I could not help but to post this little ditty that is making the rounds on the internet here on my "Ukraine" blog; I didn't write it, and I don't know who do did, but I sure do like it!:
Letter to "red" states:
We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Opry Land. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share. Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percentlower than the Christian Coalition's, We get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire. With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you. Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Redstates believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless> we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.
Sincerely,
Author Unknown in New California.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Sunday, June 26, 2005
June 25-26, 2004: Reflections on My First Ever Days in Ukraine
This has been an emotional weekend for me. One year ago, on June 25, 2004, I boarded a bus in Munich, Germany, which arrived the next day in L’viv where I was greeted by relatives I had never met, and from whence I was whipped away to my paternal grandparent’s hometown. Thus a year ago this weekend began my first pilgrimage to my ancestral homeland, and although the trip to the Ukrainian border took well over 24 hours (and it took an additional three hours to arrive in L’viv after clearing the border), I can basically say that I had entered Ukrainian space already the moment I got on the bus in Munich. I was the only one on the bus who did not hold a passport from a post-Soviet country. Russian and Ukrainian were spoken throughout the bus. All the movies were Hollywood flicks with voice-overs in Russian. An hour or so into the trip, people’s bags opened with food emerging, and the beer and vodka began flowing in a scene that I would see repeated over and over again on buses and trains throughout my stay and journeys in Ukraine. When the movies weren’t playing, we listened to the mixture of Ukrainian- and Russian-language and American pop that I became accustomed to and with which I fell in love while in Ukraine—i.e., I am not as intolerant of Russian pop nor of the Russian language as are many diaspora Ukrainians. I really like Russian pop, even if I do defer to and prefer Ukrainian language variants whenever possible, and would like to see the Ukrainian-language pop industry grow.
I was in heaven from the start. It was incredible to be absorbed into a world where everything was East Slavic, in which the smell of kovbasa was everywhere, and the humor was nothing other than, well. . .nash. I still don’t know how to describe to my non-Ukrainian friends the Ukrainian sense of humor. There is a lot of playful teasing of one another that is involved, among other things. I sat in a seat just in front of the row of three seats that always occupies the very back of modern luxury buses—so this was not my first trip on a truly “Ukrainian” bus, by which I mean the to me fantastic buses from the 1960s and 70s that still run from town to town within Ukraine—and listened to two guys, speaking in Ukrainian, tease each other and others with whom they had struck up conversation in an almost nonstop but jovial fashion. They clearly knew one another well and were traveling together.
My head really was swimming. And then the next biggest thing happened: we hit the Polish border, and even though Poland is now part of the EU, there still is a significant border check. It is not an open border, mostly since the EU has put a 7-year moratorium on the movement of laborers from the new member states to the western ones, while at the same time allowing Western businesses to go East and pay lower wages, and also allowing Western capital to flood Central European markets with products made by Western European companies and farmers that get higher subsidies than do Central European ones (thus a Spanish tomato was selling cheaper in Budapest than one made in Hungary last year). So the border is still militarized, even if it is a bit easier now for Poles to go West.
That was my first glimpse of the fact that even within the EU, the West and the East (or East-Central, or more simply Central, however you may like it) still do exist in separate spheres. In other words, I had that feeling, so often remarked upon by travel writers of the past three or four hundred years or more, of clearly leaving the West and entering the East. But as one sick to death of Western, corporate-globalization driven consumer society (although I do admire Western European culture a great deal), I was certainly marking this crossing not with Bram Stokerian horror but with jubilee, and no doubt my companions on the trip were helping with that.
As soon as we got into Poland, the superhighways (the autobahns) disappeared and we were on single lanes affairs that, in the US, would be called “county roads,” and that only occasionally widened into two lanes before shrinking again into one. These main highways often divided villages in two, and when they went into towns, they went right straight to the heart, just like the old highways of America did before the invention of the highway system. The architecture changed markedly, as well as did the condition of the buildings themselves. Things were older, and what was more, more decayed. It was incredibly enchanting to me, and it still is. The grass in most places was allowed to grow much more wildly. Everything seemed more natural, less plastic, less silicon, more coppery, more earthy. There were chickens all over the roads, and geese. And already I was feeling very much more at home with the appearance of things.
We made a stop at a very modern gas station and convenience store where I could buy some pierogi and boršč (I think, but maybe it was borszcz; I don’t know when Polish uses a haček or z). But in general, wherever you are in Europe, you can actually buy pre-made and ready-to-go, and still yet very high quality food at roadside stops, in contradistinction to the abundance of crap food that is available on the road in the US.
At this stop, we could buy booze, and the first really funny thing happened on this trip: the driver walked around asking if everyone had gotten back on the bus, and thinking that all were present, he pulled the bus out of the lot. I looked out the window and saw a fellow running desperately across the field that separated the gas station and highway in a path via which he hoped to intersect the bus, if he could run fast enough. Given the belly that was jiggling up and down in front of him as he ran, he is lucky that people noticed and shouted to the driver to stop. The guys sitting behind me laughed and said things like “He’s leaving behind his last 100g [of vodka]!” and, “I saw him talking to that dark-haired, blue-eyed Pol’ka [Polish woman]—he’s having to leave his heart back there.”
I still had not yet talked to anyone on the bus. I was too shy to open my mouth. Not because I am a shy person, but because I was embarrassed by my language skills. I am one of those diaspora Ukrainians who spoke Ukrainian as a child and who spent some early years at SUM camps and Uki school on Saturdays, but who then lost much fluency growing up. To some extent, I maintained an ability to understand what was being said to me in general, and never forgot how to say a good number of things—such as, “Daj meni khroshi [Give me some money]!” as my father likes to joke. Thus one of the biggest reason I went to Ukraine was to learn to speak and understand better (and speaking and understanding are, as far as I am concerned, vastly, vastly different faculties, with the latter being far easier than the former, and this is the opinion of someone with a working knowledge not just of Ukrainian, but also of Latvian, German, and Spanish). I needed to overcome the one thing that I felt guilty about in my life, and that I felt was the biggest thing holding me back from experiencing my life to its fullest capacity: that I could not speak Ukrainian that well. There are lots of very complicated reasons why I felt that way, but one can say that I am now overjoyed with the progress I made in the eight-month period that began that day on the bus.
Of course, the other reasons for going to Ukraine were just to see and hear and smell and taste and feel it. It was to meet relatives, and although I expected to meet people with whom I would feel I had some kind of karmic connection in the past, I was not prepared for the frequency of such encounters as I ended up having, or for the intensity of the feeling when it came. Going to Ukraine was a deeply spiritual experience for me—the most important of my life. I can be moved to tears when joyful, and my eyes welled up many times during my stay in Ukraine—probably as many time in eight months as throughout my entire life. I am a passionate person. This first trip to Ukraine was the greatest passion of my life, and I cannot wait to go back this summer. I fell in love with Ukraine just how she is. This is not to say that I don’t see the need for major improvements there. But I don’t want the baby to be tossed with the bathwater. You can read on and on here in this blog to get a sense of what I mean. In part I loved Ukraine because of how much so she is not a Western or “European” country (in the newfangled, postmodern or EU sense of “European”), but also in part for how much so she is. She is truly a borderland, and should never forget that—it is the essence of her incredible culture.
And of course, I knew of the pending presidential elections and was quite keen to be in Ukraine to observe things as they developed, even if my preoccupation at first were not at all on the elections. However as time went on, I was more and more preoccupied with it, and became swept up in the fervor with my family and friends, and was not content to be a mere observer. And like most Ukrainians, I think, I can say this about the Orange Revolution: I definitely did not expect it to happen, but certainly was not at all surprised when it did.
But back to the bus: I eventually did start talking to people. This was after I listened to the two guys behind me talk on and on about Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko, and then some more contemporary writers that I had become familiar with through my one summer at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. I just had to turn and introduce myself to them; I was sitting in front of the first contemporary Ukrainian intelligentsia I had the chance to meet! (And by that I mean, intellectual fellows born and raised and still from Ukraine and not the diaspora)! We chatted, and they seemed to like me and were patient with my butchered Ukrainian, and I liked them. We shared beer and food off and on for the duration of the trip. One of the fellows was a journalist with his own blog, and both were from L’viv.
This got the attention of the young woman sitting with her mother in the chairs across the aisle from me. I had been trying really hard not to look at her during the trip, for she phenomenally beautiful and I did not want to be lecherous. After I chatted with the fellows a bit, she turned and said to me in German (I guess she had heard me say to the fellows that I spoke some German, or maybe she thought I was diaspora Ukrainian from Germany), “It is good that you are coming back to your grandparent’s country to learn their language. Where will you be going?” I told her to Pidhajtsi, and she smiled and said that she had lived in Ternopil (70km from Pidhajtsi) as a college student, but was originally from Buczacz, a town even closer to Pidhajtsi. We chatted more, and I asked her for her number, but she said that she now lives in Poland where she is studying psychology and preparing to go to the US for a masters degree, was on her way home for a summertime visit and would be very busy. It was a polite hint—I guess I could not hide my excitement and attraction.
This gives me, however, the opportunity to comment on how this was, already, my first exposure to how contemporary Ukrainians in general think about diaspora Ukrainians. For Ana—the young woman on the bus—Ukraine is “my grandparent’s country,” and Ukrainian is “their language,” even though by now my grandparent’s have lived much more of their lives in the US than in Ukraine. What was important to Ana was that they were born and lived there for their formative years; I was not. And I would agree: Ukraine is by far more of my grandparent’s country than mine; but also, I am rather insistent on the fact that the US has become more of my grandparent’s country than Ukraine is, too. I know this is heresy for many diaspora Ukrainians, but I will state position here again (as I have elsewhere on this blog): Ukraine belongs to the people who live and make their lives happen there. For the rest of us, it is a spiritual land, not a real place of everyday existence and struggle, even if a big part of our everyday existence and struggle here in the US is geared toward her well-being (as was my grandfather’s, and my relatives’ in Germany who worked at the Ukraine desk at Radio Free Europe, or my aunt who now is the librarian at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, or my other aunt who was the courier to have carried out of Ukraine on microfiche the crucial essay entitled, “Internationalism or Russification?” during the late 1960s).
But definitely don’t get me wrong: Ukraine as a kind of spiritual homeland is extremely, extremely important and of very, very value; we are not simply Americans and my grandparents did not simply become Americans. We are Ukrainian-Americans, which is a third identity all unto itself, different from American and certainly different from what it means today to be Ukrainian (i.e., to be someone born and raised and still living in Ukraine), and we NEED Ukraine as a spiritual homeland. But we also NEED to learn how Ukrainians themselves feel about us, and my feeling is that until we in the diaspora learn to appreciate the difference between a real place where you continue to sweat and bleed, and a spiritual one, you will never be able to understand Ukrainians’ attitude toward the diaspora, and the building of bridges between our communities with Ukraine will continue to be difficult.
So with that, I can say that what finally motivated me to take my first trip to Ukraine was the legacy of grandfather’s everyday struggle for the betterment of Ukraine. That is, my grandfather had been one of the main funders for the construction of new Catholic Church in Pidhajtsi that was being christened on June 27 (which turned out to be my first full day in Ukraine). My grandfather had passed away 1 ½ years previously, and the consensus in my family was that I should be the one to go and represent him and the rest of us at the ceremony. I had been stating for almost three years that I was preparing to go to Ukraine, but one thing or another stopped me from going. I was listening to my heart. I knew this was going to be an important trip for me, and I was intent on going only when my heart said the time was ripe. When my aunt called from Germany and talked to my father and the two of them agreed to ask me to go to the ceremony, I knew the time had come. Pora! Because I waited for the right moment, I ended up arriving in Ukraine exactly 60 years to the very day that my grandparents had left their village (I learned only one week before leaving Ukraine that my father’s parents left the Pidhajtsi area on June 26, 1944), and also in time to experience the great post-Soviet awakening of the country called the Orange Revolution.
I will have to finish this sometime later. . .
So the bus finally arrived at the Polish-Ukrainian border. . .
I was in heaven from the start. It was incredible to be absorbed into a world where everything was East Slavic, in which the smell of kovbasa was everywhere, and the humor was nothing other than, well. . .nash. I still don’t know how to describe to my non-Ukrainian friends the Ukrainian sense of humor. There is a lot of playful teasing of one another that is involved, among other things. I sat in a seat just in front of the row of three seats that always occupies the very back of modern luxury buses—so this was not my first trip on a truly “Ukrainian” bus, by which I mean the to me fantastic buses from the 1960s and 70s that still run from town to town within Ukraine—and listened to two guys, speaking in Ukrainian, tease each other and others with whom they had struck up conversation in an almost nonstop but jovial fashion. They clearly knew one another well and were traveling together.
My head really was swimming. And then the next biggest thing happened: we hit the Polish border, and even though Poland is now part of the EU, there still is a significant border check. It is not an open border, mostly since the EU has put a 7-year moratorium on the movement of laborers from the new member states to the western ones, while at the same time allowing Western businesses to go East and pay lower wages, and also allowing Western capital to flood Central European markets with products made by Western European companies and farmers that get higher subsidies than do Central European ones (thus a Spanish tomato was selling cheaper in Budapest than one made in Hungary last year). So the border is still militarized, even if it is a bit easier now for Poles to go West.
That was my first glimpse of the fact that even within the EU, the West and the East (or East-Central, or more simply Central, however you may like it) still do exist in separate spheres. In other words, I had that feeling, so often remarked upon by travel writers of the past three or four hundred years or more, of clearly leaving the West and entering the East. But as one sick to death of Western, corporate-globalization driven consumer society (although I do admire Western European culture a great deal), I was certainly marking this crossing not with Bram Stokerian horror but with jubilee, and no doubt my companions on the trip were helping with that.
As soon as we got into Poland, the superhighways (the autobahns) disappeared and we were on single lanes affairs that, in the US, would be called “county roads,” and that only occasionally widened into two lanes before shrinking again into one. These main highways often divided villages in two, and when they went into towns, they went right straight to the heart, just like the old highways of America did before the invention of the highway system. The architecture changed markedly, as well as did the condition of the buildings themselves. Things were older, and what was more, more decayed. It was incredibly enchanting to me, and it still is. The grass in most places was allowed to grow much more wildly. Everything seemed more natural, less plastic, less silicon, more coppery, more earthy. There were chickens all over the roads, and geese. And already I was feeling very much more at home with the appearance of things.
We made a stop at a very modern gas station and convenience store where I could buy some pierogi and boršč (I think, but maybe it was borszcz; I don’t know when Polish uses a haček or z). But in general, wherever you are in Europe, you can actually buy pre-made and ready-to-go, and still yet very high quality food at roadside stops, in contradistinction to the abundance of crap food that is available on the road in the US.
At this stop, we could buy booze, and the first really funny thing happened on this trip: the driver walked around asking if everyone had gotten back on the bus, and thinking that all were present, he pulled the bus out of the lot. I looked out the window and saw a fellow running desperately across the field that separated the gas station and highway in a path via which he hoped to intersect the bus, if he could run fast enough. Given the belly that was jiggling up and down in front of him as he ran, he is lucky that people noticed and shouted to the driver to stop. The guys sitting behind me laughed and said things like “He’s leaving behind his last 100g [of vodka]!” and, “I saw him talking to that dark-haired, blue-eyed Pol’ka [Polish woman]—he’s having to leave his heart back there.”
I still had not yet talked to anyone on the bus. I was too shy to open my mouth. Not because I am a shy person, but because I was embarrassed by my language skills. I am one of those diaspora Ukrainians who spoke Ukrainian as a child and who spent some early years at SUM camps and Uki school on Saturdays, but who then lost much fluency growing up. To some extent, I maintained an ability to understand what was being said to me in general, and never forgot how to say a good number of things—such as, “Daj meni khroshi [Give me some money]!” as my father likes to joke. Thus one of the biggest reason I went to Ukraine was to learn to speak and understand better (and speaking and understanding are, as far as I am concerned, vastly, vastly different faculties, with the latter being far easier than the former, and this is the opinion of someone with a working knowledge not just of Ukrainian, but also of Latvian, German, and Spanish). I needed to overcome the one thing that I felt guilty about in my life, and that I felt was the biggest thing holding me back from experiencing my life to its fullest capacity: that I could not speak Ukrainian that well. There are lots of very complicated reasons why I felt that way, but one can say that I am now overjoyed with the progress I made in the eight-month period that began that day on the bus.
Of course, the other reasons for going to Ukraine were just to see and hear and smell and taste and feel it. It was to meet relatives, and although I expected to meet people with whom I would feel I had some kind of karmic connection in the past, I was not prepared for the frequency of such encounters as I ended up having, or for the intensity of the feeling when it came. Going to Ukraine was a deeply spiritual experience for me—the most important of my life. I can be moved to tears when joyful, and my eyes welled up many times during my stay in Ukraine—probably as many time in eight months as throughout my entire life. I am a passionate person. This first trip to Ukraine was the greatest passion of my life, and I cannot wait to go back this summer. I fell in love with Ukraine just how she is. This is not to say that I don’t see the need for major improvements there. But I don’t want the baby to be tossed with the bathwater. You can read on and on here in this blog to get a sense of what I mean. In part I loved Ukraine because of how much so she is not a Western or “European” country (in the newfangled, postmodern or EU sense of “European”), but also in part for how much so she is. She is truly a borderland, and should never forget that—it is the essence of her incredible culture.
