Reuters shows a video of these people seizing the police station, mayor’s offices, and so forth
Observe, no two in quite the same uniform.
It is very hard for a militia to get uniforms exactly the same. Â It is very hard for astroturf to get uniforms varied. Â Therefore, real militia, not Russian astroturf.
These are described as “anti Maidan” protestors.  Maidan’s website is in English, written in the dialect of the US ruling elite, thus Maidan is Cathedral astroturf.  Thus this is local rebellion against the Cathedral on the periphery of the blue empire.
[…] By jim […]
These people aren’t Putin’s astroturf, exactly, but they want to be part of the Russian Empire, so they are not rebels. Just like the Occupy people want to part of the American Empire, only they can’t find jobs.
it’s not the first time rebels have wanted to join a different empire.
The Occupy people were pretty incoherent and got bogged down in political correctness, but the initial goal was to force some issues like unemployment and unaccountability after the financial crisis. Unfortunately, Occupy could not tackle the unaccountability because of their implicit political correctness. Also, I get the sense that Obama was afraid that Occupy would embarrass him more than he wanted to use Occupy to push another jobs bill (which the Administration would have designed again to avoid any support for White men).
Not so.
If unaccountability, would want to occupy the federal reserve, not wall street stock exchange. Occupy protested only those icons of capitalism that were not directly involved in the financial crisis.
Whether or not to make “audit the Fed” an “official” “demand” was a big argument for the first few weeks. No list of official demands was ever published because, between the eternal bickering between glibertarians and commies, the fact of being out there looking jobless outside the bank buildings was the message.
Sure, people should have known. The decline happens now not decade by decade but year by year, the reactionary bandwagon grows, and not jumping on it becomes less excusable and more evincing of moral defect.
Could it have been occupy the fed? I’m not sure if it could. Certainly the ‘99%’ slogan is a disappointment. But ‘they got bailed out, we got sold out’ is true, though we didn’t understand why.
There is a 1% and a 47%, and the middle class gets squeezed; but the middle class is terrified by its Whiteness and not yet ready to defend its interests. Another argument was whether Occupy should champion middle class issues like people underwater on their mortgages, or if Occupy should bulid bridges to the rest of the 99% by going to the Black parts of the city and handing out flyers. Eventually Occupy chose to be careful with people’s preferred gender pronouns, and then got arrested en masse.
“underwater on mortgages” was not a middle class issue – at least it was not where I was in the Bay area, where 99% of those who were underwater were no-hablo-english wetbacks with no job and no credit rating who had been buying million dollar houses no money down and then immediately flipping them at a much higher price to other no-hablo english wetbacks with no job and no credit rating.
When the music stopped, and they could flip no longer, they stayed in the house rent free, and often several years passed before eviction, because the owner of the mortgage was not an individual, but rather a labyrinthine maze of mortgage backed securities. Some of them are still there. When eviction finally happened, they ripped the copper wiring out of the walls and stole the toilet, the taps, the kitchen sink, and the doors.
The biggest villains in the crisis were Countrywide, WaMu, the ratings agencies, Freddy, Fannie, and the Fed. None of those were on the occupy list.
The government wanted easy money dumped on minorities to turn them middle class. The money was dumped, but conspicuously and spectacularly failed to turn minorities middle class – and proof of this account of the crisis is that Occupy did not want to occupy those that were most directly involved in blowing the money.
If Occupy was really against the 1%, should have called out those of the 1% that blew the money, even if Occupy averted their eyes from what the money was blown on.
Occupy was astroturf. Nearly all of them were sent there by their professors for course credit, or were on the payroll of government unions and ngos. There were indeed a lot of homeless underclass, and people on grants who were between grants, but by and large, on the payroll.
Was started by freelance anarchists as far as I know, but the professional astroturf moved in quickly.
