Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 28
February 27, 2022
Stop Downplaying Nukes.
But the call for war is on and one shouldn't be surprised that this is the case. Chris Hedges makes a good case that we essentially goaded Russia into this war, even if Putin is wrong to invade. And he also talks about how, just like every other war, the drumbeat from our media and most centrists means that you can't just speak against the main narrative.
So when I try to point out that Ukraine did have a Nazi issue, to include pogroms against Roma, [2] it's considered Russian troll stuff. Right. Again, no context means we're just falling for the MSM bs. I sense this is going to continue as the need to scream at an object is stronger with our new communication methods.
Shame, because we might just run head first into this nuclear holocaust. I mean, bank runs in Russia may make lots of people happy, but that means destabilization and that means Putin in a corner which means the likelihood of the end of the world. Same with German increase in military spending. Just straight madness out there. All to cheer a team for our elites to distract us some more.
Meanwhile we're starving out an entire nation and.... crickets.
[1] Good to see an example of Polish border guards doing the right thing there.
[2] "Police observed the march but did not intervene. Several city officials, including the mayor, refused to condemn the mob’s hate speech and threats, but acknowledged it “scared Roma [people]” and “made them hide in their homes.”
One Irpin police official referred to the march as a “peaceful gathering.” Did he know that at least one of the leaders of Ukrainian right-wing paramilitary group C14 was among those marching? In 2018, C14 members chased women and small children with rocks and pepper spray, after burning down their tents in an attack on a Roma settlement in Kyiv, but the attackers walked free. Another attack, carried out by a different far-right group near Lviv in 2018, resulted in the death of one person and injuries to several others, including a child."
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Ukraine 🇺🇦 Still Under Attack. The War broadens.
So that being said, I am a fan of how this specific conflict is being covered, by telling the stories of those on the ground.
And all our MSM is doing this. Good. If only they covered the people we bombed with the same humanity.
Of course, I'm not stupid. These people are worthy victims and thus worthy of being covered as humans.
See, I'm old enough to remember that brown refugees crossing the border to Poland were considered weapons by the Polish gov and EU, but now Ukrainians can get across without passports if needed.
However, given the illegal pushbacks of thousands of migrants from the Middle East by Polish border guards on the Belarus border last year - which left several people dead, among them a one-year-old Syrian boy, and sent others back to inhumane conditions in freezing temperatures and without access to humanitarian aid - one wonders how and if Poland will meet its humanitarian and international human rights obligations this time.
Not that it's always a white/brown thing, though that certainly plays a part. Someone on r/chomsky said if only they would cover the atrocities in Eastern Ukraine. I've already shared the nationalistic language situation [1] in Ukraine, but there's also disappearances, [2] and a child killed in the rebel held areas recently (before invasion). It seems bad on both sides. Still, this pdf is worth looking through (the map only shows recent, pre-invasion attacks) [3]. All this, though, should have been dealt with diplomatically.
And on SWIFT being cut off, one does wonder if there will be some major shift in the world, with China helping bring that about.
I'm not sure about this one. I thought something separate would be created when Trump went ape shit with his economic warfare world wide, but the EU and China did nothing (that I know of, and given the state of places like Iran, that would seem to be true). But perhaps this is the kick in the ass that will force other nations to truly do something worthwhile. That being said, it could cause anarchy in a nuclear armed state and that's not in my good category of things happening. With Turkey preventing a Russian ship from entering the Black Sea and talk of cyber attacks, I sense an escalation here that we might not be able to draw back from, especially when "hit them hard" is the only talk I see.
On a final note, here's a piece from RT. As with any MSM, be critical when listening to it, but doesn't seem that crazy to me.
[1] And, again, if the US MSM calls cultural genocide in China genocide, Russia has a case to do the same with language erasure etc. Not that I think or have the evidence that ethnic cleansing is all one sided there. Most evidence does point to the Russians being correct.
[2] Though as the link shows, rebel held areas have similar situations but less oversight.
[3] And again, there were laws being passed that were problematic, hate groups on the rise and with impunity:
The Above article goes to show impunity for plenty of hate and the Azov Battalion,
On October 17 around 50 far-right radicals, some carrying flaming torches, went door to door in the Ukrainian city of Irpin, near Kyiv, chanting hateful slogans and calling for violence against local Roma residents. The mob spray-painted hate speech comments on the fence of one Roma family’s house.
The march was apparently a response to a reported attack on a man two days earlier, allegedly by two Roma teenagers. Police observed the march but did not intervene. Several city officials, including the mayor, refused to condemn the mob’s hate speech and threats, but acknowledged it “scared Roma [people]” and “made them hide in their homes.”
Then this:
All I've found is this on the conflict [1] and this on landmines there as well as this on disappeared people in Ukraine.
[1] This point: From 1 August 2020 to 31 January 2021, OHCHR recorded 41 civilian casualties: eight killed (seven men and one woman) and 33 injured (24 men, five boys, three women, and one girl), a 58.2 per cent decrease compared with preceding six months (17 killed and 81 injured). 25. Active hostilities10 caused three civilian injuries (all in armed group-controlled Oleksandrivka in Donetsk region): on 12 November 2020, two men were injured after their house was directly hit by light weapons fire; and on 30 January 2021, a man was injured when a bullet struck his leg as he was walking to visit his parents. 26. Thirty-six civilian casualties resulted from mine-related incidents and handling of explosive remnants of war: eight killed (seven men and one woman) and 28 injured (20 men, five boys, and three women). Two other civilian casualties (one injured man and one injured girl) were caused by a road incident with a military vehicle.
And this point on Ukraine hitting water supply (war crime, iirc).
"Of the incidents which occurred at or near water and sanitation facilities, three involved shelling: twice in November at the Donetsk Filter Station in armed group-controlled Yasynuvata (Donetsk region); and once in December at the Holmivskyi Water Treatment Plant in armed group-controlled Horlivka (Donetsk region). The fourth incident happened in January 2021 when small arms fire occurred near workers repairing a damaged clean water pipeline that distributes water from the Holmivskyi Water Treatment Plant. 31. Although the incidents did not result in any injuries or damage, the attacks put the lives of workers in water and sanitation facilities at risk, and threatened the civilian population’s water supply. In addition, the January incident violated a ‘window of silence’ that had been agreed specifically for the repair work and delayed the provision of clean water to around 45,000 residents in the region."
