this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
36 points (97.4% liked)
Comradeship // Freechat
2314 readers
84 users here now
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's more like a three-way divide: West vs Centre&North vs East&South. Western Ukraine is firmly Banderist. East and South are firmly pro-Russian. The rest is somewhere in the middle, though they have been getting forcibly dragged into the Banderite camp through an enormous amount of indoctrination and propaganda over the past decades, much of it funded by the West and by corrupt oligarchs who stood to gain from this.
This is also reflected in the language. The reality is that there isn't just Ukrainian on the one side vs Russian on the other. For most of Ukraine's history much of "middle" Ukraine (Malorossiya) spoke a mixed dialect, closer to Russian than to the Ukrainian spoken in the West but distinct from the real Russian spoken in the east. Add to that a sizeable minority even in these middle parts that natively just spoke Russian and the fact that Russian was the lingua franca in which everyone understood each other, and you quickly see why the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to force western Ukrainian language on the entirety of Ukraine was inevitably going to lead to disaster.
Because this "Ukrainian nationalism" is actually the opposite of self-determination - it's a project of cultural erasure that was forcibly imposed, an attempt by a small fanatical minority to artificially homogenize a diverse population and create a "national identity" on the basis of ethnic hatred. Sooner or later a project like this that is purely defined in terms of what it isn't rather than what it is was bound to implode on itself.
i completely agree. thanks for expanding on my comment
I don't agree at all that Ukrainian nationalism is the opposite of self-determination. The actual Ukrainian self-determination supporters begged for Russia's help.
I totally understand that alot of Ukrainians are/were violent, dangerous, white supremacist NATO-bootlicking, evil nutjobs. But it's important to remember that Ukraine has been systematically psychologically collectively been abused and gaslit by decades of Nazi-Aligned Terrorist Organization propaganda.
I don't think (I'm not saying that you think this, I'm just elaborating) that you can blame Ukrainians completely for the crimes of their government, even though there is alot of truth in that.
And unlike Israel, Ukraine has millennia, or at least multiple centuries, of history before it was part of Russia. Even though yes, Ukraine was often considered to be Russian territory.
I think that Ukraine has a right to exist, unlike Isn'treal, and I don't view Ukraine as an inherently settler-colonialist project, and there is a very real different, albeit similar in alot of aspects, than from Russian culture.
I won't shed any particularly heavy tears of if Ukraine ceases altogether to exist, but I really don't think that the high-jacking and colonialist appropriation of actual Ukrainian nationalism should justify the claim that Ukraine is inherently as artificial as Israel.
Just to clarify, i put "Ukrainian nationalism" in quotation marks because i don't believe that it is that which it claims to be, not in the broader sense of the national interest and self-determination of the whole of Ukraine. It is a strictly Galician supremacist ideology that is rooted in ethnic hate not just for Russians, Poles, Jews, but also and nowadays in large part directed at other Ukrainians who are considered the "wrong kind" of Ukrainians.
It cannot possibly represent self-determination when it historically prostrated itself before Nazi Germany, the genociders of slavs, and now before the Western imperialists whose only interest in Ukraine is to plunder, subjugate it and use it as a battering ram against Russia.
Ukraine itself is not artificial, just like Switzerland isn't artificial despite being a patchwork of different languages and ethnicities, but the ethnically and linguistically homogenous Ukraine whose sole national essence is to be the antithesis of Russia - which is how the Ukrainian project is envisioned by this "Ukrainian nationalism" - is artificial and ahistorical.
And i am very much not blaming all Ukrainians for the crimes of this ideology and this regime, in fact as i have just stated, i think Ukrainians are the primary victims of this ideology and regime which in collusion with the western imperialist powers has stolen their self-determination and their future from them.
But unfortunately i don't think Ukraine as it has existed for the past 100 years can continue to exist anymore. I think that this "Ukrainian nationalism" has irreparably broken it and the best outcome for the Ukrainian people now is either re-absorption into Russia, or a division wherein Russia takes the majority Russian speaking parts and the rest become something akin to Belarus.
Breaking free from the toxic ideology of "Ukrainian nationalism" and from the clutches of the western imperialists is the only way they can have a real prosperous and peaceful future. I know we would all like to turn back the clock to the Ukrainian SSR but that's just not going to happen.
I just think of it as Greater Ruthenia
You have very fair points, and I'm 99 percent sure that you didn't mean what you said literally, but more so the overall sentiment, and I figured this was moreso what you meant.
I mostly agree.
I would like to see the Ukrainian SSR come back, but alot of things would have to change first.