Steve Sailer points out that there’s a lot of denial of reality going on in our press over the struggle between nationalist and pro-Moscow Ukrainians:
According to a Reuters article, “Insiders say [Right Sektor] has its origins among nationalist-minded soccer fans – the word ‘sector’ in Russian denotes the spectator terraces of a stadium – and includes individuals from far-right organizations from across the country.” But don’t trust me to get translations right. (By the way, more than a few Right Sector fighters are Russian-speakers.)
On the other hand, here is pro-Ukrainian Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, in the New York Review of Books trying hard to assure the New York Review’s elderly leftist subscribers that Moscow, not Kiev, now represents the real right wing. In contrast, Snyder explains, “An important hotline that [Ukraine] protesters call when they need help is staffed by LGBT activists.”
I don’t know, though. Judging from videos, the lads who retook Independence Square from the riot police on Thursday and who are (if still alive) presumably enjoying tonight the traditional rewards offered to a nation’s brave young men by its appreciative young women don’t look too gay to me.
Yesterday, I was listening to Timothy Snyder on NPR. He was trying to explain why people who are generally referred to as “fascists” and even “Nazis” by their opponents are on the same side as American progressives. Sure, they might use the Slavic version of the Swastika, they might have chosen red, white and black as colors, and they might have even shaved their heads, but Putin hates gays! Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the Ukrainian nationalists, on the other hand, are all about rainbow flags and Pride marches.
That’s just laughable.
Right wing nationalism has a long history in that part of the world. Without it, there would be no Ukraine, and probably no Latvia, Lithuania, Poland or Estonia either. Add Romania, Hungary and a few others to the list.
Nationalist freedom fighters are folk heroes, much loved by men and women alike. They could give a damn about American values of “diversity” and “tolerance,” and in fact are openly hostile to them (in no small part because they remind them of the hated USSR). And as the article Sailer links points out, Ukrainian girls lovingly supply and care for the men who are fighting for their Ukraine.
There’s a cultural chasm between the US and most of the rest of the world, but it isn’t often that Americans pay enough attention to see this for themselves. Maybe this time a few more perceptive Americans will get a clue and start to understand that our “values” are far from universal, and may actually be losing ground. Maybe we should start rethinking them ourselves, before we end up with our own Ukraine on our hands.
