The H*hol Diaries - Chapter 2: Hunkering Down For Nuclear Holocaust

Another vignette from my time in Ukraine in the run-up to the war.

I met a friend of my uncle’s at a BBQ near the tail-end of summer. People said that we’d get along because he was a doomsday-enthusiast and a prepper. I’d certainly met a lot of preppers in the US, where it’s a sort of national pastime that has replaced baseball in terms of popularity, and I always found them to be interesting people, if nothing less.

No country will ever admit that there might come a point when having a private bunker will be useful for the average citizen, seeing as that would be a tacit admission of the government’s lack of omnipotence. As a result, anyone who takes any preparatory measures on their own initiative are looked down upon by polite society. The very act of prepping hints at the possibility that someone mistrusts the government to provide for their safety and well-being and this causes the average person to get angry at the prepper, whose activity makes them start worrying themselves. So, as a result, he was seen as an eccentric and an oddball, to put it mildly.

People tut-tutted his talk of the need to prepare for the worst, and when I encouraged members of my own family to put their basements to good use by storing up some food and supplies, I was, of course, summarily ignored. This was partially because they wanted to believe that nothing would happen and taking preparatory measures would mean admitting the possibility of something bad happening. It’s worth keeping in mind that our warnings of an imminent doomsday were being issued during a period when the metro was being periodically shut down, prices were shooting up for food, there was talk of an imminent mobilization, stores were periodically closing and laws were being implemented to prevent the unvaxxed from participating in society. In other words, there was plenty to indicate that preparing for the worse might not be as bizarre a proposition as people made it out to be.

I ended up visiting his bunker in a suburb of Kiev, which was more like a basement, and ended up having some drinks with him. We got to talking and I was surprised to learn just how ignorant this man was of anything happening outside the borders of Ukraine. For one thing, he was trying to get his hands on a supply of Western vaccines, which he thought would be valuable in the coming days of famine and plague. Everything that Western conspiracy theorists believed about the Pfiser, Moderna and J&J vaxes, he believed in reverse about Sputnik and the Chinese variant - that they were created to depopulate Ukraine and Russia by the Kremlin. He was shocked to hear that many Westerners were fighting tooth and nail to resist the vaccines in the West. He was also shocked to hear that prepping was quite popular in America.

“Why would anyone be worried in America?” He asked me, genuinely baffled and noticeably uncomfortable at the very idea.

I explained to him that American culture is built on a very healthy distrust of Washington, and that any conservative-minded American, after a few beers or some whiskey, would start whispering about the need to overthrow the federal government or about secret programs by the CIA and FBI to subjugate and poison the populace.

“You mean southerners?” He asked.

“Not only southerners,” I replied.

Then I began to tell him about the demographic situation in the West. If he was struggling to fathom what I was saying about Americans’ mistrust of their government, he flat-out refused to believe that America was rapidly approaching a situation where only 50% of the population was American. He told me that what I was saying sounded a lot like Kremlin propaganda, that he’d heard Russian pundits saying similar things on the TV or the internet, but that it was just typical Sovok talking points like they had in the USSR, where the demise of America was rapidly approaching and that it would happen any day now.

“They’ve been saying that for 80 years now,” he explained. “Always saying that things are bad in America, but then we learned that it wasn’t true. That they lived better in the West than we did. And now, they’re trying to sell the same lies to keep their own population in fear and supporting Putin.”

He had heard that I had spent several years living in Russia, and as a result, he was sure that I was spreading Kremlin disinfo. When I reminded him that I had lived in the US, he still dismissed my claims as hearsay.

“The average American is rich. Anyone can make money there. How can the government be bad and hate the average American when they help their own people live so well? Our government hates us, and that is why Ukraine is so poor. In Russia, it is the same story.”

I’ve always been struck by how difficult it is to explain to the average Slav anything that isn’t readily understood in monetary terms. They believe that money is the only thing that matters, especially if they are part of the Bariga generation. Their reality was living through a time when everything was for sale, and only chumps weren’t actively scavenging off the wealth of the USSR’s corpse and making plans to flee the country with as much money as possible to set up shop in the West.

