PC Roberts on the Ukrainian Question

[jpatter666]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

We are the exceptional people of the Earth chosen by God to lead the world's people to freedom. Therefore any equivalence with the acts of other, non-exceptional states is false. Even when we act immorally as in the case of slavery, civil rights, Vietnam, it is merely evidence of virtue as yet to be manifest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaga...y.22_countries

The US has many, many faults, but I challenge you to name a hegemonic power that acted better. Feel free to go through all of history.

Acknowledging ones faults does not require or benefit from self-flagellating walking through the (virtual) streets.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

The US has many, many faults, but I challenge you to name a hegemonic power that acted better. Feel free to go through all of history.

Acknowledging ones faults does not require or benefit from self-flagellating walking through the (virtual) streets.

I don't think the US acted any better. The Habsburgs were not exactly blood thirsty for example. Rome was actually pretty tolerant . The one difference that I see is that the US thinks its the world's liberator. In that respect the US is one of the worst in living up to what it thinks of itself. Its a side effect of its leaders having to fool its populace I think.

[jpatter666]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

I don't think the US acted any better. The Habsburgs were not exactly blood thirsty for example. Rome was actually pretty tolerant . The one difference that I see is that the US thinks its the world's liberator. In that respect the US is one of the worst in living up to what it thinks of itself. Its a side effect of its leaders having to fool its populace I think.

You think the Habsburgs were a hegemonic power? A power, yes. Hegemonic (beyond their own piecemeal realm) -- no.

Rome certainly was and during the time from Trajan (some may say Nerva) to Aurelius was considered to be the high point of governance. Call it 80 years. But the Roman legions were exceptionally active during that period. Both in the East (Trajan) and North (Aurelius [of Gladiator fame]). And Rome acted for the exclusive benefit of Rome. Always.

So far as the US thinking itself as the world's liberator, having beaten both the Axis powers and USSR and not created an *overt* empire (I actually agree a US empire exists in principle) in response, I think the US has at least *some* claim to it. Certainly not all, and not as much as many think. But certainly enough for a decent slice of the pie.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

You think the Habsburgs were a hegemonic power? A power, yes. Hegemonic (beyond their own piecemeal realm) -- no.

Rome certainly was and during the time from Trajan (some may say Nerva) to Aurelius was considered to be the high point of governance. Call it 80 years. But the Roman legions were exceptionally active during that period. Both in the East (Trajan) and North (Aurelius [of Gladiator fame]). And Rome acted for the exclusive benefit of Rome. Always.

So far as the US thinking itself as the world's liberator, having beaten both the Axis powers and USSR and not created an *overt* empire (I actually agree a US empire exists in principle) in response, I think the US has at least *some* claim to it. Certainly not all, and not as much as many think. But certainly enough for a decent slice of the pie.

I can agree that in our form of government that the US was able to stop the overt empire. However some of the things done to the native Indian tribes , not to mention slavery were pretty brutal. In the 20th century the likes of United Fruit company could happen beneath the radar. The American public means well and that is the only real difference, but they are easy to avoid and easy to manipulate in certain circumstance like Iraq for example.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

I don't think the US acted any better. The Habsburgs were not exactly blood thirsty for example. Rome was actually pretty tolerant . The one difference that I see is that the US thinks its the world's liberator. In that respect the US is one of the worst in living up to what it thinks of itself. Its a side effect of its leaders having to fool its populace I think.

In this particular case, I have to agree. The tragedy is, if the US had been able to act to it's public image, (instead of continuing to promote an empire by underhand means using the likes of the CIA), then the planet would be in a much more prosperous and peaceful place today.

[jpatter666]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

In this particular case, I have to agree. The tragedy is, if the US had been able to act to it's public image, (instead of continuing to promote an empire by underhand means using the likes of the CIA), then the planet would be in a much more prosperous and peaceful place today.

Well I'll certainly agree the the US population has a unique capability for self-delusion. The number of people I've met who think the US has the best infrastructure, medical care, etc, etc in the world. The vast majority have never been outside the US (maybe Canada or those tourist colonies in Mexico/Caribbean). Those who have traveled extensively for work or gone outside the little tour group expeditions have vastly different opinions. Partially this is because the US is so large you could go do a different location every year of your entire life and still have plenty to see. Also because American vacation time is short and to go outside the US (excepting Canada/Mexico) requires long expensive flights and significant time changes.

