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On 5/3/14 11:43 AM, turb...@aol.com wrote:
I don't believe Cohen ever said that the Kievan rebellion was "instigated" by the West, only that they took full advantage of it to futher their designs.
Cohen says that the Ukrainians had "legitimate grievances". This formula can be found in anything that John Rees has written about Ukraine or Syria as well. It is strictly a pro forma cover-your-ass statement sugar-coating designed to make the real message palatable, namely that the world is divided between imperialist and anti-imperialist blocs. The Sam Marcy estate should sue Rees for plagiarism (and the CPGB while they are at it.)
What is your explanation for the fact that Poland, the Czech Republic and other eastern European countries have been brought into NATO? Or the fact that Washington is now attempting to conclude military and trade alliances against China in Asia (the "pivot toward Asia) despite the fact that China is even more open to foreign investment than Russia, and unions there are brutally repressed? What is your analysis? Is your dismissal of geopolitics a declaration of your determination to be oblivious to them?
Eastern European nations probably signed up for NATO because Russian tanks invaded them in the past using the same kinds of excuses found in Counterfire and the Weakly Worker. It follows the same logic as the Irish nationalists seeking alliances with the Kaiser in WWI and then with Hitler.
Nothing has changed in the Ukraine over the past 90 years unfortunately. In 1918 they sought ties with the West since the Bolsheviks, like the Czars before them, saw Ukraine in exactly the same way that China saw Tibet or Xinjiang. Or, for that matter, the way that the US saw Cuba or Puerto Rico.
If the Euromaidan politicians were so gung-ho to join NATO, they would have done so when Orange Revolution politicians like Yushchenko or Tymoshenko were heads of state. For that matter, when Yanukovych was in power, they never voted against bills that kept Ukraine unaligned. This hysteria about NATO is manufactured. It is an attempt to turn the victim into the criminal, as Malcolm X once put it. Lenin equated Ukraine with Ireland under British rule. In 1920 the Ukrainians had a legislature that Christian Rakovsky deemed unacceptable. It was dissolved because the Ukrainians were not a “real nation”, the same garbage heard from the Maoist Alain Badiou. Despite all the left rhetoric, those who follow the Kremlin are no different from Stalin. If Lenin hadn’t died, he would have launched a fight against Stalin over the treatment of Ukraine. It was the Great Russian chauvinism of Stalin’s secret faction that was the initial symptom of bureaucratic degeneration.
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