Ukraine (cont.)

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It amazes me how sometimes people think everything another people does is somehow the consequence of the designs of some other nation, particularly the U.S. Seems to me that demeans, in this case, the Ukrainians themselves, who are perfectly capable of having their own reasons not to want to be dominated or ruled by Russia.

There are people living today in Ukraine (the overwhelming majority of actual Ukrainians) whose parents or grandparents lived through the “Terror Famine”, the deportations and the other genocidal horrors visited on them by the Russians. After all, if they welcomed the Germans with bread and salt because of all they had suffered at the hands of Russia, and if fifty-mile-long trains of Ukrainians followed the retreating German armies out of Ukraine ahead of the Soviets, how could a people forget the genocide that impelled them to reject so vehemently domination by Russia?

If, indeed, some western operatives encouraged that revulsion, it does not mean the revulsion was somehow artificial, any more than the present concerns of the Balts and Poles about Russian revanchism is artificial. And what, after all, were westerners supposed to encourage Ukrainians to do, bow their necks to Russia’s pleasure again?

To assume that Ukrainians are incapable of knowing their own minds about Russian domination, and only reject it because westerners say they should, one has to further assume that somehow westerners have persuaded Tatars and Ukrainians to flee their homes in Crimea as they are now doing; that westerners have persuaded Catholic leaders to protest their concerns about threats to their people and their faith.

It doesn’t really work. It’s time to acknowledge that Ukrainians really don’t want to be dominated by Russia; that Russia intends to dominate or outright annex them, and that Russian aggression should be opposed by whatever means the west and those directly threatened can muster short of inviting the kind of retribution Russia has visited on people like the Chechens.
:clapping:
 
This is what I call “stocked pond syndrome.”

Remove folks from area. Put ethnic folks in place. Either by common law or de facto, suppress indigdnoud national and cultural identity to push.a, wedge. Religion, food, language…doesn’t matter. Various and peas? Spicy or sweet borscht?

Divide region by language and socioeconimic status.

Forment unrest. Or, just as Cromwellian: let unrest forment itself.

Blame each other. Use media, use ambassadors to other countries.

Protect “your” folks from the native “others” by both ethnicity and allegiance.

Push the class and educational system. Take a lesson from China and its domination of Vietnam.

Send in SAS or whatever they’re called in this country to protect “your people.” (Ignore globalization and protecting the rights of “your people” anywhere else.)

Ignore the history of your own country. Australia? Bah. Gulags? Whatever. Claim that’s in the past. Bury it. Unlike Germany, teach that, " yes, it happened. It was a tragedy. But we are x generations removed and we don’t do that anymore."

Use media and economic influence to divide the country.

Send in “unidentified” soldiers.

Re/claim the land in the name of your country, because your people want to be with you.

Claim hypocrisy on any other nations who try to intervene, based on more recent initiatives that are still in the global collective memory.
 
As I noted one poster state, ‘How far across does the North Atlantic, actually reach?’
Two factors:
  1. Media manipulated ideology: (Desert Storm I was a show of force and to "liberate the Kuwaitis, although their emir was safely away from the, region).
  2. Economic interest.
The two don’t have to be divergent.
 
The Chechnyans?

Notice how the media stopped calling them rebels (identification with the Southern US States) in favor,of “insurgents” just before Desert Storm? Isn’t that a manipulation of…very 1984ish?
 
If Russia had taken military action against NATO when they bombed Serbia, I think it would have put an end to Western expansion eastwards.
Apparently, armed conflict between Russia and NATO was a near thing, very momentarily, in Kosovo.

But you do raise an interesting point. Where does the “East” begin and the “West” end? If we ossify conquests at some point in history, we get one answer. If we do it at another time, we get another. If we do it by affiliation, culture or intent at a point in time, we get yet another.

For example, Poland has thought of itself as “West” for centuries; even more “western” than Germany inasmuch as Poland eschewed German art, architecture and other cultural indicators in favor of Mediterranean forms. “Romanitas” is half of “Polishness”.

So, from standpoint of culture and intent, Poland is in no way part of the “East” despite Russian conquest and occupation for decades.

Lithuania, Poland and western Ukraine were once one country, and were anything but “Eastern” at the time. Russia, at the same time, was much more “oriental” than it is now. Russia flirted with westernization in the 18th and 19th centuries, then became far more oriental under Stalin.

