Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Burn, Baltics, Burn!

Un'ottimo articolo di un'ottimo settimanale "alternativo" Inglese,
pubblicato a Mosca (e parecchio anti-Putin, come testimonia anche
questo articolo).
http://www.exile.ru/2007-May-18/burn_baltics_burn.html
Why the Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia aren't going to take
it anymore.
RIGA -- I flew to Riga last week for the May 9 Victory Day
celebration, hoping to get an adrenaline fix from the promise of a
riot. I've been to the Baltics many times, and for years now I've been
expecting the Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia to
burn shit down. By any historical-moral standard we Westerners have
set, the Russians in those countries have every right to riot. It took
a long time, but finally, it happened.
Here I should admit that I come to this story with my own prejudices:
I think the Baltic people are fucking Neanderthals for the way they
turned on their Russian minority, once it was clear that the Russians
were defenseless and could be smacked around with impunity. Given the
choice between walking upright like the Westerners they claim to be,
or behaving like knuckle-dragging monkeys, the Estonians and Latvians
chose old-style European village fascism. And for that, I believe they
should be booted out of NATO and the keys to their borders handed back
to Russia to do with as they please.
For the past decade or so, I've been waiting for the Baltics to get a
little come-uppance. Partly out of affinity with the Russians, and
partly because of the Baltic people's vile record in WW II towards
Jews and Slavs, a record shameful even by Europe-of-the-40s standards.
Still, when the Tallin riots finally happened, I didn't trust them. I
got sucked into the conspiratorial mindset that comes from being in
Russia too long: Who was behind it? Who benefited? Was it manufactured
by the Kremlin? The surface can never be trusted...
A riot was promised on May 9 at Riga's Monument to the Soviet
Liberators, the local equivalent to Tallin's bronze statue memorial.
Latvian nationalists were going to try to march on it simply to
provoke the Russian minority. A group of Russian-speakers camped out
at the memorial the night before vowing to "protect" it, a crowd whose
numbers swelled from dozens to several hundreds by 10 a.m.
But there was no riot, only menace and a fizzle. A tiny group of about
30 Latvian nerds and paranoid-schizophrenics, protected by a phalanx
of riot cops, marched skittishly to the edge of the monument square.
The Russians spotted them and made their way in groups to the edge of
the square, at first out of sheer curiousity. Suddenly the atmosphere
turned from festive anticipation to wounded fury, the kind of anger
that comes from the guts. The cops tried to protect the small,
frightened group of Latvian nerds as the Russian crowd pushed,
whistled, and yelled, "Fashisti! Fashisti!"
The Latvian, including a few vid-gamer types, pale skinny twerps, and
weird old women, received official government permission to hold their
march. They waited until the police secured a cordon for them, then
moved nervously into the large concrete square, towads the Soviet
memorials. The Latvians got as far as they could push through, about
half way to the base of the monument, before the laws of density
brought the crowds to a completely standstill. It was like rugby with
two different strategies: numbers for the Russians, weapons and
shields for the cops/nationalists.
For a few minutes, things seemed combustible. The cops got into a
crouching position twisting their batons forward, pushing the Russians
back. The front-line Russians were big guys, who looked like jocks and
cops, but were remarkably orderly and reasonable. Both sides knew how
dangerous the situation was; and unlike in Tallin, where the cops
behaved like flat-out Pinochet fascists, worse even than the OMON in
Moscow, here in Riga the cops restrained themselves and tried to
maintain communication even while jostling and pushing. The Russians'
anger was real; there were young and old, men and women, athlete types
and intellectuals. As the two sides pushed against each other, the
smart money was on violence. The cops were getting antsy, helmets
pulled down and tightening into a defensive formation; the Latvian
nerds were increasingly scared and confused; and the Russians could
sense that a tipping point was near. At stake, it seemed, was the
dignity of their entire nation, culture and history.
Watch more eXile TV.
Suddenly the tension was broken when a tall Russian guy slipped
through the police lines, stole a Latvian's anti-Russian placard, and
ran away, cutting left and right through the Russian crowd as slowly
as Fred Bilitnikoff, when a pack of cops crashed through us, caught up
with him, and subdued him. Part of the Russian crowd broke away to
surround the cops and the heroic placard-thief, who lay down limp on
the concrete and refused to cooperate. The cops held him and formed a
circle around him to protect themselves, while the Russians urged and
yelled for him to be let go. It could have unleashed a total riot; but
