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Maidan, LSE and the Politics of Squares

In a interesting recent panel discussion at LSE, speakers describe the evolution of a global movement which has taken to publicspaces, the   squares of major cities, of which Maidan in Ukraine is one example.

They discuss the shift from NGOs toward individual activism. 

It was  London in May 2004, when my colleague Terry Hallman completed our strategy plan for tackling poverty in the UK which with hindsight can be seen to carry a rather prescient warning and a call for government support for an alternative to traditional capitalism.

"The opportunity for poverty relief was identified not only as a moral imperative, but also as an increasingly pressing strategic imperative. People left to suffer and languish in poverty get one message very clearly: they are not important and do not matter. They are in effect told that they are disposable, expendable. Being left to suffer and die is, for the victim, little different than being done away with by more direct means. Poverty, especially where its harsher forms exist, puts people in self-defence mode, at which point the boundaries of civilization are crossed and we are back to the law of the jungle: kill or be killed. While the vast majority of people in poverty suffer quietly and with little protest, it is not safe to assume that everyone will react the same way. When in defence of family and friends, it is completely predictable that it should be only a matter of time until uprisings become sufficient to imperil an entire nation or region of the world. People with nothing have nothing to lose. Poverty was therefore deemed not only a moral catastrophe but also a time bomb waiting to explode."

It also proposed participation and collaboration with academic programs

"P-CED will approach social enterprise academic programs at London School of Economics and Oxford University to fill the core administrative and network management positions. P-CED aims to include committed social entrepreneurs in its work force insofar as possible. Sourcing from emerging social enterprise academic programs for these workers will also serve to interface fledgling academic programs with real world issues and challenges, thus providing useful and engaging experience to both the UK academic community and to P-CED. This will in turn serve to enhance the efforts of both contingents. "

By the time it was distributed to the social enterprise community Terry had been refused leave to re-enter the UK as a visitor It was only a year earlier that he'd discovered his status as "a threat to national security" in Russia, following his work on the Tomsk Regional Initiative. It was Ukraine by chance where he would end up in October 2004 as a revolution took to the Maidan square in Kiev and Independence Square in Kharkiv.

He'd left Ukraine in 2003 after publicly condeming a corrupt government in the press and on radio, returning to the US to begin the fast for economic rights which would bring us together in London. Unaware of the civic movement developing below radar, he said:

"I have just spent a year in Crimea at my own expense designing a program that I believe would relieve some of the country’s poverty. The U.S. is interested in making the program a reality.

The program involves no freebies or handouts, and it would make it possible for anyone to earn a decent living. As an added benefit, it would pump funds into social programs for children like those who presented themselves on my doorstep.

The problem? Ukrainian government officials are reluctant to permit its implementation unless they see an opportunity for personal gain. I am totally opposed to graft, so we are at a stalemate. Neither Ukraine or the U.S. can implement the program without my assistance, and I have made stealing from the program extremely difficult.

My advisors say that Ukrainian officials will not budge until they are paid. In the meantime, messy details like starving children are held hostage. It seems that no matter how good your intentions, nothing happens until the dons of the Ukrainian political mafia are paid.

Because the public will not change this situation, the officials are killing the economy, people are starving or dying of neglect. At the end of the day, it seems that most Ukrainians just don’t give a damn about each other. Surely, there are exceptions, but if those exceptions exist, they are all but invisible."

His project in Crimea again drew attention to the strategic risk of leaving people in poverty:which had first been made in 1996 to US President Bill Clinton in a paper critiquing the failure of capitalism to trickle down to the poorest.   :

"By leaving people in poverty, at risk of their lives due to lack of basic living essentials, we have stepped across the boundary of civilization. We have conceded that these people do not matter, are not important. Allowing them to starve to death, freeze to death, die from deprivation, or simply shooting them, is in the end exactly the same thing. Inflicting or allowing poverty on a group of people or an entire country is a formula for disaster.

These points were made to the President of the United States near the end of 1996. They were heard, appreciated and acted upon, but unfortunately, were not able to be addressed fully and quickly due primarily to political inertia. By way of September 11, 2001 attacks on the US out of Afghanistan – on which the US and the former Soviet Union both inflicted havoc, destruction, and certainly poverty – I rest my case. The tragedy was proof of all I warned about, but, was no more tragedy than that left behind to a people in an far corner of the world whom we thought did not matter and whom we thought were less important than ourselves.

We were wrong."

The key trigger foir the 2004 Orange Revolution had been the murder of investigative journalist Gieogey Gongdze whose headless body had been found in woodland. Things came to a head in 2004 following an election in which polling results were widely believed to have been fixed.      

With editorial permission on the Maidan activist network Terry raised awareness of Ukraine's revolution being undermined by economic hit men and economic pressure brought to bear by Russia in collaboration with British Petroleum.                

With 'Death Camps, For Children' the following year he drew attention to corruption in state chidcare and this became the primary focus of the strategy plan know as a 'Marshhall Plan' for Ukraine.

As I reported yesterday LSE academics are among those now calling for a 'Marshall Plan' for Ukraine

Maidan leaders may be found on the about page of their website. Natalka pictured reported the discovery of Terry's death to me on 18th August 2011 just as riots arrived on UK streets. He wasn't around when Occupy Wall Street began a month later.  .

In 1996 he'd told President Clinton:

"Manipulation of numbers, represented by currency/money, allows writing “new” money as needed.  There is no tangible asset, or anchor.  There are only numbers, managed by whomever might maneuver into position to do so.  Economics came to be based on numbers, rather than real human beings.

"On that basis, capitalism trumped people and therefore trumped democracy.  Democracy is about people, who since Descartes are considered necessarily real, rather than numbers which are not necessarily real.  An imaginary construct, numbers, rule a real construct, people.  That arrangement allows for disposal of real human beings, in the name of the imaginary construct."

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