Califiornia's New Anti-Democratic Electoral System

When I received my ballot for the 2014 California General Election, I immediately realized how undemocratic it was and how I and many others have been disenfranchised. At the top of the ballot, where statewide offices appear, there were only two candidates for each office, Democrats and Republicans. Since I do not vote for Democrats and Republicans, I left the top of the ballot blank. I was deprived of the right to vote for candidates I agree with and support in the general election. In the past, primaries chose candidates for parties and then all qualifying parties (parties needed a minimum percentage of the vote in previous elections) had a candidate on the ballot in the general election. Now, however, all voters can vote for any candidate in the primary and only the top two votegetters appear on the ballot in the general election. General elections are where most people vote. I'm not sure whether I support letting all voters vote for any candidate in the primary election, but limiting the general election to two candidates turns out to stifle democracy and make it very, very difficult to build third parties. I hope there are many people like me who leave the top of the ballot blank. Those votes should be counted as a "none of the above" vote and should prevent either candidate from getting a majority if there are enough of them. That will underscore the bankruptcy of the current system. There are many ways in which democracy is undermined in the USA: voter IDs, spurious voter challenges, millions of votes stolen by manipulating voting machines, unlimited campaign spending including from corporations, etc. But this particular means of voting is a blatant move to take away choices from voters. We should be able to vote for candidates we support in general elections, and currently, we can't.

The American "Left" and Its Extremely Distorted Narrative on Ukraine

There are multiple narratives about what is going on now in Ukraine. There is the US and EU narrative, which is strongly colored by their own objectives to bring Ukraine into their own orbit. There is the Russian narrative of an east/west divide in Ukraine with massive support for Russia in the east which is being militarily attacked by a runaway government in Kiev. And then there is the Ukrainian narrative, which explains why millions of Ukrainians went into the streets to oppose the former Yanukovich government, which was so extremely corrupt that it had stolen so many tens of billions of dollars that it had bankrupted Ukraine, destroyed its economy, and was moving toward closer relations with Russia as a result. I understand why the establishment media in the US report only the US/EU narrative. I understand why extremely distorted and dishonest Russian propaganda is reported by Russian media and why alternative narratives are censored to prevent the Russian people from seeing them. What I do not understand is why so many prominent figures of the American left and left media such as the Nation, Democracy Now! and KPFA news are promoting the Russian narrative without dissenting views being allowed to be heard. We hear commentators such as Conn Hallinan, Stephen Cohen, Katrina Van Den Heuvel, Bob Scheer, and others broadcasting what I can only call pro-Russian nonsense about the situation in Ukraine.

Why, for example, do we not hear from Paul Robert Magocsi, author of "A History of Ukraine" and professor of history and political science at the University of Toronto, whom I heard on NPR presenting a Ukrainian narrative? Why do we not hear from Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, who lives a few hundred yards from Independence Square in Kiev, and who has just published his diaries from November 2013 to April 2014, also from a Ukrainian perspective ("Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev," Harville Secker, London, 2014. What these commentators present is far different from both the US/EU narrative and the Russian narrative. What they say, which is well-supported by easily ascertainable facts, is that events in Ukraine were and are not primarily motivated by east/west divisions or by Ukrainian/Russian language divisions. People went into the streets because they were fed up with their totally corrupt government, dysfunctional economy, and complete lack of democracy. The thwarted economic agreement with Europe was only a symbol for those much deeper demands, which were and are shared by Ukrainians east and west. There were, at first, uprisings in Kharkiv and Donetsk around these demands, though they were viciously and violently attacked by Russian forces. Opinion polls have consistently shown that all parts of Ukraine are strongly pro-Ukrainian with the exception of Crimea, in which 54 percent of the population wanted to be Russian (that fact should not obscure the total illegality of Russia's occupation of Crimea).

The signs that you are hearing Russian propaganda are easy to detect. For example, the word "coup" is used. There was no coup in Ukraine. President Yanukovich was advised by Vladimir Putin to use violence against demonstrators in Kiev. He did so and sent his snipers to shoot protesters. The negative reaction was so fierce that Yanukovich voluntarily fled the country; that is not a coup. Even his own Party of Regions denounced him. Second, we hear of "rebels" and "separatists." There are no Ukrainian rebels and separatists. What there is has been a Russian invasion for months with thousands of well-armed Russian troops (using the fiction that they are either "on leave" or civilian Russian citizens). Dead Russian soldiers are quietly buried in Russia with no press coverage allowed. The self-proclaimed leader of the Donetsk Republic is a Russian citizen. The weapons that these forces used to shoot down a Malaysian civilian airplane came from Russia. They have Russian tanks and advanced weapons that they are using to shoot down Ukrainian planes and helicopters inside Ukraine. There are likely small numbers of Ukrainians fighting with these Russians in the east; they are not rebels or separatists, they are collaborators with the Russian invasion.

