The Genocide(s) on the Horizon

I made a comment on another site recently that it appears a good deal of the "left" of this country is working itself up into a genocidal rage at Russia for crimes real and imagined and not limited to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an earlier comment, I suggested that Russia's invasion, aka "Putin's War", may indeed prove to be his fatal error.

Marching to Moscow, burning the Kremlin and hanging Putin seems to be one of the animating fantasies of the Azov-Nazis defending Ukraine-Kiev. Where does this come from? Well, of course, Hitler failed in his great march across the steppe to Moscow as did Napoleon before him. The Grand Imperialists never seem to be able to conquer Mother Russia, but the urge to do so seems implacable among a certain sort, and so, apparently, here we go again.

The Ukie-Nazis are doing the fighting and largely losing against Russia, but all the USandNato players are doing their part to fund them and supply them and keep the fighting going "to the last Ukrainian." So then my question is "what is the purpose of depopulating and destroying much of Ukraine? Cui bono as it were?

I've noted that the Ukrainian population declined some 30% after the fall of the Soviet Union, and since the invasion, another 25% or so have fled to other parts of Eastern Europe, and some back to Mother Russia itself. Parts of cities and villages have been destroyed. Planting and harvesting has been disrupted. There is no going back to the status quo ante, and it is my suspicion that many of those who have fled the fighting won't go back to Ukraine, either. 

In the meantime, genocidal forces are let loose. Zelensky claims (constantly) that the Russians are committing genocide in Ukraine. There is no evidence that this is the case. On the other hand, Putin has made the claim that Ukraine has committed genocide against Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. The eight year Ukrainian war against the Donbas oblasts (and now republics) is cited as evidence, together with the appalling massacres in Odessa and Mariupol in 2014 following the coup against the government of Viktor Yanukovych. Russia, on the other hand, has vowed to "denazify" Ukraine, with particular emphasis on liquidating the Azov Regiment and other neo-nazi elements  of the Ukrainian state. The threat is not to Ukrainians per se, but to groups within the Ukraine who espouse Nazi and neo-Nazi ideology -- and presumably who take action to violently enforce their will.

Which then leads to revenge.

A good many of our overlords seem to like it that way.

We see genocidal rage building in many other areas of the world as well. The United States is no exception. The urge to kill The Other in the US has long been paramount. One could say it is foundational. Now we have a situation where practically everyone is The Other to someone else, a level of alienation and lack of community that may be unprecedented. The internet provides a refuge of sorts, and the simulation of community, which has, from time to time led to extraordinary acts of violence int the real world, acts that by their nature can be characterized as genocidal -- and would be considered so but for the relatively small numbers of targeted groups murdered by the killers.

The internal stresses and tensions could metastasize at any time into generalized mayhem. What then? It seems we've been conditioned to accept it. "Nothing can be done." And our lords and masters are fine with it. So long as it doesn't touch them.

For now, crises compound without much mitigation. Society pretty much everywhere is enduring a stress test. Some will survive. Many won't -- possibly including our own. 

Odessa Massacre -- May 2, 2014

It's an event seared in my memory. On May 2, 2014, I was able to watch several livestreams from Odessa covering what was expected to be "something interesting" in Ukraine following the February Euromaidan coup in Kiev. 

Apparently two competing rallies were planned in the center of the city, one in favor of the Euromaidan coup and one opposed, and both were attracting young hooligans and soccer fans. Or so it seemed. One of the livestreamers at the rallies filmed the preparation of Molotov cocktails and showed some of the participants armed with pipes, bats and at least in one case a pistol. Militia members were part of the crowd. Police momentarily tried to keep the opposing groups apart, and then seemed to melt away, allowing -- encouraging? -- the groups to brawl in the streets.  

Some distance away, at the Trades Union House, a protest encampment had been built on a broad plaza in front of the building. It had been there for some time, occupied mostly by middle age and older Russian speaking opponents of the Kiev regime. At the time, Odessa had a majority Russian speaking population, and many were deeply opposed to what they saw as an American inspired and funded fascist/Nazi takeover of their country. 

This opposition was widespread in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, and it wasn't unknown in Kiev and other parts of the country. Most of the country had long been part of the Tsarist Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union. Bits and pieces had been added over time, taken from Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. During WWII, the Ukraine had been overrun and occupied by Nazis, and Ukrainian collaborators especially in the West of the country were commonplace. Ukrainians participated in numerous massacres of Jews, Communists, Gypsies and other undesirables during the Nazi occupation, and notoriously volunteered as concentration camp guards. 

None of this history was mysterious prior to 2014, nor was it controversial in the West. Ukrainian Nazis and Nazi collaborators were a real thing. They survived after the War and became an internal destabilizing force against the restoration of Soviet power over the territory. As such they were apparently supported by covert forces in the West, much as former Nazis had been rehabilitated and been granted favors and asylum in the West including the United States.

Ethnic Russians and Russian speakers had deep roots and had long lived, worked and loved in Ukraine, primarily in what was called Novorossyia, New Russia, the region east of the Dnieper River absorbed by the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great (a German princess for what it is worth who married and later had assassinated the Russian Tsar... but that's another story...)

Russification was often ham-handed and could be brutal under both the Tsars and the Soviets. On the other hand, Ukrainians were included in the Imperial regime and were fundamental to the Soviet regime. Numerous Politburo members and even the Party Chairman Khrushchev were Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian SSR was a member of the United Nations even though it was at the time an integral part of the USSR.

Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine along with many of the former Soviet republics and Eastern European satrapies became independent, left to fend for themselves without central control or support from Moscow -- with interesting results.

Some maintained close ties with Russia; others became fiercely anti-Russia and tied to the West. 

And from appearances and all accounts, the West has been trying to capture Ukraine, or at least cleave it off from Russian influence, since independence. 

It hasn't gone well. The 2014 Euromaidan occupation and protests in Kiev were part of a series of color revolutions that sought the elimination of ethnic Russian political influence and control within the Ukrainian government, and once the Yanukovych regime was overthrown, that objective seemed to be complete. 

Nazi-descendant militias roamed free and some were incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces with the upshot of the massacres in Odessa and Mariupol and the nearly total ethnic cleansing of Ukraine west of the Dnieper. Russians and Russian speakers were driven out or murdered. The objective was an ethno-state aligned with Nato and the US to act as a bulwark in opposition to Russia.

The point of a Nato cordon of allies along the western Russian border is the eventual dismemberment of the Russian Federation.

It's all very bizarre. 

The massacres were triggers for a civil war that has now become a general war in Ukraine between Russia and the West that has the potential to turn into a nuclear holocaust for no conceivable reason at all. The victims of the Odessa Massacre were among the first to feel the effects of the Nazi madness unleashed in Ukraine and by implication throughout Europe and soon, we can be sure, in North America and elsewhere. 

This truly may be the opening of Ragnarok. Longed for. Inevitable. Twilight of the Gods.

How Close Are We to Nuclear Annihilation?

I'm seeing more and more commentary opining that we are well and truly into WWIII, the War some were claiming Hillary was going to start with her no-fly zone suggestion over Syria c. 2016.

She explained, perhaps inartfully, that a no-fly zone over Syria would only happen via negotiation with Russia, and she was not proposing a unilateral declaration. But of course, as is the way with political campaigns, her clarification was ignored, as was, interestingly, Trump's proposal for a refugee "safety-zone" -- essentially a no-fly zone by another name. Oh well, water under the bridge.

The point, I think, about Hillary was that she was belligerent toward Russia. Trump was anything but.

Anti-Russia belligerence was part of US government foreign policy from way back, at least tracing to the depths of the Cold War, intensifying rather remarkably during the Obama regime. It was painfully obvious that Obama and Putin did not get along, but why was never entirely clear. At times it seemed like there was a deep seated racist component, one I may have noticed and written about at the time but I'm too lazy to look it up right now. 

For what it's worth, there has long been a foreign policy outline that involves the dismemberment of the Russian Federation -- already much smaller and weaker than the Soviet Union -- and essentially remaking the parts into Western satrapies for easy exploitation and control. Russia has resources, after all, and according to our rulers or those who rule our rulers, those resources are "ours."

An independent Russia must be destroyed. 

China would be next.

This plan goes back decades, and you can bet the Kremlin has been well aware of it. 

It wasn't implemented -- at least not fully -- because Russia is armed with nuclear weapons and was believed to be skilled and ready to use them if the Motherland was existentially threatened.

Well here we are.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February was quite a surprise to practically everyone. Many simply didn't think Putin was that stupid. Even Zelensky and his backers in Kiev didn't think it would happen, and when it did, they were caught on the back foot. That's putting it mildly.

I said at the outset that either Kiev would capitulate quickly, or Russia would "go Grozny" on their asses. Grozny is the Chechen capital that was leveled and its defenders annihilated by Russia in two Chechen Wars in the '90s. Tens of thousands are said to have perished. 

Kiev did not capitulate but become even more belligerent as the invasion proceeded. There is considerable evidence that Russia has experienced significant losses while inflicting considerable damage on Ukrainian targets. Large parts of several cities have been reduced to ruin, mullions have been displaced -- about 10% of the population has become refugees in other parts of Europe -- and in essence, the Ukrainian economy, which wasn't much to begin with except for the looting by Ukrainian oligarchs, has ground to a halt.

Nuclear saber rattling has been going on since the outset of the invasion; threats from Moscow, retaliatory threats from the US and Nato. 

