Taiwan, China, and other things. Recovered from the defunct TypePad platform.
If you want to know who the good guys are in Ukraine, they’re the ones pulling down Lenin statues.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 22, 2014
And replacing them with golden toilets:
Image from Boston.com
UPDATE: A similar monument to foreign domination was toppled in Taiwan just the other day…
Taipei Times: Toppled Sun Yat-sen statue in Tainan park.
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The palace constructed by Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
Dude's salary up till 2009 was $24,000 a year. Helps to know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy…
Oh, how interesting is this?
Another peculiarity of the president is his fear of being poisoned. Because of this, he has had greenhouses built in his compound, designed to mimic twenty climatic zones. The idea is that anything Yanukovych wants to eat can be brought to his table directly from his own farm.
Guilty conscience, perhaps?
UPDATE: Pictures of the mansion Yanukovych built with his looted millions. More here. And here.
More great ones here.
Hooligans, the Russians call them, hooligans! As the Ukrainians, err, keep on the pathway and avoid walking on the grass…
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To seek revenge on its political refugees.
Readers are no doubt aware that Communist China currently games the Interpol system to victimize its Uyghur refugees as well.
Monday's Taiwan News featured an editorial (Taiwan is not Georgia) in which it discussed two articles, Georgia's Lessons for Taiwan (from the Far Eastern Economic Review) and From Georgia to Taiwan (from The Wall Street Journal Asia). The Taiwan News sums up the themes of the two opinion pieces:
Or, to put it more bluntly, Taiwan over the past 8 years was provoking China just as Georgia provoked Russia; and so in the interests of preventing a similar Sino-Taiwanese conflict, the reduction of American support for Taiwan was wise and just and proper.
With this the Taiwan News took issue. Admitting that Saakashvili unnecessarily provoked Russia, the editors forcefully denied that Taiwan had done the same to China:
What these pundits see as "provocative" were the moves made by Chen and the DPP government to deepen Taiwan's democracy for the sake of improving domestic governance, to foster a stronger sense of Taiwan national identity and citizenship, and to promote the participation of "Democratic Taiwan" in the world community.
In contrast to Saakashvili's invasion, Chen's actions were not aimed to "pursue" independence but to defend Taiwan's actually existing independence and democracy from the threat posed by an authoritarian power. Instead, it has been the PRC which has posed a clear and present military threat against both Taiwan and regional peace by engaging in a massive build-up of over 1,000 ballistic missiles and other offensive forces during the past 15 years and by relentless pushing to isolate Taiwan internationally and achieve annexation through intimidation combined with economic integration.
The only fly in the ointment is that everyone here is proceeding from false assumptions. Jeffrey Bader and Douglas Paal from the Far Eastern Economic Review. Richard Bush and Kenneth Lieberthal from the Wall Street Journal Asia. And last but not least, the Taiwan News.
They're all mistaken because they completely misunderstand how the War of 8/8/08 began. And if someone misunderstands the origins of that war, then any "lessons" they draw and attempt to apply to Taiwan immediately become suspect.
From independent journalist Michael J. Totten:
Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war. [emphasis added]
“[On the] 3rd of August, [South Ossetian president Eduard] Kokoity announces women and children should leave [as a prelude to hostilities]. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day, irregulars – Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks – start coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don't do anything. They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.”
"That was the formal start of the war . . . Because of the peace treaty they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80 mm." [emphasis added]
[…]
"On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage focused on Georgian villages, not on Georgian positions . . . That evening, the [Georgian] president gets information that a large Russian column is on the move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the Roki tunnel (into Georgia from Russia) . . . "
"The first thing [the Georgians] did . . . they tried to get through (South Ossetian capital) Tskhinvali, and that's when everybody says Saakashvili started the war. [Except] it wasn't about taking Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through the town to get onto that road to slow the Russian advance."
Maybe the only lesson here is that Taiwan can't afford to lose the propaganda war as Georgia did. Russia's Ossetian catspaws started the war with Georgia, but Georgia was the one saddled with the blame. It was too psychologically challenging for the world to consider the alternative: that the Russian empire was again on the march in the near abroad, and the West now had to strengthen its security arrangements.
So instead, Olympic viewers contented themselves with platitudes about not tugging on Superman's cape. Then went back to watching lip-synching 6 year-olds and lots of pretty, fake, fireworks.
