The reason that I maintain that svidomy are a subset of sovoks is because they don’t just topple mass produced monuments to Lenin – they seek to rewrite their entire Russian imperial heritage.
For instance, this is what the Maidanists and their Western supporters refer to as “de-Communization”.
A couple of days ago, the Suvorov monument at the Kiev Suvorov Military School – now the Ivan Bogun Military High School – was removed, and will be transferred to Switzerland.
What does this remind one of?
Bolsheviks toppling a monument to Admiral Nakhimov in Sevastopol, Crimea as a symbol of Russian imperialism, chauvinism, and colonialist exploitation in 1928.
PS. Who was Ivan Bogun, whose name replaced Suvorov’s at that school? Some Ukrainian non-entity who switched sides between the Russians and the Poles multiple times during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, before the latter finally had him executed. So quite the appropriate symbol for Ukraine, come to think of it. Who was Suvorov? One of the most accomplished generals in history, who amongst the other things commanded the Russian armies that liberated Crimea and southern Novorossiya from the Ottoman Empire during the late 18th century. If the Ukrainians want to get rid of Suvorov so much, perhaps they could also vacate the entirety of the Black Sea coastline and drop any claims on Crimea? Just to make extra sure that no trace of the Russian colonialist legacy remains.
PS. Just noticed that Insomniac Resurrected has also just written about this and made the same points:
“Suvorov out. Decolonisation marches forth”. Indeed. Now it just needs to be taken to its logical conclusion.
After they toppled all statues of Lenin, who actually created this monstrosity, nothing should surprise anyone. When God wants to punish a person, He takes away his mind. The same is true of nations.
Moscovia should relieve Ukraine of Odessa, Zaphorizhia, Kherson, Mariupol, Dnepropetrovsk – disgusting monuments of Moskal imperialism. It’s a great tragedy Ukraine didn’t side with their fellow black haired freedom loving nomads in the south and allowed the steppe to be desecrated with civilization.
Interesting that you chose to note the character Ivan Bohun, he is a typical Ukrainian hero like Mazepa, whose biggest life achievement appears to be opposition to the Moskals.
The Ukrainian nationalists want to replace the Russian and Soviet legacy with these obscure characters in order to completely estrange Ukraine from Russia because that is the only way they can assert their nationhood built on formerly Russian land.
Actually, the Central Powers recreated an independent Ukraine–in 1918.
More like Svido Ukraine than “Sovok”. In the very early years, the Bolshes did such things. Later on, the likes of Nakhimov, Suvorov and Kutuzov were honored by the Soviets.
Around the time that Yanukovych was overthrown, the Svidos dismantled a monument honoring Kutuzov. The latter had a presence on the territory of modern day Ukraine at a time when the ancestors of present day Ukrainians had (on the whole) been supportive of Russia’s war effort against Napoleon.
What’s probably the best English language book on Suvorov:
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Victory-Achievements-Generalissimo-Suvorov/dp/0094511705
Russia actually had a chance to do this in 2014 and declined to do so–possibly due to fear of crippling Western sanctions on Russia in response to such a Russian action.
OT
United Memedom
https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/1089249120265662466?s=20
That’s if you call a country occupied by Germany independent. Not to mention that even that puppet was much smaller than what is (or, rather, could have been) currently Ukraine.
Maybe simply because of reluctance to feed tens of millions parasites?
The leader of that German propped Ukrainian entity wasn’t anti-Russian. See:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/22052011-pavlo-skoropadsky-and-the-course-of-russian-ukrainian-relations-analysis/
With retrospection especially in mind, he had some arguably good ideas – specifically, a loose non-Communist Russo-Ukrainian togetherness.
Nobody cared about his ideas: he was a German puppet. His last name – Skoropadsky (the one who falls quickly) was also very appropriate.
The monument to Suvorov was built by the Soviets, as is obvious from its appearance. Good that this Sovok attempt at appropriating non-Soviet people, in this case not even a Ukrainian, has been erased from Ukraine.
It is being replaced by a plaque honoring the southern Ukrainian (from the southern Black Sea Coast) proto-fascist Dmytro Dontsov:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Dontsov
These lands would have been taken by anybody, eventually, as Turkish power receded. By this logic Ukraine should abandon the use of television, antibiotics, etc. that happened to have been first introduced in Ukraine during Soviet times.
He was such (as you term it) on account of the existing reality he faced. Decades later, he has received a more sympathetic overview, partly on account of what I said.
Not so good
It’s dismantled because hes seen as representing Russia/Russian Empire. Were that not the case, Svido influenced Kiev regime controlled Ukraine could construct a non-Soviet monument in his honor.
What you seem to be supporting is one reason why Kiev regime controlled Ukraine is in dire straits. Unnecessarily offending a noticeable portion of the population doesn’t help in developing a more unified state.
It was probably more independent than Poland prior to 1989. It ran its own schools and government, the Germans obligated it to send grain to Germany but otherwise didn’t interfere much in internal matters.
It was about the same size, just with different territory. It did not include Crimea or Galicia but did include parts of what is now southern Belarus and neighboring Russian oblasts:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Ukrainian_State_1918_divisions.png
Interestingly, the current cease-fire line in Donbas matches the old border.
Indeed, Dmytro Dontsov is a much better representation of the Ukrainian nation than Suvorov. See his principles of nationalism:
The will prevailing over the mind
Physical strength that denies the power of science
Violence of the strong over the weak
Territorial expansion
Racism and fanaticism
Ruthlessness to the enemy and hatred of others
Amoralism
If only the Russians were like Ukrainians! Then they wouldn’t allow a hostile entity to exist on their borders.
I don’t think many people in Kiev are offended that a Soviet-built statue honoring a Russian general is removed from their city.
I’m not fan of Dontsov, who is a typical 1930s central European thinker. Just pointing out that replacing a Soviet statue of Suvorov with a plaque honoring Dontsov is not a very Sovok thing to do.
Not quite
Communist Poland had a well trained, well equipped army – something that was denied Skoropadsky’s government, on account of German policy. That aspect contributed to his quick downfall when WW I ended.
You make much of this for some reason. Being German ally was the best course of all, but after Germany’s exit Bolshevik rule was a worse evil than whatever form of autonomy Skoropadsky was working out with the Whites. Had I been in Skoropadsky’s position I would have made a similar deal. So what?
As in you aren’t offended, which isn’t indicative of everyone in Kiev regime controlled Ukraine. Soviet or not, that monument is honoring a great historical military figure, as a monument honoring someone with an anti-Russian leaning persona is constructed.
You’ve a way of under-representing the pro-Russian perspective in Kiev regime controlled Ukraine. If it was so low, the Kiev regime wouldn’t have had to interfere against the UOC with loose ties to the MP.
If the statue were in Kharkiv perhaps some significant % of locals would be offended by its removal. But not in Kiev.
It was nominally independent, which is a step up from where it was under the Bolsheviks. Had Imperial Germany reformed after the war, it could have given more self-rule to Ukraine.
Also, as AP says, it was about the same size as present-day Ukraine is–albeit with slightly different territories.
I agree that almost anything would have been better than Bolshevik rule. Of course, there was a risk that the Whites would have refused to honor their promises of Ukrainian autonomy had they won the Russian Civil War, but even if so, this would have still been much better than having millions of your countrymen starve to death in artificial famines.
Your reply is illogical as I exhibit no fundamental disagreement in what you say in this above set of comments.
I coherently answered Anon’s negative characterization of Skoropadsky as a German puppet.
So anything build or created under the USSR that somehow touched on the pre-Soviet past was irredeemably sovok?
Citing examples of Maidanist Bolsheviks attacking Russian cultural relics not built under the later USSR is hard, since the original Bolsheviks did most of the work with respect to that. But sure. As I recall, the plaque to Stolypin at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra was removed. There are constant Maidanist demands to dismantle the monument to Catherine the Great in Odessa, which is a post-Soviet reconstruction of a 1900 monument that was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1920. Many other examples. E.g., statue to Kutuzov was taken down in Lvov in 2014.
Good thing that Maidanists wouldn’t dream of appropriating things that don’t belong to them.
The interesting thing is that, had this independent Ukraine survived, it might have eventually become Germany’s second-most prominent ally after Austria-Hungary by sheer virtue of its population and high average IQ.
Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions were of course owned by Ukrainian Cossacks prior to Russian rule.
The tragedy for Ukrainians was the split with the Poles, that ultimately resulted in these Black Sea territories falling to a Russian state than to a multinational Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian one.
It’s very reasonable to surmise that the Whites would’ve been agreeable to a greater autonomy for Ukraine. Denikin was on record for such.
Correct. The wrong side losing World War I was a great tragedy for Ukraine.
To be honest, I’m not sure that Ukrainians should exactly love Tsarist Russia either. I mean, didn’t Tsarist Russia aggressively suppress the Ukrainian language?
Sure, Tsarist military successes resulted in some Ottoman territories being conquered which later ended up being Ukrainian, but the same could be said for Soviet military successes that resulted in some German territories being conquered which later ended up being Polish. Does this mean that Poland should build statues to the Soviets in the Recovered Territories in order to thank them for conquering these territories for Poland–in spite of the fact that the Soviets also killed the Polish military leadership by the thousands and occupied Poland for almost half a century?
Then you’d surely be in favor of monuments to Taras Shevchenko and other Ukrainian heroes in Russia being demolished. Most were built by the Soviets, and he was a foreigner who disliked Russians.
These kind of stunts betray the fact that the Ukrainian idea is first and foremost based on negation. Endless displays of ‘we’re not Russians! Moskals get out reeeeeeeeeee’ while offering nothing positive to the world does not leave a good impression.
Suvorov was a great general who expanded the Ukrainian living space. Compare that to some obscure 20th century nationalist who wrote hysterical polemics and died in Canada.
Re: Skoropadsyk’s Ukraine
It didn’t have the former Habsburg territory making up modern day Ukraine.
At the time, Austrian, German and Polish elements were content with an independent Ukraine, as long as it satisfied the terms of the respective entity/entities (be it Poland, Austria or Germany) backing this independent Ukraine .
With the Poles and Austrians especially in mind, that dynamic didn’t include the Habsburg territories making up contemporary Ukraine.
To be honest, it was a shame that the Allies didn’t support an independent Ukraine after they won WWI. The Allies (unlike the Germans) supported national self-determination for certain other peoples–such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, and Romanians–but not so much for the Ukrainians.
Also, I remember this one Australian commenter on some other forum commenting several years ago about how it was ironic that the Western Powers condemned Russian aggression against Ukraine starting from 2014 whereas almost a century earlier–specifically at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference–they vehemently insisted that Ukraine was a part of Russia and an internal Russian matter. This commenter also said that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting establishment of various independent states on the former territory of the Soviet Union in 1991 vindicated the Germans’ decision to strip Russia of so much territory in 1918 given that the post-1991 borders were very similar to those established in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
If it wasn’t for the Soviet signing the M-R Pact with Germany, Poland might have never been invaded by Germany in the first place. I don’t know if Germany would’ve been willing to simultaneously fight Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
Yes, the Poles and Austrians were imperialists who weren’t willing to give up eastern Galicia. Of course, this isn’t much different from Germany refusing to give up its Polish-majority territories to the Polish state that it created in 1916 (until the victorious Allies forced the Germans to give up these territories, that is).
I wouldn’t go that far, but this Suvorov statue in Kiev was probably not built by monarchists.
That was unfortunate, Stolypin’s land reforms were great for Ukrainians.
It was in Brody, probably built by Galician Russophiles.
I never claimed Sovoks have been the only ones. Everyone in Eastern Europe has engaged in this from time to time, it’s hardly a marker of Sovokdom. If I am not mistaken, you claimed the father of the Soviet space program wasn’t a Ukrainian?
Denikin wasn’t such an imperialist towards the Galician Ukrainians when compared to how Pilsudski dealt with Petliura. See:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/
No it didn’t on your first point. can elaborate further on request. As for Poland, the Poles under Pilsudski helped the Bolshes:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/
The Suvorov statue was both Soviet and a non-Ukrainian. It was thus purely a Soviet project. Like a statue to Marx or Engels in Russia. I would equate honoring Shevchenko with honoring Pushkin or other Russian cultural figures in Russia during Soviet rule. One needn’t have been a Soviet to appreciate them.
