Month: February 2014

On Sunday, February 23rd, 2014, the smoke over Ukraine seemed to be clearing, after a wild week.

Some Ukrainians far off in Washington D.C. were apparently celebrating the revolution, in the typical manner people celebrate World Cup victories:

These (presumably-pro-revolution) Ukrainians were walking past one of those new “bikeshare” stands.

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I was in downtown Washington, D.C. to collaborate with my “teaching partner” for our lesson on Monday. I was to teach the first half, and he (M.H.) taught the second half of (what we made as) one long lesson. (We collaborated closely and created quite a great one. I was highly satisfied with the way it turned out.)

I walked around the streets of downtown Washington D.C. (eerily empty on the weekend) after leaving M.H.  It was then that I saw the “flag wearer” above. I got on the Metro and rode off to join my father and some of the church people for dinner (D.L. and the J.D. family).

It was a busy day, in which I entered and exited the District of Columbia twice, a rare thing for me. I seemed to be zipping around all the time the whole day. That very morning — about dawn — I’d gone to the train station to help my mother with her train ride to Connecticut. She will be there helping her sister for a few weeks, at least….

News of the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014 continues to capture much of what free time I have these days.

To those who read my post-193 (“Ukrainian Insurgent Army, 1940s and 2010s”) and doubted that they were actually looking at the flag of the WWII-era, anti-Soviet, wildly-anti-Communist, pro-German [“collaborationist”] nationalist-paramilitary group called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA], see here:

I saw today a video put out by “Right Sector” which essentially names the UIA as a forerunner of its own group. Right Sector uses the UIA flag, actually, which explains why it showed up atop Kiev’s anti-government barricades.

I’d never heard of “Right Sector” before last week. It is a Ukrainian street-gang-style nationalist group, and seems to be a kind of armed wing of a political party (Svoboda) that got 11% of the vote two years ago. Russian media, in their typical form, calls them “neo-Nazis” (a term that the Russian media also applies to the meek Estonians).

Reading between the lines, Right Sector does seem to have instigated the major fighting in Kiev last week. They charged the police lines, killed several police, took scores more “hostage”at one point, and provoked the huge counter-attack. Some of their units, meanwhile, had ‘liberated’ a large armory in Lvov (western Ukraine). The weapons began to move towards Kiev. Seeing a determined, disciplined, now-better-armed, fanatical foe, for whom fear of death was not a strong deterrent, the kleptocrats of the Ukrainian government folded; the kleptocrat-in-chief disappeared. As of this writing, headlines are saying that President Yanukovich’s “whereabouts are unknown”.

Here is the video released three days ago by Right Sector, featuring one of its “commanders” [2:19, w/English subtitles]. The video seems to be an introduction to Right Sector, explaining what its goals and views are.

As this video may likely one day disappear, here is my attempt to describe it and transcribe the provided subtitles:

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[Bold is what is spoken/subtitled]   [Bracketed: My description of what is happening on screen]

“Textual Transliteration” of the Right Sector Video

[Title of the video; a serious-sounding voice narrates] The Great Ukrainian Reconquista….

What is Right Sector fighting for?

[The camera cuts to a grizzled, tough-looking man, about 40, who sits at a desk, his hands on the table in non-clenched fists. He wears a wedding band on his finger and a brown, militaryesque shirt. Behind him there is a red-and-black flag with the words “Right Sector” (in Cyrilic) across the middle, with a sword emblem between the two words. When he begins to speak, he maintans a steady gaze at the camera. He speaks in a serious and official tone, as one would expect an actual military commander to speak]

[The man speaks] “We are the fighters and commanders of Right Sector. We remember the heroic struggles of Svyatoslav Khorobry and Danyl Halytsky, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. We stand for the right of the people to revolt against injustice. We are conscious of the responsibility to the dead and disabled heroes of Maidan [the large Kiev square which was the site of the anti-government protests of November 2013 to February 2014, and the epicenter of the Ukrainian revolution of Feb. 2014].

“We fight!” [Video footage of street fighting is shown without narration; one scene shows a masked man throwing a firebomb; hundreds of police in anti-riot gear are shown; another scene shows masked men (RS members?) pushing a policeman to the ground and beating him]

[Narration returns] We stand for the right of every Ukrainian citizen to be treated with human dignity.

We demand that the “Berkut” (Ukrainian riot police) by criminally prosecuted for their repression of the movement. We stand against the humiliation and the impoverishment of the Ukrainian people. [A man without a shirt on shown amid light snow; he is a prisoner; he is hit on the head and beaten by a masked “Berkut” policeman; other scenes of the “Berkut” in armored vehicles follow.]

