Amidst the confrontation between the West and Russia over Ukraine, the world is edging towards the precipice. At this fateful moment, Foreign Affairs magazine has chosen to feature an exchange of views between two of its house philosophers over the angel count on a pinhead.  Read more…

Foreign Affairs magazine, May-June 2014 issue: The false debate over “The Return of Geopolitics”

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

The debate over the relevance of geopolitics to our understanding of International Relations featured in the May-June 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine pits Professor G. John Ikenberry of Princeton against Professor Walter Russell Mead of Bard College. Their sparring takes place in some abstract universe where pure ideas enter into combat wearing big boxing gloves so as to avoid doing bodily harm. The specific issues of current events intrude only as headings, a sort of ballast that may keep these philosophers anchored to the interests and concerns of their less enlightened readership who seek detailed solutions to the policy problems before them, not just word games or angel counting.

The abstractness of the debate is not the result of some idiosyncrasy of the two authors; it comes with the domain they occupy within the IR discipline – Wilsonian idealism in its late 20th century form, what we recognize as Neocon thinking. Their stock in trade is universal laws. History, language, religion, the economics of any given territory are almost irrelevant, the concerns of the sad lot over in what remains of the Realpolitik school, which is now passé.

Mead, who is editor at large within the magazine founded and run by Neocon popularizer Francis Fukuyama, has his two legs planted in the Wilsonian idealist domain. Ikenberry has always been more of an eclectic thinker. He coined the termstructural liberalism to describe his school of thought. You could say he has one leg in the outer fringes of Realpolitik and the other firmly in Wilsonian idealism.

Though Mead’s connection to The American Interest is mentioned by the FAeditors, they fail to say that Ikenberry has also contributed solidly to the same publication where his name has figured on the editorial board. Both also have a long association with FA where they are in the small pool of book reviewers, each with his own marked territory. And Ikenberry, at least, is affiliated with several other specialized IR journals in addition. To put it in business terminology, you might say that Ikenberry and Mead are members of the interlocking directorate that controls their industry and keeps nonmembers out of print.

The FA editors matched Mead and Ikenberry to get separate takes on what problems the current crisis over Ukraine, the confrontation between Russia and the West, have or have not posed for theorists invested in The End of History ideas. First word was given to Walter Russell Mead, who represents the pur et durpositions of Fukuyama and Co.  I will deal with his thesis first before examining Ikenberry’s antithesis.

* * * *

Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers”

Mead’s basic case is that Russia’s recent actions and confrontation with the West over Ukraine mark the revival of the geopolitical dimension in international relations, meaning creation of spheres of influence, that was thought to have been vanquished when the Cold War ended and the world entered an ideologically free, post-historical phase. This idea is what Ikenberry spends most of his capital disputing.  

Instead I will deal here with something I consider more important, Mead’s contention that Russia is a revisionist power, a term which shares top billing with ‘geopolitics’ in the title of his essay. Ikenberry also contests this but for different, and, I believe, wrong reasons as I well demonstrate in due course.

In approaching the issue of ‘revisionist powers.’ let’s take a page out of Hans Morgenthau, the Ur-source on Realpolitik, as we try to understand who is the revisionist and who is the status quo power. Morgenthau said in Politics Among Nations  that revanchist or revisionist countries need ideology to conceal their aggressive ambitions, whereas status quo nations do not, since there is no change that needs justification.

For anyone with even a modicum of fair-mindedness, it is clear that with some help from Francis Fukuyama and his comrades-in-arms in the Neoconservative movement within the Republican Party, later with the help of the won-over Democrats in the Progressive Internationalists camp, since 1992 the United States has pursued an ideologically driven foreign policy which Meade ticks off for us quite accurately.

This was and is a modified Wilsonian idealist policy that is ‘values based’ as opposed to ‘interests based’ - promoting democracy, human rights across borders. Under this smokescreen, the US incidentally fomented the color revolutions and installed regimes deemed favorable to the West in a series of countries. The same ideology provided cover for a patently revisionist security policy – bringing into NATO a string of countries from the former Warsaw Pact, in direct violation of the understandings with the Russians that ended the Cold War in 1989. This reached its high water mark in 2004 with the inclusion of the former Soviet republics of the Baltics in NATO.  The efforts to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine as well crossed red lines set by the Russians for their existential security interests and were effectively frustrated, setting up the present confrontation and New Cold War.

We have here two smoking guns:  American revisionism as expressed by the never-ending expansion of its military alliance and bases to the Russian borders and American revisionism as seen in the roll-out of a suitable ideological cover for its expanding worldwide hegemony.

What do we have on the other side?  From the 1990s until the last year or two, Russia abandoned its Soviet ideology and indulged in a policy of enrichissez-vous, preoccupied with enjoying the consumer life style that Communism had denied three generations of Russians. It has only been in the last year, and only in response to the shrill information war that the United States and Western Europe unleashed against Russia following the scandal over Snowden’s acceptance in Moscow as a political refugee and in the run-up to the Sochi Olympic Games which otherwise promised to accord great PR benefits to Russia that Vladimir Putin has moved to assemble a proto-ideology for Russia as guarantor of conservative values in a newly bi-polar world.

On the security side, Russia was on the ropes in the 1990s, retreating before every Western advance in territories that historically been allied with Russia for 150 years or more, including and particularly Serbia and other Balkan states.  Even as Vladimir Putin restored the economy and military potential of his country in the first decade of the new millennium, this retreat continued, initially as part of a calculated gamble to trade geopolitical concessions in its own back yard of Central Asia following 9/11 for the redrawing of European security architecture so as to include Russia. 

The first incarnation of this, in 2001, was the idea of Russia in NATO. That failed when President Bush responded to the Russian charm offensive with slaps in the face: the abrogation of the ABM treaty and the accelerated initiative to place missile defense installations in Europe.  Russia’s second attempt, the new European security treaty floated by Dmitry Medvedev which would give Russia a protection against military action directed against itself by its European neighbors, also failed miserably to get US and Western attention. 

Russia stopped its security retreat when it counterattacked in response to Georgian aggression in 2008. And it has continued its counterattack this year when it responded to the American led putsch in Kiev by fomenting the separatist insurgency in Crimea that led to annexation of the peninsula shortly thereafter. But even here, to speak of Russian action as revisionist is a gross misrepresentation.  The annexation of Crimea was no more than a proactive defensive move to prevent the cancellation of its extended lease on the home port of its Black Sea fleet that would amount to a crushing blow to its naval military capabilities.