I will not speculate on the motive of the massive support for the Russian propaganda campaign by voices of the left. It is their duty to explain their own actions. But I will state that they have grossly misled many people in the United States about what is really going on in Ukraine. They impose big power analysis on Ukraine and ignore the aspirations of the Ukrainian people. Vladimir Putin has zero interest in the well-being of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine or in Crimea, who faced no threat from Kiev at all until Putin began meddling there with his special forces. First and foremost, he is threatened by even the remote possibility that Ukraine could dismantle its corrupt regime and economic system and begin to build a genuinely democratic society which would certainly appeal to and inspire many Russian citizens as well as the beleaguered citizens of Belarus. That is a direct threat to Putin's power. Second and far behind that, Putin is concerned about Western influence in Ukraine. Ironically, his invasion has actually facilitated that and has caused Ukraine to apply for NATO membership.

I could understand left apologists for the Soviet Union (even when they were wrong, too) since the Soviet Union was still the result of a socialist experiment gone extremely awry. But Putin's Russia has no progressive aspect. This is oligarchical capitalism in the extreme, and Putin's allies, some of whom were sent to fight in Ukraine, are ironically far more fascist and rightwing than any party in Ukraine. This is not a case where the evil United States is trying to steal something from innocent and progressive Russia. Instead, an equally evil Russian government is trying to prevent Ukraine from freeing itself. For American leftists to support this Russian venture is shameful, dishonest, and totally unjustifiable. Inside Russia, the propaganda for this position is so pervasive and unchallenged that Russian citizens have no clue about what is really going on. I understand that, too, but I do not understand why American leftists are promoting and amplifying this completely deceptive Russian propaganda.

Understanding Ukraine is complicated by the fact that there are no genuine political parties which express the will of the Ukrainian people. It remains to be seen whether President Poroshenko will try to form such a party and whether he will succeed if he does try. Most Ukrainians are extremely distrustful of politicians, including Poroshenko. Still, that is the main story here, and the orchestrated Russian invasion is Putin's response to it.

I'd like to end this blog with some citations from the afterword to Andrey Kurkov's diaries, written on June 27. "Over the past two months the Ukrainian people have been introduced to the concept of 'hybrid war': an expression coined to mean war initiated in any country by a neighboring state without mobilizing their own troops but by supplying arms and volunteers to rebel insurgents in the country loyal to the neighboring state, who believe that life is better there. The neighboring state--in this case Russia--persistently denies involvement in the military situation in eastern Ukraine, but when challenged directly to explain how the separatists come to be in possession of tanks and military technology registered to the armed forces of the Russian Federation, they do not reply. Russian volunteers return home--to Rostov-on-Don, Lipetsk, or the suburbs of Moscow--in zinc-lined coffins, a familiar image from the war in Afghanistan.... But Russia does not welcome her wounded soldiers home. If truth be told, she would rather not accept her dead citizens either. With the exception of the opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, the Russian press does not even mention the Russian death toll in Ukraine. The funerals of these soldiers are conducted in virtual secrecy, too, under the supervision of Russia's FSB."

"Meanwhile, the Maidan, our European revolution, has become history. But6 this history is unfinished, not yet ready to be a page in a textbook. Of course, ex-President Yanukovych is currently living in Russia, and he was followed there by several dozen former members of the Cabinet and former heads of the police force and secret services. In other words, an entire class of corrupt Ukrainian politicians (as if there were any other kind) and civil servants have become political refugees. The country is governed by new people now, and Ukraine believes in them--for the time being. The new government has not yet launched its promised war against corruption on all levels."

"It will come to an end at some point. Whatever the outcome, it's already quite clear that the good old Ukraine we have lived in for twenty-three years since she gained independence will no longer exist. What kind of Ukraine will replace this quiet, peaceful version, no one knows. It's easy enough to conjure up a variety of possible scenarios for the immediate future, although none of them are particularly optimistic. The main reason for this is that Europe, so vociferous in her support during the Maidan protests, has subsequently fallen silent and walked away, preferring to profit from trade with Russia. Money matters more than democracy. This cynical lesson that Europe has taught Ukraine will inevitably influence the future of my country. Which means that it will influence my own future. Ultimately, it will influence the future of Europe herself--the future of the entire European Union."

