And so imagine if for two decades you have been trying to pull your country, bit by bit, into Europe. Imagine that it’s been a bumpy road – everything you accomplish seems to get sabotaged by the political forces from the east.
Imagine that finally the contradictions within your country have come to a breaking point. Imagine that all the people who opposed your politics for twenty years – all the most backward, poorest, least successful people in the country – got together in one place, declared an independent republic, and took up arms? What would you do? You could let them go. But then you’d lose all that land and its industrial capacity, and also what kind of country just lets chunks of itself fall off?
Perhaps you could think of it as an opportunity. Something similar happened when the old Stalinists and nationalists took over the Supreme Soviet in Moscow in 1993. All the enemies of progress in one place, all the losers and has-beens: wouldn’t it be better just to solve the problem once and for all? Wouldn’t it be a better long-term solution just to kill as many as you could and scare the shit out of the rest of them, forever? This is what I heard from respectable people in Kiev. Not from the nationalists, but from liberals, from professionals and journalists. All the bad people were in one place – why not kill them all?
For how many years have I been telling you that the supporters of the Ukrainian government were Nazis? Well, there you go.
This is not quite correct. First of all, since independence, Ukraine has been split almost 50-50 between pro-Russians and pro-Ukrainians and anti-Russians. With the Maidan coup, the pro-Russian party was outlawed. The home of its leader was firebombed resulting in the destruction of the home next door. He fled to Europe and has not been seen since.
All of the assembly members of pro-Russian Party (the Party of Regions) resigned from the Parliament. Many members of this party, including high ranking officials, were murdered by people supporting the Ukrainian government. Many labor union leaders were also murdered and most labor unions in the Ukraine were shut down because fascist Ukrainians think that labor unions are Communist and labor union members are Communists. In one building, 30-40 high ranking labor union members were tied to ground heaters before the building was set on fire.
With the opposition party outlawed, 50% of the population has no representation whatsoever. The new Nazi government in Ukraine immediately passed many laws attacking the Russians in the country and sidelining their language. Ukrainian was made the official language of the country and all official use of Russian in schools and government was banned. Not surprisingly, the Russians in the east took up arms. What do you expect them to do?
