Category Archives: Europe

Provenance Of Anti-Semitic Leaflets Still Unknown

Despite what neoconservatives stateside are asserting, according to IsraeNet, “It is unclear who is responsible for [a] leaflet,” distributed in Donetsk, Ukraine, “calling for all Jews over 16 years old to register as Jews.” Naturally, neocons are blaming the Russians. Via IsraeNet:

The leaflet demanded the city’s Jews supply a detailed list of all the property they own, or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportion [sic] and see their assets confiscated. …
… The leaflet detailed what type of documents the Jewish citizens would need to supply: “ID and passport are required to register your Jewish religion, religious documents of family members, as well as documents establishing the rights to all real estate property that belongs to you, including vehicles.”
If the message was not made clear enough, the leaflet further stipulated the consequences that would come to those who failed to abide by the new demands: “Evasion of registration will result in citizenship revoke and you will be forced outside the country with a confiscation of property.”
To add insult to injury, the leaflet demanded the Jews pay a registration fee of $50.

Reports the New York Times:

The leaflets were supposedly signed by Denis Pushilin, the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the newly declared and unrecognized state that claims to represent ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. But that group and other pro-Russian groups quickly denied they had anything to do with them.
“This has nothing to do with us; it is a provocation,” said Alexander Maltsev, a spokesman for the People’s Republic, in a telephone interview. He said he did not know who was responsible, or their motives.
The city, the center of a coal-mining region in Ukraine, has since Saturday fallen largely under the control of pro-Russian militants who have justified their uprising as a response to what they call the fascism and anti-Semitism of the new central government in Kiev. So it was a surprise that the fliers, addressed to the “Jews of Donetsk,” claimed to have come from the headquarters of the Donetsk Republic.

Developing.

UPDATE II: If We’re So Free, Where’s America’s Referenda? (And If We’re So Free, Where’s Our Right To Secede?)

Conflict, Democracy, Elections, Europe, Foreign Policy, Media, Russia, States' Rights

The pack animals of the American media and political establishment seldom fail to shed darkness on whatever topic they tackle. In that venerated tradition, the aforementioned will never stop to ask this: If we Americans are the freest people in the world, why are we not granted a right to a referendum on, say, that “little” legislative blip called Obamacare?

Yeah, I didn’t think the lap dogs and the sheeple cared to pose the question or confront the answer, against the backdrop of the Crimean referendum.

As Crimea exit polls stand, reports BBC News, “about 93 percent back Russia union.”

The quagmires in Ukraine and Crimea are no exception to the darkness-shedding rule. As observed in “Presstitute-Cultivated Ignorance On Ukraine,” “The struggle for Ukraine is a chapter in a series of US orchestrated provocations, which began with the expansion of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) eastward to abut Russia’s borders—an expansion pursued by Clinton, Bush and Obama alike. It gathered momentum with the US-backed attempts to incorporate Georgia and the Ukraine into the North Atlantic alliance.

The next stage in goading the Russian Bear consisted in American-funded NGO political-action groups—many of them backed by George Soros—flooding Russia proper. (“Purple” in Iraq, Blue in Kuwait, Cotton in Uzbekistan, Grape in Moldova, “Orange” in the Ukraine, “Rose” in Georgia, “Tulip” in Kyrgizstan, “Cedar” in Lebanon, Jasmine in Tunisia, Green in Iran, still un-christened in Russia and Syria: Dig around and you’ll find American activists à la Alinsky behind these “color-coded,” plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by Foggy Bottom.) “A US-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia” completed the provocation.

Reporting from Yalta, Serge Trifkovic, whose commentary is often featured on Barely A Blog, was asked by NBC News to comment about the referendum underway in Crimea. He sent this along:

Serge Trifkovic, an American foreign affairs analyst of Serbian origin, criticized the United States’ involvement in the upcoming referendum.

“Nobody asked the people of Crimea if they wanted to be transferred from the Russian Federation within the USSR to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,” Trifkovi? said.

He added that it’s “richly ironic” U.S. leaders appear to be upholding the Soviet Communist Party’s legacy by insisting Crimea must remain part of Ukraine, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is “upholding the right of people to self-determination and liberty.”

Another BAB contributor, our friend foreign affairs analyst Nebojsa Malic, attempted to counter the prevailing propaganda in an interview with RT:

RT: They said Russia is violating Ukraine’s sovereignty. But what about the EU and the US politicians propping up the Maidan opposition before it came to power?