Thus, both in terms of ideology ( till recently totally absent) and in terms of the dynamic in its geopolitical relationship with the West (to halt an ongoing and adverse change), Russia has been sinned against rather than sinner over the past 20 plus years and Professor Meade’s type-casting Russia as revisionist is a gross violation of the truth.

What is hard to fathom is why the world’s most powerful nation and only surviving superpower at the end of the first Cold War in 1989 could not be content with its level of control in the status quo of the day and has  instead become the world’s leading revisionist state. This hubristic overplaying of the hand has run counter to any definition of common sense. The detachment of American foreign policy elites including Professor Meade from the realities of global economic and military trends is the most alarming feature of our present confrontation with Russia. The simultaneous baiting of China as seen in Obama’s just-ended tour of Asia provides further high drama to the unfolding doomsday scenario.

* * * *

G. John Ikenberry, “The Illusion of Geopolitics. The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order”

At the very start of his essay, Ikenberry pooh-poohs the notion that Russia (and China) is (are) revisionist powers threatening the post-Cold War world order that is U.S. dominated. Of course, his argumentation is radically different from what I set out above. They are, he says, just ‘part-time spoilers at best,’ opportunists who resist the United States’ global leadership in their own neighborhoods. This, Ikenberry goes on to say, shows more their weakness than their strength. Moreover, they ‘have no appealing brand.’

The other side of the coin in the essay under review is pure Ikenberry, i.e. an extension and reconfirmation of his decades-long celebration of the American Empire (global hegemony) for the public goods it delivers to the world through the web of international institutions it dominates. This is a worldwide architecture to which the problematic outlyers like Russia and China have no alternative to offer.

Ikenberry tells us that the global architecture of financial, defense and other liberal institutions which America put in place at the outset of the first Cold War and built out ever since was precisely designed to manage geopolitics. That is to say, geopolitics never lost the attention of American policy makers. It was the End of History camp that went astray with their illusions of full victory over the ongoing realities of power He takes the more ideologically invested Professor Mead to task for not seeing that world governance is well in hand and that the barbarians at the gates in the dispute over Ukraine do not threaten our rule.

Taking the constellation of his ideas in the first two paragraphs of his essay together, one wonders whether Ikenberry was in the pool of ghostwriters who prepared Barack Obama’s keynote speech of his European tour last month delivered at the Bozar auditorium in Brussels.  There the President rolled out a New Cold War containment policy against Russia which is premised on Russia’s weakness and its being nothing more than a regional bully, not a global power. The underlying ridicule, lack of respect for and underestimation of Russia is a tragic failure of comprehension that riddles our foreign policy establishment right through the editorial board of Foreign Affairs magazine headed by Gideon Rose, making them complicit in the unnecessary risks and volatility of international relations at this moment.

* * * * *

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide. Also on sale in Sterling and Waterstone’s booksellers, Brussels.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2014
Article is published with permission from Gilbert Doctorow.

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Let us look at whom the US promoted/promotes in countries aspiring to escape the Russian orbit of influence as Latvia did after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as Ukraine, or at least its Western half, is aspiring to do today.  The American policies have cleaved the local elites from their natural interests. They failed in Latvia and they are doomed to fail elsewhere... Read on

Latvia’s failed U.S.-inspired policies towards Russia and Russians

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

This year Riga proudly bears the designation European Culture Capital 2014 and the local organizing committee has done a splendid job arranging a broad variety of entertainments to draw in visitors from across the EU, including generous packages of free air tickets and accommodation for the press.  As an accredited journalist to the event, I express my gratitude to them for the kindness shown, although what I am about to say may not match their expectations on the payback.

While I can give high marks to the purely cultural events and venues which I visited during my four-day stay in Latvia last week, including a concert of newly written oratorio in Riga’s main cathedral and an evening of ballet performances by the local troupe set to works by contemporary Latvian composers, I was more interested in the political dimension of cultural phenomena, such as the KGB Museum or ‘Corner House’ which opened its doors to the public during my stay and the Museum of the Occupation, a must-see for every foreign visitor.  

 Moreover, I wanted to investigate the retrospective mood on the ground as the 10th anniversary of Latvia’s accession to the European Union approached. And finally, I sought to follow up the issue of Latvia’s 300,000 non-citizens, the Russians living in Latvia who were stripped of their citizenship just after independence. This is something I wrote about in a preliminary way and from afar back in March: 

http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2014/03/07/latvia-s-300-000-non-citizens-and-the-ukrainian-crisis-today-1125874.html

Lest it seem that these objectives of my visit to Riga were disparate, I will demonstrate their commonality in what follows. That commonality arises from US policies, over whom the US promoted/promotes in countries aspiring to escape the Russian orbit of influence as Latvia did after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as Ukraine, or at least its Western half, is aspiring to do today.  As stated bluntly in my title above, these policies have failed in Latvia and they are doomed to fail elsewhere.

* * * *

The narrative which the organizers of Riga Culture Capital of Europe 2014 have sought to disseminate is one of a flourishing society with a rich heritage that is confident about its identity in the world.  Another key element of the narrative is that this is a country that has come through a lot, has experienced a very painful history of oppression. I will begin with the last point and then return to the questions of cultural dynamism, economic prosperity and identity.

Both the long-existing Museum of the Occupation and the brand-new KGB Museum illustrate the strengths and limitations of managing the collective memory we call history to serve the cause of Latvia’s nationalists in power. The story of a martyred people who may be forgiven for their harsh discrimination against compatriots who are not ethnically Latvian is what the leadership obviously wants to hear and both museums deliver.  It is not necessarily that truth is distorted but that it is cut to measure, leaving out all that is inconvenient to remember.

The basic focus on these museums is on a free and democratic state that was cruelly conquered by Soviet Russia in 1940, then taken by the Germans in 1941 and re-taken by the Soviets in 1944-5, remaining under Russian occupation until its independence in 1991.  Standing by itself, that is unexceptional. However, it omits the fact that in the preceding 1,000 years there had been no Latvian state, that the territory of Courland was always held by one or another of its powerful neighbors, passing from the Germans, to the Poles, to the Swedes and finally to the Russians in 1710, where it remained until the end of the tsarist empire in WWI.   In this regard, the Municipal Historical Museum in downtown Tallinn is much more honest, acknowledging that from time immemorial Estonians were a nation of farmers that had no independent state until just after WWI and that it lasted only 20 years, in the period between the two world wars.