Occupy was announced from on high by white house operatives. About seven genuine freelance anarchists answered the call. Maybe two dozen at peak. After a few days of this hilariously unimpressive turnout, Obama marched in the astroturf.
Nothing hard about varying uniforms. When you form your paramilitaries, tell them to bring their own kit.
With astroturf, they will not have their own kit. They will have the kit of the organization through which you summon them. And if it is a non military, non police organization, for example summoning students through their professors, they will not have any kit, and it will have to be supplied.
You supply the kit necessary (TA-50, weapons, mags, armor, commo gear,) and tell them to bring their own clothes, backpacks and sleeping bags. Tell them you’ll reimburse them if they can show receipts, or just give them all a stipend.
Then they will be totally out of uniform.
What is hard with astroturf is to get the effect of half assed uniforms, that they tried, but did not quite succeed.
Similarly with signs carried by astroturf, usually too professional and too uniform in style, and if they are professionally faked to not look professional, still too uniform in style.
Nah-they will buy their stuff from the local surplus places, which will have a more-or-less standardized mix of junk, giving the effect we see. Or they will loot it from the local military warehouses, again providing a similar effect.
In general, what we see in the Eastern Ukraine is a mirror image of US takeovers. On one hand, you have your local astroturf: various alkies and bums (one particularly bummy lady managed to show up in three different places as a Crimean, Kievite and Luganskian, but I lost the link.) On the other hand, you have your protest tourists-the Russians started pulling these in to the border region back in February, including Cossacks, Russian biker gangs and other assclowns, as well as standard Russia United parteigenossen. So you have the toothless gentleman in the middle of this report, protesting in Kharkiv in 2014 and in Riga in 2009: http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/04/10/eyewitness-to-the-kharkiv-beaten-by-putins-thugs/
and you have Mika Ronkainen, from Moscow, pulling down Ukrainian flags in Kharkiv: http://www.policymic.com/articles/84085/was-this-handsome-pro-russian-protester-planted-by-putin
The latter have, as we can see from the picture you linked, some training and weapons, but are mostly good for the river-of-meat effect. You can see them taking a police station here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152077263862898&set=a.60478402897.73503.554202897&type=1
Notice that they immediately started looting, unlike what happened in Kiev and Yanukovich’s residence.
On the third hand, you have Russian professionals, intel and SOF guys advising, organizing and supporting all this stuff, and staying out of the spotlight.
This is the American strategy mirrored. You know, when the Iraqi police and army were written up as apprehending/killing terrorists, nobody mentioned that the guys doing the apprehending and killing were mostly American advisors, and the Iraqis were largely there for the optics. If you took photos of the Iraqis, especially the cops, they would look like even bigger bags of shit than the “spontaneously organized pro-Russian rebels” above. That was alright-they served their purpose.
I suspect that the US’ response will be or already is to send in legions of paramilitary contractors (ex-SOF guys) to do the exact same thing but for the Ukrainian side.
Looking up Mika Ronkainen’s profile, seems like the kind of guy who would go where the action is on his own initiative and selfie himself in front of the mob. Does not seem like a Putin plant. Previously involved in making a movie about the The Siege of Sevastopol before this stuff hit the fan, thus previous interest in and connections with Ukraine and Russian patriotism before this balloon went up.
In those photos, I see a lot of masked men, each with a individually home made mask, which is the opposite of the river of meat – this people acting defiantly from a vulnerable position – that if they were to lose, the authorities could come after them. Therefore, locals taking risks for the revolution.
By the way, the prior govt (which was basically Russian puppetry) started using astroturf months ago-google “Titushki,” and check this out: http://observers.france24.com/content/20131204-agent-provocateurs-infiltrating-ukraine-protest
The prior government was EU aligned, which is to say State Department aligned, but became resentful as a result of mistreatment. Upon changing its position, a coup followed by Maidan, which is notoriously a state department sock puppet. That astroturf committed acts of violence is clear, the question is, who hired those violent astroturf?
