gungasnake wrote:nimh wrote:Hey, I dont mind anyone pointing out that Yushchenko also just rose up through the ranks of apparatchiks, and that he was himself a Prime Minister under Kuchma not so long ago. He left not because he was already possessed by a revolutionary fervour for systemic change, but primarily just because he proponed a course of stricter market reforms than Kuchma would allow. Ever since though, he's become a focal point for the opposition against the corrupt, authoritarian Kuchma regime, and now the fraud that kept him from the Presidency has become the focus for much of the Ukrainian people's impatience and longing for something more normal, something more like the West, more like Europe, something more free and more fair and more transparent. That used to be the people the West would support; Reagan surely did.
What about the antisemitic element of the Youschenko group? I mean, the claims of 400,000 Jews invading the Ukraine in WW-II?
Claims made by whom? Not by Yushchenko. What do you mean by "the Yushchenko group"? Lookit, the people on the streets the last two weeks comprise an enormous alliance of groups - all the way from socialist to liberal to conservative to right-wing radical. All they have in common at the moment is that they are fed up with the alliance of communists and corrupt businessmen that have over the past decade reduced Ukraine's incipient democracy to a sham and the economy to an institutionalised form of mob rule - and a belief that Yushchenko is the most credible chance of success they have right now of turning that old clique out.
What we see now - just an example - is that at one TV station after another, where reporters were ordered to only ever report positively about Kuchma and Yanukovich and not to report about Yushchenko at all, or only negatively - the journalists are now challenging their bosses and claiming back the right to report the truth, and turning the news back into a mix again. That kind of thing is a good thing to me. And what we also see is that in East-Ukraine, Yanukovich heartland, the authorities have reacted by taking all media off the air except the ones that are still exclusively loyal to him, wont air any images of the demonstrations, etc. That kind of thing is a bad thing to me. I mean, just to bring things back to basics. What do we stand for in the West again?
Anyway, I dont think we're going to get anywhere soon with each other on this topic ... except to say that, yes of course, the neonazi groups that are active on the margins of (West-)Ukrainian politics are a stain that needs to be tackled asap. Something Kuchma
also never did, by the way - it was quite to his advantage, after all, to have some nazis to refer to as the enemy, among the opposition. I think, in any case, a working democracy with a western orientation will better deal with that problem than a corrupt authoritarian regime under Russia's wings.
