Ukraine War Lies Debunked

For Senate Dems Pushing Weapons for Ukraine, Neo-Nazis Not Top of Mind

            Even the wars that historians judge to have been noble and beneficial rely on popular support marketed and sustained by lies. Contrary to what the English government told its people during World War I, German soldiers didn’t bayonet Belgian babies in their cribs. The “cocaine” U.S. troops claimed to have found in Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s home was nothing of the sort. The Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden – it was George W. Bush who refused to take him, because to accept would have denied him his excuse to invade Afghanistan.

As General and Director of British Military Intelligence John Charteris observed after World War I, “to make armies go on killing one another it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy.”

            America’s incipient proxy war against Russia over Ukraine is no exception to the rule. BS has been flying fast and furious as media outlets dutifully align behind the U.S. government war machine and the array of defense contractors that influence it. As usual, their purpose is clear: spook the American people into supporting a war in a country they hardly know anything about, take the side of a highly problematic regime and create a world of death and destruction for the benefit of greedy warmongers before the rubes/voters figure out they’ve been conned.

            Let’s take a look at some of the biggest lies being used to garner and prop up support for the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelensky:

            Lie #1: Ukraine is a democracy.

            Zelensky won the presidency in a fair election in 2019. But context is critical. The 2019 election was held in the immediate aftermath of a brutal coup d’état. In 2014 a violent mob comprising neo-Nazi extremist groups like the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, and covertly supported by the Obama Administration, forced President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically-elected and pro-Russian, to flee for his life.

            The new revolutionary government held an election in 2014, which Petro Poroshenko won. Zelensky is Ukraine’s second post-coup ruler.

            Here’s an analogy for Americans: instead of failing, Trump’s January 6th coup succeeds. Biden flees to Canada and, even though he lost, Trump serves a second term. Trump endorses Mike Pence in 2024. Pence wins that election. Is Pence a legitimate president? Is America a democracy?

            Democrats would answer no.. As do the 49% of Ukrainians, including many ethnic Russians, who voted for Yanukovych. They feel the same way about Zelensky, that he’s not legitimate. Which is why ethnic-Russian areas in the eastern Donbas region, Donetsk and Luhansk, declared independence and broke away from Ukraine after the 2014 coup, and ethnic-Russian Crimeans greeted Russian forces when they annexed the peninsula.

            To half its people, Ukraine doesn’t feel like a democracy.

            Lie #2: Ukraine is a free society.

            Ukraine is an authoritarian state with a veneer of democracy. Zelensky recently signed a decree ordering that all TV broadcasters in the country show the same exact government-controlled programming on every channel. “It’s important that the country has a unified information policy” under martial law, read the edict. This followed his banning of 11 rival political parties, threatening “a tough response” to politicians who disagree with him.

            Lest these repressive measures be excused as regrettable wartime excesses, Zelensky also banned three “pro-Russian” TV channels a year before Russia’s invasion “in order to protect national security,” his spokesperson said. An opposition politician and ally of the stations’ owner was locked under house arrest and accused of treason. Anti-government protesters in Zelensky’s Ukraine are brutally beaten and jailed. In May 2021 the mayor of Kiev said that Zelensky sent thugs from the Ukraine state security agency SBU to his apartment, where they demanded that he toe the line of Zelensky’s policies or else.

            “U.S. officials have long been fond of portraying Ukraine as a plucky democracy fending off the menace of aggression from an authoritarian Russia,” Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in 2021, before the war. “Washington’s idealized image has never truly corresponded with the murkier reality, but the gap has now become a chasm.”

            Lie #3: Ukraine is an ally that we have an obligation to defend.

            If Ukraine were a member of NATO, the United States would have a duty to defend it against Russia. But important members of the alliance like France and Germany oppose Ukrainian membership because it is riddled with corruption and not a full-fledged democracy. “In a 2020 analysis, Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, ranked Ukraine 117th out of 180 countries on its corruption index, lower than any NATO nation,” according to The New York Times.

            Ukraine is not a U.S. ally. It is in Russia’s sphere of influence every bit as much as Canada and Mexico are in ours. We have no historic or cultural ties to Ukraine.

