If you do nothing else today, watch this video. You won’t regret it.
President of #Ukraine @ZelenskyyUa: “We won then. We will win now, too! And Khreshchatyk will see the parade of victory – the victory of Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine!” pic.twitter.com/339L7s6Faz
— MFA of Ukraine ?? (@MFA_Ukraine) May 9, 2022
A few excerpts from President Zelensky speaking in the video:
On February 24, Russia launched an offensive, treading on the same rake.
Every occupier who comes to our land treads on it.
We have been through different wars.
But they all had the same final.
Our land was sown with bullets and shells.
But no enemy was able to take root here.
Enemy chariots and tanks drove through our fields, but it did not bear fruit.
Enemy arrows and missiles flew in our skies, but no one will be able to overshadow our blue sky.
There are no shackles that can bind our free spirit.
There is no occupier who can take root in our free land.
There is no invader who can rule over our free people.
Sooner or later we win.
We win because this is our land.
We are fighting for the Homeland.
We have never fought against anyone, we always fight for ourselves.
For our freedom. For our independence.
So the victory of our ancestors was not in vain.
They fought for freedom for us and won.
We are fighting for freedom for our children
and therefore we will win.
WaterGirl
This is why they will win. Hoping and praying that it will be sooner rather than later.
President Zelensky said much more than what I transcribed up top, but I thought those words were incredibly powerful. If there are any errors, they are all mine.
SiubhanDuinne
Every time I see him, I think of that old expression: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”
randal m sexton
Yow! He is ‘weaponizing language’. Funny how at this moment of time and place history put this guy in place. Slava Ukraine!
japa21
Just watched that at the suggestion of G&T. One thing that struck me, in addition to the setting and the words. There were shots from last years celebrations of the anniversary of Ukraine’s independence with a flyover of Mriya. The shot of Zelenskyy looking up and then the contrast with his speaking today is dramatic. Talk about growing into a role.
WereBear
As I’ve pointed out before, Ukraine seems to know how to elect politician/actors in a way we haven’t been able to master :)
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear: We’ve done it in the past, Lincoln being the obvious example. Hopefully we will do it again.
Ken
@WereBear: First secret, if you must elect an actor, go for a comedian. They are usually the most intelligent people in the room.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Baud! 20XX!
WaterGirl
@japa21: I noticed the same thing when I watched that part of the video!
WaterGirl
@Baud: You’re back! Or maybe you’re not gone yet and I just haven’t been on BJ as much?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I’m still gone. Just popping in once in a while.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Sort of semi-related, I’m reading a YA historical novel called I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys. (I have to admit I think the title is cheesy) Its central character is a 17-year-old boy in Bulgaria in 1989, the year Eastern Europe broke away from the old Soviet Union. The book is a strong portrayal of what it was like to live under Ceaucescu and the courage it took to resist.
Gin & Tonic
And on a lighter note, if you’re interested in the lifecycle of Russian tanks:
SiubhanDuinne
@Ken:
Al Franken proved that again and again during his time in the Senate.
eachother
Jill Biden lights up a room.
Gin & Tonic
@Dorothy A. Winsor: But Ceaușescu was Romanian, not Bulgarian.
Nelle
@Ken: That’s why I still mourn the absence of Al Franken for the sake of being one up on purity over Ray Moore. Franken has a comedian’s nose for hypocrisy and the gaps between truth and actual behavior. I was told, it doesn’t matter as the MN governor was a Democrat and would replace him with a D, as if D’s are interchangeable. Republicans can see more clearly who is valuable among the Democrats than they can themselves. The R’s target and destroy them, over and over.
Ah, Siobahn arrived first. And I didn’t mean to turn the conversation from Zelensky.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Baud will show us the pantless way!!!
trollhattan
Love that they also have rake-stepping (treading) as a metaphor for haplessness.
The artillery siege goes back at least as far as the Civil War, was “perfected” in the Great War, and remains a top choice today. Just lovely. I hope we’ve finally ditched the notion that one can bomb a populace “into submission” like the still-breathing Henry Kissinger believed, but you can certainly grind a city into cinders and gore. What a great prize Mariupol must be for Putin.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Gin & Tonic: Sorry. You’re right of course. It’s set in Romania. Bucharest, to be specific
Cameron
@Gin & Tonic: I know I shouldn’t have found that amusing. But I did.
RaflW
@Nelle: Al is a smart guy. The whole kerfuffle seemed overblown at the time, and a plain takedown of someone who was getting too close to the truth in his questions of Jeff Sessions.
