Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 8

Slava Ukraini

I've already mentioned how if you look up who I stop blame for the Georgia war, the google writing will state it was Russia's fault. But instead, if you have a little more in-depth knowledge about the EU report on it, you'd see that in that Report, they blame Georgia for starting it, though they also go on to talk about how Russia took things too far and also that both sides played large roles in ethnic cleansing (which I believe is going on for both sides in Ukraine... or at least all evidence points that way).  With that in mind, here's another quick lesson in terms of that which Google shows and the narrative out there. I've been hearing the phrase "Slava Ukraini" since the start of the war. And though I had thought it a little much (for here in the States, given all the propaganda our elites are throwing at us, it was a little too much), I didn't think it bad. After all, look at this wiki article (first link above):

The phrase first appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in different variations, when it became popular among Ukrainians during the Ukrainian War of Independence from 1917 to 1921.[1] From the 1930s it was used by different Ukrainian groups, as well as Ukrainian diaspora groups and refugee communities in the West during the Cold War. In the Soviet Union the phrase was forbidden and discredited by Soviet and later Russian authorities. The phrase eventually resurfaced in Ukraine during the country's struggle for independence in connection with the fall of the Soviet Union. Its use was revived again during the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the Russo-Ukrainian War, during which it became a widely popular symbol in Ukraine.

Seems pretty tame, right? Well that was my first take on it. 
Then some people started saying it was the equivalent of Sieg Heil, especially since Stephan Bandera used it while carrying out his many massacres. Okay, that's new information. Gotta absorb that and take it in. Is it right, though? That wiki article doesn't even mention the fascists using it (copopting it, sure, but so did types like the Nazis and we pretty much eschew the symbols they've tainted, haven't we? This includes Sieg Heil)[1]. 
And many of the first google results to the question of if Slava Ukraini is fascist are basically people claiming the words are just that (glory to Ukraine) and then comparing it to any other "glory to Xcountry words" and I have to say that sounds completely mendacious to me. 
Of course when you read the Wiki on Bandera, this comes up in the footnotes (not in the body of text):

 Radeljić, Branislav (18 January 2021). The Unwanted Europeanness?: Understanding Division and Inclusion in Contemporary Europe. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-11-068425-4. For instance, the chant, "Glory to Ukraine!" (Slava Ukraini!), followed by "Glory to the Heroes!" (Heroiam slava!), had its origins in Ukraine's national revolution of 1917-1920, but it became widespread as a slogan under the wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. By 1941, the Bandera wing of the OUN had embraced the ideals of fascism and Nazism, emphasizing militarism, one-party rule, and the cult of the leader.

And again, one can definitely say that perhaps the fascists took a term to try to overtake existing, less odious, versions of ideology, and that case is being made in some parts of the internet, but I'm not seeing people present much evidence of that. Note that Bandera is an issue in Ukraine (the west). Our congress even passed legislation to make sure his followers or the NeoNazis didn't get US money (before the invasion). 
It's always better to look at results from before this war, btw. You'll get more nuanced takes like this. 

The phrase dates back to World War I, when military units from the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic were fighting alongside German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers against Russia. However it was in the 1930s when it really took hold, becoming a rallying cry for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), explained Oleksandr Zaitsev, a historian from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. "There are records showing that during the court hearings against OUN's leader Stepan Bandera in 1936, his supporters were accompanying the slogan 'Glory to Ukraine' with a hand-throwing fascist-style salute," he told DW.

Okay, and then:

Critics of the slogan point toward its affiliation with the OUN, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, another World War II-era nationalist militia. Today, the organizations are honored in the country as freedom fighters who battled for an independent Ukraine, but some of their members were involved in atrocities against Poles and Jews.

