The H*hol-Diaries - Chapter 1: Pining for Paris and the Destruction of Donbass

I was visiting Ukraine right up until the start of the conflict. Despite not being privy to any insider information, I left just in time to avoid getting caught up in the conflict, for which I am very grateful to my 6th sense for urging me to move on. The situation in Kiev was extremely tense and I did not enjoy my stay in the city and its surrounding suburbs for this reason, among others.

Despite my attempts to avoid political discussions, this was all anyone talked about while I was there and I was drawn into political debates despite my reluctance to do so. I thought I’d share a collection of interactions that I had while I was there as a series of anecdotal vignettes.

The first story: I was invited to a dacha by a friend of a friend of the family.

This middle-aged lady was half-Russian, but spent a significant part of her time living in Paris, France, which she doted on. She was employed by the Cultural Ministry working on movies, recently divorced and had gotten involved in a New Age cult that had set up shop in Kiev. The leader of the cult was a guy named Abraham, and he was preaching a mix of Kabbalah and Hinduism, from what I gathered. Pretty typical stuff for a Slavic w*man, so I paid it no real mind. Frankly, I thought we were getting along rather well.

Naturally, she asked me about life in America, and I told her the truth as I saw it, that I thought there were a lot of problems in America, and that a lot of young men from my generation were struggling there like never before. She nodded along amicably enough, mostly because she hated Americans after they elected George Bush and Donald Trump and because there were too many guns and cowboys there. She then asked about my opinion on Ukraine. Having relaxed a bit, I told her my honest opinion on Kiev.

“It’s a very tense city. There’s also serious drug culture among the youth that I’m not into. The commie-blocks are completely graffiti’d up with Telegram and Whatsapp contacts for drug dealers. I got approached by tweakers twice while working out in the yard. The 5th floor of the commieblock where my granny lives looks like its the HQ of a satanic cult. They painted the walls black and drew strange creepy faces everywhere. I get the creeps just being there. No one calls the police and when I ask why, they say that the cops are in on it. I have no idea whether this is true. Also a lot of people have verbally abused me for speaking Russian while I was out and about. About 8 times at this point. The downtown is filled with very questionable-looking people who are covered in tats, piercings and generally there are a lot of offensively fat people who are dressed in a slovenly manner. In most cities, there is a nice, privileged part of town where the riff-raff is kept out, but I find that I am forced to rub shoulders with the lumpenproles a bit too often for my liking. There’s also many sulky brown people walking around and one of them started yelling at me in Arabic in the metro because I refused to stop and give him directions or whatever it is that he wanted. I avoid interacting with brown people as a rule. Also, older women cut me in line and people generally get all up in my personal space when they talk. They start the conversation in the middle of a sentence and that annoys the hell out of me. I was taught that one should start by at least saying ‘hi’ or ‘excuse me’. The suburb where my grandparents live has a trucker rest-stop nearby from what I understand. The drivers often wander around the neighborhood or collapse in the grass along the road from too much drink or too many drugs. Our neighbors in the suburb are like typical American rednecks - they even have a couch out on their lawn and they argue and scream at each other from dusk until dawn. I feel bad for the dog that they keep on a chain in the back. He barks all day long and I know that they don’t feed him well. When they let him loose to run around the neighborhood in the afternoon, he always comes to our door and we feed him scraps. Also, I can always smell cheap skunk-weed coming from their shack in the backyard and they seem to have a grudge with my family. Everyone seems to have a grudge with their neighbors and nobody seems to get along. There are a lot of homosexuals in the downtown too and the students refuse to speak Russian with me - they think I’m faking. We have to speak English, but few of them actually know English as well as they pretend.”

I then took a deep breath to prevent myself from keeling over.

She took most of what I said in stride, and agreed with a lot of what I said, laughing along as I made fun of the surly babushkas.

“Yes, it’s nothing like Paris,” she sighed wistfully.

But then she asked me what I thought about Russia.

“I have to say, I think it’s a lot more relaxed and has a better vibe. No one gave me any grief for being Ukrainian and I find that its much easier to get along with people. It’s like Ukraine, but a lot less hostile. Also, it’s not as dilapidated.”

That’s when the problems started. Ukrainians are quite fond of critiquing their own country and pining for Europe, but they do not take kindly to positive assessments of Russia. Most of Ukraine is a hell-hole in their minds, but Russia, you see, is much worse. The good parts of Ukraine are the result of European civilization and the bad stuff is the fault of the legacy of Russia constantly breathing down Ukraine’s neck and preventing them from being more genteel and cultured like the Eloi of Europe.

Anyways, she ended up going ballistic when I said that I was against the current war in the Donbass.

