When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The Dnieper's plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.
When from Ukraine the Dnieper bears
Into the deep blue sea
The blood of foes ... then will I leave
These hills and fertile fields --I'll leave them all and fly away
To the abode of God,
And then I'll pray ....
But until that day I know nothing of God
Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants' blood
The freedom you have gained.
And in the great new family,
The family of the free,
With softly spoken, kindly word
Remember also me.
~Taras Shevchenko
I saw this earlier today.
A couple days ago, I saw that even in my small corner of the world, there are Ukrainian refugees here now. Women and children whose homes have been destroyed, people whose fathers and husbands are still back home, fighting for their...and our...freedom.
And I find it funny and not a little sad how none of that matters to some people.
There's literally a life-and-death struggle playing out in Ukraine, in a war Russia is now actively trying to expand despite the fact that they're losing...probably because they expect that the American and EU right-wing will just roll over, leaving the center and the Left to fight the war and...because these people think so fucking highly of themselves...both the Russians and EU/US Right think we'll lose with that 30% either sitting on their ass or actively supporting the bad guys.
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald ReaganThis is a worldwide struggle, people. Everybody is going to have to pick a side sooner or later.
Instead, I got shit like this in my trends.
From the Oh-so-liberal Washington Post. Democracy Dies In Darkness, Yo. We Got The Truth. If you don't mind wading through a sewer of stupid shit first.
Or something.
Y'all do realize Kanye's career peaked in the early Aughts, right?
Then I see shit like this.Apparently, "Conservative" Americans care more about cheap gas and cheap goods than they do about their own freedom, or bodily autonomy, or social security, or whatever the fuck.
I mean, what's even the damn point??
This is entirely what you get at the end of the "America is not at war. The Marines are at war, America is at the mall" mentality of the last 22 years or so. People just flat-out refuse to think shit through.
Ukrainians literally don't have the option to think "Oh, their Marine Corps is at war, but it doesn't affect them personally.
What good is owning cheap crap when it's an avowed goal of these motherfuckers to make sure that nobody else but them has any money, anyway?
I mean, why should anybody give a shit that Herschel Walker, anti-abortionist, Fundamentalist Christian, and fanatically pro-family person, paid for an abortion or abandoned and refused to acknowledge most of his kids?
Come on, we're Republicans, all morality is situational. Sure, your family got murdered, but what about that Senate seat?? Right??
And the worst part of this shit is that, on that side of the political fence, literally no one cares...about anything, basically.
Hmm, it seems to me that I spent literally years of my life railing against this kind of mentality when it was the Democrats who acted like that. Now, here I am voting Democrat and Republicans have adopted that 1990's Situational Ethics mentality to a degree that would make Bill Clinton himself blush??
Fuck my life. You know what? Just...fuck everything, seriously. What the fuck is wrong with people?
And let's not forget the big news of the day;
Tulsi Gabbard "Officially" left the Democratic Party.
Come on, I thought this happened like a year ago, at least. Like, what? It wasn't a big enough clue when she started guest-hosting for Fucker Carlson??
Fuck, I'm still wondering what happens when Lauren Blowbert figures out that Tulsi Gabbard is a Hindu from Hawaii with longstanding ties to a particularly homophobic sub-sect of the Hare Krishna movement. (But, to a certain extent, I repeat myself.)
I suspect there's going to be a lot of frantic Googling, and I'm not going to point out what longstanding Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christian opinions are regarding any of these places or subjects and thus possibly save her the trouble. I mean, fucking seriously?
Way she talks she should be way more of an expert on that crap than me. But of course, she isn't.
And half the goddamned country doesn't care. A third of this goddamned country probably still can't find Ukraine on a damn National Geographic world map. Worse, these people are growing increasingly agnostic to the cause of freedom.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian social media videos are directly targeting Russian conscripts, telling them they will be treated fairly if they defect. The Ukrainians know they're on the right side of history here...and the Russian army is losing and should stand down, long term to be disdained by history and their own people if they don't. The Ukrainians, who've fully embraced the American and Western way of war, know the average Russian soldier is an unmotivated conscript who's been sent to the front as a chunk of meat to absorb enemy bullets and that, at this point, most of them know it.
Likewise they know that anybody on the Russian side who gave a shit, who thought their troops should be properly equipped and fed and trained has been killed by one side or the other, or been arrested by the FSB and sent to a Labor Camp of Strict Regime or worse, or has already defected...if not to Ukraine then to the West.
I was a sergeant, a squad leader in the United States Air Force Security Forces. I cannot imagine fighting, let alone leading, under those kinds of conditions. Can you even imagine trying to do your job, to embody the values, to set the example for sustained superior performance when your fellow NCO's and junior officers show up for duty drunk and spend most of their time bullying and trying to rob the troops??
Worse, the food is bad if you even have any, the pay sucks, if you've even been paid, the vehicles don't work if you even have the fuel to run them...and at this point you're all making due with battle rattle, gear and rifles that were outdated when the 34th Shock Army was daily planning to use your fathers or grandfathers as meat shields against the 11th "Blackhorse" Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Fulda Gap back in the 1980's??
(And this is the kind of society "Conservatives" want?)
I can't. I absolutely cannot imagine dealing with that shit. Or maybe I just don't want to.
Oleksii Reznikov, on the other hand, is a Soviet Air Forces veteran and doesn't have to imagine it. He lived that shit back in the 1980's.
So he can speak from a position of authority on this stuff far better than I can.
This is America. We're not just supposed to know better than this, we're supposed to be better than this.
Because they think their meme-ified "Mr. Trump" will handle it, never mind that the meme has not one damn thing to do with any of the reality, or that Trump doesn't have that kind of power now, and barely ever did, as he lacks the force of personality, the willpower, or even the basic courage to try and pull it off.
Because one country unilaterally trying to wipe a whole bunch of other ones, and their culture and language and nationhood, off the face of the Earth in a war based on lies doesn't matter to these fucking people...because they think by not giving a shit they're somehow going to get one over on their neighbors, or the Black people down the street, or something something Gazpacho.
Or worse, because ideologically, these assholes think that's how the world is supposed to be.
What happens when it's not Finland or Poland being attacked, or Germany having its pipelines blown up, but the United States??
After having lived in fear of everything forever, one cannot just flip a switch and be brave when it's convenient. And the thing is, even if the Russians fail completely in Ukraine, or in the rest of Europe, they're going to come at us and try that shit here for that exact reason, because they know Republicans would sooner fold like a stacked deck of cards at this point than fight for a world where everybody gets to be free.
I've personally seen where some of these fuckers have come right out and said they'd rather live under tyranny than live in a world where Black people or LGBT folk or whatever get to be free, too.
And the Russians think their chances will be better in a society where only two-thirds of the population will fight to be free, I guess. Given their performance in the field against the Ukrainians my guess is the Russians would still lose, overall.
But they might get some Republican-held failed-states to surrender to them, and get enough people to die for that shit that the rest of us give up and let them have it.
Well, you know what, Republicans??
If you're a better class of slave than all the other slaves...that still means that you're a slave.
Think on that. Ignore the dumb-shit media circus, and just think about that one thing for a second.
Is American democracy and freedom really cheap enough for you, that you'd want to trade it in for Putinist neo-Communism?
That we're even discussing this like there's a trade-in value for Constitutional rights and representative democracy is a fucking problem.
There is no "Only I can fix it." We're all gonna have to.
Слава Україна!
~Ronald Reagan
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