It's super hip to give a fuck about Ukraine right now. Everybody's doing it! All the cool kids anyway. Everywhere you look it's blue and yellow, blue and yellow, blue and yellow. There seems to be a Ukrainian flag on every other flagpole as a strange case of jingoism by proxy takes the country by storm. Social media is awash in posh celebrities and political hopefuls virtue signaling all over the heroism of tiny Ukraine's resistance to what we're told is totally senseless Russian villainy. Volodymyr Zelensky has been transformed by the sexiest cult of personality since the last half-fuckable Kennedy got popped and a strange new "antiwar" movement has hit the streets across the globe demanding peace through crippling sanctions and omnicidal thermonuclear no-fly-zones. And anyone who so much as even suggests that maybe just maybe twenty years of NATO harassment may have played a role in provoking this mess is declared a heretic and burned at the stake while the Ukrainian National Anthem drowns out your screams.
In no place is Ukrainian fever thicker than the State Department echo chambers of cable news. People who couldn't be bothered to deviate from their coverage of the cultural significance of Kim Kardashian's latest buttlift for just fifteen seconds to even mention the Washington facilitated genocide in Yemen have suddenly been reborn as stoic, dewy-eyed, war journalists giving round the clock coverage to the plight of the only victims white enough to matter. This isn't to say that this coverage, however drunk on pro-NATO narratives it might be, isn't necessary. What's going on in Ukraine is undeniably despicable. Even if it was provoked by American imperialism, Vladimir Putin is still a baby killing savage engaged in a grotesque regime change campaign that rivals anything that NATO has pulled in the Middle East.
Innocent people are dying, civilian infrastructure is being bombarded, and an entire population is being held hostage by the kind of conquest anti-imperialists like me have devoted our lives to speaking out against. It's just a little disgusting to be joined by the same cable chickenhawks who have either ignored or cheered on identical acts of savagery for decades and not just in the Middle East either. The thing that sickens me most about America's imperial double-standard is that it has totally trivialized the plight of the people who allegedly inspired Putin's rage. Everybody gives a fuck about Ukraine but there are zero fucks left to be given for the people of the Donbas.
Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed across Ukraine over the last several weeks but over 14,000 people have been killed in the tiny Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine alone over the last eight years. According to the UN 81% of the civilian casualties have been ethnic Russians and their tormentors have been the same supposedly democratic plutocrats in the Ukrainian government that our media so blindly idolizes. The breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have been virtual microcosms of everything that Ukrainians have suffered under Russia. These poverty-stricken people have spent the better part of a decade under siege, cowering in their basements as crooks like Zelensky have given Neo-Nazi mercenaries like the Azov Battalion the green light to pepper them with indiscriminate shelling that includes the use of cluster munitions. All for the unforgivable sin of seceding from a nation they were never asked to be made a part of in the first place.
The Donbas region had been a part of Russia for 350 years until Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. They have only been a part this relatively recent Ukrainian experiment for about 31 and their patience for the project officially ran out of steam in 2014 after the US State Department used openly Russophobic neo-Nazi thugs like Svoboda and Right Sector to hijack a relatively minor pro-EU protest movement in Kiev and used it to overthrow the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. The Russian-speaking people of Eastern Ukraine had overwhelmingly voted for the Donetsk native who promised to play the middle ground and retain Ukraine's historic connections to their ethnic motherland.
After seeing the man they elected tossed out and replaced by an American puppet regime who openly celebrated the Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazi cunts who murdered their people in the millions, the proud people east of the Dnieper River in a region historically known as Novorossiya took to the streets in an explosion of grassroots outrage. While most of the region wanted nothing more radical than a neutral federalized Ukraine that would grant them nominal sovereignty to defend their culture, the people of the far eastern regions of the Donbas and Crimea overthrew corrupt local officials and held emergency referendums on their national status. The people of Crimea overwhelmingly voted to return to Russia who had unilaterally gifted their region to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 after being Russian territory since Catherine the Great took the peninsula back from the Ottoman Empire.
Putin gladly accepted Crimea back into Russia to protect their Black Sea Fleet stationed for centuries in Sevastopol but all but turned his nose up at the impoverished People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk when they voted for their independence the same year. In spite of breathless claims from the western media of a full-blown Russian invasion of the Donbas, no one has ever managed to prove that the Kremlin's support for the breakaway republics ever amounted to much more than the rusty Soviet army surplus and Cossack mercenaries that they usually toss at these ethnic Russian frozen conflicts to placate the hardliners in the Russian military in a gesture equally as empty as the support Middle Eastern dictatorships afford Palestine. In fact, Putin, the great Russian revanchist, actively belittled those republics by selling their sovereignty to Ukraine as part of the Minsk Deal. He only recognized their independence this year to facilitate his campaign to rid Kiev of NATO.
