Ukraine War Day #417: For The Sacred Cause Of Our Reenaction, Part II

“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as a Westerner.”

American General William Westmoreland

Dear Readers:

Today continuing (and concluding) my review of this piece by reporter Nikolai Storozhenko. Where we left off: we were getting to know a rather hardcore ideological neo-Naughty named Vadim Pristayko, who serves as Ukraine’s Ambassador to Great Britain. At a press conference Pristayko made a “slip of the tongue”, either accidentally or on purpose, in which he referred to the Russian army as the Red Army. Then made clear his intention to fight them again, this time to a victory, or to the last man, if necessary. He’s still sore about WWII, in other words. And Westie media is more than happy to play along, always asking the wrong questions, always drawing the wrong conclusions, and thus assisting the Bandera in their new “fantasy football” revenge match.

General West-More-Land with his sidekick Colonel Killmoregooks:

Last January Pristayko gave an interview to American Newsweek magazine. In which he made another rather revealing statement [yalensis: I don’t have Newsweek in front of me, so I am translating from the Russian version in Storozhenko’s report]:

“The West now has a unique opportunity. There are not that many nations in the world who are willing to sacrifice so many lives, territories, and decades of [economic] development, just for the chance of victory over a sworn enemy.”

Kindly grandma Madeleine Albright: “The Iraqi children gave their lives for a worthy cause.”

Pristayko is right. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to completely destroy your own country, on the slim chance you might take the other side down with you. Like Samson in the Temple of Ba’al.

No, you can’t find that many countries in the world, led by such maniacs as himself, who would take such colossal losses and risks, just for the tiny chance of a Pyrrhic victory against Russia. Pristayko himself, by the way, will sacrifice nothing either way. He lives in a nice flat in London; and as soon as things start going south, he’ll declare for asylum, I predict. He reminds me of that war-pig Madeleine Albright, when she declared that killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children “was a sacrifice she was willing to make.” And then died bravely, with her expensive pearl necklace still around her neck.

Anyhow, Storozhenko scolds the Russian press which, same as the Westie press, focused on the wrong words when taking apart this Newsweek interview. They eagerly focused on the soundbite about Ukrainian “sacrifices” and “losses”, this was happening around the time when “attritional war” was on everyone’s lips, and everybody was trying to figure out exactly how many KIA and so on. But, again, that wasn’t Pristayko’s point. His point was, it doesn’t matter how many lives, and how many losses. It’s all worth it, if it leads to that final “victory” over the “sworn enemy”, Russia. Westie press, again, too dull-headed to see that they are being led by the nose into somebody else’s blood feud.

Unique opportunity.” That should have been the leading soundbite. After which, as Storozhenko points out, Pristayko sheds one crocodile tear, as he asserts that “This is how we differ from the Russians. Because we regard every Ukrainian life as precious.”

In other words, Russians just shrug, they don’t care about human life, not even their own. But the Ukrainians care. Deeply. Which makes their sacrifice all the more poignant! A moment of silence, please…

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34 Responses to Ukraine War Day #417: For The Sacred Cause Of Our Reenaction, Part II

  1. Liborio Guaso says:

    History is clear in who the murderers and thieves have always been, no indigenous nation invaded the north to murder and steal the lands. Nor did any black nation go north to murder and kidnap millions of human beings to live off their work. And so it can be done with every corner of the world.
    Thieves and murderers were always white and came out of Europe.
    One day humanity will have to recognize it.

    Like

    • “Year after year, Tatar horsemen rode north out of their Crimean stronghold across the grazing lands of the Ukrainian steppe and, in small bands or large armies, swopped down on Cossack settlements or Russian towns to ravage and plunder. In 1662 Tatars captured the town of Putivl and carried off all the 20,000 inhabitants into slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century Russian slaves thronged Ottoman slave markets. Russian men were seen chained to oars of galleys in every harbor in the eastern Mediterranean; young Russian boys made a welcome gift from the Crimean Khan to the Sultan. So numerous, in fact, were the Russian slaves in the East that it was asked mockingly whether any inhabitants still remained in Russia.”