All that said, Sen. Tina Smith has exceeded my expectations. And we may see more of her in the days ahead. She was a senior exec at Planned Parenthood North Central States (was PP MN-ND-SD then).
She doesn’t have the flash of Franken, but to my notice I think she moves faster than the sr. senator for MN on progressive issues, and may well help bring Amy along on these issues. This Roe shit should be right in her wheelhouse.
azlib
He is good. The irony is it was the Soviet Red Army that freed Ukraine from the Nazis and now Germany is sending arms to Ukraine to fight the Russian Army which is the decendant of the Red Army. And of course some Ukrainians welcomed the Werhmacht as liberators in 1941 since they really did not like what the Soviet system did to Ukraine and especially the horrid famine created by Soviet policy. Ukraine does have a complicated history. Zelenskyy has managed to unify the country in a way I did not think was possible.
RaflW
@azlib: A friend is on a tour in Bulgaria at the moment (the tour focuses on communist heroic iconography, statuary and architecture – all in decay these days. But I digress).
In learning up for the trip, he told me a thumbnail version of the Bulgarian decision to go with the Axis powers early in WWII, and then flipping as the Axis started failing. (Hence the iconography – a sort of red-washing to make it seem like they were with the anti-Nazis all along.)
My retelling of his compaction may not be super-accurate. But I think that part of the globe, being in the path of a lot of conquerors back to at least the Ottomans can impact one’s views on alliances and defenses (or offenses).
New Deal democrat
Those who have access to WaPo articles owe it to themselves to read Jennifer Rubin’s latest on the abortion decision leak:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/03/supreme-court-alito-roe-wade-ruling/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/05/roe-stare-decisis-reliances/
She argues that “stare decisis” isn’t just some fossilized legal trope. It is the means by which people are able to make important decisions about their lives without fear that the rug will get yanked out under them, because the law is stable. She points out that ever since Roe, women have been able to make important decisions about their careers, marriage, and family, knowing that they had access to birth control and, if necessary, abortion.
If abortion isn’t available in various States, can women join the military? What happens to a woman currently in the military if her assignment is changed to a base in, e.g., Texas? What about a woman whose company has transferred her, or wants to transfer her, there? What about young women in college in red States? And on and on.
For 50 years, women didn’t have to worry about what State they were located in, because their right to bodily autonomy was secure. Now, not only is that not the case going forward, but women may already have made commitments that landed them in red States, that they will have to fret about freeing themselves from.
In short, she argues that this case is going to lead to widespread, and utterly personal, social upheaval.
zhena gogolia
I love his references to the great philosopher Skovoroda.
zhena gogolia
My husband keeps saying, “Putin will not prevail.” I hope he’s right. He usually is. But then he doesn’t read any newspapers.
Ken
@azlib: I did like that tweet from a German source a few weeks ago, something like “So now you want Germany to raise a big army and march through Poland to attack Russia?”
Nelle
In 2018, I went from Odessa up the Dneiper River, stopping at Zaporizhzhia to bus out to various villages in the former Mennonite colonies. I descend from families on both sides of the river where they developed the land and grew wheat. My father grew up in a village southwest of Zaporizhzhia, now called Molochansk. As far as we know, all the ethnic Mennonites are long gone from the area, courtesy of famines, wars, and forced removal to Siberia (not counting those just shot by Stalin). My father left in the early 1920’s. My second cousin, Peter, was apparently shot as he tried to swim a river to escape in the 1930’s. Several relatives turned up in East Germany in the 70’s, having come from Siberia. As I’ve said before, I’m the youngest cousin. The first born cousin, Abraham, died of starvation. I tried to find his grave in a small village, but the graveyard had been plowed up during Stalin’s time.
The schools my uncles and aunts attended still stand, as does the church my father attended (in ruins) and the foundation of my grandfather’s publishing house. The girls school was bought by a group of Mennonites (mostly Canadians) who started an NGO as a way to provide social services and educational scholarships to those Ukrainians who now live there, an acknowlegement of the Mennonite tie and obligation to the land itself and to the current inhabitants. The village was occupied by Russians in early April; we are still getting reports of attempts to provide food for the villagers. I’ll link two reports at the end. So, one hundred years plus a few months after my cousin starved to death (and my father nearly starved and whose last words, before he died in 1997 were “That tastes good”), there are food shortages in the same village and region.