Of course those of us who remember the history of Cold War saber rattling are aware that we came very close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union several times during the era, and the whole routine of preparing for and (possibly) surviving if the button should be pushed was part of conditioning the population "just in case." I still have a Civil Defense pamphlet, "Surviving Nuclear War," and there are a couple of old radios around the place with CONELRAD emblems ("tune to 640 or 1240 on your AM radio dial for news and information in the event of an emergency..."). Together with Duck and Cover drills, air raid siren tests, and the location of public shelters and the building of backyard shelters this was what people of a Certain Age lived with for decades of their childhood and adolescence. 

I remember calculating how far from likely Bomb targets I lived, and it was never more than a few miles. 

Most of that conditioning faded as the Cold War ended -- or we thought it did. 

The various invasions and attacks since 2001, however, revived some of the terrifying images of the past, and the relentless marches to war the US and Nato have engaged in against enemies real and imagined, far and near have been deeply troubling to many of us.

Why this constant drumbeat of War and More War?

And why war against Russia?

Of course, it's been the Plan All Along. One day it had to happen. 

And here it is.

So how close are we to nuclear annihilation? I'd say very.

The war in Europe is creeping beyond Ukraine, and there are growing calls for Ukraine to attack and march to Moscow, burn the Kremlin, hang Putin, blah, blah, blah. It's not likely, but war-fever does strange things to people, and there is some intense war-fever among certain political interests. Ukraine and Zelensky are way over the edge. Bloodlust seems to be their sole animating force these days.

As they say, this can't end well.

We live considerably farther from likely targets now, so there's that, but the prevailing winds will still blow, and we are still downwind. Oh well!

No is no perceptible anti-war/anti-nuke movement today. I think people are just weary of... everything. The pandemic, increasing precarity, inflation, war and rumors of war, climate catastrophe. There seems no end to it all, and no escape either. 

So what's to be done? 

I've said that the nuclear trigger won't necessarily be pulled by either the US and Nato or by Russia. There are other nuclear players in the world, and some of them are getting antsy. If, say, Israel or North Korea (among other players) decide the time is ripe to rock and roll with nukes, how will the major players respond? 

We think of ourselves as the center of the Universe, but things can happen at the margins (the butterfly effect) that can change everything in a twinkling. The US and Nato are playing with fire and gasoline in their proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine, but something might well happen elsewhere that could trigger a global war of annihilation that would actually result in a longed for (by some) population drop. And then...?

This roller coaster ride we've been on may be nearing the end. 

OK

So the Ukraine Thing is becoming very strange, turning inside out. Just what is going on, we don't know, partly because there is almost no non-narrative based on the ground reporting, no livestreaming, no embeds, no honesty, either. 

It's all propaganda, every bit of it, at least up to now. This is the ninth-tenth-thirteenth-fourteenth day since the Russian incursion. We've seen the same building blow up again and again, the same satellite still image of the same long-long convoy stalled outside Kiev/Kyiv, the same crying woman in the subway, the same neonatal unit in the bomb shelter, the same hospital bombed to smithereens, the same pregnant woman carried away from the ruins... well, it's the same over and over.

Now we're told that the assault on the nuclear plant wasn't quite what we were told before. The reactors were never in danger, there was no radiation leakage, the Ukrainian staff is still on the job, the Russians are in control of the plant, nothing to see here, move along. 

And so on. Again and again, "Move along."

One thing I've made note of repeatedly is that Putin's grievances have some basis in fact, and yet that does not justify an invasion. USandNato propaganda insists there is no basis for Russian grievances. No Nazis, no genocide, no oppression of Russian speakers, and furthermore Ukraine has always existed, and Ukrainians and Russians are totally different people. This is absurd.

Ukraine is a democracy dagnabbit! 

Uh. No.

But let's get some clarity, ok? If our rulers actually believe the bullshit they're spewing, then we've got to come to grips with some things and we better do it quick. I think it was DW that did one of the more interesting "fact checks" on Putin's grievances, declaring them all "false" and yet in the little explanations, admitting they were all at least partly true.

Let's see if I can find it.

Ja, here we go.  

First grievance and objective: "Denazify" Ukraine.

DW declares it "false" because someone in Sweden said that Zelensky is Jewish and was elected by an overwhelming majority (true)... therefore.... what? There are no nazis in the government and military of Ukraine?

Wellllllll, not exactly.

The entire propaganda apparatus in the USandNato uses the formula that because Zelensky is Jewish and was elected by an overwhelming majority, Putin's complaint about Ukrainian nazis is bogus.

Let's see what DW says further about it, tho: "there are far-right groups..." and during the Euromaidan uprising "individual far right groups" (whatever that means) were involved, but today, far-right groups like the notorious Azov Battalion are integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard, so.... what? Not nazis now? Or what? 

And while there have been scandals regarding the far-right in the Ukrainian military they were exposed, So... so...? Again, they admit a basis for the complaint but deny its validity because "Zelensky is Jewish."

This is absurd, but oh well. Let's go on.

Complaint: Nato troops advancing toward Russia's borders. Is this true? DW says it's "misleading" and then admits it is true, getting more true every day, only it's not in formation, so what's the problem, eh?  Ukraine is not (or was not) being admitted to Nato despite all the alliances, bases, and training with Nato that were in place and expanding prior to the Russian invasion. It wasn't just Ukraine. Oh no. 14 formerly Warsaw Pact countries have joined Nato, four of them bordering Russia, and they all have Nato troops and ordnance on their borders. 

Complaint: Russia must defend itself from Nato aggression and the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk under the UN Charter chapter 7 article 51.

This gets tricky. Russia launched a preventive war which UN charter allows under very limited circumstances which Russia has invoked but Nato denies. Russia claims that Nato activities and troops on its borders are a provocation and a threat; Nato's activities in Ukraine were explicitly a threat to Russia, and the Zelensky government made other explicit threats (including reacquiring nuclear weapons) which precipitated action by Russia against Ukraine.

This argument is essentially the same one the USandNato used against Afghanistan and Iraq, the first with UN concurrence, the second without. Does this constitute "justification?" Well, obviously, if the USandNato does it, yes. If Russia or any other nation (except Israel) does it, no.

Complaint: Genocide by Ukrainian nazis against Russian and Russian speaking civilians. Again, tricky. "Genocide" has a very specific definition in international law, and what the Ukrainian civil government, armed forces and militias have been doing since 2014 technically fits that definition, though the scale of "genocide" in Ukraine is debatable. And it is genocide against Russians and Russian speakers within the borders of Ukraine. Indeed, since the start of the Russian incursion, it's only gotten worse, with rumors of nazi-ish death squads activated to liquidate pesky-Ruskies who've not fled to Russia or the Donbas already.

There is no genocide according to DW because there haven't been any documented "mass killings" of Russians and Russian speakers -- despite the fact that there have been -- and even if there weren't, "genocide" is not at all limited to Babi Yar type mass executions of many thousands at one go or to Auschwitz type extermination camps. Of course DW -- and all the rest of Western propaganda media -- knows this, but what they know doesn't matter when the truth is to be masked no matter what in service to a narrative.

And that narrative says that Russia's behavior is bad -- it is. That narrative says that Ukraine's behavior is above reproach -- it isn't. That narrative claims that the USandNato are doing their utmost on behalf of enabling Ukraine to defend itself without going directly against Russia -- debatable. And that Ukraine and the USandNato have never, ever done anything to antagonize the Russian bear -- demonstrably false.

I've been an anti-war activist since Vietnam, and I'm not about to change my stripes now. I have no brief for any side in this conflict. They're all wrong and they're all doing wrong in a very dangerous Guns of August - Missiles of October manner for which there is no excuse, none. Our ruling classes are out of their minds, following urges that date back very far but which are invalid in the current circumstance. In fact, there are so many far more important things they should be dealing with but utterly refuse to. They want war and they will have it come what may.

We the rabble have no choice in the matter.

Welcome to Eternity.

The Russia Thing

I don't think I've addressed The Russia Thing more than peripherally on this site. It always struck me as stupid to be blunt about it. Russians certainly had a hand in shaping some opinions about candidates in the 2016 election, particularly Hillary, but so what? So did a lot of other interests, national and corporate, and it shouldn't matter in the larger scheme of things that Russia and Russians were also involved. That's part of the political game in this country and it has been as long as I've been alive. And no doubt it has been true as long as the US has been a nation.

When you look at it from a historical perspective, the focus on Russia's involvement to the exclusion of just about every other national and corporate involvement is distinctly odd. Not only were they not the only ones attempting to gain advantage from the election (of Trump, but it's more complex than that), they weren't necessarily the main foreign interest in the outcome of the election. Oh no, far from it.

But in order to understand what happened, we need to understand what was going on. Trump wasn't expected to win. Not even he expected to win. The outcome was a surprise and a shock to the entire electoral system including the funders, media, and candidates. The voters were largely appalled. How did this happen?

It's not easy to sort out what was happening that led to such an unexpected outcome, but among the things I was aware of was a very concerted online effort to influence the influencers. This is tricky; it isn't self evident that influencing the influencers had much of an effect, but I think it did.

"Stop Hillary" was a really big thing online. Bernie was the great white hope, but he failed miserably. Whether or not he was robbed by the DNC and Hillary's partisans is a question I choose not to get into. I'll just say from personal knowledge that the Democratic Party apparatus is tailor made for selected outcomes, and there isn't a whole lot insurgents (or Bernie) can do about it. In a lot of ways, the Party has fossilized around a set of rules and requirements that almost always ensure that a selected candidate achieves the presidential nomination, no matter what. And who does the selection? A committee of old timers, in effect a Politburo. Hillary was the foregone nominee, despite the fact that she was opposed a large minority of party voters. Realistically, so was Bernie. If they'd had their druthers, I'm not sure who the Democratic primary voters would have chosen. The problem was that none of the 2016 primary candidates really represented the interests of a majority of the party's voters. The factional split between Hillary partisans and Bernie partisans was unbridgeable. The Party apparat went with Hillary and the rest is history.

