Subj : Ukraine Redux To : All From : Lee Lofaso Date : Fri Jun 19 2015 00:03:22 Hello Everybody, One more time. You're Vladimir Putin. What do you do? --Lee -=-=-=-=- YOU'RE VLADIMIR PUTIN by Norman Spinrad You're Vladimir Putin, and you don’t understand why the so -called “West” finds you so hard to understand. Perhaps because the United States and the European Union are so blinded by their ideology that they genuinely can’t even see that they have one? But it is glaringly obvious from inside the Kremlin looking out. Their leadership and their press proclaim that their globalized transnational banking dominant brand of market economy is no ideology but the triumphant “end of history,” as their pundit Fukuyama so grandiosely put it before their “Great Recession” and their current so-called “New Normal,” with its massive national governmental debts, massive unemployment, downward pressure on wages, and grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality rendered such ideological breast-beating pathetically ridiculous. You're Vladimir Putin, and since you were a product of the Soviet Union’s Communist ideology, you can certainly recognize a failed ideology when you see one! Just because Communism failed it doesn’t meant that predatory globalized transnational capitalism is in the process of succeeding. In Greece, for horrible example, in Spain, in Ireland, indeed in the European Union as a whole or for that matter in the holier-than-thou United States. You're Vladimir Putin, a former KGB professional, and therefore a pragmatic realist who doesn’t make decisions on the basis of any ideology at all. You’re the thrice-elected President of the Russian Federation, and your job is to defend, protect, and enhance the national self-interest of the Russian State and the Russian people, period. And the Russian people have been betrayed, and welched on ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is why you have famously declared that collapse the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century. For the Soviet Union was a transnational state with complex levels of internal autonomy, a true federation bound together by bonds of mutual economic self-interest, not narrow tribal chauvinisms. When Gorbachev announced that he would “deprive the west of an enemy” and acceded to the reunification of Germany within NATO, the deal was supposed to be that NATO and the European Union would not move west into Russia’s near abroad. But they did just that, into the Baltic States, into Poland, into the Slavic Balkans, and now they would swallow Ukraine. You're Vladimir Putin, you’ve reclaimed the Crimea virtually without firing a shot, and you’ve massed Russian forces near the eastern borders of Ukraine. But you have no intention of invading. For the last thing you want is to annex Ukraine or the Eastern part of it into the Russian Federation by military force or any other means. You have a much grander goal--a Eurasian Union, stretching from Kaliningrad and the western border of Russia east across vast Siberia to Vladivostok and the Bering Straight, from north of the Arctic Circle to the Caucasus and the border of China. Not an expanded Russian Federation per se, but a transnational confederation something like the European Union, with Russia as its senior member as Germany dominates the EU only more so. This dream has been belittled as a “Soviet Union Lite.” And in truth it would be something like the Soviet Union without the Communist ideology. Not ideologically based at all but a multicultural civilization vaster than Europe, with a customs union, common currency, economic integration, but not a national state. For all of its history, Russia has vacillated between looking west to Europe or east across Siberian to the Pacific. You're Vladimir Putin and you say it should do both. You're Vladimir Putin and you dream of of your place in history as the creator of this Eurasian Union. And an independent sovereign Ukraine with a government you can deal with is the key. For the core around which the Eurasian Union has to be built, is the very same core whose disintegration doomed the Soviet Union--Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Alone, these four states, would already be the core of a Eurasian Union. But if the globalized American dominated west swallows Ukraine it can never be. You're Vladimir Putin and you cannot allow Ukraine to join either NATO or the European Union. And you won’t. The military force you have assembled on its eastern borders is the stick. But once there is a Ukrainian government you can deal with, you have an even mightier carrot to wield. Let the European Union and its Troika strong-arm banking enforcers lay their severe economic demands on the table so that all the Ukrainian people understand that their “austerity” will mean poverty and hardship in the service of their “fiscal responsibility.” And then you offer your alternative. If Ukraine joins the Eurasian Union, Russia will not merely lend it the money to carry its debt in return for austerity. It will wipe out the debt entire by purchasing the Crimea from Ukraine. You're Vladimir Putin. With the stakes this high you can afford to do it. You're Vladimir Putin, formerly of the KGB. You're Vladimir Putin, and if you’ve learned nothing else there, you’ve learned how to make an offer that can’t be refused. end Posted 7th April 2014 by Norman Spinrad -=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Comments, anyone? --Lee --- MesNews/1.08.05.00-gb * Origin: news://felten.yi.org (2:203/2) .