And of course, I knew of the pending presidential elections and was quite keen to be in Ukraine to observe things as they developed, even if my preoccupation at first were not at all on the elections. However as time went on, I was more and more preoccupied with it, and became swept up in the fervor with my family and friends, and was not content to be a mere observer. And like most Ukrainians, I think, I can say this about the Orange Revolution: I definitely did not expect it to happen, but certainly was not at all surprised when it did.
But back to the bus: I eventually did start talking to people. This was after I listened to the two guys behind me talk on and on about Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko, and then some more contemporary writers that I had become familiar with through my one summer at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. I just had to turn and introduce myself to them; I was sitting in front of the first contemporary Ukrainian intelligentsia I had the chance to meet! (And by that I mean, intellectual fellows born and raised and still from Ukraine and not the diaspora)! We chatted, and they seemed to like me and were patient with my butchered Ukrainian, and I liked them. We shared beer and food off and on for the duration of the trip. One of the fellows was a journalist with his own blog, and both were from L’viv.
This got the attention of the young woman sitting with her mother in the chairs across the aisle from me. I had been trying really hard not to look at her during the trip, for she phenomenally beautiful and I did not want to be lecherous. After I chatted with the fellows a bit, she turned and said to me in German (I guess she had heard me say to the fellows that I spoke some German, or maybe she thought I was diaspora Ukrainian from Germany), “It is good that you are coming back to your grandparent’s country to learn their language. Where will you be going?” I told her to Pidhajtsi, and she smiled and said that she had lived in Ternopil (70km from Pidhajtsi) as a college student, but was originally from Buczacz, a town even closer to Pidhajtsi. We chatted more, and I asked her for her number, but she said that she now lives in Poland where she is studying psychology and preparing to go to the US for a masters degree, was on her way home for a summertime visit and would be very busy. It was a polite hint—I guess I could not hide my excitement and attraction.
This gives me, however, the opportunity to comment on how this was, already, my first exposure to how contemporary Ukrainians in general think about diaspora Ukrainians. For Ana—the young woman on the bus—Ukraine is “my grandparent’s country,” and Ukrainian is “their language,” even though by now my grandparent’s have lived much more of their lives in the US than in Ukraine. What was important to Ana was that they were born and lived there for their formative years; I was not. And I would agree: Ukraine is by far more of my grandparent’s country than mine; but also, I am rather insistent on the fact that the US has become more of my grandparent’s country than Ukraine is, too. I know this is heresy for many diaspora Ukrainians, but I will state position here again (as I have elsewhere on this blog): Ukraine belongs to the people who live and make their lives happen there. For the rest of us, it is a spiritual land, not a real place of everyday existence and struggle, even if a big part of our everyday existence and struggle here in the US is geared toward her well-being (as was my grandfather’s, and my relatives’ in Germany who worked at the Ukraine desk at Radio Free Europe, or my aunt who now is the librarian at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, or my other aunt who was the courier to have carried out of Ukraine on microfiche the crucial essay entitled, “Internationalism or Russification?” during the late 1960s).
But definitely don’t get me wrong: Ukraine as a kind of spiritual homeland is extremely, extremely important and of very, very value; we are not simply Americans and my grandparents did not simply become Americans. We are Ukrainian-Americans, which is a third identity all unto itself, different from American and certainly different from what it means today to be Ukrainian (i.e., to be someone born and raised and still living in Ukraine), and we NEED Ukraine as a spiritual homeland. But we also NEED to learn how Ukrainians themselves feel about us, and my feeling is that until we in the diaspora learn to appreciate the difference between a real place where you continue to sweat and bleed, and a spiritual one, you will never be able to understand Ukrainians’ attitude toward the diaspora, and the building of bridges between our communities with Ukraine will continue to be difficult.
So with that, I can say that what finally motivated me to take my first trip to Ukraine was the legacy of grandfather’s everyday struggle for the betterment of Ukraine. That is, my grandfather had been one of the main funders for the construction of new Catholic Church in Pidhajtsi that was being christened on June 27 (which turned out to be my first full day in Ukraine). My grandfather had passed away 1 ½ years previously, and the consensus in my family was that I should be the one to go and represent him and the rest of us at the ceremony. I had been stating for almost three years that I was preparing to go to Ukraine, but one thing or another stopped me from going. I was listening to my heart. I knew this was going to be an important trip for me, and I was intent on going only when my heart said the time was ripe. When my aunt called from Germany and talked to my father and the two of them agreed to ask me to go to the ceremony, I knew the time had come. Pora! Because I waited for the right moment, I ended up arriving in Ukraine exactly 60 years to the very day that my grandparents had left their village (I learned only one week before leaving Ukraine that my father’s parents left the Pidhajtsi area on June 26, 1944), and also in time to experience the great post-Soviet awakening of the country called the Orange Revolution.
I will have to finish this sometime later. . .
So the bus finally arrived at the Polish-Ukrainian border. . .
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Tymoshenko's Tribulations III: The US as Glass Box
This is supposed to be a blog about Ukraine, and it still is, but how this piece fits in with a Ukraine blog will emerge only at the end of this piece.
Every time that I leave and come back to the United States I feel like I am re-entering a glass box that is mirrored on the inside and see-thru from the outside. “Americans” stand in the middle, and while looking around within the box, and while actually trying to look outside this box, all they see, for the most part, are their own reflections everywhere. (And I am not gonna comment on how far too many Americans travel abroad and shop at American chains, eat at McDonalds, and seek out American hotels; and I also won’t comment on the expats—whether they belong to diasporas or not—who think the country they’ve adopted is only truly worthwhile and respectable if it is trying hard to become more American, or more Western in general. . .). Add to this already intense difficulty to see (and think) outside this mirrored box the complication of a powerful media machine that projects (mostly false) images of what the rest of the world and the US itself really is like onto the mirrored walls, and that many people looking at those images on the walls adopt them for their own, not knowing any better.
But the rest of the world is able to look into the US. The image of what is seen from the outside sure enough can be tinted and thus distorted as through mirrored sunglasses, but at least America can be seen from the rest of the world, while the US can’t see the world hardly at all.
The first time this image popped into my head was upon re-entering the US from Canada a week and half after the invasion of Iraq had begun. I had left for Canada the very day it began, not because I was fleeing, for I had had plans to go to Toronto before anyone knew when the invasion would begin; but I gotta say that I really enjoyed the notion of getting the hell out of here on that day! Being in Canada was like a huge breath of fresh air: the Canadian press is more of a real press with more truly intellectual and muckraking pieces available than in the US press (which is not a comment on the greatness of the Canadian press—its not that great—but on the very severe deficiencies of the press in the US). It was refreshing to be nestled in world, and not merely Canadian, opinion during those opening days of Shock and Awe (ask a so-called terrorist what s/he wants to do, and s/he may as well as tell you, “I want to put my enemy into a state of shock and awe!”) that lead to thousands of innocent people dieing in a matter of days (who holds a monopoly on terrorism? only non-State actors???). It was crushing to re-enter the world of deafening war drums and narrow-minded patriotism and, what is the worst, of worship of executive power. I felt the glass lid close as I crossed the border, where, by-the-way, I was searched for the first time ever crossing the US-Canadian border.
But what got me going on all of this again just now? Well, the image of the US as this glass box usually pops into my head when I come into contact with people who think that outside the West, the world is populated by barbarous, uncivilized nations (or once again, when I talk to people for whom the nations of the world are only worthwhile places so long as they are seeking to join the Western clubs). More frequently, however, it comes up when I talk to people who think that the media in the US is governed by a liberal, if not outright left-wing, conspiracy. It also comes up when I talk to people who think that Anne Coulture has a point. On that note, it also comes up in my mind while talking with people who conflate social democracy or populism or Keynesianism or FDRism with socialism (which is nearly axiomatic for, or has become far too typical of, political discourse in the US). I already wrote about the ridiculousness of conflating the two in my last piece, and repeat here that conflating social democracy with socialism is like saying, hyperbolically, that Bush is a Nazi, and really meaning it (or that George Soros is a Communist, and really meaning it). Or here’s another simile: it is like saying that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela—who is a democratically elected populist, or FDR liberal, or Welfare-statist, or social democrat—is the equivalent of Fidel Castro, who is a dictator with a policy of intolerance (especially toward gays) and a megalomaniac.
Specifically, what got me thinking about this today is a snippet I just read in a new book I just picked up. I was at my non-favorite bookstore Barnes and Nobles perusing all the right-wing books, which I do often. One should always read one’s opposition, and I also spend lots of time listening to right-wing talk radio and talking with right-wingers, some of whom are friends and family. So at Barnes, I sometimes buy the books, but usually will just sit for an hour or two at the store reading. The book that caught my attention today had this title: The Right Nation. I thought to myself, once again, “Damn them and their ancestors for having had historically (and thus accidentally) landed on the right-hand side of the hall of the French parliament!” since I am getting sick to my stomach from the overabundance these days of dim-witted comments about being “on the right side,” etc. But when I peered into the book, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was written by two British and left-wing authors (John Micklewhait and Adrian Woolridge) who are peering into the US from the other side of the glass. I opened randomly to p. 359 and read the following passage, which in general is about how narrow (and to the right) the political spectrum is in the US:
“The man who got left-wing America on the march [for the 2004 election] held views on all sorts of subjects that would have disqualified him from left-of-center politics in Europe. He was by European standards a firm supporter of Israel. He opposed the Kyoto Protocol. He supported the intervention in Liberia, and he mocked Bush for not being tough enough on Saudi Arabia. Indeed, [Howard] Dean said that thirty years ago, he would have been an Eisenhower Republican. ‘It’s kind of a sad commentary that I’m the most progressive candidate running, our here talking about a balanced budget and a health care system run by the private sector,’ he told the New York Times. ‘I was a triangulator before Clinton was a triangulator. In my soul, I’m a moderate.’ A young Swedish Deaniac who worked for Dean in Iowa protested that, back home in Sweden, his candidate would be regarded as a ‘middle-of-the-road conservative.’”
This is a great quote for pointing out two things: First, that the status quo in the US is already to the right (only a nation with an already right-wing status quo can have people complaining that the kind of media that the US has is the result of left-wing control; what these people really want is a farther-right status quo and an end to pluralism); but the glass-box effect makes this really hard for many in the US to see. Second, this is a great quote for warning the Left of its own problems with the glass-box effect: Dean might have been a rallying point, but he was far—quite, in my opinion—from perfect, and was and remains far from embodying a truly humane politics. Not to say that one should not have rallied behind him (I eventually did): we do need to try hard to level the playing field once again.
But one other thing: Dean did get something quite wrong in the quotes from him above. There were more progressive people in the running for the Democratic ticket, people who tried and who continue to try to re-ignite the old, populist, radical farmer-laborer flame of the DFL. The Clinton revolution within the DFL—the conversion of the Democratic Party into a cheap copy of the Republicans—needs to be reversed.
And to conclude with Ukraine: populism is still much more alive in Ukraine than in the US, and I hope that the Baby (i.e., represented by Julia Tymoshenko and her government) does not get tossed out with the dirty bathwater (i.e., the oligarchy) in what would then turn out to be a NeoLiberal Orange Revolution (which if Tymoshenko—or Yushchenko—listens to her Western and Kyiv Post critics, it will turn out to be). I hope that Tymoshenko figures out what kind of populism works for Ukraine, and successfully sorts through and gets rid of what is just unnecessary bureaucracy, for I assert here again that it is far too simplistic to say that social democracy and a suffocating bureaucracy are intimately, irreversibly connected. If Tymoshenko’s government doesn’t get it right, the blind ideologues of the unregulated free-market system will fry them, and this will bode very, very poorly for the future of Eurasia. There is much more pressure on her government than one would think.
Every time that I leave and come back to the United States I feel like I am re-entering a glass box that is mirrored on the inside and see-thru from the outside. “Americans” stand in the middle, and while looking around within the box, and while actually trying to look outside this box, all they see, for the most part, are their own reflections everywhere. (And I am not gonna comment on how far too many Americans travel abroad and shop at American chains, eat at McDonalds, and seek out American hotels; and I also won’t comment on the expats—whether they belong to diasporas or not—who think the country they’ve adopted is only truly worthwhile and respectable if it is trying hard to become more American, or more Western in general. . .). Add to this already intense difficulty to see (and think) outside this mirrored box the complication of a powerful media machine that projects (mostly false) images of what the rest of the world and the US itself really is like onto the mirrored walls, and that many people looking at those images on the walls adopt them for their own, not knowing any better.
But the rest of the world is able to look into the US. The image of what is seen from the outside sure enough can be tinted and thus distorted as through mirrored sunglasses, but at least America can be seen from the rest of the world, while the US can’t see the world hardly at all.
The first time this image popped into my head was upon re-entering the US from Canada a week and half after the invasion of Iraq had begun. I had left for Canada the very day it began, not because I was fleeing, for I had had plans to go to Toronto before anyone knew when the invasion would begin; but I gotta say that I really enjoyed the notion of getting the hell out of here on that day! Being in Canada was like a huge breath of fresh air: the Canadian press is more of a real press with more truly intellectual and muckraking pieces available than in the US press (which is not a comment on the greatness of the Canadian press—its not that great—but on the very severe deficiencies of the press in the US). It was refreshing to be nestled in world, and not merely Canadian, opinion during those opening days of Shock and Awe (ask a so-called terrorist what s/he wants to do, and s/he may as well as tell you, “I want to put my enemy into a state of shock and awe!”) that lead to thousands of innocent people dieing in a matter of days (who holds a monopoly on terrorism? only non-State actors???). It was crushing to re-enter the world of deafening war drums and narrow-minded patriotism and, what is the worst, of worship of executive power. I felt the glass lid close as I crossed the border, where, by-the-way, I was searched for the first time ever crossing the US-Canadian border.
But what got me going on all of this again just now? Well, the image of the US as this glass box usually pops into my head when I come into contact with people who think that outside the West, the world is populated by barbarous, uncivilized nations (or once again, when I talk to people for whom the nations of the world are only worthwhile places so long as they are seeking to join the Western clubs). More frequently, however, it comes up when I talk to people who think that the media in the US is governed by a liberal, if not outright left-wing, conspiracy. It also comes up when I talk to people who think that Anne Coulture has a point. On that note, it also comes up in my mind while talking with people who conflate social democracy or populism or Keynesianism or FDRism with socialism (which is nearly axiomatic for, or has become far too typical of, political discourse in the US). I already wrote about the ridiculousness of conflating the two in my last piece, and repeat here that conflating social democracy with socialism is like saying, hyperbolically, that Bush is a Nazi, and really meaning it (or that George Soros is a Communist, and really meaning it). Or here’s another simile: it is like saying that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela—who is a democratically elected populist, or FDR liberal, or Welfare-statist, or social democrat—is the equivalent of Fidel Castro, who is a dictator with a policy of intolerance (especially toward gays) and a megalomaniac.
Specifically, what got me thinking about this today is a snippet I just read in a new book I just picked up. I was at my non-favorite bookstore Barnes and Nobles perusing all the right-wing books, which I do often. One should always read one’s opposition, and I also spend lots of time listening to right-wing talk radio and talking with right-wingers, some of whom are friends and family. So at Barnes, I sometimes buy the books, but usually will just sit for an hour or two at the store reading. The book that caught my attention today had this title: The Right Nation. I thought to myself, once again, “Damn them and their ancestors for having had historically (and thus accidentally) landed on the right-hand side of the hall of the French parliament!” since I am getting sick to my stomach from the overabundance these days of dim-witted comments about being “on the right side,” etc. But when I peered into the book, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was written by two British and left-wing authors (John Micklewhait and Adrian Woolridge) who are peering into the US from the other side of the glass. I opened randomly to p. 359 and read the following passage, which in general is about how narrow (and to the right) the political spectrum is in the US:
“The man who got left-wing America on the march [for the 2004 election] held views on all sorts of subjects that would have disqualified him from left-of-center politics in Europe. He was by European standards a firm supporter of Israel. He opposed the Kyoto Protocol. He supported the intervention in Liberia, and he mocked Bush for not being tough enough on Saudi Arabia. Indeed, [Howard] Dean said that thirty years ago, he would have been an Eisenhower Republican. ‘It’s kind of a sad commentary that I’m the most progressive candidate running, our here talking about a balanced budget and a health care system run by the private sector,’ he told the New York Times. ‘I was a triangulator before Clinton was a triangulator. In my soul, I’m a moderate.’ A young Swedish Deaniac who worked for Dean in Iowa protested that, back home in Sweden, his candidate would be regarded as a ‘middle-of-the-road conservative.’”
This is a great quote for pointing out two things: First, that the status quo in the US is already to the right (only a nation with an already right-wing status quo can have people complaining that the kind of media that the US has is the result of left-wing control; what these people really want is a farther-right status quo and an end to pluralism); but the glass-box effect makes this really hard for many in the US to see. Second, this is a great quote for warning the Left of its own problems with the glass-box effect: Dean might have been a rallying point, but he was far—quite, in my opinion—from perfect, and was and remains far from embodying a truly humane politics. Not to say that one should not have rallied behind him (I eventually did): we do need to try hard to level the playing field once again.
