Ukraine as Quantum Decoherence, Part 1

Note: This feature essay was originally published on Saturday March 22, and was “sticky” for several days. Scroll down for more recent posts, including last night’s news feed, “Competing to Re-Islamize Turkey”, “A Million Dragon’s Teeth”, and the latest from Pat Condell.

At our request, Takuan Seiyo has undertaken an analysis of recent events in Ukraine. The following detailed account is the first part of a comprehensive two-part report on Ukrainian “democracy”.


Ukraine 2014


“Ukraine” 1750


“Ukraine” 1600

Ukraine as Quantum Decoherence
by Takuan Seiyo

Some basics

The maps above show present-day Ukraine on top, its terrain in 1750 in the middle, and in 1600 at the bottom. There would be no country called Ukraine — there had been several ukraines i.e. “borderlands” in Eastern Europe — until 1917 for Eastern Ukraine only, on and off as the Ukrainian People’s Republic. It’s a hint of how convoluted the history of the region is that just in 1918-1920, Kiev’s territory was under the governance of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, German-sponsored Cossack Hetmanate, again UPR, the Bolsheviks, the Russian anti-Bolshevik army of Gen. Anton Denykhin, again UPR, Poland, and finally, as of July 1920, the Bolsheviks who incorporated it formally as Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1922. Throughout these changes and particularly in 1919 there were recurring waves of pogroms that resulted in the murder of over 100,000 Jews. And ten years after Soviet Ukraine was born, the Soviets murdered at least 5 million Ukrainians in an engineered famine.

If the above slice of chaotic multi-pronged aggression weren’t enough, in 1918 Western Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic in a territory that had gone back to Poland after its century-long seizure by Austria. The Ukrainian campaign of terror against the Poles resulted in the crushing of the nascent entity by the Polish Army in 1919. Then the eastern Ukrainian People’s Republic was attacked by the Soviets, and its head — Ukraine’s one genuine great leader, Symon Petliura — sought relief in an alliance with Poland. The Soviets nonetheless crushed the Ukrainian state, continued in a bloody campaign into Polish Ukraine and on to Warsaw, and were defeated — but returned in 1939, to complete the job.

Rivers of blood have washed over Ukraine’s territory; had for 1000 years. Much of it was and is to this day one kind of Ukraine-dwelling Slav against another, and two great powers — Russia to the east, Germany to the west — that tussled repeatedly over land, resources and influence.

To greatly simplify, and omitting earlier history when Ukraine’s territory had been annexed by Lithuania and later amalgamated into Poland, it’s useful to perceive that as of the 17th century the territory on the right bank of the Dniepr river — see it bisecting Ukraine in the top map — has defined itself as the anti-Polish, Orthodox Ukraine, affiliated with Russia as of 1654 (Treaty of Pereyaslav) and with the Soviet Union as of 1920.

The territory on the left bank of the Dniepr, mostly Greek Catholic, had been for centuries and would remain Polish until 1939, with some of its eastern provinces eventually dominated by Russia. Kiev in the 1600 map is shown well inside Poland; in the 1750 map it sits on the Cossack/Russian side of the Polish border. But what is now Lviv (then Lwow), the capital of Western Ukraine — and of Ukrainian Nazism and pro-EU sentiment — was up to 1939 and had been for over 500 years Poland’s third most important city. It is 460 kilometers west of Kiev, and, if it were marked on the 1600 map, would show so far in the west of Poland that it would be in the upper left corner.

In 1939, Lviv’s population was 50.9% Polish Roman Catholic, 31.4% Jewish, 15.9% (mostly Greek-Catholic) Ukrainian, and the remaining 1.8% various minorities[1]. In 1939-41 the Soviets would greatly “reduce” — i.e. murder and exile to USSR’s far east — the top tier of the Polish population. In 1941-44 the Germans, with Ukrainian OUN/ UPA help, would further “reduce” the Polish population and wipe out the Jewish one so that from 169,900 Jews in 1939, 1,300 would remain by 1944. In 1945, the Soviets kicked out almost all the remaining Poles, and amalgamated this territory into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In the 1750 map, Ukrainian Cossacks (two dark-color zones) are shown holding the buffer zones east of Kiev into Russia. Their main political expressions, the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhnian Sich, would eventually be disbanded by Russia’s Catherine the Great in the 1760s-70s, but the Cossacks continued as Russia’s trusted military proxy, and are Russia-leaning to this day.

In the same period of Russia’s greatness, as a result of Russia’s victory over Turkey in the 5th [sic!] Russian-Turkish War, the two warring powers signed a treaty in 1774 that transferred what is now Southeastern Ukraine, with Odessa at its center, from Turkey to Russia, giving Russia for the first time access to the Black Sea. Turkey also ceded its protectorate of the Crimean Khanate and control of Crimean ports to Russia.

Even those pundits who cite tame excuses for Russia’s current pretenses to Crimea usually don’t mention that what the Russian Commies gifted to the Ukrainian Commies in 1954, Russia had formally incorporated into its territory already in 1783. Moreover, that act contributed greatly to throttling the Mussulmans’ pillaging and slave harvesting in what is now Ukraine (then Poland) that had led to multiple wars between Poland and the Tatar-Turk alliance for over two centuries, ending only in 1699. If it weren’t for the ultimate battlefield victories of Russia and Poland after centuries of bloody fighting, the entire Black Sea basin would still be red-orange, as it shows in the 1600 map.


“Allegory of Catherine’s Victory over the Turks,”
Stefano Torelli, 1772

And so we end up in 2014 with a Ukraine where originally anti-Polish and eventually pro-Nazi fascism rules in the west, Russophile Ukrainians, Cossacks and ethnic Russians concentrate in the east and in Crimea, and everyone has lost someone either to the Soviets or the Germans. Crimean Tatars — with a Waffen-SS heritage just as rich as Svoboda Party’s — feel affinity for the Svoboda government in Kiev rather than for their Russophile Crimean neighbors, and Germany and its NATO/US party pull on one side and Russia on the other.

The colors on the map below may as well symbolize the political sentiments, too.

The question is: Why we are dragged into such a morass by ignorant politicians and their pabulum spewing glad-handing MSM footmen. The pervasive willful ignorance of even the foregoing rough and sketchy background of Ukraine perverts the West’s perceptions and actions relative to that country, and the bias of Reality-averse messianic ideology — i.e. Democracy Inc. — spins the whole thing further out into orbits of cartoon craziness.

When the Reuters Progressive (they all are) writes the headline, “Russian forces storm Ukraine naval HQ in Crimea”, why does he omit that this is Sevastopol in Crimea that has just voted 97% for Russia, and Sevastopol was built by the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, and it has since been Russia’s only warm-water port, home to its all-important Black Sea fleet, and Russia had gone to war before over Sevastopol, in 1853-1856 against Turkey: a Muslim power then — and one must add, now — in an anti-Russia alliance with Great Britain and France.

That the Charge of the Light Brigade took place in that war should have taught the West that not all of its Russia-targeted moves are well thought-out. But like Talleyrand’s Bourbons, the postmodern socialists who run both Brussels and Washington have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

In the kingdom of the one-eyed

“A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism” — wrote Marx, famously, in the Manifesto. Yet, there is a worse specter haunting the entire West now: a monocular monster, a life-snuffing creature from Belzebub’s[2] fertile imagination: the one-eyed perception of man and society, distorting reality for the sake of ideology and conformity.

The Monocular Monster is omnivorous, distinguishing not between man and woman, young or old, poor or rich, Left or Right, American or Austrian. It has chewed up Western democracy itself, whose eyes are the major media, the one on the right firmly shut and taped. It has chewed up the West’s Right itself, which has its own variant of monocularism: the one that gives the electorate in the Anglophony a choice only of a Stupid Party as an increasingly hypothetical replacement for the rampant Evil Party.

The way the Ukraine question has been positioned in the media, in articles by metaphorically monocled Ivy League professors and, ultimately, in the public consciousness, is similarly distorted. Before I gave up in disgust, I had been following Ukraine-related news and commentary with the same resigned weariness that I follow every other part of the sociopolitical discourse in the United States and Europe. It’s mostly true what they say and write, and it’s all spectacularly false, for it accounts only for one fourth of the knowable Reality, maximum.

Moreover, all this noise now is no news at all but a belated disclosure of information that was available to the sane and sober a long time ago. Just as whatever Obama is doing in 2014 was totally foreseeable and could have been written as news-of-the-future in October 2007, the “news” of the making of a civil war in Ukraine and Russia’s involvement in it were a certainty in December 2013, and indeed had been predicted by a Czech commentator whom I quoted in my article that month. And Russia’s moves now could have been predicted easily 50, 100 or 200 years ago, for they follow a fixed geography and a fixed national interest.

The snatched-and-fully-delivered Western press just sprays jets of misinformation, always on a giant sardine run from the sharp-toothed dolphins of “racism,” sexism, and those awful homo and Islamo phobias and toward the safe haven where democracy, equality, tolerance, compassion, peace and justice shine. And, ah, it’s so clear to the captains of our leaking boat which side in the Ukrainian conflict holds all those twinkling jewels.

To take just one of those baubles under a professional magnifying glass: suppose that Ukraine joins the European Union; is EU a democracy? Does EU reflect, is it responsive to, the wishes and aspirations of its constituent peoples? Does it not engage, in an act of unparalleled authoritarianism, in forced re-engineering and in fact destruction of its constituent peoples, swamping them under an alien mass of foreign, inimical colonizers? Have all those millions of rules, regulations, codes and codicils spewing out of Brussels in a cosmic-size plume been put before the little people for approval?

But don’t look to CNN to explain that by moving from the repulsive Yanukovych to the strange new sexumvirate of Bandera fascists-Oligarchs-Soros-Banksters-US-EU the Ukraine is exchanging one form of corrupt autocracy for another. For one, you would hardly know, unless you read Slavic languages, that the opposition’s sainted Yulia Tymoshenko is a bona fide oligarch, one of Ukraine’s richest citizens, and directly involved in mega-corruption, connection to Ukraine’s super-mafioso Semyon Mogilevich, peripherally perhaps even murder.

If Yanukovych looks bad, and Tymoshenko not sufficiently better, since Ukraine gained independence a continuous string of its Prime Ministers has been involved in mega-theft, major looting and asset-stripping, conspiracy, murder, international arms trafficking, misuse of police and spy services for personal gain, tax evasion and more. Even a cursory glance reveals that Leonid Kuchma, Yukhym Zvyahilsky, Yevhen Marchuk, Paul Lazarenko, Valery Pustovoitenko, Mykola Azarov, Yuriy Yekhanurov and probably others are either fugitives from justice (as is Yanukovych) or in prison now, or have narrowly escaped the one or beaten the other. You wouldn’t know it from reading all that “Yanukovych bad” propaganda.

Here is the world’s most “conservative” MSM platform, the liberals’ bugaboo, Fox News, stating, “Putin plays Nazi card to marginalize Ukraine’s revolution”. Playing a card? Fox News touches gingerly on the “ugly complicity” of “some” Ukrainians’ with “German pogroms of Jews” — but that is lying by omission, distortion, diminution and willful ignorance. As I sketched much-too-briefly in the December 23, 2013 “Things Are Not What They Seem,” many thousands of Ukrainians participated in Ukrainian genocidal actions independent of those in which they collaborated with the Germans. And the victims, whose number was in six figures, included not only Jews but up to 200,000 Poles, plus Armenians, Russians, other minorities — and about 60,000 good Ukrainians too.