February 24, 2022
Don't Down play Nukes
Savage..
Seem like plenty online are downplaying nukes when they shouldn't be. The assumption that the elites on all sides are clever to some level and don't make decisions based on some group think and need to be tough cannot be over looked.
My note again is that the Ukrainians are really suffering and the invasion is wrong. Just like ours are. Not hard to hold those two thoughts in one's head. But the internet is full of violent emotion rn. Some of it understandable, some of it in the manufactured consent level (no blame for NATO whatsoever etc).
So another good video (that acknowledges the outsized power of nazi groups in Ukraine, doesn't mention the language laws passed, which are all bad but doesn't make invasion the answer).
And this thread on the history between the Ukraine and Russia is solid:
How you read the relationship between Ukraine and the early Soviet Union is contingent on how you interpret the civil war from the spring of 1918 to 1921. Following February 1917, Ukraine had demanded national autonomy, and indeed in summer 1917 the provisional government had granted the right of self rule in (parts of contemporary) Ukraine. But by December 1917 (after the October Revolution), the Bolsheviks claimed Ukraine and precipitated uprisings across the country, which quickly led to war between the fledgling states: both Bolshevik and Ukrainian Soviets claimed authority to rule. By February 1918, the Bolsheviks had seized Kiev, and the Ukrainian government had fled; in turn Ukraine received aid from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in exchange for supporting the continuing war effort, but after only a few months Germany installed the Hetmanate puppet government as an explicitly anti-communist regime. The Hetmanate was overthrown in December 1918 by Ukrainian revolutionaries bolstered by Bolshevik Russians; this group, the Directorate, established the Ukrainian National Republic once more.
In January 1919, the Bolsheviks launched an invasion of Ukraine; Kiev was seized in February, and much of the country was under Bolshevik control by late Spring. Peasant rebellions against Bolshevik brutality and manpower limitations from the Bolsheviks led to the White Army seizing much of Ukraine during the summer, with severe fighting in Crimea and the southern front ultimately leading to the relatively bloodless loss of Kiev to the White Army in late summer. By the winter, after again vicious fighting on the left bank, Kiev was taken by the Bolsheviks. Fighting continued until 1922, with the second winter campaign of 1921 the largest major resistance against Bolshevik control of Ukraine. Sporadic resistance continued throughout the 1920s as well.
This is a simplification (leaving out some additional back-and-forth, the role of Poland, and so on), but should highlight just how complicated the control of Ukraine was during the Civil War. A reasonable case for Soviet control of Ukraine against the White Army can be made, while it is inarguable that a once-independent Ukrainian socialist state repelled the Bolsheviks. How, also, you interpret the Bolshevik policy of korenizatsiya, the state support for Ukrainian language and culture (in contrast to Imperial repression of both), or the intentionality behind the Holodomor, flavors how you see the early Soviet relationship with Ukraine.
Interpreting Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as colonial empires has a long tradition (unsurprisingly, the exiled Ukrainian leaders of the early 1920s claimed as much) that has recently been revisited--Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations for the USSR and Alexander Morrison's The Russian Conquest of Central Asia for the Russian Empire explore the colonial relationships of the Russian state.
Many of the Cold War paradigms of pre-Soviet history are really rather schematic and rigid, and Soviet historiography and self-assessment can be quite poor for a variety of reasons. Western funding for Slavic studies has dried up after the dissolution of the USSR and the archival access of the 1990s has been limited more recently, so many of the finer questions aren't likely to be resolved.
I don't see any consensus on whether these relationships fit the definition of colonialism, but I think the scholarship is trending that way (particularly for the Russian Empire, which I am more familiar with).
This is a very complicated one, and no two historians will agree exactly. However, I can give a bit of an answer as it relates to the Soviet period, and particularly the early USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. The aspect of imperialism that your quotation is hinting at is primarily the cultural one, not the economic, by which I mean that if the Soviet Union is perceived as an empire in its behavior in Ukraine, we're interested in how its cultural policy shaped Ukrainian identity. The economic relationship is something I'm not as comfortable commenting on, though I am willing to say that Ukraine was one of the more productive SSRs on average over the entire period, and often did put more wealth into the Soviet GDP than it received in investment — for what little that metric is actually worth.
At any rate, speaking of the cultural and political relationship of the state to Ukraine, I would start by asking us to recognize that we can't really speak of a single Ukrainian identity, as a mass phenomenon, until some time into the period I'm about to talk about. Ukrainian identity certainly existed, and many people felt very strongly that they were Ukrainian and not Russian, and had done so for decades if not a century or more. Given the charged political context of this thread, which I can't pretend to ignore, I want to be very clear that Ukrainian identity was not simply invented by the Soviet state. That said, until the 1920s and 1930s it was largely an elite phenomenon, limited to the intelligentsia.
To take an example, if you were to go to what was then the western Ukrainian borderlands with Poland and ask a peasant what their "nationality" was, they probably would have given you a blank stare. They might have a Polish-sounding last name, or be Catholic, or profess Uniate confession, but are they Polish? Are they Ukrainian? To them, these terms aren't exactly meaningless, but they're not relevant in daily life. What language do they speak? Well, they speak "in the simple way," or "as we speak here," and given how you express grammatically your ability to speak languages in the various languages and dialects of the Eastern Slavic continuum, that's as good an answer as any. (In Russian, for example, you might say you speak "po-russki," literally "in the Russian way" — in these local dialects, "po-prostomu," meaning "simply," is no less valid.)
So despite the early Soviet state's enthusiasm for giving the former subject peoples of the Russian Empire cultural self-determination under the political guidance of the Soviet pyramid structure, they ran into quite some difficulty trying to figure out just who was to have what cultural self-determination. That hypothetical peasant above is representative of much of rural Ukraine. Language was hardly a good metric, as it was all a broad continuum between the cultural centers of the intelligentsia; faith was a jumble from village to village and even house to house; custom was little better; last names were almost meaningless in the face of all this confusion. People we would now categorize as Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Russians, Germans, and Jews all lived in a patchwork of villages where none of this particularly mattered in daily life.
