Obama Fiddles While Ukraine Burns
In his solipsistic way, Obama believes that if he isn’t fighting, there’s no war. This is most notable in Iraq, and is his plan for Afghanistan.
What Obama fails to recognize is that the enemy has a say.
Today Ukraine is spiraling into bloodshed and anarchy. The violence on the streets of Kiev gets most of the attention, but the rest of the country-particularly the western portion-is descending into civil war. Although the immediate author of this tragedy is Yanukovych, he is little more than Putin’s puppet. The pattern is all too clear. Putin, primarily through financial blackmail, has compelled the Ukrainian president to unleash his forces against those protesting against his rule–and protesting against Russian dominance.
To Putin, the Cold War isn’t over. Pace Faulkner, to Putin the Soviet past isn’t dead: it isn’t even past. Or to put it differently, he wants to reverse the results of the Cold War, and the resulting humiliation (as he sees it) of Russia. Restoring Russian suzerainty over Ukraine, as dysfunctional as it is, is the linchpin of that effort.
Putin further perceives that his main adversary in achieving this goal is the United States.
Alas, he’s probably wrong in this, at least to January 2017, because the president of the United States is in denial and advertising his non-adversarial nature:
“Our approach in the United States is not to see these as some Cold War chessboard in which we’re in competition with Russia,” Obama said.
“Our goal is to make sure that the people of Ukraine are able to make decisions for themselves for the future, that the people of Syria are able to make decisions without having bombs going off and killing women and children,” he said.
The disconnect in that statement is jaw-dropping. It is hard to imagine a president of the United States of America making a more callous and idiotic assertion. Jesus H. Christ, could it be more obvious? The overriding obstacles to Ukrainians and Syrians being “able to make decisions without having bombs going off and killing women and children” are Putin and Russia. Full stop.
If Obama’s goal is really to save lives and secure freedom and autonomy for Ukrainians and Syrians, then he has to confront the simple reality that this goal cannot be achieved without confronting Putin. Ukrainians and Syrians are dying first and foremost because Putin is still fighting the Cold War. If you want to prevent their cruel deaths, you have to take to the lists.
But, of course, the reason Putin is emboldened to fight these battles is that he has taken the measure of his non-adversarial adversary. He knows Obama has no stomach for confrontation, but will content himself to fiddle and diddle and spout fine phrases and drone on about red lines or lines without colors while Ukraine and Syria burn.
There is a saying attributed to Trotsky: “You may not be interested in the revolution, but the revolution is interested in you.” Obama is preciously little interested in the revolutions occurring in Ukraine and Syria (not to mention Venezuela-another Putin ally/project). But Putin, who is stoking these revolutions, is very interested in confronting the United States. Obama does not want to go back to the days of the Cold War, but Putin is a revanchist par excellence.
So if Obama wants to advance the ideals he spouts, he has to concede that the United States is in competition with Russia. Unless he jocks it up, Syrians and Ukrainians (and Venezuelans) will be ground under Putin’s heel. He cannot vote present.
Obama portrays himself as a progressive, but he is the ultimate reactionary in foreign policy. His policies in Iraq and Afghanistan are rooted in a reaction against Bush. His policies regarding Russia are rooted in a reaction against American Cold Warriors, notably Ronald Reagan, the president during Obama’s freezenik college years. He defines what he is primarily by what he is not. Such an obsessive focus on avoiding the errors others have supposedly made is usually a perfect recipe for making your own very special errors.
At least Ron Paul’s isolationism (“Ukraine is their business, not ours“) does not presume to strive for lofty goals while eschewing the hard and bitter work required to achieve them. Obama taunts Ukrainians and Syrians by claiming to have their interests at heart, while doing nothing to advance those interests. Paul’s isolationism is unleavened by hypocritical idealism. One cannot say the same of Obama’s policies in Ukraine and Syria, such as they are.
AP,
> “I personally have nothing against common Jews, and even have Jewish friends, but rather against a group of Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine and against Jews-Bolsheviks,” he told JTA in an interview in Lvov in 2007.