We are a ridicuous species.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zReIqi5mo4AC5ycVefC52CUfXOcrUaf4/view?fbclid=IwAR3QVa2qKvubaTxh6Q5K12BaIKBAi0Fdye683xqZy__vyz5ROU_9HuhIB0k
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N9wCSAxqYeaEhW9FIpJRtspcNUa4rWFy/view?fbclid=IwAR2Xb-jOUOBQP5js8fFxP-oYVCCVJQNJKQ3K4LUosfrldk0EkLd0UAokriQ
Gin & Tonic
@azlib: The Ukrainian Armed Forces are also a descendant of the Red Army. Around 7 million Ukrainians served in the Soviet Red Army during WWII, at all levels up to general officers, and many more Ukrainians served in the USSR’s armed forces from the end of WWII up until the collapse of the USSR. Please do not conflate “Soviet” with “Russian.”
Nelle
@New Deal democrat: What are the implications for simply driving through one state to get to another? What happens to a Minnesotan with an IUD if, when driving to Arkansas, a woman is injured in an accident in Missouri?
Nelle
@azlib: Yep, who would you choose to live under? Stalin or Hitler? A lot of Mennonites retreated with the Germans as they had already gone through the famine and the purges with Stalin.
rachel
@zhena gogolia: Is your husband good at reading people? Maybe he’s read Vova and seen that at heart that he is just a little man.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@RaflW:
Tina who?
Alison Rose ???
@SiubhanDuinne: I need someone to make art of him with that quote.
Betty Cracker
Photos at the link. Does the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman even comprehend the words she typed?
WereBear
@SiubhanDuinne: You are right! He was a winner, I do believe.
trollhattan
@Nelle: The whole thing seems like a house of cards without an applicable federal law (to which Republicans reply “hold my beer”) since citizens travel freely across state borders and are not subject to home state laws while out of state. Period.
What’s the Republican stance on transit visas?
zhena gogolia
@rachel: He’s very good at reading people.
Alison Rose ???
@New Deal democrat: I don’t think I will ever get over living in the “Jennifer Rubin is right” era. I mean, I like it…but it’s weird.
NotMax
Couple of unrelated items which caught the eye.
1) Hoocudanode? (Hint: everyone.)
2) Down Cole’s way.
“GOP-leaning?” Oh AP, that’s rich. Would y’all describe, for example. the KKK as “white supremacy leaning?”
WereBear
@trollhattan: Thinking is for the little people. Precisely the kinds of bosses who create messes and expect their “lessers” to fix it.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Savvy Republicans may be watching Casablanca and scheming how they can monetize transit visas. This makes me think of a dystopian remake of Casablanca, set in Saint Louis circa 2035.
Old School
@NotMax:
West Virginia does have a Democratic Senator.
Ken
Oh god, we do not need another Barb Wire.
Geo Wilcox
@trollhattan: How are they going to stop women from going across states’ borders to get an abortion? Check points at the highways? Pregnancy tests for every child bearing aged woman?
Do not tell that is unconstitutional because cops already set up check points to stop people to see if they are drunk or high.
azlib
@Gin & Tonic: You are correct. The Red Army drew from the many regions of the old Soviet Union. But the Russian Army is still a descendant of the Red Army and as you point out so is the Ukrainian Army and the Belarus Army as well as the armed forces of all the regions formally part of the Soviet Union.
oatler
Nice he threw in a Simpsons Sideshow Bob reference.
Roger Moore
@New Deal democrat:
This is exactly the argument for stare decisis. The best explanation I’ve seen is from one of the Supreme Court decisions on baseball’s anti-trust exemption. They basically said that the original decision had been wrong, but that MLB had built its business around the exemption, so it would be wrong for the Court to yank that out from under them. The key point they made is that by changing the law, the Court would retroactively make MLB’s actions illegal, and that wasn’t equitable. They urged Congress to remove the exemption, arguing that Congress doing it would be prospective and thus wouldn’t have the same problem.
One other important point is that negating previous decisions is more easily supported when granting rights than when taking them away for this same basic reason. You potentially put people in the position of having made decisions based on the assumption they would be able to do something, only to have that right taken away. It’s much easier for them when they suddenly have new rights and new possibilities, because you haven’t taken away their right to do what they had previously chosen.
Geminid
@NotMax: Reapportionment caused this Rep. on Rep. primary. West Virginia had six Representives for much of the last century. Starting next year they will have only two. Wikipedia tells me that West Virginia is the only one of fifty states to have a smaller population now than in 1950.
bjacques
This is pretty rich:
(From the Guardian Ukraine war blog 2:17 pm GMT)
“China’s president, Xi Jinping, has warned Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, that all efforts must be made to ensure the Ukraine conflict does not turn into an “unmanageable situation”, Chinese state media reports.