Careful cutting of the period under review to suit a propagandistic aim also mars the concept behind the KGB Museum.  The curators fail to mention that the building, which indeed served as the headquarters of the Soviet secret police from 1939 to 1991 except for the period of German rule during WWII when the Nazi puppet regime did their dirty work here, had in fact been used by Latvian secret police as early as 1936 and continued to serve the same function in post-independence Latvia right up to 2009.

Riga has succeeded handsomely on the heritage side, which is lovingly preserved and is the wellspring for contemporary culture. But here, too, the Latvian ethnic bias of the powers-that-be omits a substantial if inconvenient component: Russians in the city’s and country’s past and present.  The most important residential districts in the city, its rows of magnificent Jugendstil buildings, date from the time when Riga was the third largest city in the Russian Empire with a very mixed population and enjoyed great prosperity. The single most important museum in the country, the palace of the Duke of Courland at Rundale , 80 km south of Riga, was built for the favorite of Czarina Anna I under the direction of the same architect who designed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg and it is filled with Russian furniture and objects of art brought there from Moscow and elsewhere in the USSR in the early 1980s when the palace was reopened as a museum.  

Strolling through Riga’s shopping districts, you experience a feeling of moderate prosperity. There are no vacant store fronts downtown, unlike in Brussels and other West European capitals. There are no beggars, and the city is remarkably clean and orderly. However, the demographics tell a different story.  In the years since independence, the capitol’s population has fallen from close to one million to just under 700,000. This has occurred despite an influx from the largely ethnically pure Latvian countryside, which I am told has emptied out to such an extent that there have been extensive closings of schools and other facilities which are no longer required.  Ethnic Latvians have moved out to Sweden to England and to other EU countries in search of work.

The lack of jobs and need to emigrate has been the price of ignoring the map, refusing to accept the necessity of maintaining good relations with the big neighbor to the southeast. In the past, Latvian ports had been among the most important in the Soviet Union, particularly as regards petroleum product exports, and the country also enjoyed a position of privileged supplier of electronics and other manufactured goods to Russia, as well as of comestibles. 

By its anti-Russian, pro-NATO policies, Latvia lost the bulk of its Russian commercial relations after independence and found no adequate replacement within the EU. Employment opportunities dried up.

And, ironically, this has led to attempts by the Latvian government to tap into Russian capital at the private investor level as opposed to normal commercial flows.  I saw evidence of this on my flight into Riga. Advertising in the Baltic Air onboard magazine was nearly entirely in Russian and devoted to promotion of luxury housing projects in and near the coastal resort of Yurmala, 25 km north of Riga. The advertising texts highlighted the availability of long-term residence permits for the prospective buyer and his family. Later in the trip I had occasion to see firsthand some of these projects, which are almost exclusively subscribed by Russians. The obvious contradiction between this little measure to support the domestic Latvian construction industry, to provide jobs for gardeners, concierges and the like,  and the larger policy of repressing native born Russian speakers in the republic has not escaped the attention and censure of the more fervent local nationalists.

Since independence, the ruling elites of Latvia have worked hard to ensure that the titular ethnos dominates economic, cultural and political life. They stripped of citizenship nearly half of the Russian speakers who lived there at the time of independence (more than 15% of the overall population of 2 million today) and applied discriminatory measures against them in the hope they would either leave the country or pass through naturalization and assimilate. While Russians have also left the country, they have done so in lesser numbers than ethnic Latvians, so that the demographic balance has not improved for the Latvians.  In Riga they do not hold a majority and are neck and neck with Russian speakers.

The discriminatory measures have included squeezing the Russian language out of public space. As of my visit the local Russian population is very troubled by government plans to end all instruction in Russian at the start of the new school year. At present, teaching in Russian accounts for 40% and in Latvian for 60% of instruction time. This is the number one issue driving anti-Latvian resentment in the Russian population of the country today.

* * * *

Western newspapers have reported on the nervousness of governments in the Baltic States over the Russian annexation of Crimea and over the Kremlin-encouraged separatism of southeastern Ukraine, where Russian speakers are the majority. Latvia has officially welcomed the notion of stationing permanent NATO contingents on its soil as a protective measure against Russian aggression.

But the anxiety of Latvian elites does not end there. They look with suspicion on their Russian-speaking citizens and non-citizens, fearing they constitute a fifth column in their midst available for a campaign of subversion at any time if Mr. Putin summons them to action. This led recently to a directive forcing Latvian cable operators to cancel their distribution of certain Russian state television channels. And it has resulted in closer police surveillance of the social activities of Russian speakers

Indeed, during my visit, one of my contacts in the Latvian Congress of Non-Citizens was called in by the political police for 6 hours of interrogation.  She was permitted to bring her attorney with her for advice on which questions she could refuse to answer, and she left their offices unassisted. But she was shaken by this intimidation. The reason for the questioning was her role as organizer of a planned evening of Russian songs and peaceful protest that in fact did not take place since it was prohibited by the police.

This kind of cat and mouse game keeps both the ethnic Latvian government and its Russian ‘alien’ subjects on edge. Society has become quite fragile.

At the same time, my visit ended on a totally unexpected note. During a reception at the Chalet in the central Esplanade Park which will be used as a visitor information point during the Riga Cultural Capital festival through December, my main interlocutor was a highly placed public relations officer who serves the municipal administration.  In our prior meeting, at the Riga 2014 offices, he had impressed me as being a stern ultra-nationalist, telling me with pride that he speaks no Russian and was not aware of any Russian cultural activities that visitors might want to go to. He also informed me that he fiercely opposed the housing projects being pitched to Russian private investors and seekers of Latvian residence permits. Our chat had been chilly and brief.

Now at the reception he seemed keen to talk and did not object when I said I wanted to make a political observation, namely that I did not see the present situation with the 300,000 stateless in their midst as tenable long term and that they would be obliged to find some political accommodation with the Russian speaking population.

The response was remarkable.  Things were indeed very bad now, he said, but Putin’s actions had made it impossible to reach out to strike a deal with the stateless. Still, it had been a terrible mistake back at the time of independence that the Latvians did not grant citizenship to all the Russians. After all, the Russian Latvians had been on the barricades alongside their ethnic Latvian neighbors in the fight for independence against Soviet armed forces and they had voted for independence when a ballot was held.  

