rsn | If you were living in Crimea, would you prefer to remain part of
Ukraine with its coup-installed government – with neo-Nazis running four
ministries including the Ministry of Defense – or would you want to
become part of Russia, which has had ties to Crimea going back to
Catherine the Great in the 1700s?
Granted, it’s not the greatest choice in the world,
but it’s the practical one facing you. For all its faults, Russia has a
functioning economy while Ukraine really doesn’t. Russia surely has its
share of political and financial corruption but some of that has been
brought under control.
Not so in Ukraine where a moveable feast of some 10
“oligarchs” mostly runs the show in shifting alliances, buying up media
outlets and politicians, while the vast majority of the population faces
a bleak future, which now includes more European-demanded “austerity,”
i.e. slashed pensions and further reductions in already sparse social
services.
Even if the U.S.-backed plan for inserting Ukraine
into the European Union prevails, Ukrainians would find themselves
looking up the socio-economic ladder at the Greeks and other European
nationals already living the nightmare of “austerity.”
Beyond that humiliation and misery, the continuing
political dislocations across Ukraine would surely feed the further rise
of right-wing extremists who espouse not only the goal of expelling
ethnic Russians from Ukraine but Jews and other peoples considered not
pure Ukrainian.
This troubling racist element of the “inspiring”
Ukrainian uprising has been mostly airbrushed from the U.S. media’s
narrative, but more honest sources of news have reported this disturbing
reality. [For instance, watch this report from the BBC.]
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