Friday, December 31, 2004

Song of an Anti-Semite

In honor of Lubomyr Prytulak, Silski Visti, and all anti-Semites around the world, and with the kind permission of translator Boris Gendelev, here is a complete English translation of Vladimir Vysotsky's "Song of an Anti-Semite".

Song of an Antisemite
(Russian title: Antisemity)

by Vladimir Vysotsky

Just being a hoodlum appears so trite
I ought to convert to an anti-Semite
This cause might not yet have the law on its side
But millions of zealots support it worldwide


One would get a thrashing if I so decide
But I need to know who is a Semite
What if they are held in the highest regard
What if for the trouble I get myself barred


But my drunkard pal with a wider worldview
Said that a Semite is just a plain Jew
Well, I am in luck, as it would appear
I am reassured there is nothing to fear

I worked up resolve, cause Albert Einstein
Was once a respected icon of mine
The people, forgive me, but I have to ask
Should Abraham Lincoln be also unmasked?

Among them, are many who suffered from Stalin
And highly respected by me Charlie Chaplin
My dear friend Rubin and victims of Nazism
And even the founding father of Marxism

But my drunkard buddy said after a job
The blood of the infants they drink, every drop
And I over drinks in a bar overheard
That they long ago crucified our Lord

Without more blood they simply can't do
They tortured an elephant right in a zoo
Against our people committed high treason
And stole all the crops of the previous season

Along major highways they grabbed all the lots
Built luxury dachas and live there like gods
I'll maim and I'll burn, just to make them pay dues
To save our country, I club dirty Jews

Translation copyright © Boris Gendelev (mail to: boris.gendelev_85@gsb.uchicago.edu)

BTW, I discovered Vysotsky's song by listening to Libra Radio. If you are interested in hearing the music and you ask nicely, Marian at Libra might play it for you.

And here is a site devoted to Vysotsky containing many other translations.

I'll be back in the New Year with "The Silski Visti Affair Re-Visited".

Happy New Year to all....

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Follow-Up: The BHHRG Effect (with Update)

In "How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?", I failed to address one important factor influencing the stubborn refusal of the greater part of the blogosphere to recognize the complexities of the Ukraine situation: namely, the role played by John Laughland and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), of which Laughland is a trustee, in first raising the alarm about both certain tactics of the "Orange" coalition in Ukraine and certain ideological currents in its ranks: most notably, anti-Semitic and fascistoid currents. Given Laughland’s record of opposition to the Iraq war and his tendency to see American geo-political machinations at work in every regional crisis, he was quickly identified by the more conservative, more pro-American – or, as I put it, anti-anti-American – sectors of the blogosphere as part of the loony “left”. These sectors of the blogosphere – including some of the most influential addresses on the web – were thus immunized from having to examine any of Laughland’s or BHHRG’s factual claims.

Laughland has in fact been known to spin some rather outlandish yarns on the ubiquity and perfidy of American power: yarns that have that hermetic quality that is so characteristic of anti-Americanism as an ideology or indeed of ideology in general. Arthur Chrenkoff has discussed a particularly egregious example of Laughland’s lack of lucidity, to say the least, when it comes to American matters. Nonetheless, if one is to judge by Laughland’s earlier scholarly efforts – notably, his books The Death of Politics, on France under Mitterrand, and The Tainted Source, on what the book's sub-title provocatively labels “the undemocratic origins of the European idea” – Laughland is decidedly not a “leftist” or at least he was not one when he wrote them. His scholarly writings reflect more what one could call a broadly “liberal” inspiration, i.e. in the classical sense of the term, comprising commitments to, among other things, economic liberalism and free trade, the balance of power in international relations and, perhaps most importantly for Laughland’s itinerary, the nation-state as the framework for democratic politics. These are, namely, commitments that ought, if anything, to mark Laughland as a “conservative”. Indeed, as this article from the Guardian illustrates, in “leftist” circles it is precisely Laughland’s and BHHRG’s direct or indirect, substantial or circumstantial, links to conservative figures and institutions – Mrs. Thatcher, Bill Cash, the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and so on – that is supposed to discredit their factual claims about the Ukraine election crisis. The ideological diversity of the attacks on Laughland and BHHRG in connection with the Ukraine crisis lends support, incidentally, to my hypothesis that what is at stake in the latter escapes the traditional “left”/”right” divide as inherited from the Cold War.

Whereas, moreover, Laughland seems nowadays to be particularly animated by the anti-American Zeitgeist, in geo-political terms he seems at one time or another to have been against just about everything. The Tainted Source is or ought to be a standard text of Euroscepticism and, if memory serves (I am afraid I do not have the text to hand at the moment in order to verify), it ends with a decidedly Russophobe warning of a possible rapprochement between a German-dominated Europe and a renewed Russian empire. So, I suspect that those who have wanted to dismiss Laughland as a shill for Putin would find some cause for pause if they actually examined his writings more carefully.

Unfortunately, Laughland has given free reign to his current idées fixes on American “empire” also in his reporting on the Ukraine elections. Thus, for instance, in an editorial that he has published in various outlets, he says that the “Orange” youth organization PORA was “created and financed by Washington”. No evidence is given in support of this claim. If Laughland has some supporting evidence, I would be curious to see it. Other sources have identified George Soros and the Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) as possible sources of PORA funding. Considering the fervency of their opposition to the current inhabitant of the White House, it would hardly seem reasonable to identify either the Democratic Party or Soros with “Washington”. Moreover, as I have noted here, the NDI itself receives funding not only from the American government, but also from European ones and international institutions. In a similar vein, BHHRG’s report on anti-Semitism in the “Orange” coalition states that Viktor Yushchenko “enjoys the open support of the Bush administration” and implies that George W. Bush in person has “endorsed” Viktor Yushchenko. Again, no evidence is provided to support these claims, and in light of Viktor Yushchenko’s and the “Orange” coalition’s open opposition to the Bush administration’s foreign policy – notably, as concerns Iraq – it is extremely far-fetched to imagine Yushchenko enjoying any such “endorsement” from President Bush. (The outgoing Secretary State Colin Powell is, of course, another matter.)

I say that it is unfortunate that Laughland and BHHRG have indulged such phantasms in their reporting on Ukraine, since their doing so has provided a large part of the blogosphere and the public more generally all the excuse it needed to ignore the massive evidence supporting many of the core claims in their reports on the Ukraine election crisis. All that Laughland’s and BHHRG’s detractors would have needed to do to verify the claims of the latter regarding anti-Semitic and fascistoid currents in the “Orange” coalition, for instance, would have been to click through to the sources provided in the BHHRG report. These include numerous direct citations from both members and key backers of the “Orange” coalition. That this evidence has by and large gone unexamined provides an object lesson in the efficacy of ad hominem argument. Despite its efficacy, however, ad hominem argument is, of course, fallacious, and the common inference made in much of the blogosphere to the effect that the Laughland and BHHRG claims must be false since it was, after all, Laughland and BHHRG that were making them, provides a text book illustration of this fallacy.

What might be called the "BHHRG effect" has also, incidentally, been observed here on Trans-Int. For instance, when I first called attention to the BHHRG report on anti-Semitism and the "Orange", one DavidP. saw fit to leave a comment to the effect that "nobody takes BHHRG seriously". I wrote in reponse: "Well, if BHHRG cites the editor of a major 'pro-opposition' Ukrainian newspaper saying 'I personally have nothing against common Jews, but rather against a small group of Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine both economically and politically. I believe the point of Zionism today is Jewish control of the world, and we see this process at work in Ukraine today' - then maybe it is about time for somebody to take BHHRG seriously."

I believe my point still stands....

UPDATE: By the way, the "Discoshaman" on the Postmodern Clog also uses the ad hominem approach to evading the specific charges of the BHHRG, "informing" his readers in a 28 November post that "[t]hey're an extremely biased group with no ties [link in the original] to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights." Since BHHRG does not claim to have any connection to the International Helsinki Federation, the inclusion of the latter point is itself something of a dodge. (The word "Helsinki" in the title of both groups refers to the 1975 "Helsinki Accord", the implementation of which by state parties is officially supposed to be monitored by the OSCE. The BHHRG - which is also known as the "OSCE Watch" - makes no secret of its disdain for the OSCE.) Apart from this single sentence impugning the character of the BHHRG, the "Discoshaman" merely offers a link to another site that is supposed to reveal the group's "actual nature". The linked page offers no more detailed information on the subject than the Discoshaman himself, but includes a link in turn to the Guardian article mentioned above.

In the comments section, however, one of the Discoshaman's readers by the name of Christopher Price contributes to the cause by linking to a detailed exposé on John Laughland and the BHHRG titled "Can a Lobbyist for Dictators Work as a Journalist?" (The title, incidentally, is quite similar to that of the Guardian piece, which calls Laughland a "PR Man" for "Europe's nastiest regimes".) Lest anyone miss the point of his contribution, Christopher Price helpfully adds: "They [the members of the BHHRG] are not nice". The link leads to the Ukrainian Archive website of the anti-Semite and Ukrainian patriot Lubomyr Prytulak, who is also a favorite reference of Holocaust deniers or "revisionists" such as David Irving and Ernst Zundel. The esteem enjoyed by Prytulak in such circles is hardly surprising. His own site, as another reader of the Postmodern Clog points out in reponse to Christopher Price, contains passages such as the following:

Jews have an overpowering motive to gather the evidence. The story of the Jewish Holocaust has been widely disseminated, and yet the argument that the story is in part a fabrication is gaining ground. Thus, Jews have a powerful motive to discover physical evidence of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Babyn Yar — the motive of demonstrating to the world that they are people of integrity, that they have an abiding committment to truth, that they are not corruptors of history, and that the reparations and sympathy that they have won for themselves have been deserved.