So if Russia was littered with Nazi statues their removal after occupation would betray the fact that the Russian idea is first and foremost based on negation? It’s a rather myopic view.
His efforts just resulted in something that would have been inevitable, Ukrainian living space was expanding prior to him. Actually the fact that he and not some Polish or Zaporozhian general did this was a worse outcome for Ukrainians.
Dontsov inspired Ukrainian nationalists of the 1930s and was a link (even if, an odious one) in the chain that ultimately led to Ukrainian statehood.
The PLC was a hellhole for anyone who wasn’t a Polish speaking noble. I know Ukrainians love their Cossack larping, but the vast majority of Ruthenian speakers were second class citizens who endured conditions that were often worse than Russian serfdom. The entire project was broken apart by internal conflict, and Ukrainians have resented Polish rule so much that they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of them over the years.
At least have some dignity and advocate for a great and independent Ukrainian state and not being discount Poles.
One needn’t be Russian to appreciate the likes of Suvorov and Kutuzov. That includes Ukrainians, with these two great military figures having an affiliation with the territory making up modern day Ukraine.
“If it wasn’t for the Soviet signing the M-R Pact with Germany, Poland might have never been invaded by Germany in the first place. I don’t know if Germany would’ve been willing to simultaneously fight Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.”
History tells us that Germany ended up simultaneously fighting Britain, Soviet Union, USA and France (Free French forces). So something must be wrong with your assumption.
Ukrainian and Russian nationalist propaganda come together.
Nonsense. Serfdom in most of what is now Ukraine was lighter than in agricultural Russia and in Poland proper. In Galicia it was about as bad as in Poland, but Galicia had a relatively high % of nobles. In the end, whose fate has been better, the descendants of the Ukrainian serfs who united with Russia, or those in Poland?
That and the fact that Ukrainians weren’t as outnumbered by Poles as they were by Russians, so could not be as thoroughly crushed by them.
Up to 100,000 in the 1940s. Prior to that, not as many as that.
A nation the size and population of Ukraine, or Poland (and much more so – Czechia, or Slovakia), can not be “great” on its own, and even independence is questionable.
Discount Russian rednecks is better?
You’re kind of on the right track here Anatoly, except instead of having the Ukrainians vacate these areas, why not the minority fifth columnist Russians that have chosen to remain behind, with the exception of Crimea? Even Odesa is more than 2/3 Ukrainian in ethnic composition.
Why so hard on Bohun, anyway? He never did switch ‘sides between the Russians and the Poles multiple times during the Khmelnytsky Uprising, before the latter finally had him executed.’ (once again pointing to your lack of the rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian history!) He was always steadfast in opposition to the Polish presence in Ukraine, and in fact, according to your Russophile way of thinking should be squarely commended for finally ‘seeing the light’ and fought vociferously on the Russian side after Konotop, against the Polonohile Hetman Vyhovsky. You shouldn’t be all that saddened by the choice to replace a Russian general with a Ukrainian Colonel (with quite an impressive military record) who ended his career fighting for the pro-Russian side. But then again, you like spouting off a lot about Ukrainian history, even though you don’t seem to know much about it?…Cheer up Anatoly, it’s not all that bad! 🙂
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Ivan_Bohun.jpg/220px-Ivan_Bohun.jpg
Shevchenko, a second rate poet who openly disliked Russia and Russians. Many statues of him were erected by the Soviets, including by Lenin himself, as a part of the Soviets assault on Russian national self-confidence. Russia still suffers from the cult of the ‘brotherhood of nations’ that this policy promoted.
Suvorov behaved genocidally towards Ukrainians? A better comparison might be the destruction of statues of Spanish generals in Catalonia, or German generals in Austria.
Why would it be inevitable? It took a substantial amount of blood, largely Russian blood, in order to conquer those lands. Perhaps the Poles would have done it or perhaps not.
The Ukrainian territory was established by the Soviet Union in 1919. Its borders were expanded by Stalin, and then Khrushchev. The incompetent rule of the Soviet Union caused it to collapse, whereupon Ukraine achieved independence with its Soviet borders. I fail to see where Ukrainian nationalists fall into this.
“until the victorious Allies forced the Germans to give up these territories, that is”
I think you mean to say “Soviet Union forced Germans to give up these territories”. I am not so sure that had the Western allies have any say in this that they would acted accordingly.
Not to be forgotten, Western allies generously gifted parts of Czechia to Nazi Germany.
Surprisingly enough, it was the Soviet Union, again, that rectified this situation to the benefit of the Czechs, only to get spat on by “Western lap dog politicians” today.
So where are the outraged masses of Ukrainians that feel betrayed and saddened by the news of this dismantling of the old Russian imperialist signposts, outside of possibly a few sovok and Russian svidomite yelps in the Russian press? And of course you, our resident fighter for Russian imperial regression?
“So where are the outraged masses of Ukrainians that feel betrayed and saddened by the news of this dismantling of the old Russian imperialist signposts, outside of possibly a few sovok and Russian svidomite yelps in the Russian press?”
Wrong question.
Where is the rejoicing of the masses to the dismantling of this Russian imperialist signpost?
For that matter, are there many as in a clear majority cheering this on (Simpleguest beat me to the punch)? I know Ukrainians who don’t support such moves.
Being provocative to seek support from the Svidos has a backlash effect. Not tearing it down stands to limit the already existing divisiveness. Regardless, it comes across as a petty move. It’s not like Suvorov and Kutuzov did things that screwed over the ancestors of modern day Ukrainians.
Is Ukraine trying to be as fake and gay as possible?
This is all that you’ve got…again? And I know people that support the idea that the moon is made of Swiss cheese! 🙂
Precisely why I’m not sympathetic to marginal countries. Ukraine is destined to serve the US and atlanticists. The purpose of the Ukrainian states existence is to be used as a bludgeon against Russia, nothing more. While nationalists are fighting and dying in Donbass, the Ukrainian elite are completely integrated into the same power structure that is ethnically cleansing native Europeans and spreading homosexuality and other filth. Glory to the heroes!
An acceptable solution, rather than larping about the PLC, would be to be in a loose and friendly association with Russia. Instead they sold their country out to the west because they blame Russia for all their problems and think complete dissociation with Russia will magically make their country as rich as Germany.
Ukraine is under extreme vulnerability because of their brilliant reorientation towards the west. Putin is not going to last forever, and unless they manage to join NATO or get nukes (both of which would cause even Putin to invade preemptively), you’re going to be under constant threat that Russia will no longer tolerate a fundamentally hostile entity next to it. But perhaps the Szlachta and their hussars will come to the rescue, right?
This thread is about the tragedy of the change. Where’s any proof that anybody, outside of a very few ‘specialists’ are outraged? Any Ukrainians even among the very few?
Another idiotic comment from you.
You’re ducking Simplguest’s point as well as my follow-up on the matter.
Just competing for neocohen affections with old and busted polish whore, business as usual.
What I`d like to know is, why Switzerland? They already have a hardcore Suvorov memorial. Did they decide they need a statue as well?
I’m willing to be honest about this change of military school mascots. Outside of you, Karlin and the Mad Bohemian, nobody else much cares about this change, one way or the other. I would bet, though, that the school’s administrators, instructors and students are content with this change. I’m not detecting any demonstrations by anybody outside of the school building. Are you able to detect any such outrage over the new change?
Germany only invaded the Soviet Union once France (excluding the Free French) was knocked out of the war, though. AFAIK, Germany expected to defeat the Soviet Union within several months–in other words, before the U.S. could make a meaningful difference in the war.
The Western Allies did secure some Polish-majority parts of Germany for Poland back in 1919, though. That’s what I was talking about here.
As for the Sudetenland, it had an overwhelming German majority–though obviously conducting a plebiscite there would have been better. IMHO, holding a plebiscite there–whether in 1919 or 1938–was the best possible move.
Ukraine isn’t going to become as rich as Germany since it doesn’t (and probably won’t) have that high of an average IQ. Still, achieving Greece levels of prosperity in the long(er)-run should be doable if corruption and other issues are successfully dealt with in Ukraine.
As for Ukraine reentering the Russian orbit, Russia probably wouldn’t have stopped with Eurasian Union membership but would have likely insisted on the creation of a common Eurasian currency, parliament, military, et cetera–in other words, say hello to a recreated but non-Communist USSR!
The best thing for Ukraine after a German WWI victory would have been the creation of a Mitteleuropa-type union, no? (Mitteleuropa is essentially Intermarium plus Germany and perhaps Austria-Hungary.) After all, the Germans and Ukrainians in such a union could have easily overpowered any Polish chauvinism and having a wealthy (for the time) country such as Germany in such a union would have been a huge boon for this union.
What were Denikin’s plans for eastern Galicia?
Also, Yes, the Poles should have supported the Whites during the Russian Civil War. In addition to the moral aspect, the Poles could have still received a lot of Ukrainian support even if the Whites would have won the Russian Civil War since the Ukrainians might have been afraid of being conquered by the Whites and might have thus still preferred to do a deal with Poland.
“Germany only invaded the Soviet Union once France (excluding the Free French) was knocked out of the war, though. AFAIK, Germany expected to defeat the Soviet Union within several months–in other words, before the U.S. could make a meaningful difference in the war.”
Yeah, sure.
Here is my skeleton version of events leading to WWII.
Soviet Union 1939: lets appease Hitler and see if we can make him fight the French and British to avenge the humiliation of WWI. After all, the West tried the same thing in 1937. Hopefully they will destroy each other in the process and clear the way for world wide communist revolution.
Hitler’s Germany: we will let the morons think they are using us against the others. We will knock out all of them, one by one, at our own convenience.
You know, eternal human folly.
Is there any evidence that Ukraine would reach the level of Greece more quickly in the western sphere than in the Russian sphere? They certainly would if they got massive EU investment, but such investment would also bankrupt the EU. Maidan was not merely some anti-corruption affair either, and I doubt corruption has reduced at all since 2014.
Even if we accept those premeses, have you considered if that’s just the best lot Ukraine has considering their geopolitical position? Russia is a great power, and even in its heavily declined state is still vastly more powerful than Ukraine or even all of the rest of eastern Europe put together. Ukraine’s last chance to really escape the Russian sphere was probably WWI.
OK. I see now that you are referring to WWI.
All across the West, monuments to the past greatness of European Christian civilization are being vandalized.
The fact that the people greet this travesty with indifference makes it all the more tragic.
But most disheartening of all is the shear pettiness of alleged nationalists such as “AP” and “Mr. Hack” who justify the vandalism.
Nationalists are supposed to be a spiritual elite, keepers of the sacred flame, men with lofty goals and magnanimous spirits.
Could you imagine American nationalists demanding that Pittsburgh be renamed because William Pitt was an Englishman, not an American? Thank God American nationalists, few in numbers though they may currently be, have not learned such self-pitying pettiness!
Pitt may not have been an American, but as the leader of a kindred people he defended Americans from a formidable and merciless enemy, at a time when Americans were still too weak to defend themselves, unaided, against Louis XV and his savage allies – opening up the possibility of expansion into the wilderness and future greatness.
Likewise, Suvorov broke the power of the still very formidable Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate – something that 18th century Poland and/or Zaporozhye Cossacks simply did not have the power to accomplish, even if they had had the will to do so.
And shouldn’t a military school strive to give the future defenders of the homeland competent, successful role models? To this day, American Rangers look to Robert Rogers as their spiritual father, loyalist though he was.
Yeah, I agree that the Western Powers and the Soviet Union were idiots for not cooperating against the Nazis earlier.
Honestly, I don’t think that it would have made much difference for Ukraine’s prosperity whether Ukraine was in the European sphere of influence or the Russian sphere of influence. After all, both the ex-Warsaw Pact countries and Russia are gradually converging to their full economic potential based on their average IQ. I think that, regardless of which of these two blocs Ukraine would have been in, it would have been able to reach Greece levels of prosperity if it would have been able to raise its average IQ to its full potential and successfully deal with its corruption issue (I’ve read that Ukraine’s economy is currently growing at 3% per year when it should be growing at something like 7% per year).