“Tell me, then. Does the average American have a larger house than the average Ukrainian or Russian? Do they go to restaurants often? Two big cars? TVs in every room?”

I had to admit that this was true. Sort of. A lot of it was only made possible because of access to cheap credit and the accumulation of generational wealth in the average American family from better times. Also, going to TGIF and Olive Garden to fill up on cheap carbs isn’t really what I consider to be a good time or a sign of wealth, but I decided that it would be impossible to explain my skepticism of the West using monetary arguments.

I tried the cultural angle next.

“They are aggressively promoting all sorts of degenerate and anti-social behavior. Trannies, homosexuals, drugs, and anti-White propaganda.”

To this, again, I received an incredulous reaction.

“You know, you would really get along well with the Praviy Sektor boys. If you support nationalism and White power, you’d find a common language with them.”

He knew that the US was supporting these groups and to him this was proof that the US was not promoting degeneracy, but the opposite, that they were fighting the specter of Communism in the East, by promoting right-wingers, which was a good thing.

“Do you really think they’re funding and arming these groups out of the goodness of their hearts?” I asked.

To this, he shrugged and admitted that the US was using Ukraine to promote its own interests.

“But what they don’t understand,” he said with a grin, “is that we’re actually the ones using them. They need us to fight Russia for them, which is why they are sending money here. But we will use the money to advance our own interests. Ukrainians are clever people, we know what we are doing.”

This is a very standard coping mechanism that you hear all over Eastern Europe, even as far as Poland and the various foreign-funded political movements in Russia, or the Baltics. They think that they’re actually out-foxing the Americans, that the West is a bunch of chumps for pumping money into their countries, which they’re never going to get back. When it comes to bizarre beliefs and conspiracies, this one really takes the cake and puts flat-earthers to shame. Westerners are seen as naive, gullible, do-gooder idiots that are being exploited by the wily Easterner. It never occurs to them that ZOG is getting its money’s worth and that politicians are being bribed into pursuing disastrous policies, that Ukraine is being used as a money-laundering site, and that the cultural programming that the country is being subjected to is part of an organized propaganda effort aimed at destroying the country from within.

Furthermore, when asked why their political class is almost entirely Jewish, they say that this is simply a clever ploy to extract more money from the West. The Jews, you see, have contacts in the West, and without their connections, the money flow would stop. On this last point, I’d have to agree, albeit for different reasons. What I see as a symptom of complete and total domination of the Slavic population by a foreign elite, they see as 5D chess. In that sense, many slavs put the average Qanoner to shame with their twisted logic and coping mechanisms.

“In America,” he continued, “every man has his own castle. He can get a gun, put up a fence, get a dog, and live without being touched by anybody. He can calmly make his money and ignore the rest of the world,”

Once again, I decided to drop the topic. There was no point in trying to explain to him that gun rights were being eroded at a rapid pace and that self-defense was already a by-gone reality in several states already.

“What are your plans for the future,” I asked instead.

“When Russia invades, I’m going to be ready,” he assured me. “I’ve got plenty of ammo, supplies and eventually there’s going to be a partisan resistance against the occupiers. We’re going to make them pay for every square inch of land that they try to occupy.”

The war did indeed begin a few months later. I learned that the prepper had fled Kiev to Lvov in the first days of the operation, along with at least a half-million other capitol-dwellers. Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that he actually would, in fact, enjoy life in America. There’d he’d find just as many hard-talkers and 5D chess enthusiasts collecting guns and sardines in their basements who would also almost all certainly run or surrender to their enemies the moment things got hot. To his credit, he managed to bribe his way out of military service and then made his way over to Poland for a bit. Last I heard, he’d returned to Kiev now that the threat of a Russian advance on the capital had passed.

He is no doubt planning the next phase of his master-plan to heroically resist the Russian aggressors.