I do equate them when the country we are talking about is the Ukraine. In 1976 Yushchenko was department chief at the USSR State Bank. In 1984 he was appointed Deputy Director for Agricultural Crediting. In 1991 he was First Deputy Chairman of the Board at Bank Ukrayina. I bet, during all this time Yuschenko was a card carying COMMIE! Unless you think the Soviet Union was in the habit of promoting outside the party.
We can even disagree on your feeble slam on Yushchenko drinking, even though there are lots of other situations where Yanukovich's partisans acted like goons and it is no real stretch to believe they did so there.
It was a joke to prove a point that just because someone says they are out to get me doesn't me he's telling the truth. And I certainly believe Ya's men are ruthless enough to do it, but ability to commit a crime is not proof. In this case we don't even know if a crime was commited.
But labelling all political hacks as Communists
I wasn't clear. I did not mean to paint all political hacks as communists. Just the ones in the Ukraine and other breakaway republics.
But you are eager, of course, to smear Yushchenko as the Commie, simply because...in your heart you somehow PREFER to believe that both the leading candidates are Communists? Whatever.
It's got nothing to do with my heart. I want to believe that the people are rising up to demand an end to tyrany. It's my brain that keeps interfering. I can't believe you think he is not a communist, but WML?
I havent followed all of your discussion, just the last replies to each other, but it looks to me like you both could be right.
Yushchenko, its true, is a politician who's also had some mileage already, both under Kuchma and before that, as a Soviet apparatchik. I dont think that necessarily still makes him a communist, but at least it makes him an ex-communist. His experiences of the last few years may have totally radicalised him - it sure seems so - but sure, there's also the possibility that he's just being an opportunist, riding the waves of public outrage to power.
But *nevertheless* what we are seeing now can still also really be "the people rising up to demand an end to tyrany". I believe it is. The fury, the exasperation, the yearning for change of the masses out on the streets now are all real enough. Even were Yushchenko an opportunist appratchik rather than a sincere convert to anti-communism, he still won't be able to ignore the intent and passion of the uprising that brought him to power, if he does make it.
To wit: Zhao Zhiyang, the political patron of the Tien An Men protests, was an old political hack and a Communist, but did that make the Tien An Men demonstrations any less of a genuine popular uprising? Yeltsin was a political hack and a former Communist apparatchik, and yet he was the hero of the Russian's rebellion against the 1991 coup, and he proceeded to dissolve the Soviet Union, prohibit the Communist Party (at least for a while) and organise free elections. The East-German demonstrators whose mass protest eventually brought Egon Krenz to decide to open the Wall were lead by then-Communists, yet their revolt itself was an expression of genuine anti-Communism, and led to the dissolution of the regime.
It happens, like that. Sometimes you've got to row with the oars you have, however imperfect. The Ukrainian Democrats once tried to put up a genuine dissident, Chornovil, a nationalist intellectual, and he lost the country's first (and to some extent, last) free Presidential elections resoundingly to Kravchuk. Yushchenko is taking a different tack. Hence also the colour orange. Previous protests were dominated by the yellow-blue Ukrainian flag, but its connotations rouses too much instant resistance in Central and East-Ukraine, so Yushchenko's campaign came up with a new, fresh, 'neutral' colour. Hey, whatever it takes, is what I say.