As for power and influence, a European Union which includes Ukraine would be much more powerful and influential than a Eurasian Union which includes Ukraine. Even if one excludes Western Europe from these calculations, one would think that an Intermarium consisting of Eastern European countries and including Ukraine would be as powerful and influential (excluding nukes, that is) or almost as powerful and influential as a Eurasian Union which doesn’t include Ukraine. If Ukraine is a part of Intermarium, then Intermarium and Russia should have almost identical populations with a comparable level of average IQ.
Also, for what it’s worth, I do think that Yanukovych made a mistake in not offering a referendum on the European Union versus Eurasian Union in late 2013. Not only might this have prevented his overthrow, but it would have also likely resulted in an acceptance of whatever result the referendum would have yielded–assuming that this referendum would not have been rigged, of course.
Yeah, the victorious Allies really did give Poland good borders after the end of WWI.
Also, do you think that Russia would have actually been able to afford the amount of money/investment that would have been necessary to raise Ukraine’s GDP per capita to Greece’s levels? After all, you say that the West might not have been able to afford this, but what about Russia?
Russia has an immense amount of land and resources, and has the potential to support a much larger population than intermarium (though it remains to be seen if they’ll solve their demographic crisis). Furthermore, Russia is a unified country and much more dominated by a single ethnic group than intermarium, which would inevitably have a power struggle between Poles and Ukrainians for dominance of it. It’s also inherited a lot of power from the Soviet Union. I really don’t see intermarium reaching any kind of parity with Russia. There’s a reason the PLC and the second republic both failed.
The future of the European Union is highly uncertain. It’s not clear if it will even exist in 20 years. In any case, it’s fairly unlikely that it will admit Ukraine anytime soon considering the huge financial cost that would incur on the core EU countries. You also have to consider that the EU is a bringer of poz and third world immigrants. Perhaps you care about those things or perhaps not, but the majority of Ukrainians certainly do. The game that Poland and other countries are playing of gobbling up EU gibs and integrating with its political structure but not getting on board with its social and cultural agenda does not seem sustainable.
lol
You know the Canadian show Orphan Black made the Ukrainian girl a feral beast. I guess even their biggest advocates see them as this.
It would depend on the specific circumstances.
Mitteleuropa would most likely be a customs union under a German military aegis.
The likely fall of the Hapsburg empire would both make Germany stronger through the absorption of Austria (Austria proper, modern-day Slovenia and the Austrian littoral) and possibly Bohemia (or if Bohemia got independence it would likely be run by German aristocrats) and would strengthen Prussian-style leadership.
The Ukraine (and other Ostmitteleuropan countries) might have benefited from being in a large economic zone, but in the short-term at least it is likely that most of the surplus profits would have accrued to Germans.
From the Soviet perspective perhaps.
From the UK-France perspective I would say their great error was their waffling foreign policy, being unable to decide what to do.
Of course, for France at least one can excuse them for their morally corrupt system which they tried to overthrow.
Why second rate?
Sure. Soviets disliked Russia. So?
The point was not genocide (though Russian rule did mean a dramatic worsening of serfdom) but a bunch of statues of foreigners left over from occupation. There is no need for a statue for a non-Ukrainian serving anon-Ukrainian government, built by another non-Ukrainian government, to be standing in front of a Ukrainian military academy. It is rather strange that someone would view the removal of such a statue as some kind of unexpected or wrong action.
Because Turkey was in decline and someone was going to fill the void. If not Russia, it would have been Poland-Lithuania. Or Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Zaporozhians were settling their lands before Russia snuffed put their pseudo-state. And plenty of Ukrainian blood had been spilled to keep the Turks and Tatars where they were in the first place.
It was based on the Ukrainian-inhabited guberniyas that formed the UNR that the Soviets were forced to recognize by the Germans. In the context of 1919 it was probably also a ploy to prevent full-scale resistance by the natives. The Germans in World War II would have been wise to have done a similar thing.
You realize that without Ukrainian participation in World War II the Germans would have won, right? IIRC 1/3 to 1/4 of the soldiers were Ukrainians. Ukraine got part of the spoils of the war it took part in. Not even foreign parts, but parts with a Ukrainian population.
You seem to believe the myth that somehow Ukraine just got some sort of unearned gift from Moscow that it should be grateful for.
Sure it does. And if the same school further decides to rename itself to somebody who more closely resembles somebody who embodies the Ukrainian national ideal than somebody that doesn’t, that’s their prerogative too. I don’t see why Ukrainians need to continue honoring foreigners that embody an imperialist past that they’d rather distance themselves from. It’s obvious that they don’t need to continue this charade, and have chosen to act upon their right not to do so.
Probably needlessly harsh, but I doubt he has a wide readership in Russia and there are many superior writers to make statues for (Russian and otherwise) that don’t happen to be Russophobes. No different from when the Soviets propped up Uzbek or Chechen poets that nobody remembers the names of.
I’m explaining to you the motivations between Shevchenko and why there’s cause for Russians to remove his statues (though I would oppose that).
He fought the Turks, reducing the threat of Islamic raids and violence against Ukrainians, and allowing the Russians to found many cities which are now inhabited by Ukrainians. There was relatively little Ukrainian national consciousness at the time, and Suvorov did oppress or damage the Ukrainian nation. The problem is that Ukrainians wish to completely disassociate their nation and its history from Russia, and you should not be surprised that people on a Russophile blog oppose this.
In the US there are statues and places named after British heroes like Jeffrey Amherst too who in service for their own country expanded and protected America. There is no outcry to remove them because America, despite its violent separation with Britain, does not base its identity on opposition to Britain (yes, the situation is different it’s a rough comparison).
Perhaps that’s true, but on the other hand a huge amount of lands that the Turks ought to have lost were not lost. Constantinople and Thracia, the Aegean coast, the Armenian highlands etc. I just don’t think it’s so self evident that history was determined in this way. At any rate, Suvorov and the Russians were the ones who actually made it happen.
Apologies if was unclear , the point is that Ukrainian nationalists did not establish the state of Ukraine, nor are they responsible for Ukraine being basically its maximum possible size (Kuban not included). Ukraine is undoubtedly a Soviet creation, though there were certainly predecessors. I don’t expect the Ukrainians to be grateful. In my opinion Russians should just unapologetically advocate for their own interest, it would piss people off less than “we saved you from the Nazis”. On the other hand, east Euros need to just get over it. 20th century was an awful century for everyone but Brits and Americans.
Was the PLC strong enough to conquer this territory from the Ottoman Turks?
Technically speaking, troops from the U.S., Britain, and/or the British Empire might have been able to replace those Ukrainian troops. Of course, this would have also meant a lot more casualties for the Western Allies.
It was pretty bad for the Brits as well, as evidenced by their extremely massive WWI casualties.
So no Spain, Canada, or for that matter in the 21st century France or UK either. Probably not even Germany. None of these places are a power on their own.
No more so than a place like Poland. So not really.
Visegrad is doing fine. It and its natural extensions Ukraine and Belarus are the most demographically European places in the world.
The previous attempts at integration with Russia have led to disaster for Ukraine. No thanks.
The best solution would be to rejoin the rest of eastern Europe and leave Russia to its own, hopefully wonderful, fate. The unnaturally long, and disastrous, 300 year long experiment didn’t work out.
If they sold their country out to the west they would have at least fixed corruption as the West wanted them too. The reality is that separation from Russia and reorientation towards the West is in both Ukraine’s and the West’s interests. Let me guess – you think in 1990 Poland, Czechoslovakia, Baltics etc. also sold their countries to the West? Like France in 1944-1945?
If Ukraine managed to get nukes without anyone knowing until it was too late, Russia wouldn’t be invading because Russians are not suicidal.
The window for an easy invasion was 2014, when Ukraine had pretty much no army and the government was very shaky. After that, even though Russia would ultimately win if it tried, it keeps getting more and more expensive and troublesome, and therefore less and less likely. Ukraine has a little over 1/4 of Russia’s population – this isn’t the USSR and Warsaw Pact allies invading and occupying Hungary or Czechoslovakia. An invasion on such a scale has not been attempted by anybody since the second world war.
PLC saved Europe from the Turks at Vienna. Eventually even Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks etc. were throwing the Turks out. It would have happened in southern Ukraine too. There was absolutely nothing magical about the Russian efforts there.
PLC was doomed long-term when the civil war of Ruthenian peasants and minor nobles against Ruthenian princes took a bad turn and the former group, unable to win on their own, got Moscow involved on their side. While the PLC still had some brilliant moments (there is much ruin in a nation), this tilted the balance of power enough to make it inevitable that Moscow would eventually eclipse the PLC.
Correct.
Ukrainians and Poles in their relationships are not where the French and Germans are, but gettng there and much closer than at any previous time. Lack of territorial pretensions does wonders. Naturally Russia is working hard to prevent this (as it should do, in its position) but most Ukrainians and Poles see through this.
Not parity, but close enough to it that it would be safe from Russian predation. I doubt Russia will invade an armed Ukraine with 1/4 its population – even more doubtful with respect to an Intermarium, with 80% Russia’s population. Once the Russian threat is eliminated, Intermarium will be free to have friendlier relations with Russia.
Deadly hostility between internal groups combined with a multifront war against external enemies. Neither condition exists now. Neither Ukrainians nor Poles hate each other any more, at worst there are squabbles over divisive figures like Bandera, and the West seems to be self-destructing and is in no position to invade anyone.
Recall that Poland and its Petliurite allies, without the Germans invading from the West, did stop the Bolshevik invasion into Europe.
Its been done for decades and Poland is not getting Westernized. In fact “anti-liberal” forces have been consolidating in Poland and Hungary.
At least svidomites are consistent, I’ll give them that. Russian political leaders are trying to merge Sovok with Imperial Russia instead.
The Polish elite are totally Americanized. Unless there’s some serious paradigmatic shift, Poland will be no different than Germany. Gay marriage is guaranteed in the next 10-15 years, and there’s already a trickle of 3rd world immigrants.
There’s no reason to think the Visegrad group can hold out indefinitely against overwhelming cultural and political pressure to abide by globohomo. If you start to see nationalist governments in the core European countries, then the situation will change but that’s far from certain or even likely.
The Russian Empire wasn’t particularly unpleasant for Ukrainians. Had the status quo continued, the Ukrainians would have assimilated just like Occitans or Bavarians. Without being subjected to disastrous communist rule and the subsequent collapse in the 90’s, there would be many more Orthodox Slavs, more prosperous and with a healthier culture and society to Ukraine today.
The Soviet Union was indeed a nightmare for Ukrainians, as it was for everyone. The Soviet Union was not Russia and Bolshevism was not a Russian project, which I know you know.
Ukraine is a bludgeon against Russia. That’s good enough for the west. The fact that Ukraine is dysfunctional is of little importance.
I’m not a sovok and I don’t fault anyone for escaping the communist nightmare. The circumstances between that and 2014 are simply not the same.
If
The Ukrainians sacrificed 5000 of their boys in a futile effort to capture a region which you yourself admit is degenerate and nothing but trouble for Ukraine. Russians can make sacrifices too, as history has demonstrated. Ukraine is more important to Russia than Donbass is for Ukraine.
Nobody can really predict what happen. The successor to Putin and the successor after him will be the critical factor. Russia is gradually getting more powerful, while simultaneously the west is getting more hostile to Russia and cornering it. Like it or not, Ukraine is on the forefront between any confrontation with the west, which is a bad place to be in.
History has no “ifs”. It is what it is. Life is irreversible. That’s the beauty of it. That’s also the bane of failures, like Ukraine.
It is worth noting that a surviving Russian Empire would have also had its fair share of Third Worlders at this point in time. Central Asians are probably better than Blacks but probably comparable to Mestizos.
Yep, and Ukraine has now drifted solidly out of Russia’s orbit.
That’s in part due to the Holocaust, though. Poland, for instance, had a 10% Jewish minority before WWII–which was comparable in size to France’s Muslim minority today (albeit with a much higher average IQ than France’s Muslims have).
You can think of it in these terms: Eastern Europe historically had mostly high-quality Semites while Western Europe is currently importing mostly low-quality Semites.
Ukraine has now drifted solidly into a cesspool. Russia should be happy that cesspool is not in its orbit.