But one other thing: Dean did get something quite wrong in the quotes from him above. There were more progressive people in the running for the Democratic ticket, people who tried and who continue to try to re-ignite the old, populist, radical farmer-laborer flame of the DFL. The Clinton revolution within the DFL—the conversion of the Democratic Party into a cheap copy of the Republicans—needs to be reversed.
And to conclude with Ukraine: populism is still much more alive in Ukraine than in the US, and I hope that the Baby (i.e., represented by Julia Tymoshenko and her government) does not get tossed out with the dirty bathwater (i.e., the oligarchy) in what would then turn out to be a NeoLiberal Orange Revolution (which if Tymoshenko—or Yushchenko—listens to her Western and Kyiv Post critics, it will turn out to be). I hope that Tymoshenko figures out what kind of populism works for Ukraine, and successfully sorts through and gets rid of what is just unnecessary bureaucracy, for I assert here again that it is far too simplistic to say that social democracy and a suffocating bureaucracy are intimately, irreversibly connected. If Tymoshenko’s government doesn’t get it right, the blind ideologues of the unregulated free-market system will fry them, and this will bode very, very poorly for the future of Eurasia. There is much more pressure on her government than one would think.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
More on Tymoshenko’s Tribulations and the Issue of so-called Populism
In the talk of globalization and development, populism has become as dirty a word as liberalism has in the United States, and the pundits working to convince others they are dirty words are the same: either the Thomas Friedman liberals or right-wing theorists of globalization. What is the matter with populism? It ain’t socialism, people. . .
There is far too much hyperbole, too much exaggeration, going on. Socialism was a very specific thing. The Kyiv Post has published some really outrageous op-eds about the so-called populism of Tymoshenko’s government that follow along the same lines as Anders Asland’s now infamous Washington Post piece, each of which are full of this kind of sophistic hyperbole and conflation of two things that are not alike (however, I do want to note here that I often very much so agree with Kyiv Post editorials, and find the Post an excellent, excellent source of critical commentary on contemporary Ukraine: they at the Post are doing in Ukraine what real news media should be doing everywhere, i.e., voicing conscience and dissent, and the US media could learn a lot from them). Price-controls on oil do not take Ukraine straight back to socialism. Socialism was a specific thing, involving state ownership and regulation of just about everything. Ukraine is far from those days. In the course of a recent argument with a far right-winger, I was told that George Soros is a communist. That is absurd. Communists were very specific people, with specific principles, and Soros is far from holding any of them. I am not saying that Soros’s position is the same as Tymoshenko’s, but am making this parallel: Tymoshenko is no more leading Ukraine down a road back to Soviet-era socialism than Soros is a communist (thus the Kyiv Post publisher’s piece entitled “A Revolution? We’re still waiting. . .” is quite extreme in this case). All of these statements are just as absurd as when someone on the left waxes that Bush is the equal of Hitler, and that the presently neo-conservative dominated Republican Party is the new Nazi Party. Those statements too are gross exaggerations (although a comparison between the neo-conservative controlled Republican Party of today to the beliefs of Mussolini’s Fascist Party is of a correct order of comparison, to my mind). Amnesty International’s (AI) statement that GITMO is the “gulag of our time,” I must admit, also was hyperbole (exaggeration)—but one MUST note that the statement “of our times” indicates that they did not mean to say that GITMO is precisely like the gulag. The rhetoric “of our times” leaves open the possibility that the two are not quite the same, and if one goes on to read the report, one will see that the people of AI are not that stupid: thus those on the right who are trying to make them say that GITMO and the gulag were exactly the same are engaging in their own sophism (more below). The people of AI were just trying to grab attention with that obviously rhetorical comment. Such rhetorical phrases usually are all about GRABBING OUR ATTENTION. You have to read to see what an author really means by such a hyperbolic statement as that. But is that what the Kyiv Post and Anders Asland and my right-wing interlocutor were all simply trying to do with their exaggerations?
No. I do think that the Post 's publisher and Asland are convinced that populism is just a road back to socialism (and the person with whom I was arguing refused to back down on his statement that Soros is a commie; and oh, Michael Moore, too, is a commie according to this fellow. . .). All of these commentators are Americans, and America’s political culture is acutely driven by black and white worldviews and black and white solutions.
In this connection, read this quote from an excellent piece posted on maidan.org (there is a link below to the whole piece, which is a MUST read):
"Tymoshenko’s greatest 'crime', for which she is now being castigated by economic hit men, is that she sees no crime in retaining control and therefore profits from lucrative state enterprises to benefit common Ukrainian people instead of private buyers who care nothing whatsoever for Ukraine or Ukrainians. Aslund counters with name-calling: 'state capitalism', 'populist', and worst of all at least in US vernacular, 'socialist.' 'Socialist' is a bad word in US politics, but not so bad in Europe – where Ukraine is heading, not to the US. He used those words in a US publication knowing very well the nasty impact they would have. This, in a country where at least one in six people live in poverty, and probably closer to one in four – if honest poverty statistics ever come to the fore."
The US system and media-driven propaganda machine completely eliminates any real or complex representation of the true diversity of political ideas, opinions, etc., and right wingers and left wingers are all equally as guilty for making polarizing and hyperbolic statements and judgments. You are populist? You Commie! You believe in Welfare? You're a Socialist! You support the war in Iraq? You Nazi! And on and on. . .
But as for the attack on populism, these American commentators, as well as the worldwide class of stooges of neoliberal (free-market driven) development completely forget that the US and the nations of the EU have only arrived at their present state of prosperity through lengthy periods of Keynesian social-democratic, State-interventionist economic policies, or what I would call populism. Such policies are neither/nor: neither complete neoliberal or laissez-faire capitalism nor State socialism, but a third way, a compromise in-between that Europe used to have before it began to dismantle it's third way between capitalism and socialism, only to keep up with the US-and-neoliberal driven globalization and definitions of what is efficient: as far as I am concerned, the American and neoliberal notion of efficiency boils down to everyone giving up their good lives and vacation time to spend anywhere from 60-80 hours a week working and only two weeks on vacation a year, while giving up all public spaces and most of civil society, especially the media, to privatization in the hands of big corporations. But I will write a more detailed piece critiquing the notion that the US is “efficient” in the future. . .(the US maybe efficient from a numbers and economic viewpoint, but it certainly is not from a human or humanist one, let alone ecological one. . .)
Populism or social democracy increasingly is the demand being put forth by the people or multitude of the non-Western world, and Ukraine is part of that world. People in nations across the globe who live with high poverty and unemployment, often with deplorable work and environmental conditions, low wages, no benefits such as adequate healthcare and access to higher education, etc., are all demanding populist, New Deal type policies to get them out of their depression (both economic as well as pyschological, I would add). For they know that trickle-down, laissez-faire economics does not work: they have experienced decades of post-colonial development (what we today call neoliberalism), and have mostly witnessed the gap between the rich and the poor getting wider and wider. That is what is “progressive” about the neoliberal economy: rising poverty. The stage is set for a showdown on a global scale between capital and labor of the likes that Europe and the US went through in the late 19th to early 20th century.
A populist (i.e., New Deal) government (not State socialist) is precisely what Ukraine needs right now, and is what most Ukrainians seem to want.
Here is some stuff I wrote a couple weeks ago, but never posted, along these same lines:
What’s up with Yushchenko’s critique and partial retraction of his critique of PM Tymoshenko? Are these two just playing good cop-bad cop? And how can one deny that there is a Russian oil cartel controlling prices in Ukraine? When 80% of the industry is controlled by Russian conglomerates, how can one say that market forces set prices; see this article by Vladimir Socor at Eurasian Daily Monitor:
"Kyiv Takes Emergency Steps to Deal with Fuel Crisis"
Tymoshenko took artificial measures to combat an artificial “market” price. Tymoshenko may have gotten more than she bargained for by setting prices the way she did, but only in the sense that, well. . .did she really not expect some kind of Russian retaliation such as a cut-back in production? But then this makes me wonder, are Ukrainians really willing to do what it will take to pull their country out of a sphere of Russian domination? Or is this necessary? Can Ukrainians afford to take on this problem in the typically radical way of Tymoshenko?
Energy has always been independent Ukraine’s major Achilles heal vis-à-vis Russia. Tymoshenko herself knows this; she in the past has said that one of the major eye-opening events of her life was when she entered the government and realized how deep the corruption in the energy sector really was, and how the problems of the energy sector were really compromising Ukraine’s sovereignty vis-à-vis Russia. She certainly for a while was part of the problem—which she doesn’t ever admit, of course—but if you read between the lines of what she says about going to the opposition once she entered the government, it seems she’s admitting that she had a change of fate, and I don’t think that there is any reason not to believe her. She went after her job of cleaning up corruption in the energy sector as deputy PM to Yushchenko with gusto, for which she is hated/appreciated by the Russian government, actually (to see what I mean, read below: I will reproduce at the bottom of this a piece I did some months ago on my list-serve about who I think Tymoshenko really is and was. . .)
So, the problem of Ukraine’s energy dependence on Russia is obvious. But perhaps there need be another, less militant approach. Perhaps all of this is just a repeat of what happened during the course of the Orange Revolution, with Tymoshenko once again being the attack dog who gets us all fired up, while Yushchenko is once again being the handler urging some restraint. He did prove a very shrewd negotiator in this regard during the OR, and perhaps that is the game being played again: Tymoshenko is very good at putting fear in the hearts of opponents, and then Yushchenko steps in to take advantage of their fear at the negotiating table?
I sure hope so.
But then on to the Op-Eds by Anders Aslund and by Kyiv Post’s publisher blasting Tymoshenko’s populism:
First the articles:
Washington Post:
"Betraying a Revolution"
Kyiv Post:
“Has the Orange Revolution Gone Red?”
“A Revolution? We’re Still Waiting. . .”
“Ukraine doesn’t need its own Khodorkovsky”
It seems to me that many average Ukrainians, many of whom can get by as subsistence farmers with occasional wage labor, are not all that concerned about growth rates for Western investors. They want to see social programs started up to help them out of poverty. They want the infrastructure improved. They want to see some of the wealth ferried away by the oligarchs returned and invested into Ukraine—i.e., reprivatization. They’ve got the wealth internally to see to it that these things will happen—the wealth just needs to be redistributed. So is Ukraine’s post-OR economy all about attracting foreign investors and/or making them comfy in the course of reprivatizations, or is it about popular demands? Tymoshenko’s populist agenda has widespread support in Ukraine. Of course, the emphasis should be neither—there needs be balance. But these articles place the emphasis only on making a comfortable situation for foreign investment, as though neoliberal economics works in the end to improve the daily lives of people because of that magical (but ultimately mythical) trickle-down effect, for trickle-down economics is just a rich man’s religion designed to soothe the wealthier from feeling the the guilt of an economy really engineered (i.e., deregulated) for the sake of top-up accumulation. Of course American thinkers on economics in general are going to whine that populist policies hurt the economy, and that Ukrainians should just forget about such expensive endeavors and get on with making Ukraine a safe place for investment—well, they are working on that, too; but it is at least that Tymoshenko is no fan of “austerity measures” and “restructuring,” having had once stated that, “I am not a free-market ideologue,” which means she does not intend to lead a government that works hard to improve the country’s means of production without also giving her nation’s people guarantees for better wages, living and working conditions, healthcare, etc., all of the things that the IMF and World Bank consider to be too much “fat.” So what if investors still feel a little jittery about Ukraine right now? There is no way they are going to just turn a complete blind eye on Ukraine or any part of Eurasia: there is still too much potential there for them. They will wait. In the meantime, re-privatize! Keep the social democratic promises of the OR!
But also work on reducing the bureaucracy, which is very much at the chore of curtailing the corruption: close the bureaucratic loopholes leading toward corruption, and the Western critics need to keep in mind that social welfare states do not necessarily produce systems with redundant and inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies: the EU and Scandinavian and certain South American nations are doing a fine job with a streamlined Welfare State without the USSR’s inefficiency. Oh yeah, we’re back to the point made above, that social democracy is NOT THE SAME AS STATE SOCIALISM!!!!
Yushchenko is working on keeping investors calm, while Tymoshenko is working on helping her people. They will strike a balance, I hope—if Yushchenko doesn’t fire her (which I don’t think is likely). What I am wondering now is whether this is an indication of how the US machinery is going to in the future deal with Eurasian post-revolution populists and social democrats that the US has helped bring to power in its power struggle with Russia (over Central Asian energy and labor reserves)? Discredit them and work to have them removed in favor of those with more neoliberal policies?
Here’s a link to a great article that made similar points to mine above and defended Yulia’s track record against the Posts’ articles; it is a MUST READ:
http://blog.kievukraine.info/2005/05/really-betraying-revolution.html
Then for two perhaps more balanced accounts than mine and the one above, see:
http://blog.kievukraine.info/2005/05/fuel-crisis-drags-yushchenko-back-into.html
from Taras Kuzio:
I’ll post it soon as I find the link. . .
And then here is some evidence that much good is happening:
http://blog.kievukraine.info/2005/06/foreign-funds-moving-to-ukraine.html
In conclusion, we should no longer be talking about pure liberal capitalism versus socialism. Has the lesson not yet been learned that markets are never value nor rule-free, but rather, that they can be regulated for one or the other purpose; that that magical-mythical hand can serve either top-up accumulation or more equitable redistribution?
There is far too much hyperbole, too much exaggeration, going on. Socialism was a very specific thing. The Kyiv Post has published some really outrageous op-eds about the so-called populism of Tymoshenko’s government that follow along the same lines as Anders Asland’s now infamous Washington Post piece, each of which are full of this kind of sophistic hyperbole and conflation of two things that are not alike (however, I do want to note here that I often very much so agree with Kyiv Post editorials, and find the Post an excellent, excellent source of critical commentary on contemporary Ukraine: they at the Post are doing in Ukraine what real news media should be doing everywhere, i.e., voicing conscience and dissent, and the US media could learn a lot from them). Price-controls on oil do not take Ukraine straight back to socialism. Socialism was a specific thing, involving state ownership and regulation of just about everything. Ukraine is far from those days. In the course of a recent argument with a far right-winger, I was told that George Soros is a communist. That is absurd. Communists were very specific people, with specific principles, and Soros is far from holding any of them. I am not saying that Soros’s position is the same as Tymoshenko’s, but am making this parallel: Tymoshenko is no more leading Ukraine down a road back to Soviet-era socialism than Soros is a communist (thus the Kyiv Post publisher’s piece entitled “A Revolution? We’re still waiting. . .” is quite extreme in this case). All of these statements are just as absurd as when someone on the left waxes that Bush is the equal of Hitler, and that the presently neo-conservative dominated Republican Party is the new Nazi Party. Those statements too are gross exaggerations (although a comparison between the neo-conservative controlled Republican Party of today to the beliefs of Mussolini’s Fascist Party is of a correct order of comparison, to my mind). Amnesty International’s (AI) statement that GITMO is the “gulag of our time,” I must admit, also was hyperbole (exaggeration)—but one MUST note that the statement “of our times” indicates that they did not mean to say that GITMO is precisely like the gulag. The rhetoric “of our times” leaves open the possibility that the two are not quite the same, and if one goes on to read the report, one will see that the people of AI are not that stupid: thus those on the right who are trying to make them say that GITMO and the gulag were exactly the same are engaging in their own sophism (more below). The people of AI were just trying to grab attention with that obviously rhetorical comment. Such rhetorical phrases usually are all about GRABBING OUR ATTENTION. You have to read to see what an author really means by such a hyperbolic statement as that. But is that what the Kyiv Post and Anders Asland and my right-wing interlocutor were all simply trying to do with their exaggerations?
No. I do think that the Post 's publisher and Asland are convinced that populism is just a road back to socialism (and the person with whom I was arguing refused to back down on his statement that Soros is a commie; and oh, Michael Moore, too, is a commie according to this fellow. . .). All of these commentators are Americans, and America’s political culture is acutely driven by black and white worldviews and black and white solutions.
In this connection, read this quote from an excellent piece posted on maidan.org (there is a link below to the whole piece, which is a MUST read):
"Tymoshenko’s greatest 'crime', for which she is now being castigated by economic hit men, is that she sees no crime in retaining control and therefore profits from lucrative state enterprises to benefit common Ukrainian people instead of private buyers who care nothing whatsoever for Ukraine or Ukrainians. Aslund counters with name-calling: 'state capitalism', 'populist', and worst of all at least in US vernacular, 'socialist.' 'Socialist' is a bad word in US politics, but not so bad in Europe – where Ukraine is heading, not to the US. He used those words in a US publication knowing very well the nasty impact they would have. This, in a country where at least one in six people live in poverty, and probably closer to one in four – if honest poverty statistics ever come to the fore."
The US system and media-driven propaganda machine completely eliminates any real or complex representation of the true diversity of political ideas, opinions, etc., and right wingers and left wingers are all equally as guilty for making polarizing and hyperbolic statements and judgments. You are populist? You Commie! You believe in Welfare? You're a Socialist! You support the war in Iraq? You Nazi! And on and on. . .