I'm certainly not going to even attempt to make excuses for US treatment of Indians, slavery or behavior in the Americas. The original question was whether a truly hegemonic power had acted better. I wonder if and when China becomes a hegemon whether people might look back on the US-centric period as "the good old days" -- or no.

[GRG55]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

...The original question was whether a truly hegemonic power had acted better. I wonder if and when China becomes a hegemon whether people might look back on the US-centric period as "the good old days" -- or no.

If China becomes a hegemon will we all have to wear these by government edict?

[jpatter666]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

Naaaah. More like

[GRG55]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

Well, I suppose that's one way to make sure they don't "all look the same"...

[Chris Coles]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

Well I'll certainly agree the the US population has a unique capability for self-delusion. The number of people I've met who think the US has the best infrastructure, medical care, etc, etc in the world. The vast majority have never been outside the US (maybe Canada or those tourist colonies in Mexico/Caribbean). Those who have traveled extensively for work or gone outside the little tour group expeditions have vastly different opinions. Partially this is because the US is so large you could go do a different location every year of your entire life and still have plenty to see. Also because American vacation time is short and to go outside the US (excepting Canada/Mexico) requires long expensive flights and significant time changes.

I'm certainly not going to even attempt to make excuses for US treatment of Indians, slavery or behavior in the Americas. The original question was whether a truly hegemonic power had acted better. I wonder if and when China becomes a hegemon whether people might look back on the US-centric period as "the good old days" -- or no.

Surely the answer is to look at China in Africa. No, they are not treating people very well in some cases; but they are doing it entirely through doing business and buying land rather than using the continent as another place to do war.

[jpatter666]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

Surely the answer is to look at China in Africa. No, they are not treating people very well in some cases; but they are doing it entirely through doing business and buying land rather than using the continent as another place to do war.

Really?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...-over-zimbabwe

[Chris Coles]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

Really?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...-over-zimbabwe

Well spotted, but one airfield in Zimbabwe does not a war make; surely?

[jpatter666]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

Well spotted, but one airfield in Zimbabwe does not a war make; surely?

No, but as EJ states for other subjects, it's not an event, it's a process. And "war" these days is such a fluid term -- as the US avidly demonstrates.

But that airbase is there for a reason and it's not to fly in humanitarian aid.

[don]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Hudson: Go West, Young Man!

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Vladimir Putin, the Russian President and autocrat, had a plan for the winter of 2014: to reassert his country’s power a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He thought that he would achieve this by building an Olympic wonderland on the Black Sea for fifty-one billion dollars and putting on a dazzling television show. It turns out that he will finish the season in a more ruthless fashion, by invading a peninsula on the Black Sea and putting on quite a different show—a demonstration war that could splinter a sovereign country and turn very bloody, very quickly.

Sergei Parkhomenko, a journalist and pro-democracy activist who was recently detained by the police in Moscow, described the scenario taking shape as “Afghanistan 2.” He recalled, for Slon.ru, an independent Russian news site, how the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, under the pretext of helping a “fraternal” ally in Kabul; to Parkhomenko, Putin’s decision to couch his military action as the “protection” of Russians living in Crimea is an equally transparent pretext. The same goes for the decorous way in which Putin, on Saturday, “requested” the Russian legislature’s authorization for the use of Russian troops in Ukraine until “the socio-political situation is normalized.” The legislature, which has all the independence of an organ grinder’s monkey, voted its unanimous assent.

Other critics of Putin’s military maneuvers in Ukraine used different, but no less ominous, historical analogies. Some compared the arrival of Russian troops in Simferopol to the way that the Kremlin, in 2008, took advantage of Georgia’s reckless bid to retake South Ossetia and then muscled its tiny neighbor, eventually waging a war that ended with Russia taking control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

In a recent Letter from Sochi, I tried to describe Putin’s motivations: his resentment of Western triumphalism and American power, after 1991; his paranoia that Washington is somehow behind every event in the world that he finds threatening, including the recent events in Kiev; his confidence that the U.S. and Europe are nonetheless weak, unlikely to respond to his swagger because they need his help in Syria and Iran; his increasingly vivid nationalist-conservative ideology, which relies, not least, on the elevation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been so brutally suppressed during most of the Soviet period, as a quasi-state religion supplying the government with its moral force.

Obama and Putin spoke on the phone today for an hour and a half. The White House and Kremlin accounts of the call add up to what was clearly the equivalent of an angry standoff: lectures, counter-lectures, intimations of threats, intimations of counter-threats. But the leverage, for now, is all with Moscow.