Seems like a big deal, though there is a professor who says (and I have to imagine many in Ukraine using it are not Banderites) otherwise further down in that argument. That being said, it seems like the article simply goes on to point out many issues with almost all the nationalists in Eastern Europe, to varying degrees. 
This isn't to say things are clear cut. I'm just saying they're not, and I'm still looking for more evidence out there. 
But it goes to show how the narrative is shaped. Look at the Holodomor and how the first google result is:

So if you're not about digging deep, this is what you would think. But it isn't clear cut: [2]


[1] Sieg Heil: This is just the Wiki, so damn if I am wrong, just point out where. But in the end, it seems like its origins, though with a pan-german movement, were from an anti-semite to start with:

The spoken greeting "Heil" became popular in the pan-German movement around 1900.[15] It was used by the followers of Georg Ritter von Schönerer, head of the Austrian Alldeutsche Partei ("Pan-German Party") who considered himself leader of the Austrian Germans, and who was described by Carl E. Schorske as "The strongest and most thoroughly consistent anti-Semite that Austria produced" before the coming of Hitler. Hitler took both the "Heil" greeting – which was popularly used in his "hometown" of Linz when he was a boy[16] – and the title of "Führer" for the head of the Nazi Party from Schönerer,[15][17] whom he admired.[18]

The extended arm saluting gesture is widely, and erroneously, believed to be based on an ancient Roman custom, but no known Roman work of art depicts it, nor does any extant Roman text describe it.[19] Jacques-Louis David's 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii displayed a raised arm salutatory gesture in an ancient Roman setting.[20][21][22] The gesture and its identification with ancient Rome was advanced in other French neoclassic art.[23]

In 1892, Francis Bellamy introduced the American Pledge of Allegiance, which was to be accompanied by a visually similar saluting gesture, referred to as the Bellamy salute.[24][notes 1] A raised arm gesture was then used in the 1899 American stage production of Ben-Hur,[25] and its 1907 film adaptation.[26]The gesture was further elaborated upon in several early Italian films.[27] Of special note was the 1914 silent film Cabiria, whose screenplay had contributions from the Italian ultra-nationalist Gabriele d'Annunzio,[28] arguably a forerunner of Italian Fascism.[29] In 1919, when he led the occupation of Fiume, d'Annunzio used the style of salute depicted in the film as a neo-Imperialist ritual and the Italian Fascist Party quickly adopted it.[30]

By autumn 1923, some members of the Nazi Party were using the rigid, outstretched right arm salute to greet Hitler, who responded by raising his own right hand crooked back at the elbow, palm opened upwards, in a gesture of acceptance.[31] In 1926, the Nazi salute was made compulsory for all party members.[32] It functioned as a display of commitment to the Party and a declaration of principle to the outside world.[33] Gregor Strasser wrote in 1927 that the greeting in and of itself was a pledge of loyalty to Hitler, as well as a symbol of personal dependence on the Führer.[34] Even so, the drive to gain acceptance did not go unchallenged.[33]

[2] Alrighty, getting around to watching this. 

The "deliberately engineered" parts are iffy. To repost my answer

So this is a great question, and the answer in the case of the Holodomor is: it's complicated.

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 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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[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 21 points 9 months ago 

Some other things I'd note. 

It keeps talking about "individual farms" and "each family owning their land" before collectivization, which is kindatrue, but for many peasants what was happening was that they had strips of land intermingled with other families' strips in a village, somewhat similar to the open-field system in Medieval Europe. I confess this is where I would be happy for someone to correct me specifically on Ukrainian data though - I think it had more family farms than other regions (except Siberia), but it's kind of talked about quickly like everyone had their own family farm (with an implied compactness and individualism).

The post-famine resettlement - it happened, but it's a very, very weak link to describe why southern Ukraine is more Russified - most of the famine deaths in Ukraine weren't in that area, and it had already had Russian (and Russian-language) settlement from the late 18th century. Interestingly, most of the settlers from Russia returned there after a year, and were outnumbered by internal settlers from other parts of Ukraine. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which treats the famine as a genocide, nevertheless  states on the matter: 

" Subsequent attempts to repopulate Ukrainian villages devastated during the Holodomor drew mainly, though not exclusively, on people resettled involuntarily from other parts of the Ukrainian SSR. As such, resettlement from the RSFSR in response to the Holodomor was not a major factor in changing the ethnic composition of Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. The long-term influx of ethnic Russians into Ukraine’s cities was the more pertinent factor, although demographic losses during the Holodomor, as well as deportations related to dekulakization, also affected the ethnic balance in Ukraine."