Jews have the means to gather the evidence. The Jewish Holocaust has become possibly a multi-billion dollar industry, such that the funding needed to substantiate the story on which the industry depends can easily be gathered.

As readers will be able to confirm in consulting the text from which the passage is taken, Lubomyr Prytulak's clever implication in this passage is that the required evidence of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Baybyn Yar is not to be found - and hence that some of the key episodes of the Holocaust are "myths".

I discuss Lubomyr Prytulak's "Ukrainian Archives" at greater length here in "Nicholas Kristof and a 'Ukrainian Democrat'". In light of Discoshaman's seeming non-sequitur concerning the lack of ties between the BHHRG and the International Helsinki Federation, it is interesting to note that much of Lubomyr Prytulak's exposé on Laughland and the BHHRG is devoted to demonstrating the "bogus" character of the BHHRG and its unconnectedness to a "genuine" BHHRG (which, however, does not in fact use this acronym) that is a member of the International Helsinki Federation. Prytulak's exposé, furthermore, links the same document from the International Helsinki Federation dissociating itself from the BHHRG as is linked by Discoshaman. The BHHRG is apparently supposed to be an ideologically suspect source for the Discoshaman and his admirers: "extremely biased", as the Discoshaman says. Perhaps it is. But is Lubomyr Prytulak's Ukrainian Archives supposed to be a reliable source, by contrast?

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Forthcoming: "The BHHRG Effect" and "The Silski Visti Affair Revisited"

In "How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?", I failed to address one important factor influencing the blogosphere's stubborn refusal as a rule to recognize the complexities of the Ukraine situation: namely, the role played by John Laughland and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG) in first raising the alarm about both certain tactics of the "Orange" coalition in Ukraine and certain ideological tendencies in its ranks. Laughland and the BHHRG were quickly identified by large portions of the blogosphere as "leftist" - in fact Laughland himself is most certainly not that, at least not in any customary sense of the term - and as anti-American: which indeed they are, in the sense that they have a Guardian-like tendency to see American geo-political machinations at work in every regional crisis. These identifications served as a kind of immunization for the more pro-American - or as I say anti-anti-American - sectors of the blogosphere against taking Laughland's and BHHRG's factual charges seriously. I have already touched on this issue in some comments to various earlier posts. But I think the matter has sowed sufficient confusion that it is worthwhile to address it in a separate follow-up post to "How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?" on what I will call "The BHHRG Effect".

As regular readers of Trans-Int will know, Silski Visti is a pro-"Orange" Ukrainian newspaper that was ordered closed by a Ukrainian court (though the order has never been implemented) on charges of incitement after publishing what can, I think, safely and uncontroversially be described as blatantly anti-Semitic material. (Extracts are cited in the following link, in case anyone doubts this description.) Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Timochenko came to the defense of Silski Visti, publishing along with their colleague Oleksandr Moroz a statement titled "Dirty Hands Off Silski Visti". In an earlier post on the Silski Visti affair, I wrote the following:

Yushchenko's initial reaction to the January court decision - "The government will get more and more upset with truthful information in mass media..." - suggests something other than just a content-neutral defense of principle. Perhaps a complete English translation of the "Hands off" statement would help to clarify this matter.

Thanks to the good offices of Dominique Arel and the Ukraine List, I now have such a translation at my disposal. With their kind permission, I will be publishing it here on Trans-Int.

As indicated, I will also be sharing some new information on the history of Andriy Shkil's UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense). If Viktor Yushchenko is sometime soon confirmed as the new Ukrainian president, it will be interesting to see if the other components of the "Orange" finally take their distance from the Shkil organization.

New material should be up tomorrow by noon EST/5 PM GMT.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Updated Holidays Blogging Policy

Contrary to my earlier announcement of a full-fledged vacation from blogging, I will be doing some limited posting during the holidays. I have, for instance, come across some additional information on Andriy Shkil's UNA-UNSO - an ethnic-nationalist organization which forms part of Vitkor Yushchenko's "Orange" coalition - that I'd like to share with you. Check back occasionally for updates. A full blogging schedule will resume January 3rd. As announced, I will also be adding some thematic dossiers of earlier-posted material to the sidebar.

Thanks much for your interest in Trans-Int and Happy Holidays to all.

Friday, December 24, 2004

Notice: "Blogging as Propaganda or Disturbing Discoshaman"

I have posted "Blogging as Propaganda or Disturbing Discoshaman" as a separate post as well as including it as Part III of the now completed "How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?".

Blogging as Propaganda or Disturbing Discoshaman

The “Orange Revolution” has made an internet star of “Discoshaman”, the host of the blog known either as Le Sabot Post-Moderne or The Postmodern Clog. A simple Google search will turn up ample evidence of the extent to which various of the “bigs” of the blogosphere abjured the search for balanced reporting and factual background on the Ukraine situation in favor of the highly subjective live-blogging of the “revolution” by the unabashed “Orange” groupie Discoshaman. “Here’s a guy who’s there,” an endorsement from Andrew Sullivan on the homepage of The Postmodern Clog reads, “And, yes, the revolution will be blogged.”

For the purpose of exhibiting the fundamental righteousness of the “Orange Revolution”, the Discoshaman seemed too good to be true. He was exceedingly hip, as the trendy moniker and obscure French blog title make clear. His blog had lots of cool pictures direct from Kiev, including, among other inspiring subjects: festive young people in orange accessories, quaint old ones in folkloric garb, and, uh,…big beefy dudes in military camouflage and orange armbands, whom the “Discoshaman” genteelly dubs “Yushchenko’s peacekeeping force”. He even had a blogger wife with an equally neat handle – “Tulipgirl” – and Disco and Tulip had a gaggle of cute kids (“my yellow-haired monkeys”), whose pictures also turn up on the blog or on pages linked from it. What more could possibly be needed to know that in the global, nay cosmic, struggle of niceness against not-niceness, Disco and Tulip were on the side of the nice? Best of all for the pro-Bush sectors of the Blogosphere, feeling their oats after President Bush’s re-election and who might otherwise not have known quite what to make of the Ukraine crisis, the Discoshaman was an open right-winger, a pious Christian and a fervent supporter of our troops in Iraq. If the Discoshaman did not exist, the “Orange Revolution” would most certainly have had to create him.

But closer scrutiny of the Postmodern Clog reveals a number of disturbing inconsistencies in the Discoshaman’s self-presentation as innocent chronicler and exegete of the “Orange Revolution”.

To start with, if the Discoshaman is such a great supporter of President Bush and the American-led intervention in Iraq, why has the fact that Viktor Yushchenko has made the withdrawal of Ukraine’s troop contingent in Iraq a centerpiece of his election campaign seemingly not registered in his estimation of the man and the movement he leads? This fact alone need not, of course, have led Discoshaman to abandon his faith in “the Orange”. But given his ostensible political convictions and given his self-appointed vocation to report on and even “explain” the “Orange Revolution” to the folks back home, it would at least seem to merit some reflection. A search for “Iraq” on the Postmodern Clog turns up a number of posts with generically “right-wing” ruminations on Abu-Ghraib, the search for weapons of mass destruction, the failings of the UN, etc. – but nothing whatsoever on Iraq in connection with Viktor Yushchenko and the Orange Coalition. (If I have missed something of relevance in this connection, I would welcome comments or an e-mail to my address in the Profile section.) A November 30th post does refer obliquely to Yushchenko’s stance on Iraq, but only in order to dismiss its relevance, since somehow the “Orange Revolution” is supposed to be above politics. “The Left-Right concensus [sic.] on democracy in Ukraine is incredibly precious to me,” Discoshaman writes, “It's precisely for this reason that I'm fisking the small segment of the Left which is working to fracture that alliance. We NEED both sides with us. I could not be less interested in scoring cheap political points about American politics. If you doubt me, consider this -- a Yushchenko win will likely cost America a member of the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ Do I seem concerned?” Well, no. And given that the already thinly-stretched American military will presumably have to dispatch another division to Iraq to replace the parting Ukrainians and that these soldiers will be at risk and some might die – this indifference on the part of a self-professed "conservative" is somewhat unusual. (Incidentally, such consequences of a Yushchenko victory have been noted by a couple of posters on Free Republic - and, to my knowledge, virtually nowhere else on the Web.)

Discoshaman has not been able entirely to ignore the charges of anti-Semitism directed at certain components of the “Our Ukraine” coalition. But his characteristically glib response to them raises more questions than it answers. In a 28 November post, the Discoshaman appeals, in effect, to his supposedly privileged status as witness of the “revolution” – or, in Andrew Sullivan’s phrase, “a guy who’s there” – in order to reassure his readers that the charges are baseless. “I have seen ZERO evidence of anti-Semitism during the protests,” Discoshaman writes. That’s fine and may even be true. But it fails to engage the existing documentary evidence of anti-Semitic tendencies among important segments of Ukrainian society that openly support Yushchenko’s candidacy: notably, such evidence as has come to light in connection with the Silski Visti affair.

