Call it democracy

First, we have the details over how the new regime came to power. The telephone call between EU policy chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet deepened the suspicions over whether or not the snipers who shot thirteen people in Ukraine’s Independence Square were not, in fact, hired by the opposition to Viktor Yanukovych – the people now in charge of the Ukrainian junta.

Second, we have the staffing of the new regime itself. The Waffen-SS worshipping neo-Nazi party Svoboda, which has been active in the protests from day one, controls the ministries of defence, ecology and agriculture, the vice prime-ministry and the internal security forces for the new government. The leadership of the new government includes not only neo-Nazis but also neoliberal austerity-pushers (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) and fundamentalist Protestants (Oleksandr Turchynov). The only thing left for the junta to do, if they haven’t done it already, is to turn over the rest of its day-to-day functions over to Halliburton, Monsanto and Blackwater.

Third, we have the new regime throwing Ukraine’s poor and elderly under the bus, showing us what they are capable of and what they will continue to do to the nation’s poor. According to the recent budget railroaded through the rump Rada, the pensions of Ukraine’s elderly – who paid into the system with their hard work and tax money – will be halved under the starvation-austerity rule engineered by the EU and the IMF. As corrupt and as authoritarian as Yanukovych’s government may have been, he never showed this kind of heartlessness and callous contempt toward the elderly. But even so, as Canadian folk-rocker Bruce Cockburn angrily sang back in 1986, they still take the tyranny of so-called developed nations’ idolatry of ideology, and they call it democracy!

Fourth, we have the new regime essentially kidnapping mayors and antifa activists from Ukraine’s east and south without warrants and without cause over the past three days. Mikhail Dobkin, former mayor of Kharkiv, narrowly escaped unlawful arrest. People’s governor of Donetsk Pavel Gubarev has been detained. Antifa activist Vladimir Rogov has gone missing. Several others have been beaten and tortured by the regime’s thugs.

Through the words and deeds of its ‘bottom-feeders passing themselves off as leaders’, the new regime has shown itself to be heinously cruel, such that any comparison or moral equivalence with Yanukovych’s government is an obscenity. We are talking outright cartoonish levels of outright evil (or, as the Catholics who, when in normal command of their moral faculties, oppose this sort of thing might otherwise describe it, crimes which cry to heaven for vengeance) being paraded propagandistically through the Western press as paragons of civic virtue and champions of freedom. Seventy years ago, my late grandfather and his countrymen – my countrymen – fought people like this in Asia and in Europe with their sweat and blood. Now my government is doing all it dares to support them, and it must stop. The new Ukrainian regime deserves to be overthrown from within, as it seems the residents of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Crimea desperately want to do. I will not excuse Russia if they decide to invade, but at the end of the day, the Russian government is not my government. It’s high time for my government, and the mass media of my country, to cease and desist with the nonsense of supporting Nazis, fundamentalists and oppressors of Ukraine’s poor and elderly.

But they call it democracy.