This Pora poster shows a jackboot about to crush a cockroach, odd symbolism indeed for a political party that claims to be pro-democracy. Dig a little deeper, and one finds the jackboot may well be quite intentional.
Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students having fun in spite of the fact that – like its sister organizations in Serbia and Georgia, Otpor and Kmara – Pora is an organization created and financed by Washington.
It gets worse. Plunging into the crowd of Yushchenko supporters in Independence Square after the first round of the election, I met two members of Una-Unso, a neo-Nazi party whose emblem is a swastika. 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 that Jews had invaded Ukraine alongside the Wehrmacht in 1941.
That’s right, the poster child for US intervention, er “democracy” in Ukraine defended a virulently anti-Semitic, howling-at-the-moon lunatic article saying Jews attacked Ukraine with the Nazis.
The Ukraine elections – a dangerous fairy-tale
The Ukrainian crisis falls neatly into a long-standing mythology that a fraction of the left and a large majority of liberals in the West buy into each time the media decides to engage in a foreign policy morality tale. It is the same old story of the good – be it ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ or ‘self-determination’ – that ‘we’ bring to others. In fact this mythology is the dangerous product of a deep-seated racism in Western societies that still hasn’t come to terms with the legacy of colonialism, exploitation and genocide that ‘we’ have in reality imposed on ‘them.’
Ah yes, we, the wonderful West will bestow on other countries the benefits of democracy and capitalism – whether they want it or not. And then the West will wonder why insurgencies rise to fight them.
Was there vote fraud in Ukraine?
The preliminary report of the BHHRG’s observers on the controversial second round of the Ukrainian presidential elections challenges the widely-disseminated media image of government-sponsored fraud at the expense of an untainted opposition on the basis of first-hand reporting.
Contrary to the condemnations issued by the team of professional politicians and diplomats deployed by the OSCE mainly from NATO and EU states, the BHHRG observers did not see evidence of government-organized fraud nor of suppression of opposition media. Improbably high votes for Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich, have been reported from south-eastern Ukraine but less attention has been given to the 90% pro-Yushchenko results declared in western Ukraine.
Mainstream western media at best, as is too often the case, is only reporting part of the story.
Using its energy resources as leverage, Moscow is angling for influence in its former republics in the face of growing U.S. and NATO presence.
This article from the L.A.Times, slanted though it might be, details how Ukraine is just a pawn in a much larger game.