Himes, Blumenthal, Ukraine And The Soviet Re-Union

Speaking at ^th District U.S.  Representative Jim Himes commiserated with Ukraine, still struggling under the boot of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, 4

"The senator [U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal] and I are thrilled to be able to take a moment this morning at this very momentous and frightening time for the Ukraine to be here to express our solidarity and support for the people of the Ukraine and our unwavering support for the principle that people not just in the United States but around the world will always have the right to determine the way in which they are governed," Himes said.

Mr. Himes may not know it but placing the article “the” in front of Ukraine is a throwback to the Soviet era when Ukraine (no article) was a part of the Soviet Union: As such, it was referred to – most often by Soviet oppressors, but also by historically inattentive reporters and commentators in the United States and Europe -- as THE Ukraine.

Prior to his Stamford visit, Mr. Blumenthal had appeared before two other Ukrainian groups in New Haven and Willimantic. Mr. Blumenthal’s remarks in Stamford were general and inoffensive: "This morning and every morning, politicians may be seeking power, but the people want peace and the right to determine their own future. That has been the aspiration and dream of so many who have come to this country."

Mr. Blumenthal did not mention Mr. Putin, Russia or the Stalin induced Soviet famine in Ukraine in 1933-34.

Before Stalin’s withering hand touched Ukraine, the nation – It IS a nation – had been known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe.”

Stalin wanted to bring Ukraine within the Soviet orbit, and he seized upon famine as a means of doing so. More than five million Ukrainians died in the famine caused and sustained by Stalin, whose communist storm troopers shot all the intellectuals in the country, gathered up and exported the seed grain used to plant future crops and entered small villages to destroy ovens used to produce meals. In starving villages, Ukrainians desperately fighting off famine stripped the trees of leaves and boiled them as soup. Stalin destroyed all the small farms in Ukraine and sent the kulaks, small farmers and landowners, to the Gulag later disclosed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his book “The Gulag Archipelago.” 

The most influential reporter in the United States during the famine was Walter Duranty, whose reports on Stalin’s “Five Year Plan” earned Mr. Duranty and the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize that, even today, hangs on the Times’ wall of Pulitzers.

Mr. Duranty was, said British author Malcolm Muggeridge, the most accomlished pathological liar he had met in all his years in journalism. While Ukraine was starving, Mr. Duranty was writing in the influential Times that there was no famine in Ukraine, only spot-shortages of food. It was Mr. Muggeridge and Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who courageously defied Stalin and released news of the famine to the West. Both Mr. Muggeridge and Mr. Jones boarded trains traveling through the countryside and witnessed the famine at first hand.  Mr. Muggeridge thwarted Soviet press censorship by smuggling his stories out to The Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper, in diplomatic pouches. Mr. Jones, later murdered by communists bandits while reporting from China, also managed to penetrate the wall of silence and obfuscation best represented by Mr. Duranty’s Pulitzer. Several years ago, Ukrainians attempted to shame the Times into removing Mr. Duranty’s Pulitzer from what should have become for the paper a wall of shame.

In June 2005, Mr. Jones's niece, Dr. Siriol Colley, and her son Nigel Colley wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that was reviewing its previous decision and which had committed itself to a serious review of the Duranty award.

"The Pulitzer Prize should be revoked from Walter Duranty," Jones' relatives wrote, "not just for his falsification of Stalin's ruthless execution of the Five Year Plan of Collectivization, but also for his complete disregard for journalistic integrity. Through abusing his position of authority as the New York Times' reporter in the Soviet Union, he villainously and publicly denigrated the truthful articles of my uncle, and ashamedly did so, whilst being fully aware of the ongoing famine."

None of these efforts bore fruit, largely because neither the Pulitzer committee nor the publisher of the Times was capable of feeling the cleansing effects of shame. Mr. Duranty’s Pulitzer remains a bloody blot on the escutcheons of both the Pulitzer Prize Committee and the New York Times.

The weapon Mr. Putin may use most effectively against the grandchildren of Stalin’s victims is oil piped across Ukraine to Europe, which may be shut down at his whimsy. The foreign policy of Mr. Obama’s White House is feckless because Mr. Obama seems either incapable or unwilling to distinguish properly between foreign friends and enemies, the single most important determinant of any foreign policy worth the name. It does not appear from the remarks make recently by Mr. Himes and Mr. Blumenthal that either congressman has a solid understanding of the history of Russia and Ukraine, and neither Europe nor Ukraine nor any of the Baltic States nor Poland should rest comfortably in post-Cold War sanguinary expectations. The Soviet re-Union may very well begin with the humiliation of Ukraine, but it will not end there.