Let real voices be heard, like Kurkov's, and let ignorant American leftists stop speaking as experts on events in Ukraine about which they demonstrably know very little.
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a very brief history of Ukraine

I'm appalled at the abysmal ignorance I read and hear about Ukraine and its history. So, this is a very brief outline of how Ukraine got to be the way it is today, which is critical to understand what is going on there. I have two long histories of Ukraine. I'm using Paul Robert Magocsi's book as a source; I've heard him on the radio recently, and he definitely gets it.

First, you need to look at the geography of Ukraine. Aside from the Carpathian mountains in the western edge of the country and the mountains in Crimea, Ukraine is mostly very flat. As a result, it has been invaded and occupied over and over again for thousands of years, and its borders have shifted a lot. Ukraine means borderland. Ukraine is 232,200 square miles and larger than any European country aside from Russia. Ukraine's major north/south rivers include the Dniester, the Dnieper, and the Donets'. The Dnieper, in particular, runs from Chernobyl in the north, through Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk, and down to the Black Sea just west of Crimea and east of Odessa. Ukraine is very rich agriculturally, and it is also rich in natural resources, particularly in eastern Ukraine where there are coal, iron, and manganese. In 1989, ethnic Ukrainians constituted nearly 73 percent of the population and ethnic Russians 22 percent with many minorities of less than 1 percent, the largest being Jews at 0.9 percent. Ukrainians, like Russians and Belorussians, are eastern Slavs. Note that because in modern times, Ukraine was under Polish and Russian control, histories were often written to justify that control. In general, Polish and Russian histories played down or denied a uniquely Ukrainian nation. In general, the history of Crimea has been quite distinct from that of the rest of Ukraine.

The very early history of Ukraine is one of nomadic civilizations: Cimmerians from 1150 to 750 BCE, Scythians from 750 to 250 BCE, Sarmatians from 250 BCE to 250 CE, Goths from 250 to 375 CE, Huns from 375 to 550 CE, Avars fro 550 to 565 CE, Bulgars from 575 to 650 CE, and Khazars from 650 to 900 CE. Note that the Khazars were a Turkic people who migrated westward from the western edge of China and who converted to Judaism en masse while they controlled Ukraine. The ancient Greeks had settlements in Crimea as did the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire. This was the source of the spread of orthodox Christianity to eastern Slavs.

The early history of the Slavs is still not known; however, Slavs can be documented in eastern Europe in the first millennium BCE. The consensus is that the original homeland of the Slavs was in eastern Poland,, southern Belarus, and northwestern Ukraine. From there, they gradually spread outward for about a thousand years beginning around 500 BCE.

In the mid ninth century, the Verangians (Swedish Vikings) arrived. With the Slavs, they founded the Kievan Rus, which lasted for five centuries. One of the remnants of the Swedish presence is familiar names such as Vladimir (Volodomir in Swedish), Olga (Helga in Swedish), and Oleg (Helge). The precise origin of the Kievan Rus is one of the most controversial issues in Ukrainian history. In the late 980s, the ruler of the Rus, Volodymyr the Great, was baptized which marks the predominance of Christianity in Ukraine. Another very controversial issue is the linguistic origins of modern Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian. It seems, however, that these languages differentiated in the 13th and 14th centuries CE.

In the year 1240 CE, the Mongols arrived, razed Kiev, and destroyed the Kievan Rus. Life actually did not change much under Mongol rule; however, there was a split into three divisions: Galicia-Volhynia, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Novgorod. Vladimir-Suzdal became centered around Moscow and incorporated Novgorod as well. It became known as Muscovy.

In the 14th century, first Lithuania and then Poland arrived to conquer Ukraine. Muscovy also tried to take Ukraine but was not strong enough then. Note that Ukraine's western neighbors and new conquerors were Roman Catholics. The Lithuanian-Polish conquest also introduced feudalism to Ukraine in which most Ukrainians were serfs and the nobles were Lithuanians and Poles.

In this period, southern and eastern Ukraine were much less populated because of the threats from nomadic invaders. The last of these were the Crimean Tatars. This led to the rise of the Cossacks, who were peasants who armed themselves to take and hold the threatened territory. These Cossacks should be seen as distinct from another group, also called Cossacks, who served as mercenaries. The Ukrainian Cossacks fought for their Polish rulers, but they were also militantly Orthodox. Their first political entity was in Zaporozhia, which is in southeastern Ukraine on the Dnieper.

In 1648, under the leadership of hetman Bohdan Khmelnytski, the Cossacks revolted, took half of Ukraine's territory, and aligned with Muscovy. Their control of Ukraine lasted until 1711. Khmelnytski was also virulently anti-Jewish and killed thousands of Jews. His successor aligned more with Poland. The Cossacks and their territory became divided between Poland and Muscovy.