Since astroturf violence escalated into a Maidan coup, which is to say a coup by State Department sock puppets, obviously the state department hired that violent astroturf.
It’s amazing how the same exact tactics are immediately obvious to you when they are being used by the Cathedral and completely invisible when the Little Satan (thanks, Ayatollah Khomeini!) uses them.
If an Asian-American from Seattle, with a track record of being involved in “social justice” and “Latino studies” happened to photographed tearing down the Mexican flag in the middle of Juarez and replacing it with a black anarchist flag, you’d immediately ask the obvious question: how come they couldn’t find a Mexican to do this? Obviously, the Mexican anarchist movement is astroturf. Etc. Now, a Finn from Moscow just happens to be front and center at this thing in Kharkiv, well, all is normal. If anarchists at the WTO protests wear masks, obviously, they are astroturf on behalf of the Cathedral. When the “rebels” mostly wear the same uniform, meaning, puffy black jacket, pullover cap/hoodie, and it’s the same one they wore when they were doing their agent provocateur bit in Kiev in February-well, but look-they have masks-obviously they are authentic rebels. It has nothing to do with the fact that without the masks, they could be identified as Russian professional protesters/stormtroopers.
The previous government was a Russian puppet regime, through-and-through, from the Donetsk/Lugansk clan. The one before that was a Cathedral shop mostly from the Dnepropetrovsk clan. But they had problems from the beginning and fell out amongst themselves, which was taken advantage of by the previous government (Chicago-style voting and a Soviet judicial system helped, too.) The one prior to the Cathedral one was a typical post-Soviet satrapy like what you see in Central Asia today.
Titushko and the rest of the “antifascists” who were beating up Maidan protesters and journalists admitted that they’d been hired by Regions Party guys. They were on camera fraternizing with the riot cops and got treated with kid gloves when the state was shamed into doing something about them (rarely.) If you use the logic of “since astroturf violence escalated into a Maidan coup, which is to say a coup by State Department sock puppets, obviously the state department hired that violent astroturf”, you might as well continue-since the Maidan coup escalated into Russia’s seizure and annexation of the Crimea (and perhaps other parts of the Ukraine in the future,) obviously, the Russians hired that violent astroturf.
Untrue.
I have never accused Cathedral astroturf of being astroturf on the basis of such evidence, and would never do so. Astroturf is a river of meat. If you are identifying particular individuals as astroturf, not astroturf.
Typical symptoms of a Cathedral astroturf protest is entire busloads of astroturfed groups showing up by the busload in government buses, being issued mass produced signs, and signing off on timesheets.
Another typical symptom is, as with black bloc in Oakland, the wholly staged confrontation, where the Oakland authorities were clearly commanding both sides in the supposed confrontation. Thus, for example, when black bloc supposedly shut down the port, the Oakland authority shut down the port and sent the port workers to beef up the protest that supposedly shut down the port. Since they were shutting down their own port under orders from their own bosses, astroturf. Before black bloc vandalized businesses in Oakland, Oakland authorities shut the businesses down and sent their rentacops away. In confrontations between black bloc and Oaklands police, police complained that the confrontation was faked, staged, and staged with them as the bad guys and required to take a fall, to lose to black bloc.
So, Russians gathering various professional protesters on the other side of the border for months, then moving them across to pretend to be Eastern Ukrainians-not astroturf. GRU guys blatantly running the show-not astroturf.
http://www.unian.net/politics/907730-sbu-opublikovala-razgovoryi-rossiyskih-diversantov-s-rukovodstvom-iz-rf.html
Here you have those guys’ phone conversations released on YouTube (does anybody understand that phones are not secure these days?) You’ve got, apparently, GRU guys running groups of amateurs in blocking positions while their pipe hitters are running around doing more sensitive things (they are coordinating so that the amateurs don’t light up the pros on the latter’s re-entry into the lines.) The head Russian guy in Slavyansk (apparently, a GRU guy) is reporting a successful ambush on some “very serious guys” (I assume this is the SBU leadership which just got lit up recently) to his boss, with the Russian number, which number matches the number of Alexander Borodai, a Russian “PR expert and politologist.” He is telling the Russian guy to get his deputy, who speaks with a Ukrainian accent, ready to do an interview with Live News, a Moscow show, and telling him exactly what to demand (federalization, immediate elections of governors to block the Parliament from taking external loans.)