      From “Peter the Great: His Life and World” by Robert K Massie

      • The Truth About Slavery: A Russian Perspective

      https://www.monomakhos.com/the-truth-about-slavery/

      • Setting the Record Straight: White Europeans Were Captured and Traded as Slaves for Centuries

      https://www.winterwatch.net/2023/01/setting-the-record-straight-white-europeans-were-traded-as-slaves-for-centuries/

      I presume you get your ‘history’ from Netflix or the like. You are quite the ‘scholar’.

      Like

      • yalensis says:

        Good discussion. Humans enslaving other humans has always been a thing.
        A couple other examples of “black on black” or “brown on brown”, or whatever you want to call it:

        1.) In his novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville describes the previous life of one of his main heroes, Queequeg. To be sure, he is a fictional character, but based on real people and real cultures. Queequeg “humorously” describes to his shipboard pal, Ishmael, how his people (=Pacific Islanders) used war captives, first as “chairs” (upon whom they rested their feet), and then later as “barbecue”.

        2.) In his book “Between the world and me”, which Yours Truly reviewed, back in 2021, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of the African Queen Nzinga who forced her (black) handmaiden to kneel on the ground and be her personal armchair. (Not unlike what Queequeg used to do to his captives.) (That story is in Part IV of my saga, in case you don’t have time to read the whole thing.)

        Coates: “I read about Queen Nzinga, who ruled in Central Africa in the sixteenth century, resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought, and the story of our own royalty became for me a weapon.”

        In conclusion, everyone please repeat, one more time:
        IT’S NOT ABOUT RACE, IT’S ABOUT CLASS!

        And then write that on the blackboard, 100 times, at least.

        Liked by 1 person

    • • Setting the Record Straight: White Europeans Were Captured and Traded as Slaves for Centuries

      https://www.winterwatch.net/2023/01/setting-the-record-straight-white-europeans-were-traded-as-slaves-for-centuries/

      (and see comments)

      I presume you get your ‘history’ from Netflix or the like.

      Like

      • Not only were that enslaved, the Arabian Nights (the original non Disney version, which is anything but for children) routinely talks about white as well as black and Arab slaves.

        Liked by 1 person

        • Thank you. Since you brought it up, let me give a plug to Richard Fidler’s “The Book of Roads & Kingdoms” (“From the wonders of imperial Baghdad to the darklands at the ends of the earth”)

          … in which Richard Fidler tells the story, both history and legend/myth of Baghdad and Islam’s fabled Golden Age. Richard describes himself as a history enthusiast, not a historian.

          He devotes quite a bit of his final chapter to “The Thousand and One Nights”, with quoted passages (and context) from the last few tales.

          In an earlier introductory reference Fidler writes:

          “In the western world, the historical figure of Harun al-Rashid has long been eclipsed by his fictional persona: the king of an Arabian fantasia who appears repeatedly in “The Thousand and One Nights”. This fabulous compendium of stories, one of the greatest achievements in world literature originated in India and was subsequently translated into Persian and Arabic, picking up more and more tales over many centuries. Its title in Arabic, “Alf Layla wa-Layla”, is spoken like a whisper, an enchantment.

          The “Nights“ were introduced to the West un 1704, when the French orientalist Antione Galland published them in Paris as “Les Mille er Une Nuits” with the addition of the tales of Ali Baba and the forty thieves and Aladdin that he’d picked up from a Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab, as well as the tales of Sinbad the Sailor that he’d found in a Constantinople marketplace.”

          Like

          • Yes. Bit only have I read The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night multiple times, I’m writing a sequel – From The Two Thousand Nights And Two Nights – with my own tales.

            Like

            • Antoinetta III says:

              Check out “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade”, by Edgar Allan Poe.

              You will have to google it as I have zero techie skills, and don’t know how to import a link to another site.

              Antoinetta III

              Like

              • yalensis says:

                Antoinetta: Thanks for the reference, I love to read anything Poe wrote. Try copy-paste this crazy link into your browser (without the initial and final double-quotes), and then download the PDF onto some folder in your computer. (If you have Adobe Acrobat, that is, you need Adobe to read the PDF.)