The factional split left a wide opening for "influencers" to do their thing, and I saw it happening in real time online.  Of course it had happened before, but not to the extent I was witnessing during the 2016 election. What I saw was a relatively limited anti-Hillary drumbeat -- from somewhere, initially I thought domestic, but it turned out to be generated in Eastern Europe, with a source apparently in Russia -- hammering away at her many flaws and being picked up and amplified by all kinds of online sites and eventually by the mass media. I noticed it seemed to start with apparent Bernie partisans, particularly the canard that Hillary was going to start WWIII -- which to this day is repeated as an article of faith.

I say "apparent Bernie partisans" because I don't think they really were. I think they were using Bernie's campaign as a launch pad, but they had no interest in his winning the nomination or the election. They wanted to stop Hillary. Whatever it took to do so.

When I started seeing "Macedonian teenager" memes showing up on a number of supposedly "progressive" sites, and not long after that in the mass media, I really questioned what was going on. Obviously these kids in Macedonia (which was initially where these memes were thought to be coming from) had a more or less direct line to the internet backchannels which in turn led directly to mass media backchannels. And then right out to the public.

It wasn't just the "$100,000 in Facebook ads" that the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency purchased. Oh my no. Those ads probably had no effect at all. What was having an effect was the meme generators, wherever they were located, trouncing Hillary for "starting WWIII", for Libya, for Syria, for Iraq, for "super predators," for her devotion to neo-liberalism, for her supposed illnesses, for Bengazi, for those damned emails, etc.

Here's the thing. It wasn't coming from the Trump campaign (which was just riding a little bitty wave), and it wasn't coming from the Bernie campaign, either. There had to be some other source. It was relentless and repetitious to the point of complete predictability.

Hillary, the Arch-Bitch, had to be stopped at any cost.

By whom? Why? I think those questions are yet to be answered. "Russia" is not the Answer, though it may be part of it.

Trump of course benefited from an enormous amount of free publicity, but it was widely thought that was OK because he would come across so badly. That kind of thinking was critically in error, but it seems to have been the underlying thought process of those who were giving him so much free airtime.

On the other hand, Hillary was given no quarter, she was criticized relentlessly for everything, and she got much less airtime, even as she spent wildly to buy ads and positive coverage -- or any coverage. She was thought to be the uncatchable frontrunner. Trump was being boosted to make it a horserace, but Hillary was going to win, hands down. Everyone was certain of it. Absolutely certain.

And yet she didn't. What happened? Officially, what happened was that less than 80,000 votes in three states meant that Trump won the Electoral College while Hillary won millions more popular votes. Yet again, the Electoral College handed the presidency to the candidate with fewer popular votes.

Among the factors that led to that outcome were voter suppression in Wisconsin and Michigan, to the tune of several hundred thousand eligible voters who either not permitted to vote or whose votes weren't counted. Pennsylvania had some very hinky voting machines that could not be audited. A recount was tried in all three states, and it was shown to be impossible. Jurisdictions refused to cooperate, machines could not be audited, votes could not be verified; in some cases there were no paper trails or any trail at all. You had to take the results on faith because there was no way to verify the counts.

Then there was the issue of "interference." Prior to the election we were told that the Intelligence Community and DHS would be closely monitoring the election for any "interference." Uh oh. To me, that meant they intended to interfere. I wouldn't put it past them. They could certainly do it. As I pondered that possibility, it occurred to me that a faction of those entities would very much prefer a jocular, macho racist idiot in the White House to Hillary, no matter what we might think. Indeed, there was an obviously strong anti-Hillary streak among the macho agencies, plain as day. Particularly true of DHS, but I wouldn't say that the other three letter agencies were much in favor of her. If they were going to monitor, there would be little or nothing to prevent them from jiggering the results themselves if they wanted to.

And when the tiny number of votes in three states made the ultimate difference, I nodded sagely. When it proved impossible to fully recount or verify those votes, I figured it was obvious.

But my thinking about it is distinctly in the minority.

"Russia!" was announced as the culprit. OK. Russia and Russians did do things, yes, and Trump is in thick with Russians and (especially) Russian money, things that were almost never mentioned during the campaign. But did Russia cause Trump's success? Uh, no.

No, what was happening was much more complex. What Russians and Israelis and many other foreign interests were doing -- and are still doing as far as I can tell -- is using every tactic they can to influence the influencers, hoping to set public policy in the US favorable to themselves. The people -- we -- have almost nothing to do with it.

And I suspect the focus on Russia! is part of an influence campaign itself.

We've been in a very decadent phase of the Republic, and realistically, we're near the endgame. Trump won't be Emperor, any more than Julius Caesar was. But his successor likely will be. The Republic will become extinct. And you know what? Most people will say "Good riddance."

Why All the Lies?

I haven't been following the Russia Thing closely. It doesn't resonate with me. I see it more as Get-Back for previous politically motivated "investigations" over nothing much that is intended to cripple the serving administration. We've seen it over and over again, from Watergate -- which was never all it was cracked up to be (except for the lies, of course) to now.

That said, I really wonder why the Trump crew believes it is necessary to lie about their Russian contacts. So far, nothing more than modestly rotten has been revealed, and what has been unearthed seems more like "biznez" than anything else.

That doesn't mean I approve of any of it; it's mostly gansgster bullshit, and that doesn't please me at all. But it is not materially different than the way the government has long operated. Sadly.

I suppose in that context, the lies are part of the normal process. If something that stinks is going on in government or biznez then you lie about it, pure and simple. It's the way the game is played, and it doesn't much matter what the truth really is. The game is to lie and get away with it.

From appearances, the Trump regime isn't doing very well except with their most devoted supporters. Their lies are transparent.

How does it end?

As The Russia Thing Continues to Metastasize

This long ago got boring I know, but the Russia Thing continues to grow and flourish on the internet and throughout the media firmament; it is this summer's sharks and missing white women story on steroids.

Of course no matter its ever broadened net, no matter how many Trump or Clinton campaign advisors and staff it ensnares, ultimately it appears there will be no there there for the simple reason that it's not meant for a denouement, it's meant to keep the Rabble (and some of their Betters) entertained and distracted while the serious business of neoLibCon looting and pillage and slaughter continues relentlessly.

The Juggernaut must not be interfered with in any way.

Barring the Who-Knows-What, it won't be.

Power Play

The Comey Thing is without doubt an effort by the Trump regime to consolidate power and neuter any effort by the so-called "deep state" to interfere with the regime's exercise of power.

Analysts are wetting themselves trying to pin this or that meaning or significance to the firing of James Comey by Trump, but they have so far missed the bigger picture.

There have been several opportunities for a coup or coup-lite since the election, and each of them has been whiffed. Those opportunities are disappearing. The regime is learning how to consolidate and exercise power, and soon, it will be almost impossible to get out from under that power. We saw it happen in almost the same way with Bush/Cheney.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, Trump is doing what he needs to do.

From practically every other point of view, it's a disaster.

It may be a disaster we have no way to avoid.

The Russia Thing -- Out of Control

It's always struck me as bizarre that the Russia Thing -- whatever it's morphed into at the moment -- is the crutch the internal governmental "resistance" to Trump is leaning on. Why that? And why build Russia and Putin up into such Enemies?

The echoes of anti-Soviet propaganda campaigns have been strong all along, but never do we hear the answer to the question "Why?" Nor did we back in the day for that matter. It was just a Thing. We hated and feared the Soviets because we did. They were the Evil and we were the Good and that was that.

And we saw how silly, dangerous and bloody this scholarly concept was in the war in Southeast Asia, wherein the clash of Good v Evil led to the devastation of a whole region and the extermination of millions of innocents as well as combatants, and the supposed Evil won, only to transform itself into one of the US's economic allies in the region, and to prove itself to be far less Evil than the propagandists had us believe.

But then, the hippies knew it all along.

So here we are, far down the road to another contest with the Evil, this time in the person of Vladimir Putin and his iron fisted rule over the long-suffering Russian peasants. Is the Czar or the Party Chairman? It's hard to tell, given the fog of falsehood we are immersed in.

Of course he is neither, and Russia is no actual threat to the United States, nor to Europe, nor, in fact to any likely western target at all. And yet, here we are in the midst of another furious propaganda campaign making Putin out to be the Devil Himself, and the Russian Federation into the Greatest Enemy in History Since Hitler.

Why?

"Taking down" the Russian government and dismembering the Russian Federation for the pleasure and profit of western oligarchs has been a Thing within the government of the United States for a long time, at least since the publication of "The New American Century" in 1999 or whenever it was.

Just as the chaos in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa (much of the rest of Africa, too, but that's somewhat different) has been induced as partial fulfillment of the plans sketched out so long ago, so the demonization of Russia and Putin are part of ensuring US global hegemony.

China will have its turn once Russia is defeated and dismembered.

Of course it's a seriously daft plan, but oh well. It's apparently been burned into the skin and psyches of the US government's foreign operations with a hot iron. Immutable and unchangeable.

So it has been written. So it must be done.

Why?

Obama tried to change it and failed. Trump seems to have given up on changing it, if he ever intended to, but the fall out from trying has metastasized into the Russia Thing that bids fair to take down his entire regime, one at a time or in batches.

I have no love for this man and believe sincerely that he should not be president and his people should not be anywhere near the levers of US power let alone the nuclear launch codes. On the other hand, the anti-Russia full-court press (with the intent of controlling him or bringing down his regime) has never made any sense.

This long article at Politico "Trump Takes on The Blob" helps us see how the shift away from anti-Russia, anti-Putin (and other things) literally terrifies the permanent government (aka "The Blob") and I recommend it for perspective.