In 1721, Tsar Peter renamed Muscovy to be the Russian Empire and, over time, Ukraine was integrated into the empire. Russia imposed its control over the Orthodox church, and the Ukrainian language was also subordinated. These were to become important aspects of Ukrainian nationalism as it arose in the 19th century. In 1897, Dnieper Ukraine was 71.5 percent Ukrainian, 12.4 percent Russian, 8.5 percent Jewish, and had smaller numbers of other minorities. However, most of the non-Ukrainians lived in cities. The great Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol, wrote in Russian because Ukrainian was not yet considered a literary language. It's ironic that the first Ukrainian cultural revival was in Kharkiv, which is in eastern Ukraine. The first great writer of Ukrainian literature was Taras Shevchenko, who published a book of poetry, Kobzar, in 1840. Shevchenko, who was born a serf, was also a fervent Ukrainian nationalist.

In 1863, Poles revolted against tsarist rule. After that, the Russian empire clamped down hard against Ukrainian nationalists and banned books in Ukrainian on the pretext that it did not exist separate from the Russian language. This was a period of scholarly resistance. However, in 1900, some Ukrainians began to organize a revolutionary national party instead of joining all-Russian parties. Others, influenced by Lenin, joined the Russian party. After a brief period of political freedom, however, the tsar clamped down once again. There was also a lot of activity in western Ukraine under Austrian control.

World War I in 1914 is a major watershed in Ukrainian history. Ukraine was a key arena of fighting. There were short periods when Ukrainian political entities existed, but by the end of the fighting, Ukraine had been incorporated into the new Soviet Union by 1920.

In 1933 came the great famine during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death. Grain was confiscated from peasants by force, and they were not given any to eat. This event powerfully shaped Ukrainians attitudes toward Russia and socialism. There is some evidence that Lenin had been planning a more benign policy toward Ukraine, but after his death, a ruthless policy was followed. The policy of Ukrainianization ended, and the great purges of the 1930s were also carried out in Ukraine.

In Crimea, at first, a Tatar Bolshevik leader promoted Tatars into the government. However, after he was purged by Stalin, that policy ended.

World War II, of course, was fought very heavily in Ukraine. Germany and Romania both invaded. Significant numbers of Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans and participated in the slaughter of Jews. However, there was also significant resistance beginning in 1941. In 1943, the Red Army defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad and proceeded to march westward. By 1944, they had taken back all of Ukraine. However, on the disputed grounds that they had collaborated with the Germans (some did, but some resisted and most were neutral), Stalin deported all Tatars from Crimea to other Soviet Republics further east.

In 1953, Joseph Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev, who had been assigned to Ukraine earlier, became the leader of the Soviet Union. In 1954, he gave Crimea to Ukraine.

Soviet Ukraine was both an agricultural, industrial, and resource producer, but the Soviet system had a national division of labor which means that no one country could produce many finished products on its own. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and introduced perestroika, one of his opponents was still in power in Ukraine for a few years, and that delayed changes coming to Ukraine. As late as 1990, 95 percent of industrial and agricultural production in Ukraine was still controlled from Moscow. The entire Soviet economy was in a shambles, and Ukraine had also been the host to the terrible Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. In 1990, Ukraine's parliament declared it a sovereign state. On December 1, 1991 a referendum was held on Ukrainian independence and Leonid Kravchuk, a former communist party member was elected president with 62 percent of the vote. The vote for independence was 92 percent and in each of the eastern oblasts (provinces), the vote was more than 80 percent. Even Crimea voted 54 percent for Ukrainian independence.

That is where my source ends, but, as we know, Ukraine descended into a totally corrupt state with a small number of very wealthy oligarchs and a dysfunctional economy. In 2004, there was a popular uprising against a disputed election won by Viktor Yanukovich. Viktor Yushchenko won the rerun election. He was later replaced by Yulia Timoshenko, but she did nothing to end corruption or develop the economy. Yanukovich was re-elected in 2010, and he jailed Timoshenko for her own corruption, but Yanukovich was equally corrupt and stole billions of dollars for himself, his family, and friends.

What do we mean by corruption? At the lowest level, it is a police force that routinely takes bribes for many kinds of activities. At the highest level, it is the theft of national resources. It's difficult to find a decent job, and even those with jobs have a lot of trouble making ends meet. Some enterprises, including banks, just stopped paying their employees. It's understandable that popular anger was mounting, especially as Ukrainians saw some of their neighbors doing better. In this context, the proposed agreement for closer ties with Europe was symbolic of an end to corruption and a functioning economy. However, the European Union told Ukraine that they could not make agreements with both the EU and Russia. This situation was complicated by the fact that Ukraine relies on Russia for its natural gas and that Ukrainian pipelines are a principal conduit of natural gas to Western Europe, particularly Germany. The Ukrainian government had subsidized gas prices to consumers so whenever Russia threatens to raise the price (Putin has done that more than once), the Ukrainian economy and consumers are immediately threatened. Ukraine wants more ties to Europe, but it doesn't want to break with Russia.