                “https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=ad41f330109177c1JmltdHM9MTY4MTYwMzIwMCZpZ3VpZD0xNzZmNTgzMi01ZDJhLTZmMmYtMmIxOC00YWM3NWNmZTZlZWEmaW5zaWQ9NTIzMw&ptn=3&hsh=3&fclid=176f5832-5d2a-6f2f-2b18-4ac75cfe6eea&psq=%e2%80%9cThe+Thousand+and+Second+Tale+of+Scheherazade%e2%80%9d%2c+by+Edgar+Allan+Poe&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly9ldGMudXNmLmVkdS9saXQyZ28vcGRmL3Bhc3NhZ2UvNTMxMS90aGUtd29ya3Mtb2YtZWRnYXItYWxsYW4tcG9lLTA1NC10aGUtdGhvdXNhbmQtYW5kLXNlY29uZC10YWxlLW9mLXNjaGVoZXJhemFkZS5wZGY&ntb=1”

                Like

              • I know the story well. Poe unfortunately imagined the passenger pigeon was in such great numbers that it could never be extinct.

                Like

        • yalensis says:

          Even in the American South antebellum, there were white slaves. Not very numerous, to be sure, but they existed. Some were the descendants of African slaves who were quadroons or octaroons who could no longer by physically distinguishable from whites. Others were just god-knows-who some unfortunate poor whites who had no legal status and were sold as slaves.

          Harriet Beecher Stowe writes about this phenomenon in her classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is pretty clear that, had the South won the war and slavery persisted as an economic model, there would have been more and more technically “white” slaves. Because, legally, skin color didn’t really matter; it was the institution itself.

          Like

  2. I have a book on Vietnam War protest songs (just like there was no Iraq War protest song book) and one of the songs is on Westmoreland. I don’t recall it verbatim, but the last stanza goes roughly:

    “And when I’m president
    This is what we’re gonna see
    Gonna fight Russia and China and Cuba
    And set everybody free.”

    Like

    • Raghead, you seem pretty well-read (and well-listened) so you’ve probably heard this ditty, but “Political Science” by Randy Newman is one of the best “hooray for American genocide!” songs out there. Along with so many by Tom Lehrer. Even has a line about setting everybody free like the tune you quote. If any of Yalensis’s readers haven’t heard it, I suggest giving it a listen. A good use of 2 1/2 minutes of your life.

      Like

  3. By the way, yalensis, just wanted to tell you that you’re my absolute favourite writer in this current conflict. Not just because if what and how frequently you write but how you interact with your readers. Hopefully you’ll go on writing after this is over.

    Liked by 1 person

    • yalensis says:

      Oh, thank you so much, Raghead! I really appreciate that.
      I do plan to go on blogging after the war is over; and pretty much the same format.
      I just won’t necessarily hold myself to “posting each and every day” kind of regimen. I might skip a day every now and then, especially when on vacation!

      But I hope I still have the same wonderful readers that I have now.
      🙂

      Liked by 1 person

  4. velizhan says:

    Wanted to bring up this piece: https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2023/04/10/synovya-ukrainskogo-posla-v-londone-vadima-pristayko-oseli-v-evrope
    It is in Russian, but at the very beginning it shows where esteemed ambassador’s sons reside. Nothing wrong with that by itself, I guess, but it adds certain “flavor” to his words about “fighting to the last man, if necessary”, would not you say?

    Like

    • yalensis says:

      Interesting. Just to summarize, for non-Russian readers: Pristayko has 2 sons, Andrew and Vova, who look to be college age. Certainly old enough to be in the Ukrainian army! One lives in Leuven, Belgium; and the other in Vienna, Austria. (The latter is an Intern at the UN, I wonder how he got that job?)

      Like

  5. moon says:

    [yalensis: I don’t have Newsweek in front of me, so I am translating from the Russian version in Storozhenko’s report]:

    Vadym Prystaiko does not surface that much on Newsweek, and on first sight there is only one article that cites him more often. Other articles refer to “said in an interview”, but cite him only once. None seems to contain the text you translate.

    Does the author give us a link?

    https://www.newsweek.com/search/site/?q=“Vadym+Prystaiko”+interview

    Like

    • yalensis says:

      Here is the link that Storozhenko gives, sorry I should have included it in the post, I just assumed it would be behind a paywall, but it’s not:

      https://www.newsweek.com/putins-war-plan-reaching-critical-momentukraine-ambassador-1771840

      Like

      • yalensis says:

        If I had read this article before I posted, then I could have provided the original English text to the soundbite:

        “The West now has a unique chance,” Prystaiko said. “There are not many nations in the world who would allow themselves to sacrifice so many lives, territories and decades of development for the purpose of defeating the archenemy.”