In this way, the hardline representative of the ethnic Latvian cause before me agreed with the basic argument of the Congress of Non-Citizens regarding the unfairness of the deprivation of citizenship in 1992.  With this in hand, the objection that righting that wrong is not possible today can be neutralized rather easily.  

The conversation reminded me of discussions I had in Capetown and Johannesburg in my one visit to South Africa in the year before Apartheid was brought down.  The end of a brutal discriminatory system is near when the elites enforcing it no longer believe in its supporting principles. However, whereas in the South African case the United States stood on the side of the angels, it is today, in its measures to step up NATO presence on Latvian soil, working actively against the kind of local compromises with reality that are needed.

* * * *

Like Ukraine today, the nationalist government of newly independent Latvia received a great many political advisers from the United States in the 1990s.  Some of them, like the late Ron Asmus, were awarded Latvian state orders for their services and moved on. Others like CIA operative Paul Goble continue to meddle in Latvian politics to this day, albeit no longer in the name of the agency.

These advisers shared a mission of creating a cleavage between the anti-Russian nationalists in power whom America supported and the genuine interests of the given country. Just as it is doing today, the United States propagated a vision of Russia as hostile and menacing, offering a solution in the form of NATO membership. The scenario of big, bad Russia became self-fulfilling and prevented the Latvians from finding their own peace with Russians inside and outside their country. The Americans counselled Latvians against looking closely at the map and understanding where they live. The result is a country much poorer, much less populated and much less secure than it should or could be if other policies were pursued.

These lessons are equally relevant to the situation unfolding in Ukraine, where the United States is actively promoting instability and finds itself again on the wrong side of history, to use a concept favored by the Obama administration.

* * * * *

Source: 
http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2014/05/09/latvia-s-failed-u-s-inspired-policies-towards-russia-and-rus-1129921.html

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide. Also on sale in Sterling and Waterstone’s booksellers, Brussels.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2014
Article is published with permission from Gilbert Doctorow.

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Now, when precisely gravitas and depth of analysis is needed on campus as an antidote to the war hysteria that is sweeping the mass media and pressing upon the President, Columbia is just another weak reed, contributing its pitiful bit to that hysteria. And that is intolerable. It makes a mockery of higher education as a pillar of pluralism in our society. Read on…

An Open Letter to Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

Mr. President,

I have just looked over the latest issue of Columbia Magazine. Both from the article entitled “Going Places” and from your interview in “The Evolving University” I am greatly impressed by your vision and by the enormous success of your fund-raising and development team in realizing a grand renewal of the institution. I say ‘bravo’ to you and the staff.

I also mention that where I live, in Brussels, I have felt the new dynamism of the Alumni Association both at our national Club and in the greater European region. This is all to the good.

However, in my own parochial corner of Columbia, Russian studies, I am deeply disappointed and at times shocked by the primitive state of affairs today. I also see no reason to expect better days ahead.

 Columbia is where I took my doctorate in 1975. And it is where I came back in the academic year 2010-2011 as a Visiting Scholar of the Harriman Institute. That year gave me a rather complete and depressing picture of how the administrators and instructors in my field have abandoned the notion of diversity in favor of advocacy and conformism as ‘freedom fighters’ on the Russian front. Subsequent visits to Columbia to participate in the annual conventions of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held in the SIA Building under the aegis of the Harriman Institute left me in no doubt that a kind of McCarthyism, of absolute intolerance for unconventional thinking about Russia, about Putin, had become the order of the day.

 Until the Ukrainian crisis shocked the American establishment out of its complacency over the imagined permanence of the post-Cold War order, one could understand why my field had done little more than tread water over the past two decades at Columbia just as was the case at other major centers across the country. The Harriman is now led by staff who simply cannot fill the shoes of a Marshall Shulman, who do not have the gravitas to bring reason to bear on popular mood swings such as once justified the institution’s endowment by Governor Harriman.

The shortcomings of the Harriman Institute and of the broader Columbia community of scholars in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian studies did not matter much till now.  But NOW, when precisely gravitas and depth of analysis is needed on campus as an antidote to the war hysteria that is sweeping the mass media and pressing upon the President, Columbia is just another weak reed, contributing its pitiful bit to the hysteria that has us as a nation lurching to the precipice with each twist of events in and around Ukraine. And that is intolerable. It makes a mockery of higher education as a pillar of pluralism in our society.

As an example of what bothers me and should bother you, I cite below an events announcement from the Harriman which I received at the start of this week.  Is it reasonable in a community of the enlightened to talk about Putin as a madman?  as a Hitler? Yes, I can imagine that this was raised to draw the attention of a prospective audience. But it is giving legitimacy to views that have no place on campus.

 I understand even if I intensely dislike when the mass media engages in ad hominem argumentation. But why is this going on at Columbia, one of the two founders of area studies in 1949 alongside Harvard?   Why is the same faculty member appearing on programs produced by Comedy Central to pitch jokes to the television audience about the current crisis which is evolving along a doomsday scenario?

I mention this one faculty member because the example is ready to hand.  But it is not an issue of one or two faculty members, it is an institutionalized turn away from civil discourse and towards stultifying conformism that leaves the research of all faculty much the poorer and less helpful in guiding our federal government  and the broader public to see its way through devilishly complex issues in these trying times.

Respectfully yours,

Gilbert Doctorow

Brussels

Exhibit A:

Russia: An Enigma Once More?

Monday, May 12, 2014, 6:30-7:30 pm

Columbia Alumni  Center, 622 W. 113th Street (between Broadway and Riverside)

A talk by Kimberly Marten, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Political Science, Barnard College;

Deputy Director for Development, Harriman Institute.

What is motivating Vladimir Putin?  The puzzles seem to be multiplying, even as the Russian economy stagnates.  First was the enormous, bank-breaking expenditure on the Sochi Olympics, amid accusations of massive corruption and a human rights crackdown. Then came the brazen military seizure of Ukrainian Crimea, and a new move toward greater-Russia ethnic nationalism by Kremlin leaders.  Has Putin gone mad?  Is he a new Hitler?  Or is Russia now winning a well-plotted chess game against the West?  Kimberly Marten will provide her take on the issues.

Space is limited, pre-registration is preferred.

*  *  *  *  *

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide. Also on sale in Sterling and Waterstone’s booksellers, Brussels.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2014
Article is published with permission from Gilbert Doctorow.

