Not possible. Bush is a moron, remember?

So far, Putin has been able to equate the preservation of autocracy with Russian nationalism. This matters in Belarus and Moldova, the next theoretical targets for democratization.

Events in Armenia, the third of Russia's remaining colonies, will be interesting.

They should just take the money they looted and buy an island or few.

This article displays a faith in democracy, as an idealised concept, which is childlike in it's simplicity.

Democracy is not the philosophers stone of social organization. Democracy is only a good thing when it provides for the basic needs of the people.

Democracy can only do this in highly specific circumstances. Without sufficent wealth, education and technological developement, democracy is not a viablre form of government.

You guys have got things back to front. It is not Western democracy which creates Western levels of prosperity, but rather, Western technological and intellectual achievement which make democracy viable.

The "Orange Revolution" was not a people's revolution. The Orange revolution was sponsored by millionaire oligarch, George Sorros. Events in the Ukraine are a victory for plutocracy against nationalism. Nationalism views society as an extended family, plutocracy views mankind as a commodity. You are celebrating a victory of gold over blood. A victory of human vanity over natural order.

Calvin,

Arrant nonsense like that can only come from Pat Buchanan or the Daily Worker.

With rare exceptions, such as Singapore and Chile, autocracy always devolves into theft and tyranny. Such was certainly the case in the Ukraine where Kuchma and his cohorts have stolen everything that isn't nailed down.

Democracy does pretty well in Costa Rica and has for about 6 decades.

Your view of what happened in the Ukraine as 'nationalism vs. plutocracy' is hilarious. The vast majority of the vote for Yushchenko was among Ukrainian speakers. Ukrainian speakers who belong who are Byzantine Rite Catholics, known as 'Ukrainian Catholics', voted something like 95% for Yushchenko. The adherents of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church whose head is located in Kiev, the Ukrainian-language speaking Orthodox Church of Ukraine, were also overwhelmingly for Yushchenko. The only regions that went for Yanukovich were the Russian-speaking parts of the country, i.e. the Donbass, Crimea and Odessa, where the Orthodox Church is Russian-speaking and run from Moscow.

In other words, the Ukrainians voted for Yuschenko and democracy, the Russians voted for continued rule by a crooked puppet of Moscow. The people who voted for democracy were the nationalists, the people who voted for the guy the West wanted were the nationalists.

Despite your protestations, you are on the side of crooks who want to perpetuate Russian Empire and strangle Ukrainian independence and freedom in the cradle. That is many things( Russophilia, a nostalgia for the Cold War, anti-Americanism, pro-Communism, support for fascism perhaps) but it is most assuredly not nationalism.

You seem to assume that there are only two possible versions of government, autocracy and democracy. Democracy is a form of government far more suitable to the modern world than autocracy, I agree. Democracy is not, however, immune from auto-destruction as wtness Germany in the thirties and Italy in the twenties. The democratic trajectory may be longer, but the crash seems to have far more impact.

I am not in favour of autocracy, I am against the valourisation of Democracy as sacred cant, rather than as a form of government. I tend to agree with Edmund Burke, that there are only two forms of government, government which concerns itself with the day to day problems which it's citizens encounter and governments which seek to change society in conformity with idealised concepts. I think that democratisation is becoming the new idolatry. I would pfefer a return to pragmatic democracy until something better comes along.

Selling your country to the highest bidder, in this case Sorros and a cabal of global financial interests, doesn't make you a nationalist, regardless of linguistic factors. Are we talking about the same Ukranian speakers who flocked into the Waffen SS divisions during WWII, and who run the holocaust denying website, "The Ukranian Archive" BTW?

Russian Empire, Global Empire? Maybe the Ukranians are afraid of being bombed into partnership with "Europe" like the people of Serbia?

We come in peace, shoot to kill!

There's actually only one.

Calvin,

Since civil procedure in the US does not bar inconsistent pleading, I will allow you to jump from your claim that the people who voted for Russia's stooge were the nationalists to your new claim that it was 'pragmatic democracy,' without prejudicing your argument.

