Georgia, South Ossetia, Russia - Part 13

Stockholm,

terms like "majority" and "want" are very hard to pin down.

The "majority" of Canadians "want" our mission to be one of reconstruction, development and humanitarian aid in Afghansitan. Yet, of the money spent on Afghanistan by our government, only 10% (gross) goes to humanitarian aid, 90% to prosecuting the war. Harper has escalated our military engagement in Afghanistan not once, but twice. Would you not say that the Harper administration has ignored our democratic right to "self-determination" - our wishes to be heard and respected? Stephen Harper: "I will never allow public opinion to influence matters of importance."

When peoples' "wants" are manipulated by the Pentagon and the George Soros Foundation - as in the case of Georgia, Ukraine and the Central Asian "Stans"? What kind of "due process" and "democracy" is this?

well, i'm going to put into this mix a couple points, so folks have it in mind.

the Russian South Stream option for gas transit may go through the neck of land between the Caspian sea and the Black sea, under the Black Sea to Europe.

this neck of land happens to include the basin of the Kuban river, which is now under Russia.

the mouth of the Kuban river was inhabited by Ukrainian people and others for over a millenium.  these people were deported and wiped out by various means in the last century.

there are a diversity of peoples in the Caucasus region, from many ancient tribes, none of which were 'Russian' until the tsars started their aggressions, continued by the soviets.

to whom do those lands 'belong' to?

-primarily nature, and there is no reason ANYONE should be building more fossil-fuel-extraction-facilitating transportation pipelines, when there's not even an attempt to build alternatives in a substantial manner.

-secondly, the various peoples who have inhabited different portions of the lands, including those like the S. Ossetians, the Chechnyans, etc.

-then we need to understand that there may be some rankling frustration amongst those who were forcibly removed earlier, like Ukrainians, particularly when Russia is using it's proposed South Stream route to bypass transit through current Ukrainian territory, with financial implications, land which Ukraine has (perhaps tenuously) managed to regain functional control of only in the last decade or so.  now with the IMF loan Ukraine is dominated by US-EU interests, with Russia pulling from the regions.

i'm not saying it's correct that Ukraine want to join NATO over this, but i think babblers need to have more understanding or sensitivity to some of the underlying concerns. 

if there was less of an operating assumption that Russia should retain or regain its 'sphere of influence' in the region, then maybe there'd be more room for Ukraine at least not to feel it needs external support for its borders.  [it's a very big maybe, given the history, and Ukraine has also been used by Europe and the west in more recent centuries as a buffer zone from the east, supported only to the extent necessary for western EU interests to flourish.]

but this note is just to address some of the dynamics as Ukraine was mentioned, really the thread topic is about Georgia.

N.Beltov, I'd be able to read your input in a better frame of mind if you used the term which Ukrainians in Ukraine, and many here, use to name their country: in English it's called 'Ukraine'.  not 'the Ukraine'.   'The Ukraine' is a holdover from Russian colonialism.  It connotes Ukraine as a region of Russia, and as in 'the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic'.  These relationships thankfully no longer exist officially.   They were horrific experiences for the peoples of Ukraine. 

How many times do I have to say this at babble???

Fidel, you are correct. Here, in the context of a discussion about Russia (in the thread title) I did neglect to talk about the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis, and by the Polish, and by the Austrians, and by the Tatars, and the slaving raids of the Turks, and...

You mentioned holdover references to Ukraine, first with imperial Russia's relationship with Ukraine and then skipped to Soviet socialist republic of Ukraine as if Ukraine was still an imperialist colony by default. And there were a number of reasons for the iron curtain being raised around those buffer countries west of Russia in the post war era. The west should have let the Russians have their revolution as I dont believe Stalinists were interested in colonizing the world, if that's what was being implied. Before the multinational corporate sponsored fascists invaded to make lebensraum of Russia, the plan was for socialism in one country.

I'm just glad we werent worried about fascism being forced on anyone. Especially not after 27, 000, 000 Soviet soldiers and 19, 000, 000 civilians were murdered by 1945. Some leftists I know are sympathetic about those numbers followed by all those zeros. It didnt occur as far back as 1932-33, but it was a significant loss of life for one country. I cant imagine what it would have been like had the Red Army not liberated Russia and Eastern Europe. Can you?  

27, 000, 000 soldiers and 19, 000, 000 civilians murdered by the fascists. What do you think about that, thanks?