Report by
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Exclusive: There’s an odor of prejudice in how the mainstream U.S. news media treats the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, as if they are mindless beings, easily duped “minions” of Vladimir Putin. But this bias reflects more negatively on the U.S. press than on the people who are being insulted, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

So what does the New York Times have against Ukraine’s ethnic Russians? While the newspaper has fallen over itself insisting on the “legitimacy” of the coup regime in Kiev, despite its collaboration with neo-Nazis who spearheaded the Feb. 22 ouster of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the Times editors can’t hurl enough insults at the ethnic Russians in the east who have resisted the regime’s authority.

For weeks, the Times has called the eastern Ukrainian rebel leaders “self-declared” and ridiculed the idea that there was any significant backing for the rejection of the Kiev-appointed regional leaders; all the trouble was simply stirred up by Vladimir Putin. Now, however, the referenda in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk have demonstrated what even a Times reporter acknowledged was “substantial popular support for the pro-Russian separatists in some areas.”

But the Times editors still won’t give up their prejudices. For instance, Tuesday’s lead editorial begins: “If there were questions about the legitimacy of the separatist referendums in eastern Ukraine, the farcical names of the entities on which people were asked to vote — the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk or Luhansk — surely answered them.”

So, the votes – and the desires – of eastern Ukrainians shouldn’t matter because the Times disapproves of “the farcical names of the entities” that people voted for.

The Times then suggests that violence that marred the referenda was the fault of the rebels, not the Kiev regime’s National Guard, which includes the neo-Nazi militias that threw fire bombs at police during the Maidan protests in February and are now carrying out the most lethal attacks against protesters in cities in the east and south.

Of course, according to the Times’ narrative, these neo-Nazis from western Ukraine don’t exist, so the violence must be palmed off on others or be treated like the natural occurrence of a spring thunderstorm. In Tuesday’s editorial, the Times wrote: “But the gathering rumble of violence accompanying the votes is serious and is driving the Ukrainian crisis in a direction that before long no one — not President Vladimir Putin of Russia, not authorities in Kiev, not the West — will be able to control.”

However, even the Times’ own field reporter noted that the violence during the referenda on Sunday was provoked by those new National Guard forces that attacked some polling places. The Times’ editors must assume that most of the newspaper’s readers aren’t paying close attention to the details.

The other part of the Times’ Ukraine narrative is that Putin provoked the unrest in Ukraine so he could seize territory, although no less an authority on power politics than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says that notion “isn’t possible,” adding that Putin simply was reacting to events that caught him off-guard as he was coming out of the Winter Olympics at Sochi.

Yet, the Times ignores this more realistic scenario – of a Western-pushed destabilization of the Yanukovych government that involved demands that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund and that spiraled into a violent “regime change” – and instead puts the blame on Putin, who – the Times says – must be told to get “his minions in southeastern Ukraine in line.”

Otherwise, the Times blusters “the European Union and the United States will impose sanctions that will cut Russia off for a long time from Western sources of technology, arms and finance.”

While the Times editorial accurately reflects the swaggering belligerence of Official Washington, the editors still refuse to see the Ukraine crisis in objective terms, in which both the western Ukrainians who favor closer ties with Europe and the eastern Ukrainians whose economy is dependent on trade with Russia have legitimate concerns.

The ethnic Russians in the east are not simply dupes who fall for clumsy propaganda and mindlessly follow the dictates of Vladimir Putin. They are human beings who have their own legitimate view of their political situation and who can make judgments about what course of action is best for their interests. As difficult as life in Ukraine is, it is sure to be worse once the IMF’s harsh austerity is imposed on the country’s population.

The Times and many others in the Western media insult these ethnic Russians with a disdainful treatment that treats them as lesser beings and assumes that only the pro-European Ukrainians in the west deserve respect for their opinions.

© Robert Parry / www.consortiumnews.com
Article is published with permission from Robert Parry.
Article source: consortiumnews.com/2014/05/13/ethnic-russians-are-people-too

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Twilight of the Color RevolutionsThe initiative in starting the current crisis did not come from Putin, but rather from a complex of US and NATO institutions dedicated to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries, and to destabilizing other states in ways that the bungling Utopians of the State Department imagine will be helpful to them.

The forces behind the mob-rule destabilization of Ukraine in the fall of 2013 and the Kiev putsch of February 22, 2014 are centered in the National Endowment for Democracy, and in the politicized subdivisions of the US Agency for International Development, not to mention such private sector conduits as Freedom House, the Albert Einstein Foundation, and many more.

These are the agencies which, according to US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (the wife of neocon warmonger and top Romney advisor Robert Kagan), have invested some $5 billion in building up an anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine – an opposition in which neofascist and neo-Nazi political forces are heavily represented.

After appearing in orange, purple, and other hues, the attack on the modern national state known as the color revolution has now in Kiev stripped-down to its definitive paint job of brown — the color of Hitler’s storm troopers.

As Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently commented, “The United States and the European Union, let’s call things as they are, attempted to create yet another ‘color revolution’ in Ukraine by holding an operation on an unconstitutional regime change.” (RIA Novosti, April 24, 2014)

This US-NATO color revolution apparatus took the initiative in overthrowing Yanukovich, detonating a civil war in Ukraine. These facts mean that the United States and NATO must be seen as the aggressors in the current situation, and must bear historical responsibility for whatever tragic consequences may derive in the future.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE
www.tarpley.net/ukrainian-state-heads-for-breakup-despite-us-hysterics-putins-actions-promise-a-more-stable-balance-of-power-system

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Parry’s analysis of the Ukraine crisis better accounts for the facts than the mainstream’s Hitlerian Putin thesis or the position of some critics that it reflects the overall policy of the U.S. government to weaken Russia and expand the American empire. Furthermore, a significant unmentioned aspect of the Ukrainian affair is the irony-rich role of Israel, America’s purported close ally, which has not been critical of Russia. In fact, Israel is actually improving its relationship with Russia and stands to benefit from the crisis.

Neocons had been using the democracy card against Putin’s Russia for some time, as they had previously done against the Soviet Union, because of Putin’s hostility to the Russian liberals, many of whom happened to be Jewish and pro-Israel, and also because of Russia’s support for Israel’s major enemies — Iran and Syria.

Western ‘truth’ about the crisis in and about Ukraine is very superficial if not maliciously concocted by Thought Central. Regrettably, your average American has neither the book knowledge nor the life experience to know what is truth and what is propaganda, whereas your average Russian does. Read on…

What your cleaning lady can explain to you about the Ukrainian crisis

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 Truth has many dimensions and different people prioritize them in different ways, which is why arriving at some absolute truth recognized by everyone is so problematic if not quixotic.

