“I would choose to be shot to death right here, in Kyiv instead of going to the frontline,” Serhiy, a 17-year-old high school graduate, told Al Jazeera. “I wouldn’t be able to raise my hand at the people of my blood.”
He cited the customs of Cossacks, a medieval caste of frontier warriors in what is now central Ukraine who formed quasi-democratic communities and combined nomadic cavalry tactics with firearms.
“Our forefathers, Cossacks, didn’t allow a man who had no children, no heirs, to go to war,” Serhiy said. “I would have done the same. If there are no people, who the hell needs this land?”
Finance capitalism, kid. Finance capitalism wants your land.
Nice that there are kids who haven't bought in to the "russians are orcs" ukronazi bullshit.
How fucked is it that NATO's strategy to conquer Ukraine and steal it's land and riches is to create a war, send a half million Ukrainians to die against their own cousins, finance the war, and then demand everything of value Ukraine has left as repayment?
And now that it's looking like there may not be a ukraine to pay the war debt NATO is toying with the idea of taking things nuclear and just ending the world entire instead of capitulating and writing off some paltry amount of debt.
(CW: SA) Cossacks weren't their forefathers though, they were separate people cosidering themsevles nobility (nobody else agreed with that though) and called the local peasants "Blackness" which means "common rabble" (at best). And they were resettled by the Russian Empire to other places, iirc mostly Kuban. Cossack ancestry is only real in the meaning that they r*ped A LOT, but the same was done in Ukraine by Tatars and Poles.
yeah his historical knowledge is deeply flawed, but his modern sentiment is in the right place. He should not want to die for finance imperialists, and at least in that he has a correct consciousness.
Yeah, not disagreeing with that naturally, just pointing out that this kinds of fake ethnogenesis is usually a reactionary brainworm breeding ground, for example Poland still cannot entirely shake off the Sarmatism nonsense even after 400 years.
Since modern Ukraine is not willing to admit the only reason their current state even exists is due to Vladimir Lenin and the actual historical precursors are too Russian, apparently Ukrainian historians have landed on Zaporozhian cossacks for their nationalist myth. The kid was probably taught that in school, I've seen Ukrainian professors say the same thing.
I told my lib colleague this entire time that the global South are better off allying with China than America and he scoffed at the idea for quite a while; the genocide in Palestine though really opened his eyes and he's beginning to realize regardless of what he thinks of China (he's still a lib), they are definitely better friends to countries in the global South than the US government.
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
The US is going to alienate every ally it has.
At this point the only thing holding the West allyship together is shared racism against brown people, will it be enough?
will it be enough?
Europe is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle, and the garden must make sure the jungle does not encroach on the garden
-Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief
It's not a matter of 'is racism against brown people enough', it's a matter of when do they come back down to planet earth.
who cares how alienated they are if they follow every beck and call, if they kneel to every wave of their hand
america is in charge, ukraine can do absolutely nothing about that
Until it ain't. Even Mexico seems to be angling to pivot to BRICS as soon as a chance is presented.
Some things are just impossible to spin. Having to lower conscription to 18 is one of those. You can't pretend that Russia is losing 10 people to every Ukrainian at that point or that Ukraine has no casualties. The visceral reaction to kids being sent to war overrules everything else, and then you start realizing that the older men got no training whatsoever either.
I meant spin mostly for foreign audiences, right. The euro-american NATOist who feels very strongly about the war is just a coward several million steps removed from it all. Whereas your family is in the thick of it. At the very least they are trying to survive mentally, and are invested in the war in a much more visceral way. Their rationalizations are much more powerfully built and that's without even considering, as you mentioned, the ethnonationalist side of it all.
Oh, they have. On reddit I've seen NAFO posters continuously talk about how the real problem is that Ukraine was never on conscription and never actually mobilized. Which is insane in the face of the news piece. But rather than question those assertions, the system just overwhelms them with posts of people talking about how 18yos are children, the war must be stopped and things must be collapsing. It's as if reality kicked the propagandist out of their soapbox.
Fucking evil. Dc is just so fucking evil. They're not kids to the ghouls, they're just ammunition.
Libs will ban you from their subreddits for disagreeing with this.
Only a Russian troll who wants Putin to win would oppose this. If anything, 18 isn't low enough. Remove the age requirement entirely so that newborns and supercentenarians can join the fight to defend Western civilization. Denying preschoolers their right to take up arms is literally the definition of totalitarianism.
We also have cake in Poland called "sękacz" in different versions, from the mild ambrosia melting on your tongue to rock hard that can be mounted on a stick and used to bash someone's head.
sękacz
lets not pretend the spit cake is not a dark souls weapon