This is the guy running the show from Moscow: http://www.unian.net/politics/907820-rukovoditelem-separatistov-okazalsya-rossiyskiy-piarschik.html
This guy, from Kharkiv, is saying that there the show is being run entirely by GRU guys who aren’t hiding in conjunction with local cops, who are pretending to fight the separatists while actively cooperating with them (you know, the Weimar scenario):
http://www.vestnikcivitas.ru/pbls/3354
So, they’re rebels in the sense that ZANLA and ZIPRA were rebels, only more so-entirely directed, supplied and financed by an outside force.
If Russians had been gathering them, would have come across gathered, like Cathedral astroturf, who show up in buses and all do the same thing in the same way at the same place and the same time, like a robot zombie chorus line.
When people are being herded, they look like a herd, like a river of meat. These alleged astroturf look like cats, each coming across the border by himself separately, from different places at different times, to different places at different times, doing different things.
Tell me when they record the Russian equivalent of the assistant secretary of state issuing orders to supposedly independent groups in Ukraine.
The Cathedral claims that Alexander Boroday is the separatist leader, or a separatist leader, and that he is a Russian, and that he is located in Moscow. Where is your evidence for any of those three claims? And, supposing that he really is a russian and really is in Moscow, he is not the assistant secretary of state. He is just some guy, like me. You could probably find equally good evidence that I was running the recent Nevada Rancher uprising against the Bureau of Land Management from Singapore if you wanted to prove that Singapore was behind it.
>Tell me when they record the Russian equivalent of the assistant secretary of state issuing orders to supposedly independent groups in Ukraine.
This is worse-it’s like the Russian equivalent of the chief of station ordering Americans pretending to be Ukrainians on the Maidan where to go, whom to kill, what to tell CNN.
>The Cathedral claims that Alexander Boroday is the separatist leader, or a separatist leader, and that he is a Russian, and that he is located in Moscow. Where is your evidence for any of those three claims? And, supposing that he really is a russian and really is in Moscow, he is not the assistant secretary of state.
The Cathedral makes no claims about Boroday-they are slow on the uptake. The SBU made those claims. We have no direct evidence, only circumstantial evidence. The evidence is as follows: a few months ago, Borodai appeared on Russian TV as a “political expert” speaking on the proper way to divide the Ukraine. Ukrainian journalists matched his number with the one on the phone intercept. The voices match, as far as I can tell. Here, we have a 2002 article claiming that he has been appointed deputy director of the FSB: http://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/27-07-2002/47226-0/
Here, we have another article where he denies it:
http://www.sptimes.ru/archive/pdf/790.pdf
So, it would be just like you and the Bundy Ranch, if you were a “political analyst” for a small Singaporean political PR shop, information had come out about you working for Singaporean intelligence, and the best-armed guys at the Ranch were calling you and reporting their daily activities while you instructed them on what to tell the journalists you’d be putting in touch with them.
B wrote:
But he is not political analyst for a small Russian shop. He is some guy who managed to get interviewed. Which might suggest that he is political analyst for a small Russian shop, but if he was, you could probably name the shop.
But no information has come out about him working for Russian intelligence.
That is an accurate rendition of the Assistant Secretary of State’s conversation with ambassador about what orders were to be given to the Cathedral astroturf in the Ukraine. It is not a reasonable rendition of Borodai’s conversation. They were not reporting to him, he was not instructing them.