But what are they so afraid of?

BTW, there are so many echoes of the initial phases of the Reagan regime in this situation. It's déjà vu all over again.

What a whirled what a whirled.


End of the Beginning?

Of course it's hard to know at any given time what's coming. One can read their beads and assess the signs and portents all the live long day and then something unexpected happens. You're in a different reality, one that perhaps was always there, the way multiple universes are said to interpenetrate one another, but it wasn't something we had to pay attention to. Until now.

The reaction to Stephen Miller's round of performances on the Sunday Gabfests has been rippling through the political class, the media, the permanent government and among some of the Rabble. With few exceptions, the judgment is that he was way, way over the line. And something must be done, and done quickly.

Miller took the place of Kellyanne Conway on the shows -- apparently because her credibility was in the crapper and since she'd been working so hard at it, she needed a break. We'd been hearing about Miller for some time, as he is reputed to have written some of the more incendiary statements and speeches of the regime and its titular ruler. He along with Bannon have long been considered the ideological masters in the White House. Miller, it is said, was one of the writers of the Muslim Ban (that isn't) now wending its way through the judiciary.

So the White House sends Miller out to do the Shows, and "OMG."

I saw part of his performance on Meet the Press, and it was shocking. He came across as Joseph Goebbels' bastard Jewish grandson, railing and ranting, ordering and demanding, lying and daring Chuck Todd -- or anyone else -- to do anything about it. Pugnacious doesn't begin to cover it.  This was a pure, over the top, Nazi performance project, something designed -- I thought -- to put the Fear into all of Trump's opponents, be they judges, media celebrities, or the pink pussy-hat wearing "Resistance."

Message: "This stops now."

Now while his performances were obviously being done for effect, I'm not sure he got the effect he wanted. When the initial shock wore off the Nazi allusions -- while still strong -- faded and some of us recognized that it was more on the lines of the Israeli Spokesperson (especially under the Likud regime) than straight out Nazi. Meaning that this is a contemporary model for regime spokesmouths, not the historic one from the Time of Unpleasantness in the 20th Century. This way of communicating regime demands and commands goes on all the time around the world. It's just not been typical American practice. So it's shocking -- and rightly so -- to see it on the Sunday Shows, unvarnished, unbridled, and very much in your face.

The reaction was mostly swift and quite negative. Not simply because he was lying; we're so used to that from the White House, it's almost normal. No, it was the whole package. If that's the way the White House wants to present itself, then by golly, it's game on.

A number of thinkers and pundits and commentators have been sounding the alarms. "This is an Emergency!" they say. If something isn't done, and done quickly, about Trump and his band of mountebanks and thieves, liars and con artists, Christian Dominionists and Apocalyptic believers, white supremacists, Fascists, and worse, the United States is on a path toward becoming a failed state in its own right and instigating global destruction on an unparalleled scale simply because it can.

Trump's core believers call these warnings "hysterics." I'm old enough to have lived through a number of these transformative presidencies, and I've never seen anything quite like this. The lies and the chaos are one thing. What's worse is the overt contempt for other interests and points of view, and the easy sadistic glee in scapegoating the vulnerable and punishing opponents. This cannot be allowed to stand.

But we can't look to the courts to save us. It's not going to happen. The courts can stall some of the worst of what's in store, but they can't stop it. Should the justices get too uppity, the regime can go full on Andrew Jackson and ignore any ruling it doesn't like. After all, the courts have no independent enforcement power.

No, the system under which we've been governed up till now can't handle something like this. It will shatter to pieces. Some would say that's a good thing in and of itself, and so we should just let it shatter. The system is decadent and corrupt and unreformable. It has to crash and burn for something better to emerge.

The Resistance, so far, is basically critiquing and naysaying. A positive alternative is still in formation.

Up till now, the Resistance has been a somewhat formless potential movement away from the chaos. Potential. It hasn't turned into a movement yet, though some of its critics call it one. It's lacking a catalyst to turn it into a movement.

But that could come at any minute.

Indeed, Stephen Miller's performance on the shows seems to be catalyzing something in the media particularly.

The demonstrations continue in the streets and at selected congressmembers' town halls and offices.

So far as I can recall, there have never been so many sustained nationwide opposition actions, and they are having an effect. That isn't to say they'll succeed. But they are being noticed, which is something that deliberately didn't happen with the demonstrations against the Iraq Invasion.

There have been a few counter demonstrations, but so far, they are very small and have had no effect at all.

Perception management is an important element in these situations, and in this case, there is a perception that opposition to Trump and his cronies is widespread, deep-rooted, active and determined.

The demonstrations immediately after the election were large and widespread, so large in fact that a whole sub-industry sprang up on line to discount them as "Clintonite" rejectionism, involving too few people to matter. Well, that was wrong. In fact those who were in the streets at the time reported that "Clintonites" were a minority among the crowds, as they have remained ever since.

No, the Resistance is something else again, and the Democratic Party and the Clintons are at best minor players. Often enough they are completely irrelevant to the interests and actions of those who are taking to the streets.

There was a brief moment of hysterics on the part of Trump supporters when Alex Jones (I think it was) said that the post election demonstrations were an attempt to incite a "Soros funded Color Revolution." Why that should inspire near-panic among the Trumpists, I'm not sure, but at the time, such a judgment was premature. There was no Color Revolution, not even a hint of it. There was a largely spontaneous rejection of the election outcome. Given the fact that Hillary had so many more votes than Trump -- by an as yet unknown margin at the time -- it was natural for people to vent their outrage. Yet again the Electoral College would override the vote of the people.

However, by the time of the Women's March, the day after the inauguration, many of the elements of a Color Revolution had come together. With or without Soros funding.

The color is pink; the hand-sign is a fist, the right arm held straight across the chest at heart level. Large scale mass demonstrations can be assembled at a moment's notice, and they can and do interfere with routine. They're covered in the media. When tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of demonstrators can be assembled quickly and can disrupt the implementation of some of the regime's diktats -- and do it over and over again -- it's kind of hard to ignore.

I said a week or so ago that the wheels had come off this shitwagon, and indeed that seems to be the case, as the White House is bunkered down and Trump himself prefers the Mar-a-Lago Winter Palace in Florida or the Trump Tower HQ in New York. At least in those places, his Divinity is unchallenged.

The White House has been flailing for weeks. The court battle over the travel ban diktat is symptomatic not dispositive. Flynn's resignation, the constant dissembling, the leaks,  the fights over cabinet picks, the utter chaos all contribute to the perception that the White House is a madhouse where no one really knows what's going on, and except for certain issues, Trump doesn't care. He's looking out for his own wealth and well-being; bugger the rest.

So my question is, "Will this regime be brought down?" The Magic 8 Ball says "Most Definitely!" I take that as a yes since my own Predict-O-Meter has long been on the fritz.

OK, let's say it happens. Who will do it? The people in the streets cannot do it on their own. They can, however, make it impossible for him (or his goons) to govern, and we're close to that point now.

"Ungovernable" has become one of the protest memes, and I'm promoting "Disobey." These are ideas and actions with powerful potentials. The roundups of immigrants haven't quite catalyzed the kind of response necessary -- ie: human shields in every case -- but as more and more efforts to crack down on the designated Others get under way, I think we'll see more direct action to stop it. Disobedience will become the rule rather than the exception. Becoming defiant and ungovernable will be the new normal.

On the other hand, the tipping point may have been reached with the resignation of General Flynn from the NSC. There is gossip that the matter actually involves Trump and Pence in a conspiracy of silence about their Russian dealings. (I've never put much store in the whole Russian Thing, but apparently it matters deeply within the governing clique.) If as may be the case, then entire Trump regime is involved in something that can be construed as compromising the sovereignty of the United States -- that's what this is beginning to look like -- then the consequences  can be, must be, severe. Though not likely, it could even involve treason.

Impeachment is an option, but I think it would take too long and much mischief would be possible in the meantime.

It looks more and more like a coup will be deemed "necessary." My suspicion is that the next time Trump goes to Florida, a select team will place him under house arrest. Meanwhile, in DC other teams will isolate Pence and the White House staff. A general, could be even Mattis, but Petraeus is more likely, will take charge (much as Al Haig tried to do when Reagan was shot.) He will be interim leader.

What happens then is anybody's guess, but if the present regime is deposed, we can be sure there will be dancing in the streets.

I give it till the end of the month.

"Untermenschen"

There's something of a minor to-do over the Ukrainian Embassy in the US quoting from a statement by Yatsenyuk using the term "untermensch" or subhumans to describe... what or who exactly? It's not entirely clear, but that's the way it goes with translations. The sentence in which the term appears is gibberish that makes no sense.

So I translated it back into Ukrainian, and it looks like this:

  Вони загинули, бо стали на захист чоловіків і жінок, дітей і літніх людей, які опинилися перед загрозою винищення інтервентами і оплаченими ними нелюдами.

It is somewhat complicated to parse what happened here. Yats speaks fluent English, but I doubt he gave this statement in English. More likely, he did so in Ukrainian, as the statement is in regards to the apparent shoot down of a Ukrainian troop transport plane near Lugansk, in which forty or fifty troops and crew were killed. It's a statement of revenge on the Russians and the rebels for their temerity -- assuming the plane was shot down and it didn't crash for other reasons the way these things sometimes happen.

When translated at the site from Ukrainian into English (there's a little button in the upper right corner that lets the reader switch between Ukrainian and English) the term  нелюдами (nelyudamy) is rendered as "subhumans", but my balky offsite online translator renders it in Ukrainian as "fiends" and/or "monsters."

In Russian, however, the term is rendered as "non-humans." On the other hand, the sentence as a whole is complete gibberish in Russian, and the isolated word comes out "unsociable" in the context of the gibberish of the rest of the sentence.

