Zelensky Uses Police Tactics To Force Land Grab

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(“The Second Coming”, by William Butler Yeats)

Dear Readers:

Today I have this piece from INOSMI, the Russian portal site that translates news and op-eds from the foreign press into Russian.  The original piece is from a Norwegian newspaper named Resett, the author is Bjørn Nistad.  Norwegian is a fine Germanic language but, sadly, I cannot read it; therefore I must rely on the Russian translation.  The topic is the new Ukrainian law permitting foreigners to buy up Ukrainian land (preferably rich farmland).  The Ukraine is known for its rich black earth and used to be the breadbasket of the USSR (in addition to also being an industrial powerhouse).

Norwegian reporter Bjørn Nistad, formerly a resident of Lake Wobegon

Sadly, the benighted nation, once the proud Borderlands of the Russian Empire, is now just a shadow of itself, with a Jester for its King.  And that Jester also (although this is not mentioned in the Norwegian piece) happens to be an ideological Ayn Randite, which actually explains a lot about his political and economic views.  Randites sincerely believe that private property is literally the solution to every problem known to humanity.  Provided all that juicy property gets into the hands of superhumans such as John Galt.  Although the Ukraine does not possess anybody of the stature of a Galt, it’s a point worth arguing.  And yet there is something sinisterly biblical about wantonly selling off one’s own birthright, for pennies on the dollar, no less.  Or, as the Norwegian points out, cutting off one’s own nose to spite one’s own face!

In the absence of Galt-like superhumans, the best way to keep property in the hands of the people (“the people” being a lot of humans, too many to make group-consensual decisions, it’s basically like herding cats), is to have it managed by the government.  A government of, by, and for the people, to coin a phrase.  Once again, the Borderlands lack such a wise and enlightened government.

Now, the land privatizations actually began way back in 1991, from the very first days of the Ukraine’s esistence, for the first time in its history, as an independent nation.  But in those early days the thought was to create a class of Ukrainian farmers, from those who already tilled the land.  For example, members of the disbanded kolkhozy.  However, the Ukrainian population did not take kindly to this suggestion, preferring to keep the soil as communal property.  Believe it or not, Communist collectivization of the land had been a huge success, after a few rough bumps in the road.  The land sale idea was nixed in 2001, due to lack of public support.  A moratorium was placed on the sale of the land.

The EU Court of Human Rights building was designed by Architect Consortium Richard Rogers Partnership Ltd, and by Claude Bucher. And definitely not by Howard Roark, who would have done a better job.

The Ukrainian oligarchs did not like this moratorium and sought to overturn it.  Their dream was to buy and own the land for themselves, as their own private and personal property.  Their desire had the backing of the World Bank and other major international players, including, probably, the “Make a Wish” foundation.

And thus, in 2018 the European Court of Human Rights declared the moratorium to be illegal.  Because it hampered the “human rights”, and the dreams and the wishes of the oligarchs who coveted their neighbors land.

And thus it came to pass that Randite President Zelensky and his political party “Servant of the People” decided to go against the wishes of the 80% of the Ukrainian public who oppose the land sale.  By removing the moratorium on the sale.

In the Rada (Parliament) debates, ideological proponents of the land sale resorted to three main arguments:

1. Permission to privatize the land will put a final end to the era of Stalinism [Stalin was the architect of the collectivization project], also put a crimp in Soviet values [of common as opposed to private property], and signify a final break with evil Russia [because ?]
2. If foreigners are permitted to buy Ukrainian land, then these foreigners will proceed to protect Ukraine against Russian aggression; and
3. Ordinary Ukrainians will also have a chance to buy the land, so it’s not completely unpatriotic.

All of these arguments are stupid, it goes without saying.  It is absurd to sell a policy which can only, in the end, benefit wealthy oligarchs and billionaire foreigners, under the sauce of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian rhetoric.  The results of such a land grab will be catastrophic for ordinary Ukrainians.  But it all illustrates how gullible the Ukrainian people are, and it won’t be the first time they will be be convinced to do something against their own interests, under the sound and fury of anti-Russia hysteria.

Jacob and Esau make a deal.

It is absurd, Nistad points out, to give away one’s home to an outsider, just because one is quarrelling with one’s neighbor!  Let’s be clear about this:  No ordinary Ukrainian will get any land:  It will all go to foreigners and to the oligarchs.

In a nation where the economy is good and everything is in order, it might make sense to permit land sales.  The government could place certain limits and stipulations; and also see to it that the sold land is worked properly and produces a valuable product.  But Ukraine is not such a nation:  It is a poor nation, dying in the throes of poverty and saddled with a completely corrupt government.  Under such circumstances, privatization is a catastrophic mistake.  The class of farmers will be deprived of the land they currently till.  Those who buy the land without any supervision, can do whatever they want with it:  They could strip it and ship it overseas; or they could fill it with toxic waste.  Who would tell them what they can and cannot do?