The Ukrainian part in the biggest cesspool is the Donbass, though. Sucks for your relatives, no?
I wouldn’t call them ‘high-quality’. There is a reason both Jews and Gentiles historically distinguished between West- and Ostjuden.
Unless you mean by that – they like Trump, unlike Western European elites – than not really.
Poles look upon what is going on in Germany with disdain. When they visit Germany or work there they know what they don’t want for their own country.
Gay marriage is questionable but there will be no Muslims. Trickle of third worlders are relatively trouble-free Catholic Filipinos, and Nepalis. Poland is something like 99% European.
It meant expansion and worsening of serfdom, brain drain, loss of native institutions, etc. A disaster for everyone but those who moved to St. Petersburg to staff the imperial bureaucracies because as PLC people they were better educated and more worldly than the Russians.
A few generations later, long after Suvorov’s time, when peasants were liberated from serfdom and with Stolypin’s reforms, life became okay for the peasants. But after the brief respite – Communism.
And in the end, who is better off now? A Pole or a Ukrainian? That tells if if the anti-PLC rebellion was really worth it, or was a massive disaster.
Circumstances different but revolt and its nature visa vis the West was the same.
The real reason for the sacrifice – a sadly necessary one – was to stop the problems at Donbas and prevent them from spreading further. No pushback in Donbas would have meant trouble in Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk.
When attacked and threatened with destruction. Ukraine, even if it were to join NATO, doesn’t do that.
Again, you are discussing an invasion and occupation of a country with 1/4 of Russia’s population. Other than World War II nothing of this scale has been tried in recent history.
Because it started from practically zero in 2014, Ukraine’s improvement has had a steeper upward curve than has Russia’s.
In this scenario Ukraine gets massive funding and arms from the West. This would make the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine even more costly for Russia, and thus less likely.
He meant Semites-Jews versus Semites-Arabs.
You know what else was completely created by the Soviets? Ukraine, the state. These monkeys were literally given a state created by the Bolsheviks.
And look what they have done with it…
Are you sure that Ostjuden simply didn’t have as much opportunities as Westjuden did, though? After all, aren’t most US Jews of Ostjuden descent and yet do very well for themselves?
Yes; correct!
Indeed, I expect Western Europe to become more anti-Semitic as time goes on, but against Arabs rather than against Jews.
Jew-hatred was the old anti-Semitism whereas Arab (and Berber, and Somali, and Eritrean) hatred is the new anti-Semitism.
The Korean War and the Vietnam War both come to mind.
Are Filipinos and Nepalis as bright as Poles are, though? I mean, they’re certainly a lot less troublesome than Muslims and Africans are, but if they’re still duller than the natives are, they’re still going to be a net burden on their host country–I suppose similar to the situation with Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. or with Central Asians in a surviving Russian Empire.
To be fair, though, that was due to WWI. Had there been no WWI–or at least a shorter WWI–Russia might have been spared Communism (at least until the Great Depression would have hit, had that event still occurred).
I wasn’t just thinking about achievement, but their general behavior.
Eastern Jews were much cruder, often didn’t speak the local language, more politically radical, held greater hostility towards gentiles (and thus more willing to exploit them), and pursued more parallel societies.
One might respond that many of these factors arose due to hostility against Jews, but it doesn’t change the problem.
If people don’t care, why even dismantle the monument in the first place? Suvorov is person from a time before Ukrs even existed in nature. Ukrs behave like iconoclastic savages…
By the way, you know who cares? The Russians care. I know general Ukr doesn’t care about any of this. But the Russians see blatant Russophobia. It further estranges Ukraine’s lost territories. But we all know now that Ukraine’s demands for Crimea and ORDLO are but empty words, not backed by any real intent.
That’s a Soviet myth, wrong on many levels. The West didn’t wish for a war between Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s USSR. They wished for a peaceful coexistence with both. And they were willing to make concessions to Hitler (who arguably had some good points about Austria and the Sudeten being ethnically German), so long as Hitler could be believed to be reasonable.
But after Hitler occupied rump Czechia, which they didn’t think to be a reasonable demand, they decided not to allow Hitler anything more.
They actually went to war against Hitler when he attacked Poland. If their goal was a German-Soviet war, then it made zero sense. They should have cheered Hitler establishing a border and springboard to the USSR, and aided him in that. Or they should have pressured Poland into accepting the German demands, for Poland to become a German satellite.
It’s incredible that people repeat this Soviet propaganda point, decades after the dissolution of the USSR, even though it contradicts the simplest facts.
Don’t go full Jayman. Communism did lasting damage. (Of course it did it to Russia, too.)
First, it takes several decades of convergence to reach their potential, and it hasn’t happened yet. However, it’s accompanied by mass emigration, and based on foreign multinationals producing their GDP, so it’s going to be a vastly inferior thing, and perhaps never fully accomplished. (For all I know, the local middle class might relocate to Western Europe before it’s accomplished.)
Also millions were murdered under Stalin. How could it be irrelevant?
The Western powers wanted to give less. I think Churchill wanted to keep the Oder the German-Polish border, instead of the Oder-Neisse line, so he’d have kept over half of Silesia German.
It was much older and not growing.
“That’s a Soviet myth, wrong on many levels. The West didn’t wish for a war between Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s USSR. They wished for a peaceful coexistence with both.
It’s incredible that people repeat this Soviet propaganda point, decades after the dissolution of the USSR, even though it contradicts the simplest facts.”
Really?
Here is another evidence and very simple fact for you: behavior of the West during the Spanish Civil war. They tolerated Germany’s military (military!!) involvement on Franco’s side. Obviously, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were seen as useful tools at the time when suffocating the nascent Spanish People’s republic and thus stopping the spread of communism was seen as a priority.
Soviet Union’s was the only, as far as I am aware, government that tried to help the Spanish Republic and even proposed Western governments to join the effort which was, of course, declined for the reasons given above.
Again. Why did they go to war against Hitler in 1939? The way to the USSR leads through Poland, not Spain. The fact that they decided not to allow any further German conquest without war after the occupation of Bohemia, and that they then acted on that policy and declared war after the German attack on Poland contradicts this theory.
The Spanish Republic was a far left state, where priests were executed, so few people felt inclined to defend it against Franco. At the time Nazis had killed a few thousand people at most, while the Bolsheviks had killed millions. It was two bunch of savages killing each other, but the right wing savages seemed clearly preferable.
Totally unrelated, but I just stumbled upon a 2014 article on an LDPR deputy who submitted an inquiry into the possibility of painting the Moscow Kremlin walls white again, as they often were way back.
Then I found this rather convincing photoshop:
https://cs.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2013/07/27/0/1374870551_412683060.jpg
And I quite like it! Makes it look less like a medieval fortress (like the Novgorod Kremlin, or the Smolensk walls) and more like an epic Christian thing (съ нами богъ итд) like beautiful Rostov.
“It was two bunch of savages killing each other, but the right wing savages seemed clearly preferable.”
There you go. You just confirmed my argument.
“The Spanish Republic was a far left state, where priests were executed, so few people felt inclined to defend it against Franco.”
There were thousands of good will people throughout the world that volunteered in the International Brigades to help the Republic, including many well known artists and intellectuals.
“Again. Why did they go to war against Hitler in 1939?”
The real question is why they didn’t go to war against Soviet Union in 1939 as well? Obviously in 1939 they changed their mind and now, the left wing savages seemed clearly more preferable to the right wing ones.
Western governments were just playing the old British game of pitting European continental powers against each other.
Wasn’t Yekaterina the Great one?
AK: Yes, ofc. Mind must have wandered.
Ukraine doesn’t exist in order to maintain the status quo nor to appease the feelings of its former imperial minority. Ukraine is a new independent state and is finding its own national heroes, attributes and symbols. It doesn’t need to have these important cultural symbols dictated to it by its next door neighbor.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/Ivan_Bohun_vyvodyt%60_ljudey_na_herz%60.jpg/150px-Ivan_Bohun_vyvodyt%60_ljudey_na_herz%60.jpg
You seem to repeat Soviet propaganda points without much thinking.
There was no change in policy. The Western Powers explicitly demanded at Munich that Hitler should have no more territorial demands. When Hitler broke it in March 1939, the British responded by immediately issuing the guarantee to Poland. But they only issued it against an attack by Germany, for several reasons. One obvious reason is that they didn’t want to get into a war against two greater powers at the same time. The second is that they correctly assumed that if Germany was deterred, the USSR wouldn’t attack either. So it was enough to extend the guarantee against Germany, and they didn’t need further guarantees against further states to drag them into further wars. The third issue was that they understood the eastern Polish borders to be the result of a conquest, and they felt that some version of the Curzon Line would be a more justified border. They didn’t want to shed British blood to keep a Ukrainian population under Polish control.
It doesn’t mean that the (largely empty) promises made to Poland were morally spotless, but the British certainly didn’t want to instigate a war between Germany and the USSR. They wanted to deter the war. They wanted to avoid Germany and the USSR having a common border.
It has of course nothing to do with Spanish internal politics, it was a distraction. And it’s cute how you call a bunch of communists, other far left activists and sympathizers and fellow travelers “good willed people.” Anyway, the Western Powers were neutral in that conflict. The USSR intervened, too, and with a much larger force, and they didn’t care.
I’ve evacuated my mother via Russia to the US, so no worries there. My other relatives (and quite a few acquaintances) live in various parts of remaining Ukraine, from Kharkov region in the East, to Kiev in the middle, to Lvov in the West. I regularly communicate with them. That’s how I know that what remains of Ukraine is a hopeless cesspool. That’s exactly why many millions have moved to Russia and Poland to work. Every Ukrainian who has that choice chooses not to return to the cesspool. As one of the respondents in Kharkov told “svidomy” Ukrainian blogger, “what we have is civil war. We spread our legs for the US, but Donbass did not want to”. So, don’t worry about Donbass. They did not have an easy way to freedom, like Crimea, but they chose not to become a cesspool, either.
BTW it’s pretty simple why they didn’t want a war: one of the parties, either the Germans, or the Russians, could’ve and would’ve won such a war. As the Russian and subsequent German collapse in WW1 (and later the spectacular lack of a Soviet collapse in 1941-42, and the German fight to the last bullet in 1945) showed, it was difficult to predict an imminent collapse in a war, and so it would’ve been very difficult to calibrate the war to last long without a decisive victory on either side. And the British understood that whoever won such a war, he was bound to rule Europe between the Rhein and the Ural, and such a country would become a superpower very difficult to destroy or defeat. (By the way the British though that such a war would most likely be won by Germany.)
It was much better for them to have the two totalitarian powers posing against each other, with an intact Poland in between. It was also much better for the peoples of Germany, the USSR, Poland, and the rest of Europe and the world. If Hitler was just a little more risk-averse, it might’ve worked.
Explains the difficult post-1990 situation. There ought to have been a purge (not necessarily violent, exodus to Russia would have been fine).
OTOH, one can make the same argument that all of the post-Commie states including Poland in its current borders were created by the Soviets.
Neither Vietnam nor Korea had 1/4 of the US’s population.
The last time a Ukraine-less Russia went to war it was against Poland in 1920, and it got its ass kicked.
Obviously the current situation is different and one shouldn’t expect a “miracle on the Dnipro” (though who could have predicted a “Miracle on the Vistula”?) but the point is that this would be a more serious undertaking than some Russia fanboys here make it out to be.
No, but they are bright enough and crime-free enough that they are not a burden. I work with some Filipino nurses, they are hardworking and conscientious, very pleasant, not terribly bright but not incompetently dumb people. Don’t get me wrong, a flood of them would be bad, but even if there are twice or three times as many as there now it would still be less than 5% of the Polish population and not a real problem. There is always room for a few such people. If they were lazy, or dumb they would be a burden, but they are not these things. Also presumably Poland screens them for some type of competence, they aren’t laborers walking across the border. Maybe Poland has a nursing shortage that they fill.
*And frankly, back when Ukraine and Poland were united, Russia’s record against this entity was spotty at best.
For bringing down a cargo-cult Sovok monument, lol.
And especially Donbas.
Just a reminder: one of the respondents in Kharkov told “svidomy” Ukrainian blogger, “What we have is civil war. We spread our legs for the US, but Donbass did not want to”. So, don’t worry about Donbass. They did not have an easy way to freedom, like Crimea, but they chose not to become a cesspool, either.
