2 Comments

At your suggestion I have read this article. I do not like it even one tenth as much as your article about Orwell. It is riddled with historical inaccuracies. It purports to reveal “hidden” or unknown history yet it does so in a a disappointingly incomplete fashion that pushes a certain agenda, namely promoting the idea most often associated with Stalin, the “cult of personality”, so that you can then tar Putin - your bête noir - with the same brush. By ignoring the pre-holodomor history of Soviet created famine you play into the hands of neo-Marxists who attempt to whitewash Marxist history by blaming all atrocities on Stalin.

The fact of the matter is that Lenin was personally responsible for as many deaths as Hitler, at least half of those in western Russia in the area known as “the borderlands” of Rus, оукраина in the old Slavic the other half between Don and the Volga.

Since time immemorial, the eastern half of what you fancy as Ukraine has been the western most boundary of Rus/Russia. The eastern half has been part of Poland, again since time immemorial. Following the devastation of Rus by the Mongols, Poland sized the opportunity to invade and occupy Rus for 300 years. It was a hostile occupation that was marked by incessant wars and insurgences until the “Treaty for Perpetual Peace” restored the previous boundaries between Rus (now Russia) and Poland.

What you refer to as a separate culture and language is in fact the original core Russian culture and language. What you think of as “Russian” is a descendant of the Mosky dialect of the original Rus language. After the Mongol invasion Rus was divided for a few hundred years and the cultures diverted somewhat. Yet, Ukrainian is still closer to Moskovite Russian than many of the far eastern Russian dialects.

When Lenin was starving millions of people as a side effect of his anti-Kulak campaign he was starving his own country, as was Stalin a decade later, except that Lenin was from the Volga, and truly Russian, and the people starved to death were truly “his people” wheras Stalin was Georgian, from the annexed area south of the Black Sea. He was murdering the people who had I added and conquered his homeland. For what it is worth.

By leaving out all this history you are doin nothin more and nothing less than carrying water for the Marxist apologists who wish to lay all the excesses of communism at the feet of Stalin and none other, so they can continue to claim that “real” communism has never been tried. Well, Lenin tried it in the Ukraine in 1918 and resulted in the deaths of millions.

As well this history invalidates your conclusion that Ukraine is resisting the invader. What is happening is that a corrupt, apolitical, regime, with no real nationalist passion at all, is using western Ukrainian (Polish) nationalism and the proxy war between the US and Russia to line their pockets in what might well be a truly unprecedented rate and fashion, and they don’t give a damn who gets hurt. The record human rights abuses in modern day Ukraine - by the Ukrainian government - is well established and documented.

Again I say: hate Putin all you want, I won’t argue, I don’t really care. But don’t tell me you are innately skeptical of government and journalistic propaganda when you are swallowing the latest propaganda hook line and sinker simply because it happens to play to your personal animosity for man you don’t even know.

I regret that this comes off as possibly agressive. If you could hear me speak this, you would hear that I mean this as well reasoned debate and not searing invective, but alas, the written word is subject to the inflection that the reader provides. I hope you take me at my word that I am not trying to be objectionable or offensive. I only mean to provide a vigorous debate.

AZW

Expand full comment

Outstanding. Well done.

Expand full comment