December 2, 2004
I'M ON WHICH SIDE?:
Bitter lemons: Six questions to the critics of Ukraine's orange revolution (Timothy Garton Ash, December 2, 2004, The Guardian)
Why are so many west Europeans being such lemons about Ukraine's orange revolution? Every day brings a new example of some feeble, back-handed or downright hostile reaction.Yesterday, it was Simon Jenkins in the Times describing the crowds in Kiev as a "mob". (Dictionary definition: "a riotous or disorderly crowd of people; rabble".) Last week, it was Jonathan Steele in these pages, responding to my enthusiastic column about the Kiev events with such arguments as this: "Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he [the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko] the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll." Unpick that contorted hypothetical if you can.
In between, we have two representatives of a pressure group with a highly dubious track record, Mark Almond and John Laughland, informing us that somewhere behind or among the demonstrators were, respectively, agents of George Soros and Ukrainian, anti-semitic neo-Nazis. In the Berlin Tagesspiegel, I read a comparison of the opposition's tactics with those of Lenin in 1918; in Italy's La Repubblica, a commentary suggesting that Warsaw and Vilnius are trying to foist on the European Union a policy of destabilising the region. And so it goes on.
For 25 years, I have heard these same old arguments against supporting the democratic oppositions in eastern Europe.
Mr. Ash is, of course, a dedicated opponent of the similar effort to liberalize the Middle East, but is now surprised to discover the kinds of anti-democratic cretins he's in bed with? The spate of such stories by the more morally serious members of the Left--Michael Walzer, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff--is quite instructive, answering Mr. Walzer's question, Can There Be A Decent Left?, in the negative. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2004 9:44 AM
Anti-semitic neo-Nazis in Middle East good, anti-semitic neo-Nazis in Kiev bad.
Posted by: Brian (MN) at December 2, 2004 10:06 AMAt the risk of sounding magnanimous, one has to feel for the Left. Whether it is the Soviet Union, the Middle East, trends in the US, the Far East, South Asia, and now the former Warsaw Pact, they've proven to be completely and utterly wrong.
It must be an unsettling experience to wake up one day and find that instead of the workers rebelling all across the West, that their Eastern counterparts are bashing the Berlin Wall into dust. When after decades of dire predictions about Afghanistan and how the Taliban and the Soviets were both so much better than the Americans (who just wanted the place because it must have oil, despite the negative geological reports because why else would they want it), the Afghans go ahead and have a perfectly reasonable election, it must make that brie and chablis at the Pinters taste like cigar ash.
Posted by: Bart at December 2, 2004 11:53 AMOJ,
Thanks for the list; can't wait to get at it and place the sharpest in my quiver for my left-wing friends. I've used Walzer's article and it has never generated a response. That, could be viewed either way.
I try to use those arrows as appropriate responses to some of the inane articles that are sent to me.
Posted by: genecis at December 2, 2004 12:09 PMBart -- these people never gave a sh*t about the Afghans. Why would it upset their lunch?
I asked a boy the other day whether his teacher had told them that a gov't had been elected in Afghanistan with 1/3 women voting. He didn't know that.
But he did say that his teacher preferred Kerry because Kerry would have been better for NASA. Wow!
Posted by: Randall Voth at December 3, 2004 10:56 AM