But as for the attack on populism, these American commentators, as well as the worldwide class of stooges of neoliberal (free-market driven) development completely forget that the US and the nations of the EU have only arrived at their present state of prosperity through lengthy periods of Keynesian social-democratic, State-interventionist economic policies, or what I would call populism. Such policies are neither/nor: neither complete neoliberal or laissez-faire capitalism nor State socialism, but a third way, a compromise in-between that Europe used to have before it began to dismantle it's third way between capitalism and socialism, only to keep up with the US-and-neoliberal driven globalization and definitions of what is efficient: as far as I am concerned, the American and neoliberal notion of efficiency boils down to everyone giving up their good lives and vacation time to spend anywhere from 60-80 hours a week working and only two weeks on vacation a year, while giving up all public spaces and most of civil society, especially the media, to privatization in the hands of big corporations. But I will write a more detailed piece critiquing the notion that the US is “efficient” in the future. . .(the US maybe efficient from a numbers and economic viewpoint, but it certainly is not from a human or humanist one, let alone ecological one. . .)
Populism or social democracy increasingly is the demand being put forth by the people or multitude of the non-Western world, and Ukraine is part of that world. People in nations across the globe who live with high poverty and unemployment, often with deplorable work and environmental conditions, low wages, no benefits such as adequate healthcare and access to higher education, etc., are all demanding populist, New Deal type policies to get them out of their depression (both economic as well as pyschological, I would add). For they know that trickle-down, laissez-faire economics does not work: they have experienced decades of post-colonial development (what we today call neoliberalism), and have mostly witnessed the gap between the rich and the poor getting wider and wider. That is what is “progressive” about the neoliberal economy: rising poverty. The stage is set for a showdown on a global scale between capital and labor of the likes that Europe and the US went through in the late 19th to early 20th century.
A populist (i.e., New Deal) government (not State socialist) is precisely what Ukraine needs right now, and is what most Ukrainians seem to want.
Here is some stuff I wrote a couple weeks ago, but never posted, along these same lines:
What’s up with Yushchenko’s critique and partial retraction of his critique of PM Tymoshenko? Are these two just playing good cop-bad cop? And how can one deny that there is a Russian oil cartel controlling prices in Ukraine? When 80% of the industry is controlled by Russian conglomerates, how can one say that market forces set prices; see this article by Vladimir Socor at Eurasian Daily Monitor:
"Kyiv Takes Emergency Steps to Deal with Fuel Crisis"
Tymoshenko took artificial measures to combat an artificial “market” price. Tymoshenko may have gotten more than she bargained for by setting prices the way she did, but only in the sense that, well. . .did she really not expect some kind of Russian retaliation such as a cut-back in production? But then this makes me wonder, are Ukrainians really willing to do what it will take to pull their country out of a sphere of Russian domination? Or is this necessary? Can Ukrainians afford to take on this problem in the typically radical way of Tymoshenko?
Energy has always been independent Ukraine’s major Achilles heal vis-à-vis Russia. Tymoshenko herself knows this; she in the past has said that one of the major eye-opening events of her life was when she entered the government and realized how deep the corruption in the energy sector really was, and how the problems of the energy sector were really compromising Ukraine’s sovereignty vis-à-vis Russia. She certainly for a while was part of the problem—which she doesn’t ever admit, of course—but if you read between the lines of what she says about going to the opposition once she entered the government, it seems she’s admitting that she had a change of fate, and I don’t think that there is any reason not to believe her. She went after her job of cleaning up corruption in the energy sector as deputy PM to Yushchenko with gusto, for which she is hated/appreciated by the Russian government, actually (to see what I mean, read below: I will reproduce at the bottom of this a piece I did some months ago on my list-serve about who I think Tymoshenko really is and was. . .)
So, the problem of Ukraine’s energy dependence on Russia is obvious. But perhaps there need be another, less militant approach. Perhaps all of this is just a repeat of what happened during the course of the Orange Revolution, with Tymoshenko once again being the attack dog who gets us all fired up, while Yushchenko is once again being the handler urging some restraint. He did prove a very shrewd negotiator in this regard during the OR, and perhaps that is the game being played again: Tymoshenko is very good at putting fear in the hearts of opponents, and then Yushchenko steps in to take advantage of their fear at the negotiating table?
I sure hope so.
But then on to the Op-Eds by Anders Aslund and by Kyiv Post’s publisher blasting Tymoshenko’s populism:
First the articles:
Washington Post:
"Betraying a Revolution"
Kyiv Post:
“Has the Orange Revolution Gone Red?”
“A Revolution? We’re Still Waiting. . .”
“Ukraine doesn’t need its own Khodorkovsky”
It seems to me that many average Ukrainians, many of whom can get by as subsistence farmers with occasional wage labor, are not all that concerned about growth rates for Western investors. They want to see social programs started up to help them out of poverty. They want the infrastructure improved. They want to see some of the wealth ferried away by the oligarchs returned and invested into Ukraine—i.e., reprivatization. They’ve got the wealth internally to see to it that these things will happen—the wealth just needs to be redistributed. So is Ukraine’s post-OR economy all about attracting foreign investors and/or making them comfy in the course of reprivatizations, or is it about popular demands? Tymoshenko’s populist agenda has widespread support in Ukraine. Of course, the emphasis should be neither—there needs be balance. But these articles place the emphasis only on making a comfortable situation for foreign investment, as though neoliberal economics works in the end to improve the daily lives of people because of that magical (but ultimately mythical) trickle-down effect, for trickle-down economics is just a rich man’s religion designed to soothe the wealthier from feeling the the guilt of an economy really engineered (i.e., deregulated) for the sake of top-up accumulation. Of course American thinkers on economics in general are going to whine that populist policies hurt the economy, and that Ukrainians should just forget about such expensive endeavors and get on with making Ukraine a safe place for investment—well, they are working on that, too; but it is at least that Tymoshenko is no fan of “austerity measures” and “restructuring,” having had once stated that, “I am not a free-market ideologue,” which means she does not intend to lead a government that works hard to improve the country’s means of production without also giving her nation’s people guarantees for better wages, living and working conditions, healthcare, etc., all of the things that the IMF and World Bank consider to be too much “fat.” So what if investors still feel a little jittery about Ukraine right now? There is no way they are going to just turn a complete blind eye on Ukraine or any part of Eurasia: there is still too much potential there for them. They will wait. In the meantime, re-privatize! Keep the social democratic promises of the OR!
But also work on reducing the bureaucracy, which is very much at the chore of curtailing the corruption: close the bureaucratic loopholes leading toward corruption, and the Western critics need to keep in mind that social welfare states do not necessarily produce systems with redundant and inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies: the EU and Scandinavian and certain South American nations are doing a fine job with a streamlined Welfare State without the USSR’s inefficiency. Oh yeah, we’re back to the point made above, that social democracy is NOT THE SAME AS STATE SOCIALISM!!!!
Yushchenko is working on keeping investors calm, while Tymoshenko is working on helping her people. They will strike a balance, I hope—if Yushchenko doesn’t fire her (which I don’t think is likely). What I am wondering now is whether this is an indication of how the US machinery is going to in the future deal with Eurasian post-revolution populists and social democrats that the US has helped bring to power in its power struggle with Russia (over Central Asian energy and labor reserves)? Discredit them and work to have them removed in favor of those with more neoliberal policies?
Here’s a link to a great article that made similar points to mine above and defended Yulia’s track record against the Posts’ articles; it is a MUST READ:
http://blog.kievukraine.info/2005/05/really-betraying-revolution.html
Then for two perhaps more balanced accounts than mine and the one above, see:
http://blog.kievukraine.info/2005/05/fuel-crisis-drags-yushchenko-back-into.html
from Taras Kuzio:
I’ll post it soon as I find the link. . .
And then here is some evidence that much good is happening:
http://blog.kievukraine.info/2005/06/foreign-funds-moving-to-ukraine.html
In conclusion, we should no longer be talking about pure liberal capitalism versus socialism. Has the lesson not yet been learned that markets are never value nor rule-free, but rather, that they can be regulated for one or the other purpose; that that magical-mythical hand can serve either top-up accumulation or more equitable redistribution?
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Photo: Yulia Tymoshenko
Tymoshenko in front of the Presidental Administration building in Kyiv, Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004.
Just thought this photo went well with the piece below. . .
On Putin's East-West Germany Comment, Tymoshenko's Tribulations, and Comparisons to Chavez's Venezuela
Greetings All,
The following thought below occured to me earlier today, and could be used as a talking point for explaining the difference between the Russian and Ukrainain languages and cultures, and for explaining why Ukrainians are so sensitive about not conflating the two as one, and why it is NOT nationalistic of them to be so thusly sensitive:
UKRAINE AND RUSSIA ARE NOT LIKE EAST AND WEST GERMANY BUT ARE LIKE THE DUTCH AND THE DEUTSCH; NOT BROTHERS BUT COUSINS.
Russian talk about brotherly togetherness is as delusional as was the German insistence on forging a singular great German family. The Germans have learned to give up their imperialist delusions over their Germanic cousins; when will a government come to power in Moscow that respects the independence of Russia's East Slav cousins? When will Russia actively decolonize its mentality as the Germans have more or less done since WWII? The Putin regime shows no sign or will of taking Russia down that path. "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe. . ."
But to shift gears a little to address a related topic, I listened to an interview with an editor of the Nation (on www.democracynow.org; the interview was done back in February), a so-called Russia expert, who labelled Yulia Tymoshenko anti-Russian, which is code for "nationalist." Argh. As far as I am concerned, she is strongly demanding that Russia give up its imperial ambitions and imperial hubris and treat Ukraine as an equal. If that is nationalism, so be it--but it is not an anti-Russian stance. She is not against the Russian language, speaks it as her first language, is for the creation of the Single Economic Space with Russia (in a real sense and with an eye to fair trade and not just free trade, while what the Russian government thus far is really talking about is a mere customs union that will heavily benefit and favor Russia, of course; a NAFTA for Eurasia).
SO WHY do Eastern Europeans and Central Asians who stand up to the 800 lb. guerilla of the region so frequently get labelled "nationalist" by people on both the right and the left in the West?? That's a major topic for discussion that could have the following title (and I am actually working on a piece with this name): "The Post Soviet World: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it."
The Point therefore being:
If Yulia Tymoshenko was named Julia Rodriguez and was taking such a populist stance in Mexico as she is in Ukraine; and was standing up to American machinations in Mexico as she is standing up to Russian machinations in Ukraine; and was demanding more equality in relations between the US and Mexico as she is demanding there be between Ukraine and Russia; she would be praised by the left in the West (and demonized by the right)--much like how Hugo Chavez is at present.
For those who don't know, Hugo Chavez is, contrary to what some other Ukraine bloggers have been writing (www.publiuspundit.com), not a dictator but a popularly elected president of Venezuela who continues to enjoy widespread support, and who came to power backed by an anti-oligarchy movement that promised to stand up against the regional 800 lb. guerrila--i.e., the US--and to initiate social programs to help average Venezuelans rise out of poverty, in part by taking over and redistributing and in some cases outright renationalizing the assets of the oil oligarchy of that country. Chavez--or the policies for which he stands--is widely popular in Venezuela, as Tymoshenko is in Ukraine.
(I'm afraid that the bloggers on the aforementioned site have fallen prey to the propaganda of Chavez's opposition to the same degree that Jonathan Steele has to that of Yushchenko's opposition--for Chavez, although not perfect, just as Yushchenko certainly is not, and prone to making some errors like Yushchenko, is still a populist, and the opposition against him is as credible as is the bunch of oligarchs that are bunching together in opposition to Yushchenko.)
The situation in Venezuela is familier to the situation in Ukraine, except that the oligarchy in Ukraine has much of its basis of power and wealth in coal and iron while in Venezuela it is oil, and Ukraine's oligarchy was backed by Russia and Venezuela's was backed by the US. And both the US and Russia are becoming increasingly authoritarian states (Russia indeed is further along), and Ukraine is courting American support to get out from the Russian sphere, while Chavez courts Russia to get out of the American sphere. So of course the American and Western European left goes bizerk criticizing the Orange Revolution and Yushchenko-Tymoshenko team for Ukrainian acceptance of US help, labels Yushchenko a neoliberal and nationalist, and waxes gah-gah over the Chavez-Russia cooperation, while the right goes bizerk over Chavez's meetings in Moscow and calls him a dictator, and then strangely praises the US's work with populists in Ukraine who are pulling Ukrainian soldiers out of Iraq. And of course there are pundits out their complaining that the populist attacks on the roots of oligarchic power being led by Chavez and Tymoshenko are hurting growth in Venezuela and Ukraine--oh the oil industry is hurting, and all the talk about reprivatization is weakening Ukraine's industrial sector--and therefore are spouting off rumors of corruption within the ranks of the populists themselves in order to discredit them (although there certainly is a degree of corruption even within the populist camp, of course). . .
Its a dangerous game being played on all sides:
The US is supporting a populist regime in Ukraine that it may in the end not much care for, while Ukrainians are working with an ally that may set the propaganda and political machine working against them, as they already are against Tymoshenko (i.e., the recent Washington Post piece criticizing her populist government, which I will write about again later. . .).
On the other hand, Chavez is already ten thousand times the democrat that Putin is, but Venezuela's progress definitely does not stand to be checked by Russia if the relation goes sour as the US can start to trump Tymoshenko. (And I am very concerned about Yushchenko's comments about her, but again more later. . .)
In either case, both Yushchenko and Chavez and the governments and the movements of which they are the nominal leaders are still much more concerned with building democracy and with serving the interests of the average citizens of their nations than either governments and leaders in Russia and the US. The Putin and Bush administrations serve the corporate interests of their nations and then leave the rest of their peoples to scramble for what might come trickling down. As Bush once joked at an annual meeting of top business people and politicians, "Some call you guys the elite; I call you my base." Hence pundits of certain persuasions complain about the social programs supported by Tymoshenko and Chavez; they are not so good for the profits of elites, especially of foreign investors.
Interesting (perhaps enraging) to see, in this case, Yushchenko trying to reign Tymoshenko in a bit: perhaps he is doing so just to make the US and foriegn investors a little less nervous and jumpy, but still has a populist heart like Tymoshenko (or Chavez). I hope so--he proved himself to be quite shrewd in playing such political games in the course of the OR. But I still am not sure what to make of him yet--a true populist, or a neoliberal in the end.
(And by the way, publius pundits, if you are reading, one of the pillars of your argument that Chavez is a dictator is your accusation that Chavez is stacking his administration full of loyalists; well, I agree in general that this is a bad thing, but I must point out to you that Yushchenko and Tymoshenko have done the same thing, and that the Bush administration is exhibiting itself as perhaps the most billigerent of any administration in terms of demanding the right to stack the federal government full of loyalists everywhere, to such an extent that it sought to put an end to the filibuster--the final check on any administration's ability to stack the government with loyalists.)
So back to Ukraine and Russia, what the Left needs to learn regarding the situation in Eurasia is:
1) Not to begrudge the people of poor nations for accepting US assistance. Activists in the West may be able to get jobs to support their livelihhod and fund their efforts, but the people of Eurasian nations suffer from an unemployment rate of 30-55%, depending on season (which comes from unofficial statistics that are more reliable). They also get paid $30-60/month on average, while in the past in Ukraine, one could either not get paid some months, or not in the total amount. Furthermore, the average person (at least I can say so in Ukraine) is not a mere stooge of the US. Attitudes toward the US tend to be more like those of other European nations: healthy skepticism about its real intentions. But thank you for the money, anyway!
2) Start learning what the real, grassroots sentiments are on the ground in Eurasia, and start learning the real historyof grassroots resistance to authoritarianism in this part of the world. The peoples of Eurasia want regime change, and will use whatever help they may get. Popular sentiment was not engineered via US manipulations such as media campaigns and organizing. The anti-authoritarian movement, I know for sure in Ukraine, has a very long history that one might argue goes back to the mid 19th century. The groups that were active in Ukraine--PORA! (It's Time!), Znaju (I know), Chysta Ukrajina (A Clean Ukraine), Svoboda Vybory (Freedom of Choice Coalition) did not emerge from a vacuum; the people who led the charge in organizing them were not hand-picked by the United States; the people who joined and supported the anti-authoritarian movement and participated in its actions did not do so because they were nationalist extremists nor Islamic fundamentalists (now talking about Central Asia), and neither were they convinced by US propaganda to join the anti-authoritrian, pro-democracy movements. They simply had had enough: DOSIT! (The Ukrainian equivalent of the slogan ENOUGH! or BASTA! that one hears at populist rebellions around the world.)
3) Many on the Left, especially in the EU, need to stop looking at Russia as a buffer against US interests in Eurasia. The Russian state has historically been just as, if not more, authoritarian and manipulative in its "sphere of influence" in Eurasia as the US has been in Latin America. Furthermore, Russia under Putin is heading in an even more authoritarian direction, and is looking backward nostalgically on Russia's lost empire and influence. Russia is governeed by an increasingly authoritarian regime nostalgic for Empire: it is not presently ruled by a democratizing regime willing to encourage the decolonization and democratization of its nation's instiutions and mentality. However, there is a real pro-democracy movement in Russia that needs our attention and support, and let's hope that this movement will also be predominantly anti-imperial or anti-chauvinist.