It’s all for “democracy,” see, and in the blinding light of democracy the leprous boils of the purported seekers of democracy become invisible. The Fox News story has other major gaps, starting with playing down Svoboda Party’s nature and current influence, but even that pales in comparison to the “Vivat Democracy!” stupid pap one reads as one moves upmarket in American punditry. Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale and specialist in Eastern Europe has an article about the Ukrainian Maidan in the March 20, 2014 of The New York Review of Books that curls one’s toes with disgust at the tendentious selectiveness of his analysis.

With respect to the Ukraine, as in all other foreign matters where America’s and Western Europe’s bien pensant ruling elites wade in with their attaché cases full of Progressive stupidity, metrosexual soft power and, incongruously, missionary neocon madness unencumbered by knowledge of the relative history, ethnography and the spirit of the place, the same short motto applies that I invoked in the earlier article: We have no clue.

Let’s wade in, in search of some.

Nazizoid Democracy

Ukraine’s new government that the Snatcher nitwits governing the West have pushed into place after destabilizing the old one includes Andriy Parubiy, founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine — Nazi, to cut to the core of the matter. Parubiy is Secretary the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council, i.e. all spook and internal repression services too. His deputy is Dmytro Yarosh, identified in the international press as commander of the Maidan rioters and leader of the Right Sector. What Western hacks fail to dig out is that “Right Sector” is another name of a Nazi[3] organization Yarosh founded, named S. Bandera Tryzub, now subsumed in that sector.

S. Bandera is a name readers of my December 2013 venture onto the Ukraine’s steppes will recognize. Tryzub means trident: symbol of Ukraine. And the whole may be neatly wrapped in a scarf offered on eBay as “Ukraine Scarf Stepan Bandera Tryzub Trident OUN.” Only $14.99 . Just remember what I wrote in this space about OUN — roughly equivalent to the Nazis’ NSDAP, down to SA-like paramilitaries, aggressive symbols, the colors red and black — Blut und Boden (blood and soil) — and eventually a full convergence in the death machine of the SS, the Nachtigall Battalion, Ukrainian police regiments and extermination camp executioners.


Stepan Bandera scarf

As to the mass-murderer and Nazi tool, Stepan Bandera, New Ukraine’s official hero far more than he was the Yanukovych regime’s, the motto he inspired in his followers was “Lachiw wyriżem, Żydiw wydusym, a Ukrajinu stworyty musym”: The Poles we shall slice through, the Jews we shall strangle out, but Ukraine we must create. Look for a Bandera International Airport and the Bandera Trans-Ukraine highway soon, built undoubtedly with money confiscated by the EU from the hapless European taxpayer. UPA mausoleums and cenotaphs for SS Division Galizien and OUN’s Nachtigall Battalion will probably be built with more discreetly sourced funding from Ukraine’s oligarchs.

Svoboda, which grew directly out of Andriy Parubiy’s Ukrainian Nazi party, is now the dominant party in Ukraine’s post-Maidan “democracy” and its government. Svoboda’s leader Oleh Tyahnybok, John Mc Cain’s cordial amigo and now People’s Deputy of the new Ukrainian government, is known for rallies in which Svoboda’s paternity is unmistakable:


Extended arms: Oleh Tyahnybok’s on the left,
John McCain’s on the right

The new Deputy Prime Minister, Oleksandr Sych, is Svoboda’s chief ideologue, focused on promoting Ukrainian nationalism in Bandera’s image. Ihor Tenyukh, a member of Svoboda and a former admiral, is the new Defense Minister. Svoboda’s Oleh Makhnitsky is prosecutor-general. Svoboda’s Ihor Shvaika is head of the critically important Ministry of Agriculture. Svoboda’s Andrij Mochnyk is Minister of Ecology. Svoboda’s Serhiy Kvit (by some accounts also a member of the now-camouflaged [and Nazi] Tryzub Bandery) is Minister of Education and Science.

As a fine topping on this, UNA-UNSO’s and Right Sector’s Dmytro Bulatov is Minister of Youth and Sports, and UNA-UNSO’s Tetyana Chernovol is now the chairwoman of the government’s anti-corruption committee. Alas, you won’t find much to bite on with respect to UNA-UNSO if you open Wikipedia or any other accessible Western source, nor will you find much more about these two individuals than praise for Chernovol’s investigating journalism and empathy for Bulatov due to his kidnapping and torture by unidentified goons from the opposite side. None of this, however, justifies Western media’s tendentious skipping around living, breathing Nazism.

While there is no space in this forum for a comprehensive picture of UNA-UNSO, let it suffice that UNA’s first chairman was Yuriy-Bohdan Shukevych, son of Roman. We visited with Roman Shukevych in the December article; for now let just a small part of his calling card be posted here via an article by Lund University history professor Per Anders Rudling: “Schooling in Murder: Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and Hauptmann Roman Shukhevych in Belarus 1942.”. Professor Rudling has also exposed to sunlight the roots and deeds of Svoboda Party, here.

All of these helmsmen of the “New, democratic Ukraine” angrily deny the Nazi paternity of their organizations, and deeds of their native idols that even the original German Nazis would have blanched at[4]. Among many other examples Prof. Rudling relays, with a photo, that on the site of Huta Pieniacka, where the Ukrainian Nazi fourth police regiment burnt a Polish village and slaughtered its residents on February 28, 1944, Svoboda has erected a large billboard denying the conclusions of both Polish and Ukrainian historical commissions.

Not two weeks have passed since the putsch in Kiev, and already Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Yuriy Serheyev, was whitewashing his nation’s Nazis in an international forum. Even more strangely, the only MSM news of this in English seems to have been in the Russian RT, and the only UN ambassador to condemn this vileness was Russia’s.[5]

The red and black banners that were thick in the Maidan in December, the yellow armbands with the Nazi “wolf’s hook,” the Bandera icons, the SS Galizien and Nachtigall Battalion and all other Nazi paraphernalia have been largely toned down by now, replaced by the yellow-and-blue and the trident. Much deep-pockets money has poured in to sustain the Maidan putsch, and some of it undoubtedly paid for the services of American or British PR-men to shape an image tailored to Progressive Western sensibilities. Even the smarmy Tony Blair is in this lucrative business now, managing the Western image of Kazakhstan’s ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Lest we forget the un-massaged Ukraine too quickly, here is a good reminder: a street demonstration probably in February 2014, after the Maidan discorporated:

See the screaming crowd with Stepan Bandera pictures and red-black Ukrainian Nazi flags; the Ukrainian trident embossed on European Union yellow stars-on-blue caps side by side with Ukrainians marching proudly in Waffen SS and OUN-B uniforms — in 2014!. See Oleh Tyahnybok grinning like a Cheshire Cat and hear him mocking the foreigners who disrespect Stepan Bandera. See people holding a street-wide banner with the likenesses of two Class-A WW2 Nazi criminals and one pre-war Nazizoid criminal: Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukevych, and Yevhen Konovalets[6].

Still, the sponsors of this Circus Maximus are the United States and the European Union, and the notions of what they consider kosher in the nascent New World Order are well known to the (mainly Lviv-based) Ukrainian Nazis. This gives rise to taqiah of the sort known to followers of Muhammad and designed to fool Western useful idiots.

Ukrainian Nazis now offer a friendly “all-Ukrainians brothers” logo, relays Ukraine-based blogger Graham Phillips in his “Insane Ukraine”:

But, Phillips relays, Eastern Ukraine does not quite see it the same way:

Nor should the United States and the European Union. Even ignoring their continued and very dangerous baiting of the Russian bear, their habitual meddlesome idiocy is creating another Bosnia-Kosovo here due to the usual kind of myopia that’s both ignorant and arrogant. It’s the myopia that fails to discern the fundamental differences between West Ukraine and East Ukraine, just as it had ignored that there are Sunni and Shia, that there were no good sides to take in Egypt, Libya and Syria, and that as between the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims one ought not to be so sure to pick out the Serbs for a knockout punch.

Indeed, the Nazis are by no means the sole or even the most powerful party in the alliance that carried out the Kiev putsch. This has been a curious hybrid, with major strings pulled from places as far away as Washington, New York, Brussels and Warsaw, and given that the use of agent provocateurs is a standard KGB technique, one could wager that Moscow too.

The strange paternity of Stasoleu Babafa

None of the foregoing is to belittle the Ukrainian people or to question their desperate disgust with the kleptocratic Ancien Regime, from which there was no escape in normal elections. The Maidan was an outlet not only for the Nazis but also for millions of ordinary Ukrainians who couldn’t take it anymore. One can only wish that peoples further West — much further — were so brave and hardy to protest their political, economic and demographic disfranchisement this way.

“People came to the Maidan, in November 2013,” writes Tatiana Zaharchenko in “Ukraine: Corruption Doesn’t Capture It”, “not only to protest their government’s last minute rejection of the free trade and association agreement with the European Union [snip], not only from outrage at riot police violence [snip]. They came to the streets and many have stayed there for 90 days to denounce the looting of their country that has been taking place in front of their eyes for years. They came to reclaim their own dignity, which they were stripped off by becoming part of an unprecedented historical experiment of dismantling state ownership and creating private fortunes behind closed doors overnight, by accepting and living by the rules they did not establish and therefore becoming part of the system they despised.”

That storming the Ukrainian Bastille under Nazi banners may prove counterproductive at the end is another matter, by no means unique. The Russians chafed under the tsar’s yoke when they supported the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, in effect exchanging a Romanov for Stalin. The Germans who put Adolf Hitler in power in 1933 saw in him a true savior of their nation, not the devil incarnate that he was. The Iranians greeted the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile as liberation from the Shah’s Savak goons and wept for joy; now they just weep. The millions of middle-of-the-road white Americans who voted for Obama in November 2007 chose not to listen to the little voices in their heads whispering of foreseeable consequences.

Nor is any of this to support Vladimir Putin and hypernationalist Russian machinations. Rather, it is to ask the West’s Body Snatcher ruling elite: when you read one of those “Python devours crocodile after a 5-hour battle” stories, why must you meddle in favor of the one or the other? It’s that meddling that has been cleverly exploited by the Russian python after the West’s mad bolstering of a series of nasty crocodiles to entrench Russia in Syria, Iran, and now Ukraine as well.

What’s written here is to highlight the Progressive stupidity of the ruling cliques of the United States and the EU, and their Davos buddy banksters, oligarchs and assorted gofers who are re-engineering the world heedless of the foreseeable consequences of their good and not-so-good intentions. To begin with, as Zaharchenko mentions concerning Ukraine, and I know from having watched the post-Commie economies of Russia, Poland, Slovakia etc: ignorant and arrogant Western “experts,” particularly American ones (e.g. Jeffrey Sachs) destroyed the economies of those countries before they could get started in the early 1990s, upon liberation from communism. They did so by pushing large-scale privatization in societies that had been socialist for decades and did not have the framework of laws, institutions and traditions common in the Protestant West. Ergo, the rise of the oligarchs whose main asset when they were poor and ready then was their greed, utter ruthlessness, and connections with or outright membership in the Communist nomenklatura.