We stand against the state’s war against its own people. We stand for the direct election of judges. We stand against corrupt “phony democracy”. We stand against degeneracy and against “totalitarian liberalism”.

We stand for traditional national morality and family values [images of young couples embracing, and young children smiling are shown]. We stand for large Ukrainian families, and for a physically and spiritually healthy youth. [Images of young male RS members, masked and in combat pose, are shown].  We stand against the “cult of corruption” and against moral depravity. [Footage of scantilty-dressed singers at a concert is shown].

We stand against any multinational integration plans that would dictate to Ukraine what to do. [A short video clip of Putin is shown during the preceding line; then, immediately afterward, of EU officials under an EU flag].

[A huge nighttime rally with large numbers of Ukrainian flags waving] We stand for unity; for the greatness of the Ukrainian nation. We are for a Ukrainian, and a European, “Reconquista”! [Images of RS fighters with shields bearing the “Black Sun” emblem are shown; a “Celtic Cross” is briefly shown.]

[The intense-looking man from the early part of the clip returns on screen] “Now is just the beginning. The beginning of the revival of the Kyivska Rus.

The revival of Europe starts — with our Maidan! [End of Video]

I feel more personally optimistic today than I did in the mid-2000s. The overall mood in the post-2008 world, though, is a lot more pessimistic.

It’s all about falling expectations, isn’t it. Ukraine is a case of this, I think. As of this writing (Saturday, Feb. 22nd, 2014), it seems that Ukraine has just undergone a nationalistic “revolution”, with echoes of 1989. Ukraine wasn’t doing so well in the 1980s, but, incredibly, in 2014 it has a substantially lower GDP-per-capita than it did in 1989! (See post-194).

I saw a poll showing that an incredible five-out-of-six White-Americans say that they are dissatisfied “with the way things are going” in the USA. Here is the breakdown by the various listed demographic groupings:

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Demographic Groups that Think the USA is Going in the WRONG Direction:
          Overall: 32-to-10 [say that the USA is going in the wrong direction]
          Men: 40-to-10
          Women: 27-to-10

          Whites: 48-to-10
          Hispanics: 19-to-10

          Republicans: 133-to-10
          Independents: 46-to-10
          Democrats: 12-to-10

Demographic Groups that Think the USA is Going in the RIGHT Direction:
          Blacks: 11-to-10 [say that the USA is going in the right direction]

Here is the relevant excerpt from the poll:

Gallup also asks this question in polls. It has “mood of the country” polling data for 1979-2014 online. Gallup corroborates the Quinnipiac poll, as it also finds the “mood of the country” today to be about 32-to-10 pessimistic.

This reminds me of a nice song, a lively song of nostalgic-lament, from the mid-2000s, by Guy Forsyth (b.1968):

I first heard this song in 2006. It really “spoke” to me at that time. It still does.

On the line “we used to dream about heroes”: At one point in early 2012, when I was working in Bucheon, Korea, I found and played the Davey Crockett song. An American coworker/friend, C.H. from California (now in China), commented to the effect that the song comes from “a totally different nation” than the USA that exists today.

It’s a “road-goes-on-forever-in-my-mind” kind of song:

We got bad news on Thursday.

I walked out of the elevator and into the institute at 8:50 AM, to find the main room deserted. Where is everybody? I put my bag down. Something felt “off”. Down the hallway appeared A.F. (an effervescent veteran of musical theater, and one of the six CELTA candidates in our group). She said something that truly stunned me:

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“[S.R.]’s brother was killed!”

“What!?” I said. 

A.F., for the first time ever, looked sad to me as she spoke those words. She beckoned for me to follow. I followed. Down the hallway, I soon saw S.R. The others were huddled around. (I was the last to arrive this day).

S.R. is a kind, talkative, motherly type, in her late 30s, from Indiana. She’d b(r)ought me coffee the day before. I’d asked for “just coffee”, but she’d insisted on “caramel chocolate latte” (which I’d never had). She went out, paid for it, brought it back up, handed it to me, smiling. That is the kind of person she is. “Christian-Charity” ought to be her middle name.

For about twenty minutes, we stood around, listening, and trying to console S.R., as she talked about her murdered brother (age 21, the youngest of S.R.’s eight siblings). At that time, he’d been dead for only seven or so hours. As she was leaving, she informed us that we could “look it up on google” using the keywords of his name and the town. It seems surreal that news of a death, including all the full names, would already be online so soon.

