rest of Hampton's feeble rationalisation, there is no point going on with it when he states,

Deutscher, who saw Stalinism as (unfortunately) the only way for progress in Russia at the time, presented Trotsky's call for the "militarisation of labour" in 1920 as a prescient foreshadowing of what Stalin did in the 1930s.

Only a somewhat pitiful crank clinging on to a dogmatic pseudo-religious form of faith could think Isaac Deutscher was somehow a heretic for writing about Trotsky in this way whilst writing a generally favourable three volume Prophet series of books on the man and his Revolution.

If this is not clear from this quote I cannot think what possibly could be,

Trotsky used the term "militarisation" in the interests of honest dealing within the workers' state, and not because he rejoiced in repression. "Of course, it is only an analogy, but one that is very rich in content."

The Romantic Myth of Leon Trotsky Debunked.

2010-07-02T06:00:00.000-07:00

The most controversial figure in the pantheon of Russian Revolutionary leaders has remained that of Leon Trotsky and Robert Service's devastatingly accurate biography of this brave and bad man still has the capacity to annoy Trotskyists like Tariq Ali, Chris Harman and Peter Taafe.

Service is far more asture than these ideologues and correctly claims that Trotsky was both an opportunist and self serving ideologue ( no less than his sententious devotees ) and that has led to outrage amongst those who still cannot come to terms with his direct role in creating a horrific totalitarian state.

Service mentions the obvious facts about Trotsky's career as a professional revolutionary: the fact that he joined the Bolsheviks late only when he saw the opportunity to seize power in the run up to October 1917.

This was after having back in 1905 condemned Lenin for his "Jacobinism" and compared him to Robespierre for his factionalism. This was merely a pose to upgrade Trotsky into a potential great man of the Revolution who stood above dull politicking.

The faith in apocalyptic violence was always part of Trotsky's creed of world historical Revolution as only through Terror could a New Man be forged and to which ends millions of lives could be sacrificed.

Trotsky, however, before the Great War posed as the great unifier who was above factional squabbling but once the chance to become a world historical leader presented itself he changed his tune and started playing on crude demagogy and joined the Bolsheviks after February 1917.

As a street agitator denouncing the continuation of the Great War, Trotsky was already countenancing mass terror when addressing the Kronstadt naval garrison on Anchor Square where he called for the violent removal of the Provisional Government,

'I tell you heads must roll, blood must flow...The strength of the French Revolution was in a machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head. This is a fine device. We must have it in every city'

This is the point lost on Tariq Ali, a remnant Trotskyist, who condemned Service's "counter-factual school" of history, a total invertion of the truth as it is Ali who is doing that by pretending that had it not been for Lenin and Trotsky, then,

'...what might have happened had Generals Kornilov, Denikin and Yudenich triumphed instead of Lenin and Trotsky. One thing is virtually certain: since the revolution was portrayed as the work of Jewish-Bolsheviks, a wave of pogroms would have decimated the Jews.

This ignores the fact that the Civil War followed the Bolshevik seizure of power and which with Trotsky's backing was designed the telescope revolution in Russia into one universal Civil War across Europe as a specific aim. That was what Trotsky meant by "permanent revolution".

On July 2 1917, Trotsky had already endorsed the idea of a proletarian and peasants revolution in which the Bolsheviks alone were to be the sole vanguard party and about how a dictatorship of the proletariat was to be set up and created and enemies of the people disposed of.

It was enough to smash the entire existing system and break all possibility with liberal democratic politics in such a way that there was no way through consent and negotiation of creating a new government that could not but be based on mass violence and state terror.

Well before the Civil War got under way in 1919-1920, Trotsky was pushing harder for a policy of a totalitarian One Party State that could only but polarise Russia and push it further towards a colossal bloodbath that it became.

For at start the attempted Kornilov Coup was not merely thwarted by the Bolsheviks but by the Socialist Revolutionaries and other left wing groups who defended the Revolution from what was a confused and hardly threatening debacle at the behest of Kerensky himself, leader of the Provisional Government..

Ali's ignorance of the Russian Revolution's dynamic is confirmed by the fact that Denikin and Yudenich's White Forces only started to muster in late 1918 and in full force in 1919 after the Civil War had been started not by anti-semitic reactionaries but by rival left wing groups.

After the Bolsheviks received only a quarter of the vote in the Constituent Assembly of 1918, the Sovnarkom and the power of Military Revolutionary Committee led by Trotsky dissolved it as they would tolerate not rivals, not even from the Left SRs who opposed the war.

Having already committed himself to the Bolshevik's effective hijacking of the Russian Revolution by Lenin and agreed to having made peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918, he was bound now to the Bolsheviks if he wanted to continue to make an impact.

When the SRs retreated from St Petersburg to Kazan , Trotsky in his new capacity as the People's Commissariat For Military affairs now turned on the Kronstadt sailors as early as April 1918 when they started complaining of the lack of pay and conditions.

Trotsky harangued the sailors he had just one year before called on to overthrow the Provisional Government by cursing the sailors 'with his tongue for quarter of an hour and sent them away like whipped curs' according to one eye witness.

Furthermore before that he had made it quite clear that his view of the sailors, the "beauty and pride of the Revolution" were always going to be subordinated to his orders and that the masses required as Service puts it 'strict tutelage' by The Party.

When Trotsky dashed out to Samara to whip the disillusioned Czech legions into line, they accused the Bolsheviks of treachery and joined the Committee of the Members of the Constituent Assembly ( Komuch ), an anti-Bolshevik counter government based in Kazan.

Military conflict between the SRs and the Bolsheviks broke out in June 1918 and this threatened to drive a wedge between Petrograd and Moscow and the grain supplies needed in the cities. That was the direct result of the destruction of democracy in Russia.

The Bolsheviks under Trotsky initiated the forced requisitioning of grain from peasants-the Food Dictatorship-which in turn drove the Left SRs to join the so-called "counter-revolution" and who were ruthlessly crushed by detachments of Latvian riflemen.

Forced grain requisitioning at the barrel of the gun and bayonet was justified in laguage later used frequently by Stalin when scapegoating the richer peasants or Kulaks for hoarding grain that they were expected to harvest for nothing other than serving a dictatorial state.

Trotsky called for those 'hoarders' to be sentenced to ten years hard labour, a policy that rapidly started to develop into the policy of the Red Terror ans the enemy deserved 'merciless annihilation' in his words.

The Left SRs were supporters of the Revolution that Trotsky had supported in the early 1900s until he embraced Marxism. Now he was determined to crush with maximum force those like Mikhail Muravev and even previously erstwhile Bolsheviks like Pantaleev.

Pantaleev had been commissar of the Numery Petrograd Regiment and rather than confront the Bolsheviks after battles around Sviyazhsk, he commandeered a steamboat up the Volga to Nizhni Novgorod were Trotsky ordered those on board to be summarily executed

That enraged Bolsheviks serving in the Red Army, that Lenin and Trotsky now fully endorsed an extension of this policy of arbitrary discipline and state terror by using the Cheka, the political police set up in December 1917, to launch an all out Civil War on all 'class enemies'.