            We have no legal or moral obligation whatsoever toward Ukraine.

            Lie #4: Russia’s attack was unprovoked.

            I’m not going to endorse Russia’s invasion. But arguing that the move was unprovoked is ridiculous. Ukraine wants to join the EU and NATO, a Cold War-era relic formed as a U.S.-led military counterbalance to Russian influence in Europe. Ukraine has been shelling the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway regions for years, killing an estimated 14,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians. Not only is Ukraine on Russia’s border, it’s the same exact route Nazi Germany took to invade the Soviet Union during World War II. Ukraine is Russia’s most vulnerable border — and it wants to join a heavily armed, nuclear-capable alliance of states determined to destroy Russia.

            Imagine, if you can, Mexico trying to join a Russian-led military alliance. How would we respond?

            Lie #5: The neo-Nazi thing is overblown Russian propaganda.

            Zelensky is Jewish; he lost family members in the Holocaust. How, goes the argument that concerns about right extremism are mere disinformation, could Ukraine and its government be heavily influenced by neo-Nazism? Well, Barack Obama was Black. Why is the American police still full of racists? Because the president of a country can only do so much. He governs the country he inherits, not the one he wants.

            Ukraine has a long and infamous history of far-right politics in which Nazism and anti-Semitism play a starring role. While it’s true that Europe and the United States also have such nasty groups, no other country in the world has as many as a percent of the population. None legitimizes Nazism and fascist collaboration during World War II the way that Ukraine does. “Ukraine is erecting new plaques and monuments to Nazi collaborators on a nearly weekly basis,” The Forward reported last year. Stefan Bandera, a notorious Nazi collaborator, is a national hero with numerous statues in his honor. France had Pétain and Norway had Quisling, but both are officially condemned.

And certainly no other country in the world has police and soldiers openly serving as Nazis, drawing government paychecks while wearing swastikas and other fascist insignia on duty.

            Most Ukrainians, arguably an overwhelming majority, are not pro-Nazi. However, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, including Zelensky and his government, are highly tolerant — to an obnoxious, intolerable degree — of Nazis serving openly in parliament, controlling a substantial portion of the police and national guard as well as the military. They allow neo-Nazis to control the historical narrative of their country, even elevating traitorous anti-Semites to founding heroes who deserve statues in the streets of major cities.

Lie #6: We have to do something.

It’s a big world. Misery abounds. At any given time there are invasions, proxy wars, regional conflict, civil strife and illegal occupations on almost every continent. Yemen is on fire. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict grinds on. Afghanistan is starving. Those are three cases where the United States is involved, as usual on the wrong side. There are dozens of other conflicts in which the United States has little to no interest. The only reason we are involved in Ukraine is because the media tells us to be.

It is entirely reasonable to look at the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and decide that it’s simply not our business, that neither side is worthy of support.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

 

 

How We Got Here: A Brief History of the Ukraine Conflict

The United States Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine - Progressive.org           American media outlets characterize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as, variously and concurrently, the bloodthirsty act of a Hitlerian madman, part of an attempt to reconstitute the former Soviet Union and, predictably continuing the silently-debunked Russiagate narrative of the last six years, an assault on the concept of democracy motivated by President Vladimir Putin’s supposed fear that his own people might get jealous of the freedom next door. Senator Marco Rubio even implied that U.S. intelligence officials believe two years of COVID lockdown drove Putin nuts.

            Any, some or none of these explanations born of pure speculation may be accurate. None of them is as likely as something simpler. The fall of the Soviet Union was followed by three decades of nearly constant provocation and encirclement by the United States and its Western allies. Putin decided enough is enough; here’s where we draw a line on the steppe.

            Frenemies fighting the common threat of Nazi Germany, World War II concluded with Europe divided along the lines where the Allies and the Red Army met in 1945, with Germany divided between the two.

Proxy conflicts in which the Soviets took sides in Turkey, Greece and Czechoslovakia prompted Western European nations to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a U.S.-run collective-security arrangement formed in 1949 under President Harry Truman. Famously, an attack against one member is considered as an attack against all. Weirdly, no one was bothered by the fact that World War I began in large part because of a similar set of entangled alliances.

