|
Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Mar 9, 2022 13:11:42 GMT
With the moderator's indulgence, this is the place to discuss the war, not the shout box.
The title may be loaded, but the reason why is that allow the issues between Russia and Ukraine are far from black and white, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia is wrong and no amount of excuses will make it right.
Secondly, people should get the idea that Vladimir Putin is some kind of defender of Christendom out of their heads.
However, since independence, the treatment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine has been appalling as has been the relationship between the West and Ukraine through that time.
I know the case has been made for partition of Ukraine, but this would see mass displacement. I also can't see Russia withdrawing until Putin looses power (it's worth remembering that this war is not popular in Russia).
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 9, 2022 23:31:26 GMT
How "appalling" was the treatment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine since independence, given that for much of the time relatively Russophile governments were in power? I know a certain amount about the grievances of ethnic Russians in the Baltic states, so I'm not nitpicking - I'd genuinely like to know details. I can think of two points where the Russophones in Ukraine do have grievances: (1) The overthrow of Yanukovych - he is a crook on an epic scale but he was legitimately elected (there was an opposition government in power when the election was held, and international observers certified the result) and his overthrow implied that the easterners and Crimeans were not entitled to have a president of their choice. (2) The role of the Poroshenko government in promoting an autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine at the expense of those Orthodox affiliated to the Moscow Patriarchate, especially since my understanding is that this implies the eventual suppression of the MP remnant. Both these are counterbalanced by worse crimes on the other side - the UGCC and the Kiev Patriarchate Orthodox (as well as Protestant groups) are being actively suppressed and persecuted in the occupied territories, Yanukovych's mandate is offset by his crimes and the fact that the post-Maidan governments clearly have majority support - but they shouldn't be overlooked. The thing is that saying these things, as I have been doing for some time, now makes me feel as if I have been left holding Neville Chamberlain's umbrella.
|
|
|
Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 10, 2022 11:52:29 GMT
I don't pretend to understand the situation, though my viewpoint on it has been formed by years of reading Peter Hitchens's blog.
But I'm very disturbed and even shocked by the jingoism, war-mongering, and bellicosity of the Western public, especially the Irish public.
After decades of the World War One poets being taught in schools, it's depressing that people have people have lapsed almost to the level of "Give the Kaiser a bloody nose" and "We'll be hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line, if the Siegfried Line's still there."
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 12, 2022 22:55:28 GMT
I see what you mean, and it's interesting that quite a few groups and individuals who are normally hostile to Western foreign policy are backing the Ukrainians. Only the really hard far-left and hard far-right are siding with Putin. What amazes me is the number of commentators who are calling for direct intervention (a no-fly zone is direct intervention) against a nuclear-armed power. The big problem is that it seems intolerable to leave the Ukrainians to their fate, but a nuclear war won't help them. We're going to see nuclear deterrence tested to breaking point, and all of us - especially the poorest - will experience rising bread and energy prices even if the war doesn't spread. At least one of my points seems to be resolving itself. Rod Dreher has picked up reports that the remnant Orthodox Church in Ukraine in communion with Moscow is disintegrating, helped along by Patriarch Kirill's obscene Forgiveness Sunday sermon implicitly saying it's OK to bomb the Ukrainians because they have Gay Pride parades: www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/war-culture-war-patriarch-kyrill-lgbt-russia-ukraine/www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/russian-orthodoxy-tragedy-ukraine-kyrill/
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 12, 2022 23:13:01 GMT
