“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
-Henry David Thoreau
Some people are protesting right now.
Which is good.
People need to protest in order to demonstrate they care enough about something - anything! - to get off their butts and put themselves out there to change it. Even if it's not a super important issue, getting together with a bunch of other concerned citizens and showing you aren't apathetic keeps the authorities honest plus ensures the protestors are practiced for when greater challenges arise. Government should always fear its people.
With Nelson Mandela freshly buried, I have to wonder if it isn't some of his spirit infecting those protestors out in the streets of Ukraine. Mandela's apartheid experience made it clear that systems could change if a social injustice was great enough and your determination didn't waver. His experiences also demonstrated to him that attempting great change can rarely rely totally on legal and compliant means. Sometimes disobeying unjust authority and accepting the consequences is necessary to awaken that higher and better part of our consciousness. Visible martyrs personify and actualize issues that most of us would ignore if they remained safety abstract.
Of course, not all protests are equal and few are aimed at fixing situations as obviously evil as segregating a nation down racial lines into first and second-class citizens.
For instance, the Quebec student protests in 2012 over mildly raised tuition garnered very little support. I mean, it's always good to see students protesting because there are so many deserving issues and they are the demographic in the best situation to do so and with the most to lose through inaction. Still, I think it made everyone a little bit pissed off to see students from the most heavily-subsidized province with the lowest tuition rates whining like that. It's pretty much impossible for a protest to be seen as deserving when you are asking for additional government funds to be given to your group which is already seen as privileged.
The Idle No More protests which began roughly a year ago have also failed to gather much widespread support. In their case, it's not because they didn't have important issues to talk about. The situation on many reserves is horrific and everyone agrees it needs to change. The environmental impact of fracking also needs to be discussed as the chemical run-off and dangerously high levels of methane it can produce in people's drinking water are both extremely troubling.
No, they mostly lost their support in how they went about their protests. Although many were peaceful, a large chunk behaved more like the reckless Black Bloc protestors than the peaceful Occupy Wall Street ones. Some intimidated and hassled journalists which guarantees bad media coverage. Some of the protests blocked main roads and hugely inconvenienced random normal people trying to go about their day instead of targeting government or relevant institutions and industries. This reduced support amongst the general population. There was also a racial component in that the Idle No More protests were, or at least made it easy to be depicted as, xenophobic against non-First Nations. A more inclusive approach would likely have been more successful.
Anyway, so what's with the protests going on in Ukraine. Just for the record, it is no longer referred to as "the Ukraine." They dropped the 'the' when gaining independence in 1991.
Basically, there is a struggle for Ukraine going on between Brussels and Moscow. Both the European Union and the Russians want to bring the country into their economic spheres. Earlier, it seemed that the country was moving towards greater ties with the West but threats from Russia has caused Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, on November 21st, to back-out of the comprehensive association and free-trade agreement they had negotiated with the EU over the last few years.
While the EU was trying to lure Ukraine over with some carrots, Russia was making more progress with some fancy stick-work. Ukraine with its 46 million people is facing gas and debt bills of $17 billion due next year and has a total debt of about $124 billion. Do to disputes between the two countries over the cost of the natural gas Ukraine was buying from Russia, Ukraine has been suggesting it will cut down gas imports, even threatening that “Ukraine may stop buying gas altogether at that price.”
Ukraine was hoping to continue using its position of being courted by both Russia and the EU, playing them off against each other to get a better deal from both. Russia took this poorly and had followed up by threatening to basically bankrupt Ukraine if they went ahead with the EU deal. They would raise gas prices even higher as Ukraine went into the winter or even potentially shut it off completely since Russia provides one-third of their domestically-used supply. This threat may seem familiar as Russia had turned off the gas in both 2006 and 2009 over financial disputes between their respective state-owned energy companies.
Russia also threatened heavy tariffs and trade checks on Ukrainian exports which is a problem because Russia takes about a quarter of them, worth some $18 billion annually. Despite rapidly strengthening trade ties with the EU, Ukraine cannot afford to have Russia stop taking it imports. There have already been some difficulties in getting certain exports into Russia such as chocolate which isn't surprising considering that temporarily banning imports from former Soviet-states in order to apply pressure is something they've done before.