The USSR retaliated by grouping the Eastern European countries under its domination under the Warsaw Pact. This 1955 alliance was structured as a direct response to NATO and organized the same way except that all major decisions were controlled directly by Moscow, whereas NATO theoretically required unanimous consent by its members.

The Soviet Union was disbanded in 1991. Russia, economically devastated, politically demoralized and militarily emasculated under the incompetent and corrupt presidency of alcoholic pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin, became merely the largest of 15 now-independent former Soviet republics. Russia has three-quarters the land mass and half the population of the old USSR.

The Warsaw Pact went away. Yet NATO lived on.

NATO’s website explains: “NATO endured because while the Soviet Union was no more, the Alliance’s two other original if unspoken mandates still held: to deter the rise of militant nationalism and to provide the foundation of collective security that would encourage democratization and political integration in Europe. The definition of ‘Europe’ had merely expanded eastward.” Toward Russia.

Russia focused inward, transitioning into capitalism. Yet the West and NATO acted as though the Cold War had never ended.

In 1991 NATO was far away from Russia. The post-communist Russian Federation was separated from NATO territory by Eastern Europe plus the former Soviet republics of Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, also former republics of the USSR. That soon changed.

Over the next 20 years all of the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe joined NATO, shrinking an 800-mile buffer zone by half. The Baltics signed up in 2004.

Moldova’s constitution guarantees neutrality so it will never join NATO, but its geopolitical status as a buffer state is relatively inconsequential. Belarus remains a staunch Kremlin ally. Which brings us to Ukraine.

If Ukraine were admitted to NATO, Russia’s buffer zone would vanish. In its place would appear a vast open corridor between Russia and Europe. Ukraine, the same route Nazi Germany used to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, resulting in the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens — the same place where many Ukrainian locals greeted advancing German forces as liberators — would fall under the control of the NATO alliance. Russia’s enemy would be at its border.

The current Ukrainian government wants to join NATO. It came to power as the result of a U.S.-backed coup d’état. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically-elected and pro-Russian, was deposed in a 2014 covert operation carefully orchestrated by the Obama Administration. “The United States had no right to try to orchestrate political outcomes in another country—especially one on the border of another great power,” Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute commented in 2017.

Adding to Russian anxiety, right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, played an outsized role in the 2014 Maidan uprising.

Now notorious anti-Semitic paramilitary groups like the swastika-wearing Azov Battalion have become an important component of the official Ukrainian military. As the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting notes, however, American media consumers are not being told about this. FAIR reports that a “crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces. If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of U.S. foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.”

The BBC reported back in 2014 that “ultra-nationalists, and their extreme right fringe, are a small part of the overall campaign — a subgroup of a minority.” But the leaders of the new government “have at various points seemed unable, unwilling or even afraid to rein in the radical right, who are mostly concentrated in an umbrella organization called Right Sector.”

Azov has grown since 2014. It has now become a movement with its own politicians, newspaper, even children’s camps.

Another far-right extremist group, C14, now controls Ukraine’s police and National Guard, according to Reuters. The Trump Administration considered declaring Azov and the Ukrainian National Guard a terrorist organization. Now, The New York Times reports, alt-right militants from France, Finland and other European nations are flocking to fight Russia alongside the Azov Battalion, whose ranks include soldiers wearing Nazi insignia.

Though Jewish himself, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has turned a blind eye to the neo-Nazis within his own government. So have his American allies. Sam Biddle of the Intercept reported last week that “Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy.”

For Americans, an enemy of an enemy is always a friend. Unlike Russia, Americans don’t live next door to a country that welcomes Nazis into its military.

NATO repeatedly provoked Russia over the past few decades, most notably planning to place ballistic missiles in the former Warsaw Pact nation of Poland. “From what we have seen in recent years—the creation of a missile defense system, the encirclement of Russia with military bases, the relentless expansion of NATO—we have gotten the clear impression that they are testing our strength,” then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev observed in 2008.

