Democratist

21st January 2016 In November 2014, Democratist wrote an article in which we argued that RT, Russia’s state-funded television propaganda channel, was having a subtly corrosive effect on political discourse in the UK. We suggested that, since RT had broken the OFCOM regulatory code on bias ten times since it began broadcasting, the British authorities […]

11th November 2014 Democratist was present (as an audience member) at the King’s College London War Studies Society panel discussion, “On Holiday with a Tank: Russian Action and Ambition in Ukraine” yesterday evening. The quality of debate, as one would expect of such an event, was excellent. This is not the place for a detailed précis, […]

9th November 2014 Democratist has been enjoying RT’s rather lavish coverage of the 25th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall, complete with stories of daring escapes to the West. But there’s a couple of things that Bill Dod and Co. seem to be forgetting; Most importantly, that the Wall was originally put up by very […]

15th December 2013, I’m fed up of all the “Ukraine: A nation divided” stuff in the Western press. According to my sources there were a maximum of 30,000 pro-government demonstrators in Kiev yesterday (and even that seems rather optimistic). Many of them are students, and have been coerced and/or paid (as has been widely and […]

27th April 2013, Democratist has been out of the loop for a while, working on other projects, but we simply had to write a few lines of comment on an outstandingly crass piece of FSB disinfo masquerading as “journalism”, because it demonstrates so much about how isolated the Russian government finds itself with regard to […]

May 28th 2012, As Kiev enjoys this year’s first drawn out spell of summer weather, growing social tension suggests that the parliamentary elections in October will be key for Ukraine’s future stability. Given its deep unpopularity as a result of an economic slowdown and series of corruption scandals, the temptation for the government to rig the vote is […]

May 21st 2012, The period since the election of Viktor Yanukovich to the Ukrainian Presidency in February 2010 has been a shambles: Support for his Party of the Regions (PoR) has slumped even in its traditional heartlands in the east of the country. There has been a massive and apparently uncontrollable rise in corruption. Ukraine dropped […]

May 2nd 2012, In our last article, Democratist wrote about the concept of “international society as homogeneity”: The basic idea is that states become more like each other over time because of the spread of ideas or ideologies at the international level; for example, the French revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of nationalism, democracy and a more centralized state, which then became influential […]

April 24th 2012, Democratist has sometimes been accused of being “theoretical.” We do not deny this charge. For us, using “theory” means the ability to generalize rational insight from experience.  Although not without limitation, any attempt to explain (and by extension change) the world without some kind of rational framework will amount to little, and incautious abandonment leaves one vulnerable to a variety of […]

April 13th 2012, Democratist has been interested to read that the Duma is to set up a new advisory “Counter-Revolutionary Council” within the parliamentary Committee for CIS Affairs. According to the April 10th edition of Kommersant, “Moscow is looking for an antidote for colour revolutions and a means to strengthen its position in the post-Soviet […]