In a video call between the two leaders, Xi is cited as saying to Scholz:
Chinese state media said Xi also invited Germany to participate in the Global Security Initiative, a broad and vague framework the Chinese president put forward last month that upholds the principle of “indivisible security”, a concept invoked by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine.”
“Unmanageable” and “manageable” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
I’d love to know if Scholz asked Xi whether he gave Putin a similar warning 3 months ago and what response he got.
azlib
@Nelle: Hilter kind of blew it due to his own and his fanatical followers racial animus. The Germans could have headlined Operation Barbarossa as a war of liberation instead of conquest and set up a puppet regime in the Ukraine with a fair degree of autonomy and probably kept the population mostly in line. Germany was really good at the operational military level, but really bad at ruling the countries they conquored.
Ruckus ??
@zhena gogolia:
But then he doesn’t read any newspapers.
That can actually help one be correct more often these days because the misinformation, the misdirection of so many papers to attempt to bend opinions in the direction they want rather than just report the news. A prime example might be the FTFNYT. A paper for and about a segment of the population that really isn’t like the majority. Megamoney.
Kay
Been reading about how the anti-abortion movement plans to “support” women who will be forced to give birth.
There won’t be any expansion of state benefits. Instead public money will be funneled exclusively to ideologically conservative (Republican), fundamentalist religious groups to force women to go through those gatekeepers to receive benefits.
To receive “baby items” women will have to submit to religious/ideological indoctrination – all of it publicly funded, all of it going to well connected Right wing groups, who will then decide which woman are worthy of assistance. Huge boost for far Right wing political entities. Big tranches of public money to be doled out by them, at their sole discretion, with no public oversight and no assurance of equitable access for women who might not accept religious or ideological indoctrination. Obey, or no funds for you!
Kay
Wonder how that is going to go for women. In order to receive publicly-funded “counseling” the woman must go through Right wing ideological/religious groups who will act as gatekeepers. All of it publicly funded. Huge windfall for Right wing religious/political groups to push the ideology and also a heck of an employment program for thousands of Right wingers to get paid on the public dime.
Roger Moore
@azlib:
This is like saying the Confederacy could have been more militarily successful if it had started arming slaves in 1861. It may be true, but they could only have done such a thing if they were a completely different society from the one they were. The whole point of the war in the east was to enslave or kill the inhabitants so the land could be used for Germans. They never could have justified the war internally by selling it as a war of liberation.
Kay
So instead of something like “expanding Medicaid”, Texans will fund Republican religious groups who will dole out public funds as they see fit, to women they deem to have qualified. And take a nice slice off the top, to pay the thousands of new employees, who will only be hired if they meet ideological requirements.
It’s a far Right Republican employment program, all on the public dime.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@azlib: Barbarossa was all about stealing fuel and oil from the Soviet Union so a puppet state Ukraine would never happen. The racism, as always, was just the excuse.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
The vast majority of the money is likely to stick to the fingers of the right wing groups in charge of doling it out.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Likely no funds even if they do, I sense major grifting in this.
RaflW
@New Deal democrat: Rubin is definitely onto something. Fear that the rug will get yanked out under us, because the law is unstable is a hallmark of Authoritarianism.
DeSantis’ rapid-fire removal of a half-century of Florida law was entirely an exercise in pulling the rug out. Even if the FL GOP later ‘fix’ the looming tax/debt crisis for the counties, the message was crystal clear: Take a political stand on human rights, we’ll swoop in and instantly fvk with you. Any corp, not just Disney.
RaflW
@Nelle: In the era before Obergefell, we knew same-sex couples who traveled with durable power of atty documents at all times. And even then, knew there was a chance if, say, one of them ended up in an ER in a Catholic hospital in FL or similar would just not let the other into the patient room. It was terrible.
And could come back. Very soon.
Another Scott
Excellent video. Thanks for the pointer.
Here’s hoping that it comes to be, soon.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The biggest thing the Germans were trying to steal in WWII was land, and that necessarily meant doing something to the current inhabitants. Yes, they also wanted to steal other natural resources, but they were absolutely about stealing the land and killing or enslaving the current inhabitants.
AM in NC
@Alison Rose ???: I know! I remember the days of yelling AT her on the TV. Now I yell WITH her when I read her columns. Dogs and cats lying down together, I tell you. She is someone who gives me hope that change is possible.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I think Hitler launched Barbarrosa for both practical and ideological reasons. This is born out by his treatment of Ukrainians. The shrewd, pragmatic play would have been to enlist Ukrainians as allies in the fight with the Soviet Union. Instead, Nazi ideology dismissed them as untermenschen (sp?), a subject race that like the Poles were to be enslaved, while the Jews and gypsies among them were murdered outright.