I tried a German translation, and the term was rendered as monster or fiend, not "subhuman" or untermenschen.

So, where did it come from? Who knows? More than likely, the translation of the term нелюдами as "subhumans" was done as a deliberate provocation. It seems to have worked.

Victory Day Parade, Moscow Red Square, May 9, 2014

Full video from RT.com of today's Victory Day Parade in Red Square.

There was a time when this parade, which has taken place annually in Moscow since victory over the Nazis in 1945, was considered nothing but Communist propaganda. That's the way it was presented to school-kids during the height of the Cold War, and that's all I thought it was until much later in my life when I learned just how awful the War had been for the Soviets, how many millions had died in combat and from the effects of the War, and how grateful the survivors were.

None of this was even hinted at during the many years of anti-Communist propaganda which Americans were subjected to every day.

Since I learned of what sacrifices Soviet citizens and soldiers made during the War, which they call The Great Patriotic War, I've seen this parade quite differently. Many of the older people who attend the ceremonies, dripping with their Soviet medals and ribbons, cannot hold back their emotions. Nor should they. What they went through and survived is almost inconceivable to most Americans who have no idea to this day how immense the battles were in Russia and the Soviet Union, and how determined was the Soviet defense.

Every time I see this parade, I empathize so strongly with those who sacrificed so much to ensure the survival of their nation and their progeny.

I doubt there's been anything else approaching it in human history.

ПОЗДРАВЛЯЕМ!!! УРА!!!

----------------------------
And of course, "Putin is the New Hitler..." Or for the Nazis in Ukraine, he's "The New Stalin." Pfft.

The New Barbarians

The new barbarism out of the Kiev coup-regime is something so shocking to the conscience, it's hard to fathom or even to recognize. Of course, I understand that the coup-regime is operating in the interests of its sponsors in the EU, NATO and the US, and its barbarism is not entirely due to their own lack of humanity, but still...

The rampaging of the so-called "Ukrainian Army" and self-proclaimed "National Guard" is barely reported in the West, in part because there are few or no correspondents on the ground who can witness and testify to what is going on, and there are fewer still who can do it in English. I'm finding that by necessity, I'm learning more Russian words and phrases (it seems that even in hyper-nationalist Ukraine, Russian is the lingua franca), but it's still a struggle for me to wade through Russian language text and videos. What's interesting, as a sidelight, is that although I only understand a few spoken words and phrases and can only read Russian with what I call "averted vision" (that is, if I try to read it, I can't, but if I just let it be there and don't try so hard, it's much easier to read) when I can find English versions of what I've seen in Russian, they're very similar to what I thought I was hearing or reading in Russian. How that happens, I don't know, but it's one of many fascinating aspects of this whole nightmare.

A nightmare, it most definitely is. The Odessa Massacre is the central element of this nightmare. It took place far away from the "operations" in the East, and I'm wondering now if it was a deliberate diversion from the military (or whatever passes for the Ukrainian military) efforts to overcome and destroy the so-called "terrorists" or "separatists" or "pro-Russian" elements which have claimed the civic apparatus in many Eastern cities.

During the height of the demonstrations against him, and the numerous seizures of government buildings that took place in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine during the rebellion, Yanukovych never sent troops to re-capture territory or buildings. He negotiated endlessly with the rebels, and ultimately he agreed to most of their demands -- and he was implementing them when he suddenly fled Kiev. His police were almost impossibly restrained in dealing with the protests and the rebels in Kiev and elsewhere. Most of them weren't armed at all, and they suffered grievous losses from injury and death at the hands of the rebels. Some of them were engulfed in the flames of Molotov cocktails, others were beaten by rebels or pelted with cobblestones, others still were shot by members of the rebellion. The few police who were armed rarely used their weapons, and generally only did so in self-defense. An exception might -- or might not -- be during the failed efforts to clear the protest camps from Maidan Square in Kiev. There were many reports of gunfire from the police into the protest encampments, and I certainly heard a lot of popping noises on the livestream. But there were also a lot of fireworks going off, and contingents of the protesters themselves were armed. Who was actually firing amid the fiery chaos that night and how many of the popping noises were actually gunshots is a mystery.


The sniper attack in Kiev was performed by persons unknown. While the Western propagandists insist that Yanukovych set the snipers to work on the crowd, there's no evidence he did, and there are suspicions that the snipers were in the employ of Svoboda. There is evidence they were shooting at the crowd and the police simultaneously.

At any rate, the rebellion itself was relatively barbaric, from first to last, in part because its "security" was provided by a coalition of fascist and Nazi political elements called the Right Sektor. It was brutal. Svoboda may have been trying to mitigate its reputation and moderate its future, but Right Sektor was and is proudly nativist, reactionary, fascist and Nazi, through and through. They brutalized and killed those on their outlist. This was during the rebellion.

The Right Sektor was given prominent "security" responsibility after Yanukovych's government collapsed, and many of its members are said to have joined the so-called National Guard now operating in the East.

Many others are said to have been bused down to Odessa for the fiery festivities on May 2.

This was said during the Odessa riots on May 2, but I didn't see any evidence it was so. It looked to me like the rioting was spontaneous and the product of domestic animosities in Odessa. There had been previous riots there, after all, in which the same or similar elements collided leaving plenty of destruction and injury in their wake. There had also been many more or less peaceful contending demonstrations -- "pro-" and "anti-" Maidan, as they were characterized.

But then questions were raised about just how "spontaneous" all the rioting was. There were more and more indications that the rioting was deliberately incited by police and a shadowy group of "protesters" who seemed to be on both sides, egging each on to ever greater levels of violence, and firing weapons from both sides.

It appeared to me that the "anti-Maidan" side withdrew from the fray -- they were outnumbered -- and retreated... somewhere. The reports of the aftermath are not entirely clear regarding what happened to the "Antimaydanskis" -- they seemed to just melt away.

Meanwhile a contingent of "Pro-Maidan" young people took off at a run to the "Antimaydansky" encampment at the Trade Union building. It is quite a distance from the center of town where the rioting had been under way to the park where the Trade Union building is located. Well over a mile.

Once they arrived, several hundred of them, they attacked the encampment with a vengeance. They demolished it and burned the debris, then set upon the building itself. The Antimaydansky demonstrators, mostly women and older men -- how many, I don't know, there are reports of as few as dozens to as many as hundreds -- had retreated into the building for safety from the mob. The mob threw Molotov cocktails at the building and at least one man in the mob was firing a gun at the building (shown prominently in a number of videos taken at the scene. He, it is said, was also active in Kiev during the demonstrations there, and his name is said to be Micola.)

In fact, a number of people in the mob were recognized as either Right Sektor militants from Kiev or Maidan demonstrators from Kiev or as police commanders from Kiev. It's understandable that some people in Odessa would see the tragic episodes and the Massacre as instigated by Kiev.

Once the encampment was destroyed, a contingent of Right Sektor militants gained access to the interior of the building via a side entrance where a door had somehow been wrenched and twisted off its hinges. There are videos of these armed Right Sektor militants rampaging on the first and second floor well before any fires are ignited in the building.

Other members of the mob stayed outside the building throughout the assault, some of them lobbing Molotov cocktails, others stoning the building, or taunting those inside.

But it seems clear that Right Sektor militants were inside the Trade Union building from almost the first moments the mob arrived -- and maybe even before.

What happened inside is still being pieced together, but I can say that when I first saw videos of the inside of the building broadcast on Vremya Odessa on the night of the Massacre, I didn't believe what I was seeing. The place was wrecked and there were numerous burned and dead bodies shown in a video recording apparently taken moments after the fires were put out. I didn't even think it was the same building. Another live video showed the interior of the building, and it didn't seem so horrifying. The place looked pretty well trashed, to be sure, but not as badly as in the recorded video, and there was only one dead body in the live shots I saw that night, and it didn't look burned.

Later, I would understand that these videos were taken in different locations within the building, and that only parts of the building were burned. The recorded video was taken near the front entrance where an intense blaze burned for about an hour before the fire brigade arrived to put it out, and everything near the front entrance was charred, bodies and all. The live video I'd seen was taken at a side staircase where there had been no fire and very little damage had occurred. The dead body in the live shot was... a mystery.

Live video showed badly injured people in a pile outside the building, some being tended to by medics, but many simply tossed into a heap to bleed and moan. There were live scenes of violence to the injured and scenes of triumphant gloating by the mob, singing and chanting their victory songs.

Police roused the survivors of the massacre and roughly handled them, placing most in police vans (a few wound up in ambulances) where they sat unattended for hours. Eventually, they were transported to the jail where they were held until the next day, when they were released upon strident protest by another "mob" of friends and relations. Others, I'm told, were not so fortunate and are still being detained. Some 250 injuries were reported, more than two dozen serious.

Not one of the attackers has been detained, so I've read.

I was initially leery of reports of Right Sektor militant involvement in the riot and Massacres, but I've seen them in numerous videos, and I saw them live during a march and rally the next day, trying to incite more violence, so I don't doubt it. But it wasn't just Right Sektor. There was another, more shadowy, element involved in the riot and Massacre. No one seems to know who they were or where they came from, but they have been identified by the red armbands they wore. They seemed to be on both sides of the rioters and they were among police as well. They seemed to be the ones instigating the violence -- on both sides.

All against all, I guess.

I've read reports of Right Sektor militants inside the Trade Union building shooting, stabbing and beating to death anyone they came across, or anyone they could lure to their deaths from hiding places. I've seen videos of bodies in hallways and offices, some of them shot, others perished by unknown means, so the stories of Right Sektor thugs combing the building for victims seem valid enough, given the fact that I've also seen videos of Right Sektor militants rampaging inside the building well before fires raged.

