{"id":24441,"date":"2014-02-25T11:43:36","date_gmt":"2014-02-25T16:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24441"},"modified":"2014-02-25T11:43:36","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T16:43:36","slug":"a-contrarian-speaks-out-on-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/02\/25\/a-contrarian-speaks-out-on-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"A contrarian speaks out on Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill isn’t comfortable with the widespread media descriptions of Ukraine’s change of government and calls it regime change instead<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Even in this era of rampant political spin and platitudes, where George Orwell\u2019s claim that political language is used and abused to \u2018make lies sound truthful and murder respectable\u2019 has never been truer, the commentary on Ukraine stands out for its dishonesty. Western observers tell us there has been a revolution in that benighted nation. They claim revolutionaries have overthrown a dictator. They say the people of Ukraine have risen up and deposed their despot, and are now \u2018experiencing the intense emotions expressed so eloquently by Thomas Paine in 1776 [in his writings on the American War of Independence]\u2019. It is hard to remember the last time political language was so thoroughly used to obfuscate reality, to impose inappropriate historical narratives on to a messy modern-day event. For what we have in Ukraine is not revolution, but regime change, set in motion far more by the machinations of Western politicians than by the stone-throwing of Ukrainians.<\/p>\n

Orwell was right \u2013 too much political writing is less about clarifying real-world events than it is a collection of pre-existing phrases \u2018tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse\u2019. So it has been in relation to Ukraine, where the words selected by Western observers tell us more about them and their prejudices than they do about events in Kiev. So the word \u2018meddling\u2019 is used to describe Vladimir Putin\u2019s interventions in Ukraine, but never to describe Angela Merkel\u2019s or John Kerry\u2019s cultivation of the oppositional forces \u2013 that is \u2018mediation\u2019. Ousted Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovich is now widely referred to as a \u2018dictator\u2019, confirming how exhausted and meaningless that word has become through overuse: unlike serious dictators like Gaddafi or Assad, Yanukovich won a free and fair election, in March 2010. As for the word \u2018revolution\u2019 \u2013 that has been knackered by misuse for decades, but its deployment in Ukraine takes its bastardisation to a new low: there has of course been no replacement of one social order by another in Ukraine, or even the instalment of a people\u2019s government; instead various long-established parties in parliament, some of which are deeply unpopular among certain constituencies in Ukraine, are forming an interim government. Revolutionary? Hardly.<\/p>\n

The Western debate and coverage of Ukraine has cast a massive political fog over events there. It may not have quite made \u2018murder seem respectable\u2019, but it has certainly made externally generated regime change seem revolutionary, and the Western-assisted anti-democratic removal of an elected leader seem like an act of people\u2019s democracy. It has exposed a severe dearth of independent critical thinking among the Western commentariat. Even those on the right who are normally passionately anti-EU are now lining up like lemmings behind Brussels\u2019 dishonest moral narrative about being a mere observer to a glorious revolution in the East. And even those on the left who condemned regime change in Iraq or Libya are buying the idea that Ukraine has undergone a revolution of Paineite proportions, with the Observer<\/em> giddily declaring that Ukraine is currently experiencing \u2018an intoxicating sense of liberation from an old guard\u2019. Across the political spectrum, narratives about Ukraine that don\u2019t add up, and which are being promoted by people normally seen as untrustworthy, are being accepted as good coin \u2013 among both a right excited by the prospect of a return of the neat Cold War-era divide between good West and bad East, and a left so desperate for evidence of revolutionary behaviour in the twenty-first century that it will lap up even staid, grey, distinctly unrevolutionary Brussels\u2019 claims about a revolution being afoot in Ukraine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note<\/strong>: This article is posted at Spiked Plus<\/em>, which is normally a pay site. They’ve made the site available to non-subscribers for a limited time to mark their second anniversary. If you’re reading this post at a later date, the link to the whole article may not work unless you’re a member.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill isn’t comfortable with the widespread media descriptions of Ukraine’s change of government and calls it regime change instead: Even in this era of rampant political spin and platitudes, where George Orwell\u2019s claim that political language is used and abused to \u2018make lies sound truthful and murder respectable\u2019 has never been truer, the commentary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,28],"tags":[337,354,720,726],"class_list":["post-24441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-media","tag-eu","tag-georgeorwell","tag-protest","tag-ukraine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6md","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24442,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24441\/revisions\/24442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}