In an update to his 28 November post, moreover, Discoshaman adds: “I forgot to include the fact that Yanukovych's campaign hired a neo-fascist group to campaign on behalf of Yushchenko. Yushchenko promptly denounced both them and the agitprop itself. But don't expect those attacking him to mention that fact when using this alleged endorsement against him.” As is again typical for the Discoshaman, no evidence, let alone source, is given for the charge that the Yanukovich campaign hired a neo-fascist group to campaign for Yushchenko. We are supposed simply to take it for granted that Discoshaman has it on good authority. Presumably, the episode that Discoshaman has in mind – since he provides no specifics, we are obliged to speculate – was a pro-Yushchenko rally held in Kiev by the UNA-UNSO [Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense], at which participants are said to have displayed SS insignia and given the Hitler-salute. As noted here, Viktor Yushchenko did indeed denounce the proceedings. However, as likewise noted here, he was at the same time careful to distinguish the UNA-UNSO that is alleged to have organized the rally from the “‘UNA-UNSO’ organization headed by Andriy Shkil,” which via the Yulia Timoshenko Block is an acknowledged member of the “Orange” coalition. Now, if one is to judge by the writings of Andriy Shkil himself, which among other things – and as quoted in English on the UNA-UNSO’s own website – openly endorse the ideas of Nazi “racial theorist” Walter Darré, the UNA-UNSO of Shkil richly deserves to be qualified as a “neo-Fascist”, if not indeed, more precisely, neo-Nazi organization.

It would be easy to multiply examples of such glaring lacunae in Discoshaman's blogging of the "revolution". The hagiographic presentation of Yulia Timoshenko is notably cleansed of the many shady aspects of the would-be revolutionary heroine's vita - not to mention of her frequenting of the likes of Shkil.

The friendly but fatuous style of the Postmodern Clog - and it is curious that this same style extends also to a large part of the commentaries on the site - lends itself perfectly to the purposes of propaganda. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Discoshaman is in fact an English language editor working for the "Orange" youth organization PORA. He himself announces this in a post dated 24 November that is reproduced on Free Republic. Indeed, the title of the original post as reproduced on Free Republic is "Updates from PORA -- The Revolution WILL be blogged". The references to PORA have, however, been removed from the archived version of the post on the Postmodern Clog - as has the cheerful admission "I am writing from HQ".

To those bloggers who have in good faith adopted the Discoshaman as their authoritative source on the Orange "revolution", I would suggest the following: you have been used.

How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine? (complete - including Part III: "Blogging as Propaganda or Disturbing Discoshaman")


Preamble

Firstly, I want to make clear that in saying the blogosphere was “fooled” – or, more exactly, that large parts of the blogosphere were so – on Ukraine, I do not mean to suggest that Kuchma, Yanukovich, and “the blue” (Yanukovich supporters have a color too) are the “good guys” and Yushchenko, Timoshenko, and “the orange”, the “bad guys”. I do not think it is appropriate or useful or, frankly, particularly adult to analyze politics in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys”. When the NYTimes declares Viktor Yushchenko a “liberal” or Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal pronounces him the “democratic candidate”, or when Nicholas Kristof pronounces presumed Yanukovich sponsor Vladimir Putin a “fascist” (while expressing a charming and rather revealing preference for “fascism” over communism no less!) or when CNN describes Yanukovich himself as a “nationalist”, all that the deployment of such terms serves to accomplish is to demarcate the “goodies” from the “baddies” – while having the unfortunate side-effect of simultaneously emptying otherwise perfectly useful categories of political philosophy of their specific content.

Ukraine is a multi-party parliamentary democracy which has held several both presidential and parliamentary elections in the presence of international observers since 1994. For all the chat about inspiring "democrats", on the one hand, and nasty "authoritarians", on the other, Viktor Yanukovich has never, to my knowledge, officially expressed hostility to parliamentary democracy as such. (Incidentally, it is one of the defining characteristics of those movements that historically identified themselves as “fascist” that they did express such hostility.) The present democratic constitution of Ukraine was adopted under the leadership of Yanukovich's presumed mentor Leonid Kuchma and it is precisely Yanukovich and Kuchma - not Yushchenko and Timoshenko - who were pushing for the recently adopted raft of constitutional reforms that transfer powers to parliament. So, in short, to call Viktor Yushchenko alone the “democratic candidate” is not in fact, as it might otherwise appear, to say anything about the respective programs or political ideologies of the two candidates, but implicitly to insinuate something about their characters: i.e., Yushchenko is the “good guy” who “really” won the election and Yanukovich is the “bad guy” who cheated.

As for the description of Yanukovich as a “nationalist”, for all I know he may well be one – but being a native Russian-speaker who has his most solid base of support among the Russophone minority of the Eastern Ukraine and whose political party is named the “Party of Regions”, he is most certainly not a Ukrainian nationalist. On the other hand, as has been discussed here (see, in particular, the “update”), openly Ukrainian nationalist forces – more precisely, Ukrainian ethnic-nationalist forces – including political formations that have direct historical links to movements that well deserve the designation “fascist” or, to be more precise, Nazi, do indeed form part of the “orange” coalition. As has likewise been seen here, moreover, representatives of these formations and press organs openly supporting the "Orange" have traded in overtly anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing.

My question is this: why has the Anglophone blogosphere by and large followed the MSM’s storybook characterizations of the Ukraine contest as one between a “liberal” and “democratic” “orange” coalition - the "good guys" - on the one hand, and “fascistic” and “nationalistic” Kremlinites - the "bad guys" - on the other, when the reality, to say the least, is evidently far more complex? I might add to that: given that polling data collected prior to the election showed Ukraine to be roughly divided between support for the “orange” and support for the “blue” (I cite one such poll here), and given, furthermore, that these findings were largely corroborated by the results of the first round of the Ukrainian presidential elections, why has so much of the blogosphere, again following the lead of the MSM, seemingly excised roughly half of the Ukrainian people...from the Ukrainian people?


Part I: A Structural Problem or A Ukrainian Fable

The vigilance of the supposedly “right-wing” or “conservative” segments of the Anglophone blogosphere with regard to the distortions of the established “mainstream” media undoubtedly made a major contribution to George W. Bush’s November election victory. Each time the NYTimes or CBS or CNN or the foregoing all together threw out what was supposed to be a bombshell story sure to derail Bush’s electoral chances – the National Guard memos, the "missing" Iraqi explosives, the “100,000” Iraqi war dead, and so on – the most enterprising representatives of the “new” media were there to examine the sources, expose their flaws or ambiguities and defuse it. As a result, the stories did not “take”. Minimally, their veracity remained highly contested or, maximally, as in the case of the memo story, they were exposed as outright falsifications.

By contrast, the Ukrainian election saga as told by the same established media has most decidedly “taken”, and, ironically, some of the same influential addresses of the blogosphere that just weeks ago were busy punching gaping holes in the established media’s pseudo-scoop du jour have in this connection served as their echo chamber. The Ukrainian election saga is a tale of two Viktors: Viktor “the Good” and Viktor “the Bad”: the latter the scourge of the Ukrainian people prepared to deliver them to the Kremlinite tyranny of Vlad the Terrible; the former their savior, battling the forces of easterly darkness in order to lead his people through the gates of the European Union and into “the West”. In light of some inconvenient sociological and historical facts – most notably, the well documented preference of roughly half of the people in question for the bad Viktor and even their traditional sympathy for the empire of the terrible Vlad – it is not a particularly plausible story. It is no more plausible indeed than the story that has been making the rounds in large parts of the European media for the last three years or so to the effect that in a far off land called “Amerika”, one George W. Bush, the – variously – pampered, dissolute, bumbling, sinister, and so on, scion of an Amerikan “dynasty”, “stole” the 2000 presidential elections and then, exploiting a certain catastrophe (which this same “Amerika”, incidentally, either brought upon itself or in fact concocted), delivered the country to a tiny cabal of neo-Conservative ideologues who have since run roughshod over civil liberties, seized control of the mass media and put in place a quasi-“fascist” “dictatorship”. If the results of the 2004 American elections had been closer or if America was weaker, I guarantee you that this story with some new installments – for instance, shameless intimidation of “minorities” in American polling places (a favorite Democratic canard to which the OSCE, incidentally, has lent some credence) – would still be Page One news today in the mainstream European press. Even leaving aside the fundamental sociological and historical implausibility of the saga of the two Viktors, moreover, it has also included a spectacular “bombshell” episode: the alleged poisoning of the good Viktor presumably by forces linked to the bad and/or the terrible Vlad. As has been seen here, this supposed “bombshell” – thrown out onto the Anglophone market by the same news organizations and sometimes the very same reporters that only recently were tossing out the Bush National Guard memos or the “100,000” Iraqi war dead – is so full of unlikely twists and turns and outright contradictions that it would seem to be a natural candidate for the sort of scrutiny in which the most estimable parts of the blogosphere lately specialized.

