zaitcev.mee.nu

I was a stick in the mud at Brickmuppet's on the topic previously, but the events seem to be overtaking my curmudgeonry. When the pro-Kiev paramilitaries burned some 40 people alive in Odessa on May 3rd, it could still be doubted just who exactly was burned: "protestors" or "terrorists". However, on May 9 in Mariupol a bunch of WWII women veterans staged a march to celebrate the victory day. Kiev regime prohibited such celebrations (because reasons). At some point, an Ukrainian tank opened machine gun fire on them, killing a few. It wasn't a withering fire, but since all of them were beyond 80 years old, I suspect a few more died in the stampede. Onlookers started grabbing plastic chairs in a nearby cafe and throw them at Ukrainian soldiers, at which point they got shot up a bit. The whole episode was filmed from many locations and there's a ton of videos circulating Youtube, Rutube, Vimeo, and whatnot.

What do you think BBC said about it yesterday? One sentence: "Ukrainian troops clashed with pro-Russian militants and killed 20". I suppose those babushkas were pretty militant. I mean, who wouldn't, at ripe age of 85? But still, would anyone watching BBC even imagine what actually happened?

Not that BBC distorted reporting is anything new, but get what a supposedly sharp foreignblogger Michael Totten quoted approvingly while coblogging at Instapundit:

Lacking popular support in Ukraine, Putin’s warlords will do what terrorists do: seize buildings, promote anti-Semitism, imprison and kill opposition leaders, attack Roma and other minorities, take neutral observers and journalists hostage, and abuse the population of whichever cities or towns they terrorize. One especially brutal terrorist, the warlord of the Sloviansk Putinstan, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov recently told a female journalist the following: "We’ll adopt all necessary measures to prevent elections in the southeast from taking place. We’ll take someone prisoner and hang him by his balls. Got it?”

(originally by one Alexander Motyl)

I'm afraid I have a few questions, which Michael Totten forgot to ask. To begin with, we are told that "Putin's warlords" will do a bunch of awful things, if the popular support disappears. Will A. Motyl eat his hat if they do not? And what does it have to do with anything that's going on today?

Why is it important that the interviewer was female? Is Mr. Motyl a native speaker, and it yes, why did he never hear about "hanging anyone by the balls"? It's almost as good as Ann Althouse deliberating if Trayvon called Zimmerman a "creepy ass-cracker" or "creepy-ass cracker". Except that no anglophone knows the secret.

Anyhow. The Putin's aggression is a wonderful narrative, but it looks to me that it does not explain the hideous brutality of Kiev government, which easily exceeds what Putin has ever done (in Ukraine, anyway). Why, last time I heard about such stuff, it was done by pro-government death squads in El-Salvador. I am afraid that after dealing with it, a few residents of Ukraine might be inclined to provide the popular support for Putin, which Mr. Motyl declares non-existent. And we will never know, unless we visit YouTube.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 08:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 528 words, total size 4 kb.