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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse

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Ted Rall

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What the Media Can’t/Won’t Tell You About Why Russia Invaded Ukraine

As usual, America’s foreign correspondents are falling down on the job.

Stories devoid of historical context cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a naked act of neo-Soviet aggression. Considering that the relevant history begins a mere two decades ago, its omission is inexcusable.

The spark that led to the takeover of Crimea was not the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovich. It is what happened the day after.

A 2012 law gave the Russian language official status in regions where Russians comprise more than 10% of the population. This is the case in most of eastern Ukraine and particularly in Crimea, where 59% are ethnic Russians.

One week ago, Ukraine’s rump parliament (members of Yanukovich’s party, hiding from opposition forces and in fear for their lives, didn’t show up) took advantage of Yanukovich’s downfall to overturn the language law. Americans didn’t notice, but Russians did.

            “Attack on the Russian language in Ukraine is a brutal violation of ethnic minority rights,” Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, tweeted that day.

Seems a little over-the-top, right?

Sure, but only if you don’t know that millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics have suffered widespread discrimination and harassment since the 1991 collapse — and that their troubles began with laws eliminating Russian as an official language.

Laws like the one passed last week in Ukraine.

The demise of the Soviet Union left 25 million Russians stranded in 14 newly independent states, in such countries as Belarus, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Ukraine. These new countries had to scramble in order to create the trappings of national identity virtually overnight. They designed new flags, composed national anthems and printed new currency.

To instill a sense of loyalty and patriotism, the governments of many of the freshly-minted republics resorted to rank nationalism.

Nationalism isn’t just about what your country is. It’s also about what it isn’t. This requires defining some things — some people — as outsiders. Unwanted. Scapegoats. Enemies of the state.

Turkmenistan, a Central Asian dictatorship and former Soviet republic in Central Asia, is one example. It instituted a policy of “Turkmenization” after 1991. Russians, a privileged group before independence, were now refused work permits. A 2000 decree banned the use of the Russian language in official business; since Turkmenistan is a totalitarian state and all business is legally governmental, this reduced Russians who didn’t speak Turkmen to poverty and low-status jobs.

The Turkmen government abolished dual Turkmen-Russian citizenship, leading to the mass exodus of panicked Russians in 2003. Denaturalization — the stripping away of citizenship — followed. “Many people…were having to sell houses and apartments at far below market values in order to leave by the deadline,” reported the UN. Hundreds of thousands of people lost everything they owned.

“Over the past decade Russians have been systematically discriminated against, and currently hold no positions in Turkmenistan’s government or state institutions,” says the report.

Russians who remained behind after 2003 fared poorly. “On the streets of the eastern city of Turkmenabat, Russians appear to be rapidly becoming an underclass in a nation mired in poverty. Many scrape a living as taxi drivers, waitresses or in other low paying, insecure jobs.”

Harassment of Russians is rife throughout the former USSR. Every other Commonwealth of Independent States nation has abolished dual citizenship.

In the former Soviet Union, everyone knows that the road to statelessness, unpersonhood and poverty begins with the official elimination of Russian as an official language.

National language statutes targeted against Russian speakers are analogous to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, which prevented Jews from holding jobs or even owning a radio: the beginning of the end. At the end of the Soviet period in 1989, the Tajik SSR passed a law establishing Tajik as the sole official language. Less than two decades later, 85% of ethnic Russians had left the country.

“The linguistic nationalization carried out in each republic provided a strong impetus to emigrate…Even if schools systematically introduce children to the official language today, the [former Soviet] states have established no programs to train adults,” Seymour Peyrouse noted in a 2008 report for the Woodrow Wilson Institute about the Central Asian republics. “It seems that the principal cause of emigration remains the absence of a future, or the perception of such, for the younger generations.”

Given recent history, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that ethnic Russians freaked out when one of the first official acts of Ukraine’s parliament was a linguistic nationalization law.

