Now, I am not saying that Belarus is perfect. But when Saakashvili receives 97 cent of the vote, then that's fine. Yet when Lukashenko manages just under 80 per cent, then that proves that the polls were rigged, that Belarus is a Brezhnevian theme park (the government there does have an unfortunate taste in kitsch from that era), that Lukashenko is "Europe's last dictator", and so forth.
Lukashenko, you see, has no desire for the neoliberal economics without which Belarus, balancing IMF and Russian loans, has weathered the global economic crisis far better than have the Friedman-worshipping Baltic States. Nor does he wish to join either NATO or the EU. Nor will he be doing as Georgia does and spending 70 per cent of his country's budget on American and Israeli weapons. But he does maintain cordial relations with the equally independent and distinctive countries on the neocon hate list. Independence and distinctiveness? We can't be having any of that. Where would it all end?
If you really wanted to take out the main centre of dodgy arms-dealing, then you'd invade Britain. Any action against "national minorities" in Belarus is only a reaction to Polish attempts to stir up trouble among nationalists within the Belarusian Polish community. The CIA is giving youths computers so that they can go online and pass themselves off as a mass, grassroots opposition when in reality they are merely bored with the way that their country is, as people that age are wont to be. March 2006 saw the hilarious "Denim Revolution" of a few spotty adolescents holding up pictures of George Bush. Where are they now? Not dead or banged up, if that is what you are thinking.
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Good points. The neocons keep trying to revive the Cold War. Still mad about what happened to Trotsky I guess.
ReplyDeleteYou are obviously not watching RT. Even the Russians have turned on him.
ReplyDeleteI know you admire authoritarianism but sometimes you go too far. Wind back 21 years and you would have been supporting Ceausescu and declaring his ban on contraception an extension of "Christian values" or whatever and ranting about the Romanians fighting the Turks.
You really are an awful man!
John, precisely so.
ReplyDeleteHilda, it is worth reminding ourselves that Romania was not part of the Soviet Bloc. She had a ghastly regime, not least from the point of view of the valiant Byzantine Rite Catholics. But not a Soviet satellite one.
In fact, that regime had particularly close ties to Britain. To our shame, but there we are. English and French, rather than Russian, were taught in schools. No Romanian troops participated in putting down the Prague Spring. More than once, the Soviet Union came to the brink of invading Romania. There was absolutely no question of giving back what is now the Romanian-speaking western part of the cut-and-shunt state of Moldova.
Which bring us to the National Salvation Front, overthrowers of Ceausescu, and originators of the present political class in Romania. Their objection to Ceausescu was not that he was pro-Soviet. It was that he was anti-Soviet. They emerged out of the Moscow-backing, because Moscow-backed, faction within the Communist Party. In 1989, the Soviet Union still had two years left to go, and few were those who thought that it would collapse entirely.
When a kangaroo court convicted and executed the Ceausescus for the "genocide" of 34 people and for daring to throw parties at their house on major holidays, it was not just the beginning of dodgy "genocide" convictions: of García Meza Tejada for fully eight people, of Pinochet for under a hundred, of Mengistu in absentia, of his opponents even including aid workers, and of Kambanda without trial, with Milosovic never actually convicted at all.
It was also, as it turned out, the last great triumph of the Soviet Union, taking out a man who was vicious and brutal in himself (like García Meza, or Pinochet, or Mengistu), but who was nevertheless a dedicated opponent of Soviet power. Those who took him out have run Romania ever since.
As I said, you would be supporting him.
ReplyDeleteAdmit it, Hilda, you didn't know any of the facts in my last comemnt.
ReplyDeleteSee today's post on Belarus. Who and what, exactly, are the Belarusian opposition? We know what they are against. But what, exactly, are they for? We have made the mistake of not asking that one on an awful lot of occasions, and are continuing to do so on several more.
What were the German wanna-be killers of Hitler for? A return to Weimar or the chaos of the Freikorps and the Sparticists?
ReplyDeleteApologising for Adolf?
Bless.
ReplyDeleteCheck and mate!
ReplyDeleteAdmit it, Hilda, you are a spoof.
ReplyDeleteNoughties retro irony already? I thought that it would take a few more years, but there you go.
Of course he's a spoof, like of course he's a he.
ReplyDeleteA not very good Channel 4 late night student revue sketch about a Blair/Bush figure picking a country at random and declaring war on it despite never having heard of it up to then, regardless of what would be put in place of the "regime". Hilda has mentioned Hitler. Game over. Silly little boy. If you were real, that is.
Keep up your vitally important work, David. You may not have the most readers in the world, but you have all the right ones.