Ukraine Is A Corrupt Police State

In addition to being poor and corrupt, Ukraine is also a police state.  And because the privatization of the land is so unpopular, President Zelensky did not hesitate to resort to police-state methods to force the vote.  For example, one of the Rada deputies who voted against, reported that her husband was arrested the very next day.  She has no doubt that this arrest is a form of blackmail against her.  “Stop putting pressure on me and my family!” she demanded of Zelensky.

Aside from Nistad, not one Norwegian (nor even European, in general) reporter mentioned this act of clear intimidation on the part of the Ukrainian government.  The incident was only reported in the Russian press, on their popular “60 Minutes” TV news show.

A Third Serfdom?

That’s the end of Nistad’s piece, but I just wanted to add something of my own.  Something I learned back in college, in a course on Polish-Ukrainian history.  It was a process affecting Russia and Eastern Europe, back in the 1600’s, and was known as the “Second Serfdom”.  I fear that processes taking place in the world today will result in a “Third Serfdom”, and not just in Ukraine or Eastern Europe, but everywhere in the world.  Unless people start fighting back soon.  The process is already well underway.  It could result in the 2% of the human race owning pretty much all the wealth of the planet, and everybody else, the rest of us, forced to be their serfs and private bitches.

So, let’s go back in time to the West-Bank Ukraine, to the year 1648….

The Dniepr River marks the boundary of Western and Eastern Europe.  Since the river flows from North to South, the Left Bank is actually to the East, and the Right Bank to the West, a lot of people find that confusing…

Civilized Europeans of the 1600s

So, the Right (West) bank of the river belongs to Poland; and on the other side, you have a bunch of revolting peasants and rebellious Cossacks.  Meanwhile, during this historical epoch, Western Europe was progressing away from serfdom into more freedom and democracy; whereas in Eastern Europe, exactly the opposite was happening:  Free peasants were being deprived of their rights, previously free or half-free people were rapidly being rounded up and converted back into serfs.  Rich farmlands, individual farms, were being grabbed and consolidated into vast plantations.  Russia and Eastern Europe were regressing from more freedom to more slavery.  This process was completed under the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796).  During the exact same period of time as the French bourgeoisie liberated themselves from the Royal Parasites and invented the slogan:  “Liberty – Equality – Fraternity!”

Were these two diametrically opposite historical processes inter-related, the perceptive reader might ask?  Darn tootin’ they were.  Historians explain it thusly:  In the 1500s and 1600s, as the Western Europeans were becoming freer and more civilized (literally, with the creation of cities and a bourgeois class), urban population growth demanded more food to eat.  Once cannot be civilized on an empty stomach.  Western Europe could not produce enough wheat to feed its growing population; therefore they must needs import wheat from the Russian (and Polish) latifundias.  Which demand gave an impetus to the agricultural ruling class to fence in more lands, enslave more serfs, and produce wheat all the more efficiently for export to Western Europe.

Henry Higgins says: “Revolting rebels rarely win.”

Long story short… and we come to the peasant revolts, because peasants do indeed fight back, when people try to take their land away from them and deprive them of their few remaining human rights.  Revolting peasants usually lose, but they still try.  The only other option is completely submission.

So, in the Left-Bank Borderlands of Russia (=Ukraina) there was a massive peasant revolt.  Directed mostly against the big Polish/Lithuanian landowners.  There were lots of forces at work, including ethnic pogroms, and it was complicated, of course; but one of the main thrusts of the rebellion was to oppose the imposition of this brutal serfdom upon previously free or semi-free peasants.  Cossack leaders joined the rebellion, which made it successful, but also coopted it.  Cutting to the chase:  Some of the victorious Cossack hetmans simply took the land for themselves (away from the Poles or whomever) and became the ruling latifundia owners.  Instead of freeing the serfs, they just made them their serfs.  And that, my friends, was the Second Serfdom.  And one of the reasons why it took the Russian Civilizational World so long to free itself from the shackles of oligarchs and landowners.  Indeed, the Russian land question was never fully resolved until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, with its winning slogan of “Land to the Peasants!”  However, and I think my loyal Readers can tell where I am going with this:

The world is entering a new phase of Horrible.  Lurching, like that rough beast towards Bethlehem.  But, instead of the Second Coming, it presages the Third Serfdom of the human race.  Is it too late to stop it?  Will most of us future peons be forced to bow down and kiss the feet of our new Overlords?  Or can we try to retain our land, our common property, our freedom and our human dignity?

[THE END] – of the human race, as we know it?