Six eventual fathers had to impregnate Ukraine before she could conceive and bring to term the mythical post-Yanukovych creature, christened here Stasoleu Babafa after its begetters: State (U.S. Dept. of) — Soros — Oligarchs — EU — Banksters — Bandera Fascists. And the Nazis, though a major concern, would never have been able to succeed, were it not for the other indispensable DNA.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, new Ukraine’s Prime Minister, symbolizes this strange alliance. He is not from the odious Svoboda but from Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party, and a competent central banker-lawyer-technocrat, not a troglodyte rabble-rouser like the others. But here a different color light should come alive on the dashboard.

Ukraine is one of the poorest and least developed countries in Europe; it’s in dire need of very large loans. At the same time its huge agricultural and energy bounty is ripe for international market exploitation. Yatsenyuk is the ideal point man to deliver that rich prize into the hands of the international banksters, the IMF, America’s Fortune 500 and global democracy enforcers, the EU’s political commissars, and, combining them all, the New World Order.

Indeed the now-famous early February phone conversation between U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland and the American Ambassador to the Ukraine seem to offer a clue that “Yats” was hand-picked by Washington; The Economist’s March 6th “Embracing Yats” confirms that Brussels has blessed that choice.

Incidentally, there may be a reason why Yatsenyuk is acceptable to the OUN-UPA-Svoboda-Right Sector Nazizoids too. According to the usually reliable former Solidarity chaplain and chronicler of Ukrainian fascist atrocities, Fr. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, as president of the Open Ukraine Foundation Yatsenyuk implemented a program called “Common history — common future” in the course of which he was promoting UPA in Eastern Ukraine (as to what Eastern Ukraine thinks of UPA, see cartoon above). To make matters more confusing, “Open Ukraine Foundation” must either be a Soros spawn or is at least modeled on Soros’s Open Society activities.

More fingerprints: Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Oleksander Shlepak is a former deputy chairman of Privatbank. Privatbank was founded and is co-owned by Ukraine’s second- or third-richest man, Ihor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky, the new governor of the Dniepropetrovsk province, is important to the Svoboda/Right Sector regime because he is a high-profile Jew and can thus serve as a Hausjude (token Jew), paraded to massage Western sensibilities with respect to “intolerance” and antisemitism. Privatbank was involved in the laundering of Russian oligarchs’ money into Cyprus; there are allegations that it served as a conduit for American and other western funding of the Maidan putsch, but there is no convincing evidence of it that I know.

Now, as to the inseminators. The BaFa — Bandera Fascists — we’ve already dealt with. First among the rest is the Sta, i.e. United States as represented by its State Department. It’s not in vain that opponents of the post-putsch Ukraine call it the Nuland-Nazi Regime, and the putsch that led to it a US-EU-NATO sponsored Coup d’État. What manner of madness it is that compels the United States to charge like a bull elephant into a bone china museum in foreign conflicts is a subject for a separate treatment; indeed a roomful of thick tomes. The insight that’s relevant to my thesis is that in such meddlesome interventions the United States either has no national interest at stake or it does, and that interest would have been better served through finesse and abstinence.

John Laughland in his “The Technique of a Coup d’État” offers a good insight, based on events up to 2010:

“The United States considers as a matter of official policy that the promotion of democracy is an important element of its overall national security strategy. Large sections of the State Department, the CIA, para-governmental agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy, and government-funded NGOs like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which publishes several works on “democracy promotion.” All these operations have one thing in common: they involve the interference, sometimes violent, of Western powers, especially the US, in the political processes of other states, and that interference is very often used to promote the quintessential revolutionary goal, regime change.”

“Democracy” is not the only almost-involuntary psychotic twitch of the American governing elite. Among the others, a curious one is the mania of placing women in key foreign policy positions, where they have to go eyeball-to-eyeball with wily, ruthless, macho dictators of the patriarchal nations that are the chief foes and competitors of America. I, for one, would love to have been there as a fly on the wall for the male banter after the Nuland woman’s meeting with Tyahnybok & Co. or the Clinton woman’s meeting with Sergey Lavrov, or to hear Muslim potentates’ appreciation in places like Cairo, Riyadh, Damascus, Yemen or Pakistan after the likes of Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power have exited the palace.

And so it had to be Madam Clinton to wade into the Ukrainian conflict vicariously by likening Putin to Hitler, just a few short years after she had presented Putin’s foreign minister with a gift-wrapped red button that she thought spelled “Reset” in Russian, though it spelled “Peregruzka” — meaning “overcharged.” The latest form of resetting the U.S.-Russia relationship was even more incompetent than the first one had been.

Notwithstanding the Pavlovian salivation at the word “democracy,” why would the United States sponsor a Nazi-led coup d’état and a painful poke in the eye to Russia not in some inconsequential Haiti but in Ukraine — the Wild East of Europe with 8.5 million Russians, millions more Russophile Ukrainians, major strategic Russian assets on its soil for 250 years now, and a history of fealty to Russia since Bohdan Khmielnytski signed on the dotted line in 1654?


Riven since times immemorial

Moreover, a country where rivers of blood have been shed as recently as World War II between the Russians and Russo-Ukrainians of the Eastern part and the Nazizoid-Ukrainians of the Western part. A country which, if the putsch succeeded, would have been the thirteenth on the periphery of Russia added to NATO since 1999, delivering a humiliating slap to a bear that — flea-bitten though he may be — is still a proud, fierce grizzly.

Just how could have Russia possibly acted in response to such a provocation, per the thinking of the foggy bottoms of the U.S. State Department, but the way she has acted?

It was the right thing to do to help the Soviet Union’s former satellites; in fact it was a major blunder not to help Russia itself when the time was right, and Bush 41 in the patented Bushian manner did the wrong thing. But since the Georgia caper, it should have been clear that major diminishing returns are the case now. The more the West meddles now on Russia’s periphery, the more aggressive Russia grows — and that’s in an age of uniform Western weakness, foolishness and talking big while waving a small stick — all of which Russia knows too well.

For sure, at stake was Ukraine’s famous agricultural bounty, with its vast expanses of rich soil making it a natural breadbasket — formerly for the Soviet Union and, the hope was, now for the European Union. There is much gas and oil too, and Chevron Oil stood to lose a lot of money if the Yanukovych hoodlum broke its contract to extract up to 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year, plus much oil. The private zoo, fake pirate ship and 70-automobiles owner did plan to break that contract and sign one with Russia’s Gazprom instead. But all that pales in comparison to the unwarranted risks the West took with the Nazi-tainted Maidan, and therefore with Russia.

Other than the obligatory Holocaust memorials planted like statues of the awesome Doctor King willy nilly across the landscape, the horrors of Nazi Germany are increasingly soft-pedaled in the West. Not so in Russia that suffered blows from the Hitler Machine that are inconceivable to the Western mind and that answered them with heroism and sacrifice that are even more inconceivable. Russia would have to have a big problem with a Nazi-led putsch on its doorstep, with United States’ fingerprints all over it, including Victoria Nuland’s “The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles and values that are the cornerstones for
all free democracies
.” For Russia, this was no longer realpolitik-as-usual, protecting the Russian minority, trying to get back Crimea, but white hot fury and an ICBM rocket fired over Ukraine, just as a sampler.

Former insults and maladroit moves of the West have already led to Russia’s seeking naval bases and other military assets in eight countries on the periphery of Pax Americana, stationing NATO-targeted nuclear missiles in the formerly Polish city of Kaliningrad, Putin’s entente cordiale with China and other countries that dislike the democracy-mongering American Uncle, and Russia’s creation of a bloc devoted to eliminating the US dollar from international trade.

The more the US and EU bait the bear, the more the bear bites back. Was the OUN-UPA-Bandera Maidan the opportune moment in history for more bear baiting? Future hostilities on Ukraine’s soil are as good as guaranteed now, but there is more. Just as Ukrainian Nazis are revered in Ukraine, so are Estonian Nazis in Estonia and Latvian Nazis in Latvia. Both countries are former Soviet vassals and in both annual parades and ceremonies are held to commemorate native Waffen-SS battalions in service of the Nazi machine. Both also, like Ukraine, have significant Russian minorities, and like the post-putsch Ukraine discourage or prohibit the use of the Russian language.

Russia has now been emboldened to signal its grave concern (e.g. here) over these matters, and may at some opportune moment implement hostile activities against Estonia and Latvia as well. It remains an incalculable blunder in all three countries to imperil hard-won independence from the Soviet yoke by coddling Nazis.

“Ukraine: One ‘Regime Change’ Too Many?”, asked Ray McGovern on March 1, 2014. In his words, “It would have been a no-brainer that Russia would use military force, if necessary, to counter attempts to use economic enticement and subversive incitement to slide Ukraine into the orbit of the West and eventually NATO.”

McGovern mocks the nonsensical American bear-baiting with this understatement: “By now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is accustomed to Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, et al. telling the Kremlin where its interests lie, and I am sure he is appropriately grateful.” Just as “grateful,” I am sure, as Salafist potentates and Shiite mullahs are for America’s and Great Britain’s governing fools’ recurring explanations of what Islam is and isn’t, and how — it being the religion of peace — Muslim terrorism is actually “anti-Islamic” terrorism.

Significantly, with academic background in Russian studies and a 27-year tenure at the CIA — ten of which he spent as analyst of Russian foreign policy — Ray McGovern is now a member of VIPS: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Just because the United States has voluntarily ceded large swaths of its landmass to an estimated 25% of the population of Mexico and Latin America in the last 50 years alone (some data pro and con) not to speak of their rapidly-multiplying descendants; and has promoted countless individuals to positions of power and responsibility based on their skin pigmentation; and has redeployed its Affirmative Action-led NASA to space cooperation with Nigeria and Indonesia and to promoting Socialism, and has gifted the Panama Canal that it had built from scratch to — long story short — the Chinese; and has voluntarily built the starving Chinese waif into a giant, muscle-bound, menacing Frankenstein colossus; and has trained countless actual and potential Muslim terrorists in its colleges and flight schools and armed services, does it give it a right to emit a cloud of hostile words and actions against countries, including Russia, that define their national interest in, ahm, more traditional ways?

Indeed, sitting in the hoi polloi upper gallery of this Grand Guignol par-excellence, one howls with painful spasms of laughter listening to the likes of America’s Alinskyite saboteur Obama — far to the left of Putin and far worse for America than Putin is for Russia; or the gilded limousine liberal Jean Francois Kerry, or Hillary What-Difference-Does-It-Make Clinton, or the clueless Affirmative Action U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations lambast, insult, give ultimatums, threaten with empty gestures and amuse with New World Order confetti a super-Machiavellian, stone-eyed KGB colonel like Putin. Appropriately, as this is being written, when 97% of Crimea voted to be with Russia — and they would have even if there had been no Russian tanks at the border (and no Kiev-Ukrainian ones either) — the news says “Russia laughs at Obama ‘sanctions’: calls him ‘Prankster’” and the U.S. — and Germany too but more about that later — continue shaking in feverish indignation.

The KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn asserted in his book
The Perestroika Deception
that the Soviets designed Perestroika and Glasnost and even the collapse of the USSR as a subterfuge, to lull the West into laying down its defenses, opening itself to free commerce and movement of people to and from Russia, and so to build Russia with Western capital and Western technology while hobbling it with a large crowd of controlled useful idiots, immigrant-moles, technology-transferring Russian employees and all those other things that, like 9/11, are possible only in a Snatcher-run “open” society that’s never open enough to stop the various Sorosing and Obamaing operations performed upon it by Progressive loons.