The state had to do something, though, to uphold its ideological commitments. Stalin was strongly influenced by Lenin's writings on the intersection of capitalism and imperialism, and on the necessity of ethnic self-determination in a communist society. As People's Commissar for Nationalities, he had developed the classic Soviet definition of a nation as "a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture."
On the basis of this definition, which emphasized a "common territory", the state instituted a policy, korenizatsiya or nativization, designed to encourage, or you might say force, the ethnic groups of the USSR to practice their ethnicities properly and in relatively contiguous geographic blocks. The goal was to teach all the nationalities pride, independence, and the capacity for self-government, which meant in practice creating administrative regions throughout the USSR for each ethnicity, in which newspapers and schools would be in the local language and local cuisine, dress, etc. would be fostered. As this definition and the programs of korenizatsiya ran up against the complexity of the borderlands, the state decided on a single identity on each village and made up for anything else it couldn't handle through with forced relocations and school programs that homogenized students to fit into their region's titular ethnicity.
All of this actually worked, to some extent. The state was moderately successful in convincing local rural peoples to adopt cosmopolitan understandings of their own ethnicity. Not perfectly, by any means — the dialect continuum and local customs remain resilient to this day, but there was definitely some buy-in. National identity didn't necessarily replace other identities of place and economic role until decades later, but people accepted these new roles while maintaining their own agency and their traditions where they could and where it suited them.
If anything, though, the state saw itself as having achieved more success than was either arguably accurate, or desirable. The state had always been afraid of these identities being used as tools of separatist nationalism or foreign imperialist encirclement, but with the rise of a military dictatorship in Poland and resistance to collectivization growing in the late 1920s and early 1930s, visions of rebellion overshadowed the idealistic hopes of Lenin's formulation. In the mid-30s, the state cracked down on many of the forms of national expression it had just recently promoted, abolishing autonomous regions and prosecuting displays of national pride. Though it didn't lead to any outright armed resistance, this did cause demonstrations throughout villages in the borderlands. These demonstrations were primarily in response to the forced collectivization of agriculture throughout, but later on, I think it's fair to say that they incorporated a degree of a national element. By saying it was something to be prosecuted for, the state strengthened this identity, if anything — though, again, not to the point that it became most people's primary form of identification.
So how are we to understand this? Ukrainian identity was not "created" out of nowhere by the Soviet state, as I believe Vladimir Putin recently claimed in a televised address, but its modern, widespread form is indeed in large part due to the policies the USSR instituted in the 1920s and 1930s. This, I want to be clear, does not make it necessarily illegitimate — throughout the USSR, national identities only really became widespread and popular phenomena at this time, regardless of whether they were Russian or Ukrainian or not. If we are worried about any policy being unjust at this time, I would say, it's not that the Soviet state supposedly created "false" identities — it's that the Soviet state suppressed real ones that did not conform to our current definition of nationality.
On the HOLODOMOR:
Anyway, on to a very controversial and traumatic subject, namely the Holodomor ("Death by Starvation"), the famine of 1930-1934, with the worst happening in late 1932 - early 1933. There has been a persistent political and historic conversation over whether this was a genocide.
First, it helps to review what the legal definition of genocide is, at least according to the 1948 United Nations Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
"Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Now a couple things to say about the UN definition: there is a heavy focus on intent, meaning that for an act to qualify as genocide (as opposed to "merely" a crime against humanity), there has to be an intention to wipe out a national/ethnic/religious/racial group. There are arguments that this bar (largely set by the Holocaust) is too high. It's also worth noting that the 1948 UN language was determined with Soviet input, and so by definition the language approved by the Soviet government intentionally was designed to not immediately put them in legal issues (even though the person who coined the phrase, Rafael Lemkin, specifically had the mass deaths in Ukraine in mind). It's also important to note that there are other concepts of what concepts a genocide, notably "cultural genocide", as discussed in this excellent AskHistorians Podcast episode.
Olga Andriewsky wrote an excellent literature review in 2015 for East/West: A Journal of Ukrainian Studies on the historiography of studying the Holodomor, so I'm going to lean heavily on that for this part of the answer. She notes that the conclusions of James Mace in his U.S. Commission’s Report to Congress in April 1988 hold up pretty well. She notes that all Ukrainian presidents (except for President Yanukovich), favored official commemoration and historic of the Holodomor as a planned genocide, going back to Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk (who was Ukrainian Supreme Soviet Chairman and a longtime Communist Party member, so hardly some sort of anti-Soviet political dissident). "Holodomor as genocide" has effectively been the Ukrainian government's position since independence, as well as the position of many (not all) Ukrainian historians. Further research since 1991 that they feel has buttressed that view is that forced grain requisitions by the Soviet government involved collective punishment ("blacklisting", which was essentially blockading) of noncomplying villages, the sealing of the Ukrainian SSR's borders in 1932 to prevent famine refugees from leaving, and Stalin ignoring and overriding Ukrainian Communist Party requests for famine relief, and mass purges of the same party leaders as "counter-revolutionary" elements in the same year. Andriewsky notes that while some prominent Ukrainian historians, such as Valerii Soldatenko, dispute the use of the term genocide, they are in agreement with the proponents around the basic timeline, number of victims, and centrality of Soviet government policy - the debate is largely around intent.
So more or less open-and-shut, right? Well, not so fast, because now we should bring in the perspective from Russian and Soviet historians. Again, they will not differ drastically from Holodomor historians on the number of victims or the centrality of government policies (no serious historians will argue that it was a famine caused by natural factors alone), nor will they deny that Ukraine suffered heavily.
