Thursday, March 20, 2014

Please, arrange for the feathers and wet lettuce leaves right now ...




Julie Bishop boldly joins in the worldwide stand against Vlad the impaler by imposing sanctions against twelve Russians and Ukrainians held as being instrumental in recent events in the Crimea (Crimea crisis Australia declares sanctions)

Who are these twelve? Will Vlad the Impaler be allowed to turn up to the G20?

Sorry, there are "privacy" issues.

Will the next person with a wet lettuce leaf stand up and join the queue? Anyone feeling even more strongly and armed with a feather for a good wrist slapping will be fast tracked by the door bitch and ushered into the dance party ...

Meanwhile, the pond has been imbibing a series of articles by Timothy Snyder on the situation in the Ukraine for The New York Review of Books - in no particular order, Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda (outside the paywall at the moment), Crimea: Putin vs. Reality (outside the paywall), and perhaps most interesting Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine (also outside the paywall at the moment).

The pond had been puzzled by talk that the Ukrainian protestors were Nazis. Sure the Ukraine has had a difficult past - as much due to Stalin as to Hitler - but Snyder deals with that, and ups the ante by looking at the sort of hate being cultivated in Russia at the moment, and the plan to construct a Eurasian union in opposition to the European one:

The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

And then there's the far right party, Rodina, or Motherland, and Sergei Glazyev:

In 2005 some of its deputies signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. 
Later that year Motherland was banned from taking part in further elections after complaints that its advertisements incited racial hatred. The most notorious showed dark-skinned people eating watermelon and throwing the rinds to the ground, then called for Russians to clean up their cities. Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the 1990s to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.” This book was published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence Review with a preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review echoes Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian protesters have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war.

And then there's this:

The populist media campaign for the Eurasian Union is now in the hands of Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the most important talk show in Russia, and since December also the director of the state-run Russian media conglomerate designed to form national public opinion. Best known for saying that gays who die in car accidents should have their hearts cut from their bodies and incinerated, Kiselyov has taken Putin’s campaign against gay rights and transformed it into a weapon against European integration. Thus when the then German foreign minister, who is gay, visited Kiev in December and met with Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight champion and opposition politician, Kiselyov dismissed Klitschko as a gay icon. According to the Russian foreign minister, the exploitation of sexual politics is now to be an open weapon in the struggle against the “decadence” of the European Union. 

 Following the same strategy, Yanukovych’s government claimed, entirely falsely, that the price of closer relations with the European Union was the recognition of gay marriage in Ukraine. Kiselyov is quite open about the Russian media strategy toward the Maidan: to “apply the correct political technology,” then “bring it to the point of overheating” and bring to bear “the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet.” 
Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously?

Well who knows the answer to that question.

But the pond is standing by. Why just today we'll make sure we go out and pluck a chook, and buy a large iceberg lettuce, and stand alongside bold and brave Julie Bishop and teach those Ruskis a lesson.

Allowing for privacy of course. All savage beatings with said feathers and wet lettuce leaves will of course be conducted in strictest privacy. Wouldn't want to embarrass anyone ...

What if Vlad the impaler is a bit of a Percy Grainger in private?

Oh and we'll be waving a Russian flag when Vlad the impaler turns up for the G20 ...


13 comments:

  1. DP - It's World Happiness Day!

    Be happy.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bobby McFerrin?

      Bah. Humbug.

      :)

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0pWejAnLUQ

      Go Kiwis

      Delete
    2. DP - you are a slice of heaven.

      Delete
  2. And who is the master of Ukranian literature?

    Mikhail Bulgakov.

    Try The White Guard for a brilliant story about the revolution in the Ukraine and it's effect on a family.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We Just Gotta Be Staunch. Gotta stand up against all the Baddies in the World - like Pootie.

    In the next while there'll be some hard-line hand-wringing about the G20 and whether Pootle can attend. Of course. But, that's all right and proper when you're a stauch Staunchie like the Grand Poo-Bahs of Staunchness like Tones/Jools/Hocks and the Gang.

    But. But. But. But. It won't be the same without him being there will it? G19? G19?? WTF. WTF!!! Let's see just how much lettuce has been wasted on wrist slapping when we get to G20 Carnival Time.

    Now. As to standing up to some Really Bad Stuff? Our Glorious Staunchness and his Merry Band of Conga-Dancers (not forgetting Jooles, of course) exemplify just how to be Staunch for the Goodies of their world. We are lucky indeed to have such an mindful gubbmint. They are on the side of Ooh-manity.

    There are, of course, other perspectives on our Theatre of Glorious (strike)Cudipity(/strike) (sorry 'bout that slip) Staunchness.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ban the Bomb? Liblab? Never. They require that bombs remain to deter first wave bomb targeting of their many 'joint' bomber reconnaissance, bomber command, bomber strike, and bomber staging facilities the dumb and dumber stupids have dotted about 'our' wide brown land in aid of the ongoing Marshall plan.

      http://americanus.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/agni-iii_ranges.jpg
      http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/mapinnews/agni-missile-range.html
      http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/PLA_ballistic_missiles_range.jpg
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Missile_ranges
      http://www.fdbetancor.com/2013/09/05/the-war-america-lost/
      http://d3z1rkrtcvm2b.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/top-10-defense-budgets_502915780228d.jpg
      http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Andrew_Marshall The force of this one remains strong in liblab, and wise they believe Yoda is.

      Delete
    2. It's ol' Asbestos, not NZ, that will be off to Hiroshima next month for an NPDI meet, so there. Nya-na na na-na.
      http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20140319000085

      Delete
    3. On AMSA now searching the southern Indian Ocean. Got the good oil have they? What they think in Hong Kong:
      http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20140319000138

      Delete
    4. Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation oil?

      http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/20/mh370-two-possible-objects-may-have-been-found-in-australian-search-zone

      Delete
  4. Such a pity Ukraine hasn't managed to divest itself of the definite article, at least in these pages.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ha. Speaking of divesting, and, yes, lettuce also of Bishop, for old Asbestos' private sanctioning of some unspeakable Russians is rather too late. Just where are these undefined investments exactly? And thus unspeakable:
      http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20140320000005&cid=1202
      Vlad 1, LNP 0.

      Delete
    2. As any civilised person knows, listening to Sir Laurence Olivier talk of 'the Uuukraaane' in the World at War leaves an indelible, irreversible impression ...

      Delete
  5. From ABC News:

    “Russian president Vladimir Putin could be banned from travelling to Australia for this year's G20 summit, with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop declaring options for further sanctions are still being considered.”


    and


    Steely eyed Julie Bishop: “"We are still deciding on further steps that we will take in relation to the G20,"

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-19/government-mulls-sanctions-on-russia-in-relation-to-g20/5332760


    With Australia having a negative balance of trade with Russia, Bishop’s remonstrating is just hot air. The Australian Trade Commission reveals that exports to Russia are $681m and imports $814m.

    http://www.austrade.gov.au/Export/Export-Markets/Countries/Russia/Market-profile#.Uyor0c6ylM6

    With Australia’s exports to China totaling A$78,103 million and imports at A$44,478 million I can’t see Bishops berating China for a similar incident.

    I suppose Bishop has forgotten about Tibet.

    ReplyDelete

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