I do not know whether Mr. Golitsyn’s premise is true, but looking at the history of the United States moves versus China and Mexico or its management of its incessant wars and tussles such as over Ukraine, I know that it might as well be.

The Russians, the Chinese, the Persians, the Talibs — they all chuckle and guffaw all day as they read nonstop about America’s voluntary self-termination that America is so crazed as to celebrate nonstop. They know how little it means what Obama says compared to the fact that America elected Obama — twice. Putin in particular and his KGB lieutenants know best of all, for when they read about female combat Marines, Wise Latina justices, and student government leaders at the University of Michigan who demand that engineering students first study the “all-important subjects of race and ethnicity” (Daily Caller’s words and photo) they can trace that all the way back to the Comintern and to Lenin’s “useful idiots,” and they know that the work that failed via the “class struggle” has now succeeded through the lab-incubated plagues of identity politics, diversitism, multiculti, global migra, white privilege, affirmative action, GLBT supremacy and the rest of that whole howling insanity, and they know too that no matter how many Machs America’s jets can do now, its airplane has already landed — and she doesn’t even know it.

All this is even more surreally true in Europe, whose preening “soft power” and solicited invasion by dar-al-Islam and Africa is more grotesque than any American self-takedown — but we’ll leave that for Part 2.

Notes:

1.   Source: Grzegorz Hryciuk, Polacy we Lwowie 1939-1944; Życie codzienne (“The Poles in Lwow; Everyday Life”), Książka i Wiedza, Warsaw, 2000.
 
2.   This is volitional misspelling, or rather a correction of the wrong consensus spelling, Beelzebub. To begin with, it should have been Baalzevuv, as anyone with a smidgen of knowledge of Semitic languages can tell; failing that, Belzebub is still preferable.
 
3.   I am not going to hem and haw with soft shoe like “neo”-Nazi, Nazi-tainted etc. These are people still in a blood oath with WWII Nazis. They are Nazis, even if they see themselves just as Ukrainian patriots. The Ukrainian writer/blogger George Eliason opens his long March 7 article about the West’s ignorant wading into a Ukrainian swamp with a comprehensive explanation why he too thinks the “Nazi” appellation is warranted.
 
4.   Interested readers with a taste for the morbid may avail themselves of a translation of a post in one of those Ukrainian UPA/OUN-genocide commemoration blogs I referred to in the previous article. The title is “362 Torture Methods Used by UPA on Poles” and all 362 are iterated.
 
5.   One might ask, where was the Polish ambassador? After all, the heart of Ukraine’s Nazism is in the formerly Polish city of Lwow (Lviv) — its uniquely graceful, for the Ukraine, private and institutional buildings of pre-war Polish provenance, its population 51% Polish and 31% Polish-Jewish, the one decimated and the other wiped out with the help of Ukrainian Nazis. But here lies a tale of the Polish ruling elite’s stupidity that’s even worse than that of the U.S. and Brussels. We may get to that in Part 2. Meanwhile, interested readers may click on one of the links provided in the Polish blog Adnovum that sought to prove, including in pictures, that Mr. Serheyev was lying and Poland’s political elite is borderline moron for encouraging the charade. Likewise, eyewitness victims are still alive, which makes the denialism of Nazizoid 2014 Ukraine particularly galling and the reticence of the West’s pols particularly reprehensible. Some accounts, of many:

6.   We dealt with Bandera and Shukevych in the December article, and one can read some mention of their crimes in the MSM, though Ukrainian “patriots” have wiped out such inconvenient facts from their collective consciousness and history books. But Konovalets is a blank page for Westerners, and his Wikipedia page is a whitewash just like other entries are that are related to Ukrainian fascist leaders.

Yevhen Konovalets was, among others, the commander of the terrorist UVO (Ukrainian Military Organization) that, throughout the 1920s, aimed to take back from Poland by terror and slaughter the Galicia territory that had been Polish or Lithuanian (except when grabbed temporarily by Austria) since the 14th century and never Ukrainian before, as indeed no such country or unified people had existed.

UVO was financed and controlled by the Abwehr, i.e. Germany’s military intelligence organization. As such, its major role was to conduct spying operations in Poland on behalf of the Germans, while undergoing Abwehr’s training in terrorism and sabotage. In 1932, Konovalets met with Adolf Hitler, and wrote about that meeting in the journal Na starożi under the title “Hitler and the Ukrainian Cause.” He appealed to Ukrainians to stand as one man with Hitler, for the sake of Ukraine’s independence. [This information is not in any accessible English language source. It is presented in the Polish Wikipedia and includes bibliographical sources.]

Konovalets had his hands soaked in blood just a little less than the other two “national heroes” did. The Ukrainian writer/blogger George Eliason relays that “Konovalets is best known for his crimes against humanity. During the war [more properly the 1920s] he attacked villages filled with women and children, and slaughtered them”; some hint of that may be found in the Wikipedia entry on UVO.

It is primarily Konovalets’s sabotage of the efforts around 1920 to create some form of a union between a sovereign Ukraine and sovereign Poland that would ultimately hurl western Ukrainians into the orbit of Hitler and eastern Ukrainians into the orbit of Stalin.

UVO having been repudiated by Ukraine’s leadership and hunted down by the Polish authorities, in 1929 Konovalets transformed it in Vienna into OUN — Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — and thus laid the framework for Ukrainian Nazism during World War 2. He can be credited also with the creation of American and Canadian patriotic organizations that since the 1920s remained in OUN’s corner, aided the escape of hunted OUN-B criminals to North America, lobbied for Ukraine while camouflaging Nazi connections, and generally unbalanced the two countries’ views concerning that part of the world. Considerable literature exists to support these allegations; for starters one may visit with Max Blumenthal here. Mr. Blumenthal is at the very other end of the political spectrum from this author, but when one is right, one is right, and sticking labels onto it does not help the cause of truth.

In the same vein, it’s worth mentioning that having carried out terrorist activities against the Soviets, too, in 1938 Konovalets was assassinated by the KGB. Our common hatred of the KGB notwithstanding, as regarding Konovalets an enemy of an enemy does not necessarily a friend make. Similarly, although Mr. Grover Norquist and I have a major common denominator in our hatred of confiscatory taxes, our relative positions on Islam and the presence of Muslims in the West make symbiosis impossible. It’ a major reason for the failure of the Eujropean and American Right, that it has not learned to make such fine distinctions.

Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan. For his previous essays, see the Takuan Seiyo Archives.

78 thoughts on “Ukraine as Quantum Decoherence, Part 1

  1. As someone who comes from Ukraine and still has connections to it and talks to the people there, I can testify that most of this article is [material whose value I disparage], except maybe for some dates from ancient history.

    I’m disappointed in Takuan. He calls the media coverage cartoonish while he himself paints a grotesquely cartoonish image with just too many factual errors in history, geography, ethnography, and culture. I could understand one or two errors, but this is just too rich. It would take me as much time to untangle it as it took him to write it, so I won’t bother.

    Let me just say that Russian-speaking Ukrainians still think of themselves as Ukrainians and don’t want Russia’s dictate. THe Western Ukraine is not fascist and neither was Bandera – in fact, he spent the entire war in a Nazi prison, while his followers fought against the Germans and were being slaughtered in Babiy Yar along with thousands of Jews. The diminished Jewish population during the war was the result of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust – the author conveniently forgets that little circumstance. And so on and so forth.

    If the Ukrainian revolution was led by the Nazis, why are so many Jews supporting it? Why did Jews fight and die in Maidan along with Ukrainians? Why did the Jewish groups in Kiev organize the treatment of wounded protesters in Israel?

    The answer is that the real fascism, Nazism, and anti-Semitism is threatening them from today’s Putin’s Russia, which is currently seething with jingoistic fever. The sophisticated KGB propaganda machine is running at full capacity, rehashing old lies about Ukraine, inventing new ones, and spreading them around the world, where they are being picked up by [derogatory phrase] like Takuan and presented as fact.

    For the record, I myself speak Russian, I like Russia, and have friends there too. The problem is not ethnic, no matter how Putin’s propaganda would like to make it one. The problem is Russia’s government with its chauvinistic, authoritarian, and plutocratic policies.

    Ukraine has suffered enough already; articles like these only add insult to injury.

    [Insulting personal comments redacted]

    • Thanks, I needed that. It’s very disappointing to see GoV, Takuan, and alas, Diana West join the loony right and the loony left on this question. Isolated autodidacts often get lost in their own paranoia and lose all common sense. Bye folks, you’ve lost me.

    • Insult is not argument.
      You would pay Jizyah for a supposedly “free” Ukraina?
      I want Russia to control the north shores of the Black Sea
      Only then can we have some kind of check against the re-making of the Muslim slave trade.
      I noted Circassia on that map.
      Many human beings traveled the Black Sea . . . to be bought and sold.
      No antislavery movement ever arose there. Christian control and Western reflection are the only things keeping the area free.

    • Oleg,

      No one needs to explain to me about Russia. I hail from a country that was under Russia’s yoke since Catherine the Great, under repeated attacks by the Soviets since 1919, and under the Soviets’ heavy thumb from 1944. As late as 2010, a Russian conspiracy wiped out the top of that country’s governing elite too. In addition, because my family lived in the same place where you did, one third of it had been wiped out by the Russians (Katyn, Kazakhstan etc.) in the infernal period 1939 -41.

      However, facts are stubborn and Reality is merciless to those who traduce or ignore her. Ukrainian Nazis remain Ukrainian Nazis no matter how non-Nazi Ukrainians feel about them. Russia’s right to Crimea is preponderant, no matter what Crimea’s post-1953 history has been. The heavy-handed baiting, insulting and challenging of the Russisan bear could have had only one entirely predictable response.

      Indeed, all that and the partial Nazification of the Maidan have given Putin an opening through which to launch further expansionary projects, in Ukraine and elsewhere (e.g. Estonia, Latvia). It’s because I am against Russia’s further aggression that the article was written, not because I am for it.

      BTW, the headlines today read:

      Ukraine fears Putin “ready to attack”

      Soldiers sing as troops storm Crimea base..

      Obama aide: ‘Possible’ Russia could enter Ukraine

      There was a different way to go both against Ukraine’s kleptocracy and Putins’ designs, and without the OUN-UPA Banderowtsiy the moral case against Russia would have been infinitely stronger.

      • Takuan Seiyo,

        I am Armenian and circulate among Armenians in the US and communicate with Armenians on blogs in the US, Europe, and Armenia. Oleg exhibits what I see in a lot of Armenians (I am assuming he is Armenian from the name he uses): Western centrism, and hatred of the Russian Federation. There are many reason for this. They simply cannot imagine the moral or ethical validity of any political or social order other than the US centric liberal ordered empire. They also have a very high assimilation rate in the West, a symptom of the latter, whereas in Armenia they wouldn’t think of not marrying an Armenian. There are many Armenians that hate the Russians for what the Soviets did (many sent to labor camps, etc.) when many of the Soviet leaders were Ukrainians and Georgians. This is a historical ball and chain that they still carry, confusing hatred with thinking.

        I know of that ball can chain as I carried it as least into the 1990’s when I finally dropped it and saw the world in a new light.