There is no reason to doubt the testimony of those survivors who say they saw and heard Right Sektor militants throughout the building during the time it was being attacked from outside, and they heard shots, and the saw their comrades killed.

The survivors are said to number about 100. The dead are said to number anywhere from 40 to over a hundred, and there are reports -- to date unverified -- that many of the dead were dumped in the basement where one presumes they still are.

There is a big question in my mind about the intense blazes inside the building in which a dozen or more people were apparently burned alive. The fires that killed these people had to have happened very suddenly and they had to have been extremely large and intense for them to kill so many people almost instantly.

A Molotov cocktail is incapable of such instant incineration.

Something else caused the fires at the front entrance and the back stairwell where most of the burned bodies were found.

There is scant video evidence so far of how these fires started. There are numerous shots of Molotov cocktails being thrown at the building, and there is video of fires already burning at the front entrance and back stairwell, but so far as I've been able to find, there is no posted video of the start of those fires.

I wonder if the front entrance and the back stairwell are connected?

The fires in each are very similar, and I wonder if they are actually the same fire.

There is video that shows the back stairwell both before and immediately after the fire began there -- but not as the fire started -- and it suggests that there was a sudden and overwhelming flash over of smoke and fire, initially just heavy black smoke, which filled much of the stairwell. Many people apparently jumped for their lives at the instant the smoke and fire began in the back stairwell, for there is heart-wrenching video of a pile of perhaps ten badly injured men on the ground below the stairwell windows immediately after the fire begins. Some of the men are burned, but most seem to be bloodied about the head and face. They landed in a pile of wood debris and broken glass.

Police and bystanders pulled the injured victims away from the burning stairwell, but many people were trapped inside, and it looks like no one who could not or did not get away fast enough survived the fire in the back stairwell or at the front entrance.

The people who died in the fire have been blamed by some of the Kiev propagandists for starting it. They may have, but I've seen no evidence that they did. The claim has been made that the defenders of the Trade Union building were throwing Molotov cocktails at the mob outside, but I've seen no evidence of that, either.

Instead, I've seen abundant video evidence that Molotov cocktails were being thrown at the building, and many started fires inside it.

But those fires mostly burned out fairly quickly. The fires at the main entrance and the back stairwell burned fiercely -- for an hour or maybe more in the case of the front entrance, many minutes at the back stairwell.

Something fueled the fire at the main entrance, something more than gasoline, and something caused a flashover fire at the back stairwell, perhaps the same something that fueled the front entrance fire.

Whatever the case, what happened in Odessa, from the riots in the center of town to the Massacre at the Trade Union building was barbaric in the extreme. It appears to have been instigated in Kiev or through the agency of the coup-regime in Kiev, and it may have been deliberately engineered to distract from faltering military operations in the East, possibly even intended to provoke Russia into a military response.

To the extent it accomplished anything, however, it seems to have hardened the lines of division in Odessa, frightened the residents terribly, angered much of the population, and emboldened the radical elements looking for a fight.

As they say, "This will not end well..."

--------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE: This video of the interior of the Odessa Trade Union building posted by 01.ua TV basically confirms some of my suspicions about the fires that raged at the front entrance and rear stair well on May 2. It also made me cry, for the horror of what happened there can't be avoided, and the expressions on the faces of the people gathered for the memorial for the dead are heartbreaking in the extreme.



The front entrance and  rear stairwell are directly connected, and apart from the doors and window frames, there is nothing flammable either in the entrance or the stairwell. Construction appears to be stone veneer and plaster on a core of concrete blocks. The only wood or other flammable material was the door and window frames and the heavy doors themselves.

Yet the fire (it was apparently a single fire) burned with extreme intensity and for quite a long time in the entrance lobby and the stairwell, killing numerous people who had no time to flee the flames.

Interestingly, but not all that surprisingly, there is a room directly off the entrance lobby that appears to be separated from it only by a metal grille. That room was full of papers, cardboard boxes and other highly flammable material, none or very little of which appears to have burned. Yet the stone and plaster of the lobby and stairwell show signs of intense heat and even some of the thick window glass of the stairwell appears to be partially melted.

This is where the people were burned alive. Suddenly. It happened when some kind of incendiary material flashed into flame and burned fiercely in this single area for an hour or more.

The stairwell acted as a chimney, lofting smoke and flame up through all five stories in an instant.

What was the cause?
--------------------
BTW, this story of "what happened" is patently false in every way.  For those who don't like to open FOX News items, the story quotes Kiev coup-regime "investigators" who assert that the fire started on the upper floors when Molotov cocktails the defenders were making on the roof somehow "fell" and ignited. This did not happen.

The fire in the entrance lobby and rear stair well began there and burned fiercely for over an hour.

Ukraine Stories of Mayhem and Martyrdom -- and the Predominance of Propaganda

The stories coming out of Odessa yesterday, about what had happened the day before, when mayhem ruled the streets, and dozens and dozens were killed in street fighting and burned alive at the Trade Union building were almost beyond comprehension. Not much of it is in English, and much of what is in English follows one or another party line, none of which are necessarily truthful but are meant to inflame passions even further, and sell a particular belief about it all.

I watched a good deal of the coverage on Vremya Odessa, via UStream, during the uproar and its aftermath. While the station appears to be "pro-Kiev", at least its reporters were on the ground, covering events extensively and live, as well as posting compilation videos of the mayhem in the streets and at the Trade Union building. As far as I can tell, though "pro-Kiev," most of Vremya Odessa's reporting is in Russian rather than Ukrainian, and something I read along the way suggested that Russian was the most common language spoken in Odessa. (Note: when I interviewed Ukrainian survivors of the Great Patriotic War in California some years ago, their language of choice was Russian, and the translator translated from Russian to English and vice versa, though the translator and the interviewee would occasionally converse with one another in Ukrainian.) I've described my familiarity with Russian as "spotty" at best. I can pick out words spoken or written but I can't follow a conversation or read complete sentences in Russian, and Ukrainian is practically an unknown territory for me.

I also followed the eyewitness reports in English from Howard Amos on Twitter and his summaries at the Guardian. For news on what's been happening in the Eastern Sector where Ukrainian military operations are apparently under way -- or not -- I've largely looked to Graham Phillips' eyewitness accounts on his Twitter and his video reports on YouTube and for RT. 

These are all eyewitness reports, mostly without analysis, and if they are in the Russian or Ukrainian language, I can only barely follow bits of dialogue. Initially, I thought the language barrier would be too difficult to overcome, but I'm finding it to be something of a benefit because I can concentrate more easily on what the visuals show rather than focus on what people are saying they show. I'm aware that the videos -- whether live or recorded -- only show a slice of the whole. I found out how the slice-nature of video can sometimes be a distortion during Occupy when I was often juggling several livestreams simultaneously. The camera can only show bits and pieces of the whole at any given time, and the bits it does show can be both illuminating and distorting. It's best to see and utilize a number of points of view -- which may mean that a full picture of events has to wait for several days or months as the compilations are available and assembled.

I scan other reports, but generally I don't rely on the veracity on much of anything that isn't based directly on eyewitness reporting. 

I've gone into this rather lengthy description of how I've been gathering information about what's going on in Ukraine in part because so much of the "news" about it in the West is false and almost entirely propaganda on behalf of the coup-regime in Kiev and its sponsors in Brussels, Berlin, London, and Washington, DC. The propagandists have no interest whatever in the people being squeezed by the great powers in their efforts to control Ukraine. They have no interest in the truth, either. Their sole interest is in marketing a version of their political and economic demands and desires that will convince a significant portion of the public to buy it.

Counter-propaganda is coming out of Russia and the Eastern Sectors of Ukraine, much of it just as false and based in marketing beliefs as the propaganda of the West.

The only reliable news I've found is the on-the-ground eyewitness stuff that is available -- preferably raw, live, and unedited -- but which still must be seen and evaluated skeptically. There are so many lies, so very little truth.

The video at the head of this post is an edited compilation of scenes on May 2, taken from above and in front of the Trade Union building in Odessa just prior to and during the attack on it by anti-Russian hooligans, an attack in which the encampment in front of the building was burned, and the building itself was firebombed by Molotov cocktails. Dozens were killed. I had seen some live video of the scene during and after the assault from the Vremya Odessa livestream, but of course that video was taken on the ground and later inside the building after the fires were put out, so an overall picture was hard to gain.

Western media for the most part has not been able or willing to report honestly or accurately on what happened there, in part because all reports from Ukraine must be fit into a pre-digested narrative that matches the propaganda of the various Western and Ukrainian capitals involved in the matter. That means that what happened must be made to fit a narrative of "pro-Russian" vs "pro-Ukrainian" actions. Whatever doesn't fit the narrative is eliminated. The "pro-Russian" actions must be characterized as The Bad, whereas the "pro-Ukrainian" actions must be reported as "sadly necessary responses" to The Bad.

The more I learn about what happened in Odessa -- and the reaction of Odessans to what happened -- the less it fits the current Western propaganda narratives, and it doesn't really fit the Russian propaganda narrative, either.

It was something out of nowhere that shocked and appalled Odessans, really seemed to shake them to their core. Nothing like this fit Odessans' social and cultural ideas about themselves.

How the fires in the building started is still a "controversial matter" according to the Western propaganda, that is when the fires aren't being blamed directly on "pro-Russian" protesters. From the video above, and from some of the video I saw on Vremya Odessa (their later compilations, not live) it was obvious that the building was being firebombed from outside by Molotov cocktails. This should not be a matter of controversy or dispute. It's obvious.

Not only were firebombs being lobbed at and into the building, people who were trying to escape the fires were also being firebombed by members of the mob outside.