As Service makes it clear the point of no return had virtually already been reached,

'Lenin and Trotsky wanted a civil war in order to have the chance to carry out the irreversible suppression of enemies of the October Revolution. Neither of them said this directly in public. A telegram Trotsky sent to Lenin on 17 August summed up their attitude

"....I consider it unacceptable to let steamers sail the Volga under a Red Cross flag. The receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made and civil war is unnecessary....Air pilots and artillerymen have been ordered to bomb and set fire to the bourgeois districts of Kazan and then Simbirsk and Samara. In these conditions a Red Cross caravan is inappropriate....

To that extent Tariq Ali, rather like Trotsky's hagiographer Isaac Deutscher, is correct to assume that,

The socialist revolution, unlike the bourgeois revolutions that transformed Europe in the 16-18th centuries, was a premeditated project intended for a more advanced country than Russia.
Even for its leaders, the Bolshevik triumph of 1917 was a leap in the dark. Bolshevik orthodoxy did not believe that the infant republic could last on its own. The party leadership was waiting for the German revolution to break its isolation and transform Europe.

Yet this hinged on a tremendous continental wide fantasy and gamble effectively quashed by the suppression of the Spartacist Revolt of November 1918 in Germany led by the romantic Marxists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Yet it was Luxemburg who castigated the Bolsheviks for their arbitrary Red Terror and extension of Tsarist style tactics taken to extremity in crushing democratic activism by the masses and substituting the dictatorship of the proletariat for a dictatorship over them.

'It is amusing to note the strange somersaults that the respectable human “ego” has had to perform in recent Russian history. Knocked to the ground, almost reduced to dust, by Russian absolutism, the “ego” takes revenge by turning to revolutionary activity.
In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful. But the “object” proves to be the stronger. The knout is triumphant, for tsarist might seems to be the “legitimate” expression of history.

Tariq Ali soft peddles the terror and mass murder unleashed by the Bolsheviks thus,

'Instead the main imperialist states decided to back the White counter-revolution, leading to a civil war that was won by the newly created Red Army, but at a terrible cost: the peasants had been alienated by forced requisitions and conscription. The civil war of 1918-21 exhausted the tiny working class. Many died and a layer that survived was rapidly absorbed into the machinery of the new state.

That is an expedient falsehood if the unpleasant realities that happened during the Red Army's methods of inducing and fighting civil war and the fact Trotsky was the commissar on the spot who started the forced grain requisitioning whilst Lenin gave bureaucratic orders from Moscow.

The best Ali can feebly muster in his defence is this,

Trotsky, as the founder and organiser of the Red Army, was undoubtedly ruthless in ensuring the victory of his side – as was Lincoln during the American civil war.
Exhausted at home and isolated abroad, the Bolshevik leaders, obsessed by the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just, decided that they must hold on to power whatever the cost. An early outcome was the brutal repression of the Kronstadt sailors' mutiny.

What Ali fails to mention is Trotsky's key role in crushing the Kronstadt Revolt in 1921. He mentions it as if it had nothing to do with the way that Lenin and Trotsky had seized power, suppressed any form of democratic accountability..

Moreover the manner Trotsky in the 1920s subordinated workers to the need for centrally commanded "labour armies", all of which was supported by Stalin completely, counters the myth that Trotsky and Stalin were always so fundamentally different during the Revolution.

The facts about Kronstadt are now well established and it is truly chilling that those like Ali can skip over how and what Trotsky did to these sailors in getting Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army Supreme Commander to order Tukhachevski to get troops to suppress the mutiny.

The mutiny was essentially a complete repudiation of every draconian anti-worker policy the Bolsheviks had instituted from forced requisitioning and the armed units that blocked the free exchange of goods as well as the poverty and disease and crushing of trade union rights.

The Kronstadt Mutineers Manifesto was clear,

In carrying out the October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its liberation. The outcome has been even greater enslavement of human beings.
Power has passed from a monarchy based on the police and gendarmerie into the hands of usurpers - Communists - who have given the toilers not freedom but the daily dread of ending up in the torture chambers of the Cheka, the horrors of which exceed many times the rule of tsarism's gendarmerie.

Calling for "exceptional measures" the troops marched across the ice and were "petit-bourgeois" counter-revolutionaries who should be "shot like partridges" on the basis that they were prepared to aid an Allied invasion via the Baltic.

Following a practice later used by the Red Army during the Second World War under Stalin was the use of "blocking detachments" to ensure the Red Army did not take one step back. Trotsky's crushing of Kronstadt thus had an other element that led to Stalinism.

Dzierzynski's Cheka stayed in the rear, with their machine guns ready, with orders to kill all retreating soldiers. As Richard Pipes puts it in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime "Some Red soldiers refused to charged; about one thousand went over to the rebels."

So unpopular was this attack that Tukhachevski even had to send in special units within the regular Red Army troops to combat the possibility of internal dissent and rebellion against the military orders.

The sailors were later either shot or sent to the nascent Gulag labour camp or 'disciplinary colony' at Ukhta in the Russian North or sent to other naval units. This was ordered by the Politburo with Trotsky and Lenin present on 27 April 1921.

In the 1938 when questioned about Kronstadt by Victor Serge, Trotsky simply lied about it all,

“I never spoke of that question [Kronstadt 1921], not that I have anything to hide but, on the contrary, precisely because I have nothing to say...Personally I didn’t participate at all in the crushing of the rebellion, nor in the repression that followed.”

Ali's view of Trotsky being wholly at variance with the terrorism later used against the Bolshevik Party itself is based on a pure ideology divorced from the facts as they really were and indifference to the realities.

Trotsky's draconian policies of decimating soldiers in the Red Army for failures, his kidnapping of Generals families as hostages to ensure "loyalty" and continual threats to execute soldiers for failing were wholly disproportional.

Ali deludes himself completely in the most "counter-factual" manner possible by then asserting that the descent of the Bolshevik Revolution into bloodshed was not inherent in the way they seized power but in the myth of Imperialist Encirclement and war losses.

A later result was Stalinism, which destroyed not simply the aspirations of the revolution but most of its leading cadres.Ninety per cent of Lenin's central committee were denounced as traitors and executed. Stalin killed more Bolsheviks than the Tsar.

That was not merely Stalin's work but was inherent in the militaristic nature of Trotsky's Bolshevism when in 1918 he opined "Soviet saboteurs must be punished as severely as bourgeois ones".

John Gray correctly asserts that Stalin simply took the Terror initiated by Lenin and Trotsky and applied it more ruthlessly, with the exception that he applied it, as Lenin and Trotsky only did on a relatively small scale, to the Bolshevik Party itself.

'Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia

'Trotsky totally destroyed the voluntaristic aspects a citizens militia of idealists for the Revolution and excoriated those like I.M Smirnov, a Left Communist who complained about Trotsky's hierarchical regulations as being contrary to the comradely traditions of the party.

That makes a mockery of Ali's bland insistence that,

Attempts to reform the system from within failed largely because the bureaucracy refused to surrender its power. Ultimately it exhausted itself and capitulated quietly and shamefully to the forces of global capitalism

This is nonsense. The Soviet Union failed precisely because being held together by force, that lack of willpower to maintain it by such means by the late 1980s accelerated the desire to be rid of this totalitarian state as the historical truth of the early years came out under Gorbachev

In fact long before perestroika and glasnost, Trotsky's complicity in crushing the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 had been publicised by those opposed to Trotsky's later desire to cover it up in the 1930's when he wrote The Revolution Betrayed and My Life.

