Ukraine, an impoverished people and a desired revolution that has been now completely co-opted by NATO, the Pentagon, the European Union, and the same old Ukrainian billionaire plutocrats that have always fed off their own people… Hear the Song of Revolution 2013 – Ukraine The song now grows very faint.
My Dear Friend, Bogdan, asked me to link people here in the US with some Cossack music, culture, and history. Here it goes then:
?? ? ???? ????? – Oi u poli verba – Ukrainian cossack song of 17th century. Kind of like when rodeo meets the sea…
Thousands of Cossacks fights for Dombass – The History of Russia is repeated. NATO and its puppets meet defeat in Donbas…
The Cossack Rebellion 1648. This history is all rather intricate and complicated. Does the US government really want to defeat Russia that bad that it will actually continue foolishly leaping into the fire of Eastern European rivalries?
We can keep arguing about who the Ukrainian opposition/protesters were, but the aftermath of the celebrated uprising has wrought this: the new leadership is being courted by the EU and the IMF so long as they agree to club requirements. Make austerity reforms, aka the privatization of public assets, and saddle their economy with debt to the World Bank. Meanwhile Russia is being warned to keep its military out. That should confirm who won in Ukraine.
Protesters are being killed in Kiev, and revolutionaries enthusiasts are buying into the Western Media narrative. Even Democracy Now is parroting the theme, describing the demonstrations as opposing their government’s rejecting closer ties to the European Union. “Closer ties?” Ukraine was rejecting growing indebtedness to EU banks, favoring a bailout from Putin instead. Let’s remember that Senator John McCain jetted to Kiev to rally the uprising, seeing it as part of the rolling “freedom movement” not coincidentally encircling Russia, the former Soviets now no longer foe to Capitalism but rival. Unfortunate developments have led to government snipers firing at the “rebels” many of whom are dupes but many too are supremacist fascists not particularly misguided about US-EU hegemony. Perhaps we can find consolation in the hope that Ukrainian snipers were able to hit the OTPOR and CIA provocateurs coordinating the urban warriors.
I support all popular uprisings, but unfortunately US covert ops have picked up on our game. The only way to insulate rebellions against Western provocateurs is to build movements around political ideology they will not embrace. For the onlooker, ideology is also the means to discern destabilitation projects parading as protest. If the offending government is anti-Western-Capitalism, our counterinsurgency ops are there. Of course Socialist, Islamic, or non-World Bank client regimes are not imune to being authoritarian, but hardly more so than the Capitalist empire. Often US adversaries are forced to authoritarian measures by US covert ops working to destabilize them.
What in the world is going on in Moldova, where the losers of the election just tore up some major government buildings? Might a small Trotskyist group, Popular Resistance offer some insight into the situation? They say that the ‘communist’ winners of the election are just another group of neo-liberals wanting to privatize the entire country on behalf of Western corporations.
And another commentary, this time from Moscow Times says that the riots in Moldova Underscores Failed Russian Policy as the US stages another Color Revolution.
This how the article begins…
Anti-government protests in Moldova this week unfolded in a similar manner to Western-backed uprisings that toppled governments in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Serbia in recent years.
But what should worry the Kremlin is not the threat of a similar uprising at home but the fact that both Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin and the opposition groups turned to the West instead of Russia to mediate the conflict, analysts said Wednesday.
Because of the shortsightedness of Russian diplomacy and its failure to project its own “soft” power, the Kremlin faces the possibility of being sidelined once again in a former Soviet state that it considers to be within its realm of influence…
Hijacked tanks ‘for South Sudan’ Who paid for these tanks? The US government?
South Sudan doesn’t have that much cash on hand at all. One should ask these questions especially with Barack Obama just having called in the debate tonight for US military intervention against the Sudanese government. Whoa there! Bush has got the Democrat beat on the punch and we can all rest assured in our nice little American homes that our government is going to once again initiate yet more genocide in Africa! …in the name of preventing it, no doubt. Poor Obama, he just can’t quite seem to outflank Bush’s and McCain’s militarism to the Right no matter how hard he tries. And he does try hard!
On the subject of spinning the debates…
Did you hear about Barack Obama’s horrible gaffe in the first debate?! According to public radio, Obama referred to “The Ukraine” instead of the less diminutive “Ukraine” sans-the. PRI’s The World trotted out tsk-tsks from a Ukrainian-accented expert who derided Obama for his un-PC insensitivity to her country’s post-Soviet independence.
Self-respecting nations don’t require “the” to distinguish them apparently. “The” is only for provinces or regions, the expert explained. The Balkins, the Riviera –I can’t remember her examples. Certainly you wouldn’t say The France, unless you were referring to the ocean liner. How undiplomatic for Obama to malign poor proud “Ukrayina.” The would-be statesman [in evident need of more experience] should come visit, suggested the expert. But the report revealed [Instead] Obama was campaigning in Ohio.
Shall we look into what the Ukrainian expert didn’t explain: why English speakers unconsciously need to add “the” before Ukraine? Is it simply because we used to, when Ukraine was a part of Russia, and then a member of the USSR. But we didn’t say the Georgia, or the Belorusse…
Unless we meant THE Republic of Belarus. But that rule applies to every formal title. Then also we say the United States, we say the UK, and we say the People’s Republic of China. We say the Netherlands, but not the Finland, nor the Afghanistan. We do not add THE to any of the -stan states, which was a Russian suffix meaning “land.” Perhaps as we don’t use THE for nations ending in -land either.
We say the Philippines. We say the the Maldives. There seems to be a pattern related to territories in the plural. So it’s nothing to do with client states but rather collected lands.
As usual, I’ve entertained myself before doing the research.
1. The Ukraine
Is the Ukraine (I can’t help but say it that way) a reference to plural regions? Or is there some other idiomatic pattern which governs usage for English-speakers? The answer turned out to be the former.
Apparentely, Ukrayina is named after the Old East Slavic for “border region.” The Territories of Ukraine were the old Russian empire’s western edge. Perhaps this suggests why Ukrainians want to be considered their own land, and not part of someone else’s.
There, the expert is right. A historically geographical name does not suggest a sovereign nation. The Transvaal, the Yukon, the Sahara, the Midlands on England’s border to Scotland. I think it’s interesting that no US state needs a “the,” compared to their previous incarnations as the Dakota Territories, the Louisiana Purchase, etc.
But to complicate the matter, in the Ukrainian language the word means “country.” Doesn’t it go against their own tongue to eliminate the definite article? To refer to either concept, country or border, requires “the.” At least I know it is so in English. Which is my point here.
Since their independence from the USSR the Ukraine has asserted an identity minus “the.” The distinction is for diplomatic papers. So I’m not sure that international conventions govern how foreign languages bend to suit another’s domestic decree. Germany for example is known by as many names as it has neighbors, and none of them is Deutschland.
How appropriate is it to try to mock Obama for speaking the King’s English, aka English?
Isn’t your interest piqued about other places to which a “the” wants to cling to an earlier vestige? The Ivory Coast would seem to have become an effortless Ivory Coast, maybe because the plurality of “coast” is ambiguous.
2. The Sudan
What about the Sudan versus Sudan? We know it through the English colonials as “the Sudan,” but now the post-colonial English-speaking diplomatic class asserts it’s just Sudan. I can’t help but wonder if there’s some Globalization edict for nation-state nomenclature compliance. Is it for the sake of easier alphabetization?
That reminds me of how China lined up the Olympic participants in the 2008 Opening Ceremonies. Nations were ranked based on how many strokes were required in their Chinese character. American commentators thought viewers would probably consider the order nonsensical. How much sense does it make to require state names to conform to an anglo-file system?
As an aside, is the French “Sud” for South, related to the Arabic “Sudan” for “Blacks?” Both that direction from the then-known world. Not so further aside, the French say “Le Sud” in the same way we use “the” to differentiate the destination from the direction.
In any event, in Arabic, the language of the population of Sudan, the country calls itself “al-Sudan.” Post-9/11 westerners know “al” translates to “the.” That would be Sudan with the “the.”
The US and Britain are pulling NATO in one direction and France and Germany seem increasingly rather reluctant to follow along. The US wants a NATO ready to start nuclear war with Russia and ready to dismember Pakistan’s national integrity, but the French and German governments don’t seem fully on board this imperialistic US game plan. They sit by silently in apparent disbelief, as the US also foments civil war in Ukraine.
As a result of this French and German discord with the US war drive, NATO has issued a comment or two that it will not participate in US destruction inside Pakistan. NATO says won’t take part in Pakistan raids And France and Germany have tried to bargain with Russia separate from the US about the Georgia/ US-Russian conflict, but without any real success.
Inside the US, we have seen no split in the unity of the ruling 2 parties in their apparently united desire to push conflict with Russia to the wire. We have seen not the faintest sign that there is any disagreement at all between the DP and RP over dragging Pakistan further into civil war pushed by outside forces, i.e. the US government. There has been no apparent Democratic Party response to Palin’s comments that she was ready to war with Russia. And the DP-voting bloggers have even gone along totally, too.
There is a clear US government drive to increase world conflict in order to establish yet more US hegemony across the planet. Americans as a whole seem utterly content with this at the moment, since they still see no price to pay that will involve themselves. Such a level of ignorance and stupidity is truly disheartening, and Americans will ultimately discover what a catastrophe they went along with as their leaders plotted and planned.
Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko is a US puppet who wants to push Ukraine into NATO, although less than 30% of the Ukraine public backs the idea. NATO head pledges to forge consensus on Ukraine NATO is an offensive war alliance, led by the US government, whose main current goal in the world is to dominate China and Russia. Why doesn’t the US ‘Peace’ community talk about NATO more and oppose the alliance for war?
The answer is simple. The Democratic Party is thoroughly supportive of NATO, and the leadership of all these liberal church fed ‘peace’ groups is thoroughly tied into Democratic Party dope pushing, so you won’t see them talk about NATO much at all, except perhaps to call on NATO to militarily intervene in Darfur and Kosovo, and even to occupy these areas. Absent is any call for NATO to get out of Afghanistan, too.
The so-called Ukraine ‘Orange Revolution’ is in fact a counter-revolutionary, counter democracy movement largely funded from Western Europe, the US, and Canada. It is an anti-Russian movement, despite the fact that many Russians live in Ukraine itself. We need to watch these scoundrels as they try to get the US to take over Ukraine militarily through NATO. We need to demand that NATO be eliminated, not spread further throughout the world.
The US Antiwar Movement must open its eyes and ears! The time to do so about NATO is upon us.