Ukraine, like most other European countries, has fascist rightwing parties who polled about 10 percent of the vote in the last elections. They tend to glorify and name themselves after the fascists who collaborated with the Nazis. They were very militantly active and visible in the protests in Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev, but those protests had overwhelming popular support which was not rightwing. The organized Jewish community has issued statements asserting that these fascists are too weak to threaten them.

So, how to sort out fact from fiction in the news reports and government statements we see and hear every day. The US government and the EU would certainly like to control Ukraine, and their offers of assistance are predicated on an austerity which Ukrainians cannot afford. Their lives are already very austere. The Russian government has a few interests in preventing that. First, the Russian military is very dependent on airplanes, missiles, and ships produced in Ukraine. Second, Russia leases its large naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. Third, Russia and Belarus are both very corrupt and undemocratic in their own right, and the example of a genuinely democratic Ukraine would appeal to their citizens. Belarus, in particular, also has a very dysfunctional economy, and it is ruled by an extremely violent dictator who has little popular support. He claimed 85 percent of the vote in the last presidential elections, but the opposition said that exit polls showed that he actually got about 35 percent.

Russian propaganda has been particularly clumsy. Putin denied that Russian troops took part in the takeover in Crimea, but he has since admitted that they were there in unmarked uniforms. The Ukrainians call these green men, and green men are seen now in eastern Ukraine, where Putin continues to deny they are present. Putin claims to be concerned about threats to ethnic Russians and Russian speakers; yet there is no evidence that there are such threats. In fact, most Ukrainians are bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian, and many for whom Russian is the first language participated in the protests for which there was obvious support in eastern cities such as Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Donetsk. There is no sharp east/west divide in Ukraine, though there may be a generational divide in which Ukrainians who grew up in Soviet Ukraine look more to Russia than younger Ukrainians do.

Western propaganda is more subtle. We know that they want the corrupt former opposition to come to power again, and thus they do not want real progressive change in Ukraine. The difficulty for Ukrainians is that there is no party or politician who represents their real aspirations. They hate Yanukovich, and they hate Timoshenko. They don't trust the former boxer, Klitchko. They certainly don't want the fascists to come to power.

Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are thus in a very difficult situation. Nobody knows if there's a real way forward now, but to understand what is happening, any analysis must be rooted in facts and reality and not in competing big-power propaganda.

Delusion in American Politics

Freud distinguished between delusion, which is belief in something which can be proved to be false, and illusion, which is belief in something which cannot be proven to be true. In his book, The Future of an Illusion, he said that belief in delusion leads to psychosis and belief in illusion leads to neurosis. The following is a list of common delusions current in contemporary US politics. This is a work in progress, and I may add more delusions later.

Delusion no. 1. Global climate isn't changing. Corollary delusion: Human activity is not causing global climate change.

This belief is clearly delusional. More than 99% of the world's climate scientists and a tremendous weight of evidence agree that planet earth is growing warmer and that human activity is the primary cause. This is the 2013 report. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

Delusion no. 2. The US government is hobbled by tremendous crippling debt and so we must massively decrease government spending.

In fact, most professional economists assert that US national debt is not overly large in relation to the size of our economy. Debt is mostly investment in our future. Most of our debt is owed to American citizens. Further, we could eliminate debt by making large corporations and financial institutions and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, as they used to 50 years ago. Here's a summary of the debt from the Congressional Budget Office. http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-deficits-cbo/ Here's an article by Richard D. Wolf on debt. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wolff180811.html We actually need more spending on education and other social services, infrastructure, green technology, and lots of other things that help people and society.

Delusion no. 3.  Private business is more efficient than government. We should shrink government and outsource as much as we can.

In fact, government is much more efficient than private business at doing many things. The US Postal Service is more cost-effective than any of its competitors even though they skim off the profitable delivery business and leave it to deliver everything else. Congress has made the postal service look unprofitable by forcing it to fund 75 years of employee pensions in advance, a requirement imposed on no other government agency or private company. Health care is much more efficiently delivered in other countries by government than by US insurance companies. It is both cheaper and everyone is covered. Government is better at providing electricity at lower prices as well as internet and telephone service and water. When we had an effective system of education in the United States, it was run by the government. Now that that public system has been starved of cash and has severe problems, there is a delusion that privately run schools will do better. They don't.