        Recently I have noticed a new thinking among Armenians. When someone on a blog suggested that Armenia needs a ‘colored’ revolution I was surprised that many Armenians said NO WAY to that. There were even several that said we needed to stop the Western influence in Armenia and in our thinking. I was used to being slapped down on the blogs for saying just that. So there is hope.

        • I am encouraged that you see that. I have more reasons to hate not only the USSR but Russia than Mr. Atbashian here. To this day I carry an instinctive suspiciousness of anything coming from Moscow, no matter what’s the regime there. But one has to be able to read Reality as it’s laid out in time, including in this moment. As it were, Russia now is far to the right of EU and US, and holding fast to genuine Christian values that have all but disappeared in those two, except only for that all-gobbling “compassion” that’s destroying whatever remains of the Europeoples wherever west of the Oder-Neisse they may be living. Russia deserved a helping hand extended in friendship in 1990, and a movement to heal the divisions between the Pravoslavni and other branches of Christianity. It didn’t get that hand.

    • “The answer is that the real fascism, Nazism, and anti-Semitism is threatening them from today’s Putin’s Russia, which is currently seething with jingoistic fever. The sophisticated KGB propaganda machine is running at full capacity…”

      You lost all credibility with that accusation.

    • “If the Ukrainian revolution was led by the Nazis, why are so many Jews supporting it? Why did Jews fight and die in Maidan along with Ukrainians? Why did the Jewish groups in Kiev organize the treatment of wounded protesters in Israel?”

      Of all the arguments I’ve seen trying to exculpate the Nazi presence in Euromaidan, this [seems to be the most lacking in intellectual rigor]. It’s like saying about the Arab Spring, if so many secular people approved of it, how could it have been an Islamist revolution? Because the Islamists co-opted the revolution, just as Nazis have co-opted Euromaidan.

      Oleg, your [negativity about] Russia has been relentless and it doesn’t surprise me that you view this revolution with rose-coloured glasses. In fact, your country is just another pawn, just like Egypt before it, and will be disposed of by the EU as they see fit. Ukraine will probably become even poorer and more poverty stricken than it is now.

    • Thanks, I agree. My daughter lives in Kiev with her Russian/Ukrainian husband and baby and raves about the friendliness of the people.
      I am sympathetic to Ukraine for these main reasons:
      1) Many there envy Poland’s economic success (a tripling of per capita GDP since it joined the EU in ’92) and want to have EU access too. They were furious with kleptocrat Yanukovich’s Putin-inspired veto. Who can blame them?
      2) Smart Ukrainians are sick of corruption and want Western legal standards. Is it YanukoVICH, or YanukoRICH?
      3) Unlike Russia, where Putin’s buddies control the press, Ukraine has a lively free press – a rarity for Russian speakers.
      4) Russia is helping the genocidal Iranian regime develop nukes and provides assorted Islamic entities with lethal weapons. So who’s the Nazi here?
      5) As Abraham Foxman of the ADL opined: Pointing out where anti-Semitism is not a factor is just as important as pointing out where it is. In this case, despite Ukraine’s flaws, anti-Semitism is NOT a valid excuse to crush Ukrainian independence.

      • jewdog,

        Some commenter once called me yellow dog, others opine that I am a lap dog of the Zionists, so I have an affinity for your handle. Foxman is demented as far as I am concerned, so nothing he says is valid. However, I think it’s plainly clear the Ukraine’s Jews have much to gain by the country’s joining EU. There is no doubt this will reduce overt antisemitism, it being on the verbotten EU list. My concern has always been that EU will use the excuse of Ukrainian antisemitism to launch a Europe-wide campaign against “bigotry and intolerance.” I’s main beneficiaries, by far, will be Europe’s Muslims, not the few (and dwindling) Jews. As far as I am concerned, I prefer an antisemitic Ukraine and Islamophobic Europe to a continent-wide prostration before the Great Khalifate.

        • Thanks, Takuan.
          Well, the choices we have in life are often between lousy and worse. The EU is lousy, and down the road they may kill Ukraine with PC kindness, but in the short term I think the EU could throw Ukraine a life preserver before they wind up totally smothered in Russia’s autocratic embrace.

    • Ultimately, all of the argument over what the E.U. and U.S. should do about Putin’s actions with regard to Ukraine seem to ignore the vital question of what they could do about it.

      It is clear to me that there is some truth in the assertions that the Russians have essential legitimate objectives in Crimea, which is to say that they are objectives which could in principle be pursued without violating the norms of international law.

      It is also even more abundantly clear that the actions which Putin has chosen not only violate the norms of international law, but do so flagrantly. While he has succeeded thus far in keeping the bloodshed resulting from these criminal acts to a minimum, that only emphasizes the first point, that the obvious objectives could have been pursued by covert influence and quiet negotiation rather than through military invasion in direct contravention of fundamental principles of the international community.

      Without bothering to express my opinion of what was really going on in Ukraine (I do have one, of course, but so does everyone else), I should like to shift the question to what is really going on in Putin’s head. It is taken as a more than usually accepted fact among the contributors to Gates of Vienna that Russia does not lack expertise in successful covert influence operations. I should not think it is in question that the Russians also wield a very strong hand in any negotiations which might be necessary.

      So if Russia’s interests in Crimea and with respect to Ukraine generally are so legitimate, why has Putin done the one thing sure to bring into question the legitimacy of Russian activities on it’s own border? Why an illegal invasion which simultaneously drop-kicks all territorial guarantees, non-proliferation diplomacy, and the Geneva Conventions in their respective groins? How could that possibly be a better choice than the mixture of bribery, covert influence, and economic realities backed by a completely unspoken military option which would not have elicited the least alarm from Europe or the U.S.?

      I think…no, I know that Putin is being deliberately provocative. And the provocation is being advanced with some caution and a healthy dose of excuses designed to divide world opinion. China’s position with respect to this adventure makes everything clear. Putin is working to set up a situation where Europe will demand that the U.S. intervene, so as to make it clear to the world that the U.S. does not have any meaningful ability to do so. America will be revealed as fundamentally powerless, both militarily and economically, and that will be that.

      Once the Middle-East gets the implications (and here the Russians will be exerting some of their covert influence), the dollar will no longer be the exchange medium of choice for oil transactions. And then it is lights out for America.

    • Huntington indeed showed the genuine knowledge and insight that’s so lacking today, and in matters Ukraine as well. Alas, his voice in matters Islam was as ignored then as his voice in matters Ukraine has been ignored now. Alas, that is always the case. The herd surges forwarfd, trampling over cautionary voices whether that of Cassandra or Gen. Eric Shinseki (that about the invasion of Iraq) or the great Sam Huntington. You wouldn’t know it by reading current history books how much opposition there was in Europe to the commencement of the the great and stupid disaster or World War 1. Alas, the opposition came from intellectuals –Stefan Zweig was one of its prominent voices — and in this particular case the intellectuals were right, though universally reviled.

  2. Wunderbar! Can’t wait for the next instalment of this great essay! You have lifted the hidden facts from out of the collectivist rubbish bin and dusted off the sugar coating that has been hiding the real history of that part of the world. Oh I do wish some of those useful idiots you have exposed get to read this expose of their own stupidity!

  3. 沢庵西洋,有難う御座います. I was totally unaware of the neo-nazi connections you mention – at the same time, I wonder about what possibly is the appeal of that ideology for those people, who after all suffered under the real Nazis not so long ago.

    You capture perfectly my own sentiments about the euphoric Todestrieb of the West, compared to the relatively healthy self-interest of the Russians.

    • Many western Ukrainians collaborated happily in the bloodiest crimes of the Einsatzgruppen and SS.
      I can see that there was no reckoning of their actions at the end, no sense of wrong.
      Support this government of ice-blooded plutocrats?
      I think not.
      Lublin District.
      Is it forgotten so soon?
      Or, perhaps, is it cherished too much in the eyes of power-mad nationalist Ukrainians?

  4. … I just read the article by George Eliason that you cite in your comments, and that answers the questions I had, and also your case for naming them “Nazis”, and not neo-nazis.

    • And that article was a factual black hole, including tendentious translations of what was said in the videos (like Morley Safer translating “zhyd” as “kike”.

      • But “zhyd” IS kike. You failed to account for the spit-like thunk and inflection with which this single syllable word has been uttered in Ukraine for many centuries, the jeering repetition of this word in front of Jews, particularly children, its diminutives that deepen the insulting punch and so on. Please, no massaging of culture and history here; you are merely wasting eveyone’s time.

        You could have made a more valid point the the same word, with the same inflection, had been uttered in other Slavic countries for the same purpose — though in none of them accompanied by such horrific pogroms as Jews have experienced in Ukraine.

  5. The question is: Why we are dragged into such a morass by ignorant politicians and their pabulum spewing glad-handing MSM footmen. The pervasive willful ignorance of even the foregoing rough and sketchy background of Ukraine perverts the West’s perceptions and actions relative to that country, and the bias of Reality-averse messianic ideology — i.e. Democracy Inc. — spins the whole thing further out into orbits of cartoon craziness.

    The same happened with Yugoslavia. Perveting the course of real history. Diana Johnstone did an interview with Politika on the shenigans of the US and it’s political satellites, the EU.

    Where is this all ending up?

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/ukraine-and-yugoslavia/

  6. Well, that was certainly a tour-de-force. Takuan is certainly among the most gifted writers plying his trade on the net. His articles are like well engineered roller coasters, zooming from one paradigm to the next. I knew much of this already, but I appreciate the insight into the mentality of Russia’s neighbours.

  7. If TS is not in the pay of the Kremlin, then he definitely should be. His comments on Ukraine, as well as the Euro-Maidan, track almost point-by-point the propaganda that is so effectively being promoted by Russian disinformation agencies and intended to soften public opinion prior to partition and take-over. The mere fact that an individual who has (thus far) distinguished himself with open hostility towards any manifestation of Ukrainian national identity, sentiment and interests, and has pointedly maintained silence on historically verifiable counter-arguments to his vitriol has now been requested to “ündertake an analysis of recent events in Ukraine” also speaks volumes of the veracity and balance of this blog. It seems that I may have been a bit hasty in the past in expressing my appreciation to the Baron for the opportunity to respond to TS’s earlier biases….if the Baron then urged the same individual (with his seemingly disinterested faux-Japanese identity) to chalk up the walls with additional graffiti on a subject in which he holds strong prejudices (and not a little ignorance).

    It would be pointless for anyone to try and address point-by-point the huge amount of “research” that TS has conducted. It will certainly not change TS’s mind (though I’m not sure it matters what he thinks) and it will put most readers to sleep. Suffice to say that the “research”appears to have been lifted straight out of the texts of Russian chauvinists and propagandists.

    However, I think it will be most helpful to focus on two key elements in order to cut through all the chaff. First of all, I invite the reader to take a look at the map of Europe for the last 1000 years (http://loiter.co/v/watch-as-1000years-of-european-boarders-change/). This short but very interesting video shows that barely a decade went by in Europe without changes in borders, etc. Whole nations disappeared; and the holdings and boundaries of the lowest of the nobiliary systems (barons) through that of kings and emperors either disappeared, were renamed, or changed hands numerous times during that period.