Every occasion on which Trotsky tried to talk about what Ali calls his devotion to 'the transition from the the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom and workers 'self-emancipation' he was embarrassed by those like Victor Serge who kept bringing it up.

This was particularly humiliating when Trotsky was trying to pose as the champion of anti-Stalinist resistance during the Spanish Civil War ( 1936-1939 ) when he castigated Stalinist agents of the NKVD for tracking down and liquidating the rival democratic left.

Viktor Serge, a former anarchist of Russian parentage who had gone to Russia to support the Revolution demanded Trotsky face up to his role in crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny and thus his role in setting up a One Party State.

Trotsky's reply was intellectually feeble rationalisation based on what Service correctly calls 'casuistry' and 'Jesuitical sophistry' as he maintained that the Kronstadt sailors of 1917 were not the' same ones' he ordered to be mercilessly crushed in 1921.

But they were the same sailors, of course. In 1919 the sailors had fought bravely for the Red Army but of the 10,000 who had been stationed there in 1917, some 4,000 had turned in their Bolshevik membership cards by the winter of 1920-1921.

So in the sense that there were 4000 fewer Bolshevik Kronstadt sailors they could be considered not exactly the same sailors. A devious sleight of hand. Serge was having none of Trotsky's evasions and dissimulation . In Once More: Kronstadt, Serge insisted,

'There remains broadly the fact that the uprisings of Kronstadt and other localities signified to the party the absolute impossibility of persevering on the road of War Communism. The country was dying of bitter-end state-ification. Who then was right? The Central Committee which clung to a road without issue or the masses driven to extremities by famine?

L.D. Trotsky emphasizes that the sailors and soldiers of the Kronstadt of 1921 were no longer the same, with regard to revolutionary consciousness, as those of 1918.... But the party of 1921 – was it the same as that of 1918? Was it not already suffering from a bureaucratic befoulment which often detached it from the masses and rendered it inhuman towards them?

When and how did it begin to employ towards the toiling masses, whose energy and highest consciousness it expressed, non-socialist methods which must be condemned because they ended by assuring the victory of the bureaucracy over the proletariat?

This question posed, it can be seen that the first symptoms of the evil date far back. In 1920, the Menshevik social-democrats were falsely accused, in a communiqué of the Cheka, of intelligence with the enemy, of sabotage, etc. This communiqué, monstrously false, served to outlaw them

Let us go back still further. Has not the moment come to declare that the day of the glorious year of 1918 when the Central Committee of the party decided to permit the Extraordinary Commissions to apply the death penalty on the basis of secret procedure, without hearing the accused who could not defend themselves, is a black day?
That day the Central Committee was in a position to restore or not restore an Inquisitional procedure forgotten by European civilization. In any case, it committed a mistake. It did not necessarily behoove a victorious socialist party to commit that mistake. The revolution could have defended itself better without that.
We would indeed be wrong to conceal from ourselves today that the whole historical acquisition of the Russian revolution is being called into question.

Out of the vast experience of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxists will save what is essential, durable, only by taking up all the problems again from the bottom, with a genuine freedom of mind, without party vanity

Trotsky's response was simply to ignore it or blatantly lie about his role in it, as do his dwindling band of fanatical theologians of revolution who still cling to the myth of Trotsky as as some "martyr" to the Russian Revolution or, as Deutscher put it, The Prophet Outcast.

Bibliography

Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography.
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.
Victor Serge, Once More: Kronstadt.
Victor Serge, Kronstadt 1921, Trotsky’s Defense. Response to Trotsky.
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Revolution and the Death of Utopia.
John Gray, A Trail of Terror Stretching 200 years ( The Times )
John Gray, Behind the Myth ( Literary Review )

Leftist Doublethink in Another " New Cold War"

2010-07-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

As much as Edward Lucas, is a trite propagandist for Natopia and enforcing neoliberalism with a dash of blood and military prowess, what is almost indistinguishable from neoconservativism or the most extreme forms of American Nationalism, it is true that non-aligned sovereign nations have also acted according to Orwellian style doublethink.

If there is any legacy left from the Old Cold War, it lies in the sphere of influence exerted by rhetoric and what is now termed "public diplomacy", that is, mass propaganda which newly emerging states such as Venezuela have been using for using external threats to consolidate domestic authority.

Often with radicals such as Noam Chomsky and journalist John Pilger, the "Anti-Americanism", has with them become an uncritical creed in which the rather cynical realpolitik of states like Russia, Venezuela and Iran has been ignored or overlooked in favour of emphasising the fact that all these states are threatened by the USA.

There is no doubt that these states are menaced by the White House and the Pentagon for the simple reason that the USA is desperate for sources of oil diversification and wants, to use Greg Palast's phrase, "the best democracy money can buy" by meddling in the affairs of these states. The fact is that even when possibly well intentioned it will backfire.

Notions of "sovereign democracy" in Russia, Venezuela and Belarus are responses to this as well as messianic Western New Cold Warrior rhetoric by those like Radek Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister, who in 2005 held a conference placing these Belarus as part of The Axis of Evil.

As George Orwell once wrote, such simplistic notions of Good versus Evil belong in the playground and not in sensible political analysis, though Orwell has been unfairly conscripted by Natopians as a Cold Warrior because he was brave enough to challenge the uncritical deification of Stalin's USSR.

Yet that period of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism was a less prescient vision of a nightmare to come than that offered by the conservative English novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley in the 1930s whose Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, written after WW 2 has more relevance in 2010.

Huxley was a critic of the capacity both of Soviet totalitarianism and US style capitalism to stifle individuality and free thinking, one reason why even in those days The Daily Telegraph could praise Huxley's vision of mass manipulation and indoctrination as inimical to political liberalism.

Even in 1959 Huxley could write in Brave New World Revisited that the USA had very much moved away from the conservatism of the Founding Fathers and towards a more 'benign' form of indoctrination and thought control bolstered by mass production, Fordism, and consumerism.

During the Cold War only ideologues continued to ignore the evidence of systemic repression as though political liberty meant little in the USSR, scientists and technicians ( for example Sakharov ) were given freedom to do as they pleased providing they did not stray from the ideological strait jacket of Soviet ideology.

But what Huxley foresaw was that even in the USA, "representatives of commercial and political organisations...( had ) developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interests of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.

Huxley predicted

"The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well being of individuals-is now the central problem of mankind and will remain the central problem for another century"

Within Britain in particular, New Labour's policy of using mass migration as a tool of driving down wages and boosting the skills base or the pool of available labour has always created a quandary for the left since the 1960s and Britain is now vastly overcrowded and over populated.

Moreover, this massive increase in population created by "progressives" has been matched by New Labour's increased authoritarianism and the erosion of political liberties that too few take seriously, apart from those obsessed with seeing in other nations like Venezuela something different and better. Though Chavez has improved the living standards there

Some of the worst offenders in this respect are the journalists John Pilger and editor of The Guardian Seumas Milne who seldom deals with the Great Game for the oil needed to feed a growing population because he would be unwilling to countenance migration controls as they would be considered "racist".
When writing The New Rulers of the World, token mentions are made to Russia and China-their repressive regimes are taken for granted-but the fact that "leftist" radicals have often actively given their benediction to China, a nominally communist party state pursuing breakneck industrialisation is not mentioned by Pilger.