Delusion no. 4 The US government promotes democracy.

I recommend Stephen Kinzer's book, Overthrow, to debunk this delusion. Kinzer presents a long series of historical events in which the US government overthrew foreign governments, most of them democratic, and mostly replaced them with tyrants. Indeed, since the late 18th century, the US government has been the principal enemy  of democracy in the world. Of course, in the United States itself, the Supreme Court and many state governments are engaged in a full-scale assault on democracy by flooding elections with huge amounts of money and making it much more difficult for eligible voters to vote. George W. Bush lost two elections which were awarded to him by vote theft, endorsed by the Supreme Court the first time.

Why I'm Posting about Ukraine

Let me say that I became interested in Ukraine because two of my grandparents were born there (my grandfather was born in Odessa which was then Russian) and because I have a number of internet friends there and had been aware of the corruption and poverty most people face. I went there in 2010 to visit some friends (as I mentioned elsewhere, I visited a friend in Poland on the same trip). I spent a week on vacation in a Crimean beach resort (Alushta), a few days in Dnepropetrovsk, and one day in Kiev. I took the train to and from Crimea and met Ukrainians on the return trip. I don't pretend that that makes me an expert on Ukraine, though I bought two large histories of Ukraine and read one during my trip. I've read other books on Ukraine as well, both historical and literary. I'm currently reading a novel by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, who was born in Kiev but moved to Moscow, which is very similar to the story of Mikhail Bulgakov, who is probably the most popular 20th century novelist in the Russian language. Bulgakov's best known work is "The Master and Margarita" but I've read many of his books in translaton, including his biography of Moliere. I've read three contemporary Ukrainian novels by Andrey Kurkov, which portray the situation in Ukraine through satire. By chance when I looked him up to get the names of his novels right, I found that he had written an article for The Telegraph today. The three books of his that I've read will give you a feel for the Ukraine which motivated these protests, especially Death of a Penguin. There was a sequel entitled Penguin Lost. The third book I read, The President's Last Love, is about a fictional Ukrainian president.

I've also been studying Polish history and literature for several years (one of my grandfathers came from there) and also Slovakian history (my other grandmother was born there). When the protests began in Kiev, one of my friends there joined them and we started discussing what was going on. We have continued to do so. She and my friend in Poland have sent me many links commenting on the protests. One of the most interesting was from a Russian journalist and photographer who flew to Kiev to see for himself what was going on. His site has both English and Russian with wonderful photos. I have corroborating information from other sources, too. I don't think anyone has really questioned that this has been a popular uprising with participation from people of many political positions, both languages, and all ages and walks of life. That's why I insist on that as a starting point of analysis. Though I'm not an expert as I said above, I probably know more than most Americans do about Ukraine.

Russian Propaganda on Ukraine

There are two elements to the virulent propaganda coming out in Russian organs such as RT (Russian Television in English) and from Russian government officials such as Putin himself and his UN representative. These are first that Russian speakers in Ukraine (who are the majority) are under threat and second that the removal of former President Yanukovich is a coup. Both these claims are complete nonsense. There is zero evidence of threats to Russian-speaking Ukrainians. I know for a fact that there were Russian-speaking Ukrainians participating in the uprising in Kiev. Dnepropetrovsk, which is a city in which Russian is the first language for most residents, had a demonstration of 10,000 people against the Russian invasion on Sunday, March 2 (a friend posted a video on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, of that demonstration in which the Ukrainian national anthem was sung). Dnepropetrovsk is an industrial city of 2 million people founded by Catherine the Great. Its name was changed from Ekaterinasburg to Dnepropetrovsk during the Soviet period. Certainly, Russian-speaking Crimeans were never under any threat. Again, they are the largest group in the population there and I have seen no reports, even from Russia, of threats to them. So, that is plainly a blatant lie spread by Russia to justify its invasion.

Second, the uprising in Ukraine is no more a coup than was the American revolution. One of the principles of our Declaration of Independence is that an aggrieved people has the right to remove an unjust government. People have an absolute right to exist, but the right of a state to exist is conditional on its behavior. If a state had the absolute right to exist, we would still be living under English rule. Yanukovich was removed when he ordered his snipers to shoot down about 80 protesters from the tops of buildings in Kiev. That horrified Ukrainians, and Yanukovich fled to Russia. Talk of a coup is completely unjustified.

Some left commentators in the US, such as Professor Stephen Cohen, have cited Russian military fears as a Russian motivation, but that is also very far-fetched. Ukraine is a fairly large country and has a large army, but it is dwarfed by the size and military strength of Russia. Ukraine had nuclear weapons when it became independent, but it gave them up (to Russia) under an agreement which guaranteed its security. The idea that Ukraine would or could militarily attack or threaten Russia is preposterous. Putin obviously knows that.

