Parallels with a war long ago and far away...

 Friends,

After reading this article at the Conservative Treehouse, and listening to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in the vid embedded in that article, I was reminded of a war long ago and far away.

In WWII in the Pacific, the Japanese propaganda kept insisting, as the war wore on, that they were winning huge battles and decimating American naval and land forces; that the mongrel Americans could in no way stand up to the divinely inspired (i.e. the Jap Moon goddess Amaterasu) Nippon race, that the "Yamato Spirit" is indomitable, much like what this Pentagon spokesman Kirby in this video said about the Ukrainian fighting spirit.

However, in '43-'45, the Japanese people keep noticing the Jap military was winning these decisive victories in geography that somehow kept getting nearer and nearer to Japan! Odd, that, huh? That, and they experienced increasing food shortages, and ever less fuel and material.

Ain't that what we're seeing here? 'Oh, those amazing Ukrainians! They got the Russians on the run!' Yet the Russians are bombing the crap out of specific targets now in WESTERN UKRAINE! (I wrote about the formerly Polish city of Lvov, now Ukrainian Lviv, in my essay fo the other day.) And in the eastern half the country, Russian forces keep moving, slowly, maybe, but surely, onward. And we hear, 'Oh, Putin is panicked, fired 8 generals and two top spy chiefs and "unnamed sources" are reporting he's calling on China for help!' (Perhaps it is like the Japanese deposing Tojo after Saipan; of course, that was just "window dressing". Tojo's successors didn't deviate from his policies.)

Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps some sort of truth lies behind some of this. But I think basically this is the sort of propaganda that did not fool the starving Japanese in '43-'45. It should not fool us, either.

Then, too, there's the fact that the U.S. military, since General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 in Georgia, has had a habit of fast maneuvering through territory, by-passing strong points, and "going for the jugular" because they're generally not trying to occupy territory, but crush the enemy. MacArthur learned to do that (it took some time to teach him) in the Western Pacific campaign, but then when he landed on Luzon in the Philippines, he shot through northern Luzon in true Blitzkrieg fashion, but his intention was to take and occupy Manila. Unfortunately for thousands of Filipinos and U.S. troops – and the irreplaceable heritage of the Filipino people – fanatical Japanese dug into Manila like maggots, and refused to leave the city. Commanding General Tomojuki Yamashita (1885-1946), the famous 'Tiger of Malaya' and 'the Beast of Bataan', refused clearly order their exit and said he would not declare Manila an "open city" (as MacArthur had done in 1942) because it "would reflect badly on the Japanese Martial spirit". (Yes, Yamashita actually said that; MacArthur made sure he hanged in in 1946.)

Thus, although MacArthur refused to allow the city to be bombed from the air, American artillery had to destroy the historic city on the ground. Street-by-street, house-by-house, room-by-room. The U.S. Army (MacArthur didn't allow the Marines anywhere near his operations) had to level the historic downtown completely and kill almost every single Japanese soldier and sailor in the entire area. It was as brutal a fight at the Brits had with the Japs at horrific battles at Imphal and Kohima in Nagaland in northeast India. (These fights made Stalingrad look, in comparison, almost mild.)

Every Japanese soldier and officer seemed to go insane, raping and bayoneting women, children, slaughtering ALL civilians they had their claws on. They raped the women at the German consulate/hospital, too, their own "allies" and bayoneted the men. Unspeakable slaughter – infants were not spared; then, like American Indians after a battle, they mutilated the dead. (This is what paganism really looks like.)

Manila, the "Pearl of the Orient" the only truly beautiful European-style (Spanish-Italian architecture) city in the Orient, four-hundred years old, full of Catholic Churches, ornate public buildings, universities and colleges galore, tree-lined boulevards, a magical, fairy-tale beauty of a city from the Catholic Empire that Royal Spain once ruled, was utterly flattened and demolished. Unlike cities in Europe, it could not remotely be restored, just completely rebuilt as something without the magic. And then, too, its libraries and official records going back centuries were lost, and a heritage so needed by the new nation of The Philippines was irretrievably lost. MacArthur had foolishly declared it liberated before this hand-to-hand fighting occurred; after the last insane Jap was killed, he rushed into the city center to celebrate its 'liberation' with a speech and parade, and was left speechless by what he saw. It's the only time I know of in his life that he publicly wept and could not finish a speech he started to give. They held no parade. Perhaps it is no wonder he never returned to the Philippines once he moved on to conquered Japan.

My point: in the Ukraine, the Russians are not going for an American "shock and awe" blitzkrieg; rather, they're encircling Ukrainian cities, and in the slow process squeezing out refugees on open escape routes, with the goal of either taking the cities intact or killing what fighters remain "holed up". It is similar to their maneuvers in the latter part of WWII. Sometimes the American approach works better; but it didn't in Manila. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American tactics just left chaos behind in its wake. Clearly, the Russians have a different agenda, that much ought to be obvious (except to the MSM). So, we'll just have to see.

N.B. Personally, I think it was perfectly predictable, after three years of fighting them, that the American generals should have known that the Japanese would do what they did in Manila; so Roosevelt or General Marshall or whoever should have offered a deal with the Japanese: "You declare Manila an open city and leave it and its people intact, or we will use our B-29s not just to bomb Tokyo, etc., into oblivion, but we'll specifically target Kyoto, your ancient ancestral artistic jewel of a capital." In actuality, Kyoto was the one Japanese city we didn't bomb. I'm sorry to write this but after what the Japanese did to Manila – as well as the infamous six-week massacre in late 1937-38 known as the "Rape of Nanking" – it should have been Kyoto we nuked instead of Nagasaki, which had a relatively large number of Catholics. The bombardier of the Boxcar B-29 actually used the Nagasaki Catholic Cathedral as his landmark to target the a-bomb "Fat Man' drop.

History reveals how brutal we humans can be; the Christian religion is the only one that reveals why we all shouldn't be exterminated. None of the rest can answer that query.

An Préachán

Various Historical and Current Issues