Take for example the fact that the ex-Mayor of London is feted as a man of the left by those like the Guardian editor Seumas Milne who support Ken Livingstone's veneration of Venezuela and also a cynical realpolitik that welcomes China's ascendency as a superpower without much concern for human rights.

Livingstone has, as Clive Bloom author of Violent London suggests, a very authoritarian streak in him. He makes jibes about about political opponents being like Nazis and Fascists like a student. Yet as Anne Applebaum in the introduction to Gulag: a History pointed out, he also still romanticises the Russian Revolution and thinks it was 'deformed' and not democidal totalitarian state from the moment Lenin took power in October 1917.

The only complaint Livingstone has is that Lenin's tactical mistakes were those of the economy. Not the fact that democracy has been crushed by January 1918 and alternative socialist rivals removed to Solovetsky island for "re-reducation". Such pro-communist sympathies go towards explaining how he can easily praise China.

The proof that Livingstone is past it was shown in his Orwellian statement comparing the police response to the Poll Tax Riots of 1990 to the Tianiamen Square massacre of 1989, a comment that was complained about for its facile and callous stupidity at the time but also for the craven sucking up to China and omitting China's appalling human rights record.

Anti-Americanism, 'identity politics' and allying with hard left ideologues like Calvin Tucker who supported the USSR's continued existence and who has rebranded himself into Chavez's main propagandist in Britain is hardly wise too. Few have read the interview he gave for the webzine 21st Century Socialism.

When Lenin took power in Russia, the only economic transactions people made was that they brought the food they would eat that day, and a couple of times a year they would buy an item of clothing. I remember my grandmother saying 'you could leave your front door open', we are talking about pre-WW1 London. You could leave your front door open, everyone said, but that's because no one had anything to steal.

And as someone like Lenin could see, you could organise supply and demand around the very simple needs that people had. But nowadays, even people living on state benefits make dozens of economic transactions a week. It is a huge complexity, and there is no way a centrally planned economy is going to be able to manage the scale of economic activity we now have.

The tragedy is, a lot of people on the left have moved from accepting, that as a means of distribution and exchange, the market can't be bettered- to assuming that therefore the market can do everything else in society. And really it can't. It's a very good mechanism for the distribution and exchange of goods. Full stop.

Fidel pre-dates the recognition of all this, and Raul has got to allow the most dramatic economic growth in human history has been China, where they kept control of the commanding heights of the economy, but allowed a service and light industrial sector to grow up around it.

'But still the majority of the economy in China was in the hands of the Party. When I was discussing where should I open an office in China - Shanghai was clearly the parallel city, but we also had to be in Beijing because that is where the decisions finally get taken

'There is no mention of China's concentration camps, the largest number of executions in the world and it's policy of "no strings attached" colonialism in Africa because "identity politics" means only white Europeans are to blame. The myth that only whites can be racist, as racism is connected to Lenin's dictum of kto-kogo, which dominant group is oppressing which holds.

Whatever the big corporations are doing there, it requires the backing of the Party. And what the Chinese have done is, they have become totally predominant in a whole series of products

Livingstone is only anti-corporatist when it's US corporations and his none too secret admiration for Chinese superpower is a misguided one that puts him in the same category as "realists" like Rupert Murdoch and others sucking up to China like the doddering halfwit Lord Rees Mogg. Since Pilger hates "Murdochracy" Pilger's silence is odd.

There is no mention by Livingstone of democracy in Cuba, the political repressions, the jailing of dissidents or the effective policy of whites only beaches and promotion of covert sex tourism for Cuba is still trendy ( think of those Latin American bars in Fulham like Havana ) and Ken always wants to be "with it".

The Politics of Livingstone as a "global figure" detracts from his need to address mundane issues in London which he showed great skill at times. Yet looking at those views as expressed in 21st Century Socialism gives people an insight into the fact he would use London to promote an "alternative" to Tory Britain.

In 21st Century Socialism "Red Ken" still buys into the romanticism of the Russian Revolution as a "deformed" revolution, no doubt to please London radicals ( Trotskyist types and SWP fanatics who are terminally incapable of getting it that Lenin hijacked the Revolution and set up a totalitarian state almost immediately and intentionally. )

Livingstone absurdly omits all mention of his crimes, his terror his collective punishments and restoration of the death penalty after the Provisional government had abolished it in 1917. The reason is he wants to curry the favour of the StWC types, a motley band of power hungry ex-CPGB members.

"The biggest beneficiaries of the Russian Revolution were actually people in Europe and America who were given the welfare state. The terror of Stalin... none of this was conceded out of generosity, it was a fear of Stalin's legions".

Tell that to the London Poles, either the new transient migrants or better the older generation of political exiles and it would be treated with utter contempt. Post-war reforms were conceded because it was Labour reformism which built on the limited liberal legislation and grassroots unionism.

It had something to do with the fear of the USSR seeming to provide social security, scientific wonders like the first satellite in the Space Age, the Sputnik- and other achievements that were bought at far too high a cost in human liberty and maintained by a system of repression. Hence Seumas Milne's paeans to the USSR in The Guardian.

The anti-Americanism and talk about the US role in Latin America also reflects double standards: Venezuela has the right to be free and have real self-determination but not Tibet. This doublethink might reflect a degree of reality but to call it "socialism" is as absurd as the USSR or CCP's brand.

"It is ridiculous. Also, when people talk about China's attitude towards Tibet; the simple reality is: no Chinese government, communist or capitalist, would ever let Tibet go - because they know that within a year there would be a huge American military base there, they would be surrounded on that side, and this is just the reality of big power politics".

In which case, there is no need to single out the USA as uniquely malign. Sacrificing Tibet to what amounts to a cultural genocide has been met by silence by John Pilger and Seumas Milne. And in Burma and Africa, Chinese Imperialism has likewise not been mentioned. This is no "censorship by omission" as Pilger terms it.

Though it's little to do with the actual governance of London beyond grabbing the votes of Chavez fans in antinomian radical London, the votes of ageing anti-Vietnam types who must be approaching 60 and will be dying or dead in the next decade or so. Those like the pathetic Vanessa Redgrave.

In any case, Livingstones' connections with Chavez and the "anti-war' movement conceal the fact it's merely against the USA's "war on terror", human rights and its cynical alliances with unpleasant regimes are attacked but the double standard means that never gets extended to Chavez's allies like Iran or Zimbabwe.

The very word "leftist" is indicative of the problem: like conservatism it represents the demise of Western socialism as a coherent political project as radicals hitch themselves to this or that nation entrusted to act as the global hegemon or, as Martin Jacques calls China, a "systemic alternative".

As for John Pilger, his own view of the Soviet Union remains close to the Trotskyist version of the Russian Revolution that stagnated into bureaucratic excesses but which was still potentially reformable. Such radicals still use "Eastern Europe" instead of Central Europe and venerate the potentialities of "reformed communism".

Unlike Seumas Milne, an unabashed champion of the USSR, Pilger is too clever as a propagandist to call himself a "communist" or have any consistent vision of the complexities of the Russian Revolution or the Cold War, apart from being utterly self serving in hitching himself to the dissident cause in "Eastern Europe" in one or two essays.

