Since this little invasion of Ukraine has been going on for fifty days now, and a good percentage of my readership over the years has been from Russia (2.54 thousand hits all time, ranking 2nd among nations) I figure it probably is time for me to comment about it. I recently received a note from Google that this blog cannot monetize if it "spreads any information deemed to be false about the situation in Ukraine." This blog has never actually beeen monetized in any fashion by me, having lost control of navigation into those Google advertising innards when I dismantled a lot of my Google connections some five or six years ago. Nonetheless, Google decides what you should read. And what I want to tell you is exactly what IS happening in Ukraine, and inside of Russia, for any of you still able to read this, in either location.
Well. We have the invasion of a soveriegn nation happening. All historical precedent Russia may claim that it holds Ukraine as something dear to its cultural bosom are false. Ever since the Holodomor, the enforced famine of the 1930's, Ukrainians have held a righteous grudge against Moscow, since Ukrainians have generally been treated as expendable units by every nation ever galloped across their steppes. Mother Russia, I am sorry to say, is a myth which has died as hard as the myth of the Soviet Union. There is no going back to things as they were 500 years ago, not for anyone- not for Muslim extremists in the Middle East and Afghanistan, not for the Germans and any Austrian Empire, not for the Brits and their never-setting sun. It's all over. Ukraine has been a nation of its own over 30 years, and in a similar position to that of the American colonies when they wrested themselves from Great Britain. They have a national identity conciousness which is not going to be eradicated by Putin's minions, his military, nor his hypocritical Orthodox war-pig priests.
Putin's military is going noplace, and nobody needs to fear their invading them anywhere else, since their ineptitude has so blatantly exposed the weaknesses within Putin's heirachical strategies. Not telling your troops what they are doing, where they are going, or what they are expected to do when they get there is no way to guarantee any sort of victory, and many of your Russian troops are righteously deserting, in the face of overwhelming losses in the tens of thousands of their comrades.
Anyone with any sense would have fled the area to begin with, but the people who have chosen to stay to defend Ukraine have every right to do it. As a pacifist I cannot condone anything other than a worst case survival scenario but people have a right to defend themselves and their territories, especially when their invader seeks to obliterate any sense of individual and collective identity other than that imposed by the "insane Tsar," as he has been so recently and rightly proclaimed.
At one time it looked, truly, as if Putin was one of the only real rational world leaders. Any of the early advances like the Crimean takeover could be explained out of some historical precedence, yes, but what has been lost on the Russian leadership and "thought-influencers" is just how weak and paltry and in-effective their conservative imperialism is against everything that brought down the Soviet Union from the West. Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, forever, my friends. Patriarch Kiril vows a holy war, and does not sense himself the sheer hypocrisy of a Christian leader advocating for war, violence, and murder of one's brethren.
The Ukrainians and Russians have along way to go perhaps to sorting out their pasts and collective histories, but one thing is absolutely sure- Russia has not defeated Ukraine, and are doomed to defeat. Putin's "special operarion" is one of the stupidest, ill-thought out, and ridiculous chauvinistic ventures of any world leader since the fall of Stalin and Mao. And it's no joke, people inside Russia are only hearing Putin's side of it.
Your biggest battleship and troop transport ships have been sunk! Six of your generals and an admiral are dead! You cannot assume that your navy can nor will overtake southern Ukraine. Your troops have been defeated as they tried to encircle the capital! The best thing to do is urge upon your leaders a quick and hasty retreat to where you were before hostilities began, since those hostilities were intiated by your leaders, and rest on specious and unsuppported suppositions of the intents and values of the leaders of the Ukrainian nation. Your nation has to learn to live with itself, within itself, and go back to sucking its collective navel in shame, for the criminal destruction of the landscape and population of Ukraine and the deaths of tens of thousands of your sons in battle are not worth the ugliness they have created in the eyes and hearts of the rest of the world.
Those of us who have tried to express brotherhood between nations, as I have myself with persons living in both Ukraine and Russia, can only watch and be horrified by this return to the barbarities that characterized Europe in the 20th C. I have a young friend in Russia of draft-age for whom I have great fears and hopes, that he not be sucked into Putin's and the Russian War-Pigs' machinery- machinery every bit as evil as was that of the American conflict in Vietnam- wars fought by people with no urge to take part in them are wars that cannot be won, either. The values expressed by Patriarch Kiril and other Russian writers echo the same lame quacks of American conservatives of the 1960's- national "honor and pride" forbid them from seeing the tragedy of defeat taking shape before their eyes. All is not as they lead you to believe. Always question what you're being told. World freedom begins with each of us making up our own minds.