In the years leading up to Russia's invasion, Novorossiya was treated to a relentless campaign of terror launched by the neo-Nazis who had successfully infiltrated Ukraine's military and law enforcement establishments. Anti-Russian vigilante groups like C14 and the Azov Battalion's National Corps freely roamed the streets under the color of the authority granted to them by the National Police and the Interior Ministry and violently reigned in the AntiMaiden Movement popular in Eastern and Southern Ukraine culminating in a brutal terrorist attack in the city of Odessa, where members of Right Sector, flanked by police escorts, rounded up peaceful protesters into the Trade Unions Building and burned them alive. At least 48 people were killed, and more than 200 others were injured.
All part of Kiev's forced "Ukrainization" project. Volodymyr Zelensky was actually elected with the popular support of many Novorossiyans who took him at his word that he would reign in the racist mayhem. They probably should have seen his capitulation coming considering that Zelensky's top campaign financier was none other than Igor Kolomoisky, the same billionaire oligarch who financed the white supremacist Azov Battalion to protect his energy interests in the Donbas, but desperation leaves little room for scrutiny. The violence just kept coming and no one felt it harder than the few Novorossiyans who took a stand and made the unforgivable choice to leave this mess behind and rule themselves in the absence of cellophane saviors like Putin and Zelensksy.
If Vladimir Putin was right about one thing it was that Ukraine's borders are a fickle and contrived invention. No Ukrainian border has ever lasted much longer than a few decades. It is a land that has been tragically defined by conquest and shifting alliances whose boundaries make about as much sense as those drawn by the English in the Middle East and for the same malevolent reasons, to divide and conquer. Ukrainian nationalism took shape in the mid 19th Century as a celebration of western peasant resistance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the region in and around Galicia. Sovereignty was only granted to the region by the Bolsheviks in order to create a buffer zone between Moscow and the western invaders who stoked the White Terror, and saddled traditional Ukrainian territory with Novorossiyan territory in order to keep both under their thumb.
Since then, these two regions have been used routinely by outside forces as proxies against each other's sovereignty. Stalin starved 15% of the ethnic Ukrainian population during the Holodomor famines, killing millions, and packed the Donbas with penniless Russian peasants to safeguard its industries. Ukrainian thirst for vengeance was manipulated masterfully by Hitler during Operation Barbarossa when Ukrainian ethnic nationalists carried out genocidal pogroms of their own and this vicious cycle continues to this day with the imperial pissing match between Putin's Russia and Satan's NATO.
This is why I support secession, not just for the people of Donetsk and Luhansk but for those who have been manipulated into becoming their enemies in places like Galicia. The borders of the Westphalian nation state that the United Nations holds so sacred have always been used as weapons by those powerful enough to draw them against those poor enough to be corralled by them like cattle. The only solution to this evil is a system of pan-secession where popular autonomy is placed above state power as a fundamental human right. Novorossiya has as much right to independence from Ukraine as Ukraine has to independence from Russia and there exists zero reason why this sovereignty should even be completely territorial in nature.
The only just nation is one that exists with the complete consent of its citizenry and that citizenry should be defined by the consensual bonds of the social contracts that once bound tribes long before the shallow rule of blood and soil. In no place does this practice make more sense than in the fields of the Wild Steppes where Nestor Makhno's Black Army and the Zaporizhian Sich bravely defied the empires to their east and their west. People say secession is anarchy. I say exactly. What has the state ever done but pit impoverished neighbors against one another when they could peacefully coexist without it?
Fuck NATO and fuck Putin. The only thing that can save Ukraine is secession. I'll proudly salute the blue and yellow flag so long as it stands tall with a thousand others.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced This Post
* There is a Light That Never Goes Out by the Smiths
* Hurts to Love by Beach House
* Hey by the Pixies
* Stay Soft by Mitski
* Unnecessary Drama by Belle & Sebastian
* Heroes by David Bowie
* Jesus by the Velvet Underground
* Night Shift by Lucy Dacus
Secession was also suggested as a resolution to the chaos in South Africa, and it was probably the only solution there that could have avoided the bloodshed. The world, however, didn't even seriously consider secession as a possibility.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very thoughtful post, Nicky. Keep up the good fight to make Putin's actions be viewed as almost a caricature of those of the Great Satan America. Perhaps someday enough people will listen to make the end of the statist double standard come about.
“What has the state ever done but pit impoverished neighbors against one another...”
ReplyDeleteEXACTLY! And year after year the morons act not unlike like morons dutifully voting again and again for the mucky mucks' owned oppressors to continue to oppress them even further.
It is claimed repeatedly in the west's propaganda mills Putin attacked the Ukraine unprovoked.
It is conveniently left out by those propaganda mills that U.S.' stooge NATO provoked Russia for 20 years.
This afternoon a friend opined that people were waking up to the fact the system is corrupted and thus they no longer believe the corporate main stream media.