Rather, he was offering his PR services to Ukrainian activists, as a person with contacts in the media. The Assistant Secretary of State was dictating what was to be done to a flock of sheep, Borodai was interacting with a pride of cats.
Do you speak Russian? I am fluent in it. That was exactly the content of the conversation. Not only were they reporting to him, but they were asking him who it was that they had shot up. Meaning that he had told them, go to place X, wait for such and such vehicles, light them up.
Of the two articles from 2002 I linked from the Russian press, one said he’d been appointed deputy director of the FSB, the other said that he denied it and said he’d left his job writing for Zavtra to run his small political PR shop. Those articles were in English, so I’m no sure what you are arguing about there.
I stand corrected.
That is an excessive respectful behavior towards someone who is presumably far away
I stand corrected. I misread the article as trutherism – well it was trutherism, but was indeed purportedly about him being appointed deputy director. I tend to automatically go blank when I read trutherism. Intelligence agencies do not need to commit terrorist acts and blame them on Muslims to make Muslims look bad.
This, however, is not Cathedral style astroturf, the robot zombie chorus line, the big river of meat, which is why I was so resistant to the idea. Rather, as is KGB style, secret agents, they are doing a small number of extreme and dramatic acts, the sharp end of the spear rather than the docile river of meat: dramatic, and sometimes deadly acts by particular individuals to keep the pot boiling.
Yes, you are right. Is Russian intervention. But it is Soviet style, not Cathedral style, secret agents, not hordes of astroturf, fake local hard power, not fake local soft power.
However although you are correct, you are using the wrong word. Secret agents performing dramatic provocations is not the same thing as astroturf. Astroturf is used to manufacture the appearance of public opinion and the appearance of democratic legitimately. Astroturf intimidates large numbers of people by making them fear they will lose social status. Secret agents intimidate small numbers of people by beating them up.
I stand corrected. Not astroturf. But you misread the Russian style. It is to have shadowy guys doing shadowy things while there is a big swarm of hired meat covering for them. This was exactly the style in the 60s in the States and Europe, and exactly how they ran the arduous liberation movements in Africa and the Middle East-most of the members couldn’t find their ass with both hands and a flashlight, but they didn’t need to-that’s what the pros were for. The pros would blend and direct.
I am agnostic about the Russian apartment bombings, but lean towards suspicion. The driving factor is that shortly after the bombings, the locals in Ryazan foiled another bombing attempt, where it turned out the FSB had planted the explosives (without informing the local FSB office.) Their director, Patrushev, announced that it had been a training exercise. The series of bombings provided the impetus for the second war in Chechnya, which allowed Putin to consolidate his power, rebuild the security state, capitalize on popularity from the perceived victory, eventually eliminate his oligarchical competition and turn Russia into the neofeudal state it is today (for better or worse-it really depends on your perspective on the 90s, which really depends on which side you were on.)
National liberation, I meant.
>That is an excessive respectful behavior towards someone who is presumably far away
What do you mean?
By the way, in his latest appearance, Putin has admitted that Russian special ops guys went into the Crimea, though of course he denies that there are any in the Ukraine, naturally. They are pushing for federalization, not de jure annexation. You know, the best of both worlds-the East would be transformed into Russian vassal-states, but the formal situation would be that it was still part of the Ukraine, so sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The Euros want the same thing-they’ve been putting big industrial investments into Russia’s industrial cities like Togliatti, and would hate to lose their returns. So, I suspect that this what will happen, and the Ukraine will be like Bosnia.
Genuine rebellion is always local
Why would they be Russian vassal states. Countries with the same language tend to get on well together, and have common policies, but one does not necessarily dominate the other, even when very unequal in size.
It is always a bad idea to have a unitary state that cuts across linguistic boundaries. What happens is that members of one linguistic group get all the cherries from the government, and the members of the other linguistic group do not. Trouble ensues.