Historians will tell you how conflicts between Poland, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey and Russia going back centuries have brought us to the present confrontations in and over Ukraine. There is truth in what they say.

Economists will tell you about the failed reforms that left Ukraine in the dust over the course of the last 23 years of independence while neighbors like Poland and Russia have moved far ahead, fueling the discontent that made possible the latest turbulence and extremist currents in Kiev.

Political scientists will tell you about human aspirations for self-expression and political influence over decisions affecting their lives. These abstractions contain other elements of truth about the Maidan and its consequences.

In this essay I will focus on none of the above ‘big picture’ sides to truth, looking instead to down to earth people and how they understand the unfolding Ukrainian crisis from the context of their own family ties. I begin with the person in the title above: our Ukrainian cleaning lady. Since anecdotal evidence like this is more credible if supported by additional material drawing on statistically relevant samples or on phenomena documented by authoritative sources, I will present some observations that have been widely reported by journalists in respected mainstream American and European media. Where I will differ markedly from their reporting is in the interpretation of the observations as I make the case that Western ‘truth’ about the crisis in and about Ukraine is very superficial if not maliciously concocted by Thought Central in Washington.

 *  *   *   *   *

It should come as no surprise to readers in London or Paris or New York, that menial jobs like cleaning lady in middle class households of Brussels are performed by new immigrants.  We used to have a succession of Polish ladies helping us once a week with the cleaning of our townhouse. As Poles moved up and out to better paid work, their place has been taken by new arrivals from further East.

Our present cleaning lady, who is from the Western Ukraine, with family roots in the impoverished countryside of Lviv, has been with us for three years. Though she has no higher education, she is bilingual Russian and Ukrainian, with rudimentary French and Polish. As she goes about her duties, she regularly pauses to converse in Russian with my wife about her and our family matters. The women’s talk typically revolved about our grandchildren who are with us on Wednesdays when she works for us and about her daughter and son-in-law who are enrolled in university courses in Warsaw. Politics was always off the table.

Maidan abruptly changed all that, if only briefly.  After President Yanukovych was overthrown, Olya arrived at our house in a jubilant mood, speaking proudly about how the crooks had been chased out and Ukraine would soon be on its way into the European Union, with clean government and prosperity sure to follow.

On subsequent weeks, Olya again took up with my wife her narrative of developments back home, developments which she followed both on the phone with relatives in the Lviv region and on Ukrainian satellite television. Her mood changed. When the Russians took Crimea, she saw her homeland as being threatened by the big neighbor to the East. She was very anxious that the newfound freedom would be dashed. Her chat with my Russophile wife became tense.

Two more weeks passed, and Olya came to us completely dismayed, looking embarrassed by her past enthusiasm for the Maidan. She now told us that nothing has changed in the Ukrainian political elites, that aside from a new set of faces, thieves were once again in the seat of power. Looking forward to the presidential elections in May, she could see no candidate worth supporting. Not Tymoshenko, not Klitschko, not Yatsenyuk, the Rabbit. All the candidates were just an embarrassment. The country seemed as far away from the EU as ever. As we understood, Olya has turned off Ukrainian television in disgust.

Since then, the political discussions have ended. Olya and my wife are back talking women’s talk.

 *  *  *  *  *

The New York Times and other mainstream Western journalists reported on the sharp rise of Russian nationalism (negative connotation) in Moscow following the annexation of Crimea. They were stunned to see Russian flags hanging out of office and apartment windows all around the city, saying the atmosphere was like in America after 9/11.

From several meetings with acquaintances as well as total strangers in St Petersburg last week and. writing to you as I do today from the Russian countryside, in a hamlet of 200 souls located in the Leningradskaya oblast, 80 km south of St Petersburg, I can add to their observations that the same feeling of national pride or patriotism (positive connotation) seems to be ubiquitous, not merely a phenomenon in the country’s capital and largest city. For the first time in my experience, people other than taxi drivers are keen to talk politics.

In particular, I note that acquaintances who previously only spoke of their government as corrupt and/or incompetent suddenly have become great enthusiasts not merely of the annexation of Crimea but of the Kremlin’s standing up to the West over Ukraine and its insistence on federalization. They are saying with gusto how they are ready to undergo Western sanctions if necessary for the country to defend its interests. They are confident that the price of sanctions will be paid equally heavily by the West, thereby limiting their extent. It is expressions like this which explain the surge in approval ratings of Vladimir Putin in recent weeks to an incredible 80%.

The dramatic rise in Russian nationalism (patriotism) has been uniformly interpreted by our mainstream media as due to the aggressive propaganda campaign being promoted on the country’s state television. This same alleged distortion of the news has been used both in Ukraine and more recently in several of the Baltic States to justify their ordering cable television providers to discontinue their distribution of Russian channels. Western journalists and political commentators would have us believe that their own and Ukrainian state coverage of events in and concerning Ukraine is objective and truthful, whereas the Kremlin is keeping Russian citizens and viewers cut off from the reality of their aggression and bullying of neighbors.

So what is going on? Who is right?

Let’s start with the turn in feelings about Vladimir Putin and his ‘regime’ by Russia’s man in the street and the link to national pride over absorption of the Crimea. Are these feelings that could be manufactured from nothing by effective and unchallenged state propaganda?

Perhaps. But your man in the street was not moved by whatever propaganda content there was on state television before. On the contrary, in December 2012 at least in the capital he  demonstrated his disbelief in official news by taking part in mass protests over alleged vote rigging in the Duma elections.

I believe that the capture of Crimea for Russia has been seen by ordinary Russians as a great present to the nation. A Kremlin which only did favors for an inner circle did not command respect.  A Kremlin which faces down the West and takes back what people feel was their national legacy is something else. And this statesmanship is all the more powerful given that the government has delivered a public good at its own risk and peril. Personal sanctions on leadership figures were threatened and followed soon afterwards, while the people was left, at least up to now, unscathed.

Here in Russia everyone knows where Crimea is on the map and what its place is in Russian naval, military and national history.Everyone felt it was an injustice that this land had been gifted to Ukraine by Khrushchev and then gifted a second time by Yeltsin in his agreeing to the Ukrainian secession from the Union with Crimea in its hands.

Why everyone?  Because so many of today's over 35s had been to the children's summer resorts in Crimea on trips organized by their schools, not to mention the paid family vacations sponsored by major state institutions of the USSR.

