Skip to main content

Ukraine should learn from Uruguay

The electoral stalemate in Ukraine has received a lot of media attention. There has been a tremendous amount of media spin and doosras in the last week - even suggestions that Ukraine is going to be divided.

Is this just bad politics? Or a case of politics gone bad?

Ukrainians had a choice between blue balls and orange balls. Not a choice between Russia and the West as claimed by many political commentators. To the average poor person in east or west of Ukraine or anywhere in the world (including USA) - feeding their family, a better life prospect - is what they want.

But, then, as the American elections proved to us for the second time in four years - the brute majority of people refuse to indulge in politics and allowed an anti-social man to become the president of the richest nation in the world. The majority of people who are slaves to a consumerist system - watch TV, eat Kentucky Chicken and prefer a life of political impotence?

Impotence it is - in thought and in deeds.

Just because there are male and female prostitutes in this world, would that make sex a crime? If sex is indeed a crime then every parent has to be a criminal. Sex is the process of creation of life. Criminalising sex is a completely different social problem.

Similarly, politics is the lifeline of any civilized democratic society. Who wants to live in the shadow of an authoritarian regime of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Czar? The very idea of 'Equality' and equal rights is what makes democracy worth everything it is. And democracy, to survive, needs politics as its nervous system.

There is a fatigue, a sense of being helpless and frustrated that politics has been criminalised. That is exactly what every citizen in this world has to fight; to reclaim the democratic rights, to reclaim democracy itself from the hands of corporate and religious criminals.

Criminalisation of sex by different mafias - through sex trade and child abuse doesn't make the act of sex between lovers or partners a crime. The difference is very clear. Similarly the difference in bad politics and good politics is also as clear as broad daylight.

Why would an autocrat like Bush bother about democracy in any country? Isn't it a classic case of the The Pot Calling The Kettle Black? For someone who has legitimised the process of stealing elections, of blatantly abusing the secular credentials of democracy itself by openly colluding with the religious right - the results of the Ukrainian elections is not about his love for the Ukranian people. Only a fool would believe in America's perverted version of democracy. Fuck Off Bushies!

'West' reflects a power group of corporate first world - whose only interest is in profits and more profits. Money! Mo and Mo Money! The corporate first world (Not everyone in the West is a greedy capitalist) has always attacked or interfered in countries that are strong in Agriculture.

There is a disturbing pattern that is emerging: Korea, Vietnam, the best part of Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, South and Central America... and now Ukraine.

With the help of the World Bank and the IMF, the corporate first world convert economies from an Agrarian to a consumerist one - making sure that Agriculture fails and the American/Western agro-products has a market all the time.

Systematically, food crops are destroyed wherever the western multinationals go shopping. They try to introduce other crops - which cannot feed the people. This is a new form of imperialism - slavery.

Think about it, to develop a consumerist culture - where kid wants to eat Big Mac as food and does not want to eat the good ole bread, isn't there something terribly wrong. Such cultural imperialism is squeezing the life out of many millions in this world. The first world wouldn't stop at agricultural produce alone... they play every dirty trick known to the devious mind by se

So, Ukraine should look at Uruguay. Eduardo Galeano’s powerful words are prophetic in nature, "A few days before the election of the President of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country's history, the left won. And in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatization of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people."

There is only one victor in any democratic election held anywhere in the world: the people. It is ridiculous that the focus of the Presidential election in Ukraine has been diverted away from the real issues of the people and made into a media spectacle; one that resembles a WWE-style fight between Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko.

From an Ukranian point of view it is absurd to think that the President of the country needs to be either pro-West or pro-Russia. There is really no choice at all contrary to what the Spin Doctors from both the camps, from Russia and from the West have been claiming all these days. The only choice the President of Ukraine has is to be pro-People.

Russia cannot claim any moral high ground just because of United States' dubious claims to being the champions of democracy.

In Putin's own backyard, St. Petersburg, governor Valentina Matviyenko said that she was against the republican form of state rule in Russia. “No, this will not suit us, we are not ready for such an experiment. A Russian person’s mentality requires a lord, a czar, a president… authoritarian rule in general.”

The fact that Valentina gets to keep her job after making such a confession of her democratic beliefs says a lot about the real Putin.

The soviet legacy in Ukraine is one that is best forgotten. In 1937, during Stalin’s Great Purge, over 180,000 Ukrainians and Communist Party members were cleansed and dumped in hastily dug mass graves.