the Russians who surrounded them were too reasonable, as were the
Latvian cops. They spoke to each other; the cops argued with the
Russians; most of the Russians who surrounded the cops kept reminding
the hot-heads that their fight was not with the police, whom they
viewed as "people like us," but rather with the fascists and with the
Latvian government, which had denied half the Russian population basic
democratic rights, and treated the rest like second-class citizens
since gaining independence.
At first everyone wondered who the guy was who stole the placard. Even
some of the "Anti-Fascist Committee" organizers from the Russian and
Jewish-Russian community suspected he might be a provocateur. But as
they learned in conversations with the police who detained him, he was
just a "regular guy" pissed off at the Latvians. This is what is so
dangerous and so hard to grasp: it wasn't a planned, manufactured act.
By stealing the placard, by lying down, he had restored some of the
Russians' dignity. With the numbers, the threat of violence, and the
memory of Tallin hanging over the scene, everyone could sense that for
the first time, some measure of power was shifting to the Russian
side.
It was then that I understood the subtle connection between the "March
of Dissenters" anti-Kremlin protests in Russia, and the protests by
the Russian minority in the Baltics: both, at a fundamental level, are
about dignity, about not being a slave.
I spoke to one of the more moderate Latvian politicians, Oskars
Kastens, the government Minister of Integration, about the
disenfranchisement of the Russians. He countered their complaints by
noting that the 400,000 stateless Russians, or 20% of Latvia's total
population, do get pensions, access to education, state grants, and so
on. It seemed to him self-evident how decent and reasonble the Latvian
government was: they paid the Russians money, after all. Even given
his country's experience under occupation, he didn't grasp the Russian
minority's grievance.
One of the ugliest arguments against the Russian minority's
complaints, which you hear often, is that the Russians in Latvia/
Estonia "have it so much better than Russians in Russia...they should
be grateful, even if they can't vote, to be in an EU country." It's
the same argument that supporters of South Africa's apartheid regime
used to give: that South Africa's blacks lived so much better than
blacks in African-ruled countries, so therefore, they should be
grateful. If they didn't like it in South Africa, let them live with
their African brothers in the Congo, or Burkino Faso, or some other
fucked up black country. Then they'd see what complaining was really
about. This is essentially the argument used to deny the Russian
minority's grievance, which is, at heart, a question of dignity. The
same issues that underlie the anti-Putin protest movement.
Many in the Russian-speaking community are aware of the similarity
between their protest and those of the anti-Putin marchers. Tatyana
Zhdanok, who serves in the European Parliament, told me that not only
did she feel this affinity, but that moreover, the Kremlin's behavior
during the Tallin riots, sending Nashi to the Estonian embassy in
Moscow, "has only made our situation worse, and played into the hands
of the Latvian and Estonian anti-Russian leaders." Like many other
leaders of the Russian minority, she lamented her community's position
as "hostages" of both Latvian discrimination and sleazy Kremlin
politics.
Incidentally, the Latvian government tried to strip Zhdanok of her
elected post, but they were overruled by the European Court of Human
Rights. Zhdanok, who lost many family members in the Holocaust, was
once labeled an "extreme Russian nationalist" by the U.S. State
Department simply for supporting the Russian-speaking minority's
rights, yet today she is in an alliance with the Green Party of
Europe, the only political party which recognizes the grievances of
the Russian-speaking minority as valid.
What really fuels the frustration and injustice is the arrogant way in
which the Russian minority's grievances are dismissed. One man I met
on my way to the May 9 rally told me that he was born in Latvia, left
to study in Moscow, and came back only to find he was considered an
"alien" by the government, and had no right to citizenship. He showed
me his passport, which is stamped "alien," and began to curse.
"They won't listen to us, and the Europeans pretend as if we don't
exist, that we're just a Russian fifth column," he said. "I was born
here! This is my homeland. I supported independence. But they decided
to fuck all of us. What Estonia showed is that the only way to change
things is by physical force. We can't reason with these people with
words and arguments, after 15 years, it's clear that words don't
work."
When I think of how the West consciously and unconsciously de-
legitimizes any minority group which Russia supports, I always am
reminded of an incredibly evil article written by Robert Cottrell, the
former Russian bureau chief for the Financial Times and the Economist.
In the summer of 2004, as the U.S.-trained Georgian army tried to take