As for Russia’s response, you need to know two facts. First, Ukraine isn’t as independent of Russia as, say, Poland. None of the former Soviet republics are. “Kiev is an ancient Russian city,” Masha Gessen writes in Vanity Fair. “It is an overnight train ride from Moscow — closer than 90% of Russia is to the Russian capital. Russian citizens haven’t needed visas or even foreign-travel passports to go to Ukraine — the way U.S. citizens can enter Canada with only a driver’s license. Every store clerk, waiter, and taxi driver in Kiev speaks Russian.” And of course there’s the Black Sea Fleet. Really really independent countries don’t have 11,000 foreign troops stationed on their soil.

Had it been possible for rational diplomats and demographers to manage the Soviet collapse, Crimea probably would have wound up in Russia.

Until half a century ago, after all, Crimea was Russian. Nikita Khrushchev “gifted Crimea to Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine’s merger with tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly, at the time, it did not occur to anyone that one day the Soviet Union might collapse and that Ukraine would again be an independent country,” writes The Moscow Times.

It’s easy to see why Vladimir Putin would invade, why Russian public opinion would support him, and why neither cares what America thinks. Back in September, after all, most Russians told pollsters Crimea is part of Russia.

Why are American reporters covering Crimea ignoring the big picture, and instead so focused on secondary distractions like how it makes Obama look and whether there’s a chance of a new Cold War?

Four horsemen of the journalism apocalypse afflict overseas reporting:

Journalistic stenography, in which attending a government press conference constitutes research.

Kneejerk patriotism, where reporters identify with their government and are therefore less likely to question its actions, while reflexively assuming that rivals of the U.S. are ill-intentioned.

Jack-of-all-trades journalism, in which the same writers cover too many different beats. A few decades ago, there would have been a bureau chief, or at least a stringer, who knew Ukraine and/or the former Soviet Union because he or she lived there.

American ahistoricism, the widespread and widely acceptable ignorance of politics and history — especially those of other countries.

All four horsemen are pulling the Crimea story, but the fourth — not being aware of stuff that happened just one generation ago — is the most embarrassing.

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COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

SXSW

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Ted Rall

I’ll be attending SXSW Interactive later this week and this weekend. This will be my third year in attendance, and my goal is to try to land some kind of decent job. Or maybe to start collaborating with someone on something fun, creative and hopefully financially remunerative.

This is definitely not something that comes terribly naturally to me. I’m not antisocial or anything, but I’m used to working on my own and so the schmoozing aspect takes a lot of energy. But these days, if you want to stay working, you have to really hustle. I’m really tired of working three times harder for one third of the pay.

It’s no wonder that so many great cartoonists have quit.

Guest Blogger Post: Don’t Blame Obama for Syria and Ukraine

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Susan Stark

Susan here. There have been a lot of accusations about Obama being “weak” in not invading Syria or stopping the Russian “invasion” of Crimea. But the truth is, it’s not Obama who is “weak”, it’s the United States that’s weak.

The truth is, we are not living in the unipolar world of the 90s, or even the bipolar world of the Cold War. We are currently living in a multipolar world where both old superpowers and newer superpowers are emerging, and even imposing sanctions on a particular country doesn’t have the effect it once had. For instance, Iran is still chugging along quite nicely despite a Western embargo.

Where Obama is weak is in failing to recognize this basic fact. In this new world, you can’t go around making threats and “redlines” and promises you can’t keep. Because the truth is, Americans do not have the stomach for the sacrifices it would take to make war on other superpowers, and furthermore, we don’t have the money.

Much ado has been made about Obama’s non-attendance of a recent White House “security meeting” on Crimea, but in this instance, I think he’s doing the right thing, for once, by not attending. Crimea is 85% ethnic-Russian, so that’s like Russia invading itself. Not to mention she already has a naval base there. And despite the rhetoric from “transitional government” in Kiev, there is only so much western Ukraine can break away from Russia’s influence. As I said, a multipolar world.

Once again, Obama learns to do the wrong thing

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Ted Rall

Can it be a coincidence that Britain announced military action in Ukraine hours after Obama threatened him? Maybe this wouldn’t be happening if Obama had taken a big cup of shut the fuck up. http://nyti.ms/1odqt6w

LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Six Californias?