4) Thus, in a connected issue, segments of the Left must stop defending Russia's right to a sphere of influence. I have listened to far too many comments in which people defended a supposedly poor, bullied Russia's right to a sphere of influence against US and Western manipulations. Is anyone complaining about Chavez's attempt to cooperate with Russia against a US sphere of influence as they complain about Yushchenko's cooperation with the US against Russian manipulations? Why for some Lefties is Russia deserving of a sphere, but anyone or nation in Latin America who resists the US is a hero? Does anyone on the Left defend the US's right to a neo-imperialist "sphere of influence?" So why do such resistors of Russia in Eurasia so oftenly get the pleasant label of "nationalist" in the West, while a Bolivian who resists the US is considered heroic?
5) I want to again emphasize that I think democratization of Russia is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. The single most important event in European history for generations would, to my mind, be for Russia to undergo its own variant of the Orange or Rose Revolutions--and this seems were things might be heading in Russia for 2008. Democratization and Decolonization of Russia is a real possibility. Dreamers must dream, doers must do, and the skeptics and apologists for the way things are can just step aside.
6) Then a few points specifically about Ukraine:
a) I want to emphasize that the political conscience of the average Ukrainian is, contrary to what many pundits and intellectuals have been saying about Ukrainians for generations, quite very high--much higher than is the political awareness of the average American, at least. Few Ukrainians en masse but for a critical mass of those in the eastern part of the country, believe what the media or the political leadership tells them--definitely before, and it seems also after the OR. Most people have their own sources of news, or their own favorite opposition or non-mainstream newspapers. Granted that some of these papers are barely more than tabloids--but such papers are in the minority. The do-it-yourself, activist and political press--i.e., the or alternatives to the state and oligarchic press--is vibrant in Ukraine, and people do tune in. It is interesting to note that in a country with far less freedom of press than in the US, so many more people actually do seek out and turn to the available alternatives to the corporate and political establishement dominated press than they do in the US. Furthermore, my experience in Ukraine exposed me to what I called, in my Orange Revolution writings, Ukraine's "spoken-word information network." Even before the OR, people talked to each other about what they read in the alternative or opposition press or what they heard from someone who had acccess to the opposition Channel 5 (which is available only via satellite in most parts of Ukraine), or repeated information that they learned from their town's or village's local party offices, regardless of which party they were members of (and the US did not establish all of these parties and all of these papers and Channel 5 itself, and then sold them all on pro-Yushchenko propaganda, which they then disseminated throughout the country. . .). Membership in political parties is quite high in Ukraine. Through this network (which really simply is neighbor telling neighbor what they knew), especially during the OR, I was hearing things that I just could not beleive were true. But later, everything I heard would be confirmed on the internet or somewhere else in print. As one commentator on Channel 5 said during the OR, "Even today, the word still travels faster than the image," after telling viewers about how a group of election observers in the town of Donetsk had been attacked and their cameras smashed.
Furthermore, in the course of conversations with many people during and after the 17 days of the OR, I learned that the irony of the Bush administration defending free elections was not lost but on a few people in Ukraine. And in general, most people who asked my opnion on Bush usually asked hesitantly, and when they found out my opposition to his administration, most people usually started saying things like: "The war in Iraq is for oil;" or, "Bill Clinton was more of a statesman" (but note, I am not a big Clinton fan myself); etc. Popular opinion in Ukraine is against the warin Iraq whether one was for Yushchenko or Yanukovych, and Ukrainian attitudes towards the US tend to be typical Euroskepticism about things politically American--they have no problem with pop culture or American people. And this is not just a hangover from Soviet times; Ukrainians are Europeans which means they value public transportation systems and social programs and arts, etc., over a rampaging capitalism with very little time or care for such things. Very few people told me that they had the US in mind as the model society toward which their post-OR government stear Ukraine. But that is a mute point, since the stated goal of many during the OR was that Ukraine should and very well can achieve so-called "European standards" and join the EU, which means a more social democratic system than in the US: i.e., European values are for a more regulated capitalism and social programs. Furthermore members of the OR political leadership, most especially Yulia Tymoshenko, are populists with an agenda for social programs (for which they will increasingly come under fire by American pundits, as Tymoshenko has by a Washington Post article). Such is what the vast majority of Ukrainians care about: they want the government to improve the infrastructure, rebuild the system of universal healthcare, do public housing works, etc. They don't care too much at present about the profits of foriegn investors. They want reprivatization to proceed along rather radical lines; they want back some of the wealth that has been stolen from them these past fourteen years through investment in some of the above matters. In short, popular opinion is more captured by the heart and soul of Yulia Tymoshenko, who outshines Yushchenko at present in any popularity contest. And one is supposed to believe that these masses of Ukrainians were duped by a US campaign? Yushchenko might turn out to be less of a populist than people hoped for, but it is far too simplistic to say that the masses of Ukrainians rallied around him because the US told them to or manipulated them into doing so. They knew the risks involved--but what was the alernative? No matter which way you cut it, Yushchenko and gang are FAR, far BETTER for Ukraine than Yanukovych and gang would have been, US opinions on the matter aside. And furthermore, no one has stopped fighting for a better Ukraine: the altrernative press to the governmental and oligarchic press is active as ever in criticizing the new authorities, and PORA! is keeping its presence felt, especially vis-a-vis the whole Zvarych affair, in relation to which, by the way, I think Yushchenko is taking a deeply disappointing and troubling position. . .
b) This election campaign and subsequent Orange Revolution really was not, at its root, about a competition between a Western versus a Russian or Eastern Choice, nor was it driven or that deeply complicated by an east-west divide within Ukraine, even if these things did play an important but secondary role. Let me explain, since this is an assertion that goes against the grain of many of people's deepest assumptions about the elections and situation in contemporary Ukraine. Both Yushchenko and Yanukovych had Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking supporters in both the western and eastern parts of the country, albeit with different proportions; nonethless, at least 60% of Ukrainians voted for Yushchenko in just about every round. The east-west divide within the country is an artificial divide first made and then continued by a historical parade of authoritarian and rapacious governments (imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet) that have needed tactics of divide and rule to maintain their power and the wealth of their elites (the USSR was a class society). The tactics of divide and rule in Ukraine have been based on manipulating and politicizing Ukraine's multiethnic and multiligual situation, especially by toying with people's fears and anxieties about the status of the Russian language in Ukraine and about Ukrainian cooperation with Russia. There is no issue here: Russian is in many ways still the dominant language in Ukraine, given its prevalence on television, in print press, on pop radio and other parts of the entertainment industry (such as Western films and books coming dubbed and translated mostly into Russian only), and it still enjoys widespread us in the government; and all of this in addition to the large numbers who are primarily Russian-speaking in the home, whether they are ethnically Ukrainian or Russian or mixed. Yushchenko's stance and the whole post-OR government's stance is one of linguistic pluralism/populism, Russian propaganda that says he's against the Russian language aside. Furthermore, Ukraine continues to look toward Russia as its number 1 trading partner. Thus, the Yanukovych camp was talking about MUCH more than cooperation; they were talking about what one scholar, Taras Kuzio, called the "Belarusynization of Ukraine;" i.e., of Ukraine taking the path of Belarus' of heading toward actual re-intergration with Moscow, since the power of the oligarchy rested on close ties to an increasingly authoritarian Russian government. And most people saw this, and rejected it. But this is not an anti-Russian stance in general; it fact, it is quite pro-Russian in the sense that it sends a message to Russia that Ukrainains value democracy, not just in Ukraine but hopefully somday in Russia, too. Therefore, none of this anything to do with wanting to cut ties with Russia tout court, but with the desire to distance Ukraine from any authoritarian oligarchy, or any "government of bandits." It has to do with demanding equality between democratic nations. And the reason for all this was simple: continuation of ties between the current regime in Russia and the status quo regime as it obtained these past fourteen years in Ukraine meant keeping in power a rapacious oligarchy that, while manipulating people in Ukraine to think ill of one another and in terms of either khlib (Ukrainian for bread) or khleb (Russian for bread), were stealing and preparing to keep on stealing the dough. With Yanukovych and the present Russia, fewer people would have any bread to eat, and 60% of Ukrainians (in the civic sense) woke up to this fact. The rest of them, that 40% or so in mostly the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, are like the millions of Americans, especially lower class Americans, who support the radically right wing social agenda of the Republicans against their own best interests. One could copy the title and motivation of the book What's the Matter with Kansas? and very much so write a book entitled What's the Matter with the Donbas?--and make it a book in which one asks why so many workers in eastern and southern Ukraine support the parties and platforms of Ukraine's oligarchs. Kansas has its Republican Proletariat, and Ukraine has its Regions of Ukraine Proletariat: working people working for an agenda that is against their interests and for those of corrupt elites, or oligarchs. (Yes, I do think that the Bush administration is quite corrupt, as was the Clinton administation, too; today there is narly a difference between a Republocract and Demopublican; there is no true Left in mainstream American politics, and certainly the real Left is nowhere to be found on mainstream television. . .).
Thus, the reason why I say that the OR did not at its roots have to do with a Western v. Eastern choice is because if Russia was under a pro-democracy and anti-chauvinist government and had supported Yushchenko--and no doubt the US then would have supported Yanukovych or remained silent in matter--Ukrainians would have drawn closer to Russia. It was bread, and who was going to for the moment support people in the fight against the dough-snatchers, that mattered in this election most. And one can read above what I wrote about the strong populist tendencies of many of the leaders of the OR, most especially Yulia Tymoshenko.
Of course, it does matter, on the other hand, that Russian power was supporting the dough-snatchers and that he West weighed on the side of the people in this conflict; and it does matter that Ukrainian-speakers do feel marginalized in their own country, and now feel hope that after the OR, their country will take a more pro-active stance regarding the Ukrainian language and culture. But none of this has anything to do with being simplistically pro-Western and anti-Russian. All but the most intolerant of Ukrainians look upon the Russian people and language as an enemy nation; most continue to regard Russia and Russians as kin--but as cousins, not brothers. They look forward to wide-ranging social-democratic reform and a united Europe that is not limited to a Germanic and Central European world, but will also some day include a unique East Slav world of which Ukraine is definitely and should proudly be part, CULTURALLY speaking. Its just that 60% of Ukrainians don't like Putin's government and Putin's pundits any more than liked the Ukrainian oligarchy and its pundits. Seperate the people from the government, please.
Stefan
The following thought below occured to me earlier today, and could be used as a talking point for explaining the difference between the Russian and Ukrainain languages and cultures, and for explaining why Ukrainians are so sensitive about not conflating the two as one, and why it is NOT nationalistic of them to be so thusly sensitive:
UKRAINE AND RUSSIA ARE NOT LIKE EAST AND WEST GERMANY BUT ARE LIKE THE DUTCH AND THE DEUTSCH; NOT BROTHERS BUT COUSINS.
Russian talk about brotherly togetherness is as delusional as was the German insistence on forging a singular great German family. The Germans have learned to give up their imperialist delusions over their Germanic cousins; when will a government come to power in Moscow that respects the independence of Russia's East Slav cousins? When will Russia actively decolonize its mentality as the Germans have more or less done since WWII? The Putin regime shows no sign or will of taking Russia down that path. "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe. . ."
But to shift gears a little to address a related topic, I listened to an interview with an editor of the Nation (on www.democracynow.org; the interview was done back in February), a so-called Russia expert, who labelled Yulia Tymoshenko anti-Russian, which is code for "nationalist." Argh. As far as I am concerned, she is strongly demanding that Russia give up its imperial ambitions and imperial hubris and treat Ukraine as an equal. If that is nationalism, so be it--but it is not an anti-Russian stance. She is not against the Russian language, speaks it as her first language, is for the creation of the Single Economic Space with Russia (in a real sense and with an eye to fair trade and not just free trade, while what the Russian government thus far is really talking about is a mere customs union that will heavily benefit and favor Russia, of course; a NAFTA for Eurasia).
SO WHY do Eastern Europeans and Central Asians who stand up to the 800 lb. guerilla of the region so frequently get labelled "nationalist" by people on both the right and the left in the West?? That's a major topic for discussion that could have the following title (and I am actually working on a piece with this name): "The Post Soviet World: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it."
The Point therefore being:
If Yulia Tymoshenko was named Julia Rodriguez and was taking such a populist stance in Mexico as she is in Ukraine; and was standing up to American machinations in Mexico as she is standing up to Russian machinations in Ukraine; and was demanding more equality in relations between the US and Mexico as she is demanding there be between Ukraine and Russia; she would be praised by the left in the West (and demonized by the right)--much like how Hugo Chavez is at present.
For those who don't know, Hugo Chavez is, contrary to what some other Ukraine bloggers have been writing (www.publiuspundit.com), not a dictator but a popularly elected president of Venezuela who continues to enjoy widespread support, and who came to power backed by an anti-oligarchy movement that promised to stand up against the regional 800 lb. guerrila--i.e., the US--and to initiate social programs to help average Venezuelans rise out of poverty, in part by taking over and redistributing and in some cases outright renationalizing the assets of the oil oligarchy of that country. Chavez--or the policies for which he stands--is widely popular in Venezuela, as Tymoshenko is in Ukraine.
(I'm afraid that the bloggers on the aforementioned site have fallen prey to the propaganda of Chavez's opposition to the same degree that Jonathan Steele has to that of Yushchenko's opposition--for Chavez, although not perfect, just as Yushchenko certainly is not, and prone to making some errors like Yushchenko, is still a populist, and the opposition against him is as credible as is the bunch of oligarchs that are bunching together in opposition to Yushchenko.)
The situation in Venezuela is familier to the situation in Ukraine, except that the oligarchy in Ukraine has much of its basis of power and wealth in coal and iron while in Venezuela it is oil, and Ukraine's oligarchy was backed by Russia and Venezuela's was backed by the US. And both the US and Russia are becoming increasingly authoritarian states (Russia indeed is further along), and Ukraine is courting American support to get out from the Russian sphere, while Chavez courts Russia to get out of the American sphere. So of course the American and Western European left goes bizerk criticizing the Orange Revolution and Yushchenko-Tymoshenko team for Ukrainian acceptance of US help, labels Yushchenko a neoliberal and nationalist, and waxes gah-gah over the Chavez-Russia cooperation, while the right goes bizerk over Chavez's meetings in Moscow and calls him a dictator, and then strangely praises the US's work with populists in Ukraine who are pulling Ukrainian soldiers out of Iraq. And of course there are pundits out their complaining that the populist attacks on the roots of oligarchic power being led by Chavez and Tymoshenko are hurting growth in Venezuela and Ukraine--oh the oil industry is hurting, and all the talk about reprivatization is weakening Ukraine's industrial sector--and therefore are spouting off rumors of corruption within the ranks of the populists themselves in order to discredit them (although there certainly is a degree of corruption even within the populist camp, of course). . .
Its a dangerous game being played on all sides:
The US is supporting a populist regime in Ukraine that it may in the end not much care for, while Ukrainians are working with an ally that may set the propaganda and political machine working against them, as they already are against Tymoshenko (i.e., the recent Washington Post piece criticizing her populist government, which I will write about again later. . .).
On the other hand, Chavez is already ten thousand times the democrat that Putin is, but Venezuela's progress definitely does not stand to be checked by Russia if the relation goes sour as the US can start to trump Tymoshenko. (And I am very concerned about Yushchenko's comments about her, but again more later. . .)
In either case, both Yushchenko and Chavez and the governments and the movements of which they are the nominal leaders are still much more concerned with building democracy and with serving the interests of the average citizens of their nations than either governments and leaders in Russia and the US. The Putin and Bush administrations serve the corporate interests of their nations and then leave the rest of their peoples to scramble for what might come trickling down. As Bush once joked at an annual meeting of top business people and politicians, "Some call you guys the elite; I call you my base." Hence pundits of certain persuasions complain about the social programs supported by Tymoshenko and Chavez; they are not so good for the profits of elites, especially of foreign investors.
Interesting (perhaps enraging) to see, in this case, Yushchenko trying to reign Tymoshenko in a bit: perhaps he is doing so just to make the US and foriegn investors a little less nervous and jumpy, but still has a populist heart like Tymoshenko (or Chavez). I hope so--he proved himself to be quite shrewd in playing such political games in the course of the OR. But I still am not sure what to make of him yet--a true populist, or a neoliberal in the end.
(And by the way, publius pundits, if you are reading, one of the pillars of your argument that Chavez is a dictator is your accusation that Chavez is stacking his administration full of loyalists; well, I agree in general that this is a bad thing, but I must point out to you that Yushchenko and Tymoshenko have done the same thing, and that the Bush administration is exhibiting itself as perhaps the most billigerent of any administration in terms of demanding the right to stack the federal government full of loyalists everywhere, to such an extent that it sought to put an end to the filibuster--the final check on any administration's ability to stack the government with loyalists.)