As for the situation in Ukraine, here everyone has back channels of information.  The extent of intermarriage, of Russian families having close relatives in Ukraine is enormous. Reporting on state television cannot be far removed from what people know from their own experience and that of their kin.

The reasons why there is such an intermixing of Russians and Ukrainians in turn requires an explanation. This is not just the consequence of inter-ethnic romances, some Slavic version of West Side Story or the equivalent of intermarriages between Croats and Serbs whose families had lived side by side in Bosnia for centuries. It is the result of both the nasty and the good aspects of the Soviet past which caused the Homo Sovieticus to settle and re-settle across that vast expanse of Eurasia with almost as much abandon as Americans move across their Continent.

The nasty side of the past was the vast resettlement of families and peoples in Soviet times during Collectivization, during the Great Terror, during the Great Patriotic War and the parallel movement of runaways seeking to escape the clutches of the state machine by disappearing to another end of the empire without the helping hand of the KGB.

The good aspect of the past came from the HR policies of the Soviet system whereby graduates were matched with career opportunities across the Soviet empire.

The common result of these internal migrations was a great deal of mixing up of peoples even if the titular nationality of each republic in the USSR was in the majority.  Hence today you will find large numbers of  Russians, both your man in the street and leadership personalities, who have Ukraine under their skin.

This being the case, state propaganda about Ukraine in Russia runs up against a constant reality check of people’s family experience and informal information feed.                                                               

By contrast, in the West, and in America in particular, most folks would have had a hard time locating Crimea not to mention Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkiv on the map prior to the onset of the present troubles. They have no store of knowledge or family experience to help them judge whether reporting about Ukraine on their television sets is impartial or pure propaganda from the Neocon dominated majority of their foreign policy establishment.

Case closed.

*  *  *  *  *

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide. Also on sale in Sterling and Waterstone’s booksellers, Brussels.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2014
Article is published with permission from Gilbert Doctorow.

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The ultimate victim of name calling and diatribes as a substitute for reasoned argumentation is the quality of policy being formulated. The claqueurs who rule over our magazines of political commentary written by and for the educated classes are pointing the country and the world in its grip towards disaster. Read on…

The uncivil war being waged in America’s East Coast-based, liberal magazines of commentary

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

In Ukraine, a full-blown civil war announced itself in the atrocity perpetrated in Odessa two days ago, when some 46 civilian protesters against the provisional government in Kiev were torched, burned alive in the Trade Unions building by pro-Maidan extremists, with the firefighters and police looking on passively. Thus, calls for the physical extermination of the Moskali which have criss-crossed the Ukrainian informational space, whether originating from the long-time extremist Dmitry Yarosh and his marginally fascist Pravy Sektor movement or from the seemingly upstanding oligarch and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko with her leaked, violently anti-Russian telephone conversation of several weeks ago intended to kick-start her presidential candidacy, these incendiary summons to violence are being realized in the literal sense.

Meanwhile back in the United States, in the country which in February installed the unelected, radical nationalist regime in Kiev and which publicly backs the military crackdown on opposition activists in southern and eastern Ukraine, setting the context for the infamous crime in Odessa, an uncivil war of words has broken out within the intellectual community. It is fed by the unfolding disaster in Ukraine and what it means for relations with Mr. Putin’s Russia.

One arm of the offensive has been led by The New York Review of Books, which has published a series of rhetorical bombs by the Yale scholar turned pundit Timothy Snyder.  Willingly serving as the mouthpiece of Maidan on American shores, Snyder has rounded on Putin in each of his lengthy essays appearing at intervals of several weeks over the past six months. Putin is the autocrat, the crusher of liberties in Russia for whom a genuinely democratic Ukraine is anathema; he is the nationalist promoter of Russian hegemony in the region; he is the thief who stole the Crimea and now has designs on large chunks of Ukraine; he is the rogue, the revisionist in power who has upset the entire Post-Cold War security structure put in place by the United States and its allies.

But Snyder does not stop there. He takes on with gusto all those who suggest that the Maidan heroes in power in Kiev might have less than honorable pasts, not to mention their possible fascist inclinations and behavior. See the following remarks in his NYRBarticle “Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda”:

"Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul's newsletter, through The Nation and the Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist or even Nazi coup d'état.”

Jim Naureckas’ expose of Snyder in Fair Blog, http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/03/07/denying-the-far-right..., called out the dirtiness of Snyder’s line of attack on his political opponents by associating them with the Moscow positions: “In other words, not only Russian and ex-Ukrainian officials, but also various Western media outlets–with the most oddball and marginal listed first–are putting forth the "propaganda" claim that Yanukovych was overthrown by the far right.”  Naureckas went on to show that Snyder could not disprove the validity of those arguments in his overly long article that at the very end conceded there was some truth to the role played by extreme nationalists.

Notwithstanding his seeking to discredit countrymen holding views contrary to his own by accusing them of propaganda, the WASP-ish Yale professor would appear to be the perfect gentleman compared to others. I think in particular of the latest attack on the alleged apologist for Putin and his Ukrainian policies, Professor emeritus of Princeton and New York University Stephen F. Cohen.

Julia Ioffe’s article entitled “Putin’s American Toady at ‘The Nation’ Gets Even Toadier’ marks the resurrection in The New Republic, an iconic temple of East Coast liberalism, of the worst hallmarks of McCarthyism. The piece is so obnoxious that James Carden, writing in the aptly named American Conservative on 2 May, denounced Ioffe for what he called scurrilous, ad hominem attacks on the work and character of ‘perhaps the country’s foremost scholar of Russian studies.”

Carden wonders what could have evoked the venom in Ioffe’s essay which is nominally just a critique of an article appearing inThe Nation a few days before written jointly by Cohen and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor-in-chief of that magazine. The couple had done nothing more than describe in some detail the obvious: that the Obama administration has rolled out a New Cold War without there being much public debate in the media over this sharp change in the direction of our relations with Russia that carries great risks. Indeed it is clear that the media are lined up like so many ducks on the question of Russia.

The reasons for Ioffe’s biliousness are not so hard to find. The unpleasant thing is that they lurk in the mine field of ad hominem realities, taking us back to issues of national origins and religion where few commentators venture to go lest they lose their virginity. It is all about the history of the Neoconservative ideology that has swept the American political spectrum from right to left ever since the Reagan administration and given us a bipartisan foreign policy in the worst sense, meaning without any internal debates. This is a foreign policy that is uniformly Russophobe whether it is advanced under the Democratic or Republican party label. In what I am about to say, I take comfort from the trail blazed by none other than the greatest popularizer of Neocon ideas, Francis Fukuyama, namely his brief chronicle of the movement in his book After the Neocons, which represented only a tactical retreat and temporary suspension of his membership card.