Naturally a Sovok-“Ukrainian” would immediately reference prostitution. Sovok-land in Ukraine is the HIV capital of Europe, and the main supplier of prostitutes to Moscow and elsewhere.
You have strange definition of cesspool. Violent, bombed out cities, wages lower than even in Transcarpathian villages, etc. is not a cesspool.
Meanwhile here is “cesspool Lviv” in 2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWAobR8U0c
Sovoks have very peculiar tastes.
That’s the mildest way I ever saw this expressed. Britain and France declared war on Germany when it attacked Poland, and then heroically did nothing at all. Nada. Zilch. That war was rightly called in English “phony war”, in French “drôle de guerre” (joke of a war), in Polish a bit more politely “dziwna wojna” (strange war). It’s inventive to call it “not morally spotless”.
These events of the long-gone past are instructive, though: that’s exactly how NATO will heroically defend Poland if anyone attacks it. As Russia is highly unlikely to attack Poland, these would be attackers must be Martians.
If Lvov is so good, why aren’t you there claiming your slice of prosperity?
If I were a 5-year old, I’d take that video seriously. However, having seen similar videos of Calcutta, Nairobi, and other shitholes, I’d take it with a grain of salt (more like with a bag of salt). Happy faking, though: there are lots of people begging to be fooled. Some are so desperate that they even fool themselves.
Because my job pays much better here than there. Or in Moscow for that matter, where I could have easily settled but chose not to. But two of my cousins in different fields (one runs a tech outsourcing firm) returned to Lviv.
LOL. Honesty is hard for Sovoks.
Here is a walking video of Calcutta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxetycIW22A
Now Lviv again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDWAobR8U0c
Sovok can’t tell the difference 🙂
Ukrainians should go back to their home in Halych-Volhynia from where they all have come.
https://geomap.com.ua/images/uh8a/Maps/8_01.jpg
https://geomap.com.ua/images/uh8a/Maps/8_03.jpg
(Note, these maps are from a Ukrainian school atlas, so they admit it themselves they are colonists and occupants on much of the current Ukrainian territory.)
Lvov is eastern europe’s most notorious sex tourism hot spot.Plenty of rich Arabs and Turks go there to pick up young Ukrainian sugar babes, so Lvov is not much better than Donbass in that respect.
Look, the British did declare and eventually waged war (which was what they promised, they never said they were going to immediately launch an offensive against Germany).
It wasn’t some kind of sinister plan to do nothing, it was simply that they believed that merely promising in no uncertain terms to declare war would be enough to deter Hitler from attacking Poland. It was, of course, not enough, and hindsight is always 20/20, but if Hitler was a bit more risk-averse, they could’ve prevented war, and the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR would’ve lived in perpetual peace and harmony and both Hitler and Stalin would still be happy unless they died in the meantime…
Same thing with NATO: the US might not do initially anything, but I think eventually it’d do everything in its power to try to liberate Poland. But the purpose of Poland’s NATO membership is not to give it military protection, but to give it political protection: Russia (or anyone else) would not dare attack a NATO member. NATO’s main function is basically to deter war, not necessarily to wage it. (It now has some secondary functions in that it serves as some logistics hub for stupid US ME wars, but that’s another question.)
Lol. Last time simple rumors of russian units advancing to border were enough to make khokhol “army” run. Note, it was before Syrian demonstarion of various explosive stuff.
Great explanation. “Eventually” is the key word. Too bad it does not explain the terms used to describe that war in every language where that term exists: “phony war”, “drôle de guerre”, as well as “dziwna wojna”.
As for NATO, you are right that it is not meant to wage war, it has no capacity for that. It is bogged down in stone age Afghanistan, sitting tight in their heavily fortified bases with all their fancy expensive toys, while Taliban with medieval mentality and cheap Kalashnikovs roams the country freely. Latest maneuvers explain what the NATO is for: it is better than comedy club. Norwegians losing their most fancy very expensive military ship to their own stupidity is as funny as it gets. The viewers are grateful for a hearty laugh.
Lvov is an usually beautiful city in its historic areas, and once a great center of multinational European life, including intellectual life (e,g, Lvov school of mathematics). Likewise, Chernovtsy, Odessa, etc.
But to say it obviously, architectural beauty does not indicate its present economic or social level.
Buenos Aires has beautiful architecture too, but that does not put food in the fridge of its residents or indicate that life was easy there in e.g. 2002. Really, it says mostly about the level of the city in the years in which those beautiful buildings were constructed (and this level has sometimes changed radically).
We were discussing this last week:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/11-years-of-blogging/?highlight=lvov#comment-2764921
Nonsense. Even that Matt Foley guy admitted it, he said in Lviv the most you will get on a first date is a kiss, unlike in Hungary.
The region has the lowest HIV rate in Ukraine, not an indicator of sex tourism. Donbas has the highest HIV rate among European people.
Yet they are rarely seen in Lviv’s streets. As is evident from the video.
I only know one Turkish sex tourist, a classmate at an American university. When he was young he and his friends went to Saratov and Volgograd, where one of their relatives’ company was doing construction work. They had a good time.
Of course. Pay attention to quality and number of Lviv’s cafes and shops in the video as the guy walks around the city for an hour, how people are dressed, cars they drive, etc. It is not a beautiful but empty and crumbling museum-city, as it was in the early 1990s. Actually it gets better every year, like Moscow gets better every year.
Now compare to Calcutta – garbage, half-naked kids, poorly dressed people, crumbling. Sovoks can’t tell the difference.
On the nominal figures, average salary for Lvov area seems around $300-$350 per month. We need to talk to someone living there.
But I guess not that far from the range with nominal salaries in Chelyabinsk, which are averagely around $450 per month. But nobody in Chelyabinsk would speak happily with the average salary level there (and some salaries are just really lower than that when you look at the job advertisements).
Found it, Matt Forney, the professional sex tourist:
https://mattforney.com/dating-ukrainian-women/
In many ways, Ukraine reminds me of the Philippines, and Lviv reminded me of Davao in particular: an extremely conservative city full of approachable, cute girls who make you wait. If you’re expecting one-night stands, prepare to be disappointed, because you likely won’t be getting any action until date number three at the earliest.
The only girls who will sleep with you on the first night are prostitutes.
Yes, this goes for Tinder, too, at least in Lviv. In Hungary and America, you go on Tinder to find a girl who will sleep with you on the first date. In Ukraine, you go on Tinder to find a girl who will kiss you on the first date (more on that later).
I like to come back to this comment by Peter Akuleyev:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/im-shocked-shocked-to-hear/?highlight=lviv#comment-757678
The Western Ukrainians are like Poles. Even despite decades of outright Soviet neglect and outright antagonism the level of culture in a place like Lwow (Lviv) far outstrips anything in Donetsk. I’ve spent significant time in both cities. Lwow felt like a Western city occupied by a foreign power. The people are fantastic, in a true conservative sense. They value their history, their land, their crafts, and they are a self-sufficient people. Donetsk is completely Soviet – deracinated, crappy industries, corrupt and crime ridden, and full of people who would emigrate to the West in a heart beat if they could. Even before the fighting Donetsk was a basket case like every other Russian and East Ukrainian city. If you want to get laid, go to Donetsk. The women have no morals, prostituting yourself is just what women do. In Lwow people still get married and value families. That alone explains why so many in the “manosphere” side with East Ukraine.
There used to be a guy from Lviv posting here:
https://www.unz.com/comments/all/?commenterfilter=Pavel
They posted about him earlier – he is American and also unusually ugly, so his views doesn’t necessarily represent average dating experience of the area.
I wonder if girls are meeting with him to see if he has money or to practice their English.
Denikin and the Whites at large left that question as an open matter to be resolved in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War. In the meantime (during that conflict), Denikin treated the Galician Ukrainians as a separate (though Rus related entity), which had agreed to come under his general command – something by itself which isn’t imperialistic, as evidenced by the Allied WW II command structure on the Western Front.
At the time the Galician Ukrainians had mixed views on linking with Russia in a hypothetical defeat of the Bolshes. Pilsudski greatly contributed to the White-Galician Ukrainian alliance.
On your last point, the Ukrainians of that period weren’t so fond of Poland. Petliura made his alliance with Poland because he himself had a limited following among Ukrainians. He received Polish support in exchange for his agreeing that all of Galicia would go to Poland. Meantime, across the left-right political spectrum there was a noticeable number of Ukrainians who favored some form of togetherness with Russia.
I have personally a friend from Odessa (although he is not living there now, just his parents).
The problem I heard directly was there is a very obvious inflation (so that prices are higher every time they visit).
The interesting thing, though, is that in the later years of the USSR, Soviet Jews were often extremely willing to marry Gentiles. Indeed, the intermarriage rate in the late USSR and afterwards was extremely high. Indeed, my own paternal grandfather was one such Jew.
This doesn’t sound like Jews in the late Soviet era had a hatred for Gentiles.
No myth. Among others, Truman was on record for saying such. It’s quite reasonable to surmise that Czechoslovakia was sacrificed because (although a democracy) it had good relations with the USSR. In point of act, the West (notably France) refused the Soviet offer to protect Czechoslovakia as the USSR was left out of the Munich process which (with Western consent) sacrificed Czechoslovak interests.
You are right. Nominally my cousin and his wife live in Lvov. However, he is working in Russia and spent in Lvov maybe 2-3 weeks in the last 15 years. He is a highly qualified foreman, works in the Russian Far East, and makes more money than any honest Ukrainian can even dream of. She is not spending more than a month per year in Lvov, either. She is helping her son from a previous marriage taking care of his kids in Israel and helping their common son and his wife in the Netherlands. After my aunt moved to Kiev to my other cousin (she is 94), I don’t have direct info from that area.
A word of caution about statistics, though: what really tells you about people’s living standards is the median salary (half gets less, the other half more), not average salary. Averages are deceptive: if you average Bill Gates or Sechin with a lot of regular people, that’d appear filthy rich.
Poland had greater value in the West than the more Soviet friendly Czechoslovakia. By the time of the Nazi march on Poland, it became clearer what the Nazis were about.
In any event, nothing of actual substance was initially done to defend Poland. Hence the term phony war. The Brits only really started to fight the Nazis when the former came under direct attack from the latter.
Once again ignoring how some in Ukraine (not Russia) feel about the matter which is much different from the Svidos. Like honoring Bandera is a noble route to take. Ditto those collaborating with Polish imperial designs.
I don’t know, I actually liked Kolkata. There is a certain vivacity and vibrancy amidst minor dereliction that strongly reminds one of the Mediterranean. (Saying that as someone who has not been to India). There are traces of Third Worldism there, there seem to be destitute beggars quite often, and much more manual labor, but the improvements relative to classic stereotypes about India are massive.
Wrong for two reasons.
Ukraine-less Russia went to war in 2008 and won.
The Bolshes attacked Poland, following the initial Polish attack on the former Russian Empire. At the time, there was still a war between the Bolshes and Russian Whites. Following the Bolshe attack that you bring up, the Poles decided to finally give some support to the Whites.
As has been discussed at this and some other venues, the Bolshes did a number of anti-Russian acts. All of this explains why contemporary Russia (Putin included) has greater sympathy for the Whites and less for the Bolshes of that period. (On more than once occasion, Putin has spoken negatively of Lenin.)
Overall, history seems to show that Russia less Ukraine hasn’t done so well.
Galicians had a very poor reputation in Crimea. Their tourists tended to arrive for short vacations in their cars loaded up with vodka and salo (avoiding patronizing local establishments), littered the beaches, then went back home.
Conservatives they are but not in the polite, well-behaved way white American conservatives are.
Another one of your misrepresentations. The monument in question was taken down because it honors one of the greatest generals who fought for Russia.
Upon review, I’m sure there’s a Soviet era honoring in Ukraine of some past Ukrainian figures who the Svidos like. Have these monuments, paintings or whatever been destroyed?
If I recall the data, in Ukraine (where Jews had the highest intermarriage in the world of the early 20th century) around 25% or 30% (can’t remember number exactly from article I read) of Jews were intermarrying with non-Jews already in the 1920s.