My own view of Ukraine is formed by my awareness of the history of persecution endured by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. I remember how moved I was to see Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk - the successor of so many martyrs, now quite possibly facing martyrdom himself - at the Eucharistic Congress here in 2012. I have never seen Putin as the new Constantine, as many trads did. He came to power by blasting Chechnya to rubble (the fact that Chechens are not exactly blameless, and that Kadyrov uses his faction as Putin's hitmen, doesn't alter that point) and by dealing with some of the biggest gangsters and oligarchs, not from benevolence but in order to establish himself as the king of the gangsters whom all the little gangsters must obey. That being said, the chaos and exploitation of 1990s Russia under supposedly liberal governments was such that it was understandable that a majority of Russians - at least in the past - should see Putin as preferable on the model of Hobbes' Leviathan, and I have argued that this viewpoint must be understood. The trouble with trying to understand Putin's Russia in this way is that it got harder and harder to explain away the lengthening record of murder and foreign intervention (including the invasion of Georgia in 2008) and at last it is intolerable. For some commentators (I don't mean you) to support Putin as a way of "owning the libs" is demented. It rests on awareness that just as the Cold War saw a lot of left-liberals being smeared by association as communists, social conservatives are going to be smeared by association as Putinists. Here's an example of this guilt by association directed at Catholic trads: wherepeteris.com/the-trads-and-the-tyrant/ We just have to stand up for truth and endure the consequences.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 18, 2022 23:45:36 GMT
One of the nastier side-effects of the Ukraine crisis is the prospect of women refugees being sexually exploited. The vultures are already circling. Incidentally, note the alleged comedian described in the article. Making such 'jokes' to fellow degenerates in private is obscene enough, but what possessed him to think he could broadcast such material to a mass audience as harmless amusement? thecritic.co.uk/ukrainian-women-are-at-risk-in-the-uk/
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 22, 2022 23:34:51 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 22, 2022 23:45:53 GMT
|
|
|
Post by annie on Mar 31, 2022 20:55:00 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Apr 30, 2022 23:04:13 GMT
It's amazing how quickly we get used to the ongoing bloodbath on the continent, and the genuine possibility of a worse catastrophe. One striking detail is that Russian official sources have been putting out propaganda making the following claims (among others); - Anyone who believes Ukrainians are a different nationality from Russians is a Nazi and must be denazified. - The Russian invasion is actually an act of decolonisation as it is rescuing the Ukrainians from the illusion that the European option is a good thing. - The strength of Ukrainian resistance merely shows that the whole population is in the grip of Nazi psychosis, like the population of Nazi Germany in yhe last stages of WW2, and hence needs to be even more thoroughly denazified. How can Ukraine coexist or compromise with such a mindset? How dangerous is such a regime?
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on May 1, 2022 15:50:41 GMT
It's amazing how quickly we get used to the ongoing bloodbath on the continent, and the genuine possibility of a worse catastrophe. One striking detail is that Russian official sources have been putting out propaganda making the following claims (among others); - Anyone who believes Ukrainians are a different nationality from Russians is a Nazi and must be denazified. - The Russian invasion is actually an act of decolonisation as it is rescuing the Ukrainians from the illusion that the European option is a good thing. - The strength of Ukrainian resistance merely shows that the whole population is in the grip of Nazi psychosis, like the population of Nazi Germany in yhe last stages of WW2, and hence needs to be even more thoroughly denazified. How can Ukraine coexist or compromise with such a mindset? How dangerous is such a regime? That mindset only makes sense if you define Nazism as being synonymous with Russophobia - otherwise how on earth can you call a country with a Jewish leader Nazi, given their extreme antisemitism? It just makes no sense. This would also be consistent with having no problem with bona-fide Nazis like the Wagner group fighting alongside you while hypocritically complaining about the Azov battalion (which I agree is a disgrace and ought to be disbanded). Notice as well the constant reference to Banderites in Russian propaganda in an effort to paint all Ukrainians as Nazis. To put it in an Irish context, it would be like Britain claiming in the 1970's that the Republic was run by Nazis in cahoots with the Provisional IRA, and using this as a pretext to invade the South. The fact that some elements of Ukrainian nationalism (like the veneration of Bandera) actually are deeply problematic no more justifies invading their country and committing colossal war crimes anymore than the excesses of Irish nationalism would justify an invasion by Britain. Can Ukraine coexist with that mindset? I'd have to say no, since to adopt it would effectively be to assent to its absorption into Russia, which is now finding out is far more difficult than it anticipated. Such a regime is extremely dangerous and shows exactly the pitfalls of nationalism (as distinct from patriotism) and of nations only considering their own interests to the exclusion of their responsibilities to the wider world. It also shows us that the multipolar world so desired by the political extremes of the left and right would in fact be a far more dangerous and volatile place, and will quite possibly culminate with a nuclear war. Certainly, there are serious problems with how international institutions are being used to push narrow agendas that are antithetical to Christianity and humanity as a whole. But the solution has to be to reform them from within, not to dismantle them altogether, since in that case the cure could very well be worse than the disease.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on May 3, 2022 0:11:26 GMT