Russia considers Ukraine to be a fundamental piece of the plan for the Eastern Partnership program, unofficially referred to as the Eurasian Union, a proposed political and economic rival to the EU, US, and China. Unsurprisingly, Russia is the main engine behind the idea, the brainchild of Vladimir Putin. Critics are concerned that a new Cold War may emerge alongside a new USSR which would potentially include Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, and Tajikistan. Kazakhstan and Belarus already signed an agreement with Russia in 2011 and the Union will be fully operational by 2015. Other countries with historic ties that may be invited are Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Mongolia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
If Ukraine stays away from the EU, Russia will be willing to lower its gas prices, keep trade walls down, and even provide needed loans, funds Russia has available but the struggling EU does not. President Yanukovych asked the EU negotiators whether they could supply enough benefits and loans to offset the consequences of not going with Russia. He was told no and saw that he really had no options here, at least until Ukraine gains some energy self-sufficiency.
There is a lot of resentment in Ukraine against Russia, what with the centuries of brutal oppression. The northwest and center of Ukraine is predominately ethnically and linguistically Ukrainian while the southeast is much more tied to Russia. Ukraine's election results are basically divided this way and this important decision of choosing to either side with the West or with Russia is thus split this way as well. All things considered, it makes for a very divided country where the two halves don't even speak the same language. A poll suggests about 45% of Ukrainians want stronger ties to the EU while 14% said they want to join the Eurasian Union. The rest are undecided.
Kiev is the capital of Ukraine and located in the northern region. This is where the vast majority of the protests have been occurring. Angry at a bad economy, the perceived electoral fraud that brought Yanukovych to power in 2010, government corruption, the continued imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and the move away from the West after their leadership caved in to Putin's demands, protestors have been rioting for the last couple of weeks with the blessing of opposition parties.
The protests have many reminiscing of the 2004 Orange Revolution when similar massive protests in Kiev managed to have a fraudulent election overturned. Yanukovych was the main focus in those ones as well, having beaten out opponent Viktor Yushchenko only to have the results recalled and thrown out after accusations of corruption, intimidation and direct voter fraud.
Two days ago, 500,000 thousand protestors were going at it, calling for the president's resignation and smashing a statue of Lenin to show their anger with Russia and anything that smacks of the old USSR-Ukraine relationship. Opposition leader and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko claimed that yesterday, opposition headquarters was raided by masked men who smashed up their servers. Today, police are scuffling harder with the protestors after being quite calm and composed since clashes on Nov. 30th threatened to explode the situation into something worse.
Either way, the protests seem to be making their mark. Yanukovych is back talking with the EU about the association agreement and has said he could sign it if Europe can give better financial conditions to lessen the negative effects of Russia's response. This association agreement is not EU membership though and I don't think the EU has the ability or the will to compete with Russia on this. They have neither the carrots nor the sticks Russia has. For the time being, it looks like Russia will take Ukraine back into its sphere and that's the cold hard reality. The problem is that Ukraine is screwed either way. If they go with the EU, Russia will cut off gas during the winter and society will destabilize. If they don't go with the EU, the protestors who hate Russia will freak out and society will destabilize.
The worst part is that this all could have been handled differently so that Russia wasn't put into such a face-saving, all-or-nothing position. Russia has tried to cozy up to and repair relations with the West on several occasions and has been refused, ensuring the Cold War mentality remains. In 1990, Gorbachev asked to have a united Germany be in NATO as well as the Warsaw Pact. Thatcher and Bush Senior refused.
After 9/11, Russia supported the US in everything, even allowing US military bases to expand into what was traditionally Soviet territory. It tried to use its new and improved relationship with the US to improve relations with all of NATO and come out of its isolationist mentality. However, after differences emerged in how the countries wanted to fight terrorism and Russia heading the opposition to the illegal Iraq invasion alongside Germany and France, the US undid all the gains in relations when it started to plan the construction of a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. Also, NATO was hinting it would offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two countries immediately within Russia's sphere, without improving relations with Russia. Russia logically saw this as a threat.
A third failed chance to improve relations with Russia and prevent this kind of 'us vs them' mentality is probably the stupidest. Yanukovych invited Russia to join in on the EU-Ukraine negotiations when it was clear Russia didn't want to be left out. Brussels had refused, turning the whole thing from a trade negotiation that could have improved relations all-around and let each group know their interests were represented into a pissing contest that it seems Russia is winning.
Ironically, it seems that the Ukrainian ties to the West will only be allowed to strengthen if the West improves its own ties with the East.
So maybe everyone will win.
Or maybe the ol' Cold War mentality will split Ukraine down the middle.