So back to Ukraine and Russia, what the Left needs to learn regarding the situation in Eurasia is:
1) Not to begrudge the people of poor nations for accepting US assistance. Activists in the West may be able to get jobs to support their livelihhod and fund their efforts, but the people of Eurasian nations suffer from an unemployment rate of 30-55%, depending on season (which comes from unofficial statistics that are more reliable). They also get paid $30-60/month on average, while in the past in Ukraine, one could either not get paid some months, or not in the total amount. Furthermore, the average person (at least I can say so in Ukraine) is not a mere stooge of the US. Attitudes toward the US tend to be more like those of other European nations: healthy skepticism about its real intentions. But thank you for the money, anyway!
2) Start learning what the real, grassroots sentiments are on the ground in Eurasia, and start learning the real historyof grassroots resistance to authoritarianism in this part of the world. The peoples of Eurasia want regime change, and will use whatever help they may get. Popular sentiment was not engineered via US manipulations such as media campaigns and organizing. The anti-authoritarian movement, I know for sure in Ukraine, has a very long history that one might argue goes back to the mid 19th century. The groups that were active in Ukraine--PORA! (It's Time!), Znaju (I know), Chysta Ukrajina (A Clean Ukraine), Svoboda Vybory (Freedom of Choice Coalition) did not emerge from a vacuum; the people who led the charge in organizing them were not hand-picked by the United States; the people who joined and supported the anti-authoritarian movement and participated in its actions did not do so because they were nationalist extremists nor Islamic fundamentalists (now talking about Central Asia), and neither were they convinced by US propaganda to join the anti-authoritrian, pro-democracy movements. They simply had had enough: DOSIT! (The Ukrainian equivalent of the slogan ENOUGH! or BASTA! that one hears at populist rebellions around the world.)
3) Many on the Left, especially in the EU, need to stop looking at Russia as a buffer against US interests in Eurasia. The Russian state has historically been just as, if not more, authoritarian and manipulative in its "sphere of influence" in Eurasia as the US has been in Latin America. Furthermore, Russia under Putin is heading in an even more authoritarian direction, and is looking backward nostalgically on Russia's lost empire and influence. Russia is governeed by an increasingly authoritarian regime nostalgic for Empire: it is not presently ruled by a democratizing regime willing to encourage the decolonization and democratization of its nation's instiutions and mentality. However, there is a real pro-democracy movement in Russia that needs our attention and support, and let's hope that this movement will also be predominantly anti-imperial or anti-chauvinist.
4) Thus, in a connected issue, segments of the Left must stop defending Russia's right to a sphere of influence. I have listened to far too many comments in which people defended a supposedly poor, bullied Russia's right to a sphere of influence against US and Western manipulations. Is anyone complaining about Chavez's attempt to cooperate with Russia against a US sphere of influence as they complain about Yushchenko's cooperation with the US against Russian manipulations? Why for some Lefties is Russia deserving of a sphere, but anyone or nation in Latin America who resists the US is a hero? Does anyone on the Left defend the US's right to a neo-imperialist "sphere of influence?" So why do such resistors of Russia in Eurasia so oftenly get the pleasant label of "nationalist" in the West, while a Bolivian who resists the US is considered heroic?
5) I want to again emphasize that I think democratization of Russia is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. The single most important event in European history for generations would, to my mind, be for Russia to undergo its own variant of the Orange or Rose Revolutions--and this seems were things might be heading in Russia for 2008. Democratization and Decolonization of Russia is a real possibility. Dreamers must dream, doers must do, and the skeptics and apologists for the way things are can just step aside.
6) Then a few points specifically about Ukraine:
a) I want to emphasize that the political conscience of the average Ukrainian is, contrary to what many pundits and intellectuals have been saying about Ukrainians for generations, quite very high--much higher than is the political awareness of the average American, at least. Few Ukrainians en masse but for a critical mass of those in the eastern part of the country, believe what the media or the political leadership tells them--definitely before, and it seems also after the OR. Most people have their own sources of news, or their own favorite opposition or non-mainstream newspapers. Granted that some of these papers are barely more than tabloids--but such papers are in the minority. The do-it-yourself, activist and political press--i.e., the or alternatives to the state and oligarchic press--is vibrant in Ukraine, and people do tune in. It is interesting to note that in a country with far less freedom of press than in the US, so many more people actually do seek out and turn to the available alternatives to the corporate and political establishement dominated press than they do in the US. Furthermore, my experience in Ukraine exposed me to what I called, in my Orange Revolution writings, Ukraine's "spoken-word information network." Even before the OR, people talked to each other about what they read in the alternative or opposition press or what they heard from someone who had acccess to the opposition Channel 5 (which is available only via satellite in most parts of Ukraine), or repeated information that they learned from their town's or village's local party offices, regardless of which party they were members of (and the US did not establish all of these parties and all of these papers and Channel 5 itself, and then sold them all on pro-Yushchenko propaganda, which they then disseminated throughout the country. . .). Membership in political parties is quite high in Ukraine. Through this network (which really simply is neighbor telling neighbor what they knew), especially during the OR, I was hearing things that I just could not beleive were true. But later, everything I heard would be confirmed on the internet or somewhere else in print. As one commentator on Channel 5 said during the OR, "Even today, the word still travels faster than the image," after telling viewers about how a group of election observers in the town of Donetsk had been attacked and their cameras smashed.
Furthermore, in the course of conversations with many people during and after the 17 days of the OR, I learned that the irony of the Bush administration defending free elections was not lost but on a few people in Ukraine. And in general, most people who asked my opnion on Bush usually asked hesitantly, and when they found out my opposition to his administration, most people usually started saying things like: "The war in Iraq is for oil;" or, "Bill Clinton was more of a statesman" (but note, I am not a big Clinton fan myself); etc. Popular opinion in Ukraine is against the warin Iraq whether one was for Yushchenko or Yanukovych, and Ukrainian attitudes towards the US tend to be typical Euroskepticism about things politically American--they have no problem with pop culture or American people. And this is not just a hangover from Soviet times; Ukrainians are Europeans which means they value public transportation systems and social programs and arts, etc., over a rampaging capitalism with very little time or care for such things. Very few people told me that they had the US in mind as the model society toward which their post-OR government stear Ukraine. But that is a mute point, since the stated goal of many during the OR was that Ukraine should and very well can achieve so-called "European standards" and join the EU, which means a more social democratic system than in the US: i.e., European values are for a more regulated capitalism and social programs. Furthermore members of the OR political leadership, most especially Yulia Tymoshenko, are populists with an agenda for social programs (for which they will increasingly come under fire by American pundits, as Tymoshenko has by a Washington Post article). Such is what the vast majority of Ukrainians care about: they want the government to improve the infrastructure, rebuild the system of universal healthcare, do public housing works, etc. They don't care too much at present about the profits of foriegn investors. They want reprivatization to proceed along rather radical lines; they want back some of the wealth that has been stolen from them these past fourteen years through investment in some of the above matters. In short, popular opinion is more captured by the heart and soul of Yulia Tymoshenko, who outshines Yushchenko at present in any popularity contest. And one is supposed to believe that these masses of Ukrainians were duped by a US campaign? Yushchenko might turn out to be less of a populist than people hoped for, but it is far too simplistic to say that the masses of Ukrainians rallied around him because the US told them to or manipulated them into doing so. They knew the risks involved--but what was the alernative? No matter which way you cut it, Yushchenko and gang are FAR, far BETTER for Ukraine than Yanukovych and gang would have been, US opinions on the matter aside. And furthermore, no one has stopped fighting for a better Ukraine: the altrernative press to the governmental and oligarchic press is active as ever in criticizing the new authorities, and PORA! is keeping its presence felt, especially vis-a-vis the whole Zvarych affair, in relation to which, by the way, I think Yushchenko is taking a deeply disappointing and troubling position. . .
b) This election campaign and subsequent Orange Revolution really was not, at its root, about a competition between a Western versus a Russian or Eastern Choice, nor was it driven or that deeply complicated by an east-west divide within Ukraine, even if these things did play an important but secondary role. Let me explain, since this is an assertion that goes against the grain of many of people's deepest assumptions about the elections and situation in contemporary Ukraine. Both Yushchenko and Yanukovych had Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking supporters in both the western and eastern parts of the country, albeit with different proportions; nonethless, at least 60% of Ukrainians voted for Yushchenko in just about every round. The east-west divide within the country is an artificial divide first made and then continued by a historical parade of authoritarian and rapacious governments (imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet) that have needed tactics of divide and rule to maintain their power and the wealth of their elites (the USSR was a class society). The tactics of divide and rule in Ukraine have been based on manipulating and politicizing Ukraine's multiethnic and multiligual situation, especially by toying with people's fears and anxieties about the status of the Russian language in Ukraine and about Ukrainian cooperation with Russia. There is no issue here: Russian is in many ways still the dominant language in Ukraine, given its prevalence on television, in print press, on pop radio and other parts of the entertainment industry (such as Western films and books coming dubbed and translated mostly into Russian only), and it still enjoys widespread us in the government; and all of this in addition to the large numbers who are primarily Russian-speaking in the home, whether they are ethnically Ukrainian or Russian or mixed. Yushchenko's stance and the whole post-OR government's stance is one of linguistic pluralism/populism, Russian propaganda that says he's against the Russian language aside. Furthermore, Ukraine continues to look toward Russia as its number 1 trading partner. Thus, the Yanukovych camp was talking about MUCH more than cooperation; they were talking about what one scholar, Taras Kuzio, called the "Belarusynization of Ukraine;" i.e., of Ukraine taking the path of Belarus' of heading toward actual re-intergration with Moscow, since the power of the oligarchy rested on close ties to an increasingly authoritarian Russian government. And most people saw this, and rejected it. But this is not an anti-Russian stance in general; it fact, it is quite pro-Russian in the sense that it sends a message to Russia that Ukrainains value democracy, not just in Ukraine but hopefully somday in Russia, too. Therefore, none of this anything to do with wanting to cut ties with Russia tout court, but with the desire to distance Ukraine from any authoritarian oligarchy, or any "government of bandits." It has to do with demanding equality between democratic nations. And the reason for all this was simple: continuation of ties between the current regime in Russia and the status quo regime as it obtained these past fourteen years in Ukraine meant keeping in power a rapacious oligarchy that, while manipulating people in Ukraine to think ill of one another and in terms of either khlib (Ukrainian for bread) or khleb (Russian for bread), were stealing and preparing to keep on stealing the dough. With Yanukovych and the present Russia, fewer people would have any bread to eat, and 60% of Ukrainians (in the civic sense) woke up to this fact. The rest of them, that 40% or so in mostly the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, are like the millions of Americans, especially lower class Americans, who support the radically right wing social agenda of the Republicans against their own best interests. One could copy the title and motivation of the book What's the Matter with Kansas? and very much so write a book entitled What's the Matter with the Donbas?--and make it a book in which one asks why so many workers in eastern and southern Ukraine support the parties and platforms of Ukraine's oligarchs. Kansas has its Republican Proletariat, and Ukraine has its Regions of Ukraine Proletariat: working people working for an agenda that is against their interests and for those of corrupt elites, or oligarchs. (Yes, I do think that the Bush administration is quite corrupt, as was the Clinton administation, too; today there is narly a difference between a Republocract and Demopublican; there is no true Left in mainstream American politics, and certainly the real Left is nowhere to be found on mainstream television. . .).
Thus, the reason why I say that the OR did not at its roots have to do with a Western v. Eastern choice is because if Russia was under a pro-democracy and anti-chauvinist government and had supported Yushchenko--and no doubt the US then would have supported Yanukovych or remained silent in matter--Ukrainians would have drawn closer to Russia. It was bread, and who was going to for the moment support people in the fight against the dough-snatchers, that mattered in this election most. And one can read above what I wrote about the strong populist tendencies of many of the leaders of the OR, most especially Yulia Tymoshenko.
Of course, it does matter, on the other hand, that Russian power was supporting the dough-snatchers and that he West weighed on the side of the people in this conflict; and it does matter that Ukrainian-speakers do feel marginalized in their own country, and now feel hope that after the OR, their country will take a more pro-active stance regarding the Ukrainian language and culture. But none of this has anything to do with being simplistically pro-Western and anti-Russian. All but the most intolerant of Ukrainians look upon the Russian people and language as an enemy nation; most continue to regard Russia and Russians as kin--but as cousins, not brothers. They look forward to wide-ranging social-democratic reform and a united Europe that is not limited to a Germanic and Central European world, but will also some day include a unique East Slav world of which Ukraine is definitely and should proudly be part, CULTURALLY speaking. Its just that 60% of Ukrainians don't like Putin's government and Putin's pundits any more than liked the Ukrainian oligarchy and its pundits. Seperate the people from the government, please.
Stefan
Saturday, May 14, 2005
On the Revolt and Massacre in Uzbekistan (Links)
Tick-tock, tick-tock: I have been stating that this part of the world is going to play increasingly across headlines in the West (see the last few paragraphs of my inaugural essay part I below). . .I don't mention this to inflate my own ego, but just to make another loud call that people--activists especially--start to wake up and learn about this region, about Eurasia. . .
So here are some links to articles about the situation in Uzbekistan, from Radio Free Europe and the Eurasian Daily Monitor:
1) Don't believe the media hype: these protests are not purely nor even mostly about people wanting to set-free and defend a group of Islamic fundamentalist prisoners; they are about the poor economic conditions obtaining in Uzbekistan, the most populous of Central Asian nations. The attempt to paint the rebellion as pro-Islamicist is a result of the fact that the US finds the current regime in Uzbekistan to be an ally. There is an important US military base in Uzbekistan used for operations in Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan's president being a close ally, it is important for the US propaganda machine to represent their ally's opponents as a bunch of radical Islamic fundamentalists. But what is motivating the rebellion in Uzbekistan is mostly the same kinds of things that motivated people from Serbia, to Georgia and Ukraine, to Kyrgyzstan and hopefully someday both Belarus' and Russia itself. Its really lucky for the people of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan that their respective pre-revolution leaders--Milosevic, Shervardnadze, Kuchma Akaev--were not US allies, if you know what I mean. . .
Two articles on this:
From Radio Free Europe (RFE), entitled "Uzbekistan: Economic Concerns Primary in Andijon":
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/05/ad7f1448-b19a-47bf-b3fa-e7699ab652a8.html
From the Eurasian Daily Monitor, entitled, "Masses Reject Charges of Islamic Extremism":
http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2369747
2) About an Uzbeki opposition journalist's arrest, from RFE:
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/04/cfd6f561-482f-4631-a79d-7cf9c652a16a.html
Check out the links to other articles you will find on the RFE pages.
Eurasia is a frustrated region of the world whose webs of government power, grassroots sentiment, and Western and Russian power are anything but simple and clear cut: the interesting thing to think about is why did protest lead to massacre here; and why isn't the US strongly condemning the massacre and strongly lauding the opposition, and instead sees its pundits making a stink of fundamentalism.
Stefan
So here are some links to articles about the situation in Uzbekistan, from Radio Free Europe and the Eurasian Daily Monitor:
1) Don't believe the media hype: these protests are not purely nor even mostly about people wanting to set-free and defend a group of Islamic fundamentalist prisoners; they are about the poor economic conditions obtaining in Uzbekistan, the most populous of Central Asian nations. The attempt to paint the rebellion as pro-Islamicist is a result of the fact that the US finds the current regime in Uzbekistan to be an ally. There is an important US military base in Uzbekistan used for operations in Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan's president being a close ally, it is important for the US propaganda machine to represent their ally's opponents as a bunch of radical Islamic fundamentalists. But what is motivating the rebellion in Uzbekistan is mostly the same kinds of things that motivated people from Serbia, to Georgia and Ukraine, to Kyrgyzstan and hopefully someday both Belarus' and Russia itself. Its really lucky for the people of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan that their respective pre-revolution leaders--Milosevic, Shervardnadze, Kuchma Akaev--were not US allies, if you know what I mean. . .
Two articles on this:
From Radio Free Europe (RFE), entitled "Uzbekistan: Economic Concerns Primary in Andijon":
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/05/ad7f1448-b19a-47bf-b3fa-e7699ab652a8.html
From the Eurasian Daily Monitor, entitled, "Masses Reject Charges of Islamic Extremism":
http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2369747
2) About an Uzbeki opposition journalist's arrest, from RFE:
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/04/cfd6f561-482f-4631-a79d-7cf9c652a16a.html
Check out the links to other articles you will find on the RFE pages.
Eurasia is a frustrated region of the world whose webs of government power, grassroots sentiment, and Western and Russian power are anything but simple and clear cut: the interesting thing to think about is why did protest lead to massacre here; and why isn't the US strongly condemning the massacre and strongly lauding the opposition, and instead sees its pundits making a stink of fundamentalism.