“Those Russian rebels are trying to steal a piece of country,” she said.

“But I thought those were Ukrainians in Donbass,” I countered.

“They are a bunch of criminals and scum and they are Russians,” she explained.

“Well, if they are Russians, why not let them join Russia?” I pressed.

“They are sitting on our land,” she clarified.

“So they have to be ethnically cleansed?” I demanded.

“If they like Russia so much, they should go live in Russia,” she declared.

“Is that why Kiev is bombing them?” I queried.

“We are not bombing them, Russia is bombing them,” she huffed.

“But I thought the people of Donbass were criminal Russians who ought to pack up their bags and go home?” I exclaimed.

“Yes, they should, they are not Ukrainians,” she insisted.

“Is that why Kiev is ethnically cleansing them?” I [ran out of synonyms for said].

Point being: the opinion of all right-minded Ukrainians on the Donbass situation is the classic, “nothing happened, but they deserved it,” position. They hate the easterners for voting the wrong way and for being transplants from the Soviet Union who came to work in the factories that were set up there back in the day. They want these backwards people gone, but they don’t want the territory to return to Russia, because the clay there is Ukrainian.

You can see now, perhaps, why Moscow’s claims of an ethnic cleansing campaign waged by Kiev ring true. And the right-minded “good” Ukrainians didn’t come up with these ideas themselves - someone in a position of power in the government and the media fed them this narrative that they gobbled up and now repeated as if they had come up with it. The easterners were constantly and systematically portrayed as the reason that Ukraine wasn’t as progressive and developed as Europe was. Ukraine could be France and Kiev could be Paris, if it weren’t for those damned easterners and Russia, you see. In that sense, easterners were portrayed like the MAGA people in the United States - like reprobates and deplorables, monsters with the wrong ideology who ought to be punished for preventing progress. In a nutshell, the official narrative for “good” Ukrainians stated that these backwards people, with their pro-Russian sentiment and geographical distance from Europe, were the source of all of Ukraine’s woes.

By declaring the land Ukrainian, but the people squatting on it traitors and Russians, Kiev was able to justify its brutal campaign in the Donbass. Clever, no?

Now, this nice lady wasn’t a Nazi by any means. She physically winced when I dropped an n-bomb in Russian, even though “negri” is just a regular Russian word. She was generally pro-multiculturalism and liked the idea of cherniye (black, but nicer word) coming to live in Ukraine and was pro-Jewish because she thought that the Jews were helping Ukraine progress to a brighter future. Case in point: President Zelensky the Reformer, First of His Name, Rightful Ruler of the H*hols and Defender of Kiev’s Accession to the EU.

But, as we ascertained earlier, she was also pro-ethnic cleansing in the east.

I struggled to find any actual National-Socialists in Kiev, even though I was on the lookout for them. Mostly, they would come in on weekends to protest the government for better pay and political concessions. These protests often got quite rowdy. There were, however, a great deal of right-minded Liberal ladies like the one I spoke to at the dacha who promoted a hardline anti-Russian and anti-Donbass position.

You have to understand: Nazism is only a small part of the propaganda narrative that was being fed to Ukrainians. The muscle, which was expected to do Kiev’s dirty work, was fed the neo-Bandera stuff, that’s true, at special training camps that were largely tucked away from public view. But the average Ukrainian was fed the standard neo-lib narrative on the TV and by the culture-creators. These two groups did not tolerate each other as much as they pretended that the other group did not exist. Nationalists were not starting fights with the sullen, swarthy Arabs that had descended on Kiev and Lvov or trying to burn down the gay discos. And the Liberals were not making much of a fuss about literal neo-Nazis torturing people in the Donbass and uploading their videos online.

This is the key to understanding the basketcase that is Ukraine. On the one hand, you have a government that is pursuing a rapid liberalization agenda. On the other hand, you have a government that is involved in a brutal ethnic cleansing operation through the use of Neo-Nazi death squads.

This state of affairs only seems contradictory to those who do not understand that Liberalism, at its core, is not concerned with maximizing happiness and sunshine and GDP growth, but about utilizing terror to effect rapid cultural and political changes on a hapless populace. Liberalism is always advanced at the point of a gun and it is maintained with terror. It is an elitist, exterminationist ideology that demands a constant stream of human sacrifices to maintain its hegemony. In Ukraine, it is the easterners who were chosen for ritual slaughter. In America, the victims are White Amerikaners who vote the wrong way.

The justification may change, but the mentality and modus operandi does not.

All utopian projects demand a steady stream of sacrifices and scapegoats to keep the holy clerics of the political ideology in power. Someone is always preventing the progress and the problem can only be remedied by feeding the dark gods of Liberalism the blood of the reprobates.