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Ukraine: “West” Playing With Fire – Intentions?
The "west" is pushing a anti-democratic collection of right-wingers as a "democratic opposition" against the dully elected government of Ukraine. How can Kerry claim that these forces who fight the majority elected government are in a "fight for democracy"?
There is a great danger here. The street-muscle of the "opposition" is fascist in its core and a quite violent collection of hooligans and militants:
These groups range from right-wing radicals and soccer hooligans to military veterans and mobs of stick-wielding goons. And to the gall of more-established opposition figures, like the world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, they have become the revolution’s most commanding presence. Anyone with a stake in resolving Ukraine’s political crisis — including the diplomats watching fretfully from the E.U. and U.S. — will likely have to reckon with the role of these groups. But they are becoming increasingly hard to control.
By hyping the "opposition", which could not win in elections, the "west" is giving succor to the extreme forces. These forces already pledge to incite a civil war.
This is clearly, as we claimed, a repeat of the strategy that was used to throw Syria into ruins. Under the disguise of "peaceful protests" which, like in the Ukraine never were peaceful, radical forces are incited to fight the state and all its structures.
But what is the purpose his obvious attempt to throw Ukraine into a state of unrest and possibly into a civil war? Did not Syria show that such radical forces will in the end hit back at the "west"? What is there to win but trouble?
Could the reason be to cripple China’s future food security?
The following article from South China Morning Post:
Ukraine to become China’s largest farmer
China will plough billions of yuan into farmland in Ukraine that will eventually become its biggest overseas agricultural project.
The move is a significant step in China’s recent efforts to encourage domestic companies to farm overseas as China’s food demand grows in pace with urbanisation.
Under the 50-year plan, Ukraine will initially provide China with at least 100,000 hectares – an area almost the size of Hong Kong – of high-quality farmland in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, mainly for growing crops and raising pigs.
The produce will be sold to two Chinese state-owned grain conglomerates at preferential prices. The project will eventually expand to three million hectares.
Ding Li, a senior researcher in agriculture at Anbound Consulting in Beijing, said the deal was a big move for China compared with earlier overseas agriculture.
In April 2009, China had slightly over two million hectares of farmland abroad, he said. “So three million hectares would mean a very big project.”
The agreement was signed in June between the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and KSG Agro, Ukraine’s leading agricultural company, XPCC said in a statement.
XPCC, also known as Bingtuan, is a quasi-military organisation established in Xinjiang in the 1950s to reclaim farmland and consolidate defences against the Soviet Union, whose “granary” at that time was, ironically, the Ukraine.
The statement did not reveal the value of the investment, but the Kyiv Post reported last month that it would be more than US$2.6 billion. The newspaper called it an “unprecedented foreign investment” in Ukraine’s agriculture sector.
This would make it China’s biggest reported lease or purchase of farmland overseas. The Beidahuang Group, China’s largest agribusiness, based in Heilongjiang province, and the Chongqing Grain Group have made similar moves to expand abroad.
The farming project was an important part of China’s food security programme and a response to the central government’s strategy of outsourcing the production of food to farms overseas, the statement said.
It would also help the XPCC expand, and provide jobs abroad for Chinese labourers and boost their incomes, it said.
China has made substantial agricultural investments elsewhere, notably in South America. Beidahuang acquired 234,000 hectares to grow soya bean and corn in Argentina, while Chongqing Grain paid US$375 million for soya bean plantations in Brazil and US$1.2 billion for land in Argentina to grow soya beans, corn and cotton.
Although China’s domestic grain output had grown for 10 straight years, Ding said demand for imported grain had also grown. It imported nearly 14 million tonnes of cereal and cereal flours last year, an increase of more than 150 per cent from 2011.
The trend is making it more difficult to fulfil Beijing’s ambition for the country to remain 90 per cent self-sufficient in food production.
“As urbanisation speeds up, consumption has led to greater food demand and domestic grain prices have stayed above global prices,” Ding said. “Therefore, China has been importing more and more grain.”
A country with well-developed agriculture, Ukraine is one of the world’s top 10 wheat exporters.
Professor Tian Zhihong, a specialist in international agricultural trade at China Agricultural University, said Ukraine offered a number of advantages for the XPCC, such as excellent soil and experience in international trade.
The XPCC investment would also help upgrade farm technology in Ukraine, which was still relatively basic, Tian said. Chinese agricultural co-operation with Ukraine started in 2011, when the then vice-premier Zhang Dejiang signed a memorandum to create a model farm in Ukraine.