AS
-Henry David Thoreau
Some people are protesting right now.
Which is good.
People need to protest in order to demonstrate they care enough about something - anything! - to get off their butts and put themselves out there to change it. Even if it's not a super important issue, getting together with a bunch of other concerned citizens and showing you aren't apathetic keeps the authorities honest plus ensures the protestors are practiced for when greater challenges arise. Government should always fear its people.
With Nelson Mandela freshly buried, I have to wonder if it isn't some of his spirit infecting those protestors out in the streets of Ukraine. Mandela's apartheid experience made it clear that systems could change if a social injustice was great enough and your determination didn't waver. His experiences also demonstrated to him that attempting great change can rarely rely totally on legal and compliant means. Sometimes disobeying unjust authority and accepting the consequences is necessary to awaken that higher and better part of our consciousness. Visible martyrs personify and actualize issues that most of us would ignore if they remained safety abstract.
Of course, not all protests are equal and few are aimed at fixing situations as obviously evil as segregating a nation down racial lines into first and second-class citizens.
For instance, the Quebec student protests in 2012 over mildly raised tuition garnered very little support. I mean, it's always good to see students protesting because there are so many deserving issues and they are the demographic in the best situation to do so and with the most to lose through inaction. Still, I think it made everyone a little bit pissed off to see students from the most heavily-subsidized province with the lowest tuition rates whining like that. It's pretty much impossible for a protest to be seen as deserving when you are asking for additional government funds to be given to your group which is already seen as privileged.
The Idle No More protests which began roughly a year ago have also failed to gather much widespread support. In their case, it's not because they didn't have important issues to talk about. The situation on many reserves is horrific and everyone agrees it needs to change. The environmental impact of fracking also needs to be discussed as the chemical run-off and dangerously high levels of methane it can produce in people's drinking water are both extremely troubling.
No, they mostly lost their support in how they went about their protests. Although many were peaceful, a large chunk behaved more like the reckless Black Bloc protestors than the peaceful Occupy Wall Street ones. Some intimidated and hassled journalists which guarantees bad media coverage. Some of the protests blocked main roads and hugely inconvenienced random normal people trying to go about their day instead of targeting government or relevant institutions and industries. This reduced support amongst the general population. There was also a racial component in that the Idle No More protests were, or at least made it easy to be depicted as, xenophobic against non-First Nations. A more inclusive approach would likely have been more successful.
Anyway, so what's with the protests going on in Ukraine. Just for the record, it is no longer referred to as "the Ukraine." They dropped the 'the' when gaining independence in 1991.
Basically, there is a struggle for Ukraine going on between Brussels and Moscow. Both the European Union and the Russians want to bring the country into their economic spheres. Earlier, it seemed that the country was moving towards greater ties with the West but threats from Russia has caused Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, on November 21st, to back-out of the comprehensive association and free-trade agreement they had negotiated with the EU over the last few years.
While the EU was trying to lure Ukraine over with some carrots, Russia was making more progress with some fancy stick-work. Ukraine with its 46 million people is facing gas and debt bills of $17 billion due next year and has a total debt of about $124 billion. Do to disputes between the two countries over the cost of the natural gas Ukraine was buying from Russia, Ukraine has been suggesting it will cut down gas imports, even threatening that “Ukraine may stop buying gas altogether at that price.”
Ukraine was hoping to continue using its position of being courted by both Russia and the EU, playing them off against each other to get a better deal from both. Russia took this poorly and had followed up by threatening to basically bankrupt Ukraine if they went ahead with the EU deal. They would raise gas prices even higher as Ukraine went into the winter or even potentially shut it off completely since Russia provides one-third of their domestically-used supply. This threat may seem familiar as Russia had turned off the gas in both 2006 and 2009 over financial disputes between their respective state-owned energy companies.
Russia also threatened heavy tariffs and trade checks on Ukrainian exports which is a problem because Russia takes about a quarter of them, worth some $18 billion annually. Despite rapidly strengthening trade ties with the EU, Ukraine cannot afford to have Russia stop taking it imports. There have already been some difficulties in getting certain exports into Russia such as chocolate which isn't surprising considering that temporarily banning imports from former Soviet-states in order to apply pressure is something they've done before.
