tainted love
Scenes of the massive protests following the recent Ukranian presidential elections - coming on the heels of the substance-less farce that was supposed to be the most important election anywhere, anytime, of your/our/everyone's lives - failed to move me the way it obviously moved some to sneer and pout (yes Virginia, we progs and rads aren't always on the side of history's angels):
Unlike the non-violent people's movements that spurred the official history-book ending of the Soviet Union and it's control of the surrounding satellite countries, it should have been obvious that even the most cursory reading of the facts surrounding the election should have tipped a body off to what's actually being decided here - the nasty, law-and-order "pro-Russian" candidate and the pro-western reformer. Pro-western...pro-western...can anyone remember the last time a pro-western candidate in a geopolitically sensitive area was the pro-democracy candidate? Both The Nation and the European papers have shown in the last few weeks that there is more going on there than just people power.
Yushchenko - apparently a victim of dioxin poisoning or something, though that it's hard to know what to believe about this whole thing now - and his catalogue-model-pretty wife is in fact, as the Independent put it, little more than a "money-changer," and not (as Dave Chappelle might put it) "from the streets." Indeed, as Mr. Sam Smith shows in a collection of articles, mostly culled from the British press, what's going on in Ukraine is not too different from what just happened here.
KNIGHT RIDDER, DEC 4 - Viktor Yushchenko isn't just a presidential candidate these days in the Ukraine. He's a legend. . . 'He is all things to all people,' said Zoryana Ilenko, a western Ukrainian journalist who has covered the election. 'As to what he would actually do once he becomes president, I do not think many people have considered this yet. They are happy, for now, with a myth.'. . . Some Ukrainians question whether Yushchenko's image is greater than reality. 'The truth is that the best thing about him, to millions of people, is that he isn't the other guy,' said Evgen Rybka, editor of Tviy Vybir, a national political newspaper. 'We have to take him for what he is, not what we want him to be.'"
Sound familiar?
Now, this is not say in any way that the many thousands that came out to support the Yuschenko candidacy are any less earnest or idealistic than the many millions who voted for John Kerry, yours truly included (fucking swing state politics...). In fact, they may be attempting to - just as many progressives did here - give themselves some political space and move their country in a better, more authentically democratic direction. But we should be careful not to overreach when trying to show just how slothful and apathetic Americans are when it comes to the democratic process. That's a given. We should be more concerned with pointing out the deceptions of empire, which will be far more meaningful in the long run for both Americans and Ukranians.
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