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Ted Rall

The Six State Solution

 

Grandiosity comes standard when you’re a third-generation 1%er like venture capitalist Tim Draper. Among other things, the dorky 55-year-old claims to have invented viral marketing. (Whatever.) He founded a non-accredited “Draper University of Heroes” for aspiring entrepreneurs, based in part on Hogwarts. He’s a right-wing Republican who voted for Obama.

Draper’s latest foray into the political arena is a ballot initiative that, if he garners the required 807,000 signatures, will ask voters this November to do for the Golden State what the 1990s did to Yugoslavia — split California into six states. (This is his second dance. Voters rejected his mandatory school vouchers proposition in 2000. )

“California as it is is ungovernable,” Draper says. “It is more and more difficult for Sacramento to keep up with the social issues from the various regions of California. With six Californias, people will be closer to their state governments, and states can get a refresh.”

Actually, the result wouldn’t be six Californias. It would be six pieces of what used to be California:

            San Diego + Orange County = “South California”

L.A. +  Santa Barbara = “West California”

Bakersfield + Fresno + Stockton = “Central California”

San Francisco + San Jose = “Silicon Valley”

Sacramento = “North California”

Eureka + Redding metro = the awesome, totally not broke, new state of “Jefferson”

Is Draper’s measure a good idea? I don’t know. What I do know is that the arguments Draper makes in favor of balkanization make zero sense. Whatever the merits of his splitsville scheme, it’s scary to endorse anything ginned up by such a messy mind.

Consider these excerpts from Draper’s recent interview with Time. They make fellow right-wing multimillionaire Donald Trump look levelheaded in comparison:

We now spend the most and get the least. We spend among the most for education and we’re 46th in education. We spend among the most for prisons, and we are among the highest recidivism rates … So the status quo is failing. And there have been some very good people running California, governing California. So it must be systemic. At best, the system seems to be on a spiral down. At worst it’s a monopoly, and in a monopoly, they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want. In a competitive environment, people get good service and they pay fair prices.

If California’s current woes are “systemic” — i.e., the result of California’s current size — why didn’t the same system “spiral down” during the state’s postwar boom years?

Draper says the state is a “monopoly” that “can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want.” To the extent that that’s true — just like businesses, governments are subject to constituent/customer pressure — it’s true of all governments. It’s not like drivers in West California will pay lower fees for their drivers licenses by picking them up in South California — or that South California would have any incentive to offer lower fees, i.e., compete.

You know how everything looks like a nail when you’re a hammer? When you’re a VC, everything looks like a business. But states aren’t businesses and people aren’t just consumers.

We don’t have to look far for examples of states whose capitals are closer to their citizen. New England is already divvied up into tiny states. “Our government will be more in touch with our individual constituents” if California breaks into smaller parts, says Draper. If he’s right, the New England states should be a shining beacon of governance. But they’re not. They’re just average.

There’s just no evidence that efficient or responsive service is related to a state’s size. History, resources and luck are the real determinants.

By most standards, Vermont and Massachusetts offer better services to their citizens than Maine or New Hampshire (not to mention livelier job markets). But they’re not “competing” against each other. Why don’t we see an exodus of former Mainers to Vermont? People who stay in Maine stay there because they like it. They grew up there. Their families are there. They dig the lobster rolls. Whatever. They’re not going to move to Massachusetts just to get Romneycare.

The strongest argument for Six Californias is that we are not well-represented. The people down south are very concerned with things like immigration law and the people way up north are frustrated by taxation without representation. And the people in coastal California are frustrated because of water rights. And the people in Silicon Valley are frustrated because the government doesn’t keep up with technology. And in Los Angeles, their issues revolve around copyright law.

Copyright law. Yep, that’s what all Angelenos care about. Who could ever forget the Intellectual Property Riots of 1992? Brother against brother, PC vs. Mac, VHS vs. Beta. Brrrrr.