Why, then, has the blogosphere for the most part persisted in cheerleading for Viktor Yushchenko and the “orange revolution” and remained silent on all the incongruous elements in the Ukraine story that should minimally have encouraged uninterested parties to maintain a certain reserve towards its outcome and (both) its principals? Well, one obvious reason is of a simple structural nature. The blogosphere as a rule does not speak Ukrainian. As noted, in the midst of the American election campaign, the “new” media proved their worth and their relative independence of the “old” by going to the sources of the latter’s ostensible scoops and subjecting them to a level of scrutiny far greater than that on which the “old” media organizations themselves, whether by reason of bias or laziness or whatever, had insisted. But in the Ukraine case, the most fundamental sources are in a language that is almost entirely inaccessible to the blogosphere. (Concerning the “bombshell” story, which happened to have an Austrian clinic as its setting, and concerning the ancillary background of European/German interest in the Ukrainian elections, I have tried to help a bit on Trans-Int by citing some German-language sources.) The overwhelming majority of English-speakers – or, for that matter, French-speakers, German-speakers, etc. – cannot follow developments in Ukrainian politics first-hand: they cannot read or listen to the public statements of Viktor Yanukovich or Viktor Yushchenko, they cannot follow debates in the Ukrainian parliament, they cannot consult the Ukrainian press (certain markedly “pro-Orange” parts of which, notably the newspaper Silski Visti, have been charged with anti-Semitic hate-mongering). So, in the absence of more well-researched, balanced reporting in the English-language media, the saga of the two Viktors could easily substitute itself in the Anglophone discussions for real information.

Nonetheless, given the diminished credibility of the established media, this situation could just as well have led to a certain agnosticism or disinterest toward the Ukraine story in the Anglophone blogosphere. If it did not, I would suggest that this is because of a further factor: this one of an ideological nature.


Part II: The Return of the Cold War

The Cold War is over, people. But one would not know it from the Anglophone media’s reactions to the current Ukraine crisis. In response to Ukraine's supposed “democratic revolution” – which, as noted here, displays all the characteristics of what in more common language would be called a coup d’état – the lion has laid down with the lamb: with commentators from the NYTimes and the Wall Street Journal being equally eager to serve as cheerleaders for “the Orange” in their ostensible battle against Soviet – uh, well, Russian anyway – tyranny. This remarkable unanimity has been largely reflected in the “new” media too, among which the comforting familiarity of an apparently recognizable enemy – the ex-KGB man Vladmir Putin – has somehow managed to make even some until lately rather Europhobic sectors of the blogosphere believe that Europe and the US are again somehow united by common interests and values in face of the Soviet – well, Russian – threat and that the EU’s favorite, Viktor Yushchenko, must, then, be America’s choice as well. How quickly they forget. For anyone who still harbors doubts about the depths of the antagonism towards America that has become commonplace in the Franco-German “heart” of the EU, may I recommend my earlier pieces “The Legend of the Squandered Sympathy” and “American Beheaders”.

The relation between the US, the EU and Russia is today a triangular one. Indeed, if there is a fundamental and volatile fissure today it is between the US, on the one hand, and the Franco-German “axis” and its inner-European satellites, on the other. Russia, which is in an economically and strategically weak position vis-à-vis both, has largely attempted within the limits of its abilities to avoid committing to one camp or the other. Although in certain parts of the blogosphere and the Anglophone media more generally, it is commonly imagined that Russia was a leading player in the opposition to the US-led intervention in Iraq, in fact the official attitude of Russia to the Iraq War confirms this hypothesis. Whereas Russia was indeed at a certain point seen to rally to the self-styled Franco-German “axis of peace”, Russian authorities have as a rule – and in marked contrast to their German and French colleagues – avoided calling into question America’s rationale for taking action. Indeed, as I have already noted on this blog, when the French, German, and Russia Foreign Ministers held a joint press conference on 5 March 2003, ostensibly to demonstrate their joint resolve on the Iraq question, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov merely indicated that Russia might use its veto to block a proposed Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Since, however, French President Jacques Chirac had already announced that France would use its veto, the Russian threat was superfluous. It was, in short, like Russia’s recent commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, a sop to the EU and nothing more.

In any case, by falling back upon Cold War schemas, some of the, let’s say, anti-anti-American sectors of the blogosphere have inadvertently provided ammunition to their enemies. As I have repeatedly noted here, there is much evidence that Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovich did indeed have significant popular support in Ukraine: notably in its Russophone east. Hence, the possibility of a Yanukovich victory in the November elections was hardly implausible. The actual division of Ukraine between the pro-Yushchenko "Orange" and the pro-Yanukovich "Blue" has, however, been effaced by the fable of the Ukrainian people, seemingly as one solid mass, rising up against Kremlinite tyranny. Nicholas Kristof did not even wait for the results of the Ukrainian election re-run to make use of this simplification against the current American administration and its Iraq policy. Thus, he notes in his NYTimes column of 8 December that “These days, Ukraine’s pro-democracy leader, Viktor Yushchenko, is promising to pull Ukraine’s troops out of Iraq. A Ukraine that is responsive to public opinion, it seems, will not be a member of our coalition.” Nice work, guys....


Part III: "Blogging as Propaganda or Disturbing Discoshaman"

The “Orange Revolution” has made an internet star of “Discoshaman”, the host of the blog known either as Le Sabot Post-Moderne or The Postmodern Clog. A simple Google search will turn up ample evidence of the extent to which various of the “bigs” of the blogosphere abjured the search for balanced reporting and factual background on the Ukraine situation in favor of the highly subjective live-blogging of the “revolution” by the unabashed “Orange” groupie Discoshaman. “Here’s a guy who’s there,” an endorsement from Andrew Sullivan on the homepage of The Postmodern Clog reads, “And, yes, the revolution will be blogged.”

For the purpose of exhibiting the fundamental righteousness of the “Orange Revolution”, the Discoshaman seemed too good to be true. He was exceedingly hip, as the trendy moniker and obscure French blog title make clear. His blog had lots of cool pictures direct from Kiev, including, among other inspiring subjects: festive young people in orange accessories, quaint old ones in folkloric garb, and, uh,…big beefy dudes in military camouflage and orange armbands, whom the “Discoshaman” genteelly dubs “Yushchenko’s peacekeeping force”. He even had a blogger wife with an equally neat handle – “Tulipgirl” – and Disco and Tulip had a gaggle of cute kids (“my yellow-haired monkeys”), whose pictures also turn up on the blog or on pages linked from it. What more could possibly be needed to know that in the global, nay cosmic, struggle of niceness against not-niceness, Disco and Tulip were on the side of the nice? Best of all for the pro-Bush sectors of the Blogosphere, feeling their oats after President Bush’s re-election and who might otherwise not have known quite what to make of the Ukraine crisis, the Discoshaman was an open right-winger, a pious Christian and a fervent supporter of our troops in Iraq. If the Discoshaman did not exist, the “Orange Revolution” would most certainly have had to create him.

But closer scrutiny of the Postmodern Clog reveals a number of disturbing inconsistencies in the Discoshaman’s self-presentation as innocent chronicler and exegete of the “Orange Revolution”.

To start with, if the Discoshaman is such a great supporter of President Bush and the American-led intervention in Iraq, why has the fact that Viktor Yushchenko has made the withdrawal of Ukraine’s troop contingent in Iraq a centerpiece of his election campaign seemingly not registered in his estimation of the man and the movement he leads? This fact alone need not, of course, have led Discoshaman to abandon his faith in “the Orange”. But given his ostensible political convictions and given his self-appointed vocation to report on and even “explain” the “Orange Revolution” to the folks back home, it would at least seem to merit some reflection. A search for “Iraq” on the Postmodern Clog turns up a number of posts with generically “right-wing” ruminations on Abu-Ghraib, the search for weapons of mass destruction, the failings of the UN, etc. – but nothing whatsoever on Iraq in connection with Viktor Yushchenko and the Orange Coalition. (If I have missed something of relevance in this connection, I would welcome comments or an e-mail to my address in the Profile section.)

A November 30th post does refer obliquely to Yushchenko’s stance on Iraq, but only in order to dismiss its relevance, since somehow the “Orange Revolution” is supposed to be above politics. “The Left-Right concensus [sic.] on democracy in Ukraine is incredibly precious to me,” Discoshaman writes, “It's precisely for this reason that I'm fisking the small segment of the Left which is working to fracture that alliance. We NEED both sides with us. I could not be less interested in scoring cheap political points about American politics. If you doubt me, consider this -- a Yushchenko win will likely cost America a member of the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ Do I seem concerned?” Well, no. And given that the already thinly-stretched American military will presumably have to dispatch another division to Iraq to replace the parting Ukrainians and that these soldiers will be at risk and some might die – this indifference on the part of a self-professed "conservative" is somewhat unusual. (Incidentally, such consequences of a Yushchenko victory have been noted by a couple of posters on Free Republic - and, to my knowledge, virtually nowhere else on the Web.)

Discoshaman has not been able entirely to ignore the charges of anti-Semitism directed at certain components of the “Our Ukraine” coalition. But his characteristically glib response to them raises more questions than it answers. In a 28 November post, the Discoshaman appeals, in effect, to his supposedly privileged status as witness of the “revolution” – or, in Andrew Sullivan’s phrase, “a guy who’s there” – in order to reassure his readers that the charges are baseless. “I have seen ZERO evidence of anti-Semitism during the protests,” Discoshaman writes. That’s fine and may even be true. But it fails to engage the existing documentary evidence of anti-Semitic tendencies among important segments of Ukrainian society that openly support Yushchenko’s candidacy: notably, such evidence as has come to light in connection with the Silski Visti affair.

