Note: This feature essay was originally published on Saturday March 22, and was “sticky” for several days. Scroll down for more recent posts, including last night’s news feed, “Competing to Re-Islamize Turkey”, “A Million Dragon’s Teeth”, and the latest from Pat Condell.
At our request, Takuan Seiyo has undertaken an analysis of recent events in Ukraine. The following detailed account is the first part of a comprehensive two-part report on Ukrainian “democracy”.
Ukraine 2014
“Ukraine” 1750
“Ukraine” 1600Ukraine as Quantum Decoherence
by Takuan Seiyo
Some basics
The maps above show present-day Ukraine on top, its terrain in 1750 in the middle, and in 1600 at the bottom. There would be no country called Ukraine — there had been several ukraines i.e. “borderlands” in Eastern Europe — until 1917 for Eastern Ukraine only, on and off as the Ukrainian People’s Republic. It’s a hint of how convoluted the history of the region is that just in 1918-1920, Kiev’s territory was under the governance of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, German-sponsored Cossack Hetmanate, again UPR, the Bolsheviks, the Russian anti-Bolshevik army of Gen. Anton Denykhin, again UPR, Poland, and finally, as of July 1920, the Bolsheviks who incorporated it formally as Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1922. Throughout these changes and particularly in 1919 there were recurring waves of pogroms that resulted in the murder of over 100,000 Jews. And ten years after Soviet Ukraine was born, the Soviets murdered at least 5 million Ukrainians in an engineered famine.
If the above slice of chaotic multi-pronged aggression weren’t enough, in 1918 Western Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic in a territory that had gone back to Poland after its century-long seizure by Austria. The Ukrainian campaign of terror against the Poles resulted in the crushing of the nascent entity by the Polish Army in 1919. Then the eastern Ukrainian People’s Republic was attacked by the Soviets, and its head — Ukraine’s one genuine great leader, Symon Petliura — sought relief in an alliance with Poland. The Soviets nonetheless crushed the Ukrainian state, continued in a bloody campaign into Polish Ukraine and on to Warsaw, and were defeated — but returned in 1939, to complete the job.
Rivers of blood have washed over Ukraine’s territory; had for 1000 years. Much of it was and is to this day one kind of Ukraine-dwelling Slav against another, and two great powers — Russia to the east, Germany to the west — that tussled repeatedly over land, resources and influence.
To greatly simplify, and omitting earlier history when Ukraine’s territory had been annexed by Lithuania and later amalgamated into Poland, it’s useful to perceive that as of the 17th century the territory on the right bank of the Dniepr river — see it bisecting Ukraine in the top map — has defined itself as the anti-Polish, Orthodox Ukraine, affiliated with Russia as of 1654 (Treaty of Pereyaslav) and with the Soviet Union as of 1920.
The territory on the left bank of the Dniepr, mostly Greek Catholic, had been for centuries and would remain Polish until 1939, with some of its eastern provinces eventually dominated by Russia. Kiev in the 1600 map is shown well inside Poland; in the 1750 map it sits on the Cossack/Russian side of the Polish border. But what is now Lviv (then Lwow), the capital of Western Ukraine — and of Ukrainian Nazism and pro-EU sentiment — was up to 1939 and had been for over 500 years Poland’s third most important city. It is 460 kilometers west of Kiev, and, if it were marked on the 1600 map, would show so far in the west of Poland that it would be in the upper left corner.
In 1939, Lviv’s population was 50.9% Polish Roman Catholic, 31.4% Jewish, 15.9% (mostly Greek-Catholic) Ukrainian, and the remaining 1.8% various minorities[1]. In 1939-41 the Soviets would greatly “reduce” — i.e. murder and exile to USSR’s far east — the top tier of the Polish population. In 1941-44 the Germans, with Ukrainian OUN/ UPA help, would further “reduce” the Polish population and wipe out the Jewish one so that from 169,900 Jews in 1939, 1,300 would remain by 1944. In 1945, the Soviets kicked out almost all the remaining Poles, and amalgamated this territory into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In the 1750 map, Ukrainian Cossacks (two dark-color zones) are shown holding the buffer zones east of Kiev into Russia. Their main political expressions, the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhnian Sich, would eventually be disbanded by Russia’s Catherine the Great in the 1760s-70s, but the Cossacks continued as Russia’s trusted military proxy, and are Russia-leaning to this day.
In the same period of Russia’s greatness, as a result of Russia’s victory over Turkey in the 5th [sic!] Russian-Turkish War, the two warring powers signed a treaty in 1774 that transferred what is now Southeastern Ukraine, with Odessa at its center, from Turkey to Russia, giving Russia for the first time access to the Black Sea. Turkey also ceded its protectorate of the Crimean Khanate and control of Crimean ports to Russia.
Even those pundits who cite tame excuses for Russia’s current pretenses to Crimea usually don’t mention that what the Russian Commies gifted to the Ukrainian Commies in 1954, Russia had formally incorporated into its territory already in 1783. Moreover, that act contributed greatly to throttling the Mussulmans’ pillaging and slave harvesting in what is now Ukraine (then Poland) that had led to multiple wars between Poland and the Tatar-Turk alliance for over two centuries, ending only in 1699. If it weren’t for the ultimate battlefield victories of Russia and Poland after centuries of bloody fighting, the entire Black Sea basin would still be red-orange, as it shows in the 1600 map.
“Allegory of Catherine’s Victory over the Turks,”
Stefano Torelli, 1772And so we end up in 2014 with a Ukraine where originally anti-Polish and eventually pro-Nazi fascism rules in the west, Russophile Ukrainians, Cossacks and ethnic Russians concentrate in the east and in Crimea, and everyone has lost someone either to the Soviets or the Germans. Crimean Tatars — with a Waffen-SS heritage just as rich as Svoboda Party’s — feel affinity for the Svoboda government in Kiev rather than for their Russophile Crimean neighbors, and Germany and its NATO/US party pull on one side and Russia on the other.
The colors on the map below may as well symbolize the political sentiments, too.
The question is: Why we are dragged into such a morass by ignorant politicians and their pabulum spewing glad-handing MSM footmen. The pervasive willful ignorance of even the foregoing rough and sketchy background of Ukraine perverts the West’s perceptions and actions relative to that country, and the bias of Reality-averse messianic ideology — i.e. Democracy Inc. — spins the whole thing further out into orbits of cartoon craziness.
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