Did Romania become “Eastern” because it was long occupied by the Turks, or do we think of it as “Western” because of its Latinate language, NATO membership and present proclivities? Romania, apparently, wants no part of rule by Russia, but fears the possibility.

In an extreme sense, we might think of all the Orthodox world as 'Eastern" because, at a point after the establishment of Constantinople, the “Romans” of the East adopted cultural ways that had more in common with Persia than with Rome. But can anyone seriously maintain that Hungary should be considered “Eastern” because of its language and previous occupation by Turks and Russians, despite its clearly western culture? Or do we recognize that, say, occupation by Russia was as anomalous as it seemed to Hungarians at the time; an anomaly that was resisted and finally rolled back in the 1990s?

Unfortunately in Ukraine, and largely due to Soviet genocide, the country is not unified in its population. Some Ukrainians simply consider themselves Russians and many of those have contempt for ethnic Ukrainians and the concept of a Ukrainian state. While it might have been possible for those people to live together more comfortably over time, in the same sort of way Welsh live comfortably with Anglo-Saxons, Russia has taken advantage of the linguistic and cultural divisions to re-establish its empire as best it can, never mind that ethnic minorities don’t want to be part of it and that people of starkly different cultures certainly don’t.

The big question presently is whether Russia intends to fully conquer Ukraine, thus incorporating 'western" people unwillingly into its more “Eastern” empire. Right now, it seems more probable than not.
 
Of course when I use the term ‘Western’ I’m referring to the secular modern liberal cultural of countries like the Netherlands, UK, France, Denmark, Belgium, Canada, the USA, etc. Poland and Lithuania may identify with the West, but I don’t think they envision there eventually being swallowed up by a radical secular agenda.
 
It amazes me how sometimes people think everything another people does is somehow the consequence of the designs of some other nation, particularly the U.S. Seems to me that demeans, in this case, the Ukrainians themselves, who are perfectly capable of having their own reasons not to want to be dominated or ruled by Russia.

There are people living today in Ukraine (the overwhelming majority of actual Ukrainians) whose parents or grandparents lived through the “Terror Famine”, the deportations and the other genocidal horrors visited on them by the Russians. After all, if they welcomed the Germans with bread and salt because of all they had suffered at the hands of Russia, and if fifty-mile-long trains of Ukrainians followed the retreating German armies out of Ukraine ahead of the Soviets, how could a people forget the genocide that impelled them to reject so vehemently domination by Russia?

If, indeed, some western operatives encouraged that revulsion, it does not mean the revulsion was somehow artificial, any more than the present concerns of the Balts and Poles about Russian revanchism is artificial. And what, after all, were westerners supposed to encourage Ukrainians to do, bow their necks to Russia’s pleasure again?

To assume that Ukrainians are incapable of knowing their own minds about Russian domination, and only reject it because westerners say they should, one has to further assume that somehow westerners have persuaded Tatars and Ukrainians to flee their homes in Crimea as they are now doing; that westerners have persuaded Catholic leaders to protest their concerns about threats to their people and their faith.

It doesn’t really work. It’s time to acknowledge that Ukrainians really don’t want to be dominated by Russia; that Russia intends to dominate or outright annex them, and that Russian aggression should be opposed by whatever means the west and those directly threatened can muster short of inviting the kind of retribution Russia has visited on people like the Chechens.
My position is still that Putin announced in 2008 that he would take Crimea if the Ukraine joined NATO, so all that I’m saying is that the west had advanced warning of his intentions and imho may have started planning their counter measures which because the world is still basically struggling economically, may have included re-establishing the front line of the cold war which although will have costs, will also produce jobs and spending while at the same time cutting into Russian energy business in the west and defensively securing that front line from Russian aggression.

