Ukraine Redux

The post-revolutionary cleanup begins.

Yanukovych and his gang were absolute scum. They stole literally billions of dollars from the people through various asset-stripping front groups. The President-In-Thief built a palace with its own walk-in pirate ship, while the regime's Chief Prosecutor built his own palace.

That wasn't their worst crime. On February 18, 19 and 20, protester after protester was shot down by regime snipers in cold blood. A video compilation is here - warning: things get nightmarish about 12 minutes into this video... you have been warned.

To keep up with the latest, Ukraine's citizen journalists have a site here: http://hromadske.tv/

Another Day, Another Anti-neoliberal Revolution

The revolutions are piling up faster around here than extinct mortgage-backed securities. Ukraine's president was just sent packing, the interim government has forsworn violence, and the nation is  preparing fresh elections.

The Ukraine is just the latest in a long line of nations which have erupted since 2011. Citizens everywhere have had it with neoliberalism -- a.k.a. the endless self-enrichment of the 0.1%, and endless misery for everyone else.

However, it's worth noting that the three mainstream media narratives circulating about the Ukrainian uprising are drastically wrong.

The first false story is the boilerplate US neocon drivel about how heroic Ukrainians are overthrowing agents of neo-Soviet tyranny. This is a complete crock. Ukraine has had a flawed but functional democracy since 1991. The Yanukovych government was democratically elected, but became deeply unpopular thanks to its oligarch-friendly economic policies and increasingly thuggish authoritarianism. The people protested, and when the government responded with truncheons, the people decided to cashier the government.

The second false story has been widely propagated by Russia's state-linked media, and spins a lurid tale of how small bands of neo-Nazis are toppling a democratically elected government. This is also a complete crock. The uprising has been overwhelmingly peaceful, overwhelmingly popular, and overwhelmingly nonviolent. The only violence came from police thugs, e.g. this horrifying scene, where the police are gunning down unarmed protesters (this clip shows another incident of police firing live rounds).

Shooting unarmed protesters is unacceptable behavior for any government in the 21st century. After the massacres, the members of the Ukrainian parliament did the right thing, by voting to remove Yanukovych from office. This is entirely legal under Ukraine's Constitution, since they had the required 67% quorum. In fact, about a fifth of the parliamentarians in Yanukovych's own party deserted him and voted for his impeachment, which should give you a sense of how unpopular the government was.

The third false story is the neo-national story of how Ukraine is hopelessly split between an ethnically Ukrainian west and a Russian-speaking east. This is as false as all the others. Ukraine is a highly educated and highly urbanized country, with a centuries-old sense of national identity. Ukrainians simply want a government which delivers the public services they want and paid for, and which doesn't beat, shoot or murder its own citizens.

It's useful to highlight these three false stories, because they reveal the class anxieties of their promulgators. The first false story reveals the powerlessness of the neocons and the drastic decline of the power of the US empire. The demonstrators didn't wave US flags, they waved EU and Ukrainian flags. Clearly, the people of the Ukraine have decided that the EU's goal of democratic compromise and egalitarian reciprocity offers the best model of democratic governance out there today.

The second false story reveals the gradual decline of Putinism (a.k.a. the post-1999 class compromise between extractive-based plutocrats and nationalist-minded siloviki) as an ideology. The sheer hysteria of the Russian mainsteam media news coverage suggests that Russia's elites are alarmed that Russian citizens will start to demand more accountability, transparency and productivity from their state, and start taxing the plutocrats and reigning in elite privileges.

The third false story reveals the decline of the First World or neoliberal culture-industry, which for all its talk of borderlessness and statelessness, has always relied on highly concentrated national markets and powerful state regulators to extract maximum profits. The Ukraine is a paradise of informal media, citizen journalism, and the digital commons, a polite way of saying, its citizens have found ways to outflank neoliberalism's instruments of rule. 

This is why the doom-mongers and naysayers about the Ukraine will be proved wrong. The citizens of the Ukraine have shown tremendous collective wisdom, courage and solidarity during the whole crisis. They have already put their digital tools to good use, and removed an ineffective and corrupt government. Now begins the battle to create responsive and accountable forms of governance for all. Digital Ukraine will surprise the world!

Shout Out: Ziferblat

Never heard of the name? Yandex it. Ziferblat (the name means 'clockface' in Russian) is one of the first in what will be a whole slew of digital community spaces. That's right -- no more of your coffee money going to support greedhead CEOs, Wall Street slimelords, or gangster oligarchs. At Ziferblat, the owner is you (news coverage here, here and here). If you're a resident of the UK, or if you've got some spare cash, the London Ziferblat needs your support.