I am familiar with the struggle of some European leaders against “Jewish oligarchs” and “Jew-Bolsheviks”. Much of the original research was done by a German political figure named Adolf Hitler and his comrades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism
Jewish Bolshevism or Judeo-Bolshevism is the theory that Bolshevism was the product of a supposed international Jewish conspiracy to run the world. The expression has been used as a catchword for the assertion that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy, and it has often coincided with overtly aggressive nationalistic tendencies in the 20th century and 21st century. In Poland, Judeo-Bolshevism was known as Żydokomuna and was used as an antisemitic stereotype.
The label “Judeo-Bolshevism” was used in Nazi Germany to equate Jews with communists, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_did_Hitler_blame_the_Jews_for_Germany%27s_problems
Hitler believed in conspiracy theories that regarded the Jews as Communists and claimed that they had deliberately made Germany lose World War 1 by causing strikes, subversion and revolution on the home front. He also said that they had deliberately caused the Great Depression. Worst of all, some of these conspiracy theories claimed that the Jews were seeking world domination and were therefore in competition with Germany’s bid to dominate the world.
http://books.google.com/books?id=YadFavyLuGEC&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=jewish+capital+bolsheviks+hitler&source=bl&ots=OjYVya_0GR&sig=RnfYsHc-XxHEsR54hPaJWtsR1lg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=udINU9jHM8LzoATIlIKwBQ&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=jewish%20capital%20bolsheviks%20hitler&f=false
Hitler: A Biography – Page 92
…the distinction Hitler drew between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’.
> I’m sure that he is mildly antisemitic
Blaming Jews for Bolshevism, claiming that Jews control your country and this must stop, and demanding that the leaders of Jewish organization must be thrown into labor camps, is “mildly antisemitic, like Jesse Jackson”? Yeh, right.
Comment by vladislav — February 26, 2014 @ 5:49 am
> “I personally have nothing against common Jews, and even have Jewish friends”
Well, if nothing else, Tyanibok is guilty of plagiarism and crude parody, because “some of my best friends are Jews/gays/Blacks/Catholics etc. is the most common platitude used by bigots all over the world, including here in the USA. In fact, the phrase “Some of my best friends are Jews” has been a symbol about anti-Semites since 1936:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/90059/gop-rick-santorum-best-friend-defense
A Brief History of the ‘Some of My Best Friends’ Defense
The most infamous case, however, came in 1937. Hugo Black had been nominated for the Supreme Court, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had just uncorked a series of articles revealing Black’s past involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. Black’s defense memorably included the line “Some of my best friends are Jews,” which earned him no small amount of scorn from newspaper editorialists (that line, after all, had been the title of a book-length history of anti-Semitism by Robert Gessner the previous year).
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE JEWS
By Robert Gessner
A valuable contribution to the rapidly increasing list of books about the Jewish problem. Extraordinarily dispassionate, objective, recognizing the faults of the jews and their contribution to the causes of their persecution, and yet presenting the terrible facts of the present conditions in Germany and Poland, with enough of the human giant to give it poignancy and dramatic power. He analyses the problem from the point of view of Jews in the modern world, of the development in the countries where persecution is not so obvious, of the Zionist movement, the Jew in Soviet Russia, source material based on his own investigations, and admirably presented. Tremendously interesting and challenging reading, and of even greater importance to Gentiles than to Jews.
Pub Date:Dec. 7th, 1936
Publisher:Farrar & Rinehart
Comment by vladislav — February 26, 2014 @ 6:00 am
> “I personally have nothing against common Jews, and even have Jewish friends”
Well, if nothing else, Tyanibok is guilty of plagiarism and crude parody, because “some of my best friends are Jews/gays/Blacks/Catholics etc. is the most common platitude used by bigots all over the world, including here in the USA. In fact, the phrase “Some of my best friends are Jews” has been a symbol about anti-Semites since 1936:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/90059/gop-rick-santorum-best-friend-defense
A Brief History of the ‘Some of My Best Friends’ Defense
The most infamous case, however, came in 1937. Hugo Black had been nominated for the Supreme Court, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had just uncorked a series of articles revealing Black’s past involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. Black’s defense memorably included the line “Some of my best friends are Jews,” which earned him no small amount of scorn from newspaper editorialists (that line, after all, had been the title of a book-length history of anti-Semitism by Robert Gessner the previous year).