Weirdly the video takes the point that "the West didn't want to get involved in Soviet politics" and therefore didn't mobilize to help Ukraine. This is a little weird because I'm not actually sure how other countries - even today - are actually supposed to actively provide famine relief to a country whose government denies a famine is taking place (short of invasion).

Anyway, a big problem with this, as noted in my earlier comment, is that it tries to frame the famine as something that uniquely happened to Ukraine, especially connecting it to suppression of Ukrainian national political and cultural elites. It's a lie that the famine hit Russia just as hard - but the famine did hit Russia, and it hit Kazakhstan proportionately worse than it hit Ukraine. Vox is kind of constructing a strawman statement, when the actual Tweet from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs ("That famine was a common tragedy for Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and other Soviet peoples") is largely accurate from historians' perspective, if also (obviously) given for a political purpose.

Speaking of the persecution of Ukrainian elites - this did happen, but again it's something that happened all over the Soviet Union in the 1930s ("bourgeois nationalists" were arrested, imprisoned and executed pretty much everywhere, in a reversal of the "korenizatsiya" policy of the 1920s). It also compresses the fates of the figures mentioned into one campaign, which is simplifying things - Serhiy Yefremov of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was part of a 1929 show trial against the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine", imprisoned, and died in prison in 1939. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary and President of the Rada, had gone into exile after the Russian Civil War, returned to Ukraine in 1924, was internally exiled to Moscow in 1931 and died during an operation in 1934 (this was actually a much lighter fate than the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, whose leadership had been put on trial in 1922, imprisoned, and then were executed during the Purges of the 1930s).

Lastly I should say that for all the suffering Ukraine has gone through in the past 100 years, I don't think I agree with the conclusion that the aggression and war crimes it faces currently are basically a second round of the same thing from the 1930s famine. I mostly just don't think this is a great framework for understanding either event (it also leaves out everything else that happened in between, like World War II and the postwar insurgency in Western Ukraine).

So I guess I would rate the video as not wrong for the most part, but it's trying to fit everything into a simplified and tight narrative (sometimes even at odds with the very facts they mention), and the events described are a bit more complicated than that.

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[–]Bad_Empanada 10 points 9 months ago* 

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.

Your 2 comments are excellent, I just wanted to note that during the talks regarding the genocide convention, the USSR was anti including political groups under the definition but pro-cultural genocide (Lemkin's original broader idea of genocide). Lemkin pushed hard for cultural genocide but was never particularly concerned with treating political groups under the same definition. His opinion regarding there being a Ukrainian genocide was not just to do with the Holodomor, rather it was that in combination with the broader, perhaps more politically motivated Soviet actions against Ukrainians that you went over a bit in your 2nd post. He also thought the Holodomor was unambigiously an intentionally engineered famine but even despite that seems to have been arguing along the lines of his original 'cultural genocide' idea.

From William Schabas, 'Genocide in International Law'

The Soviet Union proposed a series of amendments, in effect returning to the points it had unsuccessfully advanced in the sessions of the Sixth Committee: reference to racial hatred and Nazism in the preamble, disbanding of racist organizations, prohibition of cultural genocide, rejection of an international criminal jurisdiction, and automatic application to non-self-governing territories.

Each of these amendments were put to an individual vote and each was rejected.

So the Soviets actually ended up favouring a definition that was arguably incredibly inconvenient for them and which conformed much more with Lemkin's original idea than what many other world power delegations were willing to let by. Since the argument about the Holodomor being a genocide has always been based on it targeting Ukrainians, a group covered by at least 2 categories in the final convention, the political group exclusion that the Soviets lobbied against is irrelevant for that particular thesis.

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[–]KaiserPhilip 1 point 9 months ago 

Why was there famine across the USSR in the early 1930s?

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[–]Kochevnik81Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia 14 points 9 months ago 

It's a combination of factors. 

