Friday 6 February 2015

Ukraine.

 A common western cultural assumption is that: if people are protesting, it must be because they are oppressed. Therefore western leaders are careful to describe war in Ukraine as a question of a bullying big Russia and a plucky violated Ukraine, and not as modestly equipped rebels fighting defensively for self determination against central government.

In multi ethnic and federal communist states, communist ideology held that, to prevent 'domination' by the largest ethnic republic and to engineer 'brotherhood and unity', internal borders should not reflect ethnicity. For example, in communist era Yugoslavia, over a million Serbs found themselves living in majority Serb areas, but outside the borders of Serbia. The borders between the various Yugoslav republics were artificial and internal administrative borders, but borders, in the war years of the 1990s, which Washington strategists and politicians insisted on maintaining, on the declared basis that borders are inviolate and that nations must be multicultural and multiracial.

In the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian, Croatian, and Kosovan ethnic leaders selected by and loyal to Washington received massive military aid, silenced any co-ethnic opposition or voices for dialogue and peace, slaughtered or expelled Serb ethnic minorities, and came to control the largest possible geographical space. The largest American military bases in the world are now in Kosovo and Bosnia. Bosnia is split entirely in two between a Muslim and Serb sector, and ruled by an American selected UN overlord, but the Serb sector is not allowed to reunify with Serbia, which it borders.

East Ukraine is Russian. Re-unification with Russia would make a very just resolution to civil war. If this is not achieved, it is only a matter of time until the larger, and directly USA backed Kiev forces, push out rebel groups and millions of refugees flee to Russia, in a parallel fashion to the 1995 Croatian Operation Storm, planned by American generals, and which expelled hundreds of thousands of Serbs.

Recent precedent and history has no place in the western version of events. Ideology moves forward in a straight line, the past is something tainted that should be left behind. There is only a mish mash of 'European integration', 'globalism' and 'multiculturalism': ethnic self determination is a racist evil; non-allied nations which seek to maintain their separate identity are suspect. The ideas of the past do not need to be engaged with, only rejected or ignored, and those who will not reject, must be damned.

When narratives that support western allies must be promoted, but the truth about these allies would undermine public assent, facts are also disregarded, or awarded secondary moral importance. For example, a research article on the rise of and Kiev government backing for outright fascist groups in Ukraine starts with a  qualifying paragraph reminding the reader that anything Russian is a ridiculous lie, and that what follows about Ukraine are only 'traits' and 'tendencies'. That's the worst part - a research article, but the writer won't present his research until he says 'I'm a good boy really, I told them Russia is the nasty one!' 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nikolas-kozloff/note-to-ukraine-stop-whit_b_6535316.html 

The BBC specializes in publishing review articles which confine themselves to the limits of and so reinforce a Nato moral narrative, the one where there is no what happened before, and where things were just fine until some dictator suddenly committed abuses to rouse western 'concern'. For example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30278606 

'Russia badly overplayed its hand last year when it tried to bring Ukraine into the Eurasian Union against the passionate opposition of many Ukrainians.'

The first paragraph is duplicitous. Russia did not bring Ukraine into any such union, the Ukrainian parliament decided upon a favourable package of economic aid and agreements. Certainly many Ukrainians opposed the decision, but there is no evaluation of what percentage, and no acknowledgement that many supported this. A gross omission is the lack of historical context that Ukraine was already a country divided into opposed and geographically cohesive blocs - and lack of reference to American interference and support for the violent overthrow of an elected government.
 
'The European Union is now risking the same thing by trying to bring Ukraine into the West without reference to economic reality or the willingness of European publics to bear the enormous costs involved, and at a time when the EU itself is in deepening crisis.'

The second paragraph refers to western actions of well over a year ago as if they had just occurred, exculpating the west of any responsibility for the pro-EU / NATO coup in Kiev and for the present civil war. There is no consideration of any costs to Ukraine, only of costs to Europe.

However, with the EU the subject of the sentence now and not Russia, the writer swaps the language of malign domination of one country by another for the neutral language of economic calculus (and by juxtaposition, benign intention). Russia the bellicose actor, the west the peaceful responder. The propaganda is first rate.



They asked that their government help
Those brave people
They read were fighting dictatorship
The government had already been helping
And now spoke out in public
Those who asked were reassured

When they looked again
They saw those brave people
Kill hundreds and say 'no' to millions
This time, they didn't ask anything of the government
The dead confused them
They didn't want to wonder if those brave people were dictators
If they themselves had been comfortable fools
And least of all
That their government was the dictatorship.



 

Thursday 5 February 2015

Rotherham.


Once again it is the Daily Mail, in reality the only popular newspaper which would give a foreigner some idea about everyday life in the UK, that publishes full details of council and police complicity in Pakistani sex gang abuses.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2939129/Two-local-councillors-corrupt-police-officer-accused-having-sex-victims-Rotherham-abuse-scandal.html
 
The strength of self censorship and fear of being labelled 'racist' in the UK can be heard here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-31130750 

In a 3 minute interview with the BBC, Louise Casey, the chief author of the report which condemns Rotherham Council and Police, does not mention the word 'Pakistani' once. When asked why local authorities so failed, she can only manage a vague and coded *an issue of not being comfortable dealing with race and ethnicity*. 

In the same way as politicians and media were so reluctant to use the word Asian and then even more reluctant to use the words Muslim and Pakistani, the identity of the abuser group is generalized out of existence. Worse still, local institutional failings are explained by reference to a supposed lack of familiarity with race, rather than by a preoccupation with race and by reference to the corrupting effect of a fanatical anti racist ideology which over decades meant that police and council members and employees did nothing to stop the enslavement of thousands of white children.

Not an old story but an ongoing phenomenon all over Britain despite mass media attention and criminal convictions. White child sex slaves, Pakistani Muslim Sex Gangs, complicit councils and state institutions. Driven by an unwillingness to offend Pakistani voters, and by an ideology of anti-racism which demands that selected ethnic minorities should be thought of as victims and never abusers in minority-white relations, local democracy leaves no consideration for the human rights of non-Pakistanis, and the government mandated solution is dictatorship.