The situation in Ukraine is very fluid, and nobody knows how it will turn out. The Russian invasion is an attempt to shape it in ways that the Russian government, but not the Ukrainian people, would prefer. No matter how loudly Putin shouts and how angry he looks, his actions have no reasonable justification. Putin also alleges that the uprising in Kiev was instigated by Europe and the United States. There is also no evidence of that. Europe and the United States would like to shape the direction of Ukraine just as Russia would like to do so, but they did not and could not instigate a Ukrainian uprising as the US has, for example, in Venezuela. Ukrainians have very strong and very just grievances against their government. They rose up because of those grievances. No outside instigation was required to cause that. Putin makes no mention of those grievances because many of his Russian citizens have similar grievances against him.

Since he has no rational justification for his invasion, it is completely understandable that Putin would order his state organs to disseminate vicious and false propaganda about why he has invaded Ukraine. It is more difficult to understand why some on the American left spread the same sort of false propaganda.

My View of Ukraine

I wrote what is below in response to an article I read on the Columbia1968 discussion group. I don't have permission to post that article so it isn't here. Conn Hallinan's article attempts to explain why Russia is so concerned about Ukraine, among other things. I hear similar arguments from Stephen Cohen on the radio. My main point below is that you don't evaluate events in Ukraine by first outlining the actions and interests of outside powers. You should first try to understand what is happening in Ukraine and then discuss the international factors. Incidentally, I hear Russian leaders asserting that the US government instigated protests in Ukraine, and that is plainly nonsense propaganda.

Conn Hallinan is an old friend of mine (I knew him as Ringo, each of the members of his large family had a nickname), but he is ignoring the first principle of analysis here. There are certainly international machinations from Europe, the US, and Russia over the future of Ukraine. There are certainly fascists in Ukraine and their participation in the uprising was very noticeable (though there are more fascists, for example, in France). But that is not where you start in understanding what is happening. Where you start is in Ukraine. There is and was no doubt that this is a genuine popular uprising involving people from all language groups, classes of the population (aside from the oligarchs), and a very wide range of political views. If you have been to Ukraine in recent times (I went there for 2 weeks in 2010) or talk to ordinary Ukrainians (I do that almost every day recently), the reason for the uprising is blatantly obvious. Their lives have beenunbearable. The police routinely take bribes to allow activities which are legal in most places. Employers stop paying employees (one of my friends had a good job at a bank; they stopped paying her and she quit after 3 months) with no recourse. Her parents are both physicians and live a very modest lifestyle (they invited me to their house for dinner), though, to be fair, physicians have historically not been well-paid there. It's quite difficult to get a visa to travel to the rest of Europe. We now know that something like $70 billion was stolen by government leaders and the oligarchs they work for and stashed abroad. I'm sure every Ukrainian could make a much longer list. The two major parties, that of Yanukovich and that of Timoshenko, both fostered this corruption. That's why Timoshenko is fiercely hated. She came to power in the Orange Revolution, which was also against corruption, and she made things even worse. I'm sure she belonged in jail,perhaps in a cell next to Yanukovich. The current prime minister, Yatsenyuk, (he happens to be Jewish, by the way, and is also partly Romanian) is from her coalition. I'm sure that many Ukrainians look at Europe and the United States and think they see the kind of society they want; the kind of total political corruption we and the Europeans have in which financial and corporate capital controls the political debate and the government is well-hidden from most Ukrainians, as it is, for example, from many Americans. So, this is the starting point. The Ukrainian people were unable to go on in the old way.

Second, Ukraine' s economy is very distorted, not only by corruption, but because of the method of economic organization in the Soviet Union, in which there was a division of labor among the Soviet republics with each part contributing toward the whole economy. After the Soviet Union broke up, what was needed was massive investment to shift industrial production, transportation infrastructure, etc. to create an independent economy with Ukraine' s valuable resources. That did not happen. Instead, Ukraine' s resources were used to enrich a relatively small number of powerful individuals at the expense of everyone else per the corruption above. Ukraine isn't the only place with these problems, but unlike neighboring Belarus, for example, Ukraine has had some political space in which to operate and protests have not been ruthlessly repressed until the day before Yanukovich fell. That is why this happened in Ukraine rather than somewhere else. The Ukrainian
government was unable to continue in the old way.

