Your Eyewitness has feasted on Rambo tales even before Rambo was created! The trope of a lone western hero taking on thousands of “natives” – of various and sundry darker hues – has been with us since Columbus stumbled across the “New World”. In fact, HE might’ve started it all. Didn’t just a few boatloads of Europeans conquer entire continents? But there’s a difference between Cortez and Rambo – Cortez used his superior weapons to mow down the natives almost unopposed. But Rambo went into action only after western forces had been convincingly defeated by natives!! Think Vietnam and Dien Bien Phu!! The Rambo movies were just a face-saving pretend move!!
Well, in the west’s estimate, Russians were never very much above the natives of far-off places. They were never considered “real” Europeans. They were “Slavs” – and while the term isn’t derived from the word “slave”, that’s pretty much how the Western Europeans saw them. Attempts by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to haul them into European Enlightenment never succeeded. That feudalism survived there into the 20th century – only to be removed by the Communist Revolution of 1917 – didn’t help; this just added an ideological burden to the earlier racial one!! Their Eastern Orthodox Roman Catholic religion that survived the Communist detour helped in being “othered”!
And it’s against this background we, natives in Guyana, have to understand Putin being able to rally the Russian people to invade the Ukraine. After the USSR – in which Russia was Uber Alles – collapsed in ignominy with their defeat in the Cold War against the US and the West, the chip on their shoulder gradually became a log. There was some hope their success in going into space and such like would’ve made them competitive. But to discover it was mostly bluff and bluster shook their confidence once again.
That Ukraine, one of the breakaway “soviets” – which had given two USSR leaders, Krushchev and Brezhnev – would now signal it was joining NATO, the military alliance than had in effect defeated the USSR, was the final straw for Putin. His claim to fame, after all, is he’d return PRIDE to the Russian people. And as we in the Third World know, hell hath no fury like a people scorned as not being equal!!
So, what’s ahead?? Putin knows he can’t occupy Ukraine forever. His end game is to absorb the two breakaway provinces into Russia as a buffer; install a friendly regime in Kiev, and have them accept they won’t join NATO. And the West? Sure, they’ll make a lot of noise…but none of them would be sending troops to actually take on the Ruskies.
They remember the experience of Napoleon and Hitler!
…in Guyana?
No, your Eyewitness isn’t going back to Jordan and Nagamootoo – the former in military olive fatigues! – calling for “war break” against the PPP in Bartica in the preparations for elections in 2019. The PNC and AFC had demanded house-to-house registration (HtH) for the voters’ list, “or else”!! “From today, comrades, war break. Because we got to go to elections before the end of this year, hopefully,” yelled Jordan. Nagamootoo identified “youths” as their shock troops in their war break. “…anyone who calls for an election without our young people being on that voters’ list, they’re calling for trouble in this country,” Nagamootoo screamed!!
Well, Local Government Elections are due this year, and there have been noises made about HtH registration from the Opposition camp. On the other hand, GECOM has announced that “continuous registration” has started to bring the present list up to date. It will presumably be cleansed by “Claims and Objections” just before the LGE.
So, another “War Break” in the offing? “Shock and awe” like Putin?
…over invitations
Poor PNC. They’ve complaining they weren’t invited to the O&G Conference. But your Eyewitness saw folks like Van West-Charles, James Bond, Khemraj Ramjattan etc…there hobnobbing and feasting.
Is it that free tickets weren’t proffered?
