frandroid | Entries tagged with there is no "the" in ukraine

A coincidental double-feature about Ukrainian history today!

The best podcast for Ukrainian history is obviously Timothy Snyder's fall 2022 Yale course, The Making of Modern Ukraine, which he taught in light of the Russian invasion.

But that's a pretty long thing to listen to! Romeo Kokriatski from Ukraine Without Hype has decided to also try his hand at a shorter version of it. He was aiming for one hour, he did it in two in 99: Ukrainian History 101. In a way I found it was somewhat complementary to Snyder's course, unless I have already forgotten large chunks of that! It was a good episode and I should listen to it again more closely so that it sticks... 8)

A more specific bit of Ukrainian history comes from Charlie Allison on
KPFA - Against the Grain: Ukrainian Anarchist. Allison wrote No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno published by PM Press, and he gives us a decent lecture summarizing it. I think as a podcast thing, Mike Duncan was a bit better than Allison talking about the more important aspects of Makhno's life during the Revolutions episode where he spent some time on him, but then again he wasn't trying to give a full biography.

My third recommendation today slightly touches on Ukraine but is more general. It's an episode of David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: [S5.5 E08] The Politics of Humiliation. Here Harvey discusses national humiliation, from the Opium Wars and Versailles, to the WWII settlement, the end of the Cold Wars, to the wars on Ukraine and Gaza. There's a funny bit in there about how Trump complaining about Fentanyl coming to the US from China is ironic considering the historical precedent of the Opium Wars... Anyway this was insightful and gave me much to think about, though I it missed a crucial element regarding Ukraine, aka Ukrainians' own aspirations.

Current Music: Le diwan de Biskra - Ched Illé Ilala

« What's the biggest example of the domino meme in my life? I'm gonna have to go with "I got bored on the sleepy overnight shift at the data center -> Russia invaded Ukraine". »

This is an epic thread by

denise about how she came to be involved with LiveJournal and how the creation of DW came about, with some bad stuff happening along the way.

(this is a post where this icon fits very well)

American Prestige - Special - A Russia-Ukraine War Update w/ Mark Ames
I was wondering why there was no share button on this episode; it's members-only. :( But basically they describe how fucked the Ukrainians are because of how they have been driven to fight Russia and then left out to dry. It's an episode from the spring but even with more weapons as was voted recently it won't change the dynamic--Ukraine has a massive manpower shortage problem (see: Bakhmut), and Russia has re-established some of its weapons manufacturing capacity, beyond what Ukraine's allies are providing it. The one time in my life where I suddenly wish that Netanyahu and Erdogan had been successful (very early on they tried to negotiate a peace deal before the U.S. told Zelensky to ignore them).

The Dig - Thawra Ep. 16 – Siege of Beirut
The 1982 war marked the exit of the PLO from Lebanon, the last of the places where they had a solid armed militant presence. As Egypt and Jordan had made peace with Israel (and the U.S.), this was also the end of the era of Arab revolutions and resistance, and the beginning of Fatah's controversial engagement with accepting the 1973 borders, which would lead to Oslo. I found Rashid Khalidi's chapter (mentioned here Wednesday) more informative about the What but this podcast episode better about the Whys. (I'm really really glad I happened to read the chapter just before listening to the episode!) It's another two and a half hour corker. 🙃 (yeah I know, I used to attend multiple university lectures that long every week...)

The Secret Life of Canada - General Idea
I didn't know very much about this art group. This is a good introduction to them. Toronto should celebrate its better artists more. I had more to say when I listened to the episode but now it's all lost to time. :P

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Oscar Sulley - Emoru

I've been listening to a few podcast episodes this week but nothing really stands out, other than The Eastern Border recounting how Soviet missile warning system programmer Stanislav Petrov saved the world from nuclear war and annihilation by trusting his common sense (and his critical sense of all things Soviet) rather than his own program when false signals indicated that the U.S. had launched nuclear missiles towards the Soviet Union. That's a well-known story. But hey I wrote this whole single-sentence paragraph about it, so here's a link anyway:

https://theeasternborder.lv/podcast/hero-of-all-mankind-stanislav-petrov/

(I just saw that there's a follow up episode with a guest that I find useless, we'll see how that goes!)

Anyway, I wanted to dig a bit into my to-post queue. Sadly half the episodes I can't recall well-enough to post a review about, but some still linger in my memory:

Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness - Ep.2 – The Great Armored Train by Nick Mamatas

This podcast reads short stories and book chapters of fiction from kindred spirits in the anarcho whatever sphere. This story here is some sort of magical fable happening on Lenin's armoured train when he was shipped from Germany to Russia and the Germans unwittingly triggered the second greatest world-historical revolution we had ever seen. I mean all this is true, but

nihilistic_kid concocted a nice spooky story here. I greatly enjoyed this.

The Brief Podcast - Episode 35: Montreal's first Haitian street gang

Les Bélangers, the above-mentioned street gang, first came together to defend Haïtians from Montréal cops. Maxime Aurélien, the leader of that gang, has co-written a history of that gang with a Concordia prof, Ted Rutland. I intellectually know Montréal cops were even more racist in the 80s (in a way that clashes with our own perception of Canadianness, maybe not in comparison to American cops, who we just perceive the be "worse" because Canadian media are happy to not shatter our self-made image of a nice and gentle country. We never got a Rodney King incident on camera here, or an over-the-top killing like Amadou ^youtube Diallo ^spotify) but hearing the kind of harassment and brutality Haïtians (there is a large diaspora in Montréal, because of French speaking) in particular were facing first-hand is still necessary, and the whole thing is fascinating.