Last year, the Export-Import Bank of China approved a US$3 billion agricultural loan to the country. A fund for joint construction projects was set up, with contributions of US$600 million expected this year.
XPCC is also investing in Ukraine in other ways. It has signed a memorandum earlier this month with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea on infrastructure investments in the peninsula, including an expressway, a government housing project and a bridge across the Strait of Kerch.
<http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1314902/ukraine-become-chinas-largest-overseas-farmer-3m-hectare-deal
Posted by: nakedtothebone | Feb 2 2014 13:23 utc | 32
Recently on Democracy Now
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Cohen, what is your take on what’s happening in Ukraine right now?
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, it’s not what Anton said. Where to begin? Can we begin at the beginning? What’s happening in Ukraine, what’s been unfolding since November in the streets, is probably the single most important international story underway today. It may impact for a very long time the geopolitics of Europe, Russia, American-Russian relations, and a lot more. At the same time, media coverage of this story, particularly in the United States, has been exceedingly misleading, very close to what Anton just told you. I would characterize Anton’s characterization, to be as polite as I can, as half-true. But a half-truth is an untruth.
The realities are, there is no “the Ukraine.” All this talk about Ukraine is on the front line of democracy—there are at least two Ukraines. One tilts toward Poland and Lithuania, the West, the European Union; the other toward Russia. This is not my notion. This is what every public opinion poll has told us since this crisis unfolded, that about 40 percent of Ukrainians want to go west, 40 percent want to stay with Russia, and, as usually true in these polls, 20 percent just don’t know or they’re not sure.
Who precipitated this crisis? It was the European Union, in this sense. It gave the Ukrainian government, which, by the way, is a democratically elected government—if you overthrow this government, just like they overthrew Morsi in Egypt, you’re dealing a serious blow to democracy. So if the crowd manages to essentially carry out a coup d’état from the streets, that’s what democracy is not about. But here’s what the European Union did back in November. It told the government of Ukraine, “If you want to sign an economic relationship with us, you cannot sign one with Russia.” Why not? Putin has said, “Why don’t the three of us have an arrangement? We’ll help Ukraine. The West will help Ukraine.” The chancellor of Germany, Merkel, at first thought that was a good idea, but she backed down for various political reasons. So, essentially, Ukraine was given an ultimatum: sign the EU economic agreement or else.
Now, what was that agreement? It would have been an economic catastrophe for Ukraine. I’m not talking about the intellectuals or the people who are well placed, about ordinary Ukrainians. The Ukrainian economy is on the brink of a meltdown. It needed billions of dollars. What did the European Union offer them? The same austerity policies that are ravaging Europe, and nothing more—$600 million. It needed billions and billions.
There’s one other thing. If you read the protocols of the European offer to Ukraine, which has been interpreted in the West as just about civilizational change, escaping Russia, economics, democracy, there is a big clause on military cooperation. In effect, by signing this, Ukraine would have had to abide by NATO’s military policies. What would that mean? That would mean drawing a new Cold War line, which used to be in Berlin, right through the heart of Slavic civilization, on Russia’s borders. So that’s where we’re at to now.
One other point: These right-wing people, whom Anton thinks are not significant, all reports—and I don’t know when he was in Ukraine, maybe it was long ago and things have gone—but the reports that are coming out of Ukraine are the following. One, the moderates—that’s the former heavyweight champion boxer, Vitali Klitschko, and others—have lost control of the street. They’ve asked the people who have been attacking the police with Molotov cocktails, and to vacate the buildings they’ve occupied, to stop. And the street will not stop, partly because—I’d say largely because—the street in Kiev is now controlled by these right-wing extremists. And that extremism has spread to western Ukraine, where these people are occupying government buildings. So, in fact, you have a political civil war underway.
What is the face of these people, this right wing? A, they hate Europe as much as they hate Russia. Their official statement is: Europe is homosexuals, Jews and the decay of the Ukrainian state. They want nothing to do with Europe. They want nothing to do with Russia. I’m talking about this—it’s not a fringe, but this very right-wing thing. What does their political activity include? It includes writing on buildings in western Ukraine, “Jews live here.” That’s exactly what the Nazis wrote on the homes of Jews when they occupied Ukraine. A priest who represents part of the political movement in western Ukraine—Putin quoted this, but it doesn’t make it false. It doesn’t make it false; it’s been verified. A western Ukrainian priest said, “We, Ukraine, will not be governed by Negroes, Jews or Russians.” So, these people have now come to the fore.