Obviously, in later times the rate was almost dissolving them (over 80% of Jews of Moscow intermarrying in the 1980s).
You make them sound sympathetic. 🙂 But yes, they are our people
While, Poles are another different and independent people, which have their own independent culture, personality, sense of humour, bodylanguage, worldview etc.
Salo and vodka – not a bad combination.
It’s true median is a better measurement.
Also add though that a lot of richer people will never be known by the government or included (or reported) , so the average data for Ukraine might not be overestimating incomes.
Ukraine (also Belarus) seems to have a lot more rich people abroad, than is ever described even by journalists.
Really, a lot of people are leaving from there.
Since my article about Lviv got linked here, some added comments (since that post is two years old now):
Lviv is getting flooded with foreigners, particularly in the summer. There are a handful of Turks, Arabs etc., but the city’s turning into another stop on the Euro backpacker circuit due to its proximity to Poland, the continued collapse of the hryvnia, a new high-speed train from Przemyśl to Kiev, a higher quality of life than most Ukrainian cities, and overly favorable visa policies (in contrast to the E.U. and Russia, Ukraine lets anyone in). My friend from Kiev was there a few months ago and said it “was so full of old Jews” that it reminded him of Florida.
Not only that, Lviv is now getting flooded with Polish PUAs. I’m not making this up. Poles treat western Ukraine the way Australians treat Thailand or Brits treat Budapest or Prague: a cheap place where they can run around getting drunk, being stupid, and hitting on everything with long hair. (Meanwhile, American men go to Warsaw and Krakow to sleep with Polish women. Where will the Ukrainian men go? Transnistria?)
Ukraine was always hostile to casual sex culture—Roosh wrote about this when he first went there back in 2011-2012—but the one-two punch of increasing sex tourism (thanks to, again, low cost of living and favorable visa policy) and technological improvements that inhibit male-female relationships (Tinder, social media, Internet porn etc.) makes meeting women there increasingly like pulling teeth, unless you’re a Turk/Arab with no qualms about sponsoring girls.
The average Ukrainian girl is a knockout by Western standards, though, so some men may find running this gauntlet worth it. Contrast to Poland/Hungary, where women are getting more frigid at the same time they’re getting fat and slovenly, and in the case of Poland, they weren’t that great looking to begin with. My Ukrainian ex was average by local standards but a supermodel by American standards.
Lviv is probably the best place to live in Ukraine in terms of quality of life (the only other city I’ve been to is Mukachevo, so I’m not the best judge), but that’s like saying the First Circle of Hell is the best one to get condemned to. You could do worse, though, like shudder Serbia.
In November 2018 compared to the previous year prices in Lviv rose 9% but wages rose 12%.
In November 2017 prices in Lviv rose 12% but wages rose 24%.
http://www.lv.ukrstat.gov.ua/
So wages are still going ahead of prices but it is becoming more even.
These videos are enjoyable to watch a bit. (I also have not been in India)
Mumbai looks a little charming also.
The thing which might be annoying to visit there, is too many cars and chaotic traffic (and gases from the cars). They would probably benefit a lot from Waymo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAzJPlXz0HE
So very few Middle Easterners in Lviv.
Correct, although unlike Poland or Ukraine, Georgia is tiny.
Poles were invited in by a state that the Soviets themselves recognized.
When eastern Galicia was part of Austria its per capita GRP was the same as that of Slovakia and higher than the GDPs of Russia, Portugal, Greece, Serbia, etc.
When the Soviets captured Lviv, which was not rich by Western standards, they were in a rich wonderland by their own impoverished standards. Not knowing what they were stealing, Soviet officers’ wives would wear nightgowns to the theater.
It is a very bad combination. Not only is eating pork ethically questionable, but salo itself is simply disgusting. As is vodka.
Somewhat on par with the Soviets being invited into Afghanistan by Babrak Karmal, who replaced someone deemed as less pro-Soviet.
There was another part of the former Russian Empire where Poland had intervened.
Using your frequent so what? Yeah the Soviets were screw ups. They mishandled Galicia.
Many former Soviets I know prefer pizza and beer, which I’m about to enjoy.
Your flimsy attempts to equate everything Ukrainian with Bandera are pathetic, and really quite unimaginative. Democracies in the world today operate not to placate the few Mickey, but to implement the will of the many. ‘Some in Ukraine’ will never trump the ‘many in Ukraine’ – get used to it Mickey, for this trend will only continue.
I’m still searching to see the outcry of disgust by the many in Ukraine, over the change in name and physical attributes of the military school. No demonstrations, nobody crying in the streets?….really, not even a whimper.
Well apart from this disgusting act with Suvorov ( and many other similar things) , this piece of ultra-retard behavior from the “Mayor” of Kiev is the ultimate proof:
https://life.ru/t/%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8/1188522/s_trietiegho_raza_klichko_na_forumie_v_davosie_nie_smogh_skazat_slovo_dighitalizatsiia
He’s well known for being braindead and heading one of the world’s most failing cities…but this video in the link takes svidomy into the realms of “high art”
He can’t say the word “digitalisation”, he seems to even struggle with the first syllable (it might be less embarassing if he was at least messing this up at the time of the 4th or 5th syllable)…worse than that the title of the meeting is about digitalisation……..so WTF why is this idiot being putup to be commiting another faux pas is a mystery…and the latest farce in Baderastan
Of course for this German, Kitschko, it’s entirely possible that because “Ukrainian” language is no such thing, and everything Russia greco-romanises or Anglicises in it’s language then “Ukrainian” does…it’s probable that svidomy simply has no concept of the word “digitalisation” or “digitalisatsiya”….and could only think of using something like tsifrovaya and derivatives from that
Russia is more democratic than Ukraine, in fact Russia is democratic, Ukraine isn’t.
Ukraine is just 95% Russia, a small bit of Poland….and everything else the “Ukrainian” is just Bandera or Bandera-compliant you dumb prick
That’s because real Ukrainians (i.e Russians) are too busy struggling, and I mean really struggling you cretin, to pay their water, electricity, gas, using petrol, getting a decent payed job, getting decent health treatment and medication…….to be protesting on the streets, or be paid by Soros to stand for 3 months in Kiev to stand around like fucktards ( with guns, knives, Molotov cocktails and so on)……as these scumbags did at Maidan
You would love this video…..it’s similar to videos of you trying to tie your shoelaces or figure out parallax or try not get to attracted to 5 year old boys in palliative-care.
Ukropia in it’s entirety summed up in that video , it must be said
AK: No doxxing threats, even indirect ones. First and last warning.
But Bandera has been honored in a way that includes postage stamps. That polls show limited support for him in Ukraine reveals the disproportionate Svido influence as evidenced by an instance like the aforementioned postage stamp.
Svidos like yourself don’t acknowledge the general acceptance of modern civilized countries which respect (not disrespect) the reasoned preferences of a significant portion of the population – whether in the majority or not.
Don’t try to change the topic at hand which is about the name change and change of school mascot for the Ivan Bohun Military High School in Kyiv. The name was changed and updated in 1998. The statue of Suvorov was recently removed, and a group of Suvorov enthusiasts in Moscow has expressed and interest to buy it. It looks like a win-win situation for all. Why all of the butthurt, when few if any Suvorov fans exist in Ukraine? The majority of Ukrainians and Kyivans don’t seem to care if they loose this remnant of their Russian imperial past. Certainly by now, after 20 years of the name change somebody in Kyiv would have expressed some concern?
The stalker tries to keep track of my posts. Has nothing better to do.
Sounds like an implicit threat. Is this permitted?
AK: No, it’s isn’t. Initially, I saw it was the usual rant and hid it behind the more tag without reading, as I am accustomed to do.
I’ve heard that Ukrainians were the ones murdering civilians at Praga because Suvorov could not control them. It is true that Ukrainians did not respect him, but it is something they should be ashamed of. It is better to keep his statue as a reminder.
Well if you want to feel better, you come come spend money in Finland where people have figured out that everything connected to Suvorov makes a potential trap to lure St Petersburgians and it’s all being “restored” with gift shops and other such respectful things. Like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suvorov_military_canals
Come see ditches, hear a Finnish tourist guide tell you that Suvorov was actually really Finnish and pay 10 euros for beer.
And yet the Vietnamese were still able to defeat the U.S.
Put nicely, Bohun was quite a shifty sort. From Wiki:
Nowhere near Suvorov’s stature.
Salo (szalonna in Hungarian) is great and very healthy food, contains no carbs at all. It’s also pretty ethical to eat, since pigs are animals, not closely related to us, and they’d die out without issue if we stopped eating them, so it serves their genetic interests to keep them around. (Good) vodka is probably the best alcoholic drink (maybe together with red wine), because it’s the cleanest, almost just water and alcohol. (Though most other hard spirits are good, too, if a bit less.) Beer, for example, is full of carbs and phytoestrogenic stuff, so doubleplus ungood.
The initial argument was that the West wanted Hitler to attack the USSR. But it turns out that the West only sacrificed Czechoslovakia on condition of no more German expansion, precluding the creation of a Soviet-German border (or Poland becoming a German satellite) without going to war in the West. The West stuck to this policy and went to war with Germany. The Phoney War (usually the British spelling is used even in America when referring to it) didn’t mean that Germany could easily attack the USSR with the BEF and the French Army being amassed in France.
In other words, it’s pretty obvious that there never was a Western plan to instigate a war between the USSR and the Third Reich.
The ideal outcome for the Western powers was the Third Reich and the USSR threatening each other without actually going to war. This, actually, would’ve been the ideal outcome for the respective peoples as well as the rest of the world.
I have read it in a communist era Hungarian popular history book for teenagers, where they wrote he was then a senator. (I.e. no actual policy-making role.) Can you find an English language source for this? I couldn’t find any.
Anyway, it’s no proof of actual British and French policy, and irreconcilably contradicts what these countries actually did.
The important thing for you Mickey, is that he always fought against the Poles in Ukraine and although at first being ‘misguided’ and not seeing the true ‘Holy Rus’ light, he ended his career fighting with the treacherous Moskals against Vyhovsky and his pro-Polish supporters. A ‘repentant’ Ukrainian who finally recognized who his true friends and masters were! What could be better for a symbol of ‘Little Russianess? (You, along with all of the Russophiles here should be elated at this turn of events!). 🙂
I’ve a book from a US academic that quotes him saying such. I’ll provide further info when I’m at the locale where that book is. From a Machiavellian anti-Nazi/anti-Soviet view that stance makes some sense. It wasn’t an official policy – but otherwise close enough to reasonably surmise as something that was positively taken into consideration.
The record clearly shows that the USSR was shutout of Munich as Czech interests were sacrificed in favor of the Nazis – never minding an understanding that the French and Soviets would jointly protect Czechoslovak sovereignty – something that France backed out of at Munich. Shortly thereafter, the Poles and Hungarians took parts of Czechoslovak territory.
However, pigs have the intelligence of dogs, and we (correctly) look down upon the Chinese and Koreans for eating our canine friends. It is intuitive, and there is good evidence to the effect of, that capacity for suffering is correlated with intelligence. It would be ethical to let domesticated pigs die out. There’ll be no major damage to their genetic interests because there’s plenty of wild pigs.
I really just dislike the taste of vodka. I like beer, though I agree, of course, that it’s very bad. I love dry red wines, cognac, and single malts.
That is very silly reasoning. No war was declared, or even thought of being declared against the Soviet Union for getting what was rightfully theirs ( at very low cost) from Poland…but was declared on Germany.
“wished for peaceful coexistence” with the USSR ….yet didn’t recogonise it’s existence until 1933, after some extortion and their own financial crisis, not to mention their moves during the Finnish Civil war and Winter War.
If anything, the immediate decline of relations from 1946 onwards proves the point
err..no. I’m not threatening this inbred r+tard or inciting anybody to do reveal this nutjob’s identity ( waste of time)…I’m merely stating the obvious…that if he didn’t hide behind his anonymity , then I’m taking an educated guess, that he would kill him/itself out of shame. I want the warning rescinded and a round of applause organised instead.