A few pages back I posted this video:
Finally, I still say there’s no love lost among any of these folks through history especially from the Russian revolution on up through the two world wars and into the present;
And so I did search for some answers and I think I did find them;

However, I’m just going to say that there seems to have been rivalry among Ukrainian/Germans, Bolsheviks and Russians for a very long time;
And it does seem that when the Russians used the strategy of starving the Nazi-German aggression in WWII, they, that is, especially apparently the Bolsheviks had no qualms about also starving the native ethnic German population of Russian territories;
So it does look like a tit for tat game of genocide back then;

However, unfortunately the Germans were the enemy of the west, that is, the UK, France and the USA back then and/so we all know that the Bolsheviks got away with a lot of hanky-panky back then.
This is the present though and I’m only realizing now how the ethnic Germans suffered back then so I can understand better now;
Except as I’ve mentioned before, the “fly is still in the ointment” and because that fly is still plaguing all of us the best the west can do and is doing imho is not give a hoot about any of it;
And just grab as much business as they/we can from it to heal the world economy,

Again, I’m not going to directly post any links because it would only make me look like a racist or maybe a neo-Nazi or something when the truth is that I have to wash my hands also of taking sides because I’m American;
But I’ll just post a link to this page that follows and let you folks read for yourselves the links within which appear to give both sides of the story:
 
Just finished reading Vladimir Putin’s Crimea speech, and thought it was very good. He lays it all out in black and white, and mentions NATO-EU expansion, threats to Russia, the Kosovo precedent, the bombing of Belgrade, the phony Arab Spring, Color coded revolutions, and America’s belief in it’s right to take unilateral military action. bbc.com/news/world-europe-26652058 Even with Bridget Kendall’s explanations, it’s a good read.
 
For some reason Obama doesn’t bother me at all but Kerry does.

Biden also worries me somewhat but I don’t really know much about him.
 
Just finished reading Vladimir Putin’s Crimea speech, and thought it was very good. He lays it all out in black and white, and mentions NATO-EU expansion, threats to Russia, the Kosovo precedent, the bombing of Belgrade, the phony Arab Spring, Color coded revolutions, and America’s belief in it’s right to take unilateral military action. bbc.com/news/world-europe-26652058 Even with Bridget Kendall’s explanations, it’s a good read.
All he needed to say is ‘might makes right’ and I would have understood perfectly.
 
Just finished reading Vladimir Putin’s Crimea speech, and thought it was very good. He lays it all out in black and white, and mentions NATO-EU expansion, threats to Russia, the Kosovo precedent, the bombing of Belgrade, the phony Arab Spring, Color coded revolutions, and America’s belief in it’s right to take unilateral military action. bbc.com/news/world-europe-26652058 Even with Bridget Kendall’s explanations, it’s a good read.
One has to hand it to Putin. He knows all the buttons to push for liberals in the west. But it would be excessive to say it would have been hard to learn.
 
If the west cared so much about Ukraine they would offer them NATO membership now, obviously the west are getting something out of the chaos as usual.
 
If the west cared so much about Ukraine they would offer them NATO membership now, obviously the west are getting something out of the chaos as usual.
And I’m sure that if the Ukrainians weren’t sure about NATO membership before this, they can see its benefits now! (since when you attack militarily one member of NATO, all members are required to move to your defense). This is why Putin will think twice about attacking say, Poland. It’s a nice insurance policy when you can see Russia from your front porch.
 
Some conservatives, yes indeed. His pose as the “protector of Christianity” won some hearts, even on CAF.
Yes, I was hounded for years on this website for my implacable opposition to Putin. It reached a fever pitch during the Syria crisis in 2011-2012. Thankfully some people are seeing the light now. I won’t say, “I told ya so” :rolleyes:
 
Yes, I was hounded for years on this website for my implacable opposition to Putin. It reached a fever pitch during the Syria crisis in 2011-2012. Thankfully some people are seeing the light now. I won’t say, “I told ya so” :rolleyes:
I think for many, Putin’s pretense likely gave some feeling of relief; that there was SOMEONE who expressed some protective words toward Christianity in a world in which the elites do nothing but denigrate and oppress it. Wishful thinking, but it’s hard to blame anyone for it.
 
Two Ukrainian bases on Crimea taken over by Russia today bbc.com/news/world-europe-26698754 and in another province, some Russian speakers are calling for secession from Ukraine foxnews.com/world/2014/03/21/new-ukraine-province-in-play-as-ethnic-russians-push-new-secession-referendum/
Division of Ukraine might be inevitable. It is difficult to express the contempt I have heard Russian speakers from Ukraine talk about Ukraine and ethnic Ukrainians. There are evidently many ethnic Russians there who would like nothing better than being part of Russia. They’ll pay for it later, of course, but Russian ethnocentrism is extremely strong among ethnic Russians. And that is precisely why countries like the Baltic states and some of the Balkan states are worried about their own Russian minorities. They are not wrong to be worried.
 
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