And Here We Go Again . . . . .

My recent series of posts and comments as to Ukrainian desires to be free of Russian hegemony has led to various accusations of being; 1 "brainwashed". 2 "full of shit" and 3 (even more hilariously) an Obama supporter.

I guess we're not supposed to notice that these accusations are absent any conjunctive refutation or counter argument. The best we get are claims of being a Ukrainian living in the US and or that some relative had fought in WW I and WW II, as if that in and of itself lends some authority or expertise.  If so where is there some demonstration of this knowledge or authority?

The self-proclaimed "people's governor" of Donetsk, Pavlo Gubarev

I guess that outfit is just an expression of his commitment to modern democracy.  Or maybe it's his graduation robe from Putin's Imperial Clown College.

And Now They Just Make Stuff Up.

I encountered a individual last night, who claimed to be a Ukrainian American, (I grow suspicious when such claims are made right up front), who put forth the spurious notion that there was "nothing special" about the way Ukrainians were starved in the early 1930's.  After making this dubious claim (s)he quickly slipped onto what is the universal dismissal accusation, namely words to the effect that "there are fascist in Ukraine".  My response is below.

"Oh bull crap. If the death rate across the entire Soviet Union had matched the death rate in the Ukraine there wouldn't have been any Soviet Union left. Stalin and his pals committed genocide against the Ukrainians for having dared to try and break away and form their own nation during the Russian civil war. For this they came under attack by both the Reds and the Whites. During this period the concept of fascism was but a dream in Mussolini's mind. I'm not saying there weren't bad conditions all over created by forced collectivization. However it was only in the Ukraine where the 'Law of Spikelets' were put In place that made it a DEATH PENELTY OFFENCE to glean food from fields that had already been harvested. The people could also be imprisoned for 10 years or even executed for possessing food that had not been distributed by the government. These were the 'Laws of the Wheat Ears'. So go stuff you ass covering Kremlin propaganda where the sun don't shine. Were there and are there fascists in Ukraine? Yes and they were driven in to the arms of fascism by the depredations of the Holodomor. Unsophisticated and desperate people all to often fall into the trap of thinking 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' "

The Russians consider Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia and that decision is theirs and theirs alone to make.  Any Ukrainians who think differently are "enemies of the state".  No contrary argument or opinions will be tolerated. 

Just ask yourself one question; it Ukrainians didn't identify themselves as a separate nation and peoples, they why did the declare their independence from Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union?  Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer, at least not an honest one.

The Uglyness Continues to Grow Part 3

What we have going on in Ukraine is one criminal organization fighting another criminal organization for control. To think that Putin and his gang of thugs are any less a bunch of fascists than the Ukrainian thugs is a fallacy as well.  The Russians might be a little more sophisticated in the manifestations of their fascist behavior than the Ukrainians but it's a difference of little distinction.

Nobody dares ask the question; Just what was it that drives the Ukrainian hatered of the Russians?  Instead of asking us to understand how the Russians think, maybe we should try to understand what it does to a people to see nearly 5 million of their family members deliberately starved to death.  Maybe we should conceive that this leaves deep scars and breeds the trap of believing the "enemy of my enemy is my friend".

Victims of the Holodomor,

the Ukrainian Holocaust

The Ukrainians, like many Eastern European populations, Poles, Romanians, Slovaks, have to one degree or another frequently been used as political footballs in the geo-political games of oppression and conflict between there larger more powerful neighbors.  Not only does this not create a great deal of political sophistication but more often paranoia, and an attitude of revenge and hate.  This becomes an open door to what ever form of tyrant is willing to seize it and manipulate those feelings (whether they be justified or not) to their own advantage.

There you have the present day Ukrainians with there long simmering resentments against the Russians, the Serbs in the 1990's caught between various Muslim factions and the Western powers of NATO, the Slovaks of the late '30's turning to the Germans caught between the Poles and the Hungarians both slicing off pieces of territory (as well as ages old oppression by the Hungarians.)  The Romanians caught between a collapsing Ottoman Empire and an expansionist Russian one.  The Poles trapped in a three way tug of war between Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarians.

It's a story oft repeated.  The parameters of the love/hate relationships, revenge and violence don't really change, just the name tags the participants are wearing and the date on the calendar.

The unwritten rule for Europe since the end of WW II has been that the era of changing national borders via military force is over.  That precedent has held until Putin and his neo-Tsarist ambitions came along.

Yes some 12 million Russians died in the fight against the Nazis and their various allies.  But we also need to understand that that was in part a tragedy of their own making.  Maybe if Stalin and Molotov hadn't been so damned anxious to make deals with the Germans so as to seize eastern Poland, the independent Baltic states and large swaths of Finland and Romania, it might have been a different story.

The story we often hear is that Putin and his gang think that Russia was treated "unfairly" in the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Really? Really?  What a bad distasteful joke piled on top of an outright and naked lie.

Truth is the Russian communists were scared shitless that the Western powers were going to hold them and communism itself accountable for their 70 some years of tyranny and criminality.  But it never happened, Bush 41 treated them with kid gloves. (Gorbachev's own transcripts from them Malta summit show this.)

After WW II we tried and executed the Nazis for their crimes against humanity.  But we conveniently ignore that that horrible war started with a deal between the communists and the Nazis.

Maybe someone can tell us how many communists went to the gallows for the decades of throwing their own people into the Gulag.  Just where were the individuals and communism held accountable for the slaughter of the Polish Officer Corp in the forests of Western Belorussia or the 60,000 Polish civilians who were marched into the labor camps in 1940 never to return?  So tell us who was held accountable for the slaughter in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.  How many Eastern Europeans disappeared into unmarked graves during the nearly 50 years of Russian military occupation?  Where is the justice for them?

