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>>14672
Bear with me, this is going to be a long post, but it will be worth reading to anyone remotely interested in the region.
>On one hand, it is easy to understand why neighboring countries such as Belarus, Georgia, and the Ukraine (not to mention the Baltic States and Finland) are not terribly fond of Russian culture. All these countries were an integral part of one of the most brutally oppressive regimes in human history (the Soviet Union) and a pretty oppressive Czarist Russia before that. The Russians (like the Germans and the French) have never enjoyed a reputation as an enlightened, benign occupying force.
Look, I'm pretty sure that you're not trolling, I think you're authentic. But your post really shows a level of ignorance on the subject that is all too typical of the West. You confuse places like Georgia and Belarus, Latvia and Ukraine. Each of these states has it's own issues, identity and history.
Belarus and Ukraine are as Russian as the Russian Federation. It is a myth of modernity that they are not. The difference is that western control of the former two regions during the medieval through Enlightenment periods caused cultural and linguistic shifts. The west would like to imagine that Ukraine and Belarus are separate nations from Russia. And guess what? That fable has been peddled in Ukraine and Belarus by the west to this day.
It was always the traitors to Rus (and Orthodox Christianity) that worked to advance those nationalist ideologies. They picked a region and directly declared it a nation, a scenario similar to California saying "We're Californian, not American." It was mainly the Uniates and those who thought that the traits they had adopted from Poland were superior. They shit on their own heritage and betrayed the governance of the Free-Russian state: The Tsardom. They kissed the chains that the Latins had put on them and spit on their brethren in the east instead of embracing them.
Ukrainian nationalism (and Belarussian nationalism is behind it a few steps) is probably the most deleterious movement in all of the history of Rus. In the past, for example in the Kievan period, there was discord and rivalries between cities. But now you have a chunk of people standing up and inventing a new nation. They are perpetually rationalizing themselves into existence, perpetually inventing their "nationhood." One who studies history will understand that Ukrainian nationalism is driven by two main influences:
1. The west encouraging disunity and trying to dismantle and pacify Russia.
2. A reactionary movement trying to foster a more localized central government, whose capital and sovereign/president/premier is nearby versus a capital farther away within a larger empire. Furthermore, it's also a reactionary movement against Bolshevism; it was a shelter from Marxist oppression during the Soviet Period (which I understand and even sympathize with).
This subject has bothered me for years, and I've relentless sought out some objective understanding, free of biases. The key conclusion that I've come to, is that Ukrainian nationalism is fundamentally dishonest. It betrays not only history itself, but it betrays the common culture of the people.
Ukraine (and Belarus to a lesser extent) is at a crossroads today. Some would say (particularly westerners with their Liberalism) that the view of Russky Mir is "living in the past." They would say that Russian nationalists, those who seek a united Rus are "living in the past." But this is patently false, and is a nauseatingly dishonest strawman attack. The fact of the matter is that problems imposed by Ukrainian nationalism are real and present. There is a choice, a choice between a guiding heritage with real continuity that embraces the worth of European Christendom, a heritage that grants a people the attributes that make a nation great; and then there's the Western View. The Western View is the choice to separate the past from the present in such a way that continuity and the relationship of cause and effect is psychotically denied. It is to criticize, demoralize and deconstruct the value system of a people, and replace it with something new. The Western View is the degenerate view. In it, tradition is dismissed and anything that deviates, anything that rebels, is praised by virtue of its own rebelliousness.
The west is dying. Because institutions like the family unit have been deconstructed, birth rates are dropping and children lack the nurturing environment of that "evil age of misogyny and domestic oppression" known as the 1950s. The shear Nihilism of the west, the materialism, the hedonism has made it decadent. The obsession with tearing down the old order and installing a renovated system of new hierarchies has led to a system in which true authority is negated and replaced with the constant, mindless pursuit of instant gratification.
That's what Rus faces. A choice. The Ukrainians are not choosing wisely. In the end, the Ukrainians are the real losers, not Moscow. I don't want to see them fall for it, I don't want to see Ukraine harmed. It belongs as part of the same civilization as the Muscovites, and it is best for it to be within the same state. That view might not be locally accepted in say Volhynia or Lvov, but that is only because of the pernicious and dishonest mythology of Ukrainian nationalists.