politics for the 99%

Published on Spiegel Online International, by Spiegel Staff: BENJAMIN BIDDER, CHRISTIAN NEEF, VLADIMIR PYLYOV and MATTHIAS SCHEPP, January 27, 2014 (Photo Gallery).

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich appears bent on crushing the protest movement but the opposition won’t go quietly. A right-wing nationalist party is seeking to benefit from the growing violence and has begun warning of a civil war.

Dressed in jeans and a down jacket, the parliamentarian who wants to overthrow Ukraine’s president by any means necessary is standing in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, where a struggle for power has played out over the last two months. “What can our cobblestones, Molotov cocktails and burning tires do against water cannons, bullets and armored cars?” asks Igor Myroshnychenko. “Many people here are prepared to die” … //

Death Toll Mounting: … //

… Weak Opposition: … //

… Flirting with the Right Wing:

The Svoboda party also has excellent ties to Europe, but they are different from the ones that Klischko might prefer. It is allied with France’s right-wing Front National and with the Italian neo-fascist group Fiamma Tricolore. But when it comes to the oppression of homosexuality, representative Myroshnychenko is very close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, even if he does all he can to counter Moscow’s influence in his country.

“The EU is the only possibility for us to defend ourselves against Russian pressure,” he says. He and his party see the alliance with Klitschko as being purely tactical. Klitschko, after all, would like to limit the powers of the president while Svoboda dreams of a country with a strong leader.

Myroshnychenko was press spokesman for the Ukrainian national football team in the lead up to the 2008 European Championships, but he isn’t exactly cosmopolitan. He would even like to see foreign professional football players deported because they “change Ukraine’s ethnic map.”

There have been other, similar incidents. In a 2012 debate over the Ukrainian-born American actress Mila Kunis, he said that she wasn’t Ukrainian, rather she was a “Jewess.” Indeed, anti-Semitism is part of the extremist party’s platform; until 2004, they called themselves the Social-National Party of Ukraine in an intentional reference to Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party. Just last summer, a prominent leader of party youth was distributing texts from Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated into Ukrainian.

Without the nationalists’ tight organization, the revolt on Maidan Square would long since have collapsed. But Svoboda also embodies the greatest danger to the protest movement. The party’s foot soldiers, with their muddled, right wing doctrine, aren’t likely to hold back for much longer.

And that might be what the president is waiting for.
(full text).

Links:

Syria’s Bodies: The Stench Was Unfathomable, auf Spiegel Online International, by Christoph Reuter and Christoph Scheuermann, January 27, 2014 (Photo Gallery): Photos released last week show that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad tortures, starves and murders its prisoners. The images provide grisly evidence to support what witnesses have been telling SPIEGEL for months …;

Being Left Part 7: Writings & Fanfare, on ZNet, by Michael Albert, Jan 26, 2014: In December 2013 David Marty did an extensive interview with Michael Albert. We present it in nine parts – of which this is the seventh. Other parts address: Radicalization, Media, Debating Vision, Venezuela, Occupy and IOPS, Fanfare, Chomsky, and a conclusion …;