Putin's propaganda is of course a pack of lies produced by people who have no concern for truth, but it is picking up on older attitudes towards the Ukrainians which have been embedded in Russian nationalism since the Tsarist era, and which are reinforced by official celebration of the Great Patriotic War as a focus for national identity. These include the following: The Russians claim that the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and its successor the Russian state were the legitimate heirs of the Kievan Rus principality destroyed by the Mongols, and that the reincorporation of Belarus and Ukraine in the C18 represents the reunification of the Russian lands. The view that Ukrainians are western-oriented and separate from Russia is seen as artificially created by successive colonisers (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Hapsburg Empire, the Second and Third German Reichs) in order to divide and dominate the Russians. Ukrainians who sign up for this project are either deliberate traitors or naive dupes, and represent a danger to Russia (in the narrow sense) as well as to Ukrainians themselves. This does have a certain basis in the history of Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Germany during WW2. (Note BTW how Russian propaganda in the conflict initially implied that the Ukrainian government were like the Ukrainian nationalists in WW1 and WW2, at least as they are portrayed in Russia - an unrepresentative minority who would collapse without outside assistance. After the discovery of widespread popular support for the Ukrainian government, they are now being portrayed as the German population in WW2.) The problem (to put it mildly) is that even if you take the view that the Ukrainians by becoming independent swapped one form of colonisation for another - a line Peter Hitchens, for example, has put forward - this still might imply that the Ukrainians are entitled to decide that some colonisers are preferable to others (bad language warning in clip below); www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1CB-D1TtXc Hence the invocation of Nazism. This also has ecclesiastical equivalents in the claims of the Russian Orthodox Church that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is an artificial creation with no right to exist, which extends to refusal to admit that the forced merger of the UGCC with the Orthodox at Stalin's bogus synod of 1946 was involuntary. (An equivalent might be if the post-independence Irish government had forcibly suppressed the Church of Ireland as a bunch of collaborators, which would have been an outrageous offence against religious freedom.) (2) The reference to Banderites has slightly more basis than you let on - there are significant bodies of opinion, especially in west Ukraine, which celebrate Bandera and his followers as heroes. (BTW Banderites fought for and against the Nazis at different times, and as well as their role in the massacre of Jews they also committed mass murders of Poles.) This sort of problem is not confined to Ukraine, BTW - certain elements in the Baltic States celebrate Baltic nationalists who resisted Stalin but who collaborated enthusiastically in the mass murder of Jews and others. It's hard to think of an Irish equivalent because we haven't been a strategic threat to Britain on that scale since the Napoleonic Wars. Let us suppose that the British government had responded to the erection in Dublin in 1950 of a statue of Sean Russell, the IRA commander who collaborated with the nazis, by declaring that all forms of Irish nationalism were nazi and invading in the name of denazification... BTW the statue really exists: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Russell
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 12, 2022 10:41:49 GMT
Putin's propaganda is of course a pack of lies produced by people who have no concern for truth, but it is picking up on older attitudes towards the Ukrainians which have been embedded in Russian nationalism since the Tsarist era, and which are reinforced by official celebration of the Great Patriotic War as a focus for national identity. These include the following: The Russians claim that the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and its successor the Russian state were the legitimate heirs of the Kievan Rus principality destroyed by the Mongols, and that the reincorporation of Belarus and Ukraine in the C18 represents the reunification of the Russian lands. The view that Ukrainians are western-oriented and separate from Russia is seen as artificially created by successive colonisers (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Hapsburg Empire, the Second and Third German Reichs) in order to divide and dominate the Russians. Ukrainians who sign up for this project are either deliberate traitors