I go away for 20 hours and this whackjob has done about 200 comments….from your point of view, as a blogger, you want more comments, which this attention-whore provides with the inane, stupidity and repetitiveness elements…..but I want to read excellent minds like Jon Hellevig, Martyanov, Patrick Armstrong, Cyrano,Thorfinnson, Glossy, Serge Krieger, and others..intellectually stimulating…….not this dumb ,insiduous, scumbag troll vermin fantasist. Is there a link between this inbred spamming the thread and them thinking, that whilst the argument is dumb and easy to disprove, it would be better to do something else?
It’s clear (educated guess, but also read it) this nutjob stalks pro-Russian blogs 24/7 because it has got absolutely nothing to do in it’s amoebic existence, most of these blogs just laugh at and or block this freak……it should be banned for a month where (again not incitement) but educated guess, it might then kill itself because nothing else to do..or if it still doesn’t do that….limit this vermin to 3 comments a post or something.
Take this example…. if I know for a fact that Donetsk wages are bigger, have been increasing more, are significantly more than anything in Lvov for this year alone or all the years….but I can read this excrement arguing to the contrary ( with amakingly fake BS videos on it’s garbage appearance and functionality), even in spite of the fact wages are something like 12% BELOW national average in Lvov…then I should be able to reply how I see appropriate.
…of the freaks fantasist lies on the embrassing issue of Kiev’s hotmater not available for 7 months..suddently fake-newsed by this dipshit into only “affecting 300 homes”!!! ( real number 1.1 million people)..then think that this bored out of it’s mind retard could then carry on arguing with moronism this invented fact for 3 days with about 15 different bloggers.
It it simply a disgrace
I posted this before, but the difference between pigs and dogs is that dogs were bred to be our servants and friends. They have evolved to read our emotions better than do any other animals, will die to defend us, and when hurt will instinctively go to us for help (at the vets recently I noticed that after getting pricked by a needle my dog immediately looked to the vet who pricked her for reassurance). Thus, killing and eating dogs is:
These conditions do not apply to pigs. Their deal is to be fed and saved from predators in exchange for being eaten.
Eating dogs is only acceptable under circumstances such as when starving in the Arctic. In that case the dog fulfills its mission of service, by saving its owner’s life.
Pigs’ high intelligence is a legitimate argument for treating them humanely and providing them with stimulation, as would occur on a traditional family farm; subjecting animals as intelligent as pigs to the conditions of factory farming is indeed cruel and immoral. But simply raising them for meat is okay, IMHO.
Do East Asians specifically breed dogs for eating/consumption, though?
They often catch strays or even pets and bring them to market.
That doesn’t seem right.
Of course, I might still be willing to eat their dog meat if they’ll let me. I mean, I wouldn’t call these types of dogs myself, but if they’re going to be killed anyway, I might be willing to try their meat if I will ever go to East Asia.
Excellent summary and analysis, AP!
I agree with AP’s reasoning here. Eating dogs (and to a smaller extent horses and even cats) is in bad taste. Pigs… that’s what they were bred for.
And pork is a very healthy and wholesome meat, for everyday consumption I prefer it over more noble meats like mutton or beef, which suit bigger occasions better.
AP made the distinction between factory farmed pork and pigs that were raised in a more natural setting. While it’s pretty easy to find grass-fed beef and mutton, their equivalent in pork is almost impossible to source consistently. Perhaps the situation is different where you live, but I assume that anywhere in the world you consume pork, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be factory farm raised.
Eventually, we all decide on an individual basis, and for various reasons, who belongs within our circles of empathy.
Well, it looks like we simply have a clash of values, then.
I see few issues with eating horses (just as I see few issues with eating cattle, on account of both being very dull, though still brighter than chickens) and none with eating rabbits (extremely dull).
Not that your considerations don’t entirely apply – I still think eating dogs is a lot worse than pigs – but the former arguments take precedence, for me. And I think eating beef is less bad than eating horsemeat (though I consider eating horse meat to be much less bad than eating pork).
This is despite the fact that I rather like horses, having ridden them quite a few times in my childhood and open to starting up against if/when I have more money.
However, I do support humane farming for chickens and cattle, and, needless to say, for pigs, so long as they remain on the table. I think fish are basically automatons so there’s no need to bother, in their case.
Argument does not make sense.
I can also say “dogs were bred for me to eat them”, because it’s just a subjective opinion which animals are “bred for” (there’s no independent existence to this feature of “breeding for”, beyond an idea in the mind – and that idea can change whenever you feel like it).
It’s not subjective. It’s generally understood that dogs and humans came together when wolves joined humans as guardians, help as hunters, in exchange for food. They were bred traits such as obedience, sensitivity to human emotions, etc. that one would expect from a companion/servant.
OTOH, pigs or cows came under human control for eating purposes. They were bred traits that made them slower, less aggressive, and with more edible meat – as one would expect from a food source.
It’s still subjective. We can divide some animals for eating and others for being pets. We might even maintain this division for many generations.
But then a Korean will come, and not understand the labels, and decide the ones for being pets are for eating, and that dogs have only become more delicious by humans breeding them.*
Who can say the Korean wrong? The animals themselves will not know the difference and the view of the humans is dependent on their nationality.
Sure, the dog will be unhappily surprised when humans kill them But do you think the lambs think, to the extent it can think, are less surprised when the nice farmers who had been feeding them all these years, then send them to be killed?
Distinctions about “purpose of animals” are subjective, human inventions.
Karlin’s argument proposes a more objective reason for dividing animal purposes – that intelligent animals suffer more, and we should limit suffering.
However, is this actually true (intelligent animals suffer more?). The moral problem is that animals have consciousness and some sense that they don’t want to be killed.
Probably the most rational is the Buddhist view towards this – not to kill any animals. On the other hand, meat is too nice and natural for us, to live as vegetarians.
(Eventually biotechnology will solve our morality, when animal tissue will be easily produced in vats).
–
*Some people reversed the other and have pet pigs…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ9SwMIft8w
The historical events, purposes and resulting traits and abilities in the animals are not subjective, however.
Sure, and someone can decide that he likes to eat paper, this not mean that paper’s status as food or not food is subjective. It means that there are wierd people out there.
Animals are not able to formulate concepts such as honor or perversity, natural or unnatural. But this is irrelevant to the point.
The dog would probably be more surprised when a human kills him than would a sheep, for the same reason that a cub would be surprised if its mother kills it versus if a hyena or some other lioness kills it. Dogs have been programmed, in accordance with their purpose, to view humans as their friends and leaders. Sheep have not.
Not sure what is rational or irrational about this.
E.g., to take the logical extreme case – what causes more pain? Killing 10,000 shrimp, or one human? (leaving aside for the moment any speciest bias)
For that matter, actually yes, there is some scientific evidence for that:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/834425048823889922
Inferring the purposes of animals, is subjective.
A dog might be useful for one person as a pet. For another it is more useful as a meal. The same for a lamb or a sheep.
What decides this purpose, is intention in a person’s mind, which is probably conditioned by their culture.
In many societies, human beings were even believed to have a “purpose” as a slave, or in some Pacific Islands – a meal.
These human beings have no intrinsic purpose to be a slave or a meal. This was just their misfortune that other people subjectively thought like this.
Kant’s ethical principle here is that people should not be viewed as having purposes, but as being goals for themselves.
A question is whether we should extend to animals or not.
Paper is not edible. A dog, pig, lamb – are biologically and chemically more or less identical, as are their nutritional properties, which makes them edible.
Meat from a dog is more or less the same arrangement of protein and fat as from any other large mammal. Paper is very different.
Determining which type of animal to eat is arbitrary result of culture in which you were born.
A Korean and Chinese person will think eating dogs is normal. An American will think it’s bad.
A Muslim, Jew and Christian will think eating cows is normal. A Hindu will think it’s not.
A Christian will think eating pigs is normal. A Jew and Muslim will not.
A sheep is fed by the farmer every day. It will assume you are its friend, until it’s killed.
By the way, brains of all these mammals are very similar.
Sheep are now seen as probably more intelligent than dogs.
The main question to decide is if killing animals for food is immoral or not. Most of us accept it as a necessary evil if we are going to enjoy a delicious meal.
Distinguishing between morality of killing different types animals who have almost the same consciousness, feel same pain, have more or less same neurology, (are basically from the same family), doesn’t make much sense.
Considerations where we would distinguish more (in killing animals for food) between what animals people can eat, would be in people who want to eat endangered animals, or who want to kill the animals for food in a way which does not minimize pain (for example, Chinese eating live animals).
I don’t disagree. But I feel more fundamental question is much more simply whether there is consciousness “trapped in” with the neurology of the shrimp or not.
Scientifically, we don’t understand what the preconditions for consciousness are, although intuitively we know from our own experience what it is, and that this (first personal perspective) is the most important thing.
A shrimp might (probably) have no “thoughts”, but it could still be as conscious as we are but unthinkingly.
In this case, it won’t have the same “unpleasant thoughts” we have. But it could nonetheless experience pain and other unpleasant sensations (pain can occur if you can think or not).
There is an easier to answer question of how consciousness – if it is trapped in a shrimp – would be evolutionarily wired to its body. For example, we can infer that many invertebrates don’t experience pain in the same way we do, from their lack of “pain response” reactions.
So they could be consciousness, but without evolutionary needed to be wired to experience pain (just as we are sure they don’t really think). .
My language sounds a bit dualistic, but I think reality could be dualistic (consciousness being trapped by biological systems for its evolutionary usefulness in a way we don’t understand).
That’s nice but there was much more to my comment.
No more so than inferring the purpose of a hammer.
And for some person a hammer may be useful as a decorative item. But it’s purpose is as a tool. That’s what it was designed to do it has features for this purpose.
Dogs were designed by people to be servants and companions. As a result, they have certain traits such as ability to read human emotions and seeking humans for comfort that other animals such as sheep do not have.
As would be meat from one’s own child. But it would be unnatural to consume one’s own child. This is not a subjective view.
A sheep will assume you are a safe source of food. It does not consider you its friend. It cannot read your emotions, and will not seek you for emotional comfort, as a dog does. Dogs are unique in this (they can read human emotions even better than chimps can). They are team-mates, servants, companions of people by their very nature. Eating them is to misuse them. Doing so systematically is an act of perversity, performed by decadent or degenerate people.
You are mistaken. Among non-primates, whales or elephants only raccoons have as many neurons as do dogs. Interestingly, bears have no more than do cats:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.00118/full
Hammer doesn’t have a purpose outside the mind. Objectively, it is dead wood and metal.
If people decide it’s a decorative item, then is a decorative item (from their viewpoint).
Did you ever play chess, or another board game, and realize you were without a piece in the set? Well then you say this marble or pencil sharper will be the “knight” or “pawn”.
The marble is not less “knight” than the original piece of painted wood which was lost from the set, to the extent that people see its purpose as “knight”. The purpose is only in your and your partner’s mind, not an objective quality of the object.
When it is used in relation to humans, the sin is to attribute “purposes” to them (to say “this person is not a goal for itself”). And the moral question is whether we should say the same of animals.
Eating your children would be unnatural. Eating different types of animals is not unnatural – humans have been eating them as long as they have been humans.
In Europe, Poles and French historically eat dog meat until the 20th century. Uzbeks, Chinese, Koreans, etc, still eat dogs.
They followed the same evolutionary path as all mammals, and their breeding and selection patterns changed after encountering humans resulting in superficial changes. They were not designed and are genetically almost identical to wolves. What happens is that people select and favour ones with certain traits (colours, dispositions, etc) so that those became more numerous. It’s just a question of frequency.
In terms of genetic distance, dogs just a subspecies of wolf (there’s no real biological difference to a wolf).
Moreover, humans have been eating dogs in many societies, as long as dogs have existed.
And sheep also have certain traits…
“The results show that the (sheeps’) face-recognition abilities are similar to those of monkeys, apes – and humans.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41905652
This idea about sheep is probably speculative.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1356069/Sheep-intelligent-make-executive-decisions.html
In your opinion. For another person, eating a sheep is to misuse them. The girl above with a pet pig, might believe eating pigs is to misuse them.
I have relatives who in the countryside, have some dogs attached to their buildings (using them as an alarm system, not as a pet).
This is kind of primitive way to use animals. But historically, it was and to an extent still is common use of dogs.
In your view, and this is a normal view for people in your culture. On the other hand, a Korean, Chinese, Uzbek, person, and historically Poles and French, will find eating dogs quite normal.
