glimmer-silver - Tumblr blog

[glimmer-silver]

Russian History

I'm taking a class on Russian history in college right now. I swear to god, it feels like every single class is another example of why Eastern Europe hates the Russians. And it's not the Eastern Europeans starting it. It's not Poles, Lithuanians, or Ukrainians starting it. It's the Russians. How anyone is surprised that the instant they had the chance they joined an alliance like NATO is beyond me.

I hate saying it, but Putin is right that to understand the war in Ukraine, you need to know the history. He's just wrong about who the victims are. Russian history is a history of Russian aggression. The victims are Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and God knows how many other groups. Of course, they sought Western protection the second they got out from under Russia's thumb.

I'm sorry if this is rambling or confusing. I just needed to vent somewhere.

 Слава Україні! Героям слава!

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the problem with not voting in order to send the message that you hate all the candidates and the entire system and therefore refuse to participate is that it's completely indistinguishable, as a signal, from not bothering to vote because you think the system is great and all the candidates are great and you'd be fine with any of them. so you might want to rethink the strategy there

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Paid pro russian farmers forgot, when Poland went into EU they became main competitors for Germany and France. Pour out Ukrainian grain that was heading to Germany, pouring out grain that was planted, grown and harvested under fire and bombing is an act of scoundrels and assholes. Weapons can’t be arrived in proper time, we are dying because of you. We cover you from horror. We die for you too. Because if we are captured by russia, you will be next. russians directly state this. You are cowards. And I say this to the Poland farmers who have bloody money in their hands. It’s not pro Poland protests. It’s anti Ukrainian protests.

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Donate to Ukraine

United 24: General fundraising

Come Back Alive: Specific projects

Prytula foundation: Specific projects

Dzyga’s Paw: General fundraising (animal themed 🐶)

They need all the help they can get.

🇺🇦

[glimmer-silver]

tumblr is better than many other social media for a ukrainian because here you are rarely forced to see idiots and your blog can be well hidden. but it is the worst for the absolute feeling of marginalization and awkward ignore from the majority of people i would call friends or something if i weren't a ukrainian or there wasn't a war. i feel like i'm forced to sit in a dark cave and see others like shadows that both entertain and upset me

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Watched a documentary about the (now legendary) football games between the national teams of russia and Ukraine in 1998 and 1999. The sheer levels of imperialistic fascism the russians were displaying leading up to those games is just typical. And yes, both those games took place before putin came to power, russians have just always been like that.

Patches and pins "russian invasion of Ukraine 1998" were popular among the russian fans leading up to the first game in Kyiv:

The rhetoric in the russian media about Ukraine not really being a separate country intensified.

For the record, russia lost that game 3:2.

But all of this is nothing compared to the second game, in Moscow in 1999. Russia needed only to win in order to move on in the tournament. Ukraine could settle with a draw. And that is when the true madness unfolded.

Probably the best known episode was this headline in one of the biggest sports newspapers in russia:

You see, they had a player with the last name "Khokhlov". So, on the surface level, the headline says, "Kick, Khokhlov, save Russia!" However, if you read out the headline, it also says "Kick [slur word for Ukrainians], save russia!". The slogan is a paraphrase of one of the main slogans of the russian Black Hundreds (ultra-reactionary, ultra-nationalist pogromist monarchist movement in the russian empire in early 20th century), only in the original versions there was the slur for Jews there instead. The russians were very proud of that pun. It was everywhere at the time.

Vladimir Putin, who was the russian prime minister at the time, was present at the game. The way the russian commentators already went out of their way to keep singing his praises for no reason is a good indicator how russians tend to make a cult of personality around everyone who happens to be a figure of authority.

And then the game finished with a draw 1:1 after an unbeliavable goal by Andriy Shevchenko (and due to a mistake from russia's goalkeeper):

Putin got really upset. He stopped showing up at such sporting events for years after this.

The bus with the Ukrainian national team got attacked on its way to the stadium before the game (according to Shevchenko, russians threw bottles at it) and especially after the game (with all sorts of objects being thrown at it, from beer bottles to rocks).

Absolutely typical. And one of the clearest views of ruscism.

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Hunger was far worse in the cities of Soviet Ukraine than in any city in the Western world. In 1933 in Soviet Ukraine, a few tens of thousands of city dwellers actually died of starvation. Yet the vast majority of the dead and dying in Soviet Ukraine were peasants, the very people whose labors had brought what bread there was to the cities. The Ukrainian cities lived, just, but the Ukrainian countryside was dying. City dwellers could not fail to notice the destitution of peasants who, contrary to all seeming logic, left the fields in search of food. The train station at Dnipropetrovsk was overrun by starving peasants, too weak even to beg. On a train, Gareth Jones met a peasant who had acquired some bread, only to have it confiscated by the police. “They took my bread away from me,” he repeated over and over again, knowing that he would disappoint his starving family. At the Stalino station, a starving peasant killed himself by jumping in front of a train. That city, the center of industry in southeastern Ukraine, had been founded in imperial times by John Hughes, a Welsh industrialist for whom Gareth Jones’s mother had worked. The city had once been named after Hughes; now it was named after Stalin. (Today it is known as Donetsk.)

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

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Everytime this is reblogged, JK Rowling steps on a lego

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So many people do not understand the relationship between climate change and cold weather.

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Wanna see how Russians hunted civilian cars in Kyiv region in March 2022?

Surreal now that it was all happening some 15 km from where I lived and I followed the local chats crying that "People, don't evacuate by the road leading to Zhytomyrska highway! Russians are hiding among trees off road there and shooting down civilian cars!!" in real time - and now I can actually see it happening on recovered footage from street cameras. Surreal.

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What I wouldn’t give for this to be reality.

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Reblog to kill it faster

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it's a lot of stuff...

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Given that Gaza is on the west coast and the West Bank is in the east, I’m surprised they got that right.

i wonder how many people even know gaza & the west bank are in two completely different places

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My glorified community college has a better online enrollment system than UCF.

Universities love to make their websites completely unusable and impossible to find things on it's their favourite activity

[glimmer-silver]

「 Ephemeral flowers are so gentle. 」

[glimmer-silver]

Today is my birthday so...

Please make my dream of having my four best photos seen by many people come true!! ︎

Please spread this post! ︎