    The Russians – for obvious reasons – like to define this word as meaning “borderlands”. But the word “Ükraine”was first used over 1000 years ago by the rulers of Kyiv to mean ” of the realm”………it is highly unlikely that the rulers of the (then) largest and most cultivated European empire (compared to the rest of post-Byzantine/Dark Ages Europe) would have considered their realm to have been anybody’s “borderlands”. However, that is not to say that Ukraine has not had its share of border changes, invaders, and occupiers. Yet, throughout the last millenium, it has maintained a political, cultural, and linguistic unity for far longer periods than most of Europe. From its early (Slavic) state of Kyiv-Rus in the 10th century (while Russia was little more than a dirty, primitive little trading post in the Muscovy-Suzdal area far to the north) through the mid-thirteenth century, Ukraine dominated over much of the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the areas now known as Russia all the way to the Caucasus. Then, after the Mongol invasion, a portion of the Kyiv-Rus state survived for another 100 years in its western realm (Galicia-Volhyn) before succumbing to Polish rule. The Ukrainian Kozak state emerged two centuries later (14th-15th centuries) and – until the Battle of Poltava at the beginning of the 18th century – maintained military dominance over parts or all of Ukraine. The Ukrainian state re-emerged for several years in the early 20th century before succumbing to Russian red and white forces and has (again) re-emerged – with over 90% vote – almost 25 years ago.

    So what is there so hard to understand? That Ukraine had been over-run numerous times by one predatory neighbor or another and had lost its political (though not its cultural and linguistic) identity for periods of up to two centuries before re-emerging again? Can Israel’s claim to state or national legitimacy even come close? (BTW:I wonder how many more times Israel’s boundaries will be changing over the next 60 years?) Can Belgium’s? Can the U.S. with only 250 years of national existence? Can Ireland?

    Observe the boundaries of Europe during these last 1000 years and the names of kingdoms and empires and nations which we no longer even remember, and then consider Ukraine’s persistent presence and emergence from under all the aggressive debris and exploitation of its predatory neighbors. Who the hell does TS think he’s kidding with his silly Ukrainophobic history lesson?

    The second point I wanted to make is that all the charts, graphs, analyses, and conferences in the world will not change one simple human principle: people will be what they chose to be regardless of how many TS’s or Russian propagandists prove to
    the contrary. Ukrainians have persisted over the century under very difficult, Holocaust -type conditions. The Poles tried to change them. The Russians (both Czars and Bolsheviks) tried the same. The Germans would have liked to kill most of them off to make room for “post-war German veterans. The Tartars and Turks freely raided Ukraine’s coast-line in search of marketable slaves. The mongols simply brought destruction and death throughout the land.

    And yet, whenever Ukrainians come together anywhere in the world – even if they speak only Russian, English, or some other language – they have absolutely no doubt as to who they are and their common heritage and desire for national statehood. It’s part of their DNA. And we don’t have to seek out a new faux-Samurai identity in a Japanese marriage. We are very proud of who we are.

    • Yeah, that’s right…if any source tells Russia’s side of the story, they’re a “Russian propagandist” and everything said can be dismissed forthwith.

      I heard that tune before, during the 1990s, when anything said on behalf of the Serbs or against US/NATO/EU foreign policy was immediately dismissed with contempt as “Serbian propaganda.”

      You’ve drunk too much mainstream media kool-aid.

  8. Russia will prevent the Crimea from being a Muslim staging ground and unsinkable aircraft carrier.

    End of story.

    • sadly, Putin is the only leader of an advanced nation that see the muslim for what he realy is.
      you are right.

      • [I disparage your assertion]. He’s actively helping the Iranians. He’s incredibly short-sighted.

  9. Common, don’t be ridiculous. Nazis led insurgency, really? People were just pissed off by Moscow puppets in their government and stated this clearly. The fact that people were actually able to overthrow government they did not trust is awesome and unbelievable. It poses direct threat to Moscow as a live example that it can be done. This is Putin’s worst nightmare and he will stop at nothing to discredit the movement. True, Ukraine today does not have leadership capable of ruling a country. This is an unfortunate fact. As far as EU is concerned and their reluctance to provide real support to Maidan movement the cause of it is simple: revolution in Ukraine is a live example of what pissed off citizens can do not only to Moscow but to Brussels too.
    What is annoying that media is quick to jump ahead with libels like Nazis. Do you guys remember what Nazis were about? Do you think these so-called Nazis of today are willing and capable? Common, it is 21 century, those guys are more like a historical reconstruction club than anything else. I encourage you to listen to what Oleg, the first to comment here has to say.
    It’s funny to see how your distaste for enemedia and Obama (fully justified) transcends to an awkward love for Putin.

    • I would suggest that you dig a little deeper into who is in the new Kiev government, the groups they are connected to, and the kind of people they are bringing into their new defense force. In short, brownshirts.

  10. This essay leaves me with an uneasy feeling of Deja Vu. I once ran across an article by Tad Szulc in the New Yorker magazine about some topic of tension between the USSR and the US. And Tad got going about what-all the Gitlerites had done.

    Gitlerites?

    And then my very modest knowledge of Russian kicked in. In Russian, H and G are very nearly interchangeable, the one being hardened and the other softened in pronunciation. Tad, I concluded, had taken his talking points from a manuscript prepared in Russian and translated into English by someone so ignorant of history that he or she couldn’t make the connection and realize that it was Hitlerites, not Gitlerites.

    I don’t see a glaring linguistic mark that betrays the author here, but the rest of the rhetorical tropes are there. It’s a highly slanted piece.

    • ” It’s a highly slanted piece.”

      Really? Unlike the morass of “objectivity” spewed out by the western media? As part of the wall-to-wall “Putin is a Nazi” coming from the BBC, Radio 4 news had a reporter in Crimea, who only gave voice to a single citizen: a woman who had refused to vote in the Referendum. But even this woman who was hostile to Russia had to admit “but everyone else I know is delighted with the result of the Referendum”.

      The BBC still refers consistently to Putin having “annexed” Crimea, as if the Referendum had not taken place.

      So, please, come back and demand “objectivity” when the mainstream media present a single opinion which dissents from their wall-to-wall support of Svoboda, “the social-national party of Ukraine”. Despite the 100s of hours of coverage of Ukraine in the last few months, I’ve yet to hear a single mainstream news programme discuss the national-socialism of Svoboda. The media are full of reports about Golden Dawn and their national-socialism, but utterly silent about Svoboda, and the EU leaders in photo-ops with them.

  11. Be all naive like those commenting from eu and us msm. Just turn your naivety in the other direction as usual and push with enthusiasm, no danger of mental work involved. Help Putin in his silly claims and power grab.

  12. I attempted an earlier comment that the system gobbled up part way through my writing it !

    Excellent article !

    One minor correction. You refer to the former Polish city of Kaliningrad. To my knowledge Kaliningrad was the former Prussian capital of Imperial Prussia, Konigsburg.

    Some readers may not be aware that the US has spent at least $5Billion supporting ‘democracy’ in the Ukraine through payments to political parties, NGO’s, charities, media moguls etc. How do you invoice for ‘democracy’ ? How do you audit it ? It is always a ‘work in progress’.

    Sources : http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/03/01/us-backed-neo-nazi-party-given-key-roles-ukrainian-government/
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm

    Similarily the EU has spent at least $1Billion in a similar manner.

    Sources : http://www.infowars.com/european-union-ngo-played-direct-role-in-violent-coup-in-ukraine/
    http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84781

    I could ask US readers what would you think if Putin’s Russia started funding political parties and interfering in governance in your neighbour, Mexico. How many ‘red lines’ would that cross ?

    • It’s one more example of how complicated the history of that region is that your point about Kaliningrad is both right and wrong. The city was founded by Teutonic Knights on lands they had plundered from the Prussian people (who weren’t German). It moved between them, Lithuania, Poland, Brandenburg, Prussia, Poland again (known as Królewiec until July 1946) and finally Soviet Russia that conquered it from the Nazis in a siege that destroyed most of the city and killed over 100k of its civilians. All of the above ethnies and cultures, except for the poor Prussians genocided out of existence, are there now, living under Russian rule.

      • Takuan, you know enough to know that Koenigsberg and its hinterland – after being wrested from the Slavic Prussians by the Teutonic Knights – was a German city for half a millenium. Your original description of Kaliningrad as a “formerly Polish city” was rightly questioned as it omitted that German 500 year period up to 1945. Post-war Poland may well have hopefully bestowed the name “Krolewiec” upon it, but it was, per Yalta and Potsdam, never intended to be nor was part of a reconstituted Poland up until July 1946. The Soviets obtained Allied agreement to annex northern East Prussia, including Koenigsberg, to the USSR and give southern East Prussia to Poland. It would have been considerably fairer and more geographically logical – and avoided the 1945 to present absurdity of a Russian territorial outlier of Kaliningrad District – to have awarded Poland the whole of East Prussia but it didn’t happen. The Soviet Union wanted a non-satellite, warm water port and Russian re-populated western base. Lavrenti Beria argued against the Soviet annexation of northern East Prussia, maintaining that all that was needed was a large combined forces military base on the Samland peninsula, north and west of Koenigsberg (city), next to and including the Baltic port of Pillau – also Koenisgberg’s seaside summer resort.

        • There is no point in quibling over details, if the parties pressuppose mutual integrity. Kaliningrad/Konigsberg/Krolewiec was a Polish city in the years 1466 -1657. My reason for calling it “Polish” within the temporary context is that geographically and geopolitically it’s part of the landmass of Poland; whatever political- military turbulence caused it to be formerly Prussian, Nazi, Soviet and Russian now nevertheless gives the former USSR a promontory, a beachhead jutting into Europe on which ICBMs don’t look reassuring.

          • It is the general, ie in Anglosphere historiography and public discourse, lack of acknowledgement that, as you put it, the “poor Prussians were genocided out of existence” in East Prussia, but also several millions in Silesia, Pomerania, West Prussia, and centuries-old German communities in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Czechoslovakia that informed my concern.

      • But that’s the whole point, Hell! They have been doing it since the 1920s! By now they no longer need to do anything, as their work is done. Diana West’s book discussed on these pages explained how all this came about, but there are additional tons of material about aspects such as the Soviet (which means Russian) infiltration of the academia, and through it the law, the media and the teacher’s colleges (which means nearly everyones’ brain). But if you are challenging Ivan Winters about the point he made specifically, I’ll answer in his stead by quoting from an excellent article by Diana Johnstone thanks to a link referenced in IW’s comment:

        “Is Russia urging Quebec to secede from Canada so that the province can join a military alliance led by Moscow? Evidently not. That would be comparable, and yet mild compared to the recent U.S. gambit led by Victoria Nuland aimed at bringing Ukraine, including the main Russian naval base at Sebastopol, into the Western orbit.”

    • I remember what I thought when Russia started sending nuclear-capable missiles to Cuba.
      Then there was their assistance to Nicaragua.
      And then to Venezuela.
      And now to New York City…

  13. Thank you for the cordial response. You missed one major point that your analysis could have been built on, if you were more suited to knowing than to opining. The Russians do have a G; it’s the Ukrainians who don’t. Many a Russian word can be converted into Ukrainian by merely replacing the G with an H.