The atrocious human rights record of Iran which has the highest rate of executions next to China does not stop Pilger's hero Hugo Chavez from aligning with it. States often operate according to self interests whilst prating about universal values. That's as true of Britain as Venezuela. But Pilger fawns on Chavez without asking difficult questions.

Hugo Chavez is also aligning himself very closely with Russia which is not known for having a particularly good record on human rights in Chechnya. Venezuela and Russia have been conducting joint naval manoeuvres in 2006 and have arms deals agreements as well. That's hardly edifying for a man who claims to be a libertarian socialist.

Yet Pilger does not condemn that. Nor does he condemn the bilateral deals with Belarus which also have an important role in propping up the international arms industry. If Britain is to be condemned, then it must be because the trade is inherently bad to Pilger. Or else only if Britain does it but not Venezuela.

Pilger does not make that argument with regards Venezuela. So it must be that it is the choice of nations that Britain chooses that is wrong. Yet if Chavez is doing deals with Russia and also voting in the UN General Assembly not to to oppose the Burmese military junta, then he is being hypocritical.

The reason for this is that Pilger's interpretation of morality is the defence of the revolution. Most of the oeuvre of the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist left is based on trying to prove that the failure of revolutions is wholly due to imperialist machinations that derailed them into Stalinist excesses.

Never that the original sin was planted within the revolution itself as experience has repeatedly demonstrated. If it can be proved that Britain had a Gulag in Kenya, then Stalinism is nothing out of the ordinary and can't be used as a reason why revolution cannot be tried again and again.

Mike Davis is another Trotskyist who wants to use history as propaganda in Late Victorian Holocausts. The Stalin terror famine was part of a deliberate attempt to kill people in Soviet Ukraine and to exterminate the kulaks as part of a class war. In British India the effects of a natural famine were compounded by incompetence.

The people killed in the Indian famines were victims of manslaughter and callous laissez faire policies whereas those victims in Ukraine were murdered intentionally in full consciousness of what was happening. The failure to distinguish is a rationalisation of an ideology of revolutionary change. That only Stalin made Lenin and Trotsky's regime become and Empire.

The one that goes from one extreme-that a crime is not a crime if 'we' commit it to the equally hypocritical one that crimes are only real crimes if 'we' commit them, whilst Stalinism is a historical 'detour' or 'deviation' and making no mention of those committed by the NLF in Vietnam, the Bolsheviks or Mugabe.

Pilger refuses to consider that the mujahadeen were not exactly the same thing as the Taliban or Al Qaida because he simply can't countenance the idea that a jihad against the Marxist-Leninist PDPA regime was popular amongst the rural masses. So the reality needs to be re-invented for pure propaganda reasons.

The root causes for the jihad against the PDPA lay in the revolt against its execution of the village sufi ulema, harebrained collectivisation plans and introducing widespread police state terror. Pilger airbrushes this out of his chapters on Afghanistan in both New Rulers of the World and Freedom Next Time.

The reasons for Pilger hypocritically introducing in his own work what he berates others for'-censorship by omission'-have as much to to with the element of racialism that pervades his entire output and the sentimental belief that Third World Revolutionary movements were 'internationalist'.

In the case of Afghanistan with the PDPA the historical facts never backed this up. Pilger fails to mention that the PDPA was ridden by tribal factions with the Khalq leader Amin organising the murder of rival Taraki, his Parcham, soon after coming to power by a coup. There was nothing edifying about this squalid power politics.

That and the mass murder of 27,000 people between 1978 and December 1979 i.e before the Soviet invasion is ignored in favour of a mendacious idea that the PDPA was trying to bring progress, women's liberation and freedom to Afghanistan. So the mass terror is conveniently ignored.

Pilger opines tenderly that "13,000 prisoners were freed and police files publicly burnt". Clearly this Bastille moment is considered to outweigh the evidence of PDPA brutality. Had Amin and later Mohammed Najibullah been close to the USA, Pilger would revile them as 'stooges'.

But the reality is that neither Communist faction ever had a popular power base is screened out in The New Rulers of the World because Pilger is only interested in trying to pin the entire blame for Afghanistan's descent into chaos and bloodshed on 'the West'.

'....although occasional reference was made to the Anglo-American role in the creation of the fanatical jihadi groups which spawned the Taliban, there was no mention of the extraordinary period in the recent past of this benighted society which would have cast 'our' war for human rights and 'civilised values' in its true perspective'

The use of the word 'extraordinary' might seem as though 'promising', set up like some rosy , even potentially social democratic experiment in good living before the sinister capitalists wrecked it all. Whilst Brzezinski's machinations in funding the mujahadeen were badly conceived shoddy realpolitik, they exploited the chaos: they did not cause it

The PDPA is described as a 'liberation movement' which was 'by all accounts a popular revolution'. Pilger then backs that claim up by citing reports from, of all places, The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. The very sources he usually claims are form of "invisible government" and part of the "hidden agendas" of corporate capitalism.

That is, the very corporate media he says obfuscates by omission. In fact, there was nothing 'popular' about it unless one has been trained to see reality correctly at a London conference of pseudo-worker-intellectual SWP ideologues. The revolution was always distinctly unpopular outside Kabul.

Not least due to the mass killing of respected village ulema and the Sufi Muslims who got in the way of Progress, a view held by Leon Trotsky who said in relation Central Asian Islam that "the putrescent tissue of Islam will vanish at the first puff". Tariq Ali, who suggested the title The New Rulers of the World to Pilger is still an ardent admirer of Trotsky.

The way Pilger propagates the falsehood about the PDPA is relevant in two ways.

Firstly, to give a subtle retrospin in favour of secular revolutionary politics and to fake the idea that the Soviet Union was a 'deformed' state due to Stalin. Hence Revolutions always create more good than evil and their failure just must be down to sinister imperialist machinations.

Secondly, the fact that the Afghan masses rose up against the PDPA regime just must means they were duped by the West. Stupid peasants can't think for themselves, unless, of course, they are part of the heroic and mythical 'the Iraqi resistance' who are fighting the USA, a view held again by Tariq Ali whom Dennis Potter correctly called a 'gibbering finger pointing nincompoop'

The idea that blacks or those with brown skins should naturally fall in with Third World Revolutionary movements is also part of Pilger's interpretation of South Africa. On page 289 where Pilger writes that 'the new African bourgeoisie' in the ANC, such as Mamphele Ramphele who was a Black Consciousness activist, share the,

'fawning of white technocrats in thrall to capitalism's new supercult'.

Evidently what comes naturally to 'whites' is somehow seen to be a betrayal of 'authentic' African values and consciousness, the revolutionary anti-imperialist ideology of Franz Fanon whose visceral racial ideologies and glorification of terrorist violence was inherent in The Wretched of the Earth which Pilger quotes from.

Pilger has many legitimate criticisms of the ANC elite and how many blacks have sunk further into poverty since 1994. Moreover, few ever bother to mention that Mandela,

'ordered the bloody invasion of tiny Lesotho. He allowed South African armaments to be sold to Algeria, Columbia and Peru, which have notorious human rights records. He invited the Indonesian mass murderer General Suharto to South Africa and gave him the country's highest reward ( Suharto had given money to the ANC in exile ). He recognised the brutal Burmese junta as a legitimate government, even though the plight of its legitimate leader Aung San Sui Kyi, who is under permanent house arrest, reflected his own struggle'

Yet such criticisms of Mandela have also been made by the staunch conservative Peter Hitchens who made the documentary 'Beneath the Halo' looking at how liberal beatification of Mandela belied the reality. Yet Pilger can not bring himself to regard Mandela as an "Uncle Tom", the term he used for US President Barack Obama, so he takes up a different pose.