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE JEWS
By Robert Gessner
A valuable contribution to the rapidly increasing list of books about the Jewish problem. Extraordinarily dispassionate, objective, recognizing the faults of the jews and their contribution to the causes of their persecution, and yet presenting the terrible facts of the present conditions in Germany and Poland, with enough of the human giant to give it poignancy and dramatic power. He analyses the problem from the point of view of Jews in the modern world, of the development in the countries where persecution is not so obvious, of the Zionist movement, the Jew in Soviet Russia, source material based on his own investigations, and admirably presented. Tremendously interesting and challenging reading, and of even greater importance to Gentiles than to Jews.
Pub Date:Dec. 7th, 1936
Publisher:Farrar & Rinehart
Comment by vladislav — February 26, 2014 @ 6:00 am
@ Vladislav,
So, guilt by association for Tiahnybok? Because a KKK leader claimed to have Jewish friends, when Tiahnybok claims to have Jewish friends this means he is an antisemite because this is what some obscure KKK leader in the 1930s whom Tiahnybok probably never heard of, did? Having Jewish friends is evidence of his antisemitism?
So Hitler blamed Jews for Bolshevism. Did you know that many non-Nazis and even anti-Nazis blamed Jews for Bolshevism? Jews = Bolsheviks was a standard belief amongst Polish nationalists, who were as opposed to Nazism as anybody (this does not, of course, make Tiahnybok a Polish nationalist either). BTW, Hitler was also was a vegetarian. Is vegetarianism evidence of Nazism?
BTW, please provide evidence that Tiahnybok blamed Jews for Bolshevism. He stated that he hated those Jews specifically who had been Bolsheviks, while having “nothing against common Jews.” Tiahnybok also stated that a Russian-Jewish mafia controls Ukraine. The latter antisemitic statement is quite comparable to Jesse Jackson’s claim about Zionists controlling American foreign policy.
So, to summarize – Tiahnybok says he has nothing against common Jews but does have something against two specific groups of Jews: the past Jewish Bolsheviks (presumably Trotsky, Kaganovich etc.) and Jewish mafia/oligarchs. So if you a Jew and are not an oligarch (or a 100 year old surviving Bolshevik), Tiahnybok has nothing against you.
Do you have direct quotes where Tiahnybok “demands “that the leaders of Jewish organization must be thrown into labor camps?”
It seems that despite accusing Andrew of smearing you, you engage in similar behavior against Tiahnybok.
Comment by AP — February 26, 2014 @ 8:35 am
> So, guilt by association for Tiahnybok? Because
Not at all. Simple logic. You presented Tiahnybok’s claim that he has some unnamed Jewish friends as the only proof that he is not a serious anti-semite. I simply pointed out that “some of my best friends are jewish” is the not a defence at all.
> Do you have direct quotes where Tiahnybok “demands “that the leaders of Jewish organization must be thrown into labor camps?”
For the third time:
Svoboda: The rise of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists
By David Stern BBC News, Kiev
In 2005, he signed an open letter to Ukrainian leaders, including President Yushchenko, calling for the government to halt the “criminal activities” of “organised Jewry”, which, the letter said, was spreading its influence in the country through conspiratorial organisations as the Anti-Defamation League – and which ultimately wanted to commit “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.
Tyahnybok stresses that he has never been convicted for anti-Semitism or racial hatred, though prosecutors opened a case against him after his 2004 speech. “All I said then, I can also repeat now,” he says. “Moreover, this speech is relevant even today.”
Even now, Svoboda’s platform calls for passports to specify the holder’s ethnicity.
