The False Cry Of Genocide.

With the dubious cease fire in Ukraine having been abandoned (by both sides) the Ukrainian national forces are making good on their promise to either drive out the armed separatists or force them into submission.  There success in Slavyansk has the separatist screaming genocide and begging Putin to intervene.

  

Ukrainian troops in Slavyansk.

Well one man's "genocide" is another man's "collateral damage".  Russians crying about genocide in Ukraine is the stupidest irony I have heard yet.  Seems the Ukrainians have neither forgotten nor forgiven the Holdomor.  And why should they?  It should be shoved in the Russian's face every day.  If Putin wants to be the new Lenin and make Russia the new USSR let him, but let him do it in Russia and leave the rest of the world alone.   

And no my position has nothing to do with Obama's foolish international policy or international gamesmanship or Israel or anything or anyone else.  It has to do with history and that most basic of human desires to be free.  To be free to pursue life, liberty and happiness in whatever way suits their desires and talents.  Free to do so without restraining the liberty of others or having their liberty similarly restrained by others from their own nation or government or by outside forces.  

Virtually every people that live in lands bordering Russia, from the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and across central Asia have dreamed, fought, struggled and died to be free of the yoke of Russian imperialism, be it in the form of Czars, commissars or now Putin's neo-fascist bureaucracy and shock troops.  They just want to be free and left the hell alone.  Their attitude is if the ethnic Russians who live in their now free nations want to be Russian nationals again, let them pack their things and go to Russia.  Their being used as political cudgels against the former Russian vassal states is no different than Hitler's tactics against Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1930's.

 

Does this mean that the Ukrainian people, their government or their military forces are free of human failures and weakness?  Of course not, war is a terrible thing and imperfect people do terrible inhuman things to each other.  But that does not raise the artillery shelling on one small city in eastern Ukraine to the level of genocide any more than the destruction of the German Army Group B in the Falaise pocket or the carpet bombing of German industrial centers in the Rhur valley were acts of genocide.