In an update to his 28 November post, moreover, Discoshaman adds: “I forgot to include the fact that Yanukovych's campaign hired a neo-fascist group to campaign on behalf of Yushchenko. Yushchenko promptly denounced both them and the agitprop itself. But don't expect those attacking him to mention that fact when using this alleged endorsement against him.” As is again typical for the Discoshaman, no evidence, let alone source, is given for the charge that the Yanukovich campaign hired a neo-fascist group to campaign for Yushchenko. We are supposed simply to take it for granted that Discoshaman has it on good authority. Presumably, the episode that Discoshaman has in mind – since he provides no specifics, we are obliged to speculate – was a pro-Yushchenko rally held in Kiev by the UNA-UNSO [Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense], at which participants are said to have displayed SS insignia and given the Hitler-salute. As noted here, Viktor Yushchenko did indeed denounce the proceedings. However, as likewise noted here, he was at the same time careful to distinguish the UNA-UNSO that is alleged to have organized the rally from the “‘UNA-UNSO’ organization headed by Andriy Shkil,” which via the Yulia Timoshenko Block is an acknowledged member of the “Orange” coalition. Now, if one is to judge by the writings of Andriy Shkil himself, which among other things – and as quoted in English on the UNA-UNSO’s own website – openly endorse the ideas of Nazi “racial theorist” Walter Darré, the UNA-UNSO of Shkil richly deserves to be qualified as a “neo-Fascist”, if not indeed, more precisely, neo-Nazi organization.

It would be easy to multiply examples of such glaring lacunae in Discoshaman's blogging of the "revolution". The hagiographic presentation of Yulia Timoshenko is notably cleansed of the many shady aspects of the would-be revolutionary heroine's vita - not to mention of her frequenting of the likes of Shkil.

The friendly but fatuous style of the Postmodern Clog - and it is curious that this same style extends also to a large part of the commentaries on the site - lends itself perfectly to the purposes of propaganda. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Discoshaman is in fact an English language editor working for the "Orange" youth organization PORA. He himself announces this in a post dated 24 November that is reproduced on Free Republic. Indeed, the title of the original post as reproduced on Free Republic is "Updates from PORA -- The Revolution WILL be blogged". The references to PORA have, however, been removed from the archived version of the post on the Postmodern Clog - as has the cheerful admission "I am writing from HQ".

To those bloggers who have in good faith adopted the Discoshaman as their authoritative source on the Orange "revolution", I would suggest the following: you have been used.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Another Report of Voter Intimidation in the Ukraine Election - by the "Orange"

Rachel Ehrenfeld, whom I have cited here before in connection with EU financing for the Palestinian Authority and who is the author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed—and How to Stop It, was an election observer during the November 21 Ukrainian elections. In an exchange on the Ukrainian elections printed at Frontpage-Magazine.com (hat tip Ukraine List), she summarizes the findings of her group as follows:

...all of the major violations we witnessed at various polling stations were engineered by the orange-clad supporters of opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

Time after time, we witnessed blatant interference by the opposition party’s “orange” monitors inside some of the polling stations — all of them easily identifiable in orange-colored clothes and scarves. They routinely intimidated voters by hovering over them and even escorting them to the booths to see how they voted — acts that interrupted the orderly flow of voters at many polling places.

Nor were some foreign observer delegations exempt from strident partisanship. We took photos of an Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) automobile with two flags on its fenders, one its own and the other the orange flag of Yushchenko’s political party.

These observations largely corroborate observations made by John Laughland and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), whose peculiar political orientation - which has been exploited by defenders of the "Orange" in order to ignore their factual claims - Rachel Ehrenfeld cannot be presumed to share.

Ukraine: Overcoming the Language Gap

Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, compiles a "Ukraine List" pdf-newsletter on Ukrainian Affairs, including both material from English-language sources and translations from Ukrainian sources. The latest issue features, for instance, an article by an important critic of the methodology used in the exit poll that was most widely cited in the aftermath of the November 21 Ukraine election to call into question the official results - as well as a response by the director of one of the institutes that participated in conducting the poll. For more on the Ukraine list, see here.

Ukraine File

I have added a "Ukraine File" to the sidebar. It contains links to all the entries on the Ukraine election crisis and related matters that have been published on Trans-Int over the last few weeks. The posts are arranged chronologically with the earliest on top.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Viktor Yushchenko, Iraq and "Fascist Thugs"

One of the political organizations supporting the “Orange Coalition” is the UNA-UNSO or Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense. Last April, the UNA-UNSO posted the following “Appeal to Ukrainian troops in Iraq” on its English-language portal:

Basing upon 400-years experience of national liberation movement of Ukrainian people we appeal to Ukrainian military contingent in Iraq to turn your bayonets against USA troops and join the rebels. Ukraine and progessive mankind will be proud of you!

Via an article published on his personal homepage in July, Viktor Yushchenko has taken some pains to distance himself from the UNA-UNSO, whose members are there qualified as “fascist thugs”. But the same article distinguishes the UNA-UNSO apparently in question from another UNA-UNSO, this one headed by Andriy Shkil. Shkil is acknowledged to be a member of the Yulia Timoshenko Block [YTB], which is a component of the “Orange Coalition”. The article specifies:

It was reported that last Saturday in Kyiv there was a «parade» of the «UNA-UNSO» party that has nothing in common with the «UNA-UNSO» organization headed by Andriy Shkil, YTB member. During this meeting Kovalenko’s «UNA-UNSO» declared the support of Yushchenko with the fascist signs, «SSS»[sic.] symbols and gestures in Hitlerite manner.

An idea of Andriy Shkil’s political orientation can be garnered from the following passages from an article published in English on another UNA-UNSO website – presumably now the “good” UNA-UNSO whose members Viktor Yushchenko does not regard as “fascist thugs” – and which refers to an issue of the Shkil-edited magazine “Natsionalist”:

Inside, an article appeared, entitled “Nationalism in the World: Past, Present, Future,” written by Andriy Shkil’, editor-in-chief of Natsionalist, chairman of the Dontsov Supporters’ Club, and head of the Lviv branch of UNA. Mostly devoted to the New Right, it also mentioned their precursors, including Gobineau, and “his worthy student Walter Darre, who developed the idea of artificial selection [eugenics] to improve the human race.” Mein Kampf and its author (whose name is not given) are praised for “reexamining these ideas on the highest level.” Several of Darre’s ideas are applied to the Ukrainian situation: Christianity’s mistaken view of the equality of human beings, the necessity for the revival of paganism as an essential spiritual feature of the nation and as a precondition for the creation of a new national elite, with eugenics as a means of cleansing and renewing the people.

Thus, the UNA values the experience of the European Right, and other radical regardless of their political orientation. Like Dontsov, they view the spiritual side of their political program to be of great significance. They appreciate the philosophical underpinnings of German Nationalism, for its philosophy with underpinnings from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler.

In another article, the author cites things that the Ukraine could copy from the German National Democratic and Republican parties: the Neo-Nazi street fighters against foreigners, and the Republican loyalty to the Nazi past, and the NDP’s racist “social biology.”

Note this is the same Andriy Shkil and apparently the same “good” UNA that Viktor Yushchenko’s personal website is careful to make clear is welcome in the Orange coalition.

It should also be recalled in this connection that Viktor Yushchenko has made the withdrawal of Ukraine’s contingent from Iraq a centerpiece of his presidential campaign: a position which – though falling somewhat short of suggesting that these troops join the Iraqi insurgency – is bound to be pleasing to the “fascist thugs” of the UNA-UNSO and perhaps helps to explain their continued support for Yushchenko despite his (in any case, notably selective) protestations.

At what point is the Anglophone media, either "old" or "new", going to devote to this evidence - which has been kindly made available in English by the principals themselves! - the attention it deserves and draw the consequences? Evidently, if at all, when it is already too late....

Germany, Yukos, and Baikal

Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer for the Yukos energy firm, has accused Deutsche Bank of co-financing the illegal break-up of Yukos and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of turning a blind eye to the proceedings. Der Spiegel Online reports on Amsterdam’s allegations as follows (link in German - hat tip and thanks to Niko) :

Amsterdam claims that Schröder knows who is behind the Baikal Finance Group, which in a surprise development won the bidding for Yuganskneftegas, the most important production unit of Yukos. But Germany’s energy interests with respect to Russia militate against adopting a critical position.

“Germany’s energy interests with respect to Russia”? But isn’t it only the United States that has energy interests in the region? Think again. Here is some useful background [in English!] from german-foreign-policy.com.

Monday, December 20, 2004

Lamy's Got a Gun II

Last week, the former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy was formally proposed by France as candidate to head the World Trade Organization. (See the Reuters account here.) Despite the official source of the nomination, Lamy, a Socialist who has some history of conflict with the current French government, is in substance the “European” candidate not the “French” one. In nominating him, France was merely discharging its European duty following a prior agreement by the 25 EU members to put him forward as a common EU candidate for the WTO post. As discussed here in “Lamy’s Got a Gun”, in his previous capacity as EU trade commissioner, Lamy once threatened the US with trade sanctions using the following language: “We have a revolver and the finger is on the trigger”. Nonetheless, he is said to be a “friend” of US trade representative Robert Zoellick.