back the breakaway ethnic enclave of South Ossetia by force, Cottrell
published an article in Transitions Online titled, "Time to challenge
Russia." It is one of the most shameless examples in dehumanization-
propaganda imaginable, recalling the sort of genocidal British
rhetoric used to deny the grievances of the Kikuyu in Kenya, the
Irish, and any other people who didn't accept their role as grateful
subjects:
"To call South Ossetia a 'rebel region' or a 'breakaway province' of
Georgia flatters it with the language of political struggle. Better to
think of it as a Russian-backed smuggling racket with a large piece of
land attached. The sooner the land returns to Georgian control, the
better for everyone. Georgia has an interest in South Ossetia's peace
and prosperity. Russia has none."
To imagine how truly shocking this opener is, just change the ethnic
groups and re-read:
"To call Kosovo a 'rebel region' or a 'breakaway province' of Serbia
flatters it with the language of political struggle. Better to think
of it as a Turkish-backed smuggling racket with a large piece of land
attached. The sooner the land returns to Serbian control, the better
for everyone. Serbia has an interest in Kosovo's peace and prosperity.
The West has none."
But since Cottrell chose to bash an ethnic minority which no one in
the West cares about, he can be both a fascist and a respectable
journalist, regular contributor to the New York Times, and so on.
One of the eXile's first sales managers was Ossetian, so I knew what
total, utter bullshit Cottrell's argument was. The conflict between
the Ossetians (and the Abkhazians) with the Georgians goes a long way
back; it flared up again in the early 90s when Georgia, notoriously
chauvinistic towards its minorities, elected an outright fascist to
the presidency, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. How could Cottrell get away with
invalidating their grievances? How can Western intellectuals, after
all of the cultural moral-propaganda, still get away with telling the
world that an oppressed minority is really not oppressed, has no
grievance, and it's all the result of evil plotting by Russians? Can a
journalist do anything more sinister than this?
In fact Cottrell's description of the Ossetian grievances reminds me
of the American South's media accounts of black grievances in the
1700s and 1800s, when they always blamed riots and uprisings on evil
outsiders: "Jacobins," Haitian revolutionaries, Northern
abolitionists, Satanists, "Roman Catholics," and so on.
Cottrell's article is an example of why Russia and West are moving
apart, and why it's on the verge of transitioning to a much worse
phase. For years now, Russia's whining over the West's double
standards has been met with a haughty shrug. After all, what are the
Russians going to do about it? Let 'em whine!
I don't think the West has quite grasped it yet, but I believe we're
at the point now when Russian complaints about the West's double-
standards, which have never been taken seriously, are about to
transform into action, for the same reason that the "alien" Russian
explained to me in Riga: violence is the only language that the West
understands.
Today we're at a point when whining about double standards is no
longer a kind of action or ends in itself. Kosovo is about to achieve
independence over Russian objections and in spite of the fact that
Russian-backed minorities are in analogous situations but without the
West's support (see Kirill Pankratov's article page 8). And now the
memory of the Tallin riots is on the collective Russian mind, a memory
that is a call to action. It makes the next riot much easier, and much
more appealing. If and when Kosovo goes free, Russia, given its own
internal dynamics, will have almost no choice but to answer action
with action.
Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote, "All truth passes through three
stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." The Russian and Russian-
backed minorities' grievances are passing the stage of ridicule and
into violence. There is a palpable change in the Russian minority's
psychology. It's a sensibility that isn't all that different from the
March of Dissenters', a struggle against contemporary serfdom in all
of its subtleties.
The only question now is how much violence it will take before
assholes like Rob Cottrell or Javier Solano recognize what should
already be self-evident, and to what degree the Russian state will be
involved in this second, and most dangerous stage.

 Complimenda per la solita razione di trash,
toh l'ingoiatore di Pat Buchanan  che rilascia come sempre un commento
da cretino per provare a tutti che è davvero un cretino.

 Continua cosi', idiota dell'anno.
Per ora sei tu quello in carica.

appare irrilevante, perderci tempo č stupido.
Infatti.  La trovo una cosa molto ma molto ipocrita. (Persio)

 stanno tenendo sulla sedia di tortura.
ROTFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
a te a forza di stare in posizione di porgi deve essere rotolato fuori il
cervellino dall'orecchio amalric.
 
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