        Not too different from my translation back from the Russian, except I chose the term “sworn enemy”. “Archenemy” sounds a bit, well, Batman-esque.

        One has to keep in mind, Pristayko probably uttered his utterances in Ukrainian. Then his translator translated into English.
        The Russian reporter read the English translation in Newsweek and translated into Russian.
        I read the quote in Russian and quoted back into English…

        Like a child’s game of “telephone” – LOL!

        Like

  6. JMF says:

    Pristayko: “This is how we differ from the Russians. Because we regard every Ukrainian life as precious.”

    But of course! That’s precisely why the Ukrainian government sent old men and boys, fresh off the streets, to serve as cannon fodder in the Bakhmut meat grinder.

    Wait! Is there a non sequitur here??

    Like

    • yalensis says:

      I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
      I deeply sympathize.’
      With sobs and tears he sorted out
      Those of the largest size,
      Holding his pocket-handkerchief
      Before his streaming eyes.

      O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
      You’ve had a pleasant run!
      Shall we be trotting home again?’
      But answer came there none —
      And this was scarcely odd, because
      They’d eaten every one.”

      Like

      • JMF says:

        Absolutely, positively, brilliantly apropos, yalensis! Your breadth of literary familiarity continuously amazes me. Bravo!

        Like

        • yalensis says:

          Thanks, JMF! My brain works in odd ways. As soon as I read your comment about “old men and boys, fresh off the streets, to serve as cannon fodder”, my gooey brain, for some reason, skipped immediately to Walrus+Carpenter.

          Especially the Walrus, who sheds copious tears while gobbling down the poor little oysters. In this analogy, Pristayko is obviously the Walrus. The Carpenter is… I am thinking Zelensky. Or maybe Blinken…

          Like

  7. S Brennan says:

    On the issue of how West African Peoples, who would become the majority of slaves in the new world.

    West African Peoples got on the slavery menu when the Ghana Empire was destroyed/enslaved by Muslim Arabs NOT by Europeans in approximately 1200 AD! This was during the time that Muslim Arabs were slowly conquering/enslaving their way NORTHWARD up the Iberian peninsula and conquering/enslaving their way NORTHWARD through Asia-Minor and into NORTHeast Europe.

    How the famous boxer, Muhammad Ali took the name of the founder of the world’s greatest slave empire and rejected the birth name of one the most ardent abolitionists is beyond comprehension.

    Like

    • yalensis says:

      Very good points. Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that the Moors also took a lot of slaves (of all nationalities) when they ran a powerful empire. Americans are used to seeing blacks as oppressed underdogs, so they don’t understand that, historically, the Moors were very powerful and feared by “white” Europeans in those medieval and late-medieval times, right up to the era of Shakespeare and Mozart. The Moors were not despised as racially inferior, they were respected and feared. (And hated. Mozart nursed a particular hatred of Moors, which he expressed in his opera “The Magic Flute”. Modern woke productions tone down Mozart’s “racism”.)

      Also, when modern theater directors try to “modernize” Shakespeare’s Othello by, for example, setting in Harlem where a black guy is in love with a white girl — they are missing the point entirely. Othello was not an underdog at all, was not a member of a lower caste. Quite the opposite. And he treated his wife the way all Moorish elite treated their wives (and other chattel)!

      Like

      • S Brennan says:

        The highly inaccurate rewrite “history” into propaganda negates it’s value as it leads humans into making EXACTLY THE SAME MISTAKES over and over again.

        When* I was being educated in history by very progressive nuns in grade school and very liberal Jews in high school we were taught world history through the perspective of other nations WITHOUT lowering the standard by which we judged our own misdeeds. We were taught empathy for others point of view but not obscuration of our fellow man’s misconduct.

        *Viet Nam War Years

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  8. In your photo caption that reads: ”General West-More-Land with his sidekick Colonel Killmoregooks:” you made a slight spelling error with that historical figure’s name. It was WASTE-More-Land. Because that’s what tonnes of high explosives, napalm and Agent Orange do to a colony. Wastes it, in the street-fighting sense of the word.

    Gen. Waste-More-Land would have appreciated Pristayko, who’s a man who knows that sometimes you have to destroy your country in order to save it. Which is easier to support if you live in London and your country is… somewhere back there in the distance.

    Like

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