-- which continued through the Eighties if you lived in Santa Cruz, California -- there was this song by Neil Young that seemed apropos, though I'm not sure of what:

Well, let me suggest something it's going to take if we wish to face up to our current dilemma. Love is nice. It might take a lot of love. But for things to work out it's going to take a lot of just plain opposing.

Given the currency of news about Ukraine, I thought it might be good to review an interview from a week ago of Yulia Yurchenko. Yurchenko argues that Russia must be expelled, kicked out of Ukraine -- she then goes on to argue, though, that after Russia is expelled, the Ukrainian oligarchs must be removed from power. I presume that, after this is accomplished, and given Yurchenko's opinions as voiced elsewhere, neoliberalism, and the Western institutions which impose it upon Ukraine, must also be removed from power as well, neoliberalism being an ideology to impose corporate control upon (and thus thievery from) whole nations full of people.

In listening to this interview, I wanted to voice just how thoroughly we must be against Mafia rule, predatory oligarchies, and neoliberal social climbers in government. It is no good to be for one group of thieves merely because they were elected, or because they say nice things, or because they are running for office or participating in war against another group of thieves who appear more disagreeable. If they are thieves, they must be removed from power. The question about strategy, of course, is important -- what people do in the world must have meaningful outcomes. But the question of strategy can appear as a separate question -- what is important is that strategy, whatever strategy, must be pursued so as to avoid endorsing thieves in their thievery, and with an eye toward their eventual removal from power.

We can see that in this era the serious matter of thievery is not merely a matter of respect for property. Shoplifters and common thieves are not in power, taking advantage of a system which allows them to manipulate rules so as to allow them to accumulate incredible sums of wealth and power while others starve. Shoplifters and common thieves, problems which are both overstated and rare, won't be significant problems in societies with strong bonds of solidarity and with notions of common sufficiency. They aren't really the cause of the mass freakout which led to a burgeoning prison-industrial complex in the Nineties. In a society in which there is always enough for everybody so that people don't go hungry, live out on streets when it's cold outside, do without necessary medicine because they can't afford it, and so on, those sorts of thieves are not a statistically significant problem. The problem of thievery that one sees in Russia, Ukraine, and throughout the so-called "free world" is that of people whose notion of "business" is to be boundlessly greedy. Nobody gets to be a billionaire, for instance, without being that way.

Last month when I said "I'm against both sides," then, what I meant was that in manipulated debates there are often stagings of "both sdies," when it turns out that "both sides" are different-colored manifestations of the same oligarchy.

So yeah. Oppose Putin. But don't stop there.