But their context and point of view will differ tremendously from Ukrainian Holodomor historians in that they will note that the 1931-1933 famine was not limited to Ukraine, but also affected the Russian Central Black Earth region, Volga Valley, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan. This map from page xxii in Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 will give some sense of the geographic extent of the famine. In fact, while most of the famine victims were in Ukraine (some 3.5 million out of a population of 33 million), some 5-7 million died from the famine across the Union, and Ukraine was not the worst hit republic in relative terms - that misfortune befell Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh ASSR), where some 1.2 to 1.4 million of the over 4 million ethnic Kazakh population died through "denomadization" and the resulting famine. At least ten million people across the Union suffered severe malnutrition and starvation without dying, and food was scarce even in major cities like Leningrad and Moscow (although on the other hand, they did not face mass mortality). Kotkin very clearly states: "there was no 'Ukrainian' famine; the famine was Soviet."
Other factors tend to mitigate the idea that it was a planned attempt to specifically wipe out the Ukrainians as a people - the Ukrainian borders with Russia were sealed, but this came in the same period where internal passports were introduced across the USSR in an effort to control rural emigration into cities (many of these were kulaks and famine refugees), and deny them urban services and rations.
Stephen Wheatcroft and Michael Ellman are two historians worth mentioning here, notably because they had a public debate about a decade ago around how much Stalin knew and intended as consequences during the famine. Wheatcroft argued that, in effect, the mass deaths caused by forced grain requisitions were the result of governmental callousness: unrealistic requisitions were set, including the punitive collection of seed grain in 1932. But in Wheatcroft et al's opinion, this wasn't specifically meant to punish peasants. Essentially, extremely flawed grain reserves policies (plus the elimination of any private market for grain) meant that millions of lives were lost. Ellman, in contrast, takes a harder line: that Stalin considered peasants claiming starvation to be "wreckers" more or less conducting a "go-slow" strike against the government, and also notes Stalin's refusal to accept international famine relief (which was markedly different from Russian famines in 1891 or 1921-22). But Wheatcroft and Ellman, for their disagreement, do agree that the famine wasn't an engineered attempt to deliberately cause mass deaths - it was an attempt to extract grain reserves from the peasantry for foreign export and for feeding urban industrial workers.
Ellman comes down on the position that the famine isn't a genocide according to the UN definition, but is in a more relaxed definition. Specifically he cites the de-Ukrainianization of the Kuban region in the North Caucasus as an example of cultural genocide. But even here he notes that while under a relaxed definition the Holodomor would be a genocide, it would only be one of others (including the famine in Kazakhstan, which I wrote about in this answer and I think has a stronger claim to the genocide label than the Holodomor, as well as the mass deportations and executions in various "national operations". He also notes that the relaxed definition would see plenty of other states, such as the UK, US, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, similarly guilty of genocides, and in the case of Australia he considers even the strict UN definition to be applicable. Which would make the Holodomor a crime of genocide, but in a definition that recognizes genocide as depressingly common and not unique to the Soviet experience.
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Good Video here.
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February 23, 2022
Welp.
So here's another article from near the front. Interesting thread on that one. Anyone doubting the mainstream view and even trying for nuance is immediately punched on. This is the kind of thing people want to prevent questions. And the author leaving.
[1] (same as ever for every single war, and it seems to make most people fall in line, impressive... Guess there's no punishment for being wrong while being pro-war, but lots if you're even right but anti-war. So it goes...)
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War is back baby!
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War! Tell your rep no!
not a fan of Glenn but on Assange and this he's right.So now we have the straight scream of war and invasion and Putin's Hitlerian tendencies or Stalin tendencies and yet no talk of our nuclear armed subs in the Black Sea (why? and would we tolerate the same in the Gulf of Mexico?) or bombers flying over their border (also something we would never tolerate). Again, full on provocations that aren't being talked about. It's enough to drive someone mad. So instead of Putin's speech, why not look at these other issues and (apparently a couple of US and Russian planes almost collided. Again, these tensions make it more likely for a mistake and are beyond stupid IMO) work for diplomacy? I mean any US speech, given the same treatment as Putin's would be unhinged. Guess the blob wants their war and there seem to be plenty of idiots online who want it too.
Another good video to think on:
To that end, we also have this article from the above speaker (not a bad view, though I don't know if that's the only angle of such a alliance). And this one on the 19th century realists warning about our provocations (in Georgia and now Ukraine).
Also the likes of Chomsky et al have always talked about how the US invades countries (with drones, in Syria etc etc) in many ways in a flagrant violation of the UN charter. I always thought our media just didn't read (they're a lazy lot, apparently) but they know enough to say it for Russia (which is true, but again, true for the US as well).
Oh and another talk about nuclear war:
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February 22, 2022
Putin is Fully Americanized. My Word Salad Rant.
So here is proof from the HRW of the laws passed to genocide (to use the words of our western MSM) non-ukrainians. Also note that there was very much (not known here in the US, to my knowledge) that the original coup was with many far-right and pro-nazi types. Now, places like the LRB that make note of this downplay it, and I'm not sure why. It's a bfd, if you ask me.
Here and here on the far right:
But it makes no mention of reports to oversee whether U.S weapons go to white supremacists like the Azov Battalion, a unit in the Ukrainian National Guard with ties to the country’s far-right, ultranationalist National Corps party and Azov movement. Last year, Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to label the Azov Battalion a foreign terrorist organization, saying it “uses the internet to recruit new members and then radicalizes them to use violence to pursue its white identity political agenda.”
So too are the laws passed against Russians. Some laws, from what I've heard form Russian sources and not outright denied by our MSM, ban any images of Lenin, while not doing the same for Hitler. [2]
Again, not to deny that Putin's essay and view of Ukraine's existence are bs, but he is being too "American foreign policy mimicry" for my tastes. To that end, claiming a nation barely exists is beyond dumb. Especially in a place like Eastern Europe [3] (oh and this is also a good overview [4] of the history of Ukraine) where many nations are new (and are we saying only old civilizations are allowed to be a nation state? Again this is an excuse that the West usually uses, and is no better in Putin's mouth).
Then again are our courtier class really worth it, when they're listening to these folks:
I mean, okay, but wtf kind of troll by our serious adults in charge is this? Are you trying to be like Trump?
