Daniel McAdams on Belorus

Imagine you are in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, setting up tents and loudspeakers without a permit to occupy the park with a group of several thousand protesters, guzzling beer and vodka. How long do you think it would be before the Secret Service or other uniformed local and federal officers moved in to disburse you? Five minutes?

Yet when less than one percent of the 500,000 Belarusians who voted for the political opposition were recently disbursed from October Square, one block from the presidential residence, the United States and the European Union (where member country France had been engaged in brutally beating youth protesting for more job security) announced a new round of sanctions against the country.

Aside from this absurd double standard is the fact that democracy itself is subverted in this new, revolutionary method of changing governments – all in the name of democracy, of course. Somehow in the new world of color-coded revolutions, a public display of only one percent of those who voted for the opposition – not of all voters, mind you, but just of those who voted for the opposition – is enough for the West to conclude that they represent the true will of the people. It is a new Bolshevism of the West in which a tiny minority is said to in fact be the majority. The media plays into this deception, with its breathless but highly selective reporting of such incidents. The Western media makes no effort to gain actual facts, preferring to rely on salacious but unverified tales of beatings and mass arrests made available in copious quantities by those who stand to benefit most by their dissemination.

Before going into the reasons for Alexander Lukashenko's victory, I should add a word on the outrageous lies told by the Western press before, during, and after the presidential elections in Belarus. How do I know? I was there. I was there standing in October Square on Wednesday afternoon watching the 150 or so protesters while the BBC reported "thousands." I took pictures of the beer bottles and coffee cups that littered the square as the foreign media reported that the police were not allowing any food or drink to the protesters.
On Wednesday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that "they flew flags of denim" when there was not a single denim flag on the square. There were plenty of Georgian flags, however, which is strange considering the abysmal state of the "reformed" Georgian economy, where electricity and water are about as available as in Iraq. Lukashenko entered his press conference "drunk with victory," the German paper reported. I saw no such thing, but rather a politician who is not afraid to shoot back rhetorically at attacks from the U.S. administration. Accused by President Bush of selling weapons to other countries, Lukashenko retorted, "Coming from a man who has profited so much from war and oil, it is an accusation that doesn't deserve a response."

Heavy police presence, the press reported. We saw far fewer police than you would have seen at any gathering in the U.S. or any Western capitol. In fact, before authorities finally moved yesterday to disburse the makeshift tent city from the square, there was hardly a police officer to be seen. The list goes on.

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