  14. The “Thank you” was for Mr. Sam Grant. Somehow the reply did not align correctly.

  15. The other fact to remember is that Crimea was essentially sold to Ukraine by Russia in exchange for nuclear weapons in early 1990s. In fact a wise move backed by international treaties which clearly stated that Russia (and USA) was supposed to uphold Ukrainian territory consistency. What is come to pass is a dangerous precedent of forcible territory annexation which contradicts signed protocols and should not be tolerated by international society. If only UN was made of real states and not the “failed states”. In fact in that case NATO would suffice.

    • Not so. Khrushchev attached Crimea to Ukraine in 1954.

      The US made a treaty with Ukraine to protect Ukraine in return for giving up the nukes. Then the US violated that treaty itself in 2013/14 by staging a coup taking over the entirety of Ukraine and installing a US puppet government.

      The take-home lesson? Never trust the US, any of its political leaders, or any of its treaties.

  16. * Iran is pro-America. Iran is our friend. Iran has always been our friend.
    * Iran is a terrorist state. Iran is our enemy. Iran has always been our enemy.
    * Russia is communist. Russia is our enemy. Russia has always been our enemy.
    * Al-Qaeda fights Russia. Al-Qaeda is our friend. Al-Qaeda has always been our friend.
    * Russia fights the Chechens, they are evil authoritarians. Russia is our enemy. Russia has always been our enemy.
    * Al-Qaeda did 9/11. Al-Qaeda is our enemy. Al-Qaeda has always been our enemy.
    * Russia fights the muslims in Chechnya, they are bravely fighting the muslim menace. Russia is our friend. Russia has always been our friend.
    * Assad supports Hezbollah and attacks Israel. Assad is our enemy. Assad has always been our enemy.
    * Russia supports Assad in Syria. Russia is our enemy. Russia has always been our enemy.
    * Assad fights ISIS/Al-Qaeda. Assad is our friend. Assad has always been our friend.
    * Russia supports Assad in Syria. Russia is our friend. Russia has always been our friend.
    * Russia annexed Crimea. Russia is our ?. Russia has always been our ?.

    Maybe we should just give up this idea that countries can be ‘friends’, like people, but instead are psychopathic self interested entities, that will always do WHATEVER (they think) is best for them.

    PS. The “Stupid Party” / “Evil Party” line is a perfect way to know a conservative from a liberal. As a (mostly) liberal, to me, the “Stupid Party” = Democrats, the “Evil Party” = Republicans. 😛

  17. Why the renewed western hostlity towards russia ? …One answer would be, that the increasingly multietnic nature of both the USA and EU makes these modern empires just as inherently unstable , as such empires has been throughout History , the last breakup being of the Sovjet-empire . Unstable empires usually has a strong need for an external enemy to patch up growing internal conflicts ….Only China seems to have found an alternative eqation , after at least 4000 years .

    • The hostility toward Russia comes from the fact that Russia repudiated not only communism but also socialism, and instead embraced Christianity.

      • Very good point.

        In addition, the Russians vigorously pursue what they understand are their national interests. This is inexplicable to U.S. elites who have no clue what U.S. interests are. This Russian proclivity is a complete mystery, and our elites thus fear and resent what they do not understand.

        • I like the point that the US doesn’t have clearly defined interests. It probably does, it is called inferring in other countries internal structures.

          If anyone goes back in time, you will see how the US created a false flag to start the Spanish American war over Cuba. What happened to Cuba afterwards??

          The Monroe doctrine has mutated into a global network, and Ukraine is going to pay a price, since it is caught in a pincer.

          The ordinary people will continue to suffer. Money is tight in the EU, supposedly, but suddenly money can be sourced for the new Ukrainian government.

      • I detected this in the NATO (US) attack on Yugoslavia. NATO would never bomb Muslims on Ramadan, but would bomb Christians on Easter. I remember a picture of a bomb ready to drop in a US bomber bay with Happy Easter written on it. The US is still supporting jihadis in Libya, Egypt, and immensely in Syria. The immense suffering of the Christians in Syria is sickening. The West is on jihad against the Orthodox peoples.

        • The west isn’t. But those who control the politicians are against Christianity.

    • The language map you linked to, of itself – setting aside Khrushchev’s 1954 gifting* of the Crimean ASSR (or whatever nominal status it had as a component of the Soviet Union) to the Ukrainian SSR – makes Putin’s seizure of the Crimea fully justified on demographic grounds alone.

      *As the Viceroy of the Ukraine presiding over the Holomodor, again in 1939 for the “Sovietization” of the western Ukraine, then again from 1944 for the “re-Sovietization” of the whole of the Ukraine (replete with the famine of 1946-47), Khrushchev had lakes of Ukrainian blood on his hands. In 1954 as First Secretary he had not yet pushed Bulganin, Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich aside. No doubt his 1954 gift was aimed at raising his popularity with the surviving Ukrainians.

      • So 100% deportation of native population and settling Your own colonists make seizure of land justified? If so then why bother about Islamisation of Europe? I beg to differ.

  18. Why don’t you write of paranoic Russian hostility towards all of us? This is again your deeply ingrained aplication of multiculturalism, i.e. “understand your enemy”. Innocence of Russians or innocence of muslims. It works in a similar way.

    Unpredictable one-man-country with funny statues of Lenin and state controled church/economics does not allow you to “analyze” anything.

  19. Regardless of the point Takuan Seiyo is trying to make, I feel both sides (pro-Western and pro-Russian) mix up moral issues and issues of national interest in this debate over Ukraine. The result is confused thinking, morally dubious claims and, quite possibly, wrong conclusions about our own (meaning Western) interests.

    As an illustration of that, I would like to offer an argument I haven’t seen anybody defend. Much is made, both by Russian propagandists and by pro-Russian Westerners, of the alleged historical ties between Crimea and Russia. Crimea has been Russian for times immemorial, they say. It was Khrushchev who handed it over to Ukraine in 1954, which was a token gesture really, since it remained within the Soviet Union.

    The breakup of the Soviet Union was a historical accident which has deprived Russia of Crimea. This was an injustice. Putin is fully justified in repairing what has been, in retrospect, Khrushchev’s mistake. Khrushchev never meant to let go of Crimea, so the return to the status quo ante is legitimate.

    However, there is a huge problem with this line of reasoning no one mentions : the Soviet Union was broken up for a very good reason : it lost the war it had been waging against the West since 1917. It lost the Cold War. It lost the war of Communism imposing itself on the Soviet bloc, and trying to impose its yoke on pretty much the rest of the world.

    Communism led by Moscow inflicted incredible misery upon the citizens of the Eastern bloc. It forced Western countries into the arms race, making them burn billions of dollars for nothing. It tried to destroy Western civilisation through direct and indirect means – puppet communist parties, covert subversion and cultural Marxism. To a worrying degree, it has succeeded. The USSR is dead, but cultural Marxism thrives in the West.

    The crimes of the Soviet Union are horrific. It is responsible for 20 million dead within its own empire. The global body count of Communism is estimated at 100 million by serious scholars. As the vanguard and active worldwide promoter of Communism, the USSR is directly responsible for those 100 million dead.

    This is far in excess of the Nazi murders, never mind any World War crimes that Japan might have committed. Nevertheless, people find it perfectly normal that, after 1945, Germany and Japan were severely punished by the Allied powers, prevented from having an army for a very long time, etc. Just a few years ago, I read a snippet in the paper that Germany had just finished paying war reparations – and that was, I think, for World War I…

    Russia, however, escaped from any similar punishment, except for the fact that it lost its former empire – and nobody took it away from her. It just crumbled.

    And now, Westerners would argue, on moral grounds, that we should turn the clock back, repair that unfortunate mistake Khrushchev made, and kindly undo one of the rare instances in which one Communist, ruthless dictator shot himself in the foot ?

    And this favour has to be extended to Vladimir Putin himself, which is like saying to Goebbels, in 1948 : all right, you can have the Sudetenland now, since Nazism is no more ?

    I say : Russia must be punished for Soviet crimes. The punishment has to be long and hard. It would be very difficult –- indeed, impossible – to equate any punishment to the untold amount of suffering and destruction the USSR inflicted upon humanity.

    The problem is, there never were any Nuremberg trials for the crimes of Communism. So people just tend to think : bad things sometimes happens, let’s move on.

    Now let me be clear : I’m not suggesting that Ukraine, or Europe, or NATO, or the United States, should wage war against Russia to expel it from Crimea. Indeed, I suppose Crimea will now stay within Russia for a very long while. I’m not even saying that the West’s policy should be to punish Russia long and hard. Maybe this would go against our best interests.

    I just mean to oppose Putin propagandists and apologists on their own ground when they make a moral point about Crimea. On purely moral grounds, Russia should have lost Crimea for ever. On purely moral grounds, Putin should be hanged for his role within the KGB, just as Goebbels and Eichmann were.

    And a final note on another anti-Western double standard that never gets mentioned in the Ukraine crisis : every time the United States army fires a gun abroad, America-haters all over the world (including America) lament that “it’s all about oil, really”. (Which is bone-headed on at least two counts : it’s far from always being “about oil”, and what’s wrong about protecting America’s oil imports, anyway ? Don’t you guys use oil all day round ? How would you fare without it ?)

    However, I’ve yet to hear that the Soviet non-invasion of Crimea was “all about gas, really”. And yet, Crimea, and its waters, are replete with known natural gas reserves. That’s just a coincidence, of course. Vladimir Putin is not interested in grabbing natural resources by military force. Not his style at all. It’s only about Catherine the Great, you know.

    • Robert,

      Your point is valid. However, you are wrong on two counts:

      1. The Soviet Union did not lose the Cold War. It won it. We, the entire West, are now infected with several lethal mutations of the Commie virus deeply to the marrow of our bones. Russia is now a Christian country, far, far to the right of us, howver corrupt, imperialistic and chauvinist it remains. Not to mention the Anatoliy Golitsyn thesis referenced in my article that the whole “Lost the Cold War” thing was a KGB ruse.

      2. You are referring to critics of America’s militant posturing all over the world as though they are are the enemy. But the enemy are the people who push us into that posturing. I’ll bring to your attention two items of a possible dozen:

      a) Recent WSJ headline:
      America’s Incredible Shrinking Navy
      Only 35% of the U.S. Navy’s entire fleet is deployed, fewer than 100 ships, including just three aircraft carriers.

      b) What’s really going on in Afghanistan:

      http://www.hbo.com/video/video.html/?autoplay=true&vid=1371163&filter=vice&view=null#/

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI

      http://www.vice.com/read/this-is-what-winning-looks-like-0000111-v20n5

      Do you think America really needs to get involved in more and more conflagrations abroad while AT THE SAME TIME decimating its own military and burning trillions of dollars in a cosmic bonfire in Afghanistan and elsewhwere all over the world? Isn’t there something deeply fishy and disquieting about such a dissonance?

      • The last link is so …depressing. Hugely informative however. With a smidgeon of knowledge about Afghanistan’s history and the costly Soviet misadventure there, I was roughly a decade ago extremely dubious about the prospects of success of the US-led mission to introduce democracy to the “Afghan nation”.

        Fouad Ajami several years ago wrote a piece for the WSJ setting out dispassionately why the US-led venture was always futile and doomed to fail. Any Western leader who read it would have and should have simply withdrawn their nation’s troops within days. Trillions in treasure wasted, scores of young servicemen’s lives lost or bodies mutilated. Afghanistan has meanwhile cemented its position as the pre-eminent supplier of opium to the world.

