Enjoy Your Kool-Aid

There are times you come across something and you are almost at a loss for words. Here is one of those times. An author's take on the "US led coup" of the Ukraine Only sleepwalkers believe in fairytale revolutions

Where to begin......well I'll let the man speak for himself, to a point.

There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the right stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more.

Wow! One sentence in and he's already unloaded a pile of crap. By that logic the "right" must have supported Stalin and every other two-bit thug. There was never any wavering from the right on wether authoritarian soviet regimes should be overthrown, there was plenty of ambiguity on the left however.

This week two British newspapers - the anti-Iraq war Independent and the pro-Iraq war Telegraph - excitedly announced a "revolution" in Ukraine, while in the US the right-wing Washington Times welcomed "the people versus the power".

Wow! The Washington Times seems to set the agenda for news coverage in the US. Who knew?

Two million anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically ignored, but a few tens of thousands in Kiev are proclaimed to be "the people", while the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.

Oh cry me a river. The last time I checked plenty of Labour MP's and many from other parties have taken up the anti-war crowd's cause. Sure, it wasn't enough to change the policy, but welcome to democracy, you often won't get your way. Learn to live with it, please!

The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.

Oh is "spontaneity" the standard? How about the "spontaneity" of a weeks or months in the making anti-war march? And gee, with all the equipment and color cooridinated clothing they had right there at their disposal you would have thought there was a presidential election going on or something. Oh, thats right, THERE WAS ONE!

We are told that a 96 per cent turnout in Donetsk, the home town of Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of over 80 per cent in areas which support Yushchenko are not. Nor are votes for Yushchenko of well over 90 per cent in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved only in two.

And whereas Yanukovich was officially credited with 54 per cent of the vote, the Western-backed President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled 96.24 per cent of the vote in January. The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it "brought the country closer to meeting international standards".

You're right. The blanket condemnation of these elections from all European observers must be a vast US led conspiracy, because none of those country's ever do anything but what the US tells them. But there is still the possibility that space aliens made them do it as well....hmm. Why limit ourselves to just one conspiracy theory? Let's embrace them all!!

They were unembarrassed about their allegiance, perhaps because last year Yushchenko and his allies stood up for the Socialist party newspaper, Silski Visti, after it ran an anti-Semitic article claiming Jews had invaded Ukraine alongside the German army in 1941.

Yushchenko, Moroz and their oligarch ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, cited a court order closing the paper as evidence of the Government's desire to muzzle the media. In any other country, support for anti-Semites would be shocking; in this case, our media do not even mention it.

Yes, because Lord knows that there has been nothing going on in the world over the last year or two that should have been more important to people in the US and UK then the workings of the socialist press in Ukraine. Its funny, in this country supporting the right of newspapers to publish unpopular things, even if you disagree with them, has always been a hallmark of the left, not the right. Maybe its differnt in Britain.

I like Anne Applebaum's take on this piece in the Washington Post: The Freedom Haters It's a good read. I'll just quote a little from her summing up:

The larger point, though, is that the "it's-all-an-American-plot" arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time: At least a part of the Western left -- or rather the Western far left -- is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.