A loose federation is a reasonable solution to this problem, a solution that pretty much everyone winds up applying. When the Cathedral opposes such solutions, just being greedy.
>Genuine rebellion is always local
Any successful local genuine rebellion has some not-so-local guys funding it, training and arming the rebels, and so on. See Moldbug on Schmidt, or the American Revolution. Anyway, during the conversation, Borodai seemed to be on his way over to Slavyansk. And even if he’d been in Moscow, there is nothing unusual about spec ops guys on a strategic mission reporting to a headquarters way on high in the next country over, or even around the world.
>Why would they be Russian vassal states.
Same reason that Herzegovina is a Croatian vassal state, and the Serbian parts of Bosnia are Serbian vassal states. Not enough critical mass, population/economy/military-wise. Especially places like Donetsk and Lugansk (Luganda, as the Ukrainians refer to it,) which are basically burned out former industrial slave plantations and are uneconomical without massive investment and restructuring. The populations were mostly transferred there to mine coal and things of that sort by the Soviets in the 1930s and onwards, and when the USSR collapsed, they started sucking hind tit and haven’t stopped since (and the times when “their” guys were running the country were no better-“their” guys had made their way up robbing their constituents blind and sticking it to them in every way, and certainly felt no obligation towards them when they got to the top of the countrywide pile.) I’m talking regular power/gas outages going for a month, people raising goats and pigs on their city balconies, all kinds of shit like that. They are basically stuck in 1983, and of course will be Russian vassalages in a federalized system.
>It is always a bad idea to have a unitary state that cuts across linguistic boundaries. What happens is that members of one linguistic group get all the cherries from the government, and the members of the other linguistic group do not. Trouble ensues.
This is a red herring. In fact, Kiev, the epicenter of the present situation, is largely a Russophone city, and the Maidan movement (to the extent that it was one movement) was to a very large degree Russophone. The West is Ukrainophone to some degree, but everyone speaks Russian. This is not a question of linguistic separatism or ethnic conflict. It’s a question of large populations in the central and western parts of the Ukraine wanting to move to a system somewhat like what they see in Poland (relative transparency, freedom from corruption and a modern economy,) and large populations in the eastern part wanting to move from their present state as corrupt and poor post-Soviet satrapies back to their glory days under the Soviets, when a glorious proletarian coal miner made 3-4 times as much as a doctor, and you could always solve your problems by bribing the right guy with vodka and sausage. Russia knows this and is offering them what they want.
Maidan movement is anglophone, and speaks the dialect of the American ruling elite. If they speak any Ukrainian languages they probably speak more Russian than Ukrainian, being foreigners, but if they speak it at all, speak it very badly.
Yanukovych, the guy Maidan overthrew, was resented and overthrown largely because he was Russophone. So the Maidan movement, in so far as it has any local traction, has traction with people who do not speak Russian.
>Maidan movement is anglophone, and speaks the dialect of the American ruling elite. If they speak any Ukrainian languages they probably speak more Russian than Ukrainian, being foreigners, but if they speak it at all, speak it very badly.
No, this is untrue. I’ve been reading blogs from people in the Ukraine (mostly Kiev) written in Russian for about 10 years now. Maidan is very much a local rebellion with a bit of American support (not much, mostly given in the media.)
>So the Maidan movement, in so far as it has any local traction, has traction with people who do not speak Russian.
Again, untrue.
Things are not as simple as The Cathedral And Its Pawns Vs. All Right-Thinking Humanity. Everyone has their own interests and attempts to play their own games.
