Do you consider Gorals, Lemkos, and Silesians Poles?

Aww - that's so cute. 😍

If Ukrainians are not Ukrainians because the Ukrainian nation doesn't exist, they are Poles, plain and simple. How can you brazenly call them Russian? lol

I'm reading history, which often is as factual and objective as possible. You are reading Russian history; it is a long list of excuses and justifications for imperialist Russian claims.

Hearts and Rangers or nothing.


I've been in his bedroom. Quite a nice room for Birmingham.


Read "Sherman's Wife" by Julia Camoys Stonor. A bit rambling but it'll tell you a lot about that set including Borja y Merry del Val and Pacelli.

And it probably has the best first sentence of any book ever written.


There's no such thing as a 'synthetic people'. If an identity forms, national or otherwise, it is very real.

If I didn't know you were just trying to wind me up, I would be rather upset now.


Will check it out, thanks. So far, your recommendations have been great.

This book is a bit of a mess (as is the very eccentric writer) however it's strangely unputdownable.

You have to read between the lines to get the juicy stuff about Ribbentrop, Graham Greene, Barbara Hutton and a whole host of other famous men and women who were friendly with her mother whose favourite phrase was "Heil Hitler, Ole and pants off"!

I know it may sound funny, but it's what we believe.

One good indicator of some "brainwashing" going on, is what percentage of Ukraine's citizens self report as Russians. In the 1990s, it was around 40%. Now it's less than 10%.

Can you go from being a Pole, to being an American - in under thirty years? I suppose Novichok would say - yes, you can.


Whichever history I am reading - Ukrainians are unable to reply to a simple question:

"Where was Ukraine in the period between the 9th century AD and 1991?"

Was it located underground, or in some heavenly kingdom which us mortals cannot see?

Maybe Ukraine was a state of the soul?

-//-

Smart Ukrainians, who recognize this "problem" with their narrative, claim instead that they are true Russians, while we are some Tatar/Mongol mutants. This at least makes a little bit more sense, but still leaves many issues outstanding.


With a heavy heart, I must admit this is true. You British people have proven this in my mind.

For the Arabs, you drew up all sorts of stupid and imaginary countries like Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, etc... and now they are ready to kill each other over invisible lines in the sand.

When a local elite forms, and begins to feel that they "own" their people, all sorts of stupid nationalisms can arise.

Nobody wants to give the wheel up back to Istanbul or Moscow, after they've had 30-40-50 years of juicing their own people for rents.

Instead - they start spending hundreds of millions of dollars on year round celebrations of "2,000 years of Iraqi Statehood", or building museums around some collection of rocks they identified in the desert - and to which they attach themselves too.

Leave alone, that their grandparents would have thought them very strange for doing such things.

I have solved your puzzle. The formative years for Ukrainians were when they were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later the Polish Kingdom.

It's what they believe that matters, Not what you believe,ieve.


They always did. Tribal societies who literally lived (and often still do) by raiding.


Ur of the Chaldees, one of the most significant archaeological sites in the world? Or Eridu, perhaps the oldest urban settlement?

Then they should live with the Poles.

That half, that is on the Right Bank of the Dnieper - they can go and become chłops again to the Poles.

The Left Bank, which was always loyal to Moscow, should be allowed to rejoin with their kin.

Maybe the Galicians would prefer to go back to sucking Austrian dick, instead of groveling before the Poles. That's their problem - who's dick to suck.

Especially all the Greco-Catholic idiots - they can go and join whomever they want.

But it is strange to have Orthodox people live under a Catholic government.

Not so.

They didn't do that while living under the Turks for five centuries.

They didn't do it earlier, under the Abbasids, Umayyads. They didn't do it under the Byzantines, or the Persians, or the Romans.

They do it now, because British boffins drew up ridiculous maps for new countries, where no countries previously existed. This, without taking into account how the rivers flow in the region, who depended on what marshlands, and on what fisheries, or where old tribal divisions lay.

Ditto for Africa.

Now Kuwaitis think themselves to be infinitely superior to Iraqis. Jordanians feel they owe nothing to the Palestinians. Bahrainis hate their own Shia population, etc, and so on.

Nationalism infects the human mind rapidly after the creation of arbitrary borders.

Only empires are able to keep those demons bottled up, and keep everyone focused on working for the greater good - rather than grabbing the fattest piece of the pie for their group.

lol! those are not feudal times. That is, they originated for the most part from Polish peasants who escaped feudal bondage and settled what is now Ukraine.
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Poland does not have a religious government; it is a republic, and all denominations are protected by the law.
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Yes, they seem to be kind of retarded. It is the Polish kingdom's fault that they exist.
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You are in for a surprise if you think they are loyal to Moscow.
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They are more than welcome to move to Austria or Germany. Nobody likes them anyway, they are F up Poles who pretend to be something else and do a lot of harm, forcing it.

They most certainly did, and they did it far more than now. The Ottomans couldn't stop them.


They very much did.


Have you spent much time in both places to compare? The difference is vast.

Now less of your orc propaganda; your attempts to gaslight do not work, and get out of the tribal territories that you pretend are called 'Siberia'. And the fake unrecognised statelets that you occupy.

I wonder if Russians would survive without a state for more than 80 years!

I don't know enough Turkish history to argue, or whatever concerns the caliphates. But I do know Roman/Byzantine history rather well, and there I can say you are wrong.

The major Arab client of the Romans were the Ghassanids. Later they became Byzantine foederati.

There is nothing in the histories regarding them being consumed by intra tribal conflict.

Their main conflict was with the Lakhmids, who were Persian clients. In essence, a proxy conflict between the Byzantines and Sassanid Persia.

There was constant Bedouin raiding, but these were neither aligned with the Byzantines or the Persians. They made incursions in border areas, raiding frontier settlements and caravan routes - but never anything that was significant enough for much ink to be dedicated to it.

So this does not support your argument that Arabs were always fighting each other, unless you want to make the argument that Bedouins represent a significant slice of the global Arab population - which they do not.

Clients, and brutality.


As there always has been and still is.


They certainly were and do. Even in more settled Arab countries, there's constant rivalry and backstabbing by tribes, as well as very authoritarian power structures and of course kleptocracies, as Iraq has always been.


As the orcs wish they still were.

Probably not.

If one were to base his arguments on modern Russians - then definitely not.

Russians disappear into whatever culture they are immersed into.

Then, when they see Russians on the street, they change the language, and speak in whispers - lest they be identified by their former compatriots.

Of all the diasporas in America - the Russian-American diaspora is probably the weakest and most impotent one - especially when compared to some of our neighbors like Armenians or Jews.

Russians don't like being around other Russians, for some reason.

One of my acquaintances in New York is a Russian, that once complained to me that he stopped going to one Russian Orthodox Church, because it "had too many Russians in it". Now he goes to a Ukrainian church, but is similarly unhappy - for other reasons.