WAS THE REVOLUTION COOPTED BY NAZIS? (OMG – Americans are stupid.)
–“Taking you at your word that you are living in Kiev, let me take this opportunity to ask: What do say to the charges that the revolution was instigated by the U.S.? Could it have happened without U. S. support? Was it in fact co-opted by nazis, neo or otherwise?”—
From Curt Doolittle:
Well, you can search for me on Google or Facebook, I’m pretty prolific, and I’m readily visible here in Kiev.
The people here BEGGED for support from the states and got almost NOTHING. A few of us hammered the news media. But we got nothing. You can’t say that schoolgirls spending lunch money on bandages and trucking in in the cold to tend the young men on the front lines, or housewives and clerical workers showing up by the millions is somehow a CIA plot. (Which if you knew anything about the intelligence community would seem absurd.)
And it’s absolutely insulting to locals to insinuate that they’re ignorant pawns of some global intrigue rather than artificially and desperately poor for no reason other than leftover Russian (soviet) bureaucrats in one of the most politically corrupt nations on earth. There is no rule of law here. None. Courts and police are bought. Last may I think I paid something on the order of 3K in bribes just to get people to do their jobs – not for any special treatment.
Most people here look across the border into Poland and see what they COULD have. Most people look to Russia and see murderers who came in the middle of the night to kill relatives and families after Stalin killed millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor: the Ukrainian Holocaust.
The only difference between Canadians and Ukrainians’ which neighbor they have. Similar sizes and populations and similar (gentle) temperaments.
I love these people and there is nothing on earth that justifies letting people who wish to be free come under Russian corruption ever again.
Americans are ignorant, stupid and benevolent sheriffs yes. They fail to grasp what it means to live in a low trust society. The do not grasp that the lower the trust in a society the more necessary authoritarian rule is. That only generations of commercialism will change a low trust polity in to a moderate trust polity – even so corrupt and politically volatile as the Italians and the Romanians. Just as Russians fail to grasp that Americans actually believe they are acting in the moral interest of less advanced peoples. Americans foolishly believe that they yearn for liberty and prosperity, and merely need to be given the opportunity for self government. And look at the damage we have done. Russians cannot believe we do this with american idealism rather than russian pragamatism. That is because our idealism is as foreign to them as it would be to space aliens.
Yet here in Ukraine we have a white, christian people (many of whom go to church, and yes, that’s important at this stage of development), who have very similar ethics, work habits, history, education, literature and mythology.
And they want to be free.
Yet in the coal mines of the east, in the decaying factories of the soviet era, in the desperate partly Russified slums, the idea of getting checks however small from the government from oil revenues is worth living under the rule of gangsters.
Most of Ukraine would have been happy to divorce and set them free. But Ukrainian’s are unified now, and their view is ‘if we do not stop the enemy in Donbas, then he will be first in kiev and then in L’viv and we will be under the boots of gangsters and tyrants and murderers yet again.