Postscript: To be fair, Michael J. Totten does quote someone as saying Georgia "provoked" Russia by trying to join NATO. Of course, other former Eastern-bloc countries are equally guilty of similar "provocations", including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states.
What Russia characterizes as provocations, I see as legitimate attempts by former satellite nations to break orbit from a tyrannical neighbor.
UPDATE (Dec 3/08): Saakashvili makes his case at the Wall Street Journal.
From Yahoo News:
Almost a year after falling victim to a "cyber-war" blamed on Russian hackers, the Baltic state of Estonia is now piloting NATO’s efforts to ward off future online attacks on alliance members.
After this week’s NATO summit in Romania, Estonia and seven other alliance partners will set up the "Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence" in Tallinn next month.
The United States, Germany, Italy, Spain and Estonia’s fellow ex-communist NATO member states Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia will spearhead the project.
Be nice if Taiwan could establish some kind of unofficial channel to the new center. Leaving aside the political problems, it’d still be a tall order – must be tough finding Taiwanese IT personnel who speak Estonian.
He may be a polonium-poisoning, vote-rigging, opposition-jailing despot…but Vlad the Cad DOES know how to pick ’em. For the State Duma, I mean.
First off, meet Alina Kabayeva, 24-year old former gymnast and newly-elected legislator from the United Russia Party. She enjoys quiet, candle-lit dinners, long walks on the beach, and rolling around naked on synthetic animal fur.
Next up, let’s give another warm welcome to Alina’s distinguished parlimentary colleague, Svetlana Khorkina. A seven time Olympic medal-winning gymnast, cerebral Svetlana enjoys reading, debating new laws, and, from the looks of things, the occasional wardrobe malfunction.
Tyranny may indeed be the ugliest form of government…but Putin, the old dog, is sure doing his level best to persuade us otherwise!
(Photos from The Sun. Hat tip to the Brussels Journal)
UPDATE: The Times of London confirms the story, sans photos. Now, just what sort of sick, twisted editor would run an article like this without any PICTURES?
UPDATE (Apr 19/08): Rumors that Putin may divorce his 50 year-old wife and marry Alina Kabaeva. I’m impressed, dude!
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Gee, now that Taiwan’s Referendum on joining U.N. makes island more isolated, does that mean that the independence party’s SUPER-SECRET PLAN to poison their own candidates and blame it all on the KMT has hit a major snag?
I mean, wouldn’t the conspiracy have gone sooo much easier if President Chen had had access to Vladimir Putin’s private stash of polonium-210? Just how will Taiwan ever manage, now that it’s lost all of that INVALUABLE Russian support?
A small democracy lives next to an authoritarian goliath. Between the two are strong economic ties. One day, the small democracy arrests four spies sent from its neighbor. Goliath responds with massive economic retaliation, suspending "air, road, maritime, rail and postal links".
Georgia’s present:
[Russian] authorities closed a popular casino and raided a hotel and a couple of restaurants run by Georgians, saying they could be closed over legal violations.
…40 Georgian restaurants and shops in downtown Moscow alone [will also] be raided in the next few days.
Taiwan’s future.
I have asserted that the games we play influence our thinking; I will go further and state that the stories we are told as children, and the people we choose to regard as heroes are no less important in defining who we are, and what we aspire to be.
One of the most inspiring moments in my lifetime was when the Russians began tearing down the statues of the communist leaders who had made the Soviet Union a hell-on-earth. It’s disappointed to hear that Putin’s government is quietly raising them again.
"Earlier this month, with little fanfare but plenty of dreary symbolism (the statue of Feliks) Dzerzhinsky was returned to a place of honor in Moscow…This is the man who…(was the father of) the Cheka (secret police), …the founder of the gulag, and whose people tortured and killed millions to create Lenin’s dream state."
(From Eleanor Randoph’s NYTs story, Soviet henchman returns to position, reprinted in the Taiwan News. Sorry, couldn’t find a link to the column in either paper)
You become what you worship, a pastor once told me. No doubt Iron Feliks would have approved of this:
(From Wikipedia’s entry on Viktor Yushchenko).
UPDATE (June 12/06): A little quote from communist secret policeman Iron Felix:
"There is nothing more effective than a bullet in the head to shut people up."
Oh! Oh! Let’s build a statue in his honor!
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