That Mandela was in exile too long, does not really understand the world any more and has been captured by 'white power'. In Freedom Next Time that becomes clear in Pilger's interview when he writes on how Mandela sitting in a mansion seems an unworldly figure with his shoelaces untied.

The irony is that all 'empowerment' on the basis of race is a form of racialism. In the end, black power movements advance the interests of those who use it to ride into positions of power and influence. In some ways, it is an inevitable consequence of what the Apartheid regime called 'group rights'.

The notion of group rights when aligned with class and resentment about 'haves' and 'have-nots' can make for a lethal combination. Yet Pilger never bothers to criticise Robert Mugabe, not least as Pilger wants to show solidarity with those calling for more radical forms of 'land restitution'.

Pilger mentions Mugabe only twice. First on page 274 when he writes that the level of land evictions has increased and that only 1% of the South African budget went on land restitution in 2005. Pilger writes of how when Mugabe attended a ceremony to mark Mbeki's second term 'he was given a standing ovation'.

To be fair, Pilger uses that to act as a warning of what might happen if restitution is not advanced more quickly. Naturally, how that could be done without provoking open conflict does not interest Pilger who cites another author Bryan Rostron who does refer to Mugabe's 'despotism'.

Yet when Pilger mentions Mugabe again on page 285, with regards forced removals, he hedges his language in such a way as to rationalise his policy of mass terror and murder into a predictable accusation of double standards from the West for criticising the Zimbabwean dictator but not South Africa.

This kind of brutal treatment, at worst, state vandalism, is not very different from that which drew the West's opprobrium to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe-but not to South Africa, where foreign capital investment has returned to the record levels of the apartheid years'

'State vandalism' is a curious term for mass murder not only of white farmers but also of their black workforce.

If Pilger can't see the difference between a policy of mass terror and dictatorship and land evictions that do not actually kill people, then its clear he can't be taken that seriously as an objective journalist. Pilger will not criticise Mugabe because one of his main supporters is none other than Chavez.

Chavez also backs not only Mugabe but has also voted against any actions to censure the Burmese Junta in the UN. Yet Pilger has uniquely held British businesses responsible for propping it up. If the USA had vetoed actions, Pilger would have been thundering against that and its backing for the generals regime and economic greed and hypocrisy.

But, of course, Chavez is not completely white and is officially an 'anti-imperialist' leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. As with other liberation leaders, they are only acceptable when they share Pilger's hatred of America. That the lens through which he judges all good and evil. This is precisely the kind of expedient falsehood Orwell complained about in the 1930s

As with Jose Maria Horta in East Timor, he sees them as sell outs the moment they become 'close' to the West, despite having risked their lives against the dictatorship of Suharto. Pilger did not do that and as such shifting allegiances on the basis of being Anti-American is precisely the definition of what Orwell mean by "transferred nationalism'.

Pilger thus has no right to invoke Orwell as a model for his own journalism. As ids clear when Pilger produced one of his more than usually unhinged diatribes for the New Statesman in Truth and War mean nothing at Party Conferences, September 25 2008 ).

In it he justifiably complains about how the media coverage of the British political conference season of 2008 has remained largely silent over the Iraq War which was supported by both parties, with virtually no real parliamentary debate or challenges as regards its wisdom, and the fact that the spread of the financial crisis is connected to the USA's colossal run up of debts.

Pilger is right that in Britain there are two political parties dominated by one ideology. Not least in foreign policy. Pilger writes,

Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain's political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States.

This true. However, he makes yet another effort to compare his journalism to that of George Orwell in order to distinguish himself from the other creeping conformists in the mass media who merely trot out received platitudes and who regurgitate official propaganda.

This would be more convincing if Pilger did not increasingly base his own journalism not on reporting from stricken war zones but on writing articles based all on political spinning, crude propaganda and little substance.

This is shown when Pilger opines,

Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as "Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns", thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. "When truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

Yet what Pilger calls the 'Orwell Rule', the invertion of public pronouncements to reveal the real truth, was never, in fact, Orwell's rule, which is precisely why in 1984 he satirised the belief that truth could be arrived at purely by reversing by giving "The Party" slogans such as 'war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is strength'.

Orwell was satirising those with a totalitarian mindset who believed, that by simply inverting 'official truths', one somehow arrives at unofficial truth when all that happened is that one set of untruths was replaced by another set by those far more dogmatic in preaching it as the total truth.

That is essentially what happened under the Soviet Union when the Bolsheviks came to power and what was meant with Orwell's concept doublethink. That because the 'morality' of their political opponents was hypocritical, then the only morality that mattered was the one that allowed the concentration of power in their hands so that they could change society for the better.

Doublethink was intended to be a concept that could be applied to all political dissimulation where those who were more aware of the truth decided that the masses were too stupid to be able to understand it. So it was necessary to feed them untruth in order to mobilise them and to get them to do what the political elite knew what was best.

What Pilger misses is that doublethink for Orwell is the systematic application of hypocrisy to its logical conclusion. For, if the political elite was telling lies, then the opposition should do so even more effectively than them and not have any moral scruples at all that they could be held accountable for.

All that would be necessary would be to draw attention to the hypocrisy of the powers that one was against and ignoring it when committed by people one regarded as being on one's own side or who are standing up the the power which is considered the sole and original first cause of all the world's problems. Today, for those like Pilger, that means overwhelmingly the USA.

In this regard, Pilger would be more convincing if he abided by the standards of journalistic integrity he is so keen to set for others in his profession with regards silence and hypocrisy.

The very article in which Pilger's citation of The Orwell Rule appears is itself loaded with ideological assumptions which cite 'Western' hypocrisy but screen out any consideration that Pilger might be somewhat of a hypocrite for mentioning two writers, Yevtushenko and Stephen F Cohen, who supported the continued existence of the Soviet Union until its demise in 1991.

Unless people had forgotten, the Soviet Union was a One Party State and an Empire. Why does Pilger mention these one dissident and one American supporter of the USSR and "reform communism" but not Solszentitsyn, Sakharov and a whole lot of Soviet dissidents and certain ?

Well, firstly, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose quote "When truth is replaced by silence the silence is a lie", is one Pilger quotes with approval. Yevtushenko was a dissident who played an important role in 'breaking the silence' about Stalin's anti-semitism and who in 1961 wrote a poem Babi Yar

Yevtushenko attacked the way the Soviet regime had distorted the Nazi massacre of the Kiev Jews by pretending that it was targeted specifically against the Jews and not just all Soviet citizens of which some happened to be Jews. Pilger might also have mentioned those criticising the slave labour camps or Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Pilger quotes Yevtushenko , partly because it suits his image too to be some kind of dissident. He is always keen to identify himself with former Eastern European dissidents for his heroic correspondent pose in the West.

Yet he curiously continued to remain mostly silent about the Soviet Union's domination of Poland and Czechoslovakia, confined to its 'sphere of influence', whilst being very vocal about CIA involvement in the repression of left wing goverments in Latin America.