Stefan
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Russia Off the Deep End on VE Day
The photo is from the book Harvest of Despair by Karel C. Berkhoff
The initial invitation of the Putin administration to the heads of former Soviet Republics to come to Moscow for VE day already was arrogant enough; the uproar of politicians, pundits and other supporters of the Putin administration over the initially polite decline to participate in the Moscow festivities by two Baltic heads of state and the Ukrainian president is even worse, putting the lie to the myth that the current Russian government and it’s pundits seek to build a democratic, post-colonial Russia that will be cooperative with an EU now on its borders. The logic of the invitation—“We defeated the Nazis together, so we should celebrate together”—is a chauvinist ploy that thankfully was recognized as such by the leadership of the Baltic States and of Ukraine. As ploy, it is part of an increasingly desperate attempt to win major ideological capital for Russian neo-imperialism after the major set back of the Rose and Orange Revolutions and of the rebellion in Kyrgyzstan. The main target audiences for the Russian and Russophile uproar over the refusal to participate are members of the Russian diaspora and those non-Russians with an aged Soviet mentality in Russia’s so-called “near-abroad,” and Western pundits vulnerable, for a variety of reasons, to the Russian version of things. The goal is to win leverage from the EU over the Baltic States and destabilization of Ukraine, which is beginning its long gallop out of Russia’s reach. The rationale is that without a unified sense of Eastern European history that places the emphasis on the role of the Great Russian people in the course of all its major events, there can be no future empire for Russia, and no neo-imperial influence in the near-abroad at present. Crucial to holding that vision of history together is the old Soviet ideology of WWII, which Putin’s administration is making clear is also part of Russia’s post-Soviet inheritance. The conclusion: Putin’s government has no intention of engaging with nor encouraging a process of decolonizing Russia’s mentality and foreign policy, even after the Rose and Orange Revolutions. As Putin has recently said, “The greatest catastrophe of the Twentieth Century was the collapse of the Soviet Union,” and “Russia and Ukraine are like East and West Germany.”
Togetherness is not the word that most people (or most non-Russians) in the Baltics and many in Ukraine would use to describe the monumental struggle against Nazi Germany (although in Ukraine, the situation is much more complicated. . .). Togetherness suggests far too much a notion of people struggling together out of free and goodwill; what happened in WWII was cooperation that was the result of necessity. But I don’t even want to engage the issue on this level: what is most appalling is that with this whole issue, the Russian government and its pundits are attempting to dictate how the Baltics and Ukrainians should recall their own past; in this case their own experiences of WWII. Moscow used to tell them not to remember their real history in Soviet times, and now Moscow is doing so again. “Forget about all that that was specific to your experience! Remember how you fought with us, your Big Brothers and Sisters! Come to Moscow!”
People want the chance to remember the real history. They want to be left alone to finally rebuild their own memories of the past, and to build their own futures. This is especially important to Ukraine, which still lags far behind the Baltic States in de-Sovietizing how history is taught and how the past is remembered. Thank you Yushchenko for choosing to stay in Ukraine. (And even though I think it would have been much better for Latvia’s Freiberga to not have broken Baltic solidarity on this matter and chosen to stay in Latvia tomorrow—Monday, May 9, 2005—she is admirably at least trying to make a point of her visit to Moscow: “Our History of that period is not Your History. And do You even know Your real History?”)
As for what the pundits are saying, it is despicable the way they are repeating all of the old Soviet myths about rampaging Baltic and Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazi program; about the partisans, and about those who joined anti-Soviet units formed under German tutelage (and unfortunately these are largely Western myths, too; Westerner culture traffics in so many stereotypes about rabid Eastern European collaboration with the Nazis, too). That they are bringing all this up in reaction to the refusal to come to Moscow with the sensibility of, “Ah-hah! We told you that they in the end were anti-Semites, Nazi collaborators and nationalists!” only makes them look ridiculous. It shows how small is their human dignity and their understanding. They seem to have forgotten that there would be no issue if Putin had not made the invitation in the first place, and if the pro-Putin pundits did not make such a big stink of the refusal. The Putin government probably expected the refusal, anyway, and they probably hoped that they could, by dragging into the open all these old Soviet spook stories about wicked, fascist partisans, throw egg in the face of the post-OR authorities in Ukraine, and of their old adversaries in the Baltics.
Russia needs to stay out so that these countries can work out their own version of the past. I am intimate with this issue myself. My father’s family is from the Ternopil region of Western Ukraine; my mother’s family is from the Poltava region of Central Ukraine. My father was born on the road while his parents and two sisters were fleeing the Red Army’s advance back into Ukraine; my mother was born in Germany because her parent’s had been Ostarbeitere (workers who were forcibly taken from home to work in munitions plants in Germany). My father has an uncle who fought at the Battle of Brody as part of the SS Galicia division (a division of Ukrainians formed under the SS that was organized ONLY to fight the Red Army and had NOTHING to do with the Holocaust, and whose members thought they would later form the chore of an independent Ukrainian Army; see the snippet I include below about them); my mother has an uncle who also fought at Brody, but with the Red Army. My father’s uncle survived the battle, even though his unit suffered 70% casualties as the Germans used the Ukrainian and other non-German units as canon-fodder; my mother’s uncle died at that battle. One member of my mother’s family once said to me that my father’s uncle killed her uncle; my father’s family is proud of his contribution to the struggle for a free and independent Ukraine. Some members of my father’s family refer to Central and Eastern Ukrainians as Moskali (derogatory term for Russians and what could be called “Russified Ukrainians”); some of my mother’s family say Western Ukrainians are all Banderivtsi (a name of one partisan group that Soviet propaganda painted as pro-Nazi and fascist). Members of both sides voted for Yushchenko. Upon learning this, some of my family in Western Ukraine admitted that things were more hopeful in Ukraine than they thought. With my Poltava family, the process of coming to the decision to vote for Yushchenko also came with the admittance that perhaps what they know of their own history and of Western Ukrainians was also a lie. Whatever be the case for them, the Russian government and Russian pundits should stay out of it: they must let Ukrainians—which I use here not in the ethnic sense but in the civic one including Ukrainian citizens of every culture and language—work out their version of the events of the past. And Western Ukrainians must have the first chance in their life to tell their stories openly in Kyiv (HELLO Symonenko!).
That is precisely what Russia is afraid of; and the invitation and the uproar is just more manipulation, is just the same as Putin’s open support for Yankovych.
For two good, recent resources that deal comprehensively with the complexities of the history of Ukraine during WWII:
Check out the book Harvest of Despair by Karel C. Berkhoff, published just last year. It covers the history of parts of Western and Central Ukraine under German occupation (the area of the Reichskomissariat).
Get a copy of Slavko Nowytski’s recent documentary, Between Hitler and Stalin: Ukraine in WWII: The Untold Story.
Also check-out the pamphlet written some years ago by Myron Kuropas, as he sought to combat 60 Minutes for a segment in which it made use of all the lies, distortions, and exaggerations about Ukrainians who fought briefly on the German side during WWII that the Russian government and its pundits, both in Ukraine and in Russia and elsewhere, are now repeating. It is entitled, Scourging of a Nation: CBS and the Defamation of Ukraine.
My next piece will be on the myth of widespread Eastern European collaboration with the Nazis. I will ruminate on the following question: Why is the general image of France during WWII in the Western mind of the Resistance and of Ukraine of widespread collaboration and anti-Semitism, when Ukraine had an active and large resistance (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought both Nazis and the Soviets and had possibly up to 100,000 soldiers at its highpoint, and thousands of others actively supporting it as doctors and other supportive staff throughout most of Western Ukraine and many parts of the central regions) while most of France was governed by an actively collaborationist government of Frenchmen, and Jews were rounded up and deported to death camps there, too. I don’t deny that some Ukrainians participated in the slaughter, but I am tired of Ukrainians being singled out as particularly wretched, more so than Germans or French or Dutch (Anne Frank was betrayed in Amsterdam, mind you), etc., during the course of WWII.
Some websites about the anti-Soviet, anti-German partisan army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, from the Ukrainian initials):
http://hometown.aol.com/shukhevych/
http://www.infoukes.com/upa/ (this site is quite detailed)
http://www.uea.ac.uk/his/webcours/russia/documents/upa.shtml
http://www.artukraine.com/upa/upa01.htm
And oh, that snippet about that SS Galicia division; its from Kuropas' pamphlet mentioned above, pp. 9-10:
The so-called Galician Division (Himmler forbade the use of the term “Ukrainian”) was established in the summer of 1943, when the German army was already beginning its retreat from Soviet territories. The rounding up of Ukraine’s Jews, begun in 1941, was essentially complete before the division was raised. The only Ukrainian Jews who did survive until 1943 were those being sheltered by other Ukrainians.
[In 1943] tens of thousands of Jews were still in hiding throughout the General Government [western Ukraine], the Eastern Territories and the Ukraine. But German searches for them were continuous.
The Galicia Division, properly identified, at first, as the SS Volunteer Division “Galicia” became, from June 1944, the 14th Volunteer Grenadier Division of the SS, 1st Galician. According to Ukrainian and German sources, the division was unique because (1) it was strictly a combat unit and so played no role in the management of concentration camps or death camps; (2) its Ukrainian members wore a lion rampant [lion symbolism is associated with Galician history and especially with the city of L’viv; Stefan] instead of an “SS” on their right collars during most of the life of the division; (3) its ranks and titles were those of the Wehrmacht [the German Regular Army that pre-existed the rise of the Nazis; Stefan] rather than the SS; (4) it was accompanied by Ukrainian chaplains who attended to the spiritual needs of the troops; (5) it was kept separate from other German forces; (6) it was created with the proviso that it never be used against the Western Allies but only against Soviet forces on the Eastern front. [2]
The Galicia Division fought the Soviets in a major engagement near the Ukrainian town of Brody. Decimated, its remnants went west. In early 1945, its survivors were regrouped into the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army, under the leadership of General Pavlo Shandruk. These Ukrainians all believed that the military training and experience they were receiving under German tutelage would allow them to establish a Ukrainian army capable of freeing Ukraine from the Soviets. Some of these Ukrainian veterans did indeed stay in Ukraine, joining the ranks of the underground. Other moved west where they fought with the French underground against the Nazis. Most ended up marching into northeastern Italy where the Ukrainian National Army surrendered to British forces. . .
These were the kind of men who held a reunion in Brody during the summer of 1994.
So ends the Kuropas passage (Sorry, I didn't include the notes). . .and these are the kind of men that want to stand on Kyiv’s Independence Square on May 9, 2005.
Us’oho najkrashchoho (All the Best),
Stefan
PS--I suppose one should also do a piece on the complexities of this matter in Ukraine, or about how those who are still beholden to the Soviet view of the UPA, OUN, and Galicia Divison are now potential pawns of the Russian neo-imperialist propaganda, just as those are who believe the Russophile propaganda that Yushchenko is a nationalist who will close Russian language schools and who wants to run the Russian language out of Ukraine. Truth is not relative, but one does have to deal with the reality of those whose grasp on the truth is. . .
Saturday, May 07, 2005
Zvarych Controversy, The Reputation of the Diaspora and Expat Community in Ukraine, and Other Related Thoughts
Propaganda sticker made by PORA!: "FACTS (A Newspaper): They Lie"
PORA! has recently made a similar sticker that says "Zvarych Lies!"
The accusations of dishonesty against Zvarych seem to be genuine, lest one think that somehow the "opposition" in Ukraine got to Columbia and NYU first, paid some bribes, and thus it was announced that this fellow lied through his teeth. But I am sad to see that neither Yushchenko nor Tymoshenko are pursuing this matter rigorously, in any open and transparent manner. Thankfully activists from PORA! are, living up to their promise to put pressure on anyone who engages in "lies, corruption, and communistic behavior," and they have put Zvarych on their blacklist (http://pora.org.ua/blacklist/ in Ukrainian only). This helps to demonstrate, by-the-way, PORA!’s lasting importance and effectiveness as a grassroots organization—I think this is PORA!’s genuine future and effectiveness, and am quite surprised by comments in punditland, especially on other Ukraine blogs that I have read, stating that PORA! has or is destined to become obsolete. Hm. . .hardly!
But I want to make some general comments. To my mind, the Zvarych case should make us all think about two related issues: 1) the reputation of diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats (i.e., those without Ukrainian roots) in Ukraine in general, and 2) the related matter of abuses by the same people. To begin with the latter, what bothers me about Zvarych's case, beyond someone lieing to get into a position of power and influence, is that it might be the tip of an iceberg; and however small that iceberg might be, its one worth discussing.
In the case of Zvarych, it seems that he lied for mostly “patriotic” reasons; i.e., it seems that he lied not because he wanted to enrich himself at the expense of Ukraine and Ukrainians like the oligarchs do, but because he so desperately wanted to be part of building a post-communist Ukraine. Whatever be the case, his lies are indefensible. And I wonder just how many diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats are in Ukraine taking advantage of the good-faith and relative inexperience of Ukrainians and of their own privileges and status as “people from the West,” just in order to get ahead for not so glorious and patriotic reasons. People like this do a diservice to all the sincere diaspora Ukrainians and expats living in Ukraine, of which there are indeed many. So. . .is there are a problem of people from the West using their status and/or privileges as Westerners to manipulate the situation in Ukraine for the sake of their own power or influence or prestige? Maybe not that great of one. . .
Now, as for the former point, I know that I am not the only diaspora Ukrainian who was initially shocked or dismayed by the rather cold and unreceptive attitude that many—but certainly not all—Ukrainians have toward their diaspora kin. It was hard to be told over and over again that I was not Ukrainian in any way, shape or form, and that I was purely American, etc. Although I do not at all agree with the notion that I am not Ukrainian in any way, I do know quite well that I am very much so American, and that they are not, and that that sets me and all the rest of us diaspora (whether Ukrainian-American, Uki-Canadian, Uki-Argentinian or Australian) quite apart from our Ukrainian kin, no matter how hard we try to emphasize that we are quite Ukrainian in many ways, too. As far as I am concerned, we are Ukrainian-Americans or Canadians, etc., which means that we are neither plainly American (etc.), but also are definitely not plainly Ukrainian--we will ever only be Ukrainians with a dash; we will never be unqualified Ukrainians. (And those who come to Ukraine and whine about the conditions do a good job of making that abundantly clear, if you know what I mean!) Along with that, it was also hard to discover that a lot of Ukrainians also do not have such a high opinion of diaspora Ukrainians—and here we can add in Westerners in general and hence of the expats—because of many diapora Ukrainians’ and expats’ attitudes and behaviors while in Ukraine. So I want to talk about that for a moment, and ask whether diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats in Ukraine deserve the bad rap.
One of the major things that sets up this bad rap is the way in which a lot of diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats complain about the living conditions, the language situation, and the culture of customer service in Ukraine. Of course, not every diaspora Ukrainian and American expat who visits Ukraine comes and whines very vocally about these things, but there are plenty who do, and these complaints don’t fall on deaf Ukrainian ears—and often, the complaints are told directly to Ukrainians, and usually not without a bit of of condescension. And from some of my Ukrainian friends, I know that sometimes the Ukrainian listening to these complaints will completely agree with the person and will have no trouble accepting what is being said; but more often than not, the person, whether s/he agrees or not, will find something troubling in being told that the living conditions in their country are savage, or that the language situation is a mess and that Ukrainian speakers speak a too Russified Ukrainian, etc.
And I also want to say that I often felt annoyed at the gatherings of fellow Westerners in Ukraine because of the apparent hegemony of the view of Ukraine as a silly little, backwards country. Such things, along with the actions of people like Zvarych, really damage our reputation among a significant number of Ukrainians, and I can’t for one say that diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats are not largely at fault for that.
(By the way, I may not have had a wide enough experience with the diaspora and expat community in Ukraine, and mind you, I am certainly not talking about all the diaspora Ukrainians and American expats living in Ukraine. I did meet a folks here and there, particularly in L’viv, whom I thought had what increasingly seemed to me the gift of being able to accept, experience, and live in Ukraine on its own terms without judgment. Also, I had a fantastic time talking with some of the diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats that were regulars in the bar “Baraban” in Kyiv, which was the salon of the OR. However, people like these seemed to be in the minority; the majority seemed to me to be whiners. Thus, if my experience was too narrow and I am unjustifiably making an issue of an attitude that truly only afflicts a small minority of expats and diaspora Ukrainians in Ukraine, I will stand joyfully corrected!)
Of course, there are other reasons why diaspora Ukrainains and Western expats have somewhat of a bad reputation among some in Ukraine other than the diaspora Ukrainians’ and Western expats’ putting the proverbial foot in their mouth vis-à-vis their comments that make clear their very Western passions for their very Western creature comforts; but that does not mean that one is therefore free to go on putting one’s foot in one’s mouth, either. But before I continue, of course a lot of those Ukrainians who do have a negative image of the diaspora and expats in general do so as result of the anti-diaspora, anti-foreigner stance of the post-Soviet authorities, and also because some of them are resentful of what we have in the West that they do not. Of course, whether they are right or wrong to be thusly resentful, the diaspora Ukrainian or the Western expat certainly is not right in making condescending comments about the way things are in Ukraine that will only stoke the fires of that resentment. In the end, all the whining just proves that one is actually an Ugly American (or Canadian or _______ fill in your own blank), or rather, more a Westerner than a Ukrainian by virtue of one’s need for more creature comforts.
