Thought For the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I used to participate in Anatoly Karlin’s threads. (Thin-skinned twerp banned me). There’s a vigorous strand of opinion among Russian nationalists which adheres to the notion that the Ukraine is a fake nation and that western Ukrainians are degenerate Poles while eastern Ukrainians are Russians in rebellion. They’re not deterred by social survey research which indicates that a grand total of 4% of the population of the Ukraine is in favor of merging with Russia and that the Russophile political parties in the Ukraine command no more than 1/4 th of the electorate. They also want to conquer White Russia. Re-incorporation into Russia is a much more popular idea in White Russia than it is in the Ukraine, but it’s still a declining minority viewpoint, favored by perhaps a quarter of the population (v. 1/2 the population 25 years ago). The clown nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky poses as favoring the conquest of all the territory lost in 1990-91, which is de trop even for Karlin’s crew. They’ve persuaded themselves that if Russian forces stomp on the population hard enough while the treasury offers good pensions, the population of the Ukraine will just fall into line.
Note also, this crew despises Ukrainians as people, maintaining they’re dunces incapable of managing their affairs and thus naturally subjugated. Some very unpleasant strands in Russian public opinion.
G~d forbid I should be accused of siding with the Brandon administration, but Ukraine has never been “ours” to lose. With the Russians no longer commies (there are more in DC than in Moscow), this becomes just one more instance of the Europeans slaughtering one another. Not worth the worst 8-ball in the American service.
We have interests in the old Soviet Union not being recreated and that is the ultimate ambition of Putin. I have zero confidence in the current administration doing anything other than talk if Putin moves against the Ukraine.
We have interests in the old Soviet Union not being recreated and that is the ultimate ambition of Putin.
No clue what his ultimate aim is.
I would be very skeptical that he has any interest in Central Asia apart from border counties and oil fields in Kazakhstan. The other four Central Asian states are dirt poor and have unassimilable populations with high fertility; for the most part, the ethnic Russian populations there packed their bags and left after 1991.
It’s hard to say if Putin’s been constrained merely by limited resources and attention to other priorities or if his own caution is also a vector influencing him. Among all Russia’s rulers over four generations, only Joseph Stalin was in charge appreciably longer than the current incumbent. Putin is also nearly 70; someone once said old men do not grow wise, but they do grow careful. He is by all appearances a stone-cold Machiavellian with no investment in bizarre social ideologies. I guess we’ll find out what he has in mind.
this becomes just one more instance of the Europeans slaughtering one another.
Warfare is not a peculiarly European phenomenon, and the closest you come to anything like what you describe in the last 75 years was the Bosnian War, fought entirely over an area with a population similar to South Carolina’s.
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-wants-rebuild-soviet-union-former-head-british-army-warns-714301
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-election-putin/putin-before-vote-says-hed-reverse-soviet-collapse-if-he-could-agencies-idUSKCN1GE2TF
I’m seeing a British military officer offering an opinion and I’m seeing some fragments of an English-language translation of some remarks.
I’ll point out that the fall of the Communist regime in Poland and other Eastern European countries generated an implosion in per capita product on the order of 5% – 20% of domestic product; economic recovery set in in 1991, 1992, or 1993. The economic implosion in the former Soviet states was far more violent – a decline in per capita product on the order of 1/3 dragged out over seven years. This was attended by a breakdown in public order. Russia by 1999 had a homicide rate on the order of what you’d see in Brazil. Yes, that was something he wanted to reverse (and has largely reversed). The lengths to which he’s willing to go to snatch territory from surrounding countries remains unknown.
“One of the ways in which the modern world tends to corrupt the mind is the unquestioning acceptance of universally accepted worldly values above all else. The most evident example of this is Democracy.
A Democracy that encourages abortion and not only tolerates but celebrates perversion is betraying God. An autocracy that cares for the preservation and transmission of Christian values is serving Him. Let this sink in.
The modern fashion of Russia-bashing is not serving God. Vladimir Putin, who has transformed one of the most atheist Countries on earth in one of the most solidly Christian – and be they Orthodox ones; you can’t always get everything in life – is a modern Constantine. …
…
Russia is a solid ally of every Christian in the West. In all the things that really count for Salvation (and I am sorry to shock you, but Democracy is not among those), Putin has been delivering excellence for going to twenty years. In the West we should thank God for this man, rather than whine because Russia is culturally and traditionally different from Western Democracies.
Vladimir Putin has done so much for Christianity, that it is no surprise the self-righteous, worldly MSMs condemn him every second. He is an existential threat to the likes of CNN or the BBC. They recoil in terror in front of unashamedly Christian Countries like the devil from the holy water.”
https://mundabor.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/god-bless-vladimir-putin/
“I’m back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR
Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia’s always on my my my my my my my my my mind.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zobzZlNwTbk