Thus, S.R. had to abruptly leave our month-long intensive course. By our lunch break, she was on an airplane. She will deal with the funeral and all. She won’t finish the course with us. I hope they let her finish at some later time. She has done so much work for it so far… She was actually due to teach that day. She and I, in fact, shared a lesson. I would cover the grammar part, and she would come on after and do the “productive task” (speaking/writing).

In the moments after A.F. gave the news, my mind jumped to Ukraine. As it happens, S.R. has spent a few years in Ukraine. She had to leave in late November 2013 to escape the political crisis. She has been teaching, as part of a church mission organization, in the eastern (pro-Russian) part of Ukraine, but she told me that the anti-government side is totally in the right, in her view. She loves Ukraine.  I can only wonder if I will ever see her again.

These numbers are amazing to me:

          Ukraine, 1989 vs. 2013
            When 1989’s figures are 100

            Ukraine’s Population
             1989: 100
             2013: 88

            Ukraine’s GDP [adjusted for inflation]
            1989: 100
            2013: 67

             Ukraine’s Per-capita GDP [adjusted for inflation]
             1989: 100
             2013: 76
 
Ukrainians under age 35 have no memory of (sustained) good times, and even those in their 40s today have no experience of sustained good times during which they were in the labor market. Falling expectations lead to this:

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Population: Ukraine had 51.5 million people in its 1989 census; today, it has 45.5 million. This is all because of low birth rates. The World Bank predicts it will further decline to 36 million by 2050.

GDP: According to this graph (and this one from the World Bank), Ukraine’s real-GDP today is only 67% of its 1989 level. If it had remained exactly the same on a per-capita basis, we would expect Ukraine’s real GDP (“real” meaning adjusted for inflation) to also be 88%of the 1989 level, but it’s a lot lower.

If the average Ukrainian in 1989 made 100 units of money, today (adjusted for inflation) he makes only 76. (=.669/.88).

Everyone knows about the major contraction in the ex-Communist-bloc in the 1990s: I see from the historical data that Ukraine’s economy by 1999 had sunk to a pathetic 39% of its 1989 level. Then there was a period of growth (2000-2007), but the 2008-to-Present worldwide economic problems have caused zero GDP growth since 2007 for that country. In terms of Ukraine’s GDP, 2014’s is about equal to 2006’s. (This is true of a lot of countries.)

An anti-government barricade, in Kiev, in one the past few wild days in that city:

This is a still from the 2:05 mark in this video (graphic content), from the Russia Today world-news service. If you look closely at the video footage, you see a red-and-black flag, flying high and clear, at the center. A closer shot (top left):

What is this red-and-black flag? I wondered. I searched. I found it:

It belonged to the The Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA]. The UIA was a radically-anti-Communist, nationalistic paramilitary group in the 1940s, whose goal was the elimination of Communism and the overthrow of Soviet rule. The UIA was the “military wing” of a Ukrainian nationalist political party. They were actively pro-German in WWII.

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It’s an oddly-untold story, which I first learned when in Estonia in 2007: An enormous number of non-German Europeans volunteered to serve, under arms, “with the Germans” in WWII (i.e., to fight against the USSR). There were entire Ukrainian divisions in the field, outfitted and supplied by the Germans. (Most European nations had at least one full regiment (thousands of men), I’ve learned; there were even a couple of Norwegian regiments; Norwegians formed the core of a division nicknamed Nordland . In my time in Berlin, I came across the dramatic history of Nordland’s last stand in the April 1945 Battle of Berlin.

Half a million non-Germans served in foreign divisions to fight in the East. “Better dead than Red”, they said.

These thoughts occur to me, as I hear news that seems very much like war coverage:

Spotting the flag of this “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” suggests that things are not quite as the U.S. media wants/is-able-to report. The hard-core of the anti-government side probably doesn’t want some kind of soft-bellied, free-market, “gay-rights” liberal-democracy. No; no. They don’t want that, at all, I’m thinking.

Today is the holiday commonly known as “Presidents’ Day” (a confusing holiday). I still go in to “work”.

A funny thing about Presidents’ Day is that more than one presidential birthday is being celebrated, i.e. Washington’s (Feb. 22) and Lincoln’s (Feb. 12) — formerly two separate holidays in many states.

However, states have all different names for this day, including the formerly-Southern state of Virginia. (Formerly because in the mid-2010s here, with Northern Virginia’s millions of people, Virginia is tipping into being something else.)

Virginia calls it “George Washington Day”, excluding old Honest Abe.

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Virginia also celebrates “Lee-Jackson Day” (two Confederate generals), instead of “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”.