If your argument is that it might be better to have a managed democracy, like Singapore, or a mild, honest autocracy, like Pinochet's Chile, rather than a democracy in an LDC, you may actually have a point. However, that is not the choice the Ukraine was presented with. Their choice was between the guy supported by the West, who may or not be a crook but who certainly is a product of the apparat, and the guy supported by Russia, an apparatchik who had been implicated up to his eyeballs in the current corruption that had strangled economic development. There is no Ukrainian Lee Kuan Yew, so far as I can see.

So, you are now claiming that any Ukrainian who doesn't vote to be ruled from Moscow is a holocaust-denying neo-Nazi or a stooge for George Soros or both? There are a few watering holes in northern NJ where if you said that you wouldn't get out alive. And that would certainly come as a shock to the rabbis who spoke at the pro-Yushchenko demonstrations.

Is there a history of Jew-hatred in the Ukraine? Of course, but there is in Germany, Poland or for that matter Britain.

Ukrainians want a better life for themselves and their children. It is not unreasonable for a group which has experienced centuries of rule from Moscow, in various forms, and where there are lots of people with family in the West particularly the US, Canada, Australia and France to look to the West for a role model. All the propaganda of a Soros or a Putin doesn't match up to the letters home from cousin Misha selling real estate in Garfield, NJ, making a nice buck and living a life you could only dream of back in Vinnitsa. And there are millions of cousin Mishas living good lives in the West and telling the family back 'home' that they could do the same thing if only they started acting like Americans, Canadians, Australians or even Frenchmen.

OK, "Calvin" is a plant meant to make Bart look reasonable. Right? Right?

What I am saying is that some Ukranians just hate Russians, that doesn't make them pro-Western. It just means that there is a confaltion of interest, just as there was a conflation of intereset between the Ukranians and the Nazis. Just because some New Jersey primatives might beat you up for saying something, doesn't make it untrue. If I said that Black people should be concerned that people of their ethnicity commit 33% of all crimes in England and Wales, in any pub in Brixton, I would also be killed.

George Sorros, the man who funds much of Yuscheko's support, promotes and funds abortion throughout the Slavic world. Maybe if he was a little bit more pro-Slavic he might be funding orphanages.

Most Ukrainians, like everyone else from Mexicans to Scotsmen to Hairy Ainu, want better lives for themselves and their kids. The Russians have failed in doing this not only in Russia but the Soviet Union was for the most part a disaster particularly in the memory of most people alive in the region today. So, it is only rational for Ukrainians to look elsewhere. Hence, the popularity of pro-Western figures. If Yushchenko and company screw up, the pendulum will swing in another direction. Although given Ukrainian educational levels and natural resources, it is hard to imagine him doing worse than Kuchma and Yanukovich.

Before an Englishman complains about Jew-hatred in other nations and their craven behavior in WWII, I would respectfully suggest that he do some research on the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Would you suggest that Americans, particularly Jewish ones, should predicate all our policies concerning Britain based upon that rather dreary experience? Many Ukrainians looked to the Nazis as liberators because of the Stalinist planned famines that killed millions of them. Did the people of the Channel Islands suffer similar penury in the 20s and 30s which motivated them to hand over their local Jews to the Nazis with minimal prompting?

BTW, next time I get out to Wallington I'll be glad to mention to a good friend of mine, a hard-drinking engineer of Ukrainian descent who just happens to be one of the top 50 chess players in the US, there is some jumped-up football yobbo in Britain who thinks he's a primitive.

Who cares about George Soros? He's simply a moneychanger out to make money for himself. If Ukrainians don't want legalized abortions, then like Poles are doing, they can illegalize them. Now that they can practice their various religions, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Judaism and evangelical Protestantism, the moral vacuum imposed by the Soviets is over.

"Most people just want a better life for themselves and their children", the key word being, "their", not other peoples, except if you are European or Northern American. We are obliged to care about everyones welfare, to the extent that we are "morally" obligated to support immigration policies which are detrimental to oursselves and our children.