The Eurasian Knot - Mental Health in Wartime Ukraine

The Eurasian Knot is the new name of the SRB podcast, a long-standing and great Russian and Eastern European podcast. Here in this episode, host Sean Guillory interviewed two Pittsburgh-based, Soviet-Bloc born and educated psychiatry professors. They have been working with Ukrainians to help them weather the catastrophe that the Russian invasion has had on Ukrainians' mental health in general, and on psychiatric institutions in particular. There's also a good discussion of political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Bloc, as if I needed to learn about more horrors. But anyway, very good episode.

The Electronic Intifada - Day 17 roundtable on Israel's attacks on Gaza
The Electronic Intifada - Day 20 roundtable on Israel's attacks on Gaza

I'm getting more and more fascinated by Jon Elmer's description of Hamas' tunnel network. The length and the depth of these things seems phenomenal, along with the claimed complexity of infrastructure. At some point I'm wondering, is he fabulating? But even if half of what he mentions is true, this is going to be worse than fighting in the jungle. The flipside is that crimes committee by Israel in there could also stray buried in there.

There's also the flipside to this, that all this infrstructure has been built at civilians' expense, as expressed in this Xhitter thread.

Otherwise the EI livestreams are a phenomenal source to get a sense of what people are living on the ground and getting some Palestinian analysis. Ali Abunimah can be a bit much sometimes but in these current circumstances, I can't think of a way he could be too much. The situation is critical.

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The second bonus episode is a hilarious tale of Kristaps and Ukraine w/o Hype's Anthony Bartaway getting threatened at gunpoint by a drunk Ukrainian in his skivvies at the Transnistria border. (Well, hilarious because nothing bad happened, of course...)

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Finally, a really sucky thing. Learning that Sacha Baron Cohen, Taika Waititi and Jordan Peele have shittier politics than you would imagine, in light of their previous commitments. How many of them (the overall list of signatories) don't grok that this letter is supporting genocide? I don't know. But this sure ain't a call for a cease-fire.

My first entry today has two episodes but starring the same person - Romeo Kokriatski. Romeo is an Ukrainian American who has been the co-host of Ukraine Without Hype for a long time. When the Ukraine war started I was listening to a lot of podcasts on Ukraine, and many of them were either too nationalist for my taste, too whiny, or weirdly lefty, or were so propagandist that they could make Volodymyr Zelenskyy blush. (I'm looking at you, BBC's UkraineCast.) I ended up sticking with Hype because Romeo and his co-host Anthony Bartaway are clear eyed while being full partisans for the Ukrainian cause. I found that Romeo published in some anarchist publication in the past but he doesn't flaunt it that much on this podcast.

So the first episode this week if from Ukraine without Hype: Episode 27: Sarah Ashton on the Situation in Kharkiv and Being "Trans at the Front"

Sarah Ashton is a trans American analyst turned journalist who was writing a book in Latvia when the war started, and then decided to drop everything to go Ukraine, and then go all the way to the front to report on the war for queer publications in the U.S. Since that interview she managed to become a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military and then get suspended from that job. But anyway, Sarah speaks about being Trans in Ukraine, which has mostly been without a hitch. She also speaks neither of the local languages, and doesn't have a fixer, so between Google Translate, rudimentary English from some Ukrainians, some German from her part and a whole bunch of gestures, she gets around to do her work. One of the interesting segments is when Romeo (who is brown-skinned) and Sarah discuss how their identities are much more of an issue in every life in the U.S. than they are in Ukraine. Romeo discusses the stratification of Russian society, where Russians sit at the top, and how that's an important thing for them but Ukraine is a lot more heterogenous. (Which makes sense where you're read some Ukrainian history...) I found Sarah's account of her time so far quite fascinating. At some point the Russians discovered Ashton's existence and decided to highlight her an example of how depraved Ukrainians are, which had the effect of significantly elevating her status on the Ukrainian side. So this episode was overall a feelgood story, until you get to the end and see what kind of fucking awful crap she's been receiving from American tankies and DSA types. So huh, yeah.

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The second Romeo episode is 136/ When War Gets Normalized, Or What's At Stake in Ukraine w/ Mariam Naiem and Romeo Kokriatski on The Fire These Times, a generally anarchist podcast. The discuss how Ukrainian identity gets taken apart by Russian society to justify the war. They discuss the issue of Russians kidnapping and adopting children, with Romeo name-dropping a book about Canada's residential schools as a resource that was relevant to understanding Russia's POV. (!!!) Romeo discusses how the war will not end until Putin is gone from Russia, resigning himself to a decade of conflict, regardless of whether Russians remain in the territory of Ukraine.

Romeo talks about his plans for the end of the war (having a child). There is one status change in Ukrainian life that will be a marker for him. Host Ayoub then discusses how some Lebanese people kind of wish they were back in the Lebanese Civil War, because back then you would make plans for what you would do when the war is over, and you were hopeful. But now there is no civil and no hope at all, in a perpetual financial crisis and political gridlock.

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Bonus episode! The podcast I love to gripe about, Fucking Cancelled, had a great guest: Talking Shit with Zachary Zane: Sex is a Huge Part of My Sexuality.

Zane is a sex educator and sex advice and non-monogamy columnist with Men's Health Magazine. Here, like in his book Boyslut, he discusses his coming into his identity as a bisexual man. An interesting part of the discussion is about sexual consent in queer sex spaces, from "Yes means Yes" super-contractual sex which has become more popular recently, to "No means no" consent which is more, huh, old school. Anyway this was a great discussion about bisexuality and consent which lit up a few bulbs in my head.