7 June 2015. A Tale of Two Cities… One Worthy of Our Aid… The Other Not… TED CRUZ SAID SO!

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Ted Cruz attacked federal aid for Hurricane Sandy victims… Ted Cruz blubbers for aid for Texas flood victims. I’d observe that since Texas claims to despise “federal intervention” in their affairs, well, it’d be simple justice to deny them aid. Of course, one doesn’t do such miserable evil rot… but do note that Texans (as a group) ARE capable of such beastly behaviour. It tells you much about their character as a polity, doesn’t it? Yes… good people can live under crank régimes… that’s true. However, such people do NOT negate the evil of those crank polities. It’s a meaty thought…

Texas has had a crank ideology and underpinning ever since the Slaver Revolt of 1836. If you saw Texas Rising on the History Channel, you saw something that deserved the Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction of the Year. If the Anglos didn’t like Mexico and its laws… well, shouldn’t they have left and gone back to the USA? Isn’t that what the ignoranus rightwing trash keep saying today? “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?” Indeed… why didn’t they follow their own advice and go back to the USA from whence they came to Mexico? It tells you much about American “conservatives”, doesn’t it? “Scoundrels and pissants!” Cordell Hull was right…

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Crimea as the Russian Texas

Pro-Russia protesters hold a banner reading, “Russia won’t forget us! Crimea was and will be Russian!” outside the Supreme Soviet of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea in Simferopol

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The situation unfolding in Crimea has a counterpart, a historical analogue… Texas. A comparison of Crimea with Texas will prove the relative similarities between the two, arguing that if one accepts the current status of Texas despite its controversial origin, then they are more than obliged to recognise the future status of the Crimea, since historical evolution there have more legitimacy than those which transpired in Texas over 150 years ago.

Originally, Texas was part of México from 1821-1836. Prior to independence, American frontiersmen rapidly colonised the region and soon outnumbered the native inhabitants. Eventually, they agitated for independence from México and wanted to join the USA. Performing a structural analysis, one can see strong parallels between the American demographic deluge in Texas and the Albanian one in Serbia over a century later (which took slightly longer to do). In both cases, non-native citizens overwhelmed the local inhabitants and pursued separatist motives against the central government. Primarily based on self-identification, the Americans in Mexican Texas and Albanians in Kosovo didn’t feel part of the states they’d moved to, and they thus enacted provocations against those respective governments. Through a downward spiralling series of events, war broke out and both entities would later become independent. Texas earned its own independence, whereas Kosovo depended on the 19 then-members of NATO to sever it from Serbia. Texas would later be absorbed into the USA per the American domestic legal framework to do so (which incidentally triggered the most geographically expansive war in North American history in 1846), whilst Kosovo was NATO’s first out-of-theatre war and remains “independent” of Albania and its EU/NATO patrons in name only.

The situation is somewhat similar in Crimea, yet at the same time, altogether different. Certainly, there are more Russians living there than Ukrainians and Tatars, as there came to be more Americans in Texas and Albanians in Kosovo, but it wasn’t the result of a demographic deluge. The Russians in Crimea lived there for centuries ever since Yekaternia Velikaya liberated it from Turkish suzerainty in 1774 (two years before the American Declaration of Independence). Crimea remained a part of the Russian state in some form or another until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchyov, the ethnic Ukrainian leader of the USSR, unilaterally handed it over to the Ukrainian SSR. At the time, its movement from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR was simply administrative, as both entities were part of the USSR. As such, the ethnic Russians there did not feel separate from the state, but rather retained their affinity towards the governing centre.

In 1991, the Russian majority in the Crimea found themselves in a foreign country with the unexpected collapse of the USSR and the Ukraine’s independence. Nonetheless, they didn’t agitate for independence or union with Russia because they retained their rights within the state and they had a shared historical memory stretching back over 300 years. They may not have felt “Ukrainian”, but they didn’t feel strong enough about this self-identification disconnect to secede from the country. It wasn’t until the revolutionary fascist coup in Kiev and the later discrimination, violence, and threats thereof by unelected coup-ocrats against ethnic Russians that questions of seceding on the grounds of humanitarian rights arose. Unlike the Kosovo scenario, the Russian community hadn’t provoked any violence upon themselves to present the structured narrative that they’re “victimised”. The Ukrainian coup activists initiated the violence on their own volition because of their fascist ideology.

American Texas and Albanian Kosovo fought bloody wars to become independent, but this has yet to occur in the Crimea. A small-scale low-intensity war of self-determination is in force, although it is largely peaceful. Ukrainian military units in Crimea switched their allegiance from the unelected fascist Kiev junta to democratic Simferopol and the region’s security apparatus proclaimed its loyalty to the people, not the putschists. What took blood, iron, and (in Kosovo) bombs to carry out for the American and Albanian community was mostly fulfilled through peaceful means by the Russian one. The residents of Crimea are even planning a referendum for 30 March about the future of their autonomous status, something that didn’t occur in the Texan or Kosovar scenarios. In parallel with Texas, the Crimea could also be legally absorbed into the state that it holds cultural affinity for via proposed Russian domestic legislation addressing addition of new territories.