The legislators in the Russian parliament today parroted those features of modern Putinism. In order to justify the invasion of the Crimean peninsula, they repeatedly cited the threat of Ukrainian “fascists” in Kiev helping Russia’s enemies. They repeatedly echoed the need to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a theme consonant with the Kremlin’s rhetoric about Russians everywhere, including the Baltic States. But there was, of course, not one word about the sovereignty of Ukraine, which has been independent since the fall of the Soviet Union, in December, 1991.

If this is the logic of the Russian invasion, the military incursion is unlikely to stop in Crimea: nearly all of eastern Ukraine is Russian-speaking. Russia defines its interests far beyond its Black Sea fleet and the Crimean peninsula.

Marina Korolyova, the deputy editor of the liberal radio station Echo of Moscow, told Slon.ru, “I am the daughter of a military officer who went in with the troops that invaded Czechoslovakia, in 1968. Today’s decision of the President and the Federation Council—I feel the pain personally. It is shameful. Shameful.”

It is worth noting that, in Moscow, the modern dissident movement was born in 1968, when four brave protesters went to Red Square and unfurled a banner denouncing the invasion of Prague. Those demonstrators are the heroes of, among other young Russians, the members of the punk band Pussy Riot. This is something that Putin also grasps very well. At the same time that he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet, his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic mercy has come to an end.

It’s also worth noting that, in 1968, Moscow was reacting to the “threat” of the Prague Spring and to ideological liberalization in Eastern Europe; in 1979, the Kremlin leadership was reacting to the upheavals in Kabul. The rationale now is far flimsier, even in Moscow’s own terms. The people of the Crimean peninsula were hardly under threat by “fascist gangs” from Kiev. In the east, cities like Donetsk and Kharkov had also been quiet, though that may already be changing. That’s the advantage of Putin’s state-controlled television and his pocket legislature; you can create any reality and pass any edict.

I spoke with Georgy Kasianov, the head of the Academy of Science’s department of contemporary Ukrainian history and politics, in Kiev. “It’s a war,” he said. “The Russian troops are quite openly out on the streets [in Crimea], capturing public buildings and military outposts. And it’s likely all a part of a larger plan for other places: Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson. And they’ll use the same technique. Some Russian-speaking citizens will appear, put up a Russian flag, and make appeals that they want help and referendums, and so on.” This is already happening in Donetsk and Kharkov.

“They are doing this like it is a commonplace,” Kasianov went on. “I can’t speak for four million people, but clearly everyone in Kiev is against this. But the Ukrainian leadership is absolutely helpless. The Army is not ready for this. And, after the violence in Kiev, the special forces are disoriented.”

Just a few days ago, this horrendous scenario of invasion and war, no matter how limited, seemed the farthest thing from nearly everyone’s mind in either Ukraine or Russia, much less the West. As it happens so often in these situations—from Tahrir Square to Taksim Square to Maidan Square—people were taken up with the thrill of uprising. After Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, the coverage moved to what one might call the “golden toilet” stage of things, that moment when the freedom-hungry crowds discover the fallen leader’s arrangements and bountiful holdings—the golden bathroom fixtures; the paintings and the tapestries; the secret mistress; the lurid bedrooms and freezers stocked with sweetmeats; the surveillance videos and secret transcripts; the global real-estate holdings; the foreign bank accounts; the fleets of cars, yachts, and airplanes; the bad taste, the unknown cruelties.

The English-language Kyiv Post published a classic in the genre when it reported how journalists arriving at the “inner sanctum” of the mansion where Yanukovych had lived in splendor discovered that he had been cohabiting not with his wife of four decades but, rather, with—and try not to faint—a younger woman. It “appears” that Yanukovych had been living there with a spa owner named Lyubov (which means “love”) Polezhay. “The woman evidently loves dogs and owns a white Pomeranian spitz that was seen in the surveillance camera’s footage of Yanukovych leaving” the mansion.

But that was trivia. Masha Lipman, my colleague in Moscow, sketched out in stark and prescient terms some of the challenges facing Ukraine, ranging from the divisions within the country to the prospect of what Putin might do rather than “lose” Ukraine.

Putin’s reaction exceeded our worst expectations. These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own people. He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don, in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004, failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy, while another country has troops on its territory?

Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian politician who no longer holds office, said that the events were not only dangerous for Ukraine but ominous for Russia and the man behind them. “It’s quite likely that this will be fatal for the regime and catastrophic for Russia,” he told Slon.ru. “It just looks as if they have taken leave of their senses.”