One of the modern world’s problems is the numerous artificial states. That is, sovereign states which were set up as administrative conveniences by imperial powers, forcing together different ethnicities with little in common. Such states always have problems meeting the needs and sensibilities of its constituent publics, which leads to suboptimal government at best and to internal conflict at worst.
Looking only at Europe, we have seen the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia break up. The former two split up peacefully, but the latter led to some wars. Belgium would split if the Eurocracy were not exerting intense pressure to crush popular initiative there.
The grand example of a failed artificial state is Ukraine. Until the late nineteenth century, the word ‘Ukraine’ referred to a geographic are, not to any ethnicity. In its present form, Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks, apparently with the idea of keeping the very troublesome Galicians under control.
Ukraine consists of the Galicians in the North and west, a large number of ethnic Russians in the South and East, and assorted other smaller nationalities stuck into it. For a more detailed narrative of how the present situation developed, go here. Basically, Ukraine was ripe to be used by western powers to wage proxy war on Russia, and that is what we now have.
The Ukraine war grinds on. Bakhmut has now been turned into Artemovsk by the Wagnerians. It now looks a lot like Mariupol did last year.
At least the ferris wheel in the main park survived intact. No doubt a year from now the energetic Russians will have it looking like the present Mariupol, the people all moved back in. Actually, the sequela may not be as cheerful for Artemovsk as for Mariupol.
The Ukrainian army evacuated the civilians into Ukraine. Anyone trying to go to Russia was threatened with execution. Nonetheless, some people made it to the Russian side to report this.
But it gets a lot grimmer. It is becoming clear that many pro Russian Artemovskians tried to wait it out in the city for the Russian army to arrive. It seems the Ukronazis hunted these people down and killed them as traitors, possibly including their children.
The Ukrainians have long been torturing and executing every Russian soldier unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner. Thus we can understand why the Wagnerians stopped taking prisoners some time ago. This is, of course, against the so called ‘rules of war’.
The Wagner group are private military contractors whom the Russian military use for very difficult tasks, such as clearing fortified areas like Bakhmut.
Of course most of the defenders of Bakhmut were hapless conscripts press ganged off the streets, not swastika wearing hard cases. It is very hard, once you have been herded onto the front line, to either flee or attempt surrender. That would have made no practical difference to the Wagner troops on the front line, who could still be killed if they did not kill first.
The Ukrainian forces made a sudden and organized pullout on May 20th, but left a few men behind. It seems one tried to get away wearing a woman’s dress, but was shot. Another was found hiding under an inverted bathtub and was presumably also shot.
What the point was to the Bakhmut/Artemovsk battle could be endlessly pondered. It is as if Ukraine wanted to destroy its own army. They seem to be rapidly approaching that point.
The Ukraine side of this conflict seems to have no limits at all. Since the end of the Artemovsk battle they have been making raids into Russia, targeting civilians. This always ends with most of the raiding parties wiped out, but that does not deter them.
They keep up their bombardments of Donbass, but are now starting to fire into the Russian border areas. They keep trying to launch their famous “offensive” toward Crimea but are unable to move men and equipment up to the contact lines due to increasingly effective Russian air power.
In return, Russia is ramping up its air war. It seems to be starting to go after the senior Ukronazi leadership. The Ukrainian president seems to be spending most of his time out of the country, one other high official has disappeared, one senior military commander has been killed, and another is said to have shrapnel lodged in his brain.
Many observers of this conflict are bewildered about what has gone wrong with Ukraine and Ukrainians. What I find more striking is the reluctance of the Russians to believe that there are various people in the world who really do not like them and will go after them.
Russians have had this lingering idea that the “Ukrainians” are just some sort of long lost cousins whom they want back in the fold. Much of this idea comes from Soviet thought conditioning which tried to smooth over nationalist ideas. But a lot also comes from old “panslavic” ideas going back to the Czar’s times.
What are now called “Ukrainians” were formerly known as Galicians. While they have a common origin with Russians, they have developed in a very different way. They are one of these ethnicities which have developed a subculture of ‘toxic nationalism’, a hatred for everybody who is not them.
It runs very deep among some Galicians. It seems to have been developed especially during their time under Austrian rule. The Austrian empire was a small minority trying to rule over large numbers of mutually antagonistic ‘small peoples’.
The Austrians encouraged this antagonism among their subject peoples to keep them from uniting against their empire. They also tried to foment dislike of Russians. The Austrians were very afraid of the Russian empire.
This condition was apparent to native Canadians when large numbers of Ukrainians immigrated into the prairie provinces in the years before the first world war. There were these two different groups from the Austrian ‘Ukraine’; the Orthodox and the Uniates, with different languages and religions. The two did not fight, because Canadians do not tolerate immigrant groups bringing their quarrels from their old countries.
However, they did not mix. In towns where the Ukrainians settled, there would be an Orthodox Church on one side of town and a Uniate church on the other. The two groups gradually assimilated into Canadian culture. The Uniates, believe it or not, had a reputation for being a bit ‘left’ and ‘Bolshie’.
There was some trouble after the second war, when large numbers of new “Ukrainians” slipped into Canada with the wave of ‘displaced persons’. The old Galicians were very angry about this new wave, who had begun harassing them. Anglo-Canadians were concerned that most of these new people seemed to have Nazi connections.
However, once a group of refugees are in the country, it is hard to get rid of them. There is usually nowhere to send them on to. The trouble was smoothed over, on the assumption that the new group would gradually be assimilated like other immigrant groups.
These Nazi immigrants never assimilated well. They have had a bad influence on politics in Canada. You know what kind of person is now deputy Prime Minister of Canada.
