Dear Readers:
One of my clueless pro-Ukrainian readers compared the Donbass secessionists to the Southern secessionists of the American Civil War. His silly point being that: If A is bad, and B has something in common with A, then B must be bad too. Aristotle would have a field day debunking so many logical fallacies all at once.
For example: Sharks are evil. Sharks have fins. Dolphins also have fins. Therefore, dolphins are also evil. On the other hand, even I have to admit that the flags look very similar, judge for yourselves. Okay, just based on the likeness of the flags, I am forced to admit that the Donbass secessionists are Jim-Crow racists.
Oprah: “And YOU get a slave! And YOU get a new slave!”
But wait! Speaking of stars and bars, and sharks, and of human slavery: I saw this piece by Russian reporter Grigory Kubatian, along with his colleague Roman Polosikov.
They interviewed a woman named “Irina” [not her real name] who works as a combo medic and spy with the Donetsk militias. And she told them a strange story about some very strange Ukrainian POW’s whom she encountered in the course of her work. But first a little background to prove her bona fides: Back in 2014, Irina was just an ordinary person living in a suburb of Slavyansk. After the Maidan coup, political protests broke out all over the Donbass, with people refusing to buy into the new government and its Bandera ideology. I have said before, and I think my opinion has been borne out, that the main cause of the Donbass secession was a difference of opinion about World War II. I mean, about who were the goodies, and who were the baddies.
I’ll let people mull that one over while I return to Irina’s backstory. At the time she felt an affinity for the protesters and started to bring them food and a change of clothing. Eventually the secessionist militias that formed recruited Irina into their ranks. They trained her as a medic and also assigned her to reconnaissance missions. [That’s why she has to use an alias!]
“They gave us military tasks to solve,” Irina tells Grigory. “And then the wounded started flowing in. Our job was to try to save them.”
Over time Irina got really good at distinguishing between the different types of wounds that she saw in the soldiers, which bullets, etc. She could even tell the difference between a Soviet-caliber versus a NATO-caliber bullet hole.
And now comes the punchline to this joke:
Irina told Grigory a strange story of the capture of seven Ukrainian soldiers. Their uniforms had chevrons sewed on with the odd inscription: “Slave Owner” (Ukrainian Робовласник – Robovlasnik).
When she asked them, What the heck is this? the Ukrainian POW’s explained that their commander had promised them “two Russian slaves apiece” for their service. In addition, they were allowed to take any house that appealed to them, or any piece of land. That would be their reward.
“I think they are out of their minds!” Irina exclaimed, in conclusion.
I think Irina is right, this is just crazy. I mean, what is an ordinary Ukrainian peasant supposed to do with a Russian slave? You can’t keep him chained up in the basement, that would be a waste. Suppose I had a slave, I’d want him to do something useful for me. “Ivan, it’s grocery day, but I don’t feel like getting out of bed. Would you be so kind…?”
“Sure, Massah, no problem!” And I hand him the keys to my car, and he’s off, and he never comes back. That’s the basic problem with having a slave.
Awful Avalanche 
To be really pedantic that is not even the flag of the Confederate States of America. It is the flag of Confederate States Army. Close enough, I assume four reader also believes in homeopathy since it “works” on the same principles.
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your reader
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I think the flag began it’s existence as the the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which, when I double-checked w/wpedia, I was informed it was designed by William Porcher Miles who originally lost out to another design when it was submitted as a candidate for the confederate flag.
While I prefer Southerners to all American save those who live upon the freshwater “north coast” of America, I am not a sympathizer to the “confederation” or it’s cause de célèbre. However, as an acquaintance of mine once said “the problem is, as flags go, it just looks good” in reference to it’s continued display.
And having said that, and having lived in the south on four different occasions I can state that display of the “battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia” is a great rarity, almost always on a disheveled poverty stricken property that would greatly embarrass Robert E Lee were he to come upon it.
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There are 13 stars, one for each secessionist state.
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Yes, as I must of failed to explain, Miles intended it to be THE CONFEDERATE FLAG. However, another design was chosen instead and the Army of Northern Virginia said something like; “hey we need a battle flag and this fellow Miles has got a pretty nifty design, let use it” and they did. The later in the war when the Army of Northern Virginia had racked up a few victories Jefferson Davis was asked to change out the Reb’s flag and they did.
Yes, details are missing/filled-in but that’s the Peabody & Sherman thumbnail sketch.
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But history records that the heroic seamstress Barbara Frietchie of Fredericksburg, surpassed even the feat of Betsy Ross by hand-embroidering a new Union flag to replace the Confederate flag. Even the Confederacy’s greatest General, Stonewall Boris, was forced to accept the new design.
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And that’s the way it was…even Boris, the evil Ruskie knew better than to argue with Bullwinkle, the moose !!! But…where’s my fave Natasha in all of this?
Well, in the spirit of my love of country, Natasha did have take 2nd place to Mary Anne* but it was a close 2nd. Thank goodness this site shields us from all the historically inaccurate charactertures in western media.