You probably eat cows. While a Hindu will say you are a degenerate for this. You might eat a pig, and the Jews and Muslims will call you degenerate.
Dog intelligence “not exceptional in context of similar species.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327853585_In_what_sense_are_dogs_special_Canine_cognition_in_comparative_context
This seems a quite interesting article (as an attempt in “animal psychometrics”).
They argue dogs are exceptional as the only animal to intersect three animal groups – carnivores, social hunters, and domestic animals.
With tasks relevant each group, they are not exceptional or the highest achieving cognitively. But they are exceptional to be the only animal to go across all three groups, and therefore include different cognitive types.
Conclusion:
“Dog cognition looks quite a lot like that of other carnivorans, especially other closely related carnivorans; but it also looks somewhat like that of unrelated social hunters, and at least some unrelated domestic animals.In the present state of our knowledge, we are led to a simple conclusion: When a broad-enough set of comparison species is considered, there is no current case for canine exceptionalism. Dog cognition is, no doubt,unique, because the cognition of every species is unique. Dogs exist at a particular intersection of phylogenetic, ecological, and anthropogenic circumstances (see Fig. 1). But on the basis of the evidence we have reviewed here, those circumstances are sufficient to account for the nature of dog cognition: It is what we would expect of cognition in a domesticated socially hunting carnivoran”.
Just as discussion thread on every non-Ukrainian article here, if continued long enough, ends as Russia-Ukraine “debate”, here thread on article about Ukraine turns to … interesting discussion about ethics of eating meat.
Wow. More articles about Ukraine, please!
Very interesting link, thanks.
Sheep can behave the same as a dog, if it is adopted as a dog. It even returns thrown sticks. And she says 1:30 hides the stick of the dog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3VQSDJzBT8
Can learn some classic “tricks” for dogs also.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2mzk239hDY
It’s not about being able to be taught tricks.
Dogs are unique in their ability to read human emotions and in instictively seeking humans out for comfort. They will also sacrifice their lives to save humans. This makes their relationship to humans different from that of sheep, in essence.
Nonsense. Its dead wood and metal is arranged in such a way that they are optimized for serving a particular purpose for humans. They are not arranged randomly. Objectively, it is a hammer.
Similarly, dog cognition and emotions are arranged in such a way that they are “programmed” to have a particular type of relationship for humans – servant, friend, companion. Dogs are programmed to consider themselves to be part of a human “pack.” A normal person does not eat one’s friends/servants/companions/partners. A degenerate or an immoral person does such things.
Sure. You are using an object that objectively serves one purpose but using it for a different purpose, out of necessity. Starving people make soup out of shoes sometimes. This does not mean that it is “subjective” that a shoe is footwear and not food. Likewise it is not subjective that a pencil sharpener is a pencil sharpener. Or a dog is a servant/companion/friend. Simply because something can be and has been used for purposes that it is not designed for does not mean that it does not have an objective purpose or nature.
Correct, and those traits that humans selected were those that made dogs, in essence, our servants and friends, or partners. Rather than food.
The difference is that what I state is objective, what the girl with the pig believes is not. One can turn a hammer into a percussive musical instrument or display it as wall art or whatever, but objectively it is a tool designed by people for a purpose that is not music nor visual arts. One can turn a pig into a housepet, or a wife, or whatever but objectively it is an animal that was bred for the purpose of human consumption.
They also eat other humans. And betray each other. Let’s circle around:
Whether it is acceptable to kill one’s friend or loyal servant for a meal is a moral rather than objective matter. According to European morality, such actions are generally seen negatively. Other cultures may view this differently, as they view child marriage, cannibalism, human sacrifice etc. differently.
Face recognition is not the same things as reading emotions:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-06/s-duw062018.php
And empathy with humans:
https://bigthink.com/ned-dymoke/study-dogs-as-adept-at-empathy-as-young-humans
So they are loyal servants who protect their master’s property and are willing to put themselves at risk in order to do so. They differentiate their master from other people and are happy when he comes to the property. This is what they were made to be. Not food. If you have a loyal worker who guards your property and you kill him for some frivolous reason like a meal, what kind of person are you?
According to the article, when one includes chimpanzees and dolphins into the mix.
It looks like dogs’ far larger number of cortical neurons relative to other carnivores are focused on cognitive tasks involving social cognition (and specifically, cooperation with humans):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327853585_In_what_sense_are_dogs_special_Canine_cognition_in_comparative_context
Social cognition is the domain in which we have most information. Dogs have an impressive ability to use other animals’ behavior (particularly the behavior of humans) as a cue. However, some other carnivorans are even better atthese tasks, and some other domestic species may do as well as dogs, though no other social hunters (except forwolves) have been shown to do as well. Dogs also have impressive capacities for social learning, and they seem to do better at these tasks than any other carnivorans, except wolves. Qualitatively speaking, they have not demonstrated any capacities that have not also been shown in other social hunters, and dolphins and chimpanzees show clear-er evidence of motor imitation. Dogs perform as well as or better than other domestic animals on social learning tests. As regards tests inspired by theory-of-mind considerations(perspective taking, deception, and empathy), we have too little comparative data to draw many conclusions. In experiments carried out so far, chimpanzees are more likely than dogs to solve tasks requiring perspective taking,though the evidence base for dogs’perspective taking is improving, and dogs may do better than chimpanzees in cooperative situations. Chimpanzees are more likely than dogs to show evidence of deception or empathy.
Which means they can do much more than members of each group, but not more than each other groups’ specialty. However, in terms of social cognition they surpass animals other than chimps and dolphins. This is probably what their larger number of cortical neurons (compared to all animals others than whales and primates) are devoted to.
First, there are the concentric circles of loyalty. A few months old baby might be dumber than a pig, but I would consider the baby’s life worth way way way more than that of the pig. Because the baby is human. For a similar reason, in my opinion, a loyal, but dumb animal is owed more than a smart animal who is neither loyal nor understands humans much.
Second, suffering is not entirely related to intelligence as such. High IQ psychopaths are probably capable of much less suffering than low-IQ non-psychopaths. I’m quite sure dogs are less psychopathic than pigs.
Third, and it’s a somewhat selfish reason again, and similar to the previous two points, we understand dogs’ minds better than pigs’ minds.
I’m reminded of a Stanislaw Lem short story, where some galactic king asks a couple of engineers to design a new world from scratch, one which is – unlike our own – perfect, with no suffering, evil, etc. The engineers first design a world of spirits, and the prototype of the world is shown to the king. There are colorful gaseous spirits floating around, some turning red, and then combining (obviously falling in love or something), but then, suddenly, some dark spirit appears, and destroys much of that colorful smoke or whatever. The engineers tell the king that the prototype world failed, and the king asks how that dark thing could be prevented from appearing. But the engineers tell the king the failure of the world is not the appearance of the dark spirit or smoke, but that they don’t understand those spirits: simply because one is red and the other dark tells us nothing about how happy or good they are. The dark spirit might cause equal happiness to the red and pink ones it seemed to destroy (maybe they willingly joined him in an orgasm of happiness?), and it’s even possible that the pink and red ones were the evil ones destroyed (or turned good?) by the good dark whatever. So the next time the engineers try to construct a world with humans (whose happiness or lack thereof they can at least understand) rather than colorful gaseous spirits.
Similarly, I’m prepared to give dogs (who interact with us all the time and are happy to meet us, or are fiercely protecting the homes of their human owners, etc.) more consideration than pigs, who will never be so loyal and so understanding of humans. The fact that dogs have a brain for humans probably means that their thinking is more humanlike than that of pigs. So, their suffering must be more humanlike, too. Pigs… possible, but we cannot be sure. Maybe their suffering is closer to the high-IQ psychopaths (who only or mostly just have physical suffering). This consideration should be extended to alien species: we cannot be sure if they are psychopathic, so at least initially their killing or not should be entirely driven by selfish considerations (does killing or sparing them benefit us more? can they retaliate?) rather than altruism.
But I agree that pigs (and other animals, even dumber ones like chickens) should be given better life conditions before being killed.
Fourth, I think pork truly is very good. Pigs are omnivores, like us, so probably their bodies contain all the nutrients needed for us. Anyway, I’m not prepared to give up one of the few major types of meat (beef, pork, mutton, poultry), so I’d need a little more reason than “pigs, while being extremely dumb by human standards, are somewhat smarter than cattle or sheep, and so, unlike these two, we don’t want to eat them, despite humans historically have eaten even smarter whales/dolphins and apes.”
Ask 5 different people, and they will choose different animals. And if there are trends, they will track only to arbitrary accidents of culture – asking Koreans and Americans, or Muslims and Hindus, will produce opposed trends in the answers.
I don’t think these psychological categories apply to animals.
We understand a simple person like Trump’s mind, more than we understand Saul Kripke’s or Donald Knuth’s mind. But is this a reason to value more Trump’s mind? I would see the opposite.
Speculative (have you studied this?) and also missing steps of the argument. Why would thinking being “humanlike” mean it has more or less value, or that the producer of the thinking has more or less value?
And if put that as an assumption, it could have funny implications reductio ad absurdum. The most average of all thinking in a population of humans, would become the most valuable? Strange thought patterns uncommon in humans, would become less valuable, as they are less “human like”?
When we speak about objective, we refer to what is actually existing (and, we hope, can be accessible to systematic, scientific knowledge).
My view or you view of what a “purpose” of some objective is, is just an opinion in our minds – so it is subjective.
You could claim subjectivity is constrained by other people’s thinking same as you – but this is not actually adding any purposes to real world. It is simply agreement between your opinion and another person’s minds. Of course, we can find then person from a different viewpoint (perhaps a culture where wood and metal in a certain shape are not used as hammers), which will shatter your intersubjective consensus.
You could distinguish how binding your subjective views are, and different degrees of intersubjectivity in this way. Secondary qualities, like colours, are subjective artifacts of the brain – but they are binding to all normally wired human brains.
On the other hand, attitudes about purposes of things we know from looking at different groups of humans, are subjective, and also not binding all normal brains: they are created by customs of certain nationalities and cultures.
There is no “objective purpose” to a pencil sharpener. Objectively it is plastic and metal. We call it a “pencil sharpener”, arranged certain segments plastic and metal in similar ways, and say to children to use these segments in a certain way.
But this does not transmit anything to the object itself. It’s all an opinion in the mind of certain people. There’s no “magic spell” and voodoo transmitting the meaning of “pencil sharper” to the object.
The idea that our mind transmits a purpose to an object, is the definition of “magical thinking”. (Although it is a tendency for us to do this unconscious – and are already more subtle forms of this in interpretations of computer science).
It’s the definition of subjective, as it exists only in the mind, and it is not subjectively binding – as difference of opinions show -, and no easy way to resolve correct answers to this question either . Really, it has all qualities of a discussion where there is no correct answer (chocolate cake is better than ice-cream).
The idea there is “European morality”, “non-European morality” – is removing the concept of morality itself and re-stating it as “custom”. Morality is either binding for everyone – or it is not “morality”, but national customs.
If we look at what is customary, it’s typically acceptable to kill domestic animals, but not – certain types – of wild animals.
And farmers are often killing animals like donkeys, hens and dogs. As for on a national or government level, feral dogs are one of the most commonly killed animals .
Of course, the above paragraph is just describing custom. The important thing is what is the morality of theses action.
If meal is determined as “frivolous reason”, then we’ll have a lot of difficulty justifying not being vegetarians. Meals are the main reason we justify killing animals in all societies.
Well, since the Holocaust at least.
What kind of “sponsoring” are you talking about here? I just want to clarify this part.
As for Mukachevo, it’s in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which I’ve heard is a pretty poor and backward region of Ukraine. Of course, maybe this city is better than the rest of SR if it has an unusually large percentage of Hungarians.
Also, personally, I prefer Anglo-Saxon girls (the non-fat ones, which is saying something considering that I myself am pretty fat–albeit not Anglo-Saxon). Anglo-Saxon or Germanic women are the hottest, IMHO.
By that logic, though, it’s not subjective that someone who has anal sex or oral sex is using one’s dick for a purpose other than the one that it was meant to be used for, correct?
Social conservatives of the past did in fact use that argument. I am not sure they were wrong.