RaflW
@New Deal democrat: On the traveling between states part, the “pro-business” political party has a plan to interfere in employee benefit design, because of course they do.
This is the sh*t corporations fund with their campaign donations!
Ksmiami
@trollhattan: that’s why we need to confront the judges where they live. No rest, no peace, no privacy
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
Again, you have to look at the why as well as the what. Germany didn’t invade the USSR on a lark. They did it because they wanted to occupy the best Soviet land, and the goal from day one was to replace the current occupants with Germans. The stuff about lebensraum wasn’t something they made up after the fact; it was the core reason for the invasion. They were already planning how many people would die of starvation before the invasion started.
azlib
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I am reading this book:
Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945
The claim here is WWII was the last imperial war. Germany was trying to create an empire in eastern Europe. Barbarossa could have been couched as a war of liberation for extending the German empire pretty easily and still ended up as a war of conquest with ruthless repressions. The Germans could have taken advantage of the Ukranian animus towards the Soviets and tailored their message to take advantage of the situation. Fortunately, they were not good at it because of their racial animus towards the Slavs. The British and the French did much the same in Africa and Asia couching their imperial ambitions as ruling the natives because they were not ready for western democracy. This is basically what justified the “mandates” coming out of the 1919 Versaille conference.
Reimagining WWII as an imperial war raises important issues about motivations. The myth surrounding WWII that it was as struggle between Democracy and Fascism, when to a large extent is was a war between the old empires of Britain, France, The Netherland and Belgium against the 3 upstarts (Germany, Italy and Japan) who wanted to establish their own empires. National identity was integraly tied to having an empire. In fact many of the leaders believed national identity required having an empire.
The US ended up siding with the old empires against the upstarts even though our policy was to a large extent anti-empirial. I am in no way justifying the actions of the upstarts whose overt racism caused millions of deaths. But many of the actions of the old empires were similar in scope and magnitude (e.g. the Bengal Famine in India, Belgium exploitation in the Congo, etc).
We had our own racial failings. Notably the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent and the segregation in the military.
We really need to understand our history and not gloss over the bad or even evil parts. We have to a large extent done that with WWII.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: It still would have been a practical move to enlist the Ukrainians on Germany’s side. There was plenty of land to go around, and what Germany really needed was the resources of the land it conquered, not the land itself. By 1942 Hitler should have known that he was in a fight for survival and needed allies where he could find them.
It’s true Hitler felt traumatised by the privation that led to the German surrender in 1918. But it was the blockade that did them in. A German dominated Ukraine would have bolstered Germany’s resource base with or without a German population which would take many years to establish anyway.
I don’t think many Germans would have balked at making Ukraine an ally. They knew what they were up against. Nazi Party members may have felt differently, since they thought they had opportunities ruling the subject areas. The German Army, on the other hand, would have favored a cooperative approach if they’d have had any say in the matter.
columbusqueen
@azlib: I’m sorry, but this argument doesn’t hold a lot of water in my view given Germany’s previous adventures in empire building before & during WWI.
Geminid
@azlib:
@columbusqueen: One of the best history books I’ve read doesn’t examine the root causes of the Second World War, but it does in part reflect them. Authors Anthony Read and David Fisher concentrate the diplomatic signals and manouvers that lead to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet pact, 1939-1941 (1989).
The book contains much material about the statesmen involved, including Chamberlin, Daladier, Polish Foreign Minister Beck, as well as Hitler and the reticent Stalin, who listened in the next room as Molotov and Ribbentrop hashed out the treaty that set the stage for the most destructive war in history. The gripping narrative follows German-Soviet relations to the launching of Operation Barbarossa and it’s immediate aftermath.
One of the last incidents the authors recount is the radio address Stalin made to the USSR’s people two weeks after the invasion. Germans had heard Hitler plenty the eight previous years. But even as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Stalin had always stayed in the background. This was the first time most of Stalin’s countrymen had ever heard his voice.
Another Scott
@azlib:
Probably dead thread, but there was a timely “With Good Reason” radio show recently on this very topic. Like Japanese Americans interred on the East Coast. And Italian Americans, and German Americans, also too. There’s a lot of American WWII history that has been buried and is still waiting to be revealed.
Legacies of World War II.
Cheers,
Scott.