Seriously, though, doesn’t Draper know that the federal government, not the state, has jurisdiction over border control? Tech regulations, the Internet — that’s the feds too. And copyright.

If the “strongest argument” in favor of breaking up California is to address issues that states don’t control…well, don’t make me say it.

Draper adds: “I’ve noticed that the people most adamant about creating their own state or being a part of their own state are the poorest regions, and in the current system, they are not happy, because it is not working for them. So if they had their own state, I believe all of those states would become wealthier.”

By Draper’s reasoning, Mississippi and Alabama — the nation’s poorest states — should split apart too. They’d all become wealthier, right?

As long as logicians like Tim Draper walk the earth, political cartoonists will never be out of work.

I don’t care what anyone says. I am still the legitimately elected editorial cartoonist of this blog.

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Ted Rall

Whenever a president is deposed, we always go through the same rigmarole: he goes on the lam and issues statements that say that he is still the legitimately elected leader.

And in many cases that’s true. But how often do they ever get to really come back? I was thinking about that this morning. The answer is: not often.

One exception that I could think of was Pres. Charles de Gaulle, who briefly fled during the May 1968 uprising in France. He returned to power after the military and police crushed the students and labor unions in street battles.

There is also Pres. Aristide of Haiti, overthrown not once but twice. After the first time, the Clinton administration invaded Haiti in order to return him to power. A few years later, the Bush administration backed a coup that overthrew him and forced him to fly to the Central African Republic. But at least that first time under Clinton, he counts as a legitimately elected president who was returned to power, albeit via foreign military intervention.

Can you think of other examples of restorations?

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ukraine Is Not a Revolution.

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Ted Rall

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Mainstream news outlets in the United States, whose politics are closely aligned with those of the U.S. government, frequently criticize mainstream media outlets in Russia, whose politics are closely aligned to those of the Russian government. Current example: recent events in Ukraine.

“Russian officials have been doing everything they can to make it clear that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of this current parliament or its right to form an interim government,” NPR’s Corey Flintoff reported February 26th. “The impression that ordinary Russians would get from [their] news coverage is really that the Ukrainian Revolution is very much a thing to be feared.”

Flintoff made fun of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who called the overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych “essentially the result of an armed mutiny.” Russian Interior Minister Sergey Lavrov said it was “an attempt at a coup d’état and to seize power by force.”

Yet American media insist on the R-word: revolution.

Here we go again.

In U.S. and Western media, both the Tahrir Square “people power” demonstrations that removed Hosni Mubarak and the military coup that imprisoned the democratically elected Mohammed Morsi are called Egyptian “revolutions.” So is the Benghazi-based insurgency that toppled Libya’s Col. Moammar Gaddafi. If the civil war in Syria leads to the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad — even if, like Gaddafi, he gets blown up by a U.S. drone or a NATO fighter jet — they’ll call that a revolution too.

But those weren’t/aren’t revolutions. A revolution is “a forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favor of a new system.”

A new system. Those are the key words.

Even if it occurs as the result of dramatic street violence, a change in leaders doesn’t mean there has been a revolution. If the system doesn’t change much, a revolution  has not taken place.

Egypt’s Tahrir Square was dramatic, an important event. But it wasn’t a revolution. This became evident last year, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi arrested and jailed President Morsi. If the 2011 Tahrir uprising against Mubarak had been a revolution, Sisi — a high-ranking officer who served most of his career under Mubarak — would not have been in the military at all, much less a figure powerful enough to stage a coup.

In a real revolution, the old system — all of its most important components — are replaced. Military leaders aren’t merely shuffled around or replaced; the army’s core mission and organizational structure are radically altered. It isn’t enough to rejigger boardrooms and change CEOs; the class structure itself — which defines every other role in society — is changed. (In China, for example, landlords went from a privileged class to impoverished pariahs after 1949.) Reforms don’t make a revolution. In a revolution, everything old gets trashed. Society starts from scratch.

The bar for whether a political change qualifies as a full-fledged revolution is extremely high.