Although no decision is expected before the end of May 2005, with the 25 EU votes already firmly in his column and with the EU countries disposing of considerable means of influence, notably via their individual and collective foreign aid programs, over “developing” countries, the current prospects of Mr. Lamy’s candidacy have to be deemed very good indeed. Whereas, moreover, initial reports had Mr. Lamy facing off against two other candidates, one from Latin America, the Uruguayan Carlos Perez de Castillo, and one from Africa, the Mauritian Jayen Cuttaree, in the meanwhile both an additional Latin American candidate, the Brasilian Luis Felipe de Seixas Correa and another African, the Kenyan Mukhisa Kituyi, have entered the fray. Thus two potential voting blocs that could have weighed heavily against a unified Europe have been conveniently split. It is interesting to note that the nomination of the second Latin American candidate should have been put forward precisely by Brazil: a country that under its current “Workers Party” government of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has been a major obstacle to the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas and a major proponent of a separate free trade agreement between the Mercosur countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) and the EU.

An unidentified “European expert”, cited in Le Figaro of 10 December, is, nonetheless, wary of American intentions toward Mr. Lamy. “The United States is more interested in having a marionette as the head of the WTO,” the “expert” is quoted as saying, “It’s the only organization that forces the US to apply international law.” But the ever disinterested EU, a global economic power whose collective GDP exceeds that of the US, could not possibly have an interest in having a self-styled EU hitman as the head of the WTO....


Saturday, December 18, 2004

Weekend Policy

Okay, I've just decided that in order to preserve sanity I need to reserve the weekend for other activities than the blog. I'll be back on Monday with the promised continuation of "HowDid the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?". I hope newcomers will have a look at all my earlier posts on the Ukraine crisis, to which you will find the links here. Also, as likewise mentioned in "Pause, Poll and Pitch", I will be looking in the new year to develop Trans-Int into a more multi-functional site, including full translations and feature articles, as well, of course, as the blog. I'd be happy to have your input. You can send suggestions to jrgencer[AT]yahoo.com.

Many Thanks.

Friday, December 17, 2004

Plausibility (Revised with Update)

Those following the Yushchenko poisoning story will no doubt have seen this from the AP or something like it. Viktor Yushchenko is now "sure" that the current Ukrainian government is responsible for his alleged dioxin poisoning. "It was a project of political murder, prepared by the authorities," Yushchenko told the AP. The following bit of rather mind-numbing prose from the same AP report, however, merits some attention:

Poisoning experts say those who spiked Yushchenko's food may have aimed to kill him or may simply have tried to debilitate him during the election campaign.

What constitutes a lethal dose of dioxin has never been established, because nobody has ever been known to die from it.

It's possible that Yushchenko did not eat all of the poisoned meal and so escaped death by accident, but it's also possible that dioxin was chosen because it is recognized as a crippling poison that normally doesn't kill, scientists say.


All of this is seemingly the AP's manner of dancing around the fact that, as French toxicologist Jean-Francois Narbonne has noted in an AFP report (Hat tip CodeBlueBlog), dioxin would not be the poison of choice for any assassin hoping to see his or her victim dead within, say, a couple of decades. Dioxin is known to make people quite ill and even to increase the risk of developing various potentially fatal illnesses, such as cancer, in the long-run. But, as the AP report rather shame-facedly acknowledges, it has never been known as such and in the short-run to kill anyone. "When you want to kill someone quickly, you use neurotoxins," Narbonne is quoted as saying, "Trying to induce a cancer in 20 years' time is not particularly clever...."

One question that seems not to have occured to those (like the inimitable Nicholas Kristof in yesterday's NYTimes) lending credence to the accusations or insinuations of some Kremlin/Kuchma/Yanukovich "plot" to off or - perhaps it was merely - maim Viktor Yushchenko is: what the devil is this alleged cabal supposed to have gained by doing one or the other? Say that the intent was to kill Yushchenko. Well, the "orange" coalition is not reducible to Viktor Yushchenko alone. All that offing Yushchenko would accomplish is to create a martyr for the "orange" movement and practically guarantee the election of, say, Yushchenko's "Our Ukraine" stablemate Yulia Tymoshenko as president. And what would be the result if the goal was just to maim Yushchenko? Well, exactly the situation that currently obtains: the miraculous transformation of Yushchenko into a martyr who is still alive and thus able to capitalize on his virtual martyrdom for electoral advantage.

The theory of the Kremlin/Kuchma/Yanukovich conspiracy does not pass the test of plausibility. And given that no third party is ever going to know for sure what transpired during Viktor Yushchenko's allegedly fateful September 5th diner with the head of the Ukrainian secret service or, for that matter, during his mysterious hospitalizations at the Rudolfinerhaus, it is the test of plausibility to which we should refer before forming judgments on the highly contentious factual allegations related to the origins of Viktor Yushchenko's illness. Such considerations do not, by the way, militate against the possibility that Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned. But they do militate against the hypothesis that he was poisoned by a Kremlin/Kuchma cabal. I will leave it to others better informed than I on the inner-workings of Ukrainian politics to speculate on who might have had a rationally-comprehensible motive to want to kill or hurt Viktor Yushchenko.

In any event, Viktor Yushchenko and his partners in the "Orange" coalition have a rationally-comprehensible motive for wanting to present his illness as the result of an assassination attempt even if it is not this. And Yushchenko's repeated insistence (see here too) that someone wanted to kill him using a substance that has never been known to kill anyone does not increase his credibility. But apparently the established media is not interested in posing any questions about Viktor Yushchenko's credibility....


UPDATE: The French health-related site e-santé.fr has posted an article on the Yushchenko affair by one Dr. Philippe Presles (originally published in Le Quotidien du Médecin, n°7651, 13 décembre 2004) that notes that the facial lesions from which Vikto Yushchenko suffers resemble those displayed by children exposed to a dioxin cloud as a result of an industrial accident in Seveso Italy in 1976. The Seveso accident has been cited as precedent for Yushchenko's alleged poisoning in various articles in the English-language press. However, Dr. Presles notes: "the dioxin that accumulates in dust or in combustion residues is not a product that can be manufactured. It is not possible to purchase it or to mix it with food..." The ellipses are from Dr. Presles. For what it is worth, Dr. Presles cites Jean-Francois Narbonne to the effect that the hypothesis of poisoning by PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) is scientifically more plausible than that of dioxin-poisoning.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Poll Results

The First Trans-Int Poll is now closed and the final results are as follows:


What Topic Do You Want to be Treated Next on Trans-Int?

Hotel Ivoire Killings - What Are French Authorities Saying Now?
32%

How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?
50%

Lamy's Got a Gun II - What Are the Prospects of an EU Hitman Becoming Head of the WTO?
18%


The winning topic is at once the most complicated and potentially the most controversial in a blogosphere many of whose denizens have much reason to be proud of their accomplishments exposing the deficiencies and bias of the MSM during the recent American election campaign. But I suppose the question is precisely: how segments of the blogosphere which exposed the MSM during the American election campaign should then put so much faith in the same MSM when it comes to the Ukrainian election campaign? I'll take a shot at it starting tomorrow. And, by the way, just because a topic "lost" doesn't mean I won't cover it once I've addressed the Ukraine issue.

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Pause, Poll and Pitch

The Intelligencer is feeling a little under the weather today. So, I'm taking the day off. I hope those who are visiting the site for the first time for the Yushchenko poisoning story will also take the time to have a look at the earlier posts on Ukraine:

Europe’s Ukraine I: Viktor Yushchenko, Democrat and Anti-Semite? (with Follow-Ups I and II)
Europe's Ukraine II: The OSCE and Electoral Fraud - A Record of Partiality?
Europe's Ukraine III: Who Supports Yushchenko? - Leftist Fantasies and German Realities (with Follow-Ups I and II)

You can also vote in the poll in the sidebar on the topic you would like to see covered next on Transatlantic Intelligencer.

If you feel so inclined, you are also more than welcome to contribute to the development of Transatlantic Intelligencer via the Paypal button also in the sidebar. Not too far into the New Year, I hope to be rolling out a new and improved Transatlantic Intelligencer, with the blog as always, but also full translations from the European press and occasional feature articles from both myself and invited guest authors. You can help make it happen with your contributions. As I have noted and, I hope, shown in various posts on Trans-Int, the established English-language media are doing a disservice to the English-speaking public. It is time, I think, to use the possibilities opened up by the Web not just to snipe at them (enjoyable, I admit), but to replace them.

