Renee
Nal wrote earlier today about the Yanukovich government trying to intimidate
opposition protesters in Kiev by sending a threatening message to their cell
phones. As she notes, selecting their phones to
receive the message required the government tracking their phone
activity.
Creepy, indeed, as Renee says. But in a sense, it’s just a modern,
technical method of fomenting the kind of violent, “dirty tricks” political
conflict in which Bolsheviks specialized a century ago, and which disciples of
Saul Alinsky sought to perfect in the 1960s. What this set of tactics is about is
creating chaos, fear, conflict between groups: whatever it takes to make middle
class and sensible people hide indoors, demand order, and lose their heart for
organized, responsible political opposition.
We
can call it ‘Bolshelinskyism’ – especially when we see the other reports coming
out of Ukraine about the handling of the protests.
In
this case, the protesters aren’t the Bolshelinskyists. The Bolshelinskyists are from the
government, and they’re there to shut down the protests by whatever means
necessary. Those means include
bringing in rent-a-thugs to intimidate the peaceful protesters. They also include kidnapping opposition
leaders, making them “disappear” for periods of time, roughing them up, and
presumably seeking by those methods to frighten their families and
associates.
You
have to read a long way into the most recent New York Times account to get to this part. But here’s a summary of what the
opposition protesters are seeing from the rent-a-thugs (emphasis
added):
[O]ther groups have also appeared in Kiev, adding to the
sense of chaos. Young men carrying sticks wandered side streets near the central
square threatening to beat protesters who walked alone. One group shattered a
shop window.
The
opposition leaders have said they believe that these people are soccer hooligans
and unemployed men bused into Kiev by the government to provide a proxy force to
intimidate protesters and darken the image of the movement by highlighting the
violence.
“Disorders should not be allowed to happen,” Vitali
Klitschko, a former boxing champion and the leader of the political party
Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, wrote on Twitter. “This is a
plan of authorities to introduce a state of
emergency.”
Early
Tuesday, opposition activists detained about a dozen of these
rival young men and marched them to one of several buildings occupied by
protesters, where several admitted in videotaped conversations that they had
been promised 200 hryvnia, or about $25, to cause trouble. But they were not
able to explain clearly who had hired them.
(Many
readers’ thoughts will stray, quite naturally, to the barely less uncivilized
practices of ACORN and its affiliates – conscious Alinskyites all – in paid
“protest” activities in the United States.
See here, here, here, here, here, and here, in case you need reminders. Most of you
don’t.)
Meanwhile, opposition activists Igor Litsenko and Yuri
Verbytsky were abducted from a hospital where they were being treated for
injuries inflicted by government security forces. (This appears to have happened on
Monday.) They were taken into a
forested area and put in separate cells in a garage-like building for 10
hours. There seem to have been
political arguments with the abductors; Litsenko thinks at least some were
ideologues, and not just rent-a-thugs.
At the end of his confinement, he was
forced to kneel down against a tree, and thought he was about to be
executed. He was apparently facing
the tree with his back to his captors, and eventually realized that they had
left him by himself. He walked,
“almost fainting sometimes,” back through the woods, ... [See rest at
links]
CDR, USN (Ret.)
Hemet, CA
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