Timothy Snyder: You can't understand the war in Ukraine without knowing history

[Nevilledog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/22/timothy-snyder-ukraine-russia-war-history/

No paywall
https://archive.is/4BYgV

Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal. The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent.

And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail, scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and the deportation.

We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer could say with confidence was that the commentators had never studied Ukraine. I heard from my former students, now in government or in journalism, that they were glad to have taken Eastern European history. They said that they were a little less surprised than others by the war; that they had more reference points.

The contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history reveals a larger problem. We know too little history. We have designed education to be about technical questions: the how of the world. And solving everyday problems is very important.

*snip*

[WarGamer]

1. I've actually been to both countries... early 2000's

Put a blindfold on me, take it off real fast and I wouldn't be able to tell which is which.

Then you notice the voices and the languages are off... similar but off. Maybe like Spanish and Portuguese?

There's a LOT of cross over, cousins live in Rostov, grandparents in Lviv...

But dig deeper and there's always been an undercurrent of bias. Russians have a feeling of superiority to Ukrainians... they have a slang term for them, K******** and it's kinda like saying "negroes". Not as insulting as the other n-word but not nice.

When I was there... Western Ukraine feels really European and Eastern Ukraine feels very Russian.

[FakeNoose]

3. I believe this - they're similar in some ways, but worlds apart in other ways

I experienced something like that while spending time in Germany. Northern Germans vs. Bavarians & Austrians - but they would never go to war over it.

In Ukraine right now, it's a life and death situation. Meanwhile in Russia, it's very close to business-as-usual.

[brush]

4. It certainly is business as usual as invading other countries...

is what they do — Hungary in 1956, Czoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, Cheznya in the late '90s, Georgia in 2006, eastern Ukraine in 2014 and western Ukraine last year, 2022.

My God, that's all they do, every decade just about like clockwork. They've already signaled their intent to "merge" with Belarus and they are also infiltrating and undermining Muldova's systems.

What monsters. Poland and the Baltic countries should be very worried as Alexandre Dugin, the deconstructionist Russian philosopher has been whispering in Putin's ear of a Russian empire from the Atlantic to Vladivostok.

Russia already spans 11 times zones but that's apparently not enough. What's funny is they expect to do all that with that third-rate army.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R