TMD: Actual reporting is over here.
MG: Russian state terrorism
Is there any other way to describe it?
Tens of thousands of innocent civilians in a neighboring “brother Slavic” country murdered in nine months of an illegal invasion—and no significant protests in Russia against the government, and no significant protests of Russian expat communities outside Russia. In contrast, Iranians at home and abroad protest their brutal dictatorship routinely.
The Russians have been waging murderous campaigns against their neighboring peoples for centuries. Their neighbors know them best, and are the least likely to give them a free pass. For instance, this young lady from Lithuania:
I became briefly obsessed with the concept of collective trauma, and the idea that we have inherited the pain inflicted on our grandparents by Russia and its people. I came across an article by the contemporary Lithuanian writer Vaiva Rykstaite, who spoke of the “pain of blood” she felt. It made so much sense to me: It felt like your entire being is in pain. It feels like sadness and empathy for Ukrainians, anger, hatred, helplessness, a sense of injustice and hopelessness mixed into one, consuming you. I cannot explain it.
Lithuania was forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union in July 1940, when the Red Army was on its soil, following secret agreements between the USSR and Germany that divided Europe. Death, rape, arrests and mass deportations followed. It is estimated that from 1940 to 1990, about 1 million people, or around a third of Lithuania’s population, were deported, imprisoned, killed or forced to emigrate. More than 20,000 Lithuanian fighters and their supporters were killed in an armed resistance that continued long after the war.
It has been eerie and depressing to watch Russia commit the same repertoire of atrocities in Ukraine. The deportations of Ukrainians to Russia make me think of the cattle trains that took an estimated quarter of a million Lithuanians in the 1940s to the frozen wastelands and gulags in Siberia. Tens of thousands perished along the way.
The Russians are keeping this tradition going, foremost in Syria, but also inside Russia itself, in Georgia, in Belarus, in Mali, in the Central African Republic, in the Republic of Congo, in assisting repressive anti-American regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Shouldn’t we be expending whatever it takes to ensure that Russians can never again export their brutal ways? Shouldn’t we be helping Ukraine defeat this unrepentant colonizing culture once and for good? Shouldn’t we be shaming Western Europeans for failing to recognize what is plainly going on under their noses?
We’ve known the true ways of the Russian soul at least since Solzhenitsyn spelled them out clearly. He told us of how the brutality of the ancient tsarist regime did not compare to the murderous bloodlust that was unleashed in the Russian revolution—a genocidal spirit that is plain for the world to behold today on a daily basis.
Can there be any basis for negotiating peace with a nation and people who appear to believe the only peace that can be achieved is one that comes about by means of extermination? No, that is not really a question.
Sigh, yeah it is awful what they are doing, just not sure how much we can fix that
Hello everyone, another brutal day at work...
I have my light up Bumble here and the walking singing Grinch too to make me smile...lol
Today's compound German words, taken from a Swiss newspaper's Ukraine coverage:
gefährliche = dangerous
Pressereise = press trip
Artilleriebeschuss= artillery fire