Monday, December 13, 2004

The Strange Case of Dr. Wicke or Questions Surrounding the Alleged Poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko (with Update)

Since Saturday’s announcement by Dr. Michael Zimpfer of Vienna’s Rudolfinerhaus clinic that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko had been poisoned with dioxin, the alleged dioxin-poisoning of Yushchenko seems set to become established fact as far as the traditional, mainstream English-language media are concerned. The December 11 AP story on the matter is titled “Doctor: Yushchenko Poisoned With Dioxin”, thus at least still indicating that what is at issue is an allegation from a single source. By contrast, the title of the NYTimes story of December 12 eschews such niceties in order to declare point blank: “Liberal Leader From Ukraine Was Poisoned”. By “liberal leader from Ukraine” is meant, of course, Viktor Yushchenko, though, as has been repeatedly pointed out here, there is reason to doubt that Yushchenko is in fact particularly “liberal”. The two stories refer respectively to Dr. Zimpfer as the “director” and the “head” of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic. Neither mentions that his title is in fact President of the clinic’s Supervisory Board [Aufsichtsrat] - an administrative body - and that the actual medical director of the clinic, Dr. Lothar Wicke, resigned from his post on December 9: i.e., one day before Viktor Yushchenko was set to return to Vienna for the latest round of tests to determine the origins of his mysterious illness. This was in fact Yushchenko’s third visit to the clinic since early September when the symptoms of his illness first appeared. Neither the AP nor the Times piece mentioned either that in the meanwhile Dr. Wicke had dismissed the allegation of poisoning as scientifically unfounded and made known, moreover, that he had been threatened by Yushchenko’s entourage with unspecified "means" or "measures" should he persist in denying the charge.

An article published in Sunday’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) [link in German] – a paper which, as Trans-Int’s German readers will be able to confirm, cannot be suspected of harboring tender feelings for the Kremlin – enters into some of the details of what it calls the “strange goings-on” at the Rudolfinerhaus clinic since Viktor Yushchenko first checked in on September 9. Citing investigations conducted by the journalist Emil Bobi of the Austrian magazine Profil, it notes, for instance, that the allegation of poisoning originated with one Nikolai Korpan, a Ukrainian-born surgeon who had joined the team treating Yushchenko during his first visit to the clinic in early September. Before, however, Yushchenko returned for a second visit on September 30, Dr. Wicke held a press conference in which he accused persons not on the Rudolfinerhaus staff – “the reference was to Korpan,” according to the FAZ – of disseminating “medically falsified [verfälschte] diagnoses concerning the condition of Mr. Yushchenko” and indicated that no signs of poisoning had in fact been found. The FAZ article continues:

Thereafter Yushchenko’s people made clear to Wicke that he should not say anything more concerning the affair, since otherwise [Wicke is here again being quoted] “one would resort to other means against me and the hospital”. Dr. Wicke is also supposed to have received death threats at the time.

These threats were taken sufficiently seriously by the Viennese police that, as the FAZ notes, an armed guard was assigned to Dr. Wicke. Furthermore, according to the FAZ, four days after the cited press conference, Zimpfer submitted a request to Wicke asking him to retract his statement to the effect that there were no indications of poisoning. On October 3, Wicke is supposed to have filed a memorandum noting that Zimpfer had said that if the statement was not retracted, “Dr. Yushchenko’s people will not be happy and will take other measures.” Later that month, acting on a request by a Ukrainian parliamentary committee investigating the poisoning allegations, Viennese criminal investigators were dispatched to the Rudolfinerhaus clinic to seize Yushchenko’s medical files, whereupon, according to Emil Bobi, they “practically came to blows with Yushchenko’s entourage.”

An article published last Friday (10 December) in the French daily Le Figaro also broaches details of Yushchenko’s “mysterious hospitalization” in Vienna and provides a taste of the atmosphere of intimidation which has reigned at the Rudolfinerhaus. It invokes, for instance, the outbreak of scuffles at a October 1st news conference on the Yushchenko case and a "strange security force with slavic accents" that on the same occasion is said to have harassed foreign journalists. The Figaro piece cites Dr. Wicke to the effect that Yushchenko personally accused him of “perhaps having made me lose the presidential election”, as well as excusing himself for a momentary reluctance to insist on his scientific opinion: "I have a child, you understand."

Codeblueblog has today posted “Ten Reasons Why This Weekend’s Yushchenko Diagnosis is a Fraud” (Hat tip Instapundit). Some of these reasons are of a specialized medical nature and have provoked debate between Dr. Boyle of CBB and medical colleagues. Others, however, are simple matters of logic and plausibility. Hospital authorities claim, for instance, that a new procedure has only just been developed that now allowed them finally to make the diagnosis that has eluded them for the previous three months. What, after all, is the likelihood of that just two weeks before the re-run of the Ukrainian elections? The questions raised by CBB combined with revelations in the European press on the odd circumstances surrounding the Korpan/Zimpfer “diagnosis” - which, like the very existence of Dr. Wicke, have been largely ignored by the accounts in the English-language press – give ample cause to pause regarding the alleged poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko.

(Many thanks to H-R for putting me on to the FAZ article!)

Update: Dr. Lothar Wicke has been almost entirely effaced from the accounts in the mainstream English-language media of Viktor Yushchenko's hospitalizations at the Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Vienna. He is mentioned in passing in an AP report dated 25 November (reproduced here on CNN.com), which notes that Dr. Wicke "requested police protection after receiving an anonymous threat while treating Yushchenko". He is also mentioned in another AP report dated 8 December (reproduced here in USA Today), which notes: "One of the chief doctors treating Yushchenko, Lothar Wicke, was been placed under police protection after receiving an anonymous threat." "No details about the threat have been released," the AP report continues. I am not sure whom the AP was expecting to "release" the details in question. Emil Bobi's investigative article on the case in Profil was published on 11 October. Given the general tenor of the two AP articles and the ominous context of poisoning accusations against the Ukrainian authorities, readers of these laconic remarks will be tempted to assume that the threats against Wicke must originate from the same sources as are alleged to have attempted to off Yushchenko. They would never know that they are, on the contrary, supposed to have come precisely from the Yushchenko camp itself - as they might, nonetheless, have speculated if the AP had bothered to inform its readers that Dr. Wicke has rejected the poisoning accusation. As I have often been led to wonder in treating mainstream American media on this site: is this a matter of willful disinformation - sticking to the preferred script with the roles of "good guys" and "bad guys" neatly distributed in advance - or of simple incompetence? Why couldn't the AP correspondent read Emil Bobi's article as the FAZ author did? Perhaps because he or she does not read German? But why would someone without the requisite linguistic competence be sent to cover a story at a Viennese clinic? Either way - whether disinformation or misinformation - it is further proof that the American public is very poorly served by its established news media.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Follow-Up II (Who Supports Yushchenko?): Who Supports the National Democratic Institute?

According to Jonathan Steele's and Ian Traynor's fable of US sponsorship for Ukraine's "orange revolution" (see Europe's Ukraine III: Who Supports Yushchenko?), two of the principal vectors of US influence in the current Ukraine crisis have been the Republican-affiliated International Republican Institute and the Democratic-affiliated National Democratic Institute. In passing let it be noted that it is rather bizarre, just weeks after the Guardian launched its infamous letter-writing campaign attempting to influence the American elections on the assumption that the fate of the world depended on America electing a Democratic rather than a Republican president, for two Guardian authors now to be treating the Republican and Democratic parties as if they were essentially interchangeable in foreign policy matters.

The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) have a status and function much like the party-affiliated German political foundations. However, the federally funded corporation from which both the IRI and NDI are largely tributary for whatever federal funding they receive - namely, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) - has a total annual budget far inferior to the budgets of each of the roughly analogous German foundations: the Christian Democratic Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) and the Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Stifting (FES). (Indeed, at the current euro-dollar exchange rate, the 109 million euro budget of the FES alone is more than three times the roughly $40 million annual budget of the NED.) So, it is safe to say that the means of which the two American institutes dispose is nowhere near on the order of those of which the most important German foundations dispose. Or at least this is evidently so as far as the public means are concerned of which they dispose from the American and German governments respectively.

But, then again, the National Democratic Institute apparently has funding also from other governmental sources besides just the American government. The NDI website notes that apart from private contributions, funding is "provided to NDI by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank, as well as the governments of the US (U.S. Agency for International Development), Canada (Canadian International Development Agency), Ireland (Irish Aid), Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom and other governments. " (Apart from its American government grants, the IRI, by contrast, only notes contributions from foundations and private individuals, and, unlike the NDI, it provides a list of contributors on its site.) Especially in light of the increasing rapprochement of Democratic foreign policy prescriptions to the foreign policy positions of those European powers that, for instance, were most adamant in their opposition to the Iraq War, it would be very interesting indeed to know from just what "other governments" the NDI has received funding. The fact that (as a simple Google search of "NDI + FES" reveals) the NDI regularly collaborates with the German FES might provide a clue. In any case, this dependence of the NDI upon funding from foreign governments and the UNDP reveals the vacuousness of the popular myth of an omnipotent American "Empire" nourished by the likes of Jonathan Steele and Ian Traynor.

Incidentally, the board of directors of the National Democratic Institute is headed by none other than former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. On the NDI website, she is identified as the NDI's "Chairman". Somehow that seems right....

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Follow-Up (Who Supports Yushchenko?): Geert Ahrens, German Foundations, and "Conspiracy Theories"

In a comment on Europe's Ukraine III: Who Supports Yushchenko? - Leftist Fantasies and German Realities, rabatjoie suggests: (1) that my remarks re. Germany amount to "a kind of conspiracy theory" a la Jonathan Steele's fable concerning American sponsorship of the "orange revolution"; (2) that Geert Ahrens is no more an agent of the German government than George Soros is one of the American government; and (3) that German political foundations like the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) are comparable to "big Washington think tanks". Well, uh: no, no and no. I have responded at length in the comments section, but since the response is precisely lengthy and since the details might have more general interest, I also reproduce it (slightly edited) here:

Geert-Hinrich Ahrens IS an agent of the German government. This is not part of any "conspiracy theory", it is quite simply and quite publicly the case. Ahrens is a long-time member of the German diplomatic corps and it was undoubtedly as such that he was seconded to the OSCE Ukraine Election Observer Mission, a decision which would normally have been made by the German Foreign Office. During his career in the German Foreign Service, Ahrens has held the following, among other, posts: Director for Asian Affairs in the Foreign Office, Ambassador to Colombia, and Ambassador to the International Conference for the Former Yugoslavia (in which capacity he was, frankly, intimately involved in creating the mess to which Niko alludes in his comment). What public function does George Soros discharge vis-a-vis the American government? Answer: none. So, let's get serious.

