Belarus Suberverters Fail
Posted by alex in Belarus, Eastern Europe at 2:22 am | 
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Interesting view from libertarian on the ground in Belarus…
Demintern Minsk Diary Part II
Posted by Daniel McAdams at 10:43 PM
As promised, I have reflected further on my recent trip to Belarus to assess the pre-election climate and the technical conduct of the elections. My conclusions and analysis can be found here.
In Belarus, there is apparently no honor among thieves, as they say. The opposition, paid millions by the West to subvert their nation’s electoral process and foment an extra-juridical revolution, has in a way admirably “taken the money and ran.” Take that, Uncle Sam!
The US paid for hundreds of thousands in October Square to overthrow the fully expected electoral victory of Alexander Lukashenka but only a handful showed up. Money was spent to fly denim flags and to wear denim uniforms, but even though the Frankfurter Allgemeine faithfully followed the Merkel/Bush script, the reality on the ground had changed by the time the paper reported that “denim flags were flying” and the once-respected German paper looked foolish to anyone who actually had a view of the denim-less October Square.
All that is left for the Western-financed opposition is to devour each other, as they are apparently doing with relish. Alexander Kozulin, the man who we heard had been brutally beaten by the regime on his bald head just days before we met him with a miraculous recovery (a perfectly smooth noggin in just days of being massacred by the evil forces of the regime!), attacked fellow US-financed Alexander Milinkevic as the whole thing went south, calling Mr. Milinkevich “a so-called democrat… who was jealous of Kozulin during the peaceful protests since March 19, and did not have the strength to lead despite the money, publicity and support from Europe and the United States”.
“Milinkevich simply acted as a coward,” Kozulin’s party spokesman said.
Ouch!
31 March, 2006 at 2:33 am
The U.S. paid for political opposition in Belarus, huh? I wonder exactly WHO decided to do that? In other words, which U.S. government official conceived that idea?
31 March, 2006 at 7:08 am
Well, it’s good taht at least in some places there’s judgement! Now, with the latest economic performances, the country will be even harder to destabilize! The regime has decades of experience in dealing with subverters and it has russian backing. So the key to stability is winning over Russia!
1 April, 2006 at 5:27 am
Organizations like National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAid, led by top politicians like John Kerry and Madeleine Albright, along with Jew George Soros, have pumped hundreds of millions into liberal parties and organizations in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, which favor feminism, “rights” for Gypsies and other minorities, “rights” for homosexuals and transvestites, closer ties with the EU and NATO, less ties with Russia, and even cheaper abortion than these countries already have. (Especially Soros spends millions on making sure as many East European infants as possible will be aborted.)
They paid for “revolutions” in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, now Belarus, and probably some other countries that I am forgetting. This is no wild theory either, the money transfers are open and the purpose is stated frankly.
1 April, 2006 at 9:12 pm
You say: “Organizations like National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAid, led by top politicians like John Kerry and Madeleine Albright, along with Jew George Soros,”
I say: Ignorance with gud intentions is more dangerous than education with bad intentions.
Why “Jew George Soros”, why not true statement:
“Jews John Kerry, Madeleine Albright AND George Soros”!?
Same as whole Clinton’s Administration, anyway.
See http://www.AntiDefamationLeague.com
or http://www.adlusa.us
11 April, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Yes, Sokrates, what was I thinking, not pointing out all the Jews in sight. Clearly my post warranted a heated response.
Or maybe you just need some exercise and fresh air; takes away the edginess when posting. Something to keep in mind.
11 April, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Blueprint on controlled democracy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1360080,00.html
40 mil goes a very long way in an East European nation; you make sure your favored candidate will have at least twice, or three times, as much cash as his opponent. When a candidate receives that kind of upper hand from a foreign agent, can it truly be called democratic?
———————————-
The Democratic party’s National Democratic Institute, the Republican party’s International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros’s open society institute.
US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.
The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.
In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.
In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.
Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.
Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the “parallel vote tabulation”, a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.
There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.
Freedom House and the Democratic party’s NDI helped fund and organise the “largest civil regional election monitoring effort” in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.
The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.
[Also: polls before and during the election, pointing to a victory for your favored candidate, embolden your own side and demoralizes the other side. Polls are a weapon. Poll numbers that were later shown to have been fraudulent were released right before the election in Ukraine.]
The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.