Category Archives: Russia

Analyze This: On ‘The Factor,’ Psychologizing Passes As Analysis

Conservatism, Democrats, English, Foreign Policy, Reason, Republicans, Russia

Bill O’Reilly, star of Fox New, has this Pavlovian response to any suggested comparison between Russian and American military bellicosity: he foams at the mouth. Why is it absolutely verboten, on The Factor, to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on?

You’re in for a treat. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison—for decades the US has been far more aggressive than Russia in its foreign policy—don’t expect argument from Bill, Juan Williams and the gang. What you get is a form of ad hominem, or psychologizing.

President Vladimir Putin, said (today, Monday, March 3) Bill, is a thug. That’s why he can’t be compared to “a good country” like the US. (Childish doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.) Apparently Bush and Obama are never to be called thugs.

Why, Billy? Because they’re American?

The other “argument” for the lack of validity of said comparison was that Putin seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire (my usage; Bill and the gang did not use that word. Read about Bill’s valiant but botched attempts to promote English). Bill has read Putin’s mind, and knows he wants Russia to be an empire again. Hence we cannot compare the actions on the ground of the two countries.

If ever you doubted that liberals and conservatives are situated on the same foreign-policy continuum, listen to the prescriptions for Ukraine of leftist Juan Williams. On the same silly segment, the Fox News “analyst” recommended that the US freeze the assets of individual Russians, stateside and abroad, expel visiting Russians and stop Russians from traveling to the US, all in retaliation for the presence of Russian forces in Crimea (which is dominated by a Russian-speaking population). Williams, naturally, also wants to see economic sanctions placed on Russia.

Williams is an “analyst” in the same way Bill O’Reilly is a thinker.

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.

Presstitute-Cultivated Ignorance On Ukraine

Democracy, EU, Foreign Policy, History, John McCain, Neoconservatism, Russia

“Presstitute-Cultivated Ignorance On Ukraine” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

When it comes to President Vladimir Putin, who enjoys an approval rate of 65 percent among Russians, the motto of the menagerie of morons that is the American media is ignorance über alles.

The energetic and reflexive demonization of a Russian leader—unparalleled during communism—against the backdrop of the Sochi Olympic Games and the conflagration in the Ukraine, is the handiwork of a conga-line of cretins, stateside, whose bombast comports with the boorishness of their pronouncements.

The “Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest,” one wag’s delicious description of broadcaster Bill O’Reilly, is not delimited by ideology. Instead, “wanton Putin bashing,” as scholar of Russian history Stephen Cohen attests, is the order of the day at the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, The New Republic; CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, on and on.

As to “traditional journalistic standards”: In the service of their anti-Putin monomania, the US Pussy Riot press and its approved phalanx of “experts” routinely omit “facts and context,” conflate “reporting with analysis,” and court conformity and unanimity at the cost of veracity and impartiality.

(Revered in the US, Pussy Riot is a punk rock Russian band of feminists, whose forté is breast-baring, defiling places of worship, punching the air while shrieking, “F-ck you Putin,” and participating in public-orgy protests and other criminal acts.)

The “Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest,” fortunately, is not a feature of the nuanced and informed analysis available on the John Batchelor Show, where the scholarly host and his guest, Professor Cohen, delve deeply into the region’s geopolitical dynamics.

Cohen, who tackled O’Reilly’s out-and-proud ignorance with aplomb, was slightly more flummoxed by that of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. …

Read on. The complete column is “Presstitute-Cultivated Ignorance On Ukraine.”

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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.