You seem to be able to find a limitless number of Ukranians in America. Remember Stanley Kowalski?, "A person from Poland is Polish, I'm an American". Changed days eh?

I presume the 50% of the Ukranian population who voted against Yushenko don't want a "better life for themselves and their children", or are they just too stupid to have their opinions taken seriously?

I know a few East Germans and most of them are not that impressed by the blandishments of consumer capitalism. Bread and circuses are, I admit, an improvement upon rubber truncheons and gulags, but there is a lot to have reservations about. The new European Order, which the Slav nations are being invited to participate in, seems to be hell bent on pissing the wealth of Europe to the four winds, as well as flushing our civilisation down the toilet of history, never mind, we'll still have Starbucks.

I hate football BTW

If you wish to conflate social welfare and immigration policy, that is your problem. The American model isn't anything like that. People come here to work and they get paid. In the US, outside of a few racial hucksters like Jesse Jackson or Pat Buchanan, nobody really cares what color you are as long as you work hard and play by the rules. The three highest income ethnic groups in the US are Hindu Indians, Jews and Japanese. A Volkist racial model just makes no sense. When I was in one of America's top grad schools, most of my fellow students were from Asia. This made me a better math geek not a worse one.

Americans pretty much universally accept that self-interest is the engine that drives society. It is our ability to cooperate with others that enables all of us to further our individual happiness. DeTocqueville writing in the early 19th century explains this phenomenon better than I do.

You seem to jump around more than Bugs Bunny. One minute you're praising a focus on ancestry and in the next you're decrying it. Americans are descendants of people from elsewhere and many are concerned with the fate of the 'mother country.' I would think someone from Britain which benefitted from American largesse due mostly to a perceived 'Anglo-Saxon' unity during two world wars, the first of which was absolutely none of our business, would refrain from complaining about this peculiarly American phenomenon. American ethnic lobbies are a fact, and just as Colonel House and his allies persuaded Wilson to bail out England in 1917, Americans today have concerns about many sections of the globe.

As for the Yankuovich voters, I have rendered no prior opinion about them but if you insist I'll explain what seems their position. About 25% of the population of the Ukraine are Russian speakers, whether they are ethnic Russians or merely Russified Ukrainians is a matter of conjecture. They are concerned that their rights will be stepped on if Ukraine maintains its independent status from Moscow. They see what has occured in the Baltic states and in Central Asia and worry, understandably. The vote was about 55-45 overall, and virtually all of that Russophone population was in the 45. Thus, of the Ukrainian speakers, the vote was about 75-25 in favor of Yushchenko. The 25% or so of Ukrainian speakers who voted for Yanukovich did so out of a whole series of reasons, perhaps they were hostile to the notion of being integrated into a non-Orthodox Christian West, perhaps they believed in a unity of the 3 Russias, perhaps they hated George Soros, perhaps they felt that Yushchenko was an even worse crook than Yanukovich or that a closer relation with Moscow would bring more opportunity.

We just had an election in the US and 48% of Americans voted for someone who would have been the worst possible choice since Jimmy Carter. Are they evil people for having done so? Some may be but most are simply guilty of having made a poor judgment in good faith, perhaps on bad information. The same is true in the Ukraine. A sensible politician will ask why a large percentage of the population opposed him and will want to rectify that in some means without sacrificing core principles. Bush did that after 2000. Reagan did that after 1980.

East Germany is just a complete cluster f*** for reasons too numerous to discuss here. The short version is that Helmut Kohl showed he didn't know beans about economics and he let a bunch of crooks control the hundreds of billions of dollars of West German largesse, which all pretty much disappeared down the rathole.

The new European Order which appears to be little more than a means of letting France punch above its own weight will collapse in short order as soon as the Eastern nations start using their votes. The French won't stand for an EU worried about economic growth in the East instead of subsidies to inefficient French farmers and state-owned manufacture.