First there was the issue of collectivization, which had started in 1929, and had been chaotic, to say the least (farms had been collectivized, then de-collectivized, and then re-collectivized). This went hand in hand with a campaign against kulaks (which the Vox piece mentions, but again I want to stress it wasn't something associated just with Ukraine but with the Soviet Union as a whole), who were classed as the rich peasants (as opposed to srednyaks - middle peasants, and bednyaks - poor peasants). The distinguishing feature was that kulaks were supposed to own means of production and hire landless laborers, but it became extremely arbitrary in practice (is your one cow a "means of production"?) and also involved a lots of outright theft by local officials under the guise of confiscation. Especially in the case of livestock many peasants slaughtered them en masse rather than turn them over to collective farms, so a large amount of productive capacity was actually destroyed in the creation of such farms, which on top of this were badly managed (leading to lots of waste and inefficiencies). 

So that's the baseline. On top of this, collective farms were given crop quotas (with a heavy emphasis on grain) by the state, with non-collectivized farmers often facing higher quotas as a motivation to join collective farms. The information flows from top to bottom and back were very poor, and so grain quotas were often set with little connection to reality. This was exacerbated when decent harvests in 1931 led to higher quotas being set for the following years, despite poor weather causing much worse harvests, which in turn meant that grain quotas included seed grain and food the farmers themselves should have been eating (leading to malnutrition and starvation, which in turn made it harder to meet quotas in a vicious cycle). 

Like the Vox video notes, there was a priority on obtaining grain for export (the hard currency was used to buy capital products from advanced countries - this was before the USSR became an oil exporter), but also for food for the industrial workforce (which was expanding massively, like on a tens of millions scale in a few years). What the Vox video leaves out even in regards to Ukraine is that quotas were reduced somewhat (usually because of district manager reports and Ukrainian Republican governmental figures), and relief supplied, but in both cases it was often too little too late for millions of victims. Even here, different regions of Ukraine were treated differently, and there was actually an emphasis on both providing more relief and not cutting quotas in the grain-producing southern districts, which consequently had relatively low mortality. The regions with the highest mortality were around Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Vinnytsia - these areas are in a "boreal-steppe" zone that neither produced a lot of grain (mostly sugar beets and potatoes), nor had access to lots of forest products like areas further north, and therefore were caught in the worst of both worlds, with the highest mortality (they were also near the biggest cities in the republic making requisition of food stores easier). 

So for the USSR as a whole but even for Ukraine individually, the famine was mostly a product of a number of factors - bad central planning and poor information flows, environmental factors including weather-related issues, general callousness on the part of authorities (especially the higher up they were), and distrust of the peasantry. Which again places the blame squarely on the government's hands, but isn't the same thing as saying it was "deliberately engineered".

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Brasil's right

Though it's not always so clear as right vs left (or even centrist, though here in the US that could mean just kinda right) all around the world (see Ukraine and Russia etc), it appears there are similar notes. Brasil getting their own 1/6, though it might be even worse. Some of the pics, of course, show a meager crowd. It's just that the cops there also won't do anything against right wing protestors. Not sure who they act towards left wingers?
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Tranq Dope.

Looks like a crazy new drug out there. Be safe all. 

I have started observing a new phenotype of opioid/xylazine addicts - limb amputations (be it autoamputation or surgical) and severe cachexia with multiple complex wounds. 

This is of course if they make it out of the ICU after being on incredible amounts of sedation for their megawithdrawal.

It's absolutely horrifying. I've been consulted on these patients I think largely because they are so distressing to witness by the medical/nursing teams. They usually have some amount of life-limiting illness potential because of consequences of their addiction, and many of them leave AMA or don't engage with long-term treatment so you're just kind of pleading with them to try and stay in treatment so they don't destroy themselves in a visually impressive manner.

And if that doesn't scare you:

Knew this was going to be about Philadelphia before even clicking on the article. The wounds associated with “Tranq” are like things you’ve never seen - literally just dead/rotten limbs with bones exposed attached to living people. It’s wild. 

From the addicts I’ve spoken with, the withdrawal off this stuff is far worse than the regular heroin withdrawal they used to experience.