Also, note that the West is fine with the oligarchs who raided Russia, part N:
Russian oligarchs with $ all over the West. Better seize it, right? Naw.
And oil is rising. Nordstream 2 has been cancelled, and I wonder who wins? Yup the US pulls the EU closer. Now, with Putin's announcement of going into Eastern Ukraine (was this in doubt? Actually thought they were already in there. all the MSM screams were about him taking Kyiv, which I'll still put in the very unlikely realm of things) is what precipitated this and I think it's not good for him (better to have that pipeline than not for him), but that many lefties thought this was about the Nordstream 2 and America not wanting the EU to be too close to Russia and less reliant on us. And once again, to me, this all points to great power geopolitics, that I am not a fan of. Not a fan of either side, either set of oligarchs, but the one sidedness of our media is something to behold. And when I hear "just like Hitler", when the Nazis are specifically on one side, and a whole host of other one-sided takes, I'm always in awe at how many people fall in line. Same thing happened after Bolivian coup. Very few naysayers and when I said as much liberals jumped on me as they tried to hand wave the coup (by right wing nutters).
So very similar feeling of manufacturing consent and calling anyone who raises a question "Putin apologists". just like all our other wars.
Doesn't mean I think this is on the same level, or that what Putin has done hasn't taken away any support he may have had from many Ukrainians, or made NATO seem like a better deal for people of Eastern Europe.
And I have yet to hear what's happening in Eastern Ukraine. Lately we're only hearing about the Russian side hitting the other and possible false flags. But has there been anything else? I shared a peace group video with Russians pointing out the laws (pro-nazi, anti-commie aka Russian [5]) passed in Ukraine and also ceasefire being broken by the likes of Ukraine. There was only silence in the west, [6] so I'm not sure.
So I'll leave you with some musings from the LRB blog. This one too.
I asked Anatoly what he thought of Putin. ‘He’s a madman,’ he said. ‘In the 21st century, he wants to fight a war in central Europe. It’s the Last Judgment.’Not wrong, tbf. Whatever the ills of NATO (and even if we would do the same as him if missiles were on our border, that makes us just as wrong).
For the time being, everyone’s carrying on calmly, although everyone’s worried,’ said the owner of a supermarket, who didn’t want to give her name. No one was panic-buying; no one was leaving. ‘Where would we go?’ she said. The border is only six miles away. Ovruch natives speak a triple variety of Surzhyk: Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian all mixed together. People used to come over the border to do their shopping all the time. ‘They have higher salaries, and we have cheaper goods.’ There aren’t many people crossing the border now.
and:
I began getting snippets from the Russian president’s address to the nation. I got back to my hotel room in time to catch the end. Perhaps he was reading from a prepared speech, but it seemed he was writing the text in his head from a stew of grievances, untruths, delusions and bitterly cherished slights that had been bubbling away for decades. The level of undisguised hatred for his western interlocutors and contempt for Ukraine was remarkable. He was addressing the Russian people, but addressing the Russian people like a man in a bar insisting to a slightly frightened friend that he was in the right and she was in the wrong, via every thing she’d ever done he didn’t like. The sighs; the righteous jaw lift; the pauses to show that, even now, he can’t believe this or that wickedness was done to him.
And that's why I'm saying: Putin is now fully Americanized. I don't like it, and think the world needs to move from this thinking, but our elites screaming like it's the next Hitler is beyond nauseating (while they starve Afghanistan and bomb other sovereign nations [7]
That being said, if they are pulled from SWIFT, wonder if this forces them and China to create a proper alternative.
[1] Wonder if there is a denial for this anywhere in the Western MSM.
[2] This is usually hand waved by saying the current Ukrainian leader is Jewish (and tbf, these right wingers are hardcore anti-semites). I mean, even if true, no one seems to tackle the issues at hand. That being said, things like this are troubling, but not entirely uncalled for:
Then again, you can see a long hatred for the Russians in many of the Ukrainian Right:
It was in the 1990s that Korchynsky learned the advantage of mixing religion and politics when he fought in the Caucasus region alongside Muslims, who were battling Russia for independence.
Korchynsky points approvingly to Lebanon. There, Hezbollah participates in government as a political party, while its paramilitary wing wages war independent of the state (and is thus considered, by the United States and the European Union, a terrorist organization). Korchynsky believes that sort of dual structure would be beneficial for Ukraine. He sees himself as the head of an informal “revolutionary community” that can carry out “higher order tasks” that are beyond the formal control of government.
That’s the theory. In practice, Korchynsky wants the war in eastern Ukraine to be a religious war. In his view, you have to take advantage of the situation: Many people in Ukraine are dissatisfied with the new government, its broken institutions and endemic corruption. This can only be solved, he believes, by creating a national elite composed of people determined to wage a sort of Ukrainian jihad against the Russians.
“We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” he told me. “The Ukrainian state has no chance in a war with Russia, but the Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.
ORCHYNSKY WAS BORN to fight Russia.
He is the descendent of a noble Polish family that, in the late 18th century, fought in the Kosciuszko Uprising, which was a doomed attempt to liberate Poland from the Russian empire. The Poles lost, and Korchynsky’s family moved to what was called the Kresy, or borderlands, in what is today Ukraine. As a Ukrainian, Korchynsky is continuing his family’s war against the Russian empire.
In the early 1990s, he was one of the founders and leaders of a right-wing, nationalist organization known, somewhat awkwardly, as the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian People’s Self Defense. When an uprising erupted in late 2013 against Ukraine’s corrupt president, Korchynsky immediately joined the fight, which was centered on the main square in Kiev, known as the Maidan.
On Dec. 1, 2013, Korchynsky led his newly formed paramilitary unit, the Jesus Christ Hundred, as it stormed the presidential administration buildings. He was photographed on a bulldozer as demonstrators tried to break through a police cordon on Bankovskaya Street.
Not everyone supported Korchynsky and his fighters. Opposition politicians, including Vitali Klitschko, who is now the mayor of Kiev, tried to stop them. Amid the melee, Korchynsky’s detractors shouted that he was trying to provoke violence. At the time, there were rumors he was a Russian agent trying to create a pretext for a crackdown. Korchynsky’s response: “In Ukraine, you can say four things about any more or less well known figure: that he is an agent of Moscow, he is homosexual, a Jew, or that he stole money.”
