Fuck Ukraine, fuck their TV president and fuck all the sanctimonious reptiles out weeping about them. I’m glad Russia made a move. Let’s get this party started.
Imagine if America was invaded and occupied by Canada, with prim Mounties manning .50 cals at major intersections and Justin Trudeau threatening to replace Joe Biden. That’s about the extent of the horror unfolding in Ukraine right now.
I had a Serbian friend in high school, half-Jewish like me, but on his mom’s side. He always insisted that the Serbs were innocent of all the calumny that was heaped upon them in the nineties. About ten years ago he went back to Serbia and disappeared. It was only later that I learned what really happened there. Turns out the slanders those people were subjected to are unparalleled in the history of dishonesty. So I don’t buy western media’s war theater in Ukraine.
The Russians are this decade’s Serbs. Their pariah status for the next ten years is all but guaranteed. And for what? They damn sure aren’t killing civilians, and they aren’t doing anything that Washington wouldn’t do if Russia was getting ready to deploy hypersonic missile batteries to Juarez. But jingoism is knife-thick in the air right now. All those conservative bandwagoner goldfish who were so blasé about Russiagate when that was on the menu are now hawks all of a sudden. I don’t like it, and I don’t like them. If when push comes to shove they side with Harvard and Washington and Hollywood, then they get what they fucking deserve. My liberal Jewish friends are likewise shrieking gevalt about pot-bellied neo-Nazis who would do them like the soap got dropped. They said the same thing about the Bosnian mujahedeen back in the nineties. That’s what’s “democracy” for them. Oh the humanity.
I actually agree with you. I'm rather surprised at some people but they must still be fighting the cold war. On the other side, it's Gay Pride and Ukrainians are blacks circa 1964 Selma, Alabama.
ReplyDeleteHard-hitting piece. Kudos to Liddell for allowing all sorts of takes on here.
ReplyDeleteI see Putin in a similar way, he is like half kleptocratic ruler, half earnest and cunning statesman.
I think that is why he drives so many people nuts. You can't just brush him aside a la McCain with flippant metaphores ("Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country"). There is more to him, and to the country. He has certainly crossed a very important Rubicon here, time will tell if this was a good move on his part.
For the Ukraine it can also become a crucial turning point, giving them a new national founding narrative, perhaps as a smaller but more homogeneous and "real" country. In this pro-Ukrainian Twitter thread the author explores this idea, stating that the apparent futile defense is actually priceless in symbolic terms (long but absolutely worth reading):
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1497993363076915204
Finally, I am Spanish, and the Ukraine/Russia affair immediately brings to mind the Catalonia/Spain one. The paralelisms are uncanny: a peripheral region which was always part of the broader empire, and whose language experiences a revival in the 19th and early 20th century, first merely literary, but soon thereafter a new nationalism emerges. And as in the Ukraine with Russian, Spanish is de facto more spoken in Catalonia than Catalan itself, despite legislation being passed in the last decades which attempts to privilege the latter. The people are often mixed and many have both Catalan and Castilian surnames, as well as family in other Spanish regions.
"it’s hard not to like him. I hate to drop all pretence of nuance, but gut instinct has to mean something"
ReplyDeleteI feel that for that guy since day 1 I saw his face (1999 or 2000).
Yes, Dugin seems a crazy lunatic, and Putin is not a saint, but, view from the right, there's nothing to win from a Zelinsky/Biden/Macron victory.
There's MAYBE nothing to win from a Putin's victory.
Unless...MAYBE we could see the collapse of the dollar, the downfall of wester Europe economies (raw materials, gas, oil, everything came frome Russia in EU, and we are not as smart as India, which now can buy half-priced crude oil).
MAYBE this economical and financial downfall can create...nothing, just make things worse than they are (in short : being under wokism with being poorer), but there is also a possibility to see the liberal-democratic system having to rule more and more authoritatively with a growing and growing mass of angry peasants.
Who knows ?
So, yeah, fuck Ukraine.
PS : you shouldn't being so comprehensive with Serbia. They are not THE evil, but they are far from being saints : they try very often to dominate their neighbours and create their mini-empire (stole lands to Bulgaria in Macedonia, to Albania in Kosovo -look at old ethnic maps : Albanians were majority for centuries, and no, they are not a bunch of islamists-, stole lands to Croatia, to Hungary, dominate Slovenia, etc.)
ReplyDeleteThey have killed a shit load of civilians. Also, they backed the communist separatists in the east. Sorry still don’t buy it.
ReplyDelete