What a horrible nightmare.

In the video above, a relatively small group of people is seen at the front entrance to the building, behind some makeshift barricades assembled on the front steps. They had apparently already abandoned their encampment in the square outside. A much larger group is seen running toward the building and the encampment. They are seen destroying and burning the encampment while those at the front entrance watch. Some time later, the people in the mob outside the building run away from the burning encampment, as if, perhaps, responding to gunfire. There were repeated reports of guns fired from the building at the mob outside resulting in several deaths and injuries. Since I saw apparently dead bodies lying in the street outside the building in the Vremya Odessa livestream, I thought the reports of gunfire from the building were reasonably creditable.

Not long after the mob runs away, though, they return. The "pro-Russian" protesters who had been on the front steps have apparently retreated inside, and only members of the mob are seen in front of the building and on the steps.

A fire is already burning inside the building on the third floor, and Molotov cocktails are being tossed by the mob at the front entrance to the building. One Molotov cocktail seems to be tossed from inside the building, and it appears to fall ineffectively on the front steps. This may actually have been one that was tossed at the building from the mob outside, but there's no way to tell from the video itself.

Shortly, the front entrance is aflame, and there is heavy flame coming from windows to the right. More Molotov cocktails are tossed at the building, and members of the mob are seen approaching the front of the building and motioning to their comrades to come along. Some people dressed in black, some of them armed with clubs or bats, are seen on the roof. Who these people on the roof actually are has been subject to some dispute, as access to the roof was said not to be available to those inside, which was said to be one reason why so many died.

More Molotov cocktails are seen being tossed at and into the building from the crowd outside, and the building is enveloped in smoke. Some time later, a column of police with shields is seen marching toward the buildings through the crowd in front. Prior to this point, there had been no sign of police at all, nor had fire brigades arrived.

But a firetruck eventually does arrive and begins to spray water on the front entrance while the crowd outside mills about. Eventually, the fires at the front entrance are put out, though flames can still be seen inside the building. A couple of people dressed in black can be seen on the roof.

That video ends without showing any attempts at escape from the burning building or any attempts at rescuing those inside.

Some of those who managed to escape were savagely beaten -- this was shown live on Vremya Odessa (which apparently does not archive its livestreams) -- others were attacked with more Molotov cocktails, and essentially everyone who got out alive was jailed.

Initial reports were that most of those who died inside died from smoke inhalation. That may be, but many of the videos and images of the dead inside show horribly burned corpses, sometimes in areas where there appeared to have been no fire. Vremya Odessa sent a reporter and cameraman inside after the fires were extinguished, and they showed and described much destruction, but there was only one dead body on a stair landing in their live video. It was apparently not burned. Where the many burned bodies were in relation to the video shot by Vremya Odessa is unknown, though some, apparently, were very close to the front entrance.

I'm unaware of any Western media or government that has condemned the actions of the mob at the Trade Union building in Odessa, though, of course they have issued their routine announcements "deploring" and expressing "sadness" that "anyone" died.

I've seen occasional efforts to blame the victims for their own fate, simply because they were where they were, and unfortunately "shit happens." They should have been somewhere else. There have been attempts to justify the mob's behavior by pointing out that they were being shot at by people inside or on top of the building. Yet who was shooting is not entirely clear. Howard Amos said he definitely heard gunshots fired from the building, and he saw dead bodies (I believe he said seven) in the street, but who was shooting is still unknown. There is video of a man in the crowd firing his gun at the building.

Molotov cocktails were being thrown at the building before the crowd runs away in the video above, and the encampment was being destroyed at the same time.

There were religious services and memorials for the dead throughout the day yesterday, and there really seemed to be a level of shock and horror among the people at what had happened, far more than there was anger, although there was plenty of anger. The police formed a cordon around the entrance of the building, but many people left floral tributes to the dead. I read that eventually the police dispersed and the people were allowed in the building, but I didn't see it.

Later yesterday evening, a mob of several thousand mostly young men formed in the center of town. They listened to speeches and were demagogued by Right Sektor toughs who tried to incite them to more violence. Many were armed with clubs, bats and chains. They marched through the city, singing and chanting, first to the police headquarters where they listened to speeches and confronted the newly appointed police chief, then to the Trade Union building where they were again harangued and incited to violence by Right Sektor thugs.

But surprisingly -- or perhaps not -- a delegation of young men from the mob linked arms and formed a cordon around the floral tributes to the dead, protecting them from the mob, and those who were trying to incite the mob to more violence were ultimately not successful.

Vremya Odessa stopped covering the action at about the time the mob was ready to disperse, so I didn't see what happened subsequently. Today, they're showing mostly movies and documentaries. I haven't seen any live coverage.

But I have looked at some of the videos that have been posted of the events of May 2 in Odessa, and I have read some of the recently posted descriptions of what people witnessed.

No matter one's point of view or political perspective, what happened in Odessa was horrible. Whether it was instigated from outside or was spontaneous hardly matters at this point. There have been persistent reports that Right Sektor thugs were bused in from Kiev to essentially raise havoc.  While that may be true -- or it may not be -- the mob and its behavior were the product of local animus, fired up, no doubt, by the propaganda out of Kiev, and perhaps instigated by Right Sektor demagoguery, but by no means was it entirely a matter of outside influence.

Mindless mobs can be terrible things, and once incited, they cannot be easily controlled. It was clear enough from the live video I saw were truly shocked and horrified at what they were witnessing and what they were a part of. Many of those in the mob outside the Trade Union building took it upon themselves to improvise means of getting people out of the building, and others attempted to rescue the injured who fell from the windows. At the same time, members of the mob continued throwing Molotov cocktails at the building and some of them beat the injured on the ground. There are reports that people who had barely escaped the burning building with their lives were subsequently beaten or stabbed to death by members of the mob; and it appears that everyone who escaped the building and the mob alive was subsequently jailed.

But yesterday a crowd assembled at the jail and demanded the release of those who were jailed after escaping the Trade Union building alive. This action -- unlike the action at the Trade Union the day and night before -- was almost universally characterized by Western media as a "mob" action. Those who demanded freedom for their comrades who had escaped the inferno have been labeled a "mob" while those who firebombed the Trade Union building were gently described as "pro-Ukraine" demonstrators.

This level of propaganda is almost unprecedented in the West. Even during the World Wars and the Cold War, such manipulation of language and facts and reality by Western governments and media acting in concert with one another was not this duplicitous and overtly false. The recent example that comes closest to the current level of Western propaganda being spewed by governments and media alike was that surrounding the invasion of Iraq.

And like that situation, the propaganda from the other side -- in this case Russia -- is almost truthful by contrast to the tissue of lies coming out of Western governments and media. The Iraqis found out, of course, that their truth could not save them. The question now is whether the Russians and their allies in Ukraine will find out the same.

What I've noticed about so many of the so-called "pro-Russian" factions in Ukraine -- and it was certainly true of those who sought shelter at the Odessa Trade Union building as well -- is that they tend to be older, whereas the "pro-Maidan" activists, especially the armed marchers who take over the streets at night, sometimes in torchlight parades, tend to be younger, often much younger.

This indicates to me that there is a significant -- and deliberately engineered -- generational divide at work in Ukraine, one that was cynically developed through the efforts of those hundreds of NGOs, most funded by the US and EU, who have been tirelessly working to "educate" the young people of Ukraine to "love Europe" and loathe Russia.

It's paying off.

Ukrainians will not soon forget the searing scenes of mayhem and martyrdom in Odessa. The question is how they will be remembered.

The Euromaidan television operation (funded by NGOs, funded by US and EU interests) consciously tried to emulate revolutionary visuals from the Soviet past. They produced some stunning images during the revolt in Kiev. Those images will stay with the participants, witnesses and viewers for a long time to come. Nothing like that took place in Odessa during the recent unpleasantness, and all of the imagery I've seen so far is ugly, disturbing, and alienating. I don't see Russia or the "pro-Russia" factions in Ukraine producing any kind of martyrdom-slash-revolutionary visuals from these recent events, not yet anyway.

Part of that, I think, is because the Russians aren't the Revolutionaries here; they represent the status quo, the status quo ante, of course, but still, not a forward impulse. Under the circumstances, and given the extraordinary level of unity on the side of Revolt and Revolution, and given the surprising level of flexibility being shown by the rebels, I'm not at all sure that the status quo can be restored or maintained.

My sense of these events is that Ukraine will never be allowed to be the same again.

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UPDATE: A couple of videos have come my way which expand on the one posted above. The first is a 24 minute video of action around the Trade Union building from a time shortly after the encampment was set ablaze until shortly after a number of badly injured and/or burned men are pulled away from the back of the building after a huge and intense fire burns above the back entrance. How that fire started isn't shown in the video, and its intensity is quite different than that of most of the other fires that burned in the building that day. Only the fires at the front entrance seemed to match the intensity of fire that is seen in this video. Also seen is a man with an automatic pistol firing into the building from the mob. There are many other surprising or disgusting elements in this video, including some mention of "Pravyi Sektor" and, if you know what to look for, some fleeting glimpses of men in camo get ups who quite likely are the Pravyi Sektor members to which the videographer refers. The video is titled (in Russian) "These are my people?" and subtitled, "They are happy when burned people jump out of windows." Be warned, this is not a steadi-cam video, and the videographer tends to point the camera at the ground or wave it somewhat randomly. As difficult as some of the visuals are to watch, the camera work is sometimes even more difficult.