*https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/01/obituaries/30Wells1/30Wells1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
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Russian spies like Stonewall Boris know better than to argue with a dear old moose in drag!
As for Natasha… while all this flag nonsense was going on in Fredericksburg, Natasha had infiltrated General Lee’s HQ with a solid plot to bring down the Confederacy!
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” I think my opinion has been borne out, that the main cause of the Donbass secession was a difference of opinion about World War II. I mean, about who were the goodies, and who were the baddies.”
Very wise thought.
Also I guess about how much you can twist history for your short term aims.
Робовласник
Reminds me of the 40 virgin promise to Sunni suicide bombers.
Of course they and the people who send them are doing exactly the same evil in exactly the same way.
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The most essential characteristic of both promises is that the promise-r does not have to deliver.
Appeal to the basest human urges. Zero-cost motivation for murder.
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Ostap Bender would have known how to deal with such phantom promises from hucksters: “Money now, chairs tomorrow!”
Or, to translate: “Virgins now, suicide tomorrow!” [never intending to suicide]
Or: “My two slaves now, then battle tomorrow!” [never intending to battle]
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Interestingly, Робовласник is identical in spelling and meaning in Serbian. This also reminds me of phrase “Bolje grob nego rob”, meaning “better grave than (a) slave”, a phrase that was used in a revolt by nationalists in former kingdom of Yugoslavia just before Germans attacked Yugoslavia. To avoid being sucked into a war the then government signed a treaty with Germany that effectively allowed Germans free passage through Yugoslavia so as to attack Greece. This caused a revolt in nationalist elements of the army and general population with street protests, etc. The deal was off and soon Germany attacked Yugoslavia, delaying operation Barbarossa. Perhaps if not for this delay Germans would have made it into Moscow before winter.
Side note, I have read that Army / Nationalist revolt was greatly encouraged by British. Another black mark for those Perfidious English.
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Sharks aren’t evil, they are just predators, but dolphins are unpredictable, sociopathic gang rapists and thrill killers. Like other highly intelligent social mammals – rats, chimpanzees, and humans come to mind – increased intelligence seems to come with what American “English” calls “dickishness”.
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I remember cartooning about the “slaveowner” patch in 2014, just in case Inkanazi1969 or whoever it was contends that it is “Russian propaganda”.
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In 2014 I was still on Fakebook, and I used the Novorossiyan flag as my profile picture. Sure enough an American, somebody I didn’t know, immediately accused me of using the “Confederate flag”. I challenged it to show me where the stars were. Instead of admitting it was wrong or even just disappearing from the conversation, it then doubled down and began claiming that the profile picture was “too small” to show any stars. So what made it assume that there were any? I also cartooned about that, by the way: Ukranazis Stepan and Andriy photographing a DNR post so that they could “prove” to Americans that the DNR were “confederates”.
Inkanazi1969 and the others are impossible to satirist, it seems.
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As soon as I penned that comparison, I knew that somebody would take umbrage at it. Like shark-lovers. Or dolphin-haters!
Alas, it is true that dolphins are gang-rapists, I read that somewhere. But it’s not because they have fins, it’s because they have … well, a different appendage!
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Thanks very much for this article. It shows very well the unbroken ideological continuity between the German nasties and the Banderites in Kiev. I think the Confederate Army flag is a fetish object among Ukie neonasties. There is a video of some Right Sector dudes during the 2014 coup hanging that flag from the balcony of a hall in a government building that has a lot of Roman columns in it together with red/black flags and various flags with trigrubs (sic) on them. It’s ironic, because the Banderites are precisely the ones who resemble the US Confederates, along with Jaroslav Hunka and his SS confederates. Decades ago, the German nasties boasted that they based their racist segregation laws on existing racist Jim Crow laws passed by states in the deep south after the Civil War, and those same nasties literally enslaved millions of “inferior” humans during WW2 and would have enslaved tens of millions more of Russians if they had been able to conquer the USSR. Even the V1 and V2 rockets were made by slaves working underground in Peenemunde. Maybe the Ukie officer who promised his men Russian slaves was proudly invoking history and comparing the Ukie nasties directly with vintage German nasties. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!
Yalensis, the pro-Ukie reader you mention at the beginning of the article has things exactly backward. Other Ukrainians I’ve exchanged opinions with on the net tend to do the same thing. I gather that the Banderite regime has massively propagandized history and turned everything since 1935 into precisely its opposite, and many naive Ukies seem to believe all the BS. Of course, the same thing usually happens within the machine that dis-explains/nastysplains US foreign policy to the American people: slaves are illegal inside the US, but who knows what’s happening overseas, as in, for instance, Ukraine? Yalensis, how about pointing out that the two Donbass People’s Republics in many ways resemble the 13 colonies that revolted against the British empire in 1776? Another good example would involve comparing the Banderites and nasties with the “free” Americans who in the 1830s invaded Texas in Mexico in order to liberate it from the cruel, economically-challenged Mexicans, who had laws against slavery, laws that Davy Crockett and his companions wanted to rescind in a liberated Texas in which slavery could be legalized. Glory to the Texan heroes!