In the case of Zvarych, it seems that he lied for mostly “patriotic” reasons; i.e., it seems that he lied not because he wanted to enrich himself at the expense of Ukraine and Ukrainians like the oligarchs do, but because he so desperately wanted to be part of building a post-communist Ukraine. Whatever be the case, his lies are indefensible. And I wonder just how many diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats are in Ukraine taking advantage of the good-faith and relative inexperience of Ukrainians and of their own privileges and status as “people from the West,” just in order to get ahead for not so glorious and patriotic reasons. People like this do a diservice to all the sincere diaspora Ukrainians and expats living in Ukraine, of which there are indeed many. So. . .is there are a problem of people from the West using their status and/or privileges as Westerners to manipulate the situation in Ukraine for the sake of their own power or influence or prestige? Maybe not that great of one. . .
Now, as for the former point, I know that I am not the only diaspora Ukrainian who was initially shocked or dismayed by the rather cold and unreceptive attitude that many—but certainly not all—Ukrainians have toward their diaspora kin. It was hard to be told over and over again that I was not Ukrainian in any way, shape or form, and that I was purely American, etc. Although I do not at all agree with the notion that I am not Ukrainian in any way, I do know quite well that I am very much so American, and that they are not, and that that sets me and all the rest of us diaspora (whether Ukrainian-American, Uki-Canadian, Uki-Argentinian or Australian) quite apart from our Ukrainian kin, no matter how hard we try to emphasize that we are quite Ukrainian in many ways, too. As far as I am concerned, we are Ukrainian-Americans or Canadians, etc., which means that we are neither plainly American (etc.), but also are definitely not plainly Ukrainian--we will ever only be Ukrainians with a dash; we will never be unqualified Ukrainians. (And those who come to Ukraine and whine about the conditions do a good job of making that abundantly clear, if you know what I mean!) Along with that, it was also hard to discover that a lot of Ukrainians also do not have such a high opinion of diaspora Ukrainians—and here we can add in Westerners in general and hence of the expats—because of many diapora Ukrainians’ and expats’ attitudes and behaviors while in Ukraine. So I want to talk about that for a moment, and ask whether diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats in Ukraine deserve the bad rap.
One of the major things that sets up this bad rap is the way in which a lot of diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats complain about the living conditions, the language situation, and the culture of customer service in Ukraine. Of course, not every diaspora Ukrainian and American expat who visits Ukraine comes and whines very vocally about these things, but there are plenty who do, and these complaints don’t fall on deaf Ukrainian ears—and often, the complaints are told directly to Ukrainians, and usually not without a bit of of condescension. And from some of my Ukrainian friends, I know that sometimes the Ukrainian listening to these complaints will completely agree with the person and will have no trouble accepting what is being said; but more often than not, the person, whether s/he agrees or not, will find something troubling in being told that the living conditions in their country are savage, or that the language situation is a mess and that Ukrainian speakers speak a too Russified Ukrainian, etc.
And I also want to say that I often felt annoyed at the gatherings of fellow Westerners in Ukraine because of the apparent hegemony of the view of Ukraine as a silly little, backwards country. Such things, along with the actions of people like Zvarych, really damage our reputation among a significant number of Ukrainians, and I can’t for one say that diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats are not largely at fault for that.
(By the way, I may not have had a wide enough experience with the diaspora and expat community in Ukraine, and mind you, I am certainly not talking about all the diaspora Ukrainians and American expats living in Ukraine. I did meet a folks here and there, particularly in L’viv, whom I thought had what increasingly seemed to me the gift of being able to accept, experience, and live in Ukraine on its own terms without judgment. Also, I had a fantastic time talking with some of the diaspora Ukrainians and Western expats that were regulars in the bar “Baraban” in Kyiv, which was the salon of the OR. However, people like these seemed to be in the minority; the majority seemed to me to be whiners. Thus, if my experience was too narrow and I am unjustifiably making an issue of an attitude that truly only afflicts a small minority of expats and diaspora Ukrainians in Ukraine, I will stand joyfully corrected!)
Of course, there are other reasons why diaspora Ukrainains and Western expats have somewhat of a bad reputation among some in Ukraine other than the diaspora Ukrainians’ and Western expats’ putting the proverbial foot in their mouth vis-à-vis their comments that make clear their very Western passions for their very Western creature comforts; but that does not mean that one is therefore free to go on putting one’s foot in one’s mouth, either. But before I continue, of course a lot of those Ukrainians who do have a negative image of the diaspora and expats in general do so as result of the anti-diaspora, anti-foreigner stance of the post-Soviet authorities, and also because some of them are resentful of what we have in the West that they do not. Of course, whether they are right or wrong to be thusly resentful, the diaspora Ukrainian or the Western expat certainly is not right in making condescending comments about the way things are in Ukraine that will only stoke the fires of that resentment. In the end, all the whining just proves that one is actually an Ugly American (or Canadian or _______ fill in your own blank), or rather, more a Westerner than a Ukrainian by virtue of one’s need for more creature comforts.
There is nothing wrong with having a difficult time adjusting to lower standards of living when one encounters them, I suppose; but one should also keep in mind that Ukraine by global standards is actually quite well off. Ukraine is NOT India NOR Subsaharan Africa; it is NOT a Third World but a Second World country. Furthermore, one can in Ukraine enjoy a Western standard of living, for the most part, but only in the cities and definitely not in the smaller towns and villages (which one can also more or less do in truly Third World countries as well). Thus, on the other hand, life for many average Ukrainians is much closer to how it is lived by most of the people of our earth than it is for an average Westerner, and thus travel to Ukraine is an important opportunity for any Westerner, whether diaspora or not, to learn some important things about the world we are living in. But I have learned that a lot of diaspora are generally shocked to see how their Ukrainian kin live. And of course, being relatively OK by global standards does not mean that there is nothing to improve. Of course there is: an Orange Revolution did happen in Ukraine for genuinely populist reasons, but I believe that unless one can really learn to accept and see things in Ukraine as closely to how a Ukrainian does or has to, you will have a really hard time understanding the real reasons for why the OR happened and where Ukraine may go from here, among other things. . .
So I’d like to set out here a kind of manifesto, or what I think one’s attitude as a diaspora Ukrainian or Western expat should be toward Ukraine and Ukrainians while one is in Ukraine:
For starters, one’s attitude should be one of non-judgmentality, and it certainly needs to be an attitude of not thinking that one needs to save Ukraine from Ukrainians. It has to do with giving advice when asked for it, and listening and learning otherwise. It has to do with not whining about living conditions in Ukraine, or the language situation, but accepting them and accomodating yourself as best as you can—for, how certain are you about your language ideology? Are you so sure that the word you just heard was Russian? And if so, so what? Many contemporary Ukrainians are not that bothered by the occassional word, and just because some Russian words have entered the lexicon, the language has not suddenly leaped into being Russian; Ukrainians in America often use English words; and Ukrainians in North America also often use phrases that are direct translations from North American English to Ukrainian that Ukrainians don't use; and so language changes, period.
This does not mean, however, that the Ukrainian government should not be more actively promoting the use of the Ukrainian language at an all-Ukrainian level: the general and robust use of the Ukrainian language, and the entrance of certain Russian words into the vocabularly, are related but not directly, and therefore are separate issues. Ukrainian speakers are speaking Ukrainian just fine in Ukraine, especially in the Western and much of the Central part of the country, and there is nothing wrong with people speaking Russian in the home and in public. Where the problem lies in terms of the language situation in Ukraine as far as I am concerned is with the fact that everyone who speaks Ukrainian can more or less speak Russian, but the vice-versa is not true. That needs to be changed, but not to the complete elimination of Russian either in the minds of Russians or Ukrainians of a future Ukraine. Multilingualism is one of the more fascinating aspects of Ukraine, and multilingual populism is actually Yushchenkko’s stance, despite the Russian chauvinist propaganda machine working against him. Also, it would be a shame if Ukrainian speakers lost their ability to be fluent in two languages, and I don’t know a single Ukrainian who resents actually knowing the Russian language. And of those I knew with whom I had explicit conversations about this, most said that what they have resented is that in Ukraine, the Ukrainian language has been treated as second to Russian, but not that Russian was bad. But so many diaspora seem to be plainly intolerant of Russian, period. This is the position of only a extremely right-wing minority in Ukraine, the same minority that rejected Yushchenko’s candidacy because of his policy of tolerance for Ukraine’s multilingual and cultural situation and because of his “American” wife. It seems to me that in general, such total and complete intolerance is not how most Ukrainian-speakers feel about the Russian language in Ukraine.
I think this is one instance in which Ukrainians have a much more progressive and open minded attitude than much of the Ukrainian diaspora; and its not the only instance in which Ukrainians in general seem to me to take a more progressive stance on an issue than their fellow Western kin. Nonetheless, almost every Ukrainian speaker I knew in Ukraine agreed that it would be to the benefit of Russian-speakers and of course of Ukraine in general if the level of fluency of Russian speakers in the Ukrainian language reached that of Ukrainian-speakers in the Russian language. And as far as I can see, such is the goal being set by the post-OR authorities, as well as is the goal of fluency in the national tongue toward which the governments in the Baltic states are working, regardless of what extremist and chauvinist Russian pundits and politicans are saying to and from the Russian diaspora. . .
But to return to our manifesto, a sincere diaspora or expat attitude also has to do with not whining about the culture of customer service in Ukraine or any other former post-Soviet nation but striving to understand and adjust to it, and therefore learning how to work with it, and by extension, with not assuming that everything the way it is done in the West is the best.
In short, all of this manifesto can be summed up by stating that the most important attitude of the diaspora or the expat is one of humility and willingness to live and learn.
So I’d like to set out here a kind of manifesto, or what I think one’s attitude as a diaspora Ukrainian or Western expat should be toward Ukraine and Ukrainians while one is in Ukraine:
For starters, one’s attitude should be one of non-judgmentality, and it certainly needs to be an attitude of not thinking that one needs to save Ukraine from Ukrainians. It has to do with giving advice when asked for it, and listening and learning otherwise. It has to do with not whining about living conditions in Ukraine, or the language situation, but accepting them and accomodating yourself as best as you can—for, how certain are you about your language ideology? Are you so sure that the word you just heard was Russian? And if so, so what? Many contemporary Ukrainians are not that bothered by the occassional word, and just because some Russian words have entered the lexicon, the language has not suddenly leaped into being Russian; Ukrainians in America often use English words; and Ukrainians in North America also often use phrases that are direct translations from North American English to Ukrainian that Ukrainians don't use; and so language changes, period.
This does not mean, however, that the Ukrainian government should not be more actively promoting the use of the Ukrainian language at an all-Ukrainian level: the general and robust use of the Ukrainian language, and the entrance of certain Russian words into the vocabularly, are related but not directly, and therefore are separate issues. Ukrainian speakers are speaking Ukrainian just fine in Ukraine, especially in the Western and much of the Central part of the country, and there is nothing wrong with people speaking Russian in the home and in public. Where the problem lies in terms of the language situation in Ukraine as far as I am concerned is with the fact that everyone who speaks Ukrainian can more or less speak Russian, but the vice-versa is not true. That needs to be changed, but not to the complete elimination of Russian either in the minds of Russians or Ukrainians of a future Ukraine. Multilingualism is one of the more fascinating aspects of Ukraine, and multilingual populism is actually Yushchenkko’s stance, despite the Russian chauvinist propaganda machine working against him. Also, it would be a shame if Ukrainian speakers lost their ability to be fluent in two languages, and I don’t know a single Ukrainian who resents actually knowing the Russian language. And of those I knew with whom I had explicit conversations about this, most said that what they have resented is that in Ukraine, the Ukrainian language has been treated as second to Russian, but not that Russian was bad. But so many diaspora seem to be plainly intolerant of Russian, period. This is the position of only a extremely right-wing minority in Ukraine, the same minority that rejected Yushchenko’s candidacy because of his policy of tolerance for Ukraine’s multilingual and cultural situation and because of his “American” wife. It seems to me that in general, such total and complete intolerance is not how most Ukrainian-speakers feel about the Russian language in Ukraine.
I think this is one instance in which Ukrainians have a much more progressive and open minded attitude than much of the Ukrainian diaspora; and its not the only instance in which Ukrainians in general seem to me to take a more progressive stance on an issue than their fellow Western kin. Nonetheless, almost every Ukrainian speaker I knew in Ukraine agreed that it would be to the benefit of Russian-speakers and of course of Ukraine in general if the level of fluency of Russian speakers in the Ukrainian language reached that of Ukrainian-speakers in the Russian language. And as far as I can see, such is the goal being set by the post-OR authorities, as well as is the goal of fluency in the national tongue toward which the governments in the Baltic states are working, regardless of what extremist and chauvinist Russian pundits and politicans are saying to and from the Russian diaspora. . .
But to return to our manifesto, a sincere diaspora or expat attitude also has to do with not whining about the culture of customer service in Ukraine or any other former post-Soviet nation but striving to understand and adjust to it, and therefore learning how to work with it, and by extension, with not assuming that everything the way it is done in the West is the best.
In short, all of this manifesto can be summed up by stating that the most important attitude of the diaspora or the expat is one of humility and willingness to live and learn.
None of this means, of course, that there is no role for diaspora Ukrainians or Western expats in Ukraine, and none of this means that Ukrainians are on the whole totally against or completely ungrateful or indifferent to us and what we can contribute to their nation's growth. NOT IN THE LEAST! But, whether you have Ukrainian heritage or not, it is THEIR nation! So I am talking about one's attitude toward work in Ukraine: the diaspora Ukrainian or expat should work with Ukrainians, not as their bosses (unless of course that is your business being there; but then, of course you should come at differences of approach without a condescending attitude about the way they have always done things. . .). One should not conduct one’s self as if one knows better simply because one has knowledge and experience from the West! And one obviously shouldn't take advantage of one's privilege as a Westerner and the goodwill of many toward all things Western simply to get ahead. Thus I propose that for now on, the term for whenever a diaspora Ukrainian or an American expat lies or otherwise takes unfair advantange of his or her status as someone from the West and the situation in Ukraine for the sake of personal advancement, Zvarychism, whether one was motivated by a patriotic feeling or purely out of personal greed. . .
.
However, to switch back to Zvarych for the moment: it might not be that he told his lies simply due to a patriotic feeling. His near resignation over changes in oil prices and imports/exports policy when his wife works for and makes her money at a firm that is affected by such policy changes smacks too much of the kind of corruption the OR was to stand against; his lies, her job and his threat to quit his job, all seem like "communistic behavior" to me.So this is an opportune moment for Yushchenko et al to clarify their stance on their call for the diaspora and expats to come and help build a post-OR Ukraine. They could be saying, with this opportunity, something like: "We are more open to our diaspora kin and to Westerners in general than any regime has been in the modern history of Ukraine, but we also ain't gonna be suckers, neither! And part of our goal of improving conditions in Ukraine is so that our women have no more motivation to marry themselves off to cruising Western men looking for trophy wives half their age in our country! We will not be exploited! Come work with us with dignity! We, after our OR, have our dignity again!" And then let's hope people will be doing more thorough background checks on everyone in Ukraine, and not just those with suspected ties to the oligarchy. . .
So, in extreme contradistinction to the extreme of Zvarych (who is an extreme example of the diaspora Ukrainian or Western expat gone bad) and Zvarychism, here's a story of an American expat who lives in a village not far from my ancestral hometown, my beloved Pidhajtsi. I was told that there is an American guy in a nearby village who had been a Peace Corps volunteer who fell in love, not just with a Ukrainian woman whom he married, but also with life in Ukraine in general. He has been living in Ukraine ever since getting hitched. His reason for staying and wanting to live out the rest of his life in rural Ukraine is, supposedly, because he says that the peace of mind he finds possible in Ukraine is no longer available in the West. . .
When I return to Ukraine, either in the middle of this summer or in the fall, I will definitely be seeking him out for an interview. Such is the ideal of love for and acceptance of the country toward which the diaspora Ukrainian and/or expat American should strive (without necessarily going to the extent of chosing to move to Ukraine) to my mind, and I will seek to create a term for this more positive orientation of the diaspora and expat toward Ukraine from his last name. It will denote the opposite of Zvarychism!
Perhaps I am being a bit too harsh on Zvarych; Zvarych loved Ukraine quite a bit, too. He did take that same courageous step of giving up his American citizenship and moving to Ukraine. But his lies and his seeming manipulations in relation to his wife’s business interests deeply tarnish whatever he has done that might be admirable. What was he thinking, I wonder, when he began his lies, and then continued them? Lieing to get ahead or into positions of influence and power, whether for the sake of Ukraine or for that of personal gratification (in Zvarych's case, it seems that both those things played a role), is not all that patriotic in the end: is it patriotic to abuse your privileges as a Westerner with statements like “I was a professor at Columbia,” for no Ukrainian could get away with such a flippant lie; and thus is it patriotic to abuse people’s goodwill and willingness to trust you, just to get ahead? And there is nothing wrong with personal gratification, so long as it achieved in a legitimate manner and within reason. . .
To read more about the issue of Zvarych, see Taras Kuzio’s article at the Eurasian Daily Monitor at: http://jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2369693
And also, for those who read Ukrainian, see what PORA! has been writing about the situation: http://pora.org.ua/content/blogcategory/132/186/
Stefan
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