As Pilger has made it his purpose to cover most of the world's doomed uprisings, it is curious that he never bothered to report much about Solidarity in 1981. There are no reports from Pilger on that.

Yet those dissidents connected to it hated the Soviet system and wanted an end to it are almost entirely ignored.

It just didn't matter that much even though it happened and that most Poles, to Pilger's ire in his book Hidden Agendas, supported the Catholic Church and flocked in hundreds of thousands to turn out in Krakow back in 1979 to welcome John Pope Paul II. Glibly he compares it to the hullabaloo over Princess Diana's funeral.

For the simple point is that many Marxists were never that happy about Poland's resistance to Communist rule being so dominated by Catholicism nor the resistance to the spread of Communism through Poland even going back to the Polish-Soviet War of 1920.

Poland was regarded by many radical Marxists as a priest ridden backwater and den of reactionaries, a view held by those like Terry Eagleton, who wrote, in relation to Karol Wojtyla, (The Pope has Blood on his Hands, Guardian April 4 2005 )

"As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism.

Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy"

So the Polish Church was a reactionary force no so different from the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Apart from the fact the Catholic Church had not, in fact, retained a role in Polish society by murdering political oppenents as Stalin did to so many of Poland's political elite who had formed part of a wartime resistance, the Home Army,

Such People who had also fought the Nazis, who had fought alongside the British, who had supplied pilots in the Battle of Britain and who were rewarded with very little despite their epic role in fighting Nazism

Then, after Stalin allowed the Nazi repression of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the execution of its leaders was followed in Poland with the installation of a communist puppet government unelected by the Polish people.

Terry Eagleton's sneering dismissal of Poland as a priest ridden backwater that stopped the Russian Revolution linking with the German one to create a 'United States of Europe' remains a source of bitterness for Marxoid relicts of his ilk.

Whilst Pilger did berate Stalinism and give a certain support to risings like the 1968 Prague Spring, Pilger seldom condemned the hegemony of 'the Party' as such but just the "Stalinist" versions of it.

Nor did Pilger vocally criticise much the notion of one party rule because he believed 'the people' would be able to revivify Communism and make it work for them rather than the state bureaucratic apparatus which existed for that purpose.

Pilger has remained a firm believer in Rousseau's concept of 'direct democracy' and the notion of the majoritarian 'will of the people' with regards his support of Hugo Chavez today in Venezuela.

So, secondly, the same notion of direct democracy lay behind Pilger's hope that the Soviet Union could yet be reformed in accordance with the original precepts as ostensibly laid down by Lenin and which were believed in even by Gorbachev until the last days of the Soviet Empire.

Pilger cites a whole lot of things wrong with US and British foreign policy such as the plots to destabilise Pakistan and Venezuela All that is true but it is post-Cold War politics and The Great Game Pilger elsewhere refers to.

In particular, Pilger focuses on the notion that Russia's invasion of Georgia was somehow 'started' by the USA and uses that to go to provide a thinly veiled retrospective rationalisation for the existence of the USSR, albeit 'reformed'.

"None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of "the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years".

What Pilger does not tell you is that Cohen was an advisor to Gorbachev and who tried to advise him on how to reform the Soviet Union.

The absurd notion that the USA is engaging in a 'war on Russia' taps into the rationalisation for the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia because it was continually surrounded by imperial plots to encircle and destroy the Soviet regime. Certainly, the USA aims at hegemony in Central Asia. It hardly wants direct war with Russia,

The idea is that Russia was simply only reacting to 'NATO aggression' in the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia and was defending itself is ridiculous. It was reacting the aggression of Mikheil Saakashvili who was not directly order to bomb South Ossetia and kill 15 Russian peaceppers.

NATO itself was not "aggressive": most of its representatives had no intention of backing Saakashvili at all, though irresponsible proponents of NATO expansion caused Saakashvili to believe Cheney and the neoconservatives would back him up. But that's hardly tantamount to a NATO attack.

The Georgian leader initiated the conflict not because he was ordered by NATO to do it but because he hoped that by goading Russia into responding belligerently they would accelerate the accession of Georgia into NATO and get more Western backing to shore up his increasingly unpopular regime.

On the other hand, despite all the equally daft propaganda in the USA about Putin being some 'Neo Soviet' threat, Putin is not interested in starting another Cold War in any way whatsoever.

Putin is only interested in defending Russia's regional geopolitical interests against NATO expansion into Georgia and further into Central Asia and which is crucially concerned on both sides about control over the oil and gas of the Caspian.

Even so, the idea NATO wants to destroy Russian power or has directly aggressive intentions against it is vastly exaggerated, though it seeks to reduce it to the extent that it can control Central Asia

And indeed certain 'Democratic Geopoliticians' do have the messianic idea that by spreading US style market democracy to all these nations, Russia will lose its traditional imperial pretensions and, if it chooses, join 'the West'.

Yet the reason Pilger believes in 'imperialist encirclement' is no less for ideological reasons that bear no resemblance to the reality. For it was precisely this belief in imperialist encirclement that was one of the paranoid justifications for the Bolsheviks concentrating total state power in their hands and this was supported by even the most 'liberal' of them.

For example Nikholai Bukharin, whose glowing biography was written by none other than the very Stephen Cohen, the advisor to Gorbachev, who believed had he succeeded Lenin, the Soviet Union would have not degenerated into totalitarian terror. This is not borne out by the historical record.

In fact, it is now widely accepted by historians, in the light of access to the documents released during Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost, the relaxation of censorship and more open discussion of the past, that it was Lenin who instigated the policy of systematic terror that Stalin inherited.

Pilger wants to believe that a state founded on lies and deception only degenerated because of imperialist machinations in 1919, a myth that has been repeated over and over again and is factually incorrect.

Not least by those like George Galloway who use the idea of imperialist encirclement to justify Castro's retention of power and the suspension of democracy in Cuba. As well as taking money from the Iranians for his Press TV programmes. Pilger opinies that Galloway is a principled politician. But he is not.

Now though the Soviet Union is history, Pilger is not being completely honest about his position that everything would be better had not the Soviet Union not collapsed.

The fact the Soviet Union was a one party state that, at least, benefited more working people than what came later cannot really be compared with the fact that both political parties in the USA and UK share a consensus on the state not controlling the economy in the way Pilger believes it should.

What Pilger is objecting to is the rule of money and corporate interests and advertising in politics in Britain which makes party political differences seem to be meaningless. This is a legitimate criticism But this is hardly news. And it does not require specious analogies with the Soviet Union.

Huxley predicted growing resource wars and authoritarianism as a conservative. Peter Oborne, another conservative has criticised British foreign policy and the drive to War in Iraq in The Rise of Political Lying without making 'Ostalgic' comments about the Soviet Union's capacity for "reform".

To criticise this whilst having a nostalgia for the one party rule of the Soviet Union just because it was not dominated by the rule of money is actually beyond hypocrisy. It's the Orwellian doublethink he thinks other use but not himself. Pilger is an atrocious hypocrite for using Orwell to make the case for the continued existence of the Soviet Union.

It means effectively rationalising the imperialism of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe whilst criticising the USA for being imperialist in Latin America. And Pilger wrote little about life behind the Iron Curtain.

Yet Pilger has an important and formidably strong case when he mentions what is all too often omitted from triumphalist neoliberal narrative about the collapse of Soviet Communism when he writes how Stephen Cohen,

"......describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all of Russia's post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east".

