The EU, along with the USA and other Western powers, are responding to the Ukraine crisis in their typically craven manner.
In response to the Ukraine’s special forces using anti-Putin protesters for target practice, they’re threatening sanctions not against Putin, not against Russia and not even against the Ukraine but against Yanukovych’s family.
If he continues to be a bad boy, the EU may fine his son Oleksandr, who has built a £300-million ‘business’ empire in Europe. The quotation marks are inevitable here, for what Oleksandr has really built is an outlet for the ill-gotten gains purloined from the nation by his father and his cronies.
If such a draconian measure doesn’t do the trick, the Yanukovyches and other members of their ‘family’ may even be denied access to European countries, which is apparently seen as a punishment commensurate with the crime of taking 27 lives (with many more doubtless to come).
Meanwhile, in Sochi, 600 miles from Kiev, the man really responsible for the carnage is allowed to have his Olympic triumph. A parallel with the 1936 Nazi Olympics begs to be drawn, and in fact the Russian journalist Viktor Shenderovich did draw it.
In response to his moderate, well-argued article Shenderovich has received thousands of virulently anti-Semitic rebuttals, calling him a ‘Yid snout’ and expressing the regret that Hitler didn’t quite finish the job. Rather than refuting Shenderovich’s analysis, the campaign vindicates every word of it – and sources close to Putin are clearly implicated.
This adds but a slight touch to the backdrop against which Ukrainians are fighting against Putinite fascism in their own country. For this is what the upheaval is all about, and Yanukovych is merely a pawn moved by the chess master in the Kremlin.
The KGB’s own Col. Putin sees the world in the terms defined by his sponsoring organisation. The disintegration of the Soviet empire represents to him “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.” Greater in other words than the two world wars, artificial famines, purges, democide, genocide and so forth – those other geopolitical disasters that collectively destroyed more lives than in all the previous centuries of recorded history combined.
Given this peculiar view of history, it’s no wonder that Col. Putin devotes every ounce of strength (whatever he’s got left over from robbing Russia blind and using the loot to stage emetic extravaganzas) to rebuilding the Soviet Union, if by some other name.
The name he favours, the Eurasian Economic Union, betrays his heritage. For it was the GPU, the KGB’s precursor, that set up the Eurasian movement in the 1920s, with the aim of neutralising anti-Soviet plans being hatched by millions of Russian émigrés in Europe.
The aim of the movement was to portray the Soviet Union as the Russian Empire reincarnated, and many émigrés had sufficiently warm feelings about old Russia to allow themselves to be duped. Those who wouldn’t be duped were murdered or kidnapped – but then that’s how Putin’s alma mater has always done its business.
The EEU is an echo of the same movement, except that this time it’s the whole world that’s being duped into meekly accepting the rebirth of the most awful state Western history has ever known.
We shouldn’t be misled by the term ‘Eurasian Economic Union’. Just like the EU, the EEU is neither driven by economic considerations nor confined to a certain geographical space. Its aims are ideological and geopolitical.
That’s why Putin’s ruling party has far-reaching plans to include not just the former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Also targeted are countries within the former Soviet sphere of influence, such as Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Mongolia – along with those great Eurasian nations Cuba and Venezuela.
The proposed union would use Russian as its common language and incorporate what Putin has described as “the best values of the Soviet Union”, presumably including concentration death camps, mass murder, torture and obliteration of every conceivable liberty.
The project is proceeding apace. So far only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up, their own fascist regimes fitting seamlessly into Putin’s vision. But progress is being made on all fronts. The governments of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia are about to see the light, while Putin’s military aggression succeeded in installing a puppet government in Georgia that’ll do as it’s told.
This is the backdrop against which the events in Kiev and elsewhere in the Ukraine are unfolding. For the career criminal Yanukovych is also running a puppet government, which too is prepared to do as it’s told.
What Yanukovych’s ruling clique has been told to do is join the EEU, not the EU. The words ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’ come to mind, but in any case the Ukraine officially applied to join the EEU in September, 2013.
The trouble started because, unlike the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian people won’t do as they’re told. They have too vivid a recollection of the plagues visited on their nation by Putin’s KGB colleagues.
Specifically, they refuse to forget the 1932 Holodomor, the artificial famine with which Stalin punished Ukrainian peasants for refusing to transfer all their worldly possessions to the state. The Soviet response was both brutal and pioneering, lighting up the path to be treaded by many subsequent despotic cannibals.
In late autumn security troops confiscated all the grain stocks and other food reserves, then sealed the area so tight that no one could get in or out. When the snow melted in the spring, bulldozers moved to remove the frozen corpses, 7,000,000 of them.
Now imagine the 1932 English government doing the same to, say, Scotland. How do you suppose the Scots would feel about the English and national independence? I don’t know if your imagination is vivid enough; mine isn’t.
In today’s Ukraine we’re dealing with a real situation, not an imaginary one. Unlike their government, the people won’t be puppets to the Russians – especially when they’re led by spiritual heirs to the perpetrators of Holodomor.
More and more of them are ready to die fighting KGB stooges, who for the time being are just as ready to kill. Meanwhile the West is assuming the supine position it invariably adopts vis-à-vis tyrannies capable of defending themselves.
It’s not Yanukovych’s family that ought to be boycotted but Putin’s Russia. Yet I’m not holding my breath: the West was too lily-livered to boycott even Putin’s answer to the Nazi Olympics.