And yeah, the definition matters. It matters a lot. Because revolution — capital-R, blood-in-the-streets, head-on-a-stick Revolution is by far the biggest threat to our system of corporate capitalism and the ruling classes who have been stealing almost every cent of the fortune we the people create with our hard work. If our business overlords convince us that revolution is something short of actually changing the system — in other words, getting rid of them — then they’re safe no matter what. Even if we protest, even if we turn violent, we will never truly emancipate ourselves.

Maybe they’ll pay higher taxes. For a little while. Until they bribe their way back out of them.

Until we destroy the 1%, stripping them of their money, power and social status, we will be their slaves. And that will never happen if we forget what revolution is.

Bearing in mind what revolution means, Ukraine comes nowhere close.

Consider this quote from Nicolai Petro, a politics professor at the University of Rhode Island, on Amy Goodman’s radio show:

“Yes, [Ukraine] is pretty much a classical coup, because under the current constitution the president may be—may resign or be impeached, but only after the case is reviewed by the Constitutional Court and then voted by a three-fourth majority of the Parliament. And then, either case, either the prime minister or the speaker of the Parliament must become the president. Instead, that’s not what happened at all. There was an extraordinary session of Parliament, after—it was held after most members were told there would be no session and many had left town. And then, under the chairmanship of the radical party, Svoboda, this rump Parliament declared that the president had self-removed himself from the presidency.”

Note the trappings of “legitimacy”: Constitutional Court, Parliament, preexisting political parties, laws created under the old regime.

Under a revolution, old institutions would be abolished. Anyone who had anything to do with them would be discredited, and possibly in danger of being executed. Parties, if there were any, would be new (unless they’d been operating clandestinely), with revolutionary politics and brand-new organizational structures. You certainly wouldn’t see old establishment figures like the recently released former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko (a leader of the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, which also wasn’t a revolution), seriously discussed as a potential new ruler.

Many Ukrainians know what revolution is — and they want one. “We need new people who can say no to the oligarchs, not just the old faces,” a 25-year-old economist told The New York Times. “The problem is that the old forces are trying to come back to take their old chairs,” said a shipping broker who waved a sign outside parliament that read: “Revolution, Not a Court Coup!”

U.S. reporters quote the would-be revolutionaries, but they can’t understand their meaning. After all, their country’s founding “revolution,” the American Revolution, was nothing of the sort. The elites became even more powerful. Slavery continued. Women still couldn’t vote. The poor and middle class didn’t gain power.

Just another coup.

(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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Ted Rall

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We all complain about the sorry state of the media these days. That includes lame political analysis and insipid cartoons that not only don’t make you think, they didn’t make the cartoonist who drew them think.

Unfortunately, if you like hard-hitting commentary, you can’t get the mainstream media to support it. To the contrary — they stifle it. So it’s up to you.

This is my pitch to consider the Ted Rall Subscription Service. For $30 a year you get my work emailed to you at the same time as my editors get it. In many cases this means you get it days before anyone else. That’s all the cartoons, including freelance cartoons that only appear in one publication, plus columns and essays, plus illustrations. You also get discounted rates on my books and original artwork so if you see a toon you like, you can buy it for your wall.

Silk Road to Ruin: 2nd paperback edition

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Ted Rall

The expanded paperback 2nd edition of Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia is the Next Middle East comes out April 1, 2014. It is now available for pre-order from Amazon. The new edition updates the politics and current events sections to the present. In addition, there is a bonus chapter about my expedition to Lake Sarez in Tajikistan — Central Asia’s “Sword of Damocles,” which could cause an epic flood that could kill millions of people at any time.

I will sell personally signed copies of the book through my website. Please use the contact form if you’d like me to add you to the mailing list and I will get in touch as soon as I have copies to sell — probably around May 1st. (The Amazon copies will ship first, though.)

If you are a book critic or reviewer interested in a review copy, please contact NBM Publishing directly.

If you would like me to speak about Central Asia and the new book at an event, please contact me through the contact form here on the Rallblog.

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