The following video -- which I'll link to but not embed -- was taken inside the building after the fires were put out. There are many burned bodies -- and if you would rather not see such graphic video of burned bodies, please don't watch. One of the links in the earlier text shows some stills from this video. As far as I can tell, the majority of the bodies are found on stair landings where the most intense fires were burning at the back of the building, and from where the injured in the previous video appear to have jumped. As I say, I don't know what caused this fire or how it started, but as I pointed out to a correspondent, many years ago I was engulfed in a gasoline fire, much like one that would be caused by a Molotov cocktail, and I survived pretty badly singed but otherwise unscathed. The fire burned itself out fairly quickly, and despite a great deal of smoke and flame, never got all that hot.

Whatever caused the fire which burned these people, I doubt it was a Molotov cocktail.

The New Normal: This Is The Way The World Works... Now

The Ukrainian Thing seems to have stalled for the moment, as the mighty troops sent to smoke out the terrorists holding those public buildings in the Eastern Sector have an annoying tendency to run away or get caught by the refusniks. It would be funny if this were some fictional place in Mittel Europe pre-WWII, and the Marx Brothers made a movie about it.

Oh wait.

But it's the real thing. Insofar as these things are ever "real" -- in the sense that ordinary people and/or the high and the mighty can ever know fully what is really going on and the consequences thereof... it's real enough. People are being shot and killed and kidnapped and manhandled and otherwise being put through the wringer -- one that looks very much like gangland behavior under chaotic, ruthless, and lawless conditions. Everybody has their stick, their bat, their AK-47, their new camo uniform, their balaklava...

At least there are some productive uses for all the old tires in Ukrainia. Wouldn't want them to go to waste.

Meanwhile, the posturing by the principals goes on and on and on and on, in a kind of dance or minuet, something we haven't seen in quite this way since the run up to the tragedies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because the principals are behaving now very much the way they did then -- though they say that they have taken military adventuring off the table and they are clearly trying to fight an old-fashioned proxy war through their surrogates on the ground in Ukrainia -- people everywhere are nervous as heck. No doubt the survivalists are stockpiling even more goods for the ultimate End of Times they sincerely believe is so soon to come.

This is all dangerous as heck, given the fact that the Superpowers are involved, the nuclear armed states, the Global Terror States of times gone by, when only they, the USA and the Soviet Union, had nukes and were brandishing and rattling them at one another...

So it is once again... except... for something. Something has changed.

Oh, that's right. One of the Superpowers, the other one, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. And its successor, the Russian Federation ("Russia") is a pale shadow of its former incarnation. A picked apart pale shadow of what it once was at that, ringed with hostile and in some cases competitive independent states aligned with, often hosting the military of, the vaunted "West" -- led by the USofA. So... what's this all about?

I've pointed out several times now what I think is going on, really going on, and though I haven't gotten much into why (the Global Great Game interests me less than its consequences to the ordinary people on the ground), I have little doubt that what's happening is the result of a Game-play that went wrong. It's "real" in that real people are being made to suffer for the forced and unforced errors of their Betters (as always, no?) and it's "real" in that the capture by the EU of the EU's Eastern Partnership nations (Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia) is a fundamental policy objective.

Regardless of what happened in Kiev, in other words, the EU, NATO and the US would have been pursuing policy goals to capture ever more territory and peoples from the orbit of the Russian Federation. It's apparently hard-wired into the EU's self-conception as technically assisted by the US.

Russia, for its part, has not been able to resist, and really hasn't resisted until now. Even now, the Russian resistance is more guerrilla-esque than military. What happened in Vilnius last November -- and its consequences in Kiev -- seems to have taken the Kremlin by as much surprise as it did in Brussels, Berlin, London and Washington.

Yanukovych was apparently expected by all parties to sign the Integration Agreement he was presented with at the Vilnius Conference of the EU's Eastern Partnership on November 29, 2013, and he refused. They say that he saw the actual terms of the agreement for the first time at that meeting, on the last day of the meeting, and he balked. Those terms -- which I seem to have misplaced the link to for the moment -- were devastating to the Ukrainian people, forcing them ever further into poverty, and they basically turned over the very fragile sovereignty of Ukraine to unelected technocrats and strategic wonks at the IMF, the European Central Bank, and NATO. Under the terms Yanukovych was presented, Ukraine would effectively become a colonial possession of the EU and NATO.

He was expected by all concerned -- including the Kremlin, apparently -- to sign away what limited patrimony Ukraine had in order to receive an economic package from the EU/IMF that would primarily benefit Ukraine's Russian creditors. Shockingly, he said no.

Nyet.

Oh.

Almost immediately protests and demonstrations formed in the Maidan Square in Kiev, somewhat patterned on the Color Revolution/Occupy model (with some interesting and important differences), and Yanukovych's government was subjected to typical subversion and destabilization tactics that have long been employed by "Color Revolutionists" in Eastern Europe and around the world. Occupy never used those tactics, which may be a clue to why Occupy never overthrew any government. It wasn't trying to. That wasn't its purpose. But overthrow and replacement of governments was very much a part of the main objective of Color Revolutions, including the "Orange Revolution" that had occurred in Kiev in the winter of 2004-2005.

Yanukovych had messed with his masters in Brussels, Berlin, London, Washington -- and Moscow, apparently -- and he had to go, one way or another.

And so it would be. The Maidan Model included a level of violence that had not been seen in these Color Revolutions previously, a truly shocking level of violence culminating in shadowy and unknown snipers firing on the crowds assembled at the square. Prior to that still mysterious event, however, the police had been routinely firebombed with Molotov cocktails, and armed and violent gangs of fascists and Nazis (yeah, the real thing) had patrolled the perimeters and enforced "discipline" on the crowd and they periodically stormed and took over government buildings in the center of Kiev and in other towns in Western Ukraine.

Much of what is being done in the East now is based quite closely on the Maidan Model, albeit with the absence of the large crowds of demonstrators that were typical of the Maidan protests. The difference has to do, I'm sure, with the fact that the crowds in Kiev were fired on by those snipers... the same could easily happen to large crowds elsewhere. It has happened in other cases.

Snipering the crowds of protestors was typical of the 2013 post-coup Cairo Model of dispersing demonstrators; they were shot at, and many were killed or wounded, by snipers strategically emplaced around the pro-Morsi demonstrations. So it would be in Kiev as well. This tactic tends to limit the number of demonstrators who will turn out... it also has an effect on who and what demonstrators will support.

The coup-regime in Kiev, as it's called, has agreed to the terms that the EU/IMF/NATO et al tried to impose on the Yanukovych government, with the proviso, apparently, that the funding not go to Russian creditors, only to EU creditors. Interesting.

When Yanukovych balked in Vilnius, Russia -- specifically Putin -- was blamed, though it's not at all clear that Putin engineered the last-minute refusal by Yanukovych to sign on the dotted line. Russia had offered a different deal to Ukraine, but its terms were only slightly less onerous and exploitative. The issue seemed to be one of a tug-of-war between the EU and RF for Ukraine's future. The people were not to be consulted. They were simply to be led. In whichever direction the leadership and elites (in this part of the world, read: "Oligarchs") wanted to go.

Apparently, Yanukovych wanted to blaze his own path, and thought he could do it best under Russian aegis.

Well, that didn't work out.

In other words, Yanukovych's refusal triggered a cascade of unanticipated events that no only led to his overthrow and ouster and the installation of an EU/NATO approved coup-regime in Kiev, but to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and the stalemate now in place on Ukraine's eastern borders, which stalemate could lead to some kind of nuclear exchange between the EU/US/NATO -- out of sheer incompetence if not strategy.

I say these were not anticipated events, in part because most of it looks to be ad hoc, even the Maidan protests that were clearly rather carefully organized and remarkably well presented via professional public relations efforts. The preparations for the Maidan protests had clearly been made in advance and were carried out as efficiently as possible, but there were so many uncoordinated aspects of it that didn't fit the pre-conceived and arranged pattern of these sorts of things. The enormous stage and the demagoguery  that was conducted from it seemed to me to be one of those ad hoc rather than pre-planned arrangements. Even the snipering that climaxed the demonstrations seemed to be ad hoc rather than pre-planned. The use of Nazis and fascists as shock troops may well have come about spontaneously.

In other words, while the demonstrations and assemblies seemed pretty well planned in advance (if, for example, the Yanukovych government refused some aspect of the EU integration agreements) the fact that he refused the whole thing was the surprise, and the response became much more spontaneous, vigorous -- and violent -- than was anticipated.

I've pointed out that the ground was laid long before the uprising by the hundreds of "educational" and "democracy" NGOs that had been operating in Ukraine for decades before the Maidan protests. Many of them were dedicated to EU "integration" -- and that has been the focus of the Kiev coup-regime ever since they seized power in February.

The coup-regime was allowed to seize power, however. They didn't have the means or authority to seize it on their own. Yanukovych's flight from Kiev seems to have been arranged by the Kremlin, a flight which enabled the almost immediate installation of a pre-selected group of financiers, technocrats and Nazi-bullies to rule. But it couldn't have happened if Yanukovych hadn't fled. That he did so under a Russian wing indicates to me that the Kremlin was OK with his overthrow, and indeed may have been behind it. (He was, after all, a bumbler at best.)

What the Kremlin is not OK with is the EU/NATO/US take over of Ukraine without recognition of Russian national interest. The fact that the Kiev coup-regime and its backers deny there is a legitimate Russian interest in Ukraine is the key flashpoint which can -- especially through the incompetence of the elites involved -- lead directly to severely unpleasant consequences, such as an unfortunate nuclear exchange.

The partition and dismemberment of the Russian Federation is one of those long term projects of the ruling class in the West that won't soon be accomplished and won't soon go away. Russia is to be eliminated as a major global influence and power according to long-standing neo-conservative principles. Once that's accomplished, then China.

These are insane principles, but they're now the New Normal.

It's the way the world works.