The first victims of any revolution—I don’t know if this is a revolution, but the first victims of any revolution are the moderates. And the moderates have lost control of what they created, helped by the European Union and the American government back in November. And so, now anything is possible, including two Ukraines.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/30/debate_is_ukraines_opposition_a_democratic
Posted by: okie farmer | Feb 2 2014 16:51 utc | 45
Here’s an even more poignant piece.
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol9/vol9_no1-2_takis_Globalization_End_of_the_Left_Right_Divide_Part_I.html
Globalization and the End of the Left-Right Divide (Part I)*
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
A new political phenomenon, which characterizes the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization and the parliamentary junta, is the effective abolition of the old political divide – established formally during the French Revolution – between Right and Left. On the Right, were all those political forces that supported the continuation and reproduction of the “establishment”, once represented by the monarchy and later by bourgeois parliamentary “democracy” and the capitalist market economy, while on the Left were those who advocated the overthrow of the establishment in the above sense, ranging from anti-monarchists to Marxists, anarchists, antisystemic ecologists (unlike today’s washed-out Greens) etc. By definition, then, the Right supported “law and order” and whatever that implied in terms of inequality, hierarchy and the privileges of the advantaged social strata, while the Left essentially fought for the overthrow of the “status quo” and ― to varying degrees ― for the equal distribution of political, economic and social power.
The main arena in which the struggle between Left and Right was taking place was the nation-state, even if the Left – particularly the Marxist (but also the libertarian) Left – was traditionally internationalist, until it adopted in practice the strategy of “socialism in one country” because of the objective conditions it faced, although in theory it remained internationalist. However, it is precisely this arena that is being eliminated by the current NWO, which is literally “pulling the rug” from under the traditional Left-Right divide. The consequences are the seismic changes that we see today across the whole political spectrum.
As regards the Left, an undeniable symptom of this phenomenon is the political bankruptcy of the traditional Left, both in the narrow sense of its electoral percentages, and, most importantly, in the broader sense of its traditional conception as the subversive mass movement that mainly attracted the popular strata, and not the privileged “Leftists” of the bourgeoisie who seek minor reforms through the degenerate “Left”, as is the case now. In other words, even though this “Left” continues to survive politically, this does not change the fact that it has been fully integrated into the NWO, as its demands are anything but subversive. On the other hand, the part of it which belongs to the communist Left theoretically makes subversive demands, which however remain theoretical, since they are not accompanied by a transitional programme and subversive political action. And this is true of any party or organization today that defines itself as Left, communist, anarchist, “Green”, etc, if it does not challenge – both in theory and in practice – the NWO itself, i.e. globalization (which can only be neoliberal within the system of a capitalist market economy) and the main international institutions implementing the neoliberal policies, such as the EU, preferring instead to wait for revolution before demanding withdrawal from such institutions and imposing economic self-reliance. That is why this entire “Left” can no longer attract the popular strata – who are the main victims of globalization – on a mass scale.
But seismic changes can also be seen on the Right, as evidenced by the fact that the traditional conservative parties of today have only survived thanks to the social strata which have clearly benefited from globalization and which therefore sustain them, while they have been losing support from the popular strata who were embourgeoised during the period of social democracy but are now getting poorer because of the mass unemployment and poverty that globalization brings! Thus, these increasingly conservative popular strata that are being crushed by globalization are now leaving the established Right but are not crossing over to the degenerate “Left” which has been fully integrated into the NWO either. Crucially, these popular strata are not joining the communist, or the pseudo-libertarian Left forces, who are supposedly fighting for self-management but who “fail” to see the strangulation of the popular strata through globalization, the EU etc going on right under their noses!