That is the starting point. The Ukrainian people rose up in a genuine revolutionary uprising which they maintained for months. Clearly, rightwing fascists enthusiastically participated in the uprising and are very visible and militant, but the vast majority of participants were not from this group. Most Ukrainians consider Russian to be their native language, though many are bilingual in Ukrainian. Note that historically, when Ukraine was under foreign control, the most recent such control being from Russia, the foreign rulers tried to suppress the Ukrainian language, and language and literature became strong avenues of resistance. Ironically, both Ukrainian and Russian became modern languages of literature in the 19th century in the hands of Taras Shevchenko and Alexander Pushkin (whose great-grandfather was an enslaved African who became an aristocrat). Tsarist Russia also tried to bring Ukrainians under the Russian Orthodox Church. That is one reason
why Ukraine has insisted on Ukrainian as being the primary language. For example, when you land in the airport in Kiev, the sign in Ukrainian says Kyiv. However, Russian has never been suppressed, despite the silly resolution passed by the new parliament last week.

So, we have a genuine uprising. The participation of fascists is troubling, but they were not powerful enough to be dangerous and unlike Egypt, for example, no foreign powers will be sending them support. Ukraine' s disastrous economy and the uprising presented Europe and the US with what they saw as an opportunity to draw Ukraine into their sphere. Of course, they want to do it with the IMF and its absurd austerity demands, which the Ukrainian people will also see as absurd. At the same time, Russia sees all this as very threatening, not militarily, not from fascists, but precisely because Ukrainians are rising up against essentially the same type of system of control that exists in Russia and Belarus. I've only seen one report of Russian citizens demonstrating support for the Ukrainian uprising, though there are more reports and even small demonstrations against the Russian invasion in Russia now, but we know that there is strong Russian opposition to
Putin which is likely very sympathetic with the Ukrainian uprising. On the other side, if you read RT (English-language Russian television from the Russian government), it has been filled with vicious and false propaganda against the Ukrainian uprising. I'm sure internal propaganda in Russian is just as vicious and false.

So, where should progressives stand? Plainly, we have to side with a genuine uprising as we did in Egypt despite the participation of Islamic extremists in that uprising. The Russian invasion is plainly directed squarely at that uprising. Note that the new Ukrainian government is not a very good reflection of the uprising. The people who rose up generally do not trust the parliamentary leaders, whether it is Yatsenyuk, Klitchko, or others. They see them either as completely intertwined with government corruption or as opportunists who would like to become part of a corrupt government. They lack a party which reflects their aspirations and thus they lack genuine leaders. In these circumstances, just as in Egypt, it is unlikely that the protesters will get what they want in the short-term, although they are very aware of that and suspicious since the 2004 revolution produced no significant change. Unless the Russian invasion stops it, Ukraine is supposed
to have elections in May. I don't know whether there will be candidates who genuinely represent the uprising and its aspirations. That is up to Ukrainians to manage.

Personally, I think our role should be to expose what Russia, the US, and Europe are doing to control Ukraine from the outside and to derail the uprising. Ukrainians have shown that they want to deal with the situation inside their country, and they should be allowed to do so. They may not succeed, but it is their right to try.

The Language of Racism

This morning, I was listening to a fellow talking about racism on KPFA radio in Berkeley. I liked a lot of what he had to say, but he kept using the language of racism, such as referring to people of European descent as Whites, and I had to turn it off. Many commentators have pointed out that the language and labels we use shape the message we send. In my view, you cannot talk about racism without abandoning racist terminology. Even though there are probably millions of Americans who would describe themselves as members of a "White race," critical thinking demands that we point out that no such group exists outside of the racial categories of a racist society. Of course, race itself has no scientific meaning, and it is defined only by racists. For example, in apartheid South Africa, many races were recognized, Whites, Coloureds, Blacks, Asians (Japanese were considered honorary Whites for economic reasons), and quite a few other categories. The South African government had an official body whose job it was to classify people by race. In apartheid Israel, people are classified as Jews and non-Jews, and that system of classification is used to deny most rights to the indigenous Palestinian people except for those descended from Palestinian Jews.

I have commented before that White has no meaning to me in terms of my own identity. I have never heard of a place called Whiteland nor is there any ethnic identify that can be associated with Whiteness. I identify as a descendant of Eastern European Jews. It is certainly true that the American system of racism has granted me many privileges because it classifies me as White and denies those privileges to those classified as Black or Latino. So, how do we discuss this situation without accepting the terminology of racism?

In my view, we have to be very explicit in distancing ourselves from that terminology. We can certainly describe the racist system in its own terms, but we always have to distinguish the false reality described by racist terminology and the genuine reality of nationality and ethnicity. I was offended by the speaker on KPFA because, in his presentation, he described himself and others (by extension, me) as Whites with no qualification whatsoever or an explanation that White is a racist term. When one applies racist terminology to oneself, one grants power to racism and that is completely unacceptable.