There is more riot police at soccer games … you don’t send trainees to manage a crowd, you send police with crowd control training: the infants that were sent to “protect” the official buildings threw gas grenades _in_ the crowd, not _in front_ of the crowd … if you were curious and looked at the rest of the posts in the blog I pointed you to, you would have seen the crown talking, giving water, taking pictures in front of the “testudo” manned by the children from some police highschool, then a gas grenade goes off _in the middle of the crowd_.

There was no “revolution” in Kishinev, only crass incompetence on both sides … I prefer to blame incompetence and stupidity instead of inventing conspiracy theories that another state organized the “revolution” or “the authorities organized the provocation”.

In all the countries of the former Communist bloc there are “military high-schools” for boys between 14 and 18: upon graduation these boys are supposed to join the army as professionals and either go to some university level education sponsored by the army or become NCOs after some more training. These high-school students were sent to keep in check 10000 people bothered by irregularities in the elections! Hell, the US army panicked and began shooting in Faluja under similar circumstances, what do you expect from children?

On the side of the opposition there was the same incompetence: when you improvise a march you also improvise security teams to take care of the troublemakers. In Kishinev the organizers, those that called people in the square, did not get involved because they did not expect get such a strong response, which is exactly what the “photogenic figurehead” says. If that was a coup they would have headed straight for the TV station, not the Parliament …

I can’t put all my weight on one interpretation. Some people have substantially different accounts of what happened – should I just toss them out of the window? I am certainly not calling you a liar, but please consider that many, many observers there did interpret it as run of the mill nationalist hooliganism, and that both your and their viewpoints do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

PS. Where did I say it was sponsored by the West? I merely pointed out that some of the key organizers have “interesting” links to Western democracy-promotion organizations or Romanian nationalist organizations, readers are free to interpret this as they will.

Teaching Russian did not stop, and education degraded (or rather changed emphasis away from erudite culture) everywhere in the Eastern block.

The explanation for the excesses in Moldova is a lot simpler: it was not the regular police that was sent to manage the protesters, but _very young trainees_. They got scared, threw a couple of gas grenades, took the bats out and banged a couple of heads, then were pushed back and scattered and the young people on the other side of the shields consumed the adrenaline rush by breaking windows. While all these were taking place the regular riot police was in the barracks and went into action only to arrest random people in the city when everything had already cooled down.

“Twitter terror” ? Soccer fans do more terror in more respectable countries, except in Kishinev the trouble began with accidental provocation and continued in the absence of police (unless you call ‘police’ the teenagers hiding under the testudo ).

Some pictures: http://benia.livejournal.com/249565.html

The “policemen” that started the trouble were very young, 15 to 19 years old, the same as those that finished it.

No “phones” to do the twittering ? Oh, boy … it was more like a rock concert without gate guards, and now every entry level phone is web enabled.