Title – Stop the Criminal Activities of Organised Jewry
Signed by Tyahnybok and 17 others
Lists Jewish businessmen, who got rich in the 1990s, and claims they control Ukrainian media
Describes Zionism as “Jewish Nazism” and warns of “genocide” through the impoverishment of Ukrainians
Demands investigation into the activities of Jewish organisations headed by people “suspected of serious crimes”
http://www.rubezh.eu/Zeitung/2006/07/03.htm
А в середине апреля 2005 г. в издаваемой МАУП газете «Персонал плюс» было опубликовано открытое письмо, озаглавленное «Остановить преступную деятельность организованного еврейства», президенту Украины Ющенко, председателю Верховной Рады Литвину и председателю Верховного суда Маляренко. В письме содержалось требование к правоохранительным органам проверить еврейские религиозные и национальные организации и «по результатам проверки привлечь нарушителей законодательства к ответственности», провести парламентские слушания по вопросам деятельности еврейских организаций в Украине и т. д. В преамбуле письма говорилось о «преступной деятельности организованного еврейства», начиная со времен Хазарского каганата.
Comment by vladislav — February 26, 2014 @ 10:31 pm
> > So, guilt by association for Tiahnybok?
No, the refutation of your “innocence by association” argument that Tiahnybok cannot be an anti-semite because in his personal life he associates with some unnamed jews.
Comment by vladislav — February 26, 2014 @ 10:33 pm
“Not at all. Simple logic. You presented Tiahnybok’s claim that he has some unnamed Jewish friends as the only proof that he is not a serious anti-semite. I simply pointed out that “some of my best friends are jewish” is the not a defence at all. ”
You pointed out this this is not a defense by stating that a KKK member said the same thing decades earlier in another country. Since Tiahnybok is not a KKK member in the USA this has no relevance to him. A KKK member may have said that when it rains one ought o wear an umbrella. Does that make everyone who says such things like a KKK member?
Also this claim was not the only proof. Reread Tiahnybok’s statement. You conveniently forgot the last part of his sentence: ““ I personally have nothing against common Jews , and even have Jewish friends, but rather against a group of Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine and against Jews-Bolsheviks ”
So he does not have anything against Jews in general, or regular Jews, but against certain particular Jews – oligarchs and Bolsheviks. This makes Tiahnybok’s antisemitism comparable to that of Jesse Jackson and nothing like Nazism which after all was against all Jews, simply because they are Jews and not because anything they may have done, even Jewish converts.
None of the quotes you provided show that Tiahnybok demands “that the leaders of Jewish organization must be thrown into labor camps.” He signed – but did not write – a letter demanding that Jewish organizations be investigated and those found guilty of crimes to be punished. The letter indicated that if a Jewish oligarch committed crimes the organization he heads ought to be investigated. Singling out Jewish organizations for investigation is of course antisemitic but doing so is not the same as demanding that Jewish leaders be sent to labor camps.
So please correct your claim that Tiahnybok wants “that the leaders of Jewish organization must be thrown into labor camps” by specifying that he only wants those specifically found to be guilty of crimes after an investigation to be arrested.
Comment by AP — February 27, 2014 @ 10:13 am
Sorry, AP, but Tiahnybok doesn’t list any crimes that the suspects these people of, except the fact that they are Jewish. I am sorry you don’t see it reprehensible to persecute and prosecute people for their belonging to a certain ethnicity/race/religion. This topic has taken up too much time and space and it is clear that I am not going to convince you, nor you me. I will let you write the last post here, and please say hello to Black Monk from me.
Comment by vladislav — February 28, 2014 @ 4:44 am
It’s “he” not “the”
Comment by vladislav — February 28, 2014 @ 4:44 am
Correction:
Sorry, AP, but Tiahnybok doesn’t list any crimes that he suspects the leaders of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations of, except the fact that they are Jewish. I am sorry you don’t see it reprehensible to persecute and prosecute people for their belonging to a certain ethnicity/race/religion. This topic has taken up too much time and space and it is clear that I am not going to convince you, nor you me. I will let you write the last post here, and please say hello to Black Monk from me.
Comment by vladislav — February 28, 2014 @ 6:45 am
. The word zhyd in Ukrainian is perfectly acceptable for Jew.
