Antiglobalization On a Local Scale

On October 9, representatives of Ukraine’s so-called Antiglobalist Front, a non-governmental organization, joined by so-called national Bolsheviks, picketed the US Embassy in Kyiv. The demonstrators protested the cultural or, as they termed it, global expansion of the US in Europe and Asia, as well as economic expansion based on American banking capital. They explained their antiglobalist stand as a protest against the establishment of a uniform world order and division of the world in the process of globalization into three categories: the so-called affluent golden billion with power; second middle-class caste, with the remaining population being slaves or cheap workers. With such seemingly global and burning issues raised, the number of protesters was strikingly scant, as the pickets were outnumbered by journalists and numerous law enforcement officers. After the demonstrators chanted unseemly slogans directed against the US government, Ukraine’s Antiglobalist Front Leader Serhiy Lahoda answered journalists’ questions. He revealed the immediate and long-term goals of the still unregistered organization and professed to have supporters in sixteen oblasts of Ukraine. According to him, the organization members staged a similar protest in February (then McDonald’s tableware was dumped near the American Embassy), and some of them boasted of having participated in the Genoa antiglobalization protests. Mr. Lahoda also revealed his intentions to soon stage similar protests near embassies of other antiterrorist coalition states like Great Britain and France. When asked if they had vested interests in the antiglobalist campaign, the protesters denied this vehemently and were resentful at how the question had been framed. Following a series of attempts to offend the US government, the pickets set fire to an American flag which, ironically, would not catch fire, and tossed a paper dummy of an atomic bomb toward the embassy.