Again, this is a brutal civil war:
When the fighting first started, he saw supporters of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic bullying young girls on Ukrainian Independence Day simply because they wore traditional Ukrainian embroidery. One time, he says, the separatists brutally punished a woman for wearing the embroidery. They drove nails into her feet and forced her to walk through the street. It was pure evil, he explains,
also this about a person who died fighting for Ukraine:
He came from a family of ethnic Germans living in Russia. He was a citizen of Russia and had no Ukrainian passport, but fought on the side of Ukraine out of personal conviction. He was buried with honors in Kiev.
And a Ukrainian position:
To the northeast are the separatists. To the southwest, it’s still Ukraine, but the residents living in in the small villages on the way to Mariupol are strongly pro-Russian. So the fighters are in essence surrounded on all sides, and expect attacks from every direction. In Mariupol itself, the residents speak Russian, not Ukrainian, and many support the separatists, preferring to live in Russia, where the state at least pays salaries and pensions.
[3] The source of the conflict largely stems from whether Ukrainians are a distinct people and whether they have legitimacy over the territory they control. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians all trace their origins back to the medieval Kyivan Rus where an old version of their contemporary languages was spoken. Russians tend to identify Kyivan Rus as exclusively Russian while any sort of nationhood and identity didn't exist in the medieval period.Over the following centuries after the collapse of the Rus, the lands of parts of contemporary Ukraine and Russia were controlled by different states. For Ukrainians, the 17th century Cossack revolt against Poland led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky was seen as the first proto-Ukrainian state which would get incorporated into the Russian empire by the 18th century.
By the 19th century Russian as well as Ukrainian culture and identity emerged as literary languages were formulated. The status of Ukrainian though proved contentious among Russian intellectuals who often considered Ukrainian a mere dialect. Nonetheless, the Ukrainian language was heavily censored or even banned within the Russian Empire.
In the 20th century, the political idea of Ukraine as a distinct political state separate from Russia began to emerge and a series of short-lived states even existed around the time of the Russian revolution. The ethnic composition of what is Ukraine was at the time complicated. Typically ethnic Ukrainians dominated the countryside while the cities tended to be a mix of Russians, Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians who were typically in the minority. With the Soviet Union, and in particular WW2 this changed as the Jewish population was annihilated and the Polish population in the west was forcibly relocated. Hence the cities, especially in the East and South of Ukraine, became dominantly Russian speaking either from Ukrainians assimilating or from ethnic Russians that moved from Russia to work in the booming Ukrainian factories/mines/ports.
Ukraine achieved independence in 1991 in a referendum where over 80% in every region, except Crimea where it was 55%, voted for independence from the USSR. Despite this, the direction and identity of the country were deeply split between the East and West of the country with the west being more nationalist and wanting to associate with Europe and the east desiring closer relations with Russia.
Russians make various claims about the status of Ukraine today. At the most extreme there's the complete denial of Ukrainian identity. Another view is that certain parts of Ukraine aren't really Ukrainian and are only a part of Ukraine due to an accident of history. Crimea and the Donbas are the principal Russian examples, but the claims can extend further to include Kharkiv, Odesa, or even Kyiv as being genuinely Russian. Russian nationalists even claim there's a cultural genocide being committed against ethnic Russians in the east for which Russia must intervene to save.
Ukrainian identity after the Maidan revolution and the war in Donbas has intensified throughout the country. Even many of those who are primarily Russian speakers and live in the east still identify as Ukrainian and have no desire for Russia to save them from 'genocide'. The Russian language continues to be freely spoken and is still even the dominant language in Kyiv.
Putin perhaps believes he could easily take large swathes of the country with little resistance and assimilate it into Russia. Whether this would occur is hard to really tell and would be a real test of the strength of Ukrainian identity.
And a shortish article for a bit more context. https://theconversation.com/why-putin-has-such-a-hard-time-accepting-ukrainian-sovereignty-174029
[4] Putin's speech from what I have followed of it, isn't so much a sin of commission as a sin of omission.
Which is to say, on very narrow terms he is correct: the first Ukrainian state to cover all of present day Ukraine is a state originally created by the Bolsheviks in 1917, and that was separate from Russia by virtue of Lenin's ideas on nationality policy (ie that nominally independent republics should be united under the Bolshevik Party in a Union) winning out over Stalin (who wanted all these areas integrated into a single unified state more like how the Russian Empire had been set up).
But this ignores a lot. A Ukrainian national cultural tradition had developed as such in the Ukrainian National Revival of the late 18th century and 19th century. This was especially prominent in Left Right Bank Ukraine (west of the Dnipro) and especially in Austrian Galicia. The Ukrainian SSR was also preceded by a number of short-lived governments in the turmoil of 1917 and its aftermath, especially the Ukrainian People's Republic based in Kyiv and the West Ukrainian People's Republic based in Lviv. So it's definitely misleading to think that the creation of a Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian political institutions was solely the result of Lenin's nationality policy, as Putin appears to be doing. If anything Lenin's policies were a concession to undercut support for the Ukrainian People's Republic, which was fighting with the Bolsheviks through 1920 (this fight merged into the Polish-Soviet War).
Anyway, this isn't the first time Putin has made such claims. In 2014 he made a similar claim about Kazakhstan, namely that "Kazakhs never had a state" until 1991. This is similarly misleading in that it ignores that there was a Kazakh Khanate and independent Kazakh Hordes, as well as Alash Orda, a Kazakh nationalist movement prominent in the early 20th century. It's a deliberate attempt to confuse "there was never an internationally-recognized nation state for this ethnic group" with "this ethnic group never had a national identity", which is arguably very similar to attempts to downplay the existence of Palestinian nationalism (there hasn't ever been an internationally recognized Palestinian state and Palestinian national identity is fairly modern, but that's not the same as there not being such a thing as a Palestinian people, as some would have it).