Attitudes about ‘Ukrainians’ are ambivalent in Canada, even among Ukrainian descendants. There is a nostalgia for the stolid and cheerful first wave of Ukrainian immigrants. Yet there is also embarrassment over the intolerance of some migrants from Ukraine and from some other East European lands.
One old man I knew, who told me a lot about early settlement history on the prairies, was a descendant of Galicians. He even spoke that language. Yet when asked if he was of Ukrainian descent he would snap that his ancestors were “South Russian”.
As for the ‘South Russians’ and ‘Ukrainians’ back in the old country, it seems the Russian speaking parts of that country will be easily absorbed back into Russia. The real Ukrainians, the Galicians, in the north west of that country, will be an ongoing threat to Russia for a long time. Mother Russia has no happy options in dealing with them.
If Russia simply draws the border around the Galicians, the Galician Ukraine will simply continue to be a base for attacks on it. It will continue as a playground for the “Slava Ukraina” lunatics and their CIA handlers. The contact line will merely be moved west.
As well, having an openly Nazi state existing anywhere in the world is a hazard to the world. That kind of mentality always appeals to a certain type of personality, when shown the example. Because of the Ukraine war, there seems to be a surge of Naziism and Nazi wannabes all over the world, even in places they were never known before.
Naziism is a kind of contagion. Unless there is a persistent, systematic effort to eradicate it, it persists in pockets and flares up when conditions are right. I hope the Russians take that as their clue about what to do when they eventually reach Galicia.
However, occupying Ukraine right up to the Polish border would also be very difficult for the Russians. They would have to finally engage in the kind of guerrilla war the Ukronazis wanted to fight at the start of the war. They would remember the difficulties they had in stamping out the Stukhevich army the Germans left behind on that territory after their retreat in the world war.
There are a lot of weapons and ammunition floating around that country now. There are plenty of nazi nuts with good cover and some military training. The Russians would likely have to put the whole population into filtration camps, requiring a very large and lengthy deployment of troops.
Many Russian talking heads are talking about letting the Poles take over Galicia. It is an interesting idea because some nationalistic Poles are also talking about this. However, these same Poles also talk about reestablishing the Polish commonwealth of the seventeenth century.
These Poles and their friends from Western intelligence services dream about creating the ‘’intermarium”, or empire from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which the Polish commonwealth never quite achieved. This fits well with the geostrategic desires of the Atlanticists but would be a problem for Russia. As well, these Poles usually hold irrational anti-Russia ideas similar to the Ukronazis.
The biggest delusion about the Ukraine war is the idea of a peaceful end. The Atlanticists have this conflict wired down to go to the last gasp of the Ukrainian state. The Ukronazis, controlled by western intelligence services, will kill anyone who talks about a negotiated peace.
The way the Ukraine forces are structured makes a successful coup or mutiny against the Nazis unlikely. The fighting and dying is for the conscript untermenschen. The pure aryan stock are behind the lines in the “blocking units”, preventing any retreat or surrender.
So it seems that where all this is going, one way or another, is to the end of the Ukrainian state. That would also mean the end of the Ukrainian nationality because, to repeat, Ukraine has always been an artificial nation, created by foreign rulers drawing lines on maps to fit their own aims. The Galician people will go on existing in some condition but really need to be subjected to a rigorous ‘denazification’ program.
As for Canadian descendants of Ukrainians, they are not the threat to everyone not ‘them’ that the Galicians/Ukrainians are in Europe. However, it is obnoxious to aware Canadians to have these people putting up statues to mass murderers on Canadian soil. They are a factor in corrupting our foreign policy, but we are locked into the Atlanticist dominion and have little agency anyway.
When Ukraine has disappeared along with the Atlanticist hegemony, it will be possible for Canada to look closer at Ukrainian organizations here, and to police them better. It could be made clearer that Ukrainian heritage is about the early pioneers who came to farm the west and build a new life. It is not about the Nazis, fleeing justice, who slipped into the country within the post world war wave of refugees.
Long ago, when I was in high school, the Ukrainian heritage was generally viewed with affection in Canada. Ukrainian jokes were popular, mostly turning on the stereotypical dull wittedness, unsanitary personal habits, but also hardiness and optimism, of the early Ukrainian immigrants. They were hilarious when we were fourteen years old.
For example, Harskychuck the Ukrainian arrives in Canada and gets work as a lumberjack. He finds he can cut down twenty trees a day with his axe. Someone advises him that if he got a chainsaw, he could cut down three times as many trees in a day.
So Harskychuck puts his savings together and goes to a logging equipment store. He says to the salesman; “I cut down twenty trees a day with axe. If I buy dis chainsaw, how many trees I cut down?”
Says the salesman; “With one of our chain saws, you should be able to cut sixty trees a day.”
“Holy Smoke, dat what I need!”, says Harskychuk, and buys the chain saw.
The next day he comes back with the chainsaw, very angry. He says to the salesman; ‘You cheat me! I work all day, only cut twelve tree wit chainsaw.”
Says the salesman; “Oh, dear. That’s not very good. Let me see if something is wrong with this chainsaw.”
So, he started the chainsaw and it came to life with a loud buzz.
Harskychuk jumped back in alarm, shouting; “What dat noise? What dat noise?”
More recent Ukrainian jokes are not so funny. Many of them turn on the radioactive consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. Most jokes turning on the present war are very unfunny to anyone aware of the facts of the situation.
But the saddest of Ukrainian jokes would be if the use of Ukraine by the Atlanticist hegemon as a weapon against Russia led to nuclear armageddon. Then it will be not just ‘goodbye Ukraine’, but goodbye all.