Russia considers Ukraine to be a fundamental piece of the plan for the Eastern Partnership program, unofficially referred to as the Eurasian Union, a proposed political and economic rival to the EU, US, and China. Unsurprisingly, Russia is the main engine behind the idea, the brainchild of Vladimir Putin. Critics are concerned that a new Cold War may emerge alongside a new USSR which would potentially include Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Krygyzstan, and Tajikistan. Kazakhstan and Belarus already signed an agreement with Russia in 2011 and the Union will be fully operational by 2015. Other countries with historic ties that may be invited are Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Mongolia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
If Ukraine stays away from the EU, Russia will be willing to lower its gas prices, keep trade walls down, and even provide needed loans, funds Russia has available but the struggling EU does not. President Yanukovych asked the EU negotiators whether they could supply enough benefits and loans to offset the consequences of not going with Russia. He was told no and saw that he really had no options here, at least until Ukraine gains some energy self-sufficiency.
There is a lot of resentment in Ukraine against Russia, what with the centuries of brutal oppression. The northwest and center of Ukraine is predominately ethnically and linguistically Ukrainian while the southeast is much more tied to Russia. Ukraine's election results are basically divided this way and this important decision of choosing to either side with the West or with Russia is thus split this way as well. All things considered, it makes for a very divided country where the two halves don't even speak the same language. A poll suggests about 45% of Ukrainians want stronger ties to the EU while 14% said they want to join the Eurasian Union. The rest are undecided.
Kiev is the capital of Ukraine and located in the northern region. This is where the vast majority of the protests have been occurring. Angry at a bad economy, the perceived electoral fraud that brought Yanukovych to power in 2010, government corruption, the continued imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and the move away from the West after their leadership caved in to Putin's demands, protestors have been rioting for the last couple of weeks with the blessing of opposition parties.
The protests have many reminiscing of the 2004 Orange Revolution when similar massive protests in Kiev managed to have a fraudulent election overturned. Yanukovych was the main focus in those ones as well, having beaten out opponent Viktor Yushchenko only to have the results recalled and thrown out after accusations of corruption, intimidation and direct voter fraud.
Two days ago, 500,000 thousand protestors were going at it, calling for the president's resignation and smashing a statue of Lenin to show their anger with Russia and anything that smacks of the old USSR-Ukraine relationship. Opposition leader and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko claimed that yesterday, opposition headquarters was raided by masked men who smashed up their servers. Today, police are scuffling harder with the protestors after being quite calm and composed since clashes on Nov. 30th threatened to explode the situation into something worse.
Either way, the protests seem to be making their mark. Yanukovych is back talking with the EU about the association agreement and has said he could sign it if Europe can give better financial conditions to lessen the negative effects of Russia's response. This association agreement is not EU membership though and I don't think the EU has the ability or the will to compete with Russia on this. They have neither the carrots nor the sticks Russia has. For the time being, it looks like Russia will take Ukraine back into its sphere and that's the cold hard reality. The problem is that Ukraine is screwed either way. If they go with the EU, Russia will cut off gas during the winter and society will destabilize. If they don't go with the EU, the protestors who hate Russia will freak out and society will destabilize.
The worst part is that this all could have been handled differently so that Russia wasn't put into such a face-saving, all-or-nothing position. Russia has tried to cozy up to and repair relations with the West on several occasions and has been refused, ensuring the Cold War mentality remains. In 1990, Gorbachev asked to have a united Germany be in NATO as well as the Warsaw Pact. Thatcher and Bush Senior refused.
After 9/11, Russia supported the US in everything, even allowing US military bases to expand into what was traditionally Soviet territory. It tried to use its new and improved relationship with the US to improve relations with all of NATO and come out of its isolationist mentality. However, after differences emerged in how the countries wanted to fight terrorism and Russia heading the opposition to the illegal Iraq invasion alongside Germany and France, the US undid all the gains in relations when it started to plan the construction of a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. Also, NATO was hinting it would offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine, two countries immediately within Russia's sphere, without improving relations with Russia. Russia logically saw this as a threat.
A third failed chance to improve relations with Russia and prevent this kind of 'us vs them' mentality is probably the stupidest. Yanukovych invited Russia to join in on the EU-Ukraine negotiations when it was clear Russia didn't want to be left out. Brussels had refused, turning the whole thing from a trade negotiation that could have improved relations all-around and let each group know their interests were represented into a pissing contest that it seems Russia is winning.
Ironically, it seems that the Ukrainian ties to the West will only be allowed to strengthen if the West improves its own ties with the East.
So maybe everyone will win.
Or maybe the ol' Cold War mentality will split Ukraine down the middle.
AS
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