History of Modern Ukraine
The title of lesson 19 of Timothy Snyder’s on-line course, “Oligarchies in Ukraine and Russia,” sounded interesting, so I listened to the lecture. Twice. And then I looked at the syllabus.
Nothing about Murti-Bing pills or the Sino-Mongolian army or Murti-Bingism.
Tim has teamed up with Z and @U24_gov_ua to raise funds to buy a fleet of naval drones. Apropos of nothing, Z yesterday announced at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum that there is no corruption in Ukraine.
I didn’t learn anything about oligarchies in Russia and Ukraine from this lecture, which was mostly about Polish fantasies (Jerzy Giedroyc, Ivan Rudnytsky) about Ukraine pre-1991. Marci will talk about Manafort in lesson 20, Tim said.
Whatever.
I think about the mess differently, because my intellectual political baggage is packed with Miłosz, Budinas, Bykov, Taras, Baradullin et al. Last time I checked, Poland’s experiment in state building had devolved into a weird pseudo religious strain of electoral authoritarianism.
Here’s a second, more cogent lecture about modern Ukraine by Vitaly Portnikov, who talks to students studying journalism about contemporary myths involving language issues, separatism, idiotarianism, populism, etc.
Unfortunately, if you’re a good journalist in Ukraine, you don't have an Achilles' heel. Because you're just a piece of shit in the middle of the track that eventually is going to get run over by the Z!Team train.
Which reminds me of this:
Once upon a time there was a rooster and a cat who lived in the forest. The fox wanted to eat the rooster for dinner. This tale follows similar plot, but instead of the rooster and cat, we have two pederasts, Vasyl and Petro.
One day, the two seek refuge in the woods to escape the dreariness of modern existence. Globablism and civilization catch up with them when Mikita – a cannibal – tries to eat Petro for purely ideological reasons. Mikita, you see, had spent his whole life fighting globalism, which, for some unknown reason, he blamed pederasts for.
The story has a happy ending, though. Instead of eating Petro, Mikita becomes a pederast, too. And in so doing, good conquers evil, etc.