AT THE VOICE OF AMERICA during the Cold War some of the most troublesome employees were those who broadcast daily to the Soviet Union and its satellite states, in Russian, Azeri, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, and so on. These staffers were often émigrés--well-educated, sometimes understandably bitter men and women whose attitudes had been formed by a Communist political system in which errors in judgment or action brought disproportional punishment, while rewards could derive from deep, back-channel manipulation of appearances and an avoidance of responsibility. ("Deny everything, make counter-allegations" seemed the guideline in discussions with senior managers. "I didn't do it. He did!" the standard retort.)
Of the more than 50 VOA language services at that time, the most blustering and contentious, emanating a continuing, colorful, and aggressive hostility to management (accompanied by an ironic, bizarre willingness to grovel to tough, uncompromising leadership) was that which broadcast to the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
I was in Georgia last month, and it is still colorful and still difficult, a poor country, poorer even than Haiti, with a new president but the same culture--one that cultivates a swaggering, prideful masculinity in its leaders who, since the fall of the Soviet Union, have been lionized by the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the Western press but who just as quickly seem to morph from lion to demon.
A case in point is Eduard Shevardnadze, once the Soviet foreign minister, who was for more than a dozen years invariably described in the West as a stalwart friend of democracy
and a liberal, honest fellow. Six months ago, he was ousted as the president of Georgia in a coup led by his young protégé, Mikhail Saakashvili, who is glorying in the same lavish treatment from the State Department and the media. They now paint him as honest, liberal, and democratic, while Shevardnadze is Bronx-cheered as corrupt and murderous, a brute who was forced from office by what Saakashvili (with an unerring eye for the sixties-sentimentality of the Western media) dubs "The Rose Revolution."
Late last fall, Saakashvili led thousands of "spontaneous" demonstrators, bused in from around Tbilisi, brandishing flowers as they invaded the president's palace. This was during the freezing Georgian winter when any roses not black and brittle had to be flown or trucked in, courtesy of the same bankroll that funded the fleet of rented buses for demonstrators: that of George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and egotist. A former member of the Georgian Parliament said that in the three months before the "Rose Revolution," "from August through October, Soros spent $42 million ramping-up for the overthrow of Shevardnadze."
Soros has publicly committed himself to funding the "democratic" presidency of Mikhail Saakashvili, just as he has publicly committed himself and his money to the destruction of the presidency of George W. Bush, whom he has compared to Yasser Arafat and Hitler. Soros and the United Nations are paying the wages of all of Saakashvili's top government officials--ministers, deputies, the road police, and others--on the grounds that this will keep them from stealing. As if bribery and corruption were simply a problem of immediate financial need, not greed.
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