One mistake Bush seemed to do was think that Putin was a great guy. As low as an opinion of Bush I had, I assumed he would have realized that Putin was a worse guy than himself. Of course, Republicans are conveniently forgetting that when they attack Obama now. Maybe Bush liked the flat tax Putin had just implemented.
To be fair to Bush, didn't he make that comment (some of which is hardly innacurate- the bits about Putin's patriotism and so forth) at a time when Putin was a relatively unknown quantity, and indeed, in some quarters, seen as a breath of fresh air after the Yeltsin years. So, I can understand Bush trying to hit it off with Putin, especially since, at the time, there was some (albeit rather wishful) thinking that America and Russia could make good strategic partners with rgeards to some of the changes happening in Asia at the time.
Enter a lonely, courageous Ukrainian rebel, a leading investigative journalist. A dark-skinned journalist who gets racially profiled by the regime. And a Muslim. And an Afghan. This is Mustafa Nayem, the man who started the revolution. Using social media, he called students and other young people to rally on the main square of Kiev in support of a European choice for Ukraine. That square is called the Maidan, which by the way is an Arab word. During the first few days of the protests the students called it the Euromaidan. Russian propaganda called it, predictably enough, the Gayeuromaidan.
Snowstalker, I agree with you on the fundamentals. But you could word things better.
Of course, it's not a revolution if it's not the working people's revolution. Things will be awful when any government of pro-EU oligarchs start to implement EU austerity at its finest and the people is wholly disappointed and doesn't know what to do next.
But you have to at least acknowledge that the pro-Russia side is indeed worst in its actions than the pro-EU one. That doesn't mean that either of them is good for on the long-term for the working class though.
The new government is almost guaranteed to become unpopular. Just like Yushchenko did. When that happens though, at least they won't send snipers to shoot the protesters.
The next next election will result in a left-wing candidate coming to power. Hopefully the voters aren't stupid enough to make it Yanukovych again.
1. I doubt that the new government would be above violence.
2. Yanukovych is not remotely left-wing, nor is there a coherent or organized left in Ukraine.
1. What are you basing this belief on? Wishful thinking mostly.
2. Well, not to your standards, no. A candidate campaigning against austerity (regardless of how sincere) will win though.
The FN in France and the BNP in Britain are nominally anti-austerity too. Does that make them leftists?
But does that make them, as I assume you
might term them, neoliberal tools of the global elite? Not particularly.