Until last August, NATO and the U.S. had fully occupied Afghanistan—which borders the former USSR—for 20 years.

The United States portrays itself as a critic of aggressive militarism carried out by Russia. At this writing, however, Russia has one military base outside the former Soviet Union, in Syria. The United States has over 800 around the world. After the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the Bush Administration rented military airbases from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia along Russia’s southern border, which it claimed it needed in order to wage airstrikes and deliver materiel inside U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.

The U.S. took over the Khanabad base in three former Soviet republics bordering and near Russia: Uzbekistan, Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan, and the airfield in Kulob, Tajikistan. NATO forces set up a base at Termiz, Uzbekistan, and outside the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.

The U.S. troop presence in former-Soviet Central Asia ended in 2014. But maintaining American military forces within striking distance of southern Russia is clearly still on American officials’ minds. In April 2021 the new Biden Administration reached out to the governments of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan about using bases there.

            None of this is to justify all of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Still, it is impossible to accurately assess the current crisis in the far reaches of Eastern Europe without considering Russia’s motivations. After years of encirclement in a one-sided Cold War directed at Russia, a Ukraine that is anything less than at least neutral (or ideally an ally) is simply too close for Moscow’s comfort.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Clueless in Gaza – We Americans Support Democracy, But Only When the Elections Go Our Way

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“Rarely has a president been confronted with so many seemingly disparate foreign policy crises all at once,” The New York Times noted about Obama on July 23rd. What the paper didn’t/won’t/can’t say is: Rarely has a president caused so many of his own crises.

This summer, most of Obama’s problems follow from his unwillingness to respect democracy overseas.

The U.S. government supports democracy in other countries — but only if the elections go its way. If not, anything goes to obtain a favorable outcome: economic sabotage, backing violent coups d’état, installing dictators to replace democratically-elected leaders, even ginning up all-out war.

Three recent examples showcasing U.S. contempt for electoral democracy include Egypt, and two places making news this week, Palestine and Ukraine.

Egypt’s 2012 election, the first after the overthrow of U.S.-backed autocrat Hosni Mubarak, is a recent case of American perfidy that’s embarrassing going on tacky. Mohamed Morsi of the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party, won the presidency in elections international observers called as fair and transparent as could be expected in a nascent democracy.

The thing to do, of course would have been to congratulate Morsi, the Brotherhood and the Egyptian people, and offer assistance upon request.

Rather than accept the results, however, the Obama Administration “channeled funding … [that] … vigorously supported activists and politicians who have fomented unrest in Egypt.” A year later, Morsi was overthrown by a coup that restored Mubarak’s military junta minus the ailing former tyrant. Ignoring American law, Obama continues to finance General Abdel Fata al-Sisi’s violent, oppressive regime, which many human rights groups describe as even more brutal than Mubarak’s. Morsi, a democratically-elected leader whom a principled American president should demand to be restored to power, rots in a prison whose jailers are paid by American taxpayers.

To add Orwellian insult to neocolonialist injury, Secretary of State John Kerry is still saying that Egypt’s post-Morsi junta is “transitioning to a democracy.” Kerry’s mouthfart came a day after al-Sisi sent three foreign journalists away for long prison terms.

Overshadowed by Israel’s latest brutal swat-a-fly-with-laser-guided-missiles invasion and bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip is the fact that, as in Egypt, the United States got the elections it demanded in Palestine, only to succumb to buyer’s remorse after the ballots were counted.

The Palestinian elections of 2006 are hardly the most thrilling story ever told, so I won’t be surprised if you decide to look at this story about the guy who sent his wife a spreadsheet detailing all the excuses she gave him for not having sex and never look back.

Still here? Here’s an abridged recounting of an episode that not only sheds some light on the current conflagration between Israel and Palestine, but reveals the methods used by Israel and its allies to undermine Palestinian self-governance — and belies America’s loudly proclaimed commitment to democracy to boot.

Israeli leaders like to complain that the Palestinian side doesn’t offer them a viable partner with whom to negotiate peace. Read the following, however, and Israel’s right-wing government’s real agenda becomes clear: to demoralize and divide the Palestinian people in order to sap their resistance to economic and military oppression.