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Excellent comment, based on logic and knowledge of history.
Two things being of such nature that the Westie pro-Banderas just don’t understand.
They remind me of Otto in “A Fish called Wanda” (one of my favorite movies). Otto reads philosophy, politics, and history. He reads avidly, he just doesn’t understand what he is reading!
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Ron Unz described in one sentence.
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I would point out that the confiscation of houses/properties was/is pretty common, after all isn’t Israel’s efforts to confiscate the West-Bank and Gaza just an effort to avoid paying market prices for prime location property? Same with most of the US’s “little wars” that go largely unnoticed, a clique of monied interests decides they don’t want to pay market price for a commodity and we “send in the Marines” because so & so, while previously a good US quisling, has undergone metamorphosis into another…wait for it…Hitler.
And while we are on the subject of confiscation of houses/properties and US perfidy to it’s citizens. What about the American-Japanese of WW II? Internment/relocation of those on the west coast would be wrong but understandable in the fervor of the time, however, the forced sale and outright theft of their property by local banks/businesses/government has no national security justification. None. During the war all taxes upon those relocated should have been suspended and in the war’s aftermath, their properties returned as if they had never left.
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I don’t know much about that incident, did the Japanese families never get their houses back after the war?
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No, their property was repossessed/sold/bought for pennies on the dollars by the monied class and then resold for huge profits in the years after the war.
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yes…the ones fighting the racists are “the south”. and we all remember when the platoons of muslims showed up to fight john brown. jesus christ. i swear western history classes are just “durr cavemen durrr knights and kings and stuff lol dragons durrr civil war duuhhhh HITLER…then nothing happened for 80 years. recess!”
sharks aren’t “evil” nor are dolphins “sociopaths” since those are both human things. some dolphins rape (allegedly) for the same reason otters and other animals rape: a skewed ratio of male/female which (wait for it) is probably from humans sh_tting all over the planet for 10,000ish years. as for “thrill killers”, i’ll start caring about wild creatures doing that when humans finally cull pit bulls and put them out of our collective misery.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/animals-rape-murder-morality-humans/585049/
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Pit bulls used to be known as Nursery Dogs, good around children. Go look at turn of the century illustrations [circa 1900]. Any terrier-type can be raised to accentuate the negative side of it’s high energy level. A properly raised terrier is a joy to be around.
Having been badly mauled by an unattended rottweiler* that attacked my dog while walking at night I am abundantly cautious around them…that doesn’t make them bad but, bad owners do. Watch dogs are NOT guard dogs and once you’ve trained a guard dog, that dog shouldn’t be out in public settings, not on the street. That’s where the problem lies, human behavior, lack of self-discipline.
*The dog belonged to an ex-con and was shot a couple of years later by an off-duty cop whom the dog attacked.
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Yes, it’s all referred to in that famous song:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
While Muslim troops came swarming in, their battle-flag to save.
If not for pious General Lee, you’d be a brutish slave!
His soul is marching on…
Glory glory hallelujah… (etc)
Cavemen, dukes, and knights and stuff, they all did awesome things,
They conquered all the dragons, turning princes into kings,
Then Hitler made the orcs run out and capture all the rings,
While Elves go marching on…
Glory glory halleluhah… (etc)
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with “pit bulls”, which is not a breed, it’s a category including multiple breeds (Staffordshire bull terrier, bull terrier, American pit bull terrier, and the three breeds of American Bully, plus also bulldog breeds like the Olde English Bulldogge which is not to be confused with the English Bulldog). No dog breed is inherently aggressive. And pit bulls do not have the “small dog syndrome” of dogs like dachshunds which are the world’s top breed when it comes to being bitey.
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i can’t believe it slipped my mind but compare the confederate flag to the union jack. i actually have a pair of trainers (i used to collect them like a dork) with a union jack on the side and i realized i could never wear them when i was in DC because someone might (understandably) think i was saying “the south will rise again” with my footwear.
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In WWII the RAF/Royal Navy in the Eastern Theatre had to change their aircraft roundels from the usual blue/white/red to blue/white because American pilots were too ignorant to understand the difference between that and the Japanese rising sun roundel and would fire on the Brits as well.
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Silly Ukronazis! Don’t they know that war is not how you get slaves. Debt is what gives birth to slavery!
Credit cards. Student loans. Mortgages Medical bills that go to collections agencies. Once a human lives above their means — and the “means” are set at a mean (as in “cruel”) level — they are enslaved. With the “massahs” being bankmaggots or other financial corpopredators. Pay massah or lose everything — coz massah owns it all, in the eyes of the law. Slavery enforced by the State’s Monopoly On Authorised Violence, i.e. the police. Not some chevron.
UNLESS! — the commander was a bankster, and the Magnificent (captured) Seven were “debt recovery specialists” i.e. “Mafia kneecappers.” Irina should have asked whether they were working for a maggotbank.
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