  20. Invert the situation: the Warsaw pact engineered a coup in Mexico with plans to put military installations south of the US border? How do you think the US would respond?

    Mexico and Canada are in the US sphere of interest, Ukraine is in the Russian sphere of interest.

    Case closed.

  21. Neither my girl and boy children nor any other American’s children should ever be put at risk of life and limb and sanity in any foreign war UNTIL the United States is prepared to decisively WIN that foreign war and compensate American families with the treasure of COMPLETELY CONQUERED nations who are disallowed from practicing any variant of communism including Islam.

    CASE CLOSED.

    • So if we just win the wars and sufficiently compensate soldiers then war is good? Then conquering other peoples is good? You argue for the American Empire. I argue for the American Republic. It is one or the other, you can’t have both.

        • John Quincy Adams address as Secretary of State to the U.S. House of Representatives. (4 July 1821)

          America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama(1) the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

  22. Really getting tired of ethnic hatred disguised as “commentary”. The simple factual errors certainly are annoying enough: it is the Left Bank that was the Hetmanate and under Russia, and the Right Bank that stayed under Poland until the partitions. Odessa is in Southwestern, not Southeastern Ukraine. Bandera’s виріжем means “massacre”, not “cut up” in this context. etc. etc.
    The writer may not be a Russian stooge, but he likes 2 points out of Russian propaganda: 1)Ukrainians never were united as a people in 1 state – i.e. deny their existence as a nation. Of course, under Lithuania all but Galicia was under one state, and along with today’s Belarus, they were known as “Rus”, with their own written language used even in Lithuania proper. 2)The whole east of Ukraine not only speaks Russian, but wants to be part of Russia. TS ain’t much for facts, but huge numbers of Russian speakers were involved in the Maidan. In a BBC video there were even some Pravy Sektor guys speaking Russian (?provocateurs). Sure, TS, Sevastopol voted 97% for union with Russia, and you believe it. Despite the fact that turnout was 123%! A poll published during the crisis had support for Russian in Crimea at 15%, though that seems low.
    The Eliason reference is a joke, too. Bad translations of slogans in videos. Asserting that Ukraine is divided between Catholic West and Orthodox East, which is ludicrous, unless “East”=everything outside Galicia. The Greek-Catholic Church only has 5 million adherents out of 45 million.
    The Waffen SS division Galizien was cleared of war crimes accusations after WWII. Ethnic Waffen SS divisions were a desperation maneuver when Germany was already losing the war.
    Despite my love for Ukraine, I understand the arguments against US intervention. But I fail to see how being against intervention morphs into “Putin has a right to do this”. Gotta justify yourselves? Reflexively disagreeing with Obama? I don’t know, but the results are ugly and do violence to facts on the ground.
    If you want analysis by a non-Ukrainian, read the stuff by EdgeoftheSandbox at Legal Insurrection. She has her issues, but she isn’t peddling this kind of [material which I consider inferior].

    • Something rings true about this critique by Kozak, and more often than not I have a nagging feeling about Takuan that he’s a Mr. Know It All polyhistor juggling way too many plates, fruits, and flaming pies to be believable (any detail about anything one brings up, no matter how far-flung and exotic, it seems that Takuan knows what’s really the real deal about it). I don’t know enough about these Ural Mountains of complex historico-cultural data to move beyond uncertain misgivings, and I never will know enough. Most people, including many intelligent people, are in my shoes on this. So what are intelligent people like me therefore to do? One goes with one’s gut — unless one has 1,000 hours to spare tracking down the vast archipelagos of complex arcane recondite details wielded by the likes of a Takuan like a set of hochyo cooking knives before thirty-seven different frying, sizzling, overboiling flambaying pots and pans before our eyes.

    • Kozak,

      Thank you for identifying your ethnicity. One’s biases should be put on the table, up front. I write under a Japanese nom de plume, have lived in Japan for years and am deeply influenced by its culture, but since I veered from themes Oriental on into matters American, Jewish and now Ukrainian, I’ve considered it proper to identify on multiple occasions that I am in fact not Japanese, but a Polish Christian of half-Jewish DNA and, on both sides from the Lwow area. I’ll add now that I’ve never seen that area as my immediate surviving family, consisting of my parents alone, were kicked out of there by the Soviets before I was born. During WWII, my polonized Ukrainian paternal grandmother was murdered by her Ukrainian neighbors, my mother witnessed atrocities committed by Ukrainians in the city of Lwow proper that curdled her blood even 60 years later, and my more distant family and that of close friends perished in cruel ways at the hand of Ukrainian Nazis in Volhynia. So yes, I have my biases that run counter to yours.

      Nevertheless, I tried to present the issue truthfully to the best of my ability. Undoubtedly some small errors of fact or interpenetration are there, but then the subject is vast enough to fill a PhD dissertation that takes two years, and I wrote this piece in my PJs in two weeks, though relying on heavy research, not just my opinion.

      Your critique consists of venting of offended ethnic pride, which is legitimate, but when it imputes to me things I did not write and then criticizes them, or sweeps under rug inconvenient facts, or dwells on minutiae for which there is no space in an article of this scope, it is my duty to correct you.

      You engage in petty time wasting by calling Left what I called Right (bank) and vice versa. It all depends where one stands, after all. From where I stand, Galicia is left of the Dniepr. And quibbling how many Greek Orthodox are in Western Ukraine merely wastes more of our mutual time for now I have to add that had I wanted to make the article 2000 words longer, I would have elaborated among others that in addition to the Greek Catholics, Western Ukraine has had historically large numbers of Roman Catholics, plus adherents of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and, not so long ago, large numbers of Jews, plus minorities in the Armenian Apostolic Church, Lutherans etc. On the other hand, the names of the two main religious denominations, Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kiev Patriarchate, and Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate, rather neatly express their geographic orientation.

      To refresh your knowledge of the subject matter of the Two Ukraine’s I recommend that you study the four maps present at Geocurrents here: http://www.geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/linguistic-geography/tale-two-ukraines-missing-five-million-ukrainians-surzhyk and showing Ukrainian population distribution by native language, religion, and voting in the 2010 election. Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the “Clash of Civilizations” bisecting Ukraine is noteworthy too; I’ll devote some space to it in Part 2.

      You are wrong as well in correcting me as to the meaning of Bandera’s word that I spelled phonetically as wyriżem, in English translation as “slice through” and that you present as виріжем and translate as “massacre”. It does not mean “massacre” but specifically massacre by bladed instruments: swords, knives and as it were too often in the hands of Bandera’s lads, axes, adzes, sickles, saws and other bladed implements.

      My text did not deal with Ukrainians as a people but with Ukraine as a state. Thus in asserting that I deny Ukrainians’ peoplehood you impute to me words that aren’t there. To the contrary, in the December article that was an introduction to this one, I asserted that Ukrainians had then and now have the right to assert their peoplehood and to seek self-determination — it’s only the uniquely savage methods they chose in the years 1919 – 1944, and before that under Khmelnitsky, that I took exception to.

      Dragging out the Kievan Rus and early history of statehood is legitimate, but on the one hand in an article of this scope I could not go this far, and on the other bringing up the Kievan Rus puts the Russians in such a close kinship to the Ukrainians that it hurts your case.

      The argument that “huge numbers of Russian speakers were involved in the Maidan” is disingenuous. Every Ukrainian under a certain age speaks Russian, whether he be a Banderowtsiy from Lviv or a Tatar from Crimea. As to the actual linguistic division, see maps recommended above.

      Your other arguments, such as about Waffen SS Galizien are preposterous and not worthy of a reply. There are several links to historical sources in my two articles that demolish what you assert, and I could easily source 200 more in a matter of hours.

  23. Whatever the arguments one way or another about the complexity of issues in Eastern Europe that they exist just serves to emphasize one of the main thrusts of TS’s article: the jaw dropping despair induced by the bull in a china shop actions of Obama and his offside fool Biden, preceded by administrations before him all acting against the interests of the US and its citizens in stark contrast with Putin. Lord help us.

  24. Basically they want Ukraine to join the New World (Dis)Order…that is Marxism-fusion-with-Capitalist economic enslavement, social and cultural destruction and invasion by blacks, browns and Muslims. They also wanted to remove Crimea from Russia but Putin prevented it.

  25. TS,
    You penned better articles, let me put it this way.
    Some points, you raised, are true.
    But not the overall picture.
    The “revolution”, whatever her birth was, reflected the pain the Ukrainians felt under the corruptocrats. Their revolt was coming from their inner depths. I know it, as I felt the same in 1989, in another Eastern European country who liberated herself from the Soviet/Russian yoke.
    That “revolution” was also Soviet approved and conducted (there are many sources stating that Gorbachov initiated the revolutions, for what-ever reasons, Anatoliy Golitsyn considered).
    But it reflected the mood of the population, and those revolutions evolved per the population’s wish, not Gorbachov’s, as you see after so many years.
    I suspect the same trajectory would have allowed Ukraine to find her own destiny.
    But that scenario was not allowed by Putin/Dugin.
    The fact that the Americans made so many mistakes, with disastrous consequences, does not absolve the ruskies.
    Your article would have been more balanced had it analyzed Aleksandr Dugin’s fascism, which is extraordinarily virulent and dangerous.
    I suggest the following web site for some facts: http://www.theinteramerican.org/blogs/98-olavo-de-carvalho/247-olavo-de-carvalho-debates-aleksandr-dugin-i.html
    Also, I can tell you that the Eastern European countries are ALL freaked out, their memories of the soviet/russian “brotherly love” still fresh in mind.
    You could have had a bigger impact looking at the problem from all angles.
    With respect.
    cobra

  26. Well Tekuan, it seems that the results of the May 25 Ukrainian election have made you long [written opinion] against Ukraine a total waste of time. I take the liberty of paraphrasing just a few arguments that A. Motyl outlined in a recent piece in World Affairs. Here’s why you, Putin and his ilk were/are wrong:
    1. Despite the best efforts of Vladimir Putin and his terrorist commandos in the eastern Donbas region, Ukraine’s presidential elections did in fact take place on May 25th, under conditions that international observers concur were fair and free.
    2. Ukraine is hardly the divided and unstable near-failed state that you and a number of Western apologists have made it out to be, and hardly the illegitimate state as Putin and his western apologists said it was. Voting participation for the entire country was 60 percent (compared to 43 percent for the European Parliament held on the same day), not including the two provinces that were terrorized by Putin’s commandos, participation was even higher. Everyone knows that the only thing that kept Ukrainians in the Donbas from voting was Putin’s terrorists.
    3. Putin’s terrorist commandos have been outflanked by the elections. People want stability; they want a return to normality. Even Ukraine’s richest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, got off the fence and denounced the terrorists, while calling on Donbas residents to take to the streets and march in protest.
    4. While Ukraine now has a legitimately elected president, Putin has egg on his face. You can continue questioning democratic Ukraine’s legitimacy, but at some point [epithets redacted].
    5. Finally, Ukraine’s much touted, much decried, and much denounced “radical, right-wing extremists” attracted about 1–2 percent of the vote—which surprised no one who knows a bit about Ukrainian politics. (Contrast that with the 25 percent achieved by France’s National Front in the May 25th elections to the European Parliament.)
    Tekuan, if you consider yourself to be intellectually honest man of character an apology to the readers of Gates of Vienna is in order.

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