It is no secret that the Neoconservative movement can be traced back to a cohort in City College in Manhattan among predominantly Jewish intellectuals who were predominantly of Trotskyist political persuasion. As colorfully explained by the godfather and leading publicist of the Neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, these leftists were eventually ‘mugged by reality’ and turned fiercely against their former illusions and against the land which promoted those illusions, the Soviet Union. The successor state to the USSR, today’s Russian Federation, picked up the opprobrium when it stood in the way of the Neocon crusade to sweep the world of all remaining challenges to the American century, beginning with its opposition to their Iraqi adventure in 2003.

Apostasy is always vengeful towards those who do not follow the change of religion, read ideology. Ioffe does not fail to remind us that Cohen is a ‘lefty,’ nor does she let us forget his sympathy for the subject of his past scholarly labors, the political thinker and Bolshevik leader, Bukharin. This and Cohen's family ancestry were evidently quite sufficient to trigger Ioffe’s rant at the impertinence of Professor Cohen in his questioning America’s present-day Neocon consensus on Russia and much else.

As evidence that however uncivil and ultimately irrational it may be, the hatred otherwise educated people bear for those who do not bend with the wind transcends national borders and is not limited to my American compatriots, I would cite a similar phenomenon in France, where the left revolutionary generation of the 1960s became disillusioned over time with their sympathies for the developing world.  Heroes of their youth, like the great American dissident Noam Chomsky, who was once celebrated for his brave opposition to America’s war on Vietnam, are today ignored at best, ridiculed at worst by the apostates who now occupy the leading positions in the French universities and magazines of commentary.

The ultimate victim of name calling and shouting as a substitute for reasoned argumentation is the quality of policy being formulated. In this regard, we have reason for alarm. The light-weight counsellors of our President in foreign policy decision-making and the claqueurs who rule over our magazines of political commentary written by and for the educated classes are pointing the country and the world in its grip towards disaster.

***********

G. Doctorow is an occasional guest lecturer at St. Petersburg State University and Research Fellow of the American University in Moscow. His latest book, Stepping Out of Line: Collected (Nonconformist) Essays on Russian-American Relations, 2008-12, is available in paperback and e-book from Amazon.com and affiliated websites worldwide. Also on sale in Sterling and Waterstone’s booksellers, Brussels.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2014
Article is published with permission from Gilbert Doctorow.

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Mission

Our Mission is to report on issues and news stories otherwise ignored by traditional media and to lift political awareness and bring worldwide news stories to young people in the UK.

About Us

Started in July 2012, Shout Out UK has become one of Britain’s fastest growing independent global news networks. It aims to create an understanding between current affairs around the globe and the history behind each issue. Their global network of journalists covers news stories without censorship or preference, with the aim to inform and to create a news network, which is incorporative, independent and gives a means of expression to the voiceless generation.

Collaborations include hosting online debates on immigration and ‘What would you do if you were Prime Minister for a day’ with the BBC’s FreeSpeech, campaigning and marketing with 97% Owned’s documentary on the Occupy movement and becoming media partners to HTC’s The Tomorrow Talks. In 2013 Shout Out UK became Bite the Ballot’s official media partners and has covered their campaign to get more young people involved in politics since. Shout Out UK also took part as the media partner of the Hansard Society’s 3rd Young Person’s Question Time, covering the event via video.

For parliament week 2013 Shout Out UK launched it’s ‘Positivity, change and unity in Politics’ event. The night was themed ‘Positivity, change and unity in Politics’ in an effort to allow young people to connect with politics in their own unique way. The night showcased through a diverse collection of dance groups, one of which was a well established dance group that goes by the name of Dauntless. Dauntless were previously feature in the band M.I.A’s music video ‘bad girls’ which has generated over 1 million views on YouTube.

In addition, Shout Out UK held a small art exhibition showcasing art work painted and inspired by the next generation. Lastly, we gave the individuals the opportunity to share their voice through the form of poetry/spoken words on issues that have influenced their everyday lives.

Government Work

Shout Out UK submitted evidence on the 2013, Theresa May Immigration Bill, stressing that immigration is a highly emotive issue, one which should always be navigated with rational, objective consideration rather than peer pressure and misrepresentation of others. The submission also stressed that the proposals set out in the Immigration Bill should be designed to protect immigrants, legal or otherwise, from exploitation or harm.

The evidence also highlighted a controversial problem: “That of affluent foreign citizens buying up property, more often than not leaving homes vacant for the majority of the time, particularly in large cities like London, and the knock-on effect this has on housing prices and availability”.

On the 16th April 2014, Shout Out UK conducted Youth Unemployment Analysis, which was included in the 2014 house of Lords report commissioned to tackle rising unemployment.

According to the report; 881,000 young people aged 16-24 were unemployed in December 2013 to February 2014, down 38,000 on the previous quarter and down 98,000 on the previous year.

The unemployment rate (the proportion of the economically active population who are unemployed) for 16-24 year olds was 19.1%, down 0.9 percentage points from the previous quarter and down 1.9 percentage points from the previous year.

Campaigns

Politics in Schools

Shout Out UK launched a campaign called ‘Politics in Schools’ in 2013, with the aim of making politics a compulsory element of the UK National Curriculum. Since it’s launch, Shout Out UK ran a successful case study in the London borough of Harrow in support of political education in schools.

The project, sponsored by Vinspired, saw a remarkable discovery: That students, parents, teachers and local politician’s believe that political education should have a larger presence in schools, with some believing it should be an independent subject; Politics.

Citizen Journalism

Shout Out UK is an advocate for Citizen Journalism, believing that it has the power to transform the way news is presented and distributed. Shout Out UK’s Director and founder, Matteo Bergamini, states “Citizen journalism will grow strength in strength and as long as the internet remains free and accessible. It will continue to thrive and give people the information they need to have.”

To mark the 69th anniversary of the Allied Victory over Fascism, the Trustees of the Soviet Memorial Trust Fund [SMTF] organised an Act of Remembrance at the Soviet War Memorial in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, adjacent to the Imperial War Museum on Friday, 9th May 2014.

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www.ShoutOutUK.org

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