The word “zhyd” in modern Ukrainian is very analogous to the word “nigger”. Originally, “nigger” was a legitimate word:
The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the now-pejorative French nègre (negro). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced [ˈniɡer] which, in every other grammatical case, grammatical gender, and grammatical number besides nominative masculine singular, is nigr-, the r is trilled).
In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony.[2] Later American English spellings, neger and neggar, prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia’s Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name “Begraafplaats van de Neger” (Cemetery of the Negro); an early US occurrence of neger in Rhode Island, dates from 1625.[3] Among Anglophones, the word nigger was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted “black-skinned”, a common Anglophone usage.[4] Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of nigger without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who used the word as contemporary usage. Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported usage, but used the term “negro” when speaking in his own narrative persona.[5] …By the 1900s, nigger had become a pejorative word.
“Zhyd” was a legitimate word in all Slavic languages, including Russian, up to the end of the 18th century, when Jewish leaders complained to Catherine the Great that this word became pejorative, and she started to take some action. This word gradually became illegitimate and was officially replaced by the word “evrei” (‘Hebrew”). After 1917, when ethnic and religious hatred became a crime, the use of this word was forbidden as a hate word.
I know that West Ukraine didn’t become part of the Soviet Union until 1939 and used the old word “zhyd”. However, starting with 1945 all West Ukrainian children were specifically taught in school that ethnic hatred is wrong and that the word “zhyd” is insulting to Jews. Tyahnibok, who was born several decades after 1945, was also taught that, over and over again. He was also taught that Jews resent this word the way Blacks resent the word “nigger”. Insisting on using the word “zhyd” in the context of glorifying those, who during the Holocaust years “took machine guns and fought Zhyds and other scum”, is clearly an insult, even if you see nothing wrong with calling Jews “scum” and killing them with machine guns in the Holocaust.
Comment by vladislav — February 28, 2014 @ 7:13 am
This was a quote from elmer:
> The word zhyd in Ukrainian is perfectly acceptable for Jew.
Comment by vladislav — February 28, 2014 @ 7:30 am
@ Vladislav
Please do not make false accusations against me. You wrote:
“I am sorry you don’t see it reprehensible to persecute and prosecute people for their belonging to a certain ethnicity/race/religion. –
I wrote: “Singling out Jewish organizations for investigation is of course antisemitic but doing so is not the same as demanding that Jewish leaders be sent to labor camps.”
Of course it is reprehensible and anti-Semitic to single out Jewish organization for investigations, just as it is reprehensible to single out black drivers for random stops. Please retract your smear about me supporting this practice.
As for the word “Zhyd” –
“I know that West Ukraine didn’t become part of the Soviet Union until 1939 and used the old word “zhyd”. However, starting with 1945 all West Ukrainian children were specifically taught in school that ethnic hatred is wrong and that the word “zhyd” is insulting to Jews.
So when the brutal Soviets conquered West Ukraine they forced the locals to conform their own language to the occupiers’ Russian language, because Russian-language people found it offensive. This would be like if an American army conquered Russia and forced the Russian people to no longer use the word “nyeger.”
Meanwhile, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians continue to use variations of Zhyd.
Insisting that Ukrainians use the Russian Yevrei in their own language is an artifact of past imperialism which nationalits naturally oppose.
Comment by AP — February 28, 2014 @ 9:58 am
“Insisting that Ukrainians use the Russian Yevrei in their own language is an artifact of past imperialism which nationalits naturally oppose.
I will also add that it is a subtle way of separating Ukrainians from their Western neighbors and streamlining them with Russians. There is the Western world that uses Jew/Zhyd, and the Eastern world that uses Hebrew/Yevrei. You want to enforce Ukraine’s membership in the Eastern world. Maybe this is the real point?
Comment by AP — February 28, 2014 @ 10:00 am
To my surprise, сдай a person I intensively worked with in 1988-89 popped up on my screen again with an interesting emotional piece of Ukraine: http://grigoryants.ru/sovremennaya-diskussiya/krym-eto-afganistan/
Comment by MJ — March 2, 2014 @ 2:11 pm
I don’t know where the word «сдай» came from in the above text. Sorry.
Comment by MJ — March 3, 2014 @ 12:58 am