Disposing of the dead in the

frozen lakes of Siberia

If the Russians so consider the communist period such a "black mark" on their history why do so many former KGB and party apparatchiks hold positions of power today?  Why do journalists and artists who dare question Putin and his thugs end up in jail, dead or simply disappear?  Why do statues of Lenin and Stalin still dot the landscape? Why does a military honor guard still stand at the entrance to Lenin's tomb?  Why is his tomb even still there? 

The communist period was just a different form of Russian imperialism with Tsars and Dukes replaced with Commissars and political officers.  Putin is now just trying to do the same thing with his own batch of oligarchs armed with 21st century propaganda and technology.

The Russians didn't get treated "unfairly," they got handed a "get out of jail free card".

Revisionist History is the New Truth! (and black is white and up is down)

The crisis in Ukraine has brought forth a new meme in revisionist history.  Dare mention on almost any discussion board that the Ukrainian people might have legitimate grievances with the Russians and there will be those who will attempt to bludgeon you with it.  This fallacy is twofold.  Firstly, Ukraine is not really a nation but simple a “region” of Russia and only Moscow has the right to make any decisions about Ukrainian self-determination. Secondly, there wasn’t really anything Russian about the Russian Revolution or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 

Seriously, not only are there some who put out this tripe but there are others who no doubt believe it, simply because some idiot said it.  Such is the pathos of the American (non)educational system.  To listen to these idiots tell it the events of October 1917 were all just a plot of clever foreigners and (wait for it) ……….. Zionists!

That Ukraine’s history has long been both intermingled with and separate from that of both the "great" Russians and the "White" Russians is a reality to be ignored in the new version of history.  Just because they all are culturally and linguistically closely related does not mean that they are not separate nations.

The same thing could be said of the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, but no one would seriously entertain the notion that they are not all separate nations and peoples.  Such is the product of our so-called education system.

I guess we are supposed to believe that the fact that the crucial events of October 1917 took place in the Russian capital, that the protagonists all spoke Russian, identified themselves as Russians and exhorted the Russian poor and peasants to join them is all irrelevant because some revisionist twit says so now some 97 years later.  I guess those of us with an actual education don’t understand that because one of Lenin’s grandfathers was a Jew, that this makes Lenin himself a secret Zionist!  Uh wait isn’t “Jewishness” passed down through the maternal line?  Never mind, don’t you dare let such trivialities interfere with the new “politically correct” interpretation.

Stalin himself was indeed a “non-Russian” having been born in Georgia of Georgian parents.  We should just ignore the fact that he spoke Russian and ruled from the capital of Russia and conducted the “Great Patriotic War” on the basis of defending “Mother Russia”.  If the great murderer of Ukrainians and any other group, nationality or individuals that were perceived to be the opposition was not a Russian, he sure made Ivan the Terrible look like a piker.  So why then do so many Russians still revere his name even today?

I even had one moron try to tell me Khrushchev was not a Russian but rather just another “Zionist”.  Never mind that this intellectual midget couldn’t even spell his name correctly, I doubt he had even bothered to actually read any biography of the man, least of all his autobiography.

These assholes (is there any other word to describe them?) are so warped in their thinking that anyone who dares point out historical realities contrary to the new history is to be regarded as operating in furtherance of some new “Zionist plot”.

 I am once again reminded of something that Isaac Asimov, himself a Russian, a Jew and one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century once said:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

These people (if one were to lend them that much dignity) are the very personification of his statement.  It seems that "Zionist" is now like "racist," once that accusation is made it automatically invalidates any and all previous statements of the accused, and absolves the accuser from having to or ever justifying the accusation.  

I can only guess that the next step in this onerous and illogical progression will be that the October Revolutionaries weren’t really communists at all but secret Zionist plotters who foresaw the events of today in Madame Blavatsky’s magic crystal ball!

Propaganda, or Just Plain Ignorance?

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on Yahoo News for repeating half truths and recycled Soviet Communist propaganda about the massacre at the Khatyn forest.

Firstly, at the time Khatyn was but one site in Belo-Russia where the Soviets took to slaughtering Poles. There were also mass executions of Poles in Tyer, Minsk, Bykownia, and Kharkov.  Over 60,000 Poles were deported to Kazakhstan in 1940, never to return.  Tens of thousands more disappeared into the Gulag or unmarked graves in the post war's nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation.

Memorial to Polish victims.

Secondly, this was not the first mass murder at Khatyn. The first slaughtered and buried in mass graves were not local villagers killed by the Nazis but those members of the Polish Officer Corps that were captured by the Red Army when they invaded Poland in 1939 as part of their secret deal with the Nazis.  Many a Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian suffered the same fate as part of the same secret deal.

Thirdly, documents discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union revealed the guilt of the Red Army and the NKVD in the slaughter of nearly 22,000 Polish officers. A number that makes the Nazis killing of 149 villagers pale by comparison.

Polish officers stacked like cord-wood in mass graves at Khatyn.

 Is Yahoo's news staff so lazy or inept as to be ignorant of these facts? Didn't any one teach you people that WW II started with a deal between the Nazis and the Soviets, or that the Poles were the only Allied power to lose the war?  Have they forgotten that Stalin and the communists starved as many as 5,000,000 Ukrainians to death in the 1930's?  Have they forgotten that the communists have killed at least ten fold the number that the Nazis ever did?  Do they even care?

Shame on Yahoo News. Their readers, and all of us deserve better.