Reply #73: Will be harder for the Shiites to emulate the Ukrainian protests

[JohnyCanuck]

Apparently the Ukrainian opposition had a rich sugar daddy in the form of US taxpayers shoveling money and aid at them to finance their Orange revolution and buy some good PR.

From a speech The role of the media in the age of empire by Justin Raimondo of www.antiwar.com at The Whittier Law School in Whittier California:


The vast public relations effort that went into building up the so-called "Orange Revolution" as a paragon of the pro-Western, pro-democracy movement supposedly breaking out all over the world won't be known for years, but we do know that a great deal of it was funded by U.S. tax dollars. As congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), put it:

"We do not know exactly how many millions – or tens of millions – of dollars the United States government spent on the presidential election in Ukraine. We do know that much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and that through a series of cut-out non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – both American and Ukrainian – millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko."

Through such organizations as Freedom House, U.S. tax dollars were poured into Ukrainian NGOs, all of which were fervently pro-Yushchenko. As if out of nowhere, the facilities and resources for what amounted to a giant rock concert-style perpetual rally were set up in the middle of Kiev's main square, complete with giant television screens, ostensibly by heretofore impoverished opposition groups mostly made up of students.

As in the case of the Iraq war, the American-led effort to promote the Orange Revolution came with a unique narrative, one that was reported uncritically by the mainstream media and repeated endlessly until it became incontrovertible fact. The storyline went something like this: the youthful "Orange revolutionaries," led by the charismatic Yushchenko, were up against the old oligarchy left over from the days of Soviet domination. According to the conventional wisdom, Yushchenko's opponent, Viktor Yanukovich, was a dark demonic figure, linked to Russia and Ukraine's oligarchs based in the eastern part of the country. He was painted as a semi-criminal type, who served two jail terms on account of some small-time youthful indiscretions – apparently only slightly more rambunctious in nature than the shenanigans of George W. Bush's misspent youth.

More at: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5187