That was a Richmond decision, though. Typical Northern Virginians of the 2010s here would cringe at “Lee-Jackson Day”. I remember when I was at college in Northern Virginia, the local college authorities had to decide to give only one Monday off in the spring semester and axe the other: MLK Day or Presidents’ Day (i.e., “George Washington Day”). They decided to retain MLK Day and have classes as-normal on Presidents’ Day. (I remember Arlington Public Schools similarly refusing to touch MLK Day when snow-days called for one holiday to be cancelled.) The move by the college prompted a professor of Geography, one of my favorites, a part-AmericanIndian from Oklahoma, to criticize their PC decision: If you’re deciding who is more important to the history of the USA, how can MLK possibly take precedence over George Washington?

The excellent Korean politics and history blog, Popular Gusts, found this image from 1990:

This attitude remains strong in South Korea even into the mid-2010s.

The entire Left and much of the Right (except its leadership) share this attitude. It may be the most-vigorous strand of Korean political thought that I noticed. It may “come from” the left-wing, but as its real appeal is on nationalistic-racialistic grounds, the right-wing “doth not protest too much”. There thus being little opposition, conformism takes care of any stragglers who didn’t get the memo (the apolitical, not-particularly-racialistic bloc).

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There are so many examples I could cite, from my time in Korea. One is the U.S. Beef Ban. Many may not remember this, but American beef was banned for years in Korea, and it is still, in some ways, defacto banned, after a phony “crisis” was manufactured a few years ago about American beef allegedly being tainted.

In reaction to that “crisis”, they passed a law requiring that all restaurants and markets post their meat-products’ countries of origin. In my time in Korea, from 2009 to 2014 (not all consecutive), never once did I ever see any restaurant selling a beef-product from the USA, from the cheap “분식” [minute-food] places to the “meat buffets” to even American chain restaurants like “T.G.I. Friday’s”. Some had American pork, but none ever had American beef.

I saw this at a Lotteria fast-food restaurant:

On the wrapper is an official-seeming seal certifying that this burger has Australian beef, which is “clean and safe”

The full phrase in Korean is “호주청정우”. I recognize the first word as “Australia”, and the last word as [an abbreviated way to say] “Beef”. My dictionary translates the middle word, “청정”, as “pure, immaculate, clean, spotless, stainless, unsullied, undefiled, unpolluted.” By implication, U.S. beef is the opposite of those things.

Korean-grown beef is way too expensive to be economical. Lotteria now sells a “Hanwoo burger” — Hanwoo means “Korean-grown beef”. It’s far-and-away their most-expensive menu item.

Here is another part of the 1990 cartoon distributed to students:

This cartoon’s pictures are self-explanatory. “If we open our market to foreign foods, all the Korean farms will fail, farm babies will starve, and we will be dependent on foreigners for food”. The last box features a man in a traditional Korean outfit pleading for “A bit of rice, please”. The White man in the boat (who is smoking a pipe in the style of the famous photos of General MacArthur) mockingly glowers down at him. “How much ya got?”

Translation
White Man: [Scheming] “Let’s make it expensive”.
Korean: [In Panic and Despair] “How can we survive if it costs so much?”
White Man: [Haughtily] “If you think it’s expensive, then don’t buy it!” [Whistles]

(But thanks, anyway, for the trillions in net aid [in today’s dollars] you’ve given us, for your ongoing military protection, for liberating us from Japan, and for saving us from Communism….)

It snowed a lot in Washington, D.C. and shut down most things on Feb. 13th in 2014 (see post-188) and also on one of the Feb. 13ths in the 1980s. The snowstorm notwithstanding, that Feb. 13th back in the ’80s was my most active day in life up to that point….as it was my very first.

I don’t know how, but someone in the CELTA group found out that Thursday was my birthday. They insisted on having a ‘party’. Pictured at left are J.F. (standing; going to Japan in March), A.F. (blue striped shirt), and S.R. (semi-hidden). In the center are bottles of orange and apple juice presented as gifts, which we shared. (In the background is the white board. Nametags of “practice students” are to the right of it. Lot of chairs, with those impossibly-small foldable-desks attached, are all around.)

The balloons were yet to come:

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On Friday, Feb. 14th, back came the “practice students”, adult foreigners of an “upper-intermediate” English ability (they had not come on the 13th, see the very end of post-188). To my surprise, they, too, had presents for me, in the form of six or seven balloons and a small cake (at left). Also, a card signed in various languages by most students.

I’ve only seen these students for two weeks, and I’ve only taught them five times, but they seem to really like me.

The cake was excellent.

Four of the balloons survive, as I write this.

I got good wishes from many people via Facebook, though as I avoid logging into Facebook, I haven’t acknowledged them. I also got a book-collection of Washington Post newspaper front pages from the 1940s, an excellent present, from my mother.