For instance, in Egypt and Syria, the Cathedral-proxy hipsters, who were Time magazine’s darlings and had been to State’s Democracy Camp, quickly got eaten alive by the Muslim Brotherhood. Which State was uncomfortable enough with that it didn’t make too big a stink when the Egyptian military decided to start shooting them in the head (big surprise there for me, because I assumed that just like the way to get ahead in the Venezuelan military during Chavez’ rise was to be in a secret Communist clique, the way to get ahead in the Egyptian military for the last 30 years was to be in a secret MB clique. Apparently, no.) It turned out that most of the people supporting the rebellion against Musharraf were not hipsters who wanted Cairo to be a bit more like San Francisco but angry goatfuckers who wanted Cairo to be a bit more like Grozny during its glory days, 1996-1999. Then it turned out that most of the people of Egypt apparently didn’t care one way or the other as long as the trains ran sorta on time and everyone got their pita handouts.
Likewise, Israel set up Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO. I mean, pretty logical-you want to get rid of socialists in a Middle Eastern country, bring in some Muslims who hate them worse than they hate you. And since the Muslims are MB types, what are the odds they will gang up on you with the Egyptian government? Unfortunately, it turns out that the Hamas guys had a mind of their own, and decided to outflank their Shin Bet handlers and cozy up to the Euros and the Cathedral. Oops. But fortunately, the Cathedral is uncomfortable enough with them that they don’t get the full-on support that Abbas does, so things work out in the meantime, sort of.
And when you look at Turkey, it’s even worse. Neoreactionary Ataturk, the Lee Kuan Yew of the Middle East, sets up the army as a counterweight to the commies and the muzzies. Every time one of these two gets uppity and leverages foreign aid and democracy to rise to power, the army steps in. The Cathedral, surprisingly, keeps its interference to a minimum for a long time, building up the army and its proxy goons in the shadow govt. But then the MB emerges! Turns out there are enough Turks who support them, and with the Cathedral flying top cover (“reform the army shadow govt system or no EU for you!”), they can take over. But then it turns out there’s another conspiracy, with Cathedral ties to some degree, the Gulen boys, who start to eat the Turkish MB govt from the inside, allying with all those Turks who really don’t want to be ruled by the local version of Hamas.
All I’m saying is that what happened in the Ukraine was complicated. Of course, guys like Yuschenko and Yats and Timoshenko were Cathedral darlings. It wasn’t enough-their govt got eaten alive by Russia’s proxies. Maidan involved something much bigger, namely, parties actually representing big chunks of the educated classes who wanted their own country, not a Russian or EU colony, but something that would maneuver between the two, like Singapore maneuvered between China and the West. Whether they can pull it off is up in the air-I think that they have about a 30% chance.
If so, Assistant secretary of state would not have been issuing orders like they were muppets, and they would use Ukrainian, rather the Cathedral, language for political concepts.
Who are these parties that want independence? Maidan was a creation of George Soros, and clearly wants to absorb Ukraine into the united states of Europe. Maidan’s native tongue, the langauge in which its defining politics is expressed, is English. If these parties existed, we would be hearing their names.
And the name I hear is “Right Sector”, which Maidan intends to murder as soon as it has sorted out this business in the east.
B, you are right to be loyal to your fellow Jews in Israel who are in the long run the hope of the Jews to live with dignity and are surrounded by genetically inferior and culturally backward races who want to murder them all, but it seems to me you are also loyal to your fellow Jews in the State Department, who want to sell out the Jews of Israel as a down payment to advance their project of converting Islam from Islam into progressivism the way they converted Christianity from Christianity into progressivism.
Nuland was doing the typical State thing, trying to steer the big ball of wax her way. Obviously, given how things have gone, State doesn’t have a firm grasp on the situation, though of course Turchynov and Yatsenyuk are in its pocket. If they had the whole movement in their pocket, there would be no reason for her to fear Klitchko. In any case, this whole thing really kicked into gear when the protesters told Klitchko and Yatsenyuk (I believe) to go get fucked. In other words, State’s guys were not serious enough.
“Parties” was not quite the right word-I didn’t mean it in the sense of organized parties. The two right-most ones, Svoboda and RS seem to be very murky, where it’s unclear whom they are working for at any given moment.