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Vespuczin 214 points 22 hours ago
This was especially prominent in Left Bank Ukraine (west of the Dnipro) and especially in Austrian Galicia
If I may have a follow up question.
I've came across a claim that Ukrainian National Revival in Galicia was supported by Austrian officials who according to old Roman "divide et impera" principle sought to counter the Polish influences in the region. Is that true or is it another exaggeration aimed at undermining Ukrainian sense of national identity?
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 262 points 21 hours ago*
I would say - it's complicated (surprise, surprise). The landowning gentry in Galicia were Polish speakers, and the serfs (freed after 1848) spoke a dialect that would now be called Ukrainian. The Greek Catholic Church in the region mostly used Polish, but a number of priests based in the Lviv Theological Seminary, such as Yakiv Holovatsky, Markiyan Shashkevych and Ivan Vahylevych were instrumental in collecting Ukrainian folklore, publishing Ukrainian literature, and teaching Ukrainian language and philology.
It gets complicated because not only were these Galician figures priests in a still-nominally Polish using Greek Catholic Church, and were generally from Polish-speaking families, but their movement was generally speaking Russophile - it looked to Russia as a Pan-Slavist protector for the development of the movement.
So I guess I would say that the Austrian government provided some tactical support for Ukrainians in Galicia in the early 19th century, but only to a limit (it never really threatened the Polish gentry), and much of the Ukrainian National Revival figures there ultimately ran afoul of Austrian authorities for supporting a Russia-based Pan-Slavism (which wasn't the same thing as considering themselves ethnic Russians, I should clarify).
ETA if people are interested in additional reading, I would strongly recommend The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy. It's probably the best thing one can find to an up-to-date, comprehensive history of Ukraine that is also generally pretty open to historic points of view from various sides. Timothy Snyder's Reconstruction of Nations also has some useful parts in relation to Ukraine but Snyder's focus is on Poland so much of the history is specifically through the lens of Polish-Ukrainian relations.
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 134 points 19 hours ago
I'd actually like to follow up on my response to that follow up question, because I don't want to give the impression that the Ukrainian National Revival was somehow only based in Galicia or Right-Bank Ukraine. Quite a few figures were from the area around Kyiv (to its south and east), like Ivan Kotliarevsky (considered the first modern Ukrainian writer), Oleksii Pavlovsky (the author of the first Ukrainian grammar), and Mykola Tsertselev (who published the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs). This region (which was the historic Zaporizhian Cossack Host/Hetmanate) was also relatively unique in that the landowners and elites tended to speak the same language as the peasants, unlike areas to the east and south that were Russified, and areas to the west that had Polish gentry. Kyiv itself had a university that ended up being a hotbed for Ukrainian intellectual activity, including employing the national poet Taras Shevchenko as a drawing instructor (where he got involved in conspiratorial politics). Kharkiv, further east, likewise had a prominent university that was also considered the birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism, and which also published cultural, literary and historic texts on Ukraine and/or in Ukrainian.
permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive awardreply[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 29 points 5 hours ago
Good morning everyone, back for some additional info.
One thing I would like to very briefly sketch out as an add on to this answer from yesterday is around the absolute confusion in what is now Ukraine from 1917 to 1921, because how one reads this history feeds a lot into interpretations of the current politics.
Early 1917: After the February 1917 Revolution, the Central Council (or Central Rada) is formed in Kyiv and chaired by Mykhailo Hrushevsky. It forms the Ukrainian People's Republic (or Ukrainian National Republic, these are both translations of the same term), which throughout 1917 works to build national Ukrainian institutions but is still technically autonomous in Russia. It claims most of modern-day Ukraine, not interestingly enough Crimea or parts of eastern Ukraine, but effectively controls central Ukraine.
November 1917: the Bolsheviks overthrow the Provisional Government and gain power in Russia. They want to station Red Guards in Ukraine, and the Central Rada says no, so the Bolsheviks invade in December (and reach Kyiv by January 1918).
January 1918: all this time World War I is still going on, and Russia (and Ukraine) are still fighting. Negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers at Brest Litovsk break down and an offensive is launched, with most of Ukraine now occupied by the Central Powers. The Central Rada declares independence and enters into relations with Germany and Austia-Hungary, but the latter basically occupy most of the country. Bolshevik control persists in the east around Kharkhiv.
April 1918: A coup is launched against the Central Rada and Pavlo Skoropadsky gains control as Hetman, with German and Austrian support. This government is pretty unpopular.
November 1918: With the First World War armistice, German and Austrian troops withdraw from Ukraine. The Directory overthrows Skoropadsky and the Hetmanate, and the Ukrainian People's Republic is back, first under Volodymyr Vynnychenko, then Symon Petliura. But Bolshevik troops also use the opportunity to advance from Kharkhiv, and seize Kyiv again in February 1919. The Republic bases itself in Vinnitsya.Meanwhile the Ukrainians in Galicia declare the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and pretty much immediately begin fighting with Poles - Lviv is Polish-held and besieged by Ukrainians, until the French-led Blue Army arrives and tilts the balance in favor of Poland in March 1919.
1919-1920 Most of Ukraine is consumed by the Russian Civil War, which also sees White Russian Armies moving across, as well as Bolsheviks, French interventionist forces, and Nestor Makhno's Anarchists. This is a giant bloody mess. Pretty much everyone occupies Kyiv at some point.
April 1920: the Ukrainian People's Republic joins an alliance with Poland and a joint campaign is launched, capturing Kyiv. This is defeated and a Bolshevik offensive reaches Warsaw, which is also defeated at the least minute. A ceasefire is signed in October 1920 and the Treaty of Riga in March 1921. Basically Poland gets Galicia and Volhynia and the Bolsheviks get the rest, and what's left of the Ukrainian People's Republic is interned and disarmed in Poland.
Some maps by Arthur Andersen to help demonstrate the situation on the ground:
Ukraine, March - November 1918
Ukraine, November 1918 - March 1919
Ukraine, August 1920 - March 1921
[5] Also note that I shared an article some time ago showing that the people in the East were rightfully scared by the nazis during the coup and by the anti-Russian rumblings and so had their fight, but any movement towards their own collective movements were crushed by Russia. One set of oligarchs against another, yet again.