Thus, the events in Crimea thus have shades of their Texas analogues, albeit with enhanced legitimacy when you compare the two. Americans flooded into Texas over a 15-year period, overwhelmed the locals, and, then, provoked and fought a war of independence. They didn’t hold a democratic referendum to decide their status within México, yet, after the fact of their independence, and their annexation by the USA, no one contests Texas’ status, and all sovereign states recognise it. The tragedy of Kosovo is absolutely illegitimate by all means, and many states rightly don’t recognise that its “independence” is legal. If Texas (with its dubious legitimate grounds for its former independence) can now be recognised as a beacon of American identity and an important part of the country, then the Crimea, through its legitimate actions during the current crisis, surely deserves the same level of recognition. Just as Texas is now a part of the USA and the “American Story”, so too can the Crimea become a part of Russia and the “Russian Story” in the years to come.

3 March 2014

Andrei Korybko

Voice of Russia World Service

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_03/Crimea-as-the-Russian-Texas-9288/

 

Texas Warned It’d Prosecute International Election Monitors

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Texas warned it’d prosecute election observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a global body that regularly monitors voting around the world, if they try to visit polling stations next month. In a letter to the director of election-monitoring at the OSCE, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the group’s views on the 6 November American elections were “legally irrelevant”. He warned that he wouldn’t allow OSCE observers, deployed for the presidential and other election races in two weeks’ time, to come within 100 feet (@30 metres) of a polling station in the famously no-nonsense state.

Writing to head of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Abbott said the European diplomat had “reportedly” met in April with groups challenging Texas electoral law. He said in a letter, posted on his office’s website that one of those groups, Project Vote, “is closely affiliated with ACORN, which collapsed in disgrace after its role in a widespread voter-registration fraud scheme was uncovered”. He cited a letter suggesting that the OSCE “identified Voter ID laws as a barrier to the right to vote”.

Abbott wrote, “The OSCE may be entitled to its opinions about Voter ID laws, but your opinion is legally irrelevant in the USA, where the Supreme Court has already determined that Voter ID laws are constitutional. If OSCE members want to learn more about our election processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented” to protect electoral integrity. he pointed out that “groups and individuals from outside the USA aren’t allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas. The OSCE’s representatives are not authorised by Texas law to enter a polling place. It may be a criminal offense for OSCE’s representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place’s entrance. Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE’s representatives to criminal prosecution for violating state law”.

The Vienna-based OSCE regularly monitors elections in its member states, many in the former Soviet bloc, some of which have struggled to meet international standards as fledgling democracies over the last two decades. It also sends observers to the USA, as a key member of the organisation. Meanwhile, Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, the Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), expressed his grave concern over the threat of criminal prosecution of OSCE/ODIHR election observers.

Lenarčič said that this threat, contained in an open letter from the Attorney General of Texas, is at odds with the established good cooperation between OSCE/ODIHR observers and state authorities across the USA, including in Texas, adding that it’s also contrary to the country’s obligations as an OSCE-participating state. The OSCE website reported that the ODIHR Director shared his concerns in a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Lenarčič said, “The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable. The USA, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections”.

The ODIHR Director also emphasised that any concerns or reports that the election observers intended to influence or interfere with the election process were groundless. He underlined that OSCE/ODIHR election observers adhere to all national laws and regulations, as well as a strict code of conduct. Lenarčič said, “Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way. They’re in the USA to observe these elections, not to interfere in them”.

The ODIHR limited election observation mission for the 2012 American general election consists of a core team of 13 experts, from 10 OSCE-participating states, based in Washington DC, and 44 long-term observers deployed throughout the country. This is the sixth American election the Office has observed, without incident, since 2002. The OSCE notably raised questions about the 2000 presidential election won eventually by George W Bush, but only after prolonged legal and administrative wrangling which ended in the US Supreme Court.

25 October 2012

Voice of Russia World Service

http://voicerussia.com/2012_10_25/92363300/

Editor’s Note:

Texas has a particularly cruel, vicious, and nasty culture, as evidenced by its barbaric prison system and its juvenile love affair with guns. This goes back to the beginning of Anglo rule in Texas, which began as a slaveowner’s revolt against Mexican demands that they emancipate their slaves. Eastern Texas is well-suited for cotton monoculture, as anyone driving through the region can see. Slaveowners moved into these lands from the southern USA, bringing their “property” with them. At first, the Mexican authorities turned a blind eye to it all, but finally the Mexican government demanded that the owners free their slaves, and they refused. That was the genesis of the 1836 Texas Rebellion. It was no fight for liberty… it was a power-grab and land-grab by bloody-minded bastards who believed in “American Exceptionalism” (as does Willard Romney, by the way). Shades of Dr Johnson’s, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

That is, Texas Anglos have never lost their fear of a Mexican revanche, which has led to the twisted society that they created. This is equally true in Arizona, and somewhat true in New Mexico. In short, Anglo Texas is a snapshot of what the Germans wanted to do in Eastern Europe… and it may prove just as temporary, in historical terms. The Mexican population in Texas grows by the year, one reason for the increase being importation of wetbacks by greedy Republican businessmen. Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequence! Each wetback brought in by a money-grubbing Grand Olde Pervert brings the day of the Reconquista of Tejas closer. One day, the Anglo occupation of Tejas will just be a bad historical memory, like the German occupation of the Ukraine… however, for the present, Tejas groans under oppression. Heaven won’t be silent forever…

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