Lieberman’s Leave-Taking

Like U.S. Senator Chris Dodd before him, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman soon will be leaving the congress with 23 years of service under his belt. Following his leave-taking, Mr. Dodd fell on a plush Hollywood featherbed. Lieberman’s future is a question mark. His bitterest critics – they are legion – suppose he will worm his way into a lobbyist position in Washington because, as Willy Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, that’s where the money is. Like Senator Dick Blumenthal, who stepped into Mr. Dodd’s congressional shoes, Mr. Lieberman is Jewish, and when his most hot-headed critics wish to strike a death blow, they revert to stereotypical insults: Jews are motivated by money alone; Lieberman’s principal loyalty lies with beleaguered Israel rather than the United States, that sort of thing. Apart from racism, the two oldest and most perduring prejudices in the United States are anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, both of which still have lots of wind in their sails.

When Mr. Lieberman appeared recently before the MiddlesexCounty Chamber of Commerce in Cromwell, “goodbye” was in his voice. No one, perhaps not even Mr. Lieberman himself, has been keeping count over the years of his public appearances. Like his critics within the progressive wing of his former Democratic Party, they are legion, though likely falling short of those of Mr. Blumenthal, about whom it has been said there is no more dangerous spot in the state than that between Mr. Blumenthal and a television camera. Mr. Blumenthal attended the Cromwell event as a sort of legacy pallbearer: Mr. Lieberman’s legacy in Connecticut politics and his own, Mr. Blumenthal said, had been intertwined.

The New European Left: Is There A Fascism In Our Future?

The New Left, both in Europe and the United States, is the old left reanimated by an economic downturn.

In France, former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon is being pushed forward politically by a favorable communist wind at his back. It is said that M. Mélenchon’s public rallies rival those of President Nicolas Sarkozy in size and intensity.

The Financial Times reports:

“His policies, including rescinding the new EU fiscal discipline treaty, raising the minimum wage from€1,200 to €1,700 a month and confiscating all income above €360,000 a year, go far beyond even [France’s chief socialist] Mr. Hollande’s proposal to tax income above €1m at 75 percent.”

M. Mélenchon’s poll numbers have surged from 5 percent two months ago to a high of 17 per cent in more recent days, a reaction in conformity with Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion: To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.

M. Mélenchon’s recent popularity is undoubtedly a reaction to austerity measures adopted in Europe that, some suppose, will reverse a crippling economic downslide. The painful austerity measures – now imposed in stricken parts of Europe by economic and autocratic technocrats – are themselves a predictable reaction to unsustainable increases in the cost of labor.

The communist-socialist-union led opposition to austerity measures designed to reverse the European downslide should be viewed as a reaction to a reaction. Newton’s Third Law of Motion may be applied repetitively to every action-reaction sequence.

The same economic forces roiling Europe – extreme debt, unsustainable social programs, timid governments committed to preserving an enfeebling status quo, a radical disproportion between tax consumption and supply -- are blowing hot and cold here in the United States. The United States is not yet Greece or Spain or Italy, democratic governments captured by special interests in the grip of a seeming unending recession, now replaced by autocratic technicians who soon find themselves in disfavor. Austerity measures imposed by technocrats are both painful AND anti-democratic.

Much of Europe today resembles a pre-World War II theater in which Western countries nervously awaited the arrival of its various world altering saviors, a steam pot that brought forward Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Stalin in the Soviet Union. Europe is haunted today by its discredited specters. Communism has been exorcised, but its first cousin, fascism, still prowls the world, growling in China, where enterprise is brought under the domination of the state, waving cheerily in quasi-monarchist Muslim saturated Middle Eastern countries. Here at home in the United States, command economies are being carefully nurtured in left of center hot beds, and constitutional restraints upon the withering grasp of state and national governments are regarded as quaint and passé.

Passé also is a Christian infused moral consensus that has completely collapsed. One hears the moral house falling in any rap song chosen at random that entices young people to kill policemen or mutilate women; in prestigious universities that have exchanged research and study for left of center political indoctrination; in a Byzantine justice system that no longer believes in the efficacy of punishment and cannot, in some cases, even convict criminals who are clearly guilty; in racial tensions artificially induced by Elmer Gantry like ministers of the word; in the popularization of violence promoted by a morally adrift “entertainment” industry; in the rise of illegitimate births; in immodest displays of sexuality; in a suicidal birth rate that, in most of Europe, falls far short or the rate necessary to simply replace a dying and decadent civilization.

Economic disorder and end of the century moral dissolution marches hand in hand with the rise of a resurgent Islam in North Africa. The United States is exhausted – and, perhaps more importantly, disheartened – by a twenty year war in the Middle East in the course of which the country first rented out its armed services to overthrow a petty dictator and since has winked at the bloody machinations of Bashir Assad in Syria and the preposterous declarations of theocratic thugs in Iran.

The Los Angeles Times reports that a unified Western opposition to Mr. Assad is prepared to sanction Mrs. Assad by preventing her from traveling in Europe and “halting her reported spending sprees for expensive French chandeliers and candlesticks.” And just in time too. One wonders how rough-rider Teddy Roosevelt, President Barack Obama’s most recent progressive presidential hero, might have handled Assad or Iran’s development of nuclear weapons or the boy wonder of North Korea.

All this social and economic roiling portends something -- but what, exactly, no one seems to know.