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| Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw, Poland, lit up in blue and yellow, in solidarity with Ukraine (Source: The Economist) |
An important article on the deep understanding that Poland has with what is going on in the Ukraine right now. As an example:
Yanukovych's regime, together with the Kremlin, have been telling us that the protestors are anti-Semites and Nazis—while simultaneously telling their riot police that the protestors are gays and Jews. This is bewildering to most Europeans. It is much less bewildering to Poles. They have experience with just this kind of shameless—and absurdist—mendacity. After all, they remember the Stalinist regime promising to protect Jews from the anti-Semitism of the anti-communists, while conducting an anti-Semitic campaign of its own. And they remember March 1968, when the communist regime justified its suppression of demonstrators against censorship by accusing protestors of engaging in a Nazi-Zionist conspiracy against Poland.
The article also points out that there was a lot of murdering of Poles by Ukrainians during WWII:
[I]n September 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland from the west, and the Red Army invaded from the east. The Polish state ceased to exist, and eastern Galicia and Volhynia became Soviet Ukraine. In 1943, with the Ukrainian lands now under Nazi occupation, Ukrainian nationalist extremists embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing: They herded Poles into churches and set them on fire. They shot Poles with bullets and beat them to death with farm tools. There were hangings and decapitations. Poles responded, sometimes in kind. After the war, the Polish government, finding concentrations of ethnic Ukrainians inside Polish territory undesirable, "resettled" thousands of Ukrainians in western Poland, murdering some in the process.
Not something I like to think about too much, as my father's family was from that part of the world. The irony being that their deportation to Siberia by the Soviets most likely saved my dad's life, as they weren't home to be set on fire in church, or beaten to death by farm tools. I'm not really too sure what to make of that as it's only something that just occurred to me recently.
Related link: The Bloody History Between Poland and Ukraine Led to Their Unlikely Solidarity ~ New Republic
Ukraine as it is drawn on the map today is an accident of history - nobody even called themselves "Ukrainian" until the Romantic movement of the 19th century - Ukraine was a region of Europe where Catholicism meets Orthodoxy - the Western parts of the modern state were in the Austro-Hungarian Empire 100 years ago while the Eastern parts were in the Russian Empire and always had been
ReplyDeleteAnyway by quirks of history Ukraine as a "nation" came into being with its current borders in 1991 and if it was to have any hope of survival and becoming a nation the last thing it needed clueless,idiotic Americans stirring up trouble in the name of "promoting democracy".
By removing the democratically elected Government, no matter how bad, by an armed mob and replacing it with one appointed by street violence the prognosis for the long term existence of the modern state of Ukraine is not good.
And all the huffing and puffing of Western leaders over this will not relieve them of their culpability for the blood that will be shed in the civil war they have created in the advancement of their Godless agenda.