I rained on his parade with apparently 154 million voters in the November 2020 POTUS election voted either for the former senator credit card or the orange monstrosity, furthermore, in the CDN 2021 federal election 33% of the participants voted for the Cons and 32% voted for the Libs which meant in total 65% of the voters voted for corporate party A or corporate party B.
Since 99% of those 65% didn't own large corporations the propaganda mills had again done a pretty thorough job at persuading the suckers to vote against their own self interests.
“The rule is that whenever you find a news item creating a negative emotional response in yourself, you are almost certainly being deliberately stuffed with false propaganda. Think of all the tales of Iran, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Russia, China, so many nations and so many events, and yet none of those terrible things have ever been substantiated.”
— Larry Romanoff (Propaganda and the Media)
No doubt that, among the many Ukrainians fighting the Russian army, there are a small percentage of neo-Nazis. However, the vast, vast majority of Ukrainians in the fight are not neo-Nazis or sympathetic to the neo-Nazis. Moreover, the government of Ukraine is decidedly not neo-Nazis. The family of the country's president was massacred by the Nazis. He is Jewish. The Prime Minister of the country is also Jewish and is not a neo-Nazis. In fact, the current Ukrainian government has no sympathy for Fascism or Nazism. And, they were elected by large swaths of the public in a blow-out election. In fact, polling data show that only a tiny percentage of Ukrainians has sympathy for Fascism. So, one has to wonder at your logic.
ReplyDeleteIt is also to be noted the distance that Ukraine has traveled, since the time of the demise of the USSR. In fact, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was the most antisemitic of all of the USSR republics, even more so than the extremely antisemitic Russian part. That is the reason there was a mass exodus from that region of Jews in the 1970's and, later, in the 1990's. So, one has to doubt that large numbers of Fascists or Neo-Nazis are flocking in to fight for Ukraine. In that regard, they would have a far better partner fighting for Putin, who does espouse classically fascistic rhetoric - pretty much the opposite of what the Urkrainian government is doing.
Anyway, the election by the Ukrainians of a Jew as president and a Jew as Prime Minister - pretty much the opposite of any Nazi cause I have ever hear of - is, given the 1,000 plus year history of Jew hatred in Ukraine an achievement that goes beyond the election, in the US, of Obama. And, unlike Obama who projected himself as apple pie Americana, Zelenskyy and Shmyhal assert their Jewish heritage unabashedly. Nonetheless, they were elected in a landslide.
Did the West trap Russian into a fight by dangling Nato membership. Well, that seems pretty unlikely. Russia knew full well that Ukraine was not being admitted into Nato. The US did not keep that fact a secret. That fact, moreover, ticked off the Ukrainians, who saw it as somewhat of a betrayal of the promise to protect their country after it voluntarily gave up its nuclear arsenal.
As for Russia, its leader comes from the KGB. If you know anything about the former USSR - and my wife was born and lived her first 20 years of life there, so my understanding is colored by the fact that she actually knows something firsthand about the country -, you know that those who volunteered for the KGB were, while extremely bright, the nastiest kids in school and, moreover, the most ideologically driven.
Now, did Putin like the US extending protection to states forced into the USSR? Of course not? But, he did not attack Ukraine to keep it from doing what it was not being allowed to do. In suggesting that, you are suggesting he is a moron, which he likely is not.
You might consider his comment long ago that the breakup of the USSR was among history's great tragedies. In that Putin was not a communist, it is worth pondering what he had in mind. Presumably, what he was saying is that the breakup of the empire established prior to the USSR, and reestablished by the USSR, was a tragedy. And, it is that tragedy - a form of fascistic revanchism - which he sought to remedy. And, it is that, not anything in particular that Nato or the US has done or threatened to do, which is the cause of the war in Ukraine. It is the ideology that Putin believes in.
Dear Ralph,
Delete"... the breakup of the USSR was among history's great tragedies."
It was for not only most Soviet citizens but also for the rest of the world because the USSR Bear helped keep the United States of Atrocities (USA) in check.
Yes I know that is completely counter to USA propaganda.
Aside from studiously avoiding the USA funded bio weapon and nuclear sites found in the Ukraine, from your 621 word screed it appears you may be more than somewhat unaware the USA is behind the shit storm that has been underway in the Ukraine since at least 2004.
The USA has an historical record of dropping its shit hammer on any entity that refuses to allow it to be dominated by its imperialistic B.S.
Guess who has been funding and training the Nazis?
It is unlikely Oliver Stone's two Youtube censored documentaries will persuade you otherwise as your mind is already made up and has no room for facts, but just in case I'm assuming incorrectly, lets have a go:
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2022/03/13/the-scumbags-at-google-youtube-censored-oliver-stones-ukraine-documentary-so-watch-it-here-via-rumble/ 720p