It is these popular strata which are currently shifting en masse towards nationalist parties such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP), to the point that even the most authoritative newspaper of the economic elite, the Financial Times, has emphasized that a wind of Euroscepticism, going as far as to raise the demand for withdrawal from the EU, is sweeping across Europe[1] (15.10.2013). Contrary to the malicious propaganda of the transnational elite, which enjoys the support of the entire degenerate Left, this does not mean that the millions of Europeans who are turning against the EU and, indirectly, against globalization itself, have suddenly become Nazis, as though we were living in the 1930s. National socialism and social democracy itself are impossible today, as both flourished during the era of the nation-state which, under globalization. is dead and buried. Nor does it mean that the fact that as much as 30 per cent of the new parliament, following next year’s Euro-elections, will comprise eurosceptics, have suddenly become racists. As the FT report stresses, the exptected massive influx of Eurosceptics in the next European Parliament, which even ardent European federalists now concede, will simply mean that the nationalist parties ‘are capitalising on the economic misery and high levels of unemployment that are plaguing the continent’.[2] It is indeed characteristic that the more these parties get rid of racist or extremist right-wing elements in their politics, the more their percentages rise, as the meteoric rise of Le Pen in France showed lately.
At this crucial historical juncture that will determine whether we shall all become subservient to neoliberal globalization and the transnational elite, it is imperative that we create a Popular Front in each country which will include all the victims of globalization among the popular strata, regardless of their current political affiliations. In Greece, in particular, where the popular strata are facing economic disaster, what is needed urgently is not an “antifascist” Front, as proposed by the parties of the parliamentary junta, supported also by the degenerate “Left” (such as SYRIZA, whose leader A. Tsipras is a candidate for the post of the president of the European Commission!) which would unite aggressors and victims. An ‘antifascist’ front would simply disorient the masses and make them incapable of facing the real fascism being imposed on them by the political and economic elites, which constitute the transnational and local elites. Their criminal policies have already led to almost a third of the active population and over 60 percent of the young being unemployed, to Greek disposable income being almost halved and to a huge rise in poverty with thousands of people having committed suicide since the “crisis” began three years ago. Instead, what is needed is a Popular Front that could attract the vast majority of the people who would fight for immediate unilateral withdrawal from the EU – which is managed by the European part of the transnational elite – as well as for economic self-reliance, thus breaking with globalization.
This would allow also a genuine, new form of internationalism to be built from below, while creating the preconditions necessary for the people to decide, democratically, what kind of socio-economic system they would like in order to achieve an authentic form of popular power.
* This is an edited version of an article that was first published (in Greek) in the Athens daily Sunday’s Eleftherotypia, on 20/10/2013
Posted by: okie farmer | Feb 3 2014 4:08 utc | 64
I don’t think the situation is as clear-cut as b makes out in the top post, of course it is short, one has to go to the essence. I agree with the West-bashing, overall, absolutely.
Virgile at 9 mentions that many ‘groups’ (paraphrasing) in the Ukraine are dissatisfied, imho their beefs can be considered valid, if they can find no expression in the present political arrangement, some kind of social disturbance(s) may or did occur, V mentions the internet, etc.
– Syria 3 years ago is an ex. if very different.. (Opposition there was evident and rumbling for a long time – Damascus decl. 2005 and more – and then the drought which killed the countryside..)
The manifestations of opposition may be ‘recuperated’ immediately, without comprehension by the original opponents, by:
a) radical troublemakers of any stripe, non-political/religious, mostly young men (will fight security services, police, army)
b) figures (or tight tiny circles) who see an opportunity for power, fame, fortune, who try to play a leading role and often succeed because the oppo is not organized and often has very low-level demands, such as to be heard, get a seat at the table, lower bread prices, respect Unions, prevent predatory rents, free political prisoners, etc., citizen-peaceful-type-revolt..which everyone has been trained in!
c) infiltrated foreign elements on the ground obeying other masters, foreign interference from outside the country with threats, crackdowns, sanctions, blame, tongue in cheek ‘negotiations’, to promote their mostly financial, commercial, corporate interests.
Makes a heady stew.
What is there to win but trouble? – b.
Nothing much (see Iraq today, though a few made out like bandits), but the play-book is now an institution, that is the way things go, and everyone follows along, the pundits, the UN, the world leaders, the NGOs, the opponents in Ukraine, the local bloggers, ‘leftist’ Stars, etc. etc.
Call it: Revolution by twitter, the end of the so-called democratic model, the rise of a new world order, the gasps of a failing Empire, the end of Nation states, the ultimate fight between Russia and America, the oppression of ordinary ppl, the rise of Corporations who increasingly control land, resources, ppl – all have some truth.
So everyone – everyone! who is in the game scrambles for a seat at the increasingly narrow, restricted, table.
How to prevail, dominate, is up in the air.
Posted by: Noirette | Feb 3 2014 17:47 utc | 71
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