or naive dupes, and represent a danger to Russia (in the narrow sense) as well as to Ukrainians themselves. This does have a certain basis in the history of Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Germany during WW2. (Note BTW how Russian propaganda in the conflict initially implied that the Ukrainian government were like the Ukrainian nationalists in WW1 and WW2, at least as they are portrayed in Russia - an unrepresentative minority who would collapse without outside existence. After the discovery of widespread popular support for the Ukrainian government, they are now being portrayed as the German population in WW2.) The problem (to put it mildly) is that even if you take the view that the Ukrainians by becoming independent swapped one form of colonisation for another - a line Peter Hitchens, for example, has put forward - this still might imply that the Ukrainians are entitled to decide that some colonisers are preferable to others (bad language warning in clip below); www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1CB-D1TtXc Hence the invocation of Nazism. This also has ecclesiastical equivalents in the claims of the Russian Orthodox Church that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is an artificial creation with no right to exist, which extends to refusal to admit that the forced merger of the UGCC with the Orthodox at Stalin's bogus synod of 1946 was involuntary. (An equivalent might be if the post-independence Irish government had forcibly suppressed the Church of Ireland as a bunch of collaborators, which would have been an outrageous offence against religious freedom.) (2) The reference to Banderites has slightly more basis than you let on - there are significant bodies of opinion, especially in west Ukraine, which celebrate Bandera and his followers as heroes. (BTW Banderites fought for and against the Nazis at different times, and as well as their role in the massacre of Jews they also committed mass murders of Poles.) This sort of problem is not confined to Ukraine, BTW - certain elements in the Baltic States celebrate Baltic nationalists who resisted Stalin but who collaborated enthusiastically in the mass murder of Jews and others. It's hard to think of an Irish equivalent because we haven't been a strategic threat to Britain on that scale since the Napoleonic Wars. Let us suppose that the British government had responded to the erection in Dublin in 1950 of a statue of Sean Russell, the IRA commander who collaborated with the nazis, by declaring that all forms of Irish nationalism were nazi and invading in the name of denazification... BTW the statue really exists: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Russell A couple of issues here. The ecclesiastical composition of the Church in Ukraine is more complex than just a division between Russian Orthodox and Greek Catholic. At the time of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Orthodoxy in Ukraine was predominantly Moscow Patriarchate with a few small bodies claiming autocephaly which were principally made up of Ukrainians overseas (this is par for the course in the Orthodox world). This gained traction around 1992 when the Metropolitan of Kiev (or Ky'iv, as it is more common to call it these days), Filaret was excommunicated and forcibly laicised by Moscow in 1992 amid some very colourful accusations. Filaret responded by taking a chunk of the Church with him and a couple of years later, he was Patriarch of Kiev in what was still a minority Orthodox denomination. However, the independent Orthodox churches in Ukraine have consolidated and expanded and gained recognition from Constantinople, who are not paying much attention to Moscow's allegations about Filaret (which doesn't mean there's nothing in them). I think the split between what I will call Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy in Ukraine is about two to one, which Greek Catholicism around 10% (which is 30% in Western Ukraine), there's a small amount of Latin Catholicism (ethnic Poles and Lithuanians) and other religious groups. I think that Bandera would attract more following in Ukraine by far than Seán Russell would in Ireland. It might have been different if we were involved in WW2 due to the Allies occupying Ireland for strategic reasons if Germany had won the Battle of Britain and were able to land infantry and armour in England. The situation on the Eastern Front was much more complicated. One thing that has been quite hidden here is the long standing enmity between Poland and Ukraine, which was very much a feature of the Second Polish Republic when Western Ukraine was part of Poland (and Polish Latin Catholics had as little time for Greek Catholicism as the Russian Orthodox did as to them it wasn't really Catholic - this is a sandwich situation Eastern Catholics (apart from Maronites who have no equivalent in any great number outside the Catholic Church) have everywhere. But the original point here is that there was a very real connexion between Ukrainian nationalism and the Third Reich which Putin's people don't need to manufacture (though they might be overstating it).
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 12, 2022 21:41:13 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Oct 21, 2022 19:38:40 GMT
|
|