There are lessons to be learnt about such authoritarian regimes, may it be Stalin's or Bush's. Lack of respect for human rights, which is at the nerve-centre of democracy, makes these regimes the real axis of evil.

One of my favourite Russian commentators, Yulia Latynina, in her column in The Moscow Times writes, "If Russia had a different president and a different army, the results of the election in Ukraine could have led to a schism between east and west, with Russian troops rolling into the eastern part of the country to the cheers of the local residents. After all, eastern Ukraine from Odessa to Donetsk is basically Russian territory that was artificially annexed to Ukraine in the Soviet era along the line of the Russo-German front in 1918."

West should stop treating Ukraine like a mail-order-bride. Russia should stop treating Ukraine like a stepchild. Let the people of Ukraine make their choice in dignity – not because a few Ukranians want to chase a Western capitalist dream or not because a few Ukranians want to hold on to a nostalgic Soviet scheme. They are real people with real problems and real dreams.

For young democratic nations like Ukraine, their role models should never be USA or Russia… they should learn a lot from the courageous people of Uruguay – who refused to sell their souls for a few dollars.

Bob Dylan sang,

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed
Dignity never been photographed
I went into the red, went into the black
Into the valley of dry bone dreams

So many roads, so much at stake
So many dead ends, I'm at the edge of the lake
Sometimes I wonder what it's gonna take
To find dignity


Ukraine has to find its dignity in Ukraine, not in an American or a Rasputin dream.


Comments

John T said…
Santhosh,
Enjoyed reading what was written...Capital has a way of shaping each and every aspect of one's life leaving him or her with no choice. The Corporations determine what we should eat, dress, think, sing and dream. Even when we consciously try to get out of this process of being controlled by corporate power, they still manage to make their way into our lives. But, I am sure that as more and more people feel the hunger and begin to dream of a banquet, the world will be turned upside down. Then surely there will be democracy. The real 'democracy' I mean. Uruguay was a vote towards that end.

Popular posts from this blog

Arundhati Roy: The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture

The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy, at the Seymour Theatre Centre, University of Sydney. Peace & The New Corporate Liberation Theology It's official now. The Sydney Peace Foundation is neck deep in the business of gambling and calculated risk. Last year, very courageously, it chose Dr Hanan Ashrawi of Palestine for the Sydney Peace Prize. And, as if that were not enough, this year - of all the people in the world - it goes and chooses me! However I'd like to make a complaint. My sources inform me that Dr Ashrawi had a picket all to herself. This is discriminatory. I demand equal treatment for all Peace Prizees. May I formally request the Foundation to organize a picket against me after the lecture? From what I've heard, it shouldn't be hard to organize. If this is insufficient notice, then tomorrow will suit me just as well. When this year's Sydney Peace Prize was announced, I was subjected to some pretty arch rema

"Global Doubts as Global Solutions"

by Amartya Sen Melbourne Town Hall Tuesday, May 15, 2001, 6pm 1. Misery and Resignation We live in a world of unprecedented prosperity - incomparably richer than ever before. The massive command over resources, knowledge and technology that we now take for granted would be hard for our ancestors to imagine. But ours is also a world of extraordinary deprivation and of staggering inequality. An astonishing number of children are ill nourished and illiterate as well as ill cared and needlessly ill. Millions perish every week from diseases that can be completely eliminated, or at least prevented from killing people with abandon. The world in which we live is both remarkably comfortable and thoroughly miserable. Faced with this dual recognition, we can go in one of several different directions. One line of thinking takes the form of arguing that the combination of processes that has led to the prosperity of some will lead to similar prosperity for all. The advocacy of this perspective c

Prisoners in the land of the free

Better be careful if you are in the US and want to buy a ciggy lighter. You could be arrested for conspiring to detonate the nuclear arsenal the US has been piling up over the years. America's attitude towards anyone with a Middle Eastern origin is not too shocking. In Chinua Achebe's wonderful piece of writing 'Things Fall Apart' -- there is a passage where African tribal men sit around eating and drinking, contemptuously referring to white men, comparing their white skin to lepers’ white skin. One can understand the ignorance of the African tribals; they thought all white men are lepers! If America as a nation is as ignorant as the African tribals were 100 years ago... it is time to salvage their souls from the dark depths of ignorance. UN should set up an Educational Aid programme to help the ignorant and ill-educated American population, which includes the President of the US. 3 Texas men arraigned on terror charges CARO, Mich. — Three Texas men were arraigned Satur