Great progressive news comrades. In light of the unfortunate trouble the Ukraine has had in retaining their Soviet Era Spirit and the pitiful showing of pro-dictatorship rallies at home and abroad, Belarus has effectively transformed itself into a fully functioning and oppressively operational Sputnik. (With apologies to the Kommisar) “Khorosho!”

Lukashenko’s government has all but shut down the independent media, arrested hundreds of opposition campaign activists, kicked and beaten one presidential contender during a campaign rally, expelled students and reportedly fired state workers who did not toe an ideological line that reads like a reissue of the Communist-era Pravda. The KGB has been accused of operating secret death squads responsible for some of the disappearances and deaths of half a dozen journalists, businessmen and political opponents since 1999.

Why, then, does a recent InterMedia poll show Lukashenko drawing an easy 52.9% of the vote, far ahead of his rivals?

Good question. Maybe because 100% of the vote looks suspicious?

UPDATE on the Belarus Presidential Election as we speak:

Early exit polls yesterday gave Mr Lukashenko more than 82.90 per cent of the vote and the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, just 2.2 per cent.

The BBC provides a decent list of quotes where Lukashenko speaks about his admiration of what Hitler achieved, a solid defense of Milosevic, how it’s understandable that people might think he’s a dictator, and how he’s not running for a third term that he’s somehow winning by a 90% margin this afternoon.

But it gets better as the State Department released how Belarus has been selling billions in weaponry to Iran as the Sydney Morning Herald intones:

Belarus has moved closer to international isolation after the White House submitted a largely classified report to the US Congress accusing the country’s President, Alexander Lukashenko, of illegally selling weapons to Iran.

The report, released on the eve of yesterday’s election in Belarus – which it denounced as a sham – comes amid condemnation of a brutal crackdown on his opponents by Mr Lukashenko, labelled Europe’s last dictator.
[...]
Western diplomats say that Belarus earns more than $A2.7 billion £ annually in weapons sales, much of which goes into a secret fund that Mr Lukashenko controls.

This story is particularly interesting after one of our local alt-weeklies recently accused the Reagan administration of wholesale genocide in Central America in the 1980s and the inconvenient words “soviet” and “communist” did not appear once in the entire 4,000+ word “article”, who this week laughably attempted to defend Alger Hiss against being a spy, and that the site’s editor implied that the Venona Project is an exaggeration if not an outright McCarthyite fabrication.

As one contributor noted:

Anyone still worrying about communists at this point in American history is betraying a severe lack of imagination.

This may very well come as a newsflash to what is tantamount to a truth-exempt local media but there are such things as Communists. They exist today doing many of the same things they did before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They run China, they run the Kremlin as well as sympathetic regimes in Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia.

If Iran gets a nuclear weapon it will because of the Communists in Russia and North Korea. But maybe the mad mullahs have more active imaginations than me. Maybe their imaginary friends can’t really deliver the bomb.

Shoehorning the Village Voice chain’s brand of Folk Marxism in between advertisements for Mercedes dealerships and overpriced Midtown eateries keeps the Vandy kids clamoring for more but for the rest of us, it’s just a sign of your immoral relativity and whitewashing of the Stalinist principles that your ideological kin in Belarus still practice and which you are denied.

Last week his (Lukashenko) secret police, which has retained its Soviet-era KGB acronym, said that anyone taking part in a planned opposition protest at a square in central Minsk would be arrested as a terrorist, and could face the death penalty.

On Saturday every Belarusian with a mobile telephone was sent a text message that said: “Provocateurs are planning bloodshed in the square. Watch out for your life and health.”

The warnings are in keeping with the twin pillars of Mr Lukashenko’s style of government: fear and disinformation.

As the Soviets on the Cumberland keep sailing along. Thousands of miles apart but unapologetically rowing the same boat in the wrong direction against the tides of history.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Bedwetting Leftists, Bloggery, Tennessee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.