Because the Russians said it would never happen again and proceeded to move Russian lines of defence westward by the same layer of countries they liberated from corporate-sponsored fascists. And few leaders in the western world objected. The Russians meant it when they vowed 'never again'

i think i've already said what i think about the millions of people massacred by both fascists and soviets, which included millions of Ukrainians. i think i've also said already what i think about any who participated in the S. Ossetia events.  several times, in fact.

you guys will just never admit that those you support have committed mass murders of millions.

and that's a problem.

thanks wrote:

i think i've already said what i think about the millions of people massacred by both fascists and soviets, which included millions of Ukrainians.

Population of Ukraine was reduced from ~41M prior to the war to ~27M by 1945. ~2, 500,000 Ukrainians were marched out of the country and worked to death as slave labourers for the fascists,  as well as several hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews deliberately murdered by rightwing death squads. And anywhere from 50M to 83 million killed and missing in sum total as a result of western world capitalism in crisis part two. Lest we forget.

Some historians will explain that with true revolution and depending on size of the regime and how desperate they are to cling to power, anywhere from several thousand to several million politicians, bureacrats and key military people will tend to remain loyal to the outgoing regime regardless. They will fight tooth and nail to maintain their own privileges and status quo.

The US has interfered in just about every Latin American country's democracy. How dare they question the integrity of Cuba's or Bolivia's constitution when warmongering plutocrats in America have trampled their own time and time again.

thanks wrote:

thanks Fidel for your accurate critique of the US. do you think that Lenin committed atrocities through his police?

wikipedia says:

Quote:

Under Lenin's rule fear was used to suppress opposition. For that function the Cheka was set up in December 1917. Felix Dzerzhinsky, its leader, exclaimed with some enthusiasm: "We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly stated".[9] Western authorities estimate that the Cheka had executed more than 250,000 people.[10][11]

Lavrentiy Beria was the last chief of security to wield so much authority as head of Soviet secret police. Khrushchev ordered Zhukov and his men to arrest Beria in 1953 and murdered not long after.

Meanwhile, the vicious empire was well underway to murdering millions and installing their own US-friendly secret police around the colonies, like Batista's secret polizia "BRAC" and righting death squad governments around Latin America and the world and with the help of other capitalist countries. The total body count attributable to capitalist economics and its imperialist masters policies around the world is truly breathtaking.

Is it best to crack an egg in the middle, the top or bottom? Should it be done along the width or length?

Ossetia and Abkhazia who?

The reason why there is such a storm in babble over these places is the importance that capitalist imperialism has placed on them.

The west produced lots of numbers during the cold war. And the estimates didnt seem to corroborate from one to the next. Some survivors of the labour camps in Siberia said the pay wasnt very good during the war, and food became scarce. Very many Jews, however, have credited Stalin sending them to Siberia with saving them from the Nazis and what were the first mass exterminations in Russia and Ukraine.

New question: What do you think about more than [url=http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/5051/canada-admits-letting-in-2-000-... Ukrainian waffen SS troopers given refuge in Canada[/url] after the war?

Fidel do you have sources for the statements you've made about Siberia in #77?

If you are comparing what Stalin did in his time to what Russia did recently concerning Ossetia, Abkhazia, Georgia and Ukraine, you are comparing apples to oranges.

Lenin's or Stalin's (he was Georgian, by the way) regime is one thing, Russia today is something else.

Russia, then as now, wants to be strong and have stability.

In the late 1990s, Madeline Albright publicly stated that Russia was too large and had too many resourses, more than it needed. This summed up the Clinton administration's view of the subject.

The actions of the Pentagon, the W. Bush administration, the State Department and the George Soros Foundation has been to try to foment instability and a further break up of Russia.

The actions of both (modern) Russia and the U.S.A. are financially motivated. Needless to say, the actions of Russia are also politically motivated.

thanks wrote:

Fidel do you have sources for the statements you've made about Siberia in #77?