As for the political foundations, you are technically right that they have the nominal status of "non-governmental organizations" and as such are supposedly "independent". But such designations involve some remarkable conceptual contortions. The (massive) funding for the German foundations is systematically and by law assured out of the German federal budget, according to the calculus to which you allude: i.e. in proportion to the representation in the Bundestag of the parties with which they are associated. (And, btw, if the foundations are "independent" of the parties, why should such a calculus apply?) The Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), for instance, acknowledges that fully 97% of its financing comes from public sources [link in German]. There is no serious analogy to be drawn with American "think tanks", which are privately incorporated and privately funded (and none of which by the way have budgets on anywhere the order of the FES or the KAS). Moreover, unlike the German foundations, the American "think tanks" do not have any notable international presence or function.

Of course, the German political foundations are not organs of the German government in the narrow sense of the current red-green coalition. But, if one is not to twist the meaning of words beyond recognition, they quite obviously are organs of the German state. And when the government happens to be formed by the same party as, say, the party to which a given foundation is "near", then the, so to say, synergies are self-evident. The foundations are not directly subordinated to the respective party leaderships, but take a look sometime at the membership of their own directorships or assemblies: the degrees of separation are meager indeed. (Here, for instance, is the membership list for the KAS, which, unsurprisingly, reads like a veritable who's who of German Christian Democracy.)

Incidentally, a study published by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Office for Political Education) concludes - citing no less an authority than former German president Roman Herzog - that the political foundations constitute "the most effective and reliable instrument of German foreign policy" (hat tip German-Foreign-Policy.com [link in German]). Those who read German can consult the study here.

None of this has anything to do with “conspiracy theorizing” à la Jonathan Steele. Unlike Steele, all the facts I cite are public and can be easily verified by anyone with the requisite linguistic skills. Indeed, contrary to what you imply, I have not even proposed any particular interpretation of these facts. Your reaction suggests that perhaps they speak for themselves. But, in any case, readers may make of them whatever they like.

Thursday, December 09, 2004

Europe's Ukraine III: Who Supports Yushchenko? - Leftist Fantasies and German Realities

One of the most preposterous stories coming out of the present Ukraine crisis is that being peddled by Guardian reporters Ian Traynor and Jonathan Steele to the effect that the US has organized and financed Viktor Yushchenko’s “orange revolution”. “Yushchenko got the US nod, and money flooded in to his supporters” runs the sub-title to Steele’s November 26 piece on “Ukraine’s postmodern coup d’etat”. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev” runs the more blunt-edged title of the accompanying piece by Traynor. The Guardian articles represent a novel sort of “journalism” made up almost entirely of innuendo, conflation, and unsourced assertion: in the style of certain fashionable academic "theories" regarding supposed American "Empire", they “tell a story” but make virtually no effort to substantiate it. Thus, the Traynor piece, for instance, identifies a series of American political organizations, government agencies and NGOs as the sources of the supposed “campaign”: “The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid…, as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.” If there is any highly deformed kernel of truth to be found in this, it consists of the fact that Freedom House along with the Democratic NDI and the Republican IRI co-sponsored an election monitoring mission by the European Network of Election Monitoring (ENEMO) that found the conduct of the November 21 poll wanting. (See the Freedom House press release here.) The inclusion of the US state department and USAid in the alleged conspiracy, on the other hand, seems to be based on nothing at all. Whereas, moreover, Soros’s Open Society Institute is undoubtedly active in Ukraine, to present it as somehow an agent of the US government just weeks after an openly declared and highly publicized Soros-bankrolled campaign to topple that same government came to naught is a nice piece of work – especially coming from the Guardian, which just as openly made common cause with Soros against the Bush administration. With impressive exactitude, the Traynor article also puts a number on the amount of money the US government is supposed to have spent to defeat Leonid Kuchma’s chosen successor Viktor Yanukovich. “[T]he figure is said to be about $14 million,” Traynor writes. He does not bother to tell us by whom it is said to be this.

But the Traynor/Steele “scoop” is not only notable for its utter lack of factual basis. It also is distinguished by its glaring implausibility. Why in the world would a US government whose most important geostrategic issue of the moment is quite obviously the stabilization of Iraq attempt to oust a Ukrainian government which has provided the sixth largest troop contingent to the coalition forces, numbering at last count some 1400 troops, in favor of a candidate who has promised, Zapatero-style, to withdraw Ukrainian troops immediately upon taking office? (Note that some reports suggest that Yanukovich too has pledged to withdraw Ukrainian troops from Iraq. But, firstly, it is the opposition, not the Ukrainian government, which has sought to make troop withdrawal into a campaign issue – indeed just last Friday it forced a vote in the Ukrainian parliament on the matter – and, secondly, a closer inspection of the official government position reveals it to be essentially indistinguishable from that of the US government, i.e. that foreign troops should be replaced by Iraqi troops as the latter become ready.) Traynor, however, has a solution for this seeming riddle. According to the ultra-devious American playbook for democratic regime change, “The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.” Aha! Most excellent “pragmatism” that. In the imaginary world of the fevered “left”, American “Empire” is so powerful that even what is bad for America is good for America!

Rehearsing his fantasy of US sponsorship of the “orange revolution” in the pages of the Nation, Jonathan Steele concludes by bemoaning what he sees as a lack of EU involvement in the matter. “The European Union,” he writes, “has been weak and divided, missing the chance to exert a strong European line in the face of US strategic meddling. It should give Ukraine the option of future membership rather than the feeble ‘action plan’ of cooperation currently on offer. Adapting its legislation and practice to EU norms would set Ukraine on a surer path to irreversible reform than anything that either Yushchenko or Yanukovich would do. The EU should also make a public statement that it sees no value in NATO membership for Ukraine, and those EU members who belong to NATO will not support it. At a stroke this would calm Russia's legitimate fears and send a signal to Washington not to go on inflaming a purely European issue.” Ah: so European “inflaming” of the issue would be all right then.

But Jonathan need not be so sad. If he devoted as much attention to the Europe that he loves as he does to the America he despises, he might have noticed that certain Europeans have been very active indeed strategically meddling and “inflaming” in Ukraine. Citing an October 25th report from the Center for Applied Politics, a Munich-based think-tank with close ties to Germany’s ruling “red-green” coalition, a November 24 article on German-Foreign-Policy.com [link in German] notes:

The Social Democratic Party’s Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (FES) and the Center for Applied Politics (CAP) have been seeking to influence the Ukrainian electoral campaign already since December 2003. As the CAP puts it, the activity of the supposed election observers went “beyond election observation” and was also concerned with the “interfaces between the elections and the [political] transformation”. The aims of the “election observers” likewise included developing “political recommendations for successful and effective reform”, the CAP explains. The “commitment of the candidates to a ‘European option’” is found among the observation criteria [enumerated by the CAP]....

Note that the “election observers” here in question consisted of a group of ten German and Ukrainian “experts” put in place by the CAP and the Kiev office of the FES (in December 2003). It might also be of interest in this connection that the FES disposes of an annual budget of over 100 million euros, largely consisting of subsidies from the German federal government and German regional governments. For comparison’s sake, this is more than twice the annual budget of the federally-financed US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The FES, moreover, is only one of several party-based and publicly-funded German foundations that are active around the world.

The November 24 article from German-Foreign-Policy.com continues:

In light of the successful mobilization for the planned upheaval, Berlin has been increasing its interference in Ukraine. According to the foreign policy spokesperson of the SPD [Gernot Erler], the German Bundestag will hold a debate this Wednesday on the Ukrainian election and call on the parliament in Kiev “to accept the real election result”. Without offering a single piece of evidence for the victory of Berlin’s favorite, on Tuesday the SPD- spokesperson decreed that Yushchenko “is the elected President”.

It is also of some relevance that the head of the OSCE Election Observer Mission in Ukraine is the German diplomat Geert-Hinrich Ahrens. (Interestingly, the head of the OSCE Observer Mission in the US just weeks before the Ukrainian election was also a German: the former President of the German Bundestag and CDU politician Rita Süssmuth.) Throughout the 1990s, apart from a three year interlude from 1996-99 during which he served as German Ambassador to Colombia, Ahrens was a pivotal figure in the implementation of German and European policy in the former Yugoslavia. This past Monday, the CAP and the FES co-sponsored a colloquium in Berlin with the title “The Ukrainian Presidential Elections – Pointing toward Transformation?” The proceedings included a greeting from SPD foreign policy spokesperson Gernot Erler, as well as presentations by CAP and FES experts and invited Ukrainian colleagues. The morning session on the conduct and implications of the presidential elections featured a moderator of a certain distinction: Geert-Hinrich Ahrens.