I am not going to explain my loyalties, except to say that 1) I live on a hilltop in Samaria, 2) I have not worked for the Cathedral in several years, ever since I grew disappointed in even its pointy end, 3) I believe that for once, Israel has done the right thing and said, listen, we don’t have a dog in this fight. I will say this-a European nationalist movement is quite ripe to emerge into the mainstream. I’m waiting for its appearance. This seems as good a place as any.
She did not think she needed to try. She had confidence that the movement was under her command.
Indeed, the sequence of events leading up to the crisis events are events of imperial overreach, of casual and excessive confidence in Cathedral power. History, supposedly, was an their side. Like Darth Vader: “I am altering our agreement. Pray that I alter it no further.”
When things blew up, we see prolonged disbelief that things could possibly be blowing up. “How could this possibly be happening”, they thought. “Surely everyone will just obediently do as they were told, once their roles are properly explained to them, and be terribly embarrassed for deviating from the script written in Washington.” Not only did Nuland behave as though everyone who mattered in Ukraine were all actors in a script written in Washington by the state department, the US and the mass media continued to behave as though everyone who mattered in the Ukraine were all actors in a script written in Washington, even as some people rejected the script.
Um they’re also FAT.
and not disciplined like the RU [or aren’t U] “contractors” who took the Crimea.
they’re punk like pointing the guns…at no one in particular, trying to look tough.
you’re right about the uniforms as a clue.
In this scene they are trying to look tough to persuade the cops to leave the police station, not trying to look tough to impress the girls.
Your second conclusion does not follow from the first, nor is it subjected to the same logic as your correct first conclusion. The militia members shown here are most likely real militia members who are pro-Russian or ethnically Russian citizens of the Ukrainian polity. However, it does not follow from this, nor from the content of any website, that their opponents in Western Ukraine are some kind of collective US plant. To make such a claim is absurd; conspicuously, you simultaneously argue that the men shown in the picture are “real militia”, but the even more ragtag Praviy Sektor is somehow an arm of USG, despite being outright fascist paramilitaries. You cannot maintain coherence and claim these two things at the same time. Even if you only claimed #2, you would still be coherently wrong.
The fascist paramilitaries are not really willing to fight for Maidan, and it increasingly looks like the regular Ukrainian army is not willing to fight either. The Cathedral finds itself in the same situation in the Ukraine as the Soviet Union found in Afghanistan, which eventually led to the disastrous Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
Today, the state department hints at military intervention. If military intervention occurs, will be following the path that the Soviets followed in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union mistreated its allied government in Afghanistan, after the style of Darth Vader
The allied government, upon being treated as a servant, became difficult, so was overthrown and replaced by a puppet government. The puppet government faced rebellion and a military disinclined to follow orders, so in Afghanistan, the puppet government was brushed aside and replaced by direct rule of imperial troops. Long, messy, expensive war ensues.
Eventually the Soviet Union decides to retreat – but discovers that retreat under fire is a difficult and extremely dangerous maneuver.
It seems to me that USG’s presence in Ukraine in any form is simply to fuck with Putin as much as possible, but Putin must know that USG is bluffing, since by design a left-bureaucrat state will not waste its stolen resources defending a (admittedly, somewhat left-)nationalist one. It was abundantly clear long ago that what might’ve been called the “Cathedralist” section of western Ukraine (i.e. the section brainwashed by Western media into actually wanting the potentially suicidal entrance into the EU) have definitively lost the battle, and their erstwhile allies the nationalists won. But because the new western Ukrainian regime really is a big-tent-type coalition, it is hard to say the prevailing common ground that it operates on, if any even exists. It is safe to say, though, that with the Svoboda winning over a third of Galicia routinely in elections, that if eastern Ukraine does successfully secede to follow the Crimean example, rump Ukraine will begin marching to the right in elections to come.
No, their retreat went quite smoothly.
Smoothly all the way to Moscow
No-to Uzbekistan. See: Op Magistral.
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