In the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006, held both in the West Bank and Gaza in response to pressure from the United States, Hamas beat Fatah (Yasir Arafat’s more moderate party), 44.45% to 41.43%, entitling it to 74 seats in parliament over Fatah’s 45. (The current split, in which Hamas rules Gaza and Fatah has the West Bank, followed a later internal military clash.)

Israel’s interference with the 2006 elections began during campaign season, when it preemptively arrested and jailed 450 members of Hamas because they were involved in the elections as candidates or campaign workers. Despite this and other acts of sabotage, including trying to ban residents of East Jerusalem from voting, the elections went off well. The European Parliament’s spokesperson called the vote “extremely professional, in line with international standards, free, transparent and without violence.”

The thing to do would have been to congratulate Hamas and the Palestinians, and offer assistance upon request.

Instead, the Bush Administration and its allies cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority, ended diplomatic relations and imposed trade and other economic sanctions. Three months after Hamas formed its first government, in June 2006, Israel invaded Gaza and the West Bank, demolished and bombed civilian and government infrastructure, and arrested 25% of the members of parliament “because technically they were members of a terrorist organization although they may not be involved in terrorist acts themselves.” The U.S., which supplied the weapons used in the attacks, cited Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

Hamas, U.S. government-controlled media frequently reminds readers and viewers, is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. So to people who don’t hold tickets to the Way Back A Decade Ago Machine, the actions of America, Israel and their allies vis-à-vis Hamas, which rules Gaza, seem reasonable. They’re terrorists! They shoot rockets at Israel! (Really lame rockets, but still.)

Hamas remains boxed in and desperate under Obama. Israel and Egypt’s al-Sisi regime, the two largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid military hardware, have shut the territory’s land crossings to Israel and Egypt and imposed a naval blockade on the Mediterranean coastline. Despite dozens of tunnels built to smuggle in goods, the West’s sanctions regime has been successful; Gaza’s economy has tanked, and unemployment among its 1.8 million people has risen to 38.5%. (The highest rate in the U.S. during the Great Depression of the 1930s was 25%.) Shooting rockets at civilians isn’t a great way to make friends — but desperation makes people do stupid things.

What the U.S. media doesn’t want you to know is: Hamas is popular. They won the last election, and they’d probably win again if one were held now. By pushing regime change in Gaza, therefore, the U.S. wants to replace a popular government with an unpopular one…in other words, subverting democracy.

Ukraine is yet another case of a democratically-elected ruler overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup.

Viktor Yanukovych won the Ukrainian presidency in 2010 elections that were widely believed to have conformed to international standards according to foreign observers. The thing to do would have been to congratulate him and the Ukrainian people on a fair election, and offer assistance upon request. But the U.S. was wary of Yanukovych, worried he might not easily be tamed. (Sample American punditry at the time: “The Ukrainians need to expand their relationship with the International Monetary Fund.”)

He didn’t. Finally, in November 2013, Yanukovych sealed his fate by siding with neighboring Russia over a pending EU association agreement — thus rejecting closer ties to the West and the United States. Street protests that led to Yanukovych’s ouster in February 2014 were likely indigenous, but would almost certainly not have succeeded in driving the president into exile without the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in covert U.S. funding to the Maidan organizers.

Though more of a money-motivated oligarch than a creature of the far right, current Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to accommodate right-wing factions, including neo-fascists, in Ukraine. Moreover, whatever you think of Poroshenko, he is not the legitimate ruler of the country. Nevertheless, President Obama has recognized him as such and offered economic and military hardware in his civil war against Russian-speaking separatists in the eastern part of the country.

I’ll close with a quote from Noam Chomsky: “For Washington, a consistent element is that democracy and the rule of law are acceptable if and only if they serve official strategic and economic objectives. But American public attitudes on Iraq and Israel/Palestine run counter to government policy, according to polls. Therefore the question presents itself whether a genuine democracy promotion might best begin within the United States.”

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and cartoonist, is the author of “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan,” out Sept. 2. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

 

 

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ukraine Is Not a Revolution.

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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.

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COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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