[6] This crime of omission by our media is common and doesn't mean it's always wrong or wrong in this case, it just makes me wonder. For example, at the start of 2014 there were articles by correspondents about the EU trying to pull some IMF debt BS in Ukraine. And so when that corrupt prez went with a deal with Russia, the coup was started (and these articles very much seem like it was a non-grassroots one at the time). Said articles are now gone forever and the writer too. Weird af, to me. Of course anti-vaxxers say the same about covid so I sense it's not the right instinct to have. It is a dumb thing to do, ofc.
[7] Oh, so when Russia and China make a deal it's an Axis (no bias in that name). Well,, whatever, but at least they joined forces to fight CC. Maybe they won't but NATO is only here for energy securing (its new statement post Cold War, btw). If fighting CC is a moral imperative, well you know exactly what that means for the future and who is right.
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Vaccine Hesitancy.
In Australia, coverage rates for COVID-19 vaccines are 7–26% lower in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities than in the overall population (see ‘COVID-19 vaccinations by Australian state’). When discussing drivers of low vaccine uptake in Aboriginal communities last August, the minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, argued that “some people have made choices because they’ve become fearful of adverse effects”. This framing as a ‘choice’ overlooked the supply problems and slow roll-out plaguing the country, as well as the lack of schemes (such as allowing people to get vaccinated without booking an appointment) for ensuring that vaccine services were reaching disadvantaged populations, including those living in remote regions.It goes on to talk about us in the US.
I couldn't agree more. I've already talked about my own attempts to get the vaxx. In the end, signing up for it via local agencies was very slow and I only got the booster because I saw a reddit post on it (and thanks to Amazon on this one). That a very certain subset of people claimed that they had gotten it easily and that everyone else should get one months before I could (despite trying) was one of the more annoying things about the internet and shows the privileged voices in there. If I were any angrier, I would have been like "well fuck you and this obviously biased process..." I wonder how many think that way and I wonder about the access (again, not easy for me at all, and I was actively trying). [1]Similarly, in the United States, uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in Black communities was 14 percentage points lower than in white communities in the first five months of the country’s vaccine roll-out. (This gap has no
If governments fail to reach people promptly with easy-to-get vaccines and clear encouragement, other messages fill the void and people are likely to grow more worried about getting vaccinated.w reduced to 6 percentage points for those receiving at least one dose.)
Various media reports homed in on vaccine hesitancy as the explanation. But Black scholars, community leaders and investigative journalists have pointed to important systemic issues. Among them is that an age-based roll-out does not take into account the disparate effects of race and social determinants of health. This means that some at-risk Black and Hispanic citizens — who have higher death rates from COVID-19 across all age groups — had to wait longer than did their white counterparts. Black Americans are less likely to own computers, which are easier to book vaccine appointments on than smartphones. Furthermore, many people in these communities don’t have easy access to the pharmacies that distribute the vaccines.
If governments fail to reach people promptly with easy-to-get vaccines and clear encouragement, other messages fill the void and people are likely to grow more worried about getting vaccinated.
Also:
Larmina, a refugee from Afghanistan, now lives in Perth, which until recently had no community transmission of COVID-19. Even if she’d wanted to, Larmina would have struggled to book a vaccine appointment, because all the information about how to do so was in English, not Persian. If the government had provided trustworthy vaccine information in Persian, Larmina hadn’t seen it. Instead, she’d been reading alarming stories about COVID-19 vaccines on social media and in WhatsApp group chats with her family.
fair point. I also wonder if the change from 2 to 3 is getting people all riled up and increasing hesitancy. I can see if you think science is some solid thing, but we moved from 2->3 because of increased data.
In 2013, Sweden’s Public Health Agency collaborated with WHO experts, a social scientist with specific cultural expertise, and local community leaders to address the low uptake of measles vaccines in Somali migrant communities. Through in-depth interviews and multiple consultations, the team established that parents were worried about perceived dangers of the measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccine, and that health workers were not equipped to deal with their concerns. Those findings led to a suite of interventions, thought to be at least partly responsible for increasing MMR coverage — such as training members of the community to become advocates of vaccination for their friends and family, educational videos for local community members, educational opportunities for health workers, and so on9.
And, again, you need someone in the community to talk to people. That matters the most. That and if the elites in your country have wasted all their trust with the people (mainly grifting). Well, then, you'll lose in the long term:
A survey conducted in 19 countries in 2020 before the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines found a strong link between people’s reported trust in government and their willingness to be vaccinated16. And this has been supported by various observations in the pandemic. In the United States, for example, some Republican legislators are striving to nullify COVID-19 vaccine mandates17. And unvaccinated adults are at least three times as likely to identify as Republicans than as Democrats (see go.nature.com/34y3snp). Meanwhile, in Russia, various surveys indicate low levels of trust in the government18. And only around 54% of the population have had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, despite the Sputnik V vaccine being free, home-grown and moderately effective, at least against the Delta variant.
So, be safe out there and get your damn booster.
[1] This seems to point in that direction some: "Know the needs of marginalized groups. Governments should be investing more resources in qualitative research to better understand the unique needs of culturally and linguistically diverse groups. Some groups are likely to require extra support or interventions owing to language barriers or mistrust that stems from decades of poor treatment, racism and other forms of discrimination.
Investigators must go out to the communities and engage with people in person. Since 2014, UK public-health authorities have been working with a Charedi Jewish community in London, in which MMR (first dose) vaccination coverage was just 78% in 2015. Interviews of mothers and health professionals revealed that long waits in uncomfortable waiting rooms were more of an issue than were concerns about the safety of the vaccine, and led to a much more locally tailored approach to improving coverage14."
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February 17, 2022
Well Lookie here.
I guess in the midterms the Dems can run on a "only half as dumb as the right wingers, whom we're scared of".
Anyhow, and here's Chomsky who's saying what I've been saying: This drum beat for war is some stupid shit, but you still get liberals lining up for it.
And then the trucker protest in Canada.
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