Various things I've read, really. A friend of the family came to Canada from the border region of Russia and Poland. She spoke both Polish and Russian.  She told us that her father actually volunteered to go to Siberia. He was a physician. Both her parents survived the war. You could try googling "father Stalin"

[url=http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w45/msg00079.htm]L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin![/url]

Quote:

"L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin!" details the birth of the first Jewish homeland since the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. No, not the State of Israel... the Jewish Autonomous Region, created by Stalin in a previously-unsettled stretch of land on Siberia's Far Eastern border in April 1928. Although geographically closer to Seoul than Moscow, the Jewish Autonomous Region (or J.A.R., as it became known) attracted Jewish settlers from across the Soviet Union and even as far away as the United States, Argentina, and Palestine. The J.A.R. was the first place in the world where Yiddish culture thrived, and by 1948 the Jewish population peaked at 45,000 (roughly one-quarter of the region's total demographics). The J.A.R. was home to Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publications and synagogues.

your friend of the family was very fortunate.  many others weren't.

i see that you're presenting materials which support a view that Stalin did some nice things, and i don't know much about the Jewish Autonomous Region which that item refers to.

yes, the Holocaust was horrible. 

before that, the Holodomor was horrible.  tens of millions of people were brutally killed from mass slaughters and forced starvation, and throughout the soviet period in slave camps (pay from Stalin for slave labourers was torture, rape and early death).

some managed to avoid these horrors.  some even benefitted.

I think it's really important for people to state that any benefits (enjoyed by some in Europe, the USSR, or by those in other countries who got support from, or did deals with soviet leaders) were based on the slaughter, torture and starvation of millions, mostly the rural poor in Ukraine and in other subjugated countries.

If people want to talk about 'the communist strength of '32/'33', or soviet support for those resisting US imperialism, or Nazi fascism for that matter, it's important to acknowledge that soviet 'strength' was built on the bodies of tens of millions of dead civilians.

the soviets also benefitted from the subjugation of peoples under the tsars and western european elites: after a brief period when some tried to reasseret self-determination, they were squashed by Lenin et al.  The soviets moved into an existing system of domination over the lands and peoples who had been fighting oppression from Moscow for centuries, and basically replaced tsarist oppressors with soviet oppressors.  The suffering of civilians continued, further decimated by the soviet atrocities, then nazi atrocities, then again after by more soviet atrocities.

it was awful for people to experience the Holocaust, the Holodomor, Nazi or Soviet terror, and perhaps much worse to have experienced both.

i just wish that people who speak about the benefits from the soviet regime speak at the same time of those who paid the price for those benefits.

Fidel, I think i've said a few times already that people of any background, Ukrainian, Jewish, or any others that have been involved in war crimes, including those responsible for bombing civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, should be tried for war crimes.

i know very little about Mao. 

i can't say what might or might not have happened if the soviets hadn't 'liberated' Eastern Europe.  I can say that if the Soviets hadn't earlier killed Ukraine's self-determination when they were starting to get on their feet, perhaps fascism might have been nipped in the bud.  strong, self-reliant and generous countries are a good antidote to those whom banker-generated poverty pushes to fascism.

[url=http://friendlydictators.blogspot.com/]Friendly trading card #17[/url]

In my midnight confessions
When I tell all the world that I love you
In my midnight confessions
When I say all the things that I want to
I love you

thanks wrote:

i can't say what might or might not have happened if the soviets hadn't 'liberated' Eastern Europe. 

Hitler planned to make living space of Russia. Hitler and the Nazis began to realize it would be a war of annihilation against Soviet communism when they were calculating how and where the German army would be fed and fuel obtained while marauding through Russia. Some Baltic and Ukrainian collaborators thought that by cooperating with the nazis that they would be given preferential treatment. But there isnt much evidence for it with Hitler planning to enslave the general non-German populations of occupied countries. As an example, an estimated 2.5 million Ukrainians were marched out of Ukraine and worked to death in slave labour conditions. Hitler once said something in one of his squawking oratories about setting the whole world on fire. And throngs of his worshippers answered him with, sieg HEIL!! sieg HEIL!! sieg HEIL!!

And some of what youre relaying to us about the evils of Soviet communism sounds somewhat similar to the things Joseph Goebbels said in radio broadcasts to European countries in the 1930's - that Stalin was exterminating the middle classes of the Soviet Union. And that the rest of the world would be next. Of course, the Red Army stopped the Nazis and liberated Eastern Europe. And Stalin was named man of the year, and "biggest winner" of the last century by Time Magazine.

i'm tired Fidel, words are blurring..talk later

Fidel is right.

http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1961/05/war.htm

"You mean, it's too bad that he was a prolific liar and Nazi propagandist broadcasting all those things about Russia and Stalin."

Fidel, I don't know all of what Goebbels said, i was commenting on your comment that there was a critique of Stalin's exterminations of people, which should have been critiqued, and it was too bad it wasn't a critique coming from the US or UK or anyone else.

Do you still not believe that Stalin murdered millions of peoples, mostly the rural poor, but as well dissident middle class people?