The consequences that Cohen draws attention to with regards the living standards of the Russian people are undeniable but that should translate into a criticism of IMF ideology and not that NATO expanded into places like Poland which had every obvious reason to feel threatened by the continuation of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.

Like it or not Poland wanted to be part of it as a final security solution to their age old strategic vulnerability between what often an indifferent West and an imperialist Soviet Union that treated like an colonial outpost that was part of its 'sphere of interest'.

Pilger is conflating the eastward expansion of NATO necessarily with neoliberal capitalism in order to retrospectively justify aspects of Communist rule and ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people in Poland never wanted it.

Such feelings are common to those like Seumas Milne who also habitually refer to 'Eastern Europe' when moaning about Poland's accession into NATO when it is more correct to write of Central Europe as Milan Kundera, a Czech dissident Pilger is fond of quoting, rightly called it.
The expansion of NATO beyond Poland, indeed beyond Europe into Georgia is the real problem.

To that extent there is a curious irony that the US neoconservatives have acted like Trotskyists believing that the spread of US style market democracy can be achieved by co-ordinating and choreographing 'regime change' in former territories of the Soviet Union like Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus.

The irony is that they are acting somewhat like the Communists once did in believing that their system was the only possible one that people could and must live under. Pilger gets that but glides over the realities of the Soviet Union's atrocious environmental record as evidenced at Chernobyl which helped bring down the Soviet Union.

The result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era."

"This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as "a duel to the death - perhaps literally". The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac". The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a "pariah".

Pilger was correct about the propaganda parroting simplistic tropes about "Russian aggression" and "Russia's attack on Georgia", but the rest of his ex-post facto rationalisation for the existence of the USSR is craven. It also reaches levels of potty surrealism when he opines that the USa was serious about attacking Russia,

Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen,"when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?"

Pilger then histrionically adds "It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence". But back on Planet Earth two facts remain essential to understand.

Firstly, there is no way that the USA would have attacked Russia in 2009. This is a lunatic and unhinged assertion because not even Palin nor McCain would have launched a nuclear weapon and World War Three. Pilger in still living in the past. He has no conception of post-Cold War realities.

Secondly, there was no way out of the Soviet Union's implosion and few, not even most Russians, wanted it's continuation, though they were to only in retrospect find out that the USA was simply uninterested in the fate of ordinary Russians when it imposed IMP shock therapy.

Berlin as a New Model for Krakow's Destruction by Post-War German Architecture.

2010-06-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

Professor Roger Scruton warned the nascent Krakow Conservation movement Cravovia Urbs Europaea about the impact of the concept of post-war German architectural design being imported into Krakow. It is wholly out of place to throw up German designs into very heart of Krakow.

Unfortunately the dysfunctional organisation and polycentric chaos of these conservation intitiatives and bad leadership have failed to get it organised, disciplined and effective, though hope lies in the academic community of Krakow in gaining the support of prominent thinkers and intellectuals in Poland

The interesting thing about Berlin was that numerous building have been copied on a minature scale in Krakow. Geartner's M65 Meduza building is a direct mini-replica of plate and steel glass erections in Berlin especially around Potsdamer Platz, an atrocity exhibition of grotesque kitsch which was once the heart of Berlin's cafe and night life in the 1920s.

Krakow is not Krakau and was not destroyed during World War Two as was Berlin. Gaertner has no right to impose these designs on a very different city and in the process despoiling it. Geartner is one of the biggest potential threats to Krakow since Nazi Wartime Governor Hans Frank who, unlike Gaertner, did not have the time to destroy Krakow.

With the January Offensive by the Soviet Army in 1945, the city was rigged up with explosives by the Nazis with orders to destroy it on retreat.

Fortunately, the Red Army's advance was so swift, the Nazis did not have time to detonate them. Geartner has plenty of time and official sanction by those like the plodding and dull witted technocrat Mayor Jacek Majchrowski to wreck Krakow piecemeal.
The problem comes from what Scruton terms the "culture of repudiation" whereby in Germany "Stunde Zero" in 1945 mean that a wholly new modernistic Germany should arise from the ashes not merely of the Third Reich but also the Second Reich which ended in 1918 ans whose buildings were mostly destroyed as well.

Yet Nazi building were pompous monumentalist kitsch in a way that the buildings of Berlin's expansion from the 1840s onwards were not. The Kaiserreich ( 1871-1918 ) was far from perfect but neither in historical terms nor in architectural and cultural terms was is some mere simple precursor of Nazi Germany.
Poland preserved it's culture and sense of Polish identity through Krakow. It would be ironical that German capital and architecture was able to ruin the harmony of the city in a way that the Nazis were not able to do during their occupation of Krakau as part of the GG, a sector of Poland nor directly incorporated into the Third Reich.

This is not exactly a joke. English critics called the London County Council in the 1960s more inimical to London's historical fabric and more devastating destructive than the Herman Goering's Luftwaffe and the waves of continued bombing raids during the dark days of The Blitz in 1941.

Yet in Germany where it's death as an Imperial Power was dramatic and conclusive, it seems that after 1945 the "imperial past" was to be utterly destroyed, and not just in Western Berlin, with Erhard's new capitalism where no effort was made to rebuild the old elegant streets of Berlin.
And that, of course, was equally if not more so in East Germany where pure Communist functionality, Stalinist momumentalism and a repudiation of the German imperialism that had led to 'Hitler's War' meant all the more erasing the past under Ulbrich and Honecker's DDR police state.
This never happened in Poland as Krakow survived, Wroclaw as Festung Breslau in what was then then Germany and even Warsaw were extensively rebuilt according to pre-war plans. Ironically, Polish Communist authorities helped rebuild what still looks like an essentially German city, as it was for 800 years.

This is all the more a reason to preserve Krakow as a symbol of Poland's historical destiny as a nation and the cradle of quintessential Polishness in culture. The recent innovations, for which Henryk Gaertner of GD & K Group and the way the Rada Miejska have given him a virtual free hand in Krakow is an international disgrace.

As Professor Roger Scruton put it,

"Krakow is a symbol of Poland and its culture, a city that maintained its moral and aesthetic identity throughout the worst experiences of the 20th century.

For those who came during the last days of communism it offered the face of hope, and its beautiful architecture and dignified streets spoke of the historical Poland, which was determined to endure beyond the years of oppression.

It's ancient university, its royal castle, its churches with their unspoilt interiors, and its magnificent market square all embody the idea of the city as a seat of learning, culture and religion, and a place where the nation shapes itself by building a home. There is no place like this city on our continent, and I fully endorse the work of CUE in its determination to save Krakow for future generations.

All over Europe the predators are at work , exploiting our heritage for financial gain, and in the process destroying it. Let them not succeed here, in the heart of Poland. For if they succeed, the whole nation will suffer in its soul".

Mikheil Saakashvili	1,692,728	96.0
Teimuraz Shashiashvili	33,868	1.9
Roin Liparteliani	4,248	0.2
Zaza Sikharulidze	4,098	0.2
Kartlos Garibashvili	3,582	0.2
Zurab Kelekhsashvili	1,631	0.1
Against all	22,817	1.3
Total 82.8 % turnout, 1,762,972 registered voters	1,762,972	100.0