Also some NSFL pics here. Real rough stuff, so be prepared (necrosis etc)
Welp, I'm sure that instead of tackling the societal issues that are behind people using these drugs our elites will... *checks notes* scream about the yellow peril yet again. Yeah, nothing was learned. So even as China passed us in terms of life expectancy (again, only developed country who had such a large drop in life expectancy; one that was slight in the 10's then sharp during the pandemic), our elites are not looking to shore up the people. Nope. Just fucking everyone over as usual, then screaming about yellow peril. Damn shame, that. 

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lol, this interview.

Ray Bradbury just going crazy here. 

Gems like this one:
"Oh, God. It’s everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace 

for the screen a few decades ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, How could you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book! I said, Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried. That doesn’t mean the book’s bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me. "

but some good advice here:
"

Yes, the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone. 

 

But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it. "

more of it here:

No. I type my first draft quickly, impulsively even. A few days later I retype the whole thing and my subconscious, as I retype, gives me new words. Maybe it’ll take retyping it many times until it is done. Sometimes it takes very little revision. 

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Interesting.

Some thoughts on nationalism and the breakup of the USSR. Not sure I agree with it all. Austerity played a large role in many parts of the downfall of the Warsaw bloc etc. I will agree that ethnic nationalism ended up mattering the most and that it still does. I do wonder about what I reading Second hand time, where Russians left in these other countries were essentially attacked and even killed in many cases (and sometimes this was directed at other ethnic groups, and they can only be described as similar to pogroms). I wonder how much that plays a part in current Russian thinking. 
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Good read

Every war we set out on is righteous until the stench of our corrupt elite make it seem less so and they move on to the next one. Don't fall for it. I only say this because at the start I was all for the war in Afghanistan. Most Americans were and I think most of the world understood the moral idea of revenge. So they weren't against America then. But all I've heard over the years from people who served there, was how obvious the corruption was. Yet from the media you would have thought it was once and always the good war. Now we're back to the same place. 
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What're you doing?

Read up on the latest variant. Not sure it'll hit as hard as even Omicron did. Latest one is so infectious, it's wearing a measles mask. jc. But not sure we know how bad it will be in terms of deaths. Not yet, at least. But it does have decent immune escape, so be wary. 
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Best movies, back in 1999

Apparently a knock out year. I'd say many don't stand the test of time (fight club doesn't, for me). I'd also say that some seem downright prophetic. 3Kings is an all time Great War movie. matrix, of course, is great. Wondering if I should watch Eyes Wide Shut with older eyes... might appreciate it more. 

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Best Books of 2022

Been doin this a while now. Best books which I read this past year. I'm actually including some graphic memoirs which were amazing and really speak to that medium's power. Impressive stories I've read this year, though there are a few which I didn't finish and hopefully I can add them to the list next year. 
I will admit that the list is less impressive than previous years. I wonder why that is. 
Frankenstein in Baghdad . This book really needs little to no explanation. I tremble with shame at my own books in front of this one. Might make the list of best war book ever. We'll see if that thought stays with me for long. 
Alpha . Graphic memoir that really speaks to our time (and the evil inherent in the world). A man goes from West Africa all the way to Spain. His journey, and the journey of countless others, is one of tenacity and bravery the likes of which few of us could know. And yet these people will never get a "thank you for speaking to the human spirit" from anyone in power, let alone those in the west. Worth the read, for sure. 
Vietnamese Memories . Really great collection of stories of refugees from Vietnam, to include those kidnapped by the French for slave labor right around WWII. 
OK, this list isn't conclusive, but these were the books that stuck out in my mind. Don't ask me why. 
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Lab Leak is a Legit Theory. So is the natural Zoonotic Type.

So there are enough people performing something like CYA, that we should worry about the covid virus being a lab leak and we really need a proper commission to look into it (and get info from people in the NIH) as some people did not fully cooperate with the Lancet commission as it were (Sachs said some scientists merely said, talk to my lawyer... uh no. We need to know and we need to know exactly what happened) [1]
Anyhow, check this out if you get the chance:




[1] Now, I don't think it was a "plandemic" but rather a mistake. But still, this is how trust will be completely eroded. 
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