NM: I would say that a far greater violation of sovereignty is actually staging a coup and replacing an elected government of a country with unelected stooges, like the United States has specifically done with the Maidan opposition. There was the intercepted phone call, which we all heard, who the United States government was plotting to install in power. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. That is a violation of sovereignty. Before that is resolved, nobody should really speak about any sort of other violations, real or imagined.

RT: The UK says the new government in Kiev is legit, while Yanukovich didn’t honor the February 21 agreement with the then-opposition and fled. Do they have a point?

NM: Who decides the legitimacy of these things? Normally it would be the Ukrainian people. The last time they were polled, they elected Viktor Yanukovich as their president. The crowd in Maidan didn’t have any sort of democratic legitimacy. What they did have is that they had weapons. And they had money from the West, and the diplomatic support of Western governments. And using those levers, they actually took over power by force on February 22. The agreement that was purportedly achieved between European ministers and President Yanukovich was violated by the Maidan protesters who resorted to violence and forced the issue. So honestly, for the Western governments propping up these rebels, to declare them legitimate is obviously expected. But they don’t get to decide the legitimacy of these things.

RT: We’ve seen how many people in Crimea aren’t happy with the Kiev leaders. Why is the will of the people not taken into account by Western nations then?

NM: Western governments generally don’t take will of the people into consideration at all, anywhere ever. The only will that matters to them is their own. So if they want to achieve something, if they want to carve up Yugoslavia or Serbia or Russia or Ukraine or anywhere else, they just find stooges that they can manipulate, install them in power, and then claim that the stooges’ decisions are legitimate because they represent a will of some phantom people or other. And that’s usually how they’ve been doing business for the past two decades. Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to stand up to them and say, “No, you can’t do this. This is against your own rules, this is against everybody rules. Stop.”

MORE of Mr. Malic.

Kosovo, South Sudan, The Falklands, Scotland and Catalonia represent “5 referendums that the West has not taken issue with.”

RT elaborates on on this bit of western hypocrisy.

“Let’s fret about our own tyrants” was and is my advice:

“It is possible that the vote in [fill the blank] is the product of widespread fraud. Real or not, this is none of the United States’ business. This county has been pulverized economically and constitutionally. American livelihoods and liberties have been put into peril. In case the advocates of muscular responses have failed to notice, we’re pinned down like butterflies by our own tyrants.”

UPDATE I: And If We’re So Free, Where’s Our Right To Secede? Just you watch the philosophical fascists that follow Lincoln’s example, as they proceed militarily against fellow Americans should these Americans attempt to peacefully secede. All in the name of … American freedoms, of course.

Jealous: “Crimea voters overwhelmingly approve referendum to secede from Ukraine.”

UPDATE II (3/18): “Crimea secedes. So what?” by Ron Paul:

… What’s the big deal? Opponents of the Crimea vote like to point to the illegality of the referendum. But self-determination is a centerpiece of international law. Article I of the United Nations Charter points out clearly that the purpose of the U.N. is to “develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.”

Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?

Critics point to the Russian “occupation” of Crimea as evidence that no fair vote could have taken place. Where were these people when an election held in an Iraq occupied by U.S. troops was called a “triumph of democracy”? …

MORE.

Blood Brothers, The Ukraine And ‘The Enduring Schism’

English, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Russia

Blood brother is a perfectly good, if colorful, phrase to denote fealty between like-minded men. Yet in the land of the terminally stupid, linguistic flourish can become a liability; the use of a phrase “proof” of a Nazi mindset, whatever that means.

Hush. Don’t tell our deracinated neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, stateside, but “blood brother,” a perfectly proper appellation deployed by Ted Nugent to describe his affinity for “Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful Greg Abbott,” works as well to explain many a conflict in Europe (and the US).

What I take away from Nebojsa Malic’s fascinating historic insight into the complex dynamics that undergird “present-day trouble in Ukraine” is that it stands in stark contrast to the simplistic paradigm with which Anglo-American neoconservatives rape the same reality.

Malic, who is now at the The Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies, Writes:

… can be traced back not to the Mongol invasion that destroyed the first Russian state, but to the 1595 Union of Brest – when, under tremendous pressure of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, some of the Orthodox clergy decided to submit to Rome. These “Uniates” have been the driving force behind the creation of a separate, anti-Russian, “Ukrainian” identity at almost every point in history since. They allied with Poland during the civil war that brought the Bolsheviks to power and reorganized the tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union; likewise, they allied with Hitler in 1941, and were sheltered by the British after 1945 as “good Catholics and fervent anti-Communists” (see here). Since Ukraine became an independent state in 1991 (following Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of the USSR), they’ve sought to dominate its politics, which culminated recently with the “Maidan” coup. …

… While other factors – such as Islam, or geopolitics – have certainly played a role, the millennium-long history of Catholic hostility towards the Orthodox is the key to understanding the conflicts in Europe’s East. Not surprisingly, it is also the explanation least mentioned and examined. It doesn’t take a genius to see why.

MORE.

UPDATED: Lone Voice Of Reason On Ukraine (One More: Srdja Trifkovic)

Democracy, EU, Europe, Foreign Policy, Russia

The only impartial, scholarly analysis of the events in the Ukraine and their broader geopolitical implications is coming from historian of Russia, Professor Stephen Cohen. More about the conflagration in Ukraine in tonight’s WND column. For now, here’s Cohen in an interview on Democracy Now!

The last three days have been the bloodiest in Ukraine’s twenty-two-year post-Soviet history. In an interview with Democracy Now!, Nation contributing editor Stephen Cohen railed against the tepid response of western leaders to this eruption of violence. Warning that the chaos in Ukraine could spark a civil war—or even “a new Cold War divide”—he chastised the US and Germany for placing responsibility for solving this political crisis squarely in the hands of the Ukranian government. According to Cohen, President Obama and Chancellor Merkel’s implicit support for the anti-government protestors helps to “rationalize what the killers in the streets are doing. It gives them western license.”

UPDATE: Srdja Trifkovic on RT: “Ukrainian Protests Degenerate from Hooliganism to Terrorism”:

RT: In Ukraine there have been accusations of the use of live ammunition by both sides in the conflict. Protesters are well armed but it is unclear just where they’ve sourced their firearms from. They were also using grenades, fireworks and Molotov cocktails against law enforcers. Others threw rocks, wielded baseball bats and metal rods. Attempts were also made to ram trucks through police cordons. Let’s now get some analysis from Srdja Trifkovic, foreign-affairs editor for the Chronicles magazine. Mr. Trifkovic, we understand that the EU is talking about imposing sanctions on the authorities, or on those who are responsible for violence in Ukraine. Can we expect them to be fair? Can we expect them to single out who is behind the violence?

TRIFKOVIC: Absolutely not. We have witnessed brazen hypocrisy from the European Union ever since the beginning of this crisis. Let us just remember the list of various EU functionaries and ministers from its member-countries, such as Poland, Germany and Lithuania, who went to Ukraine in December to harangue the demonstrators in Kiev. What we are looking at, objectively, is that from the phase of demonstrations, early on, the protests had degenerated into hooliganism in mid-December, and into terrorism since January 19. Any talk of sanctions against Yanukovych or his ministers overlooks the fact that a major responsibility for the behavior of—and we can no longer use the term “demonstrators,” I would rather use the term “rebels,” because we are looking at a de facto armed rebellion—lies with Ukraine’s opposition politicians, and first and foremost with the neo-Nazi party Svoboda which has been recruiting young men of a thuggish disposition in Lvov, Ivano-Frankovsk and other places. It has effectively provided logistic support to the rebels in the Maidan Square.

RT: There’s no doubt that the EU is concerned about the events in Ukraine, because all this violence and bloodshed is happening in its backyard. Europe should react somehow, don’t you think?

TRIFKOVIC: Yes, and an even-handed reaction would have entailed not only pressure on Ukraine’s authorities, but also pressure on its opposition figures to call on the demonstrators to cease and desist—and that we haven’t witnessed so far. Quite the contrary, the pressure that Yanukovych finds himself under is due to all the concessions that he made in the last days of January—with Prime Minister Azarov’s resignation, with the withdrawal of the restrictive law on public assembly, and with the offer of amnesty. If you make unreciprocated gestures of a conciliatory nature, unfortunately it tends to be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Ukraine has crossed the threshold of toleration. For Yanukovych to continue to listen to the clarion calls from the West—and he has been called by Biden and by Kerry, and asked for restraint—would be self-defeating. All of these people are up to no good. They want regime change, they are interested in the geopolitical control over the key country in central-eastern Europe that links Russia with Europe’s heartland. They will not stop—as we know from Victoria Nuland’s talks with her ambassador in Kiev—by means foul and fair until that goal is achieved. Yanukovych should finally realize that dealing with the demonstrators and dealing with their political representatives is simply futile. The time has come to establish law and order and to calmly tell the West that they should start minding their own business. They have contributed to this crisis, they have aided and abetted—both propagandistically and logistically—the rebellion, which is the true stage we have, and they should now make amends for that.

RT: Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor for the Chronicles magazine, thank you very much for your time and for sharing your views with us.