Chris:
> I think the whole situation is risible no matter how you look
> at it -- Luka for some reason feels he needed to arrange
> things bump his share of the vote from from maybe 60% to 80%
> (I think); a pathetic Yushchenko wannabe camped out there in
> Minsk with a whole 200 supporters, claiming he's the future;
> people denouncing the guy who did get 60% of the vote even
> though he felt he had to bump it up as a dictatorial
> oppressor of his subjects, who in fact support him; and
> mostly the hope that there will be a Ukraine-style revo in Belarus.
>
> Belarussians are like the most conservative (in the fSU
> sense) and mellow people on the planet. They make the Swiss
> look like crazed anarchist bomb-throwers.
> They like stability, peace and order, and Batka gives them
> that. There is almost no nationalism in Belarus, so there is
> no nationalist card to play like in Ukraine and Georgia.
> Moreover, since lots of Belarussians view the West as an
> enemy, taking money from Western "pro-democracy" sources does
> about as much for a Belarussian politician's approval ratings
> as taking it from the Chinese did for Al Gore's. I think the
> whole thing is ludicrous on a whole lot of levels.
By the same logic, you should approve the election of Bush jr. in the US - he provided a (false) sense of security for the conservative segment of the population that demanded it, and got the majority of the votes. That 40+ percent that voted for his opponent are portrayed as a bunch of urban liberals and wannabies by the patriotic Right.
I happened to be in Poland when this whole Belarus debacle unraveled, and the Polish media covered it quite extensively for their own selfish reasons - as a diversion from the growing political impasse in which the right wing government found itself (the dead pope was another distraction). What transpired to me from that coverage was that Belarus was a microcosm of the US - the small town/rural conservatives vs. urban/college educated liberals (I will verify that with my contact on this country). Sorry, Chris, but I have serious problems supporting the former - be it in the US, Eastern Europe or elsewhere.
In fact, I think that the main political fault line today is - and has been for the past 100+ years - the pre-modern rural/modern-urban divide of which social class was only a correlate. The initial successes of the Left in countries like Russia, China and Eastern Europe - which were predominantly rural - was its ability to mobilize and manipulate the rural masses for its political purposes. Or more precisely, to harness the fundamentally reactionary anger of the uprooted by wars rural and small town masses into its own modernization projects, that happen to include some progressive ideals.
However, the Right quickly learned the trick of rabble rousing (cf. Hitler) and it practically crowded out the Left from this field. Today, the mobilization of the angry rural/small town masses is almost the exclusive domain of the Right, whit the Left survived only in very narrow niches - either small localities with exceptionally strong Left traditions (more about it momentarily) or in the academia.
So do not get fooled by political labels "Left" "Right" "Communist" "Christian" "Muslim" etc. - these are merely the local flavours of the same essence - the manipulation of the uprooted rural/small town masses, which are fundamentally reactionary, for political purposes, usually nationalist or even fascist. These themes are played big time in Eastern Europe today, even those parts that currently joined the EU, and of course has its equivalents in the US. On the pain of oversimplification, the X-tian and Nativist right in the US is the structural equivalent of the old Communists and populists in Eastern Europe.
I furthermore predict that this political dynamic will soon spread to the more developed parts of the EU - where the Right has been quite effectively mobilizing the population on anti-immigrant and populist sentiments. BTW, the current issue of the New Yorker has an excellent analysis of the Dutch situation in which it links the current tensions to the failed policies of multiculturalism (or pillarization as the Dutch call it). An excellent piece indeed - I highly recommend it.
With the phenomenal progress in communication, marketing and persuasion techniques I predict that it has become easier for the moral entrepreneurs and political manipulators to mobilize the fundamentally reactionary uprooted lower echelons of every society. This does not bode well for the future of socialism, internationalism, and the left-of-the centre parties. I see a low-intensity populist fascism spreading in the foreseeable future.
PS. I just came from Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where most major streets are named after Marx, Engels, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse tung, Nyerere, Lumumba and other characters from the Communist Who's Who. That is all that is left of the socialist past in this part of Africa, which has become a low-cost beech resort for South Africans - a Santa Cruz on the Indian Ocean if you will - complete with surfer and hippie types, and mellow blues, reggae, Latin and African music played in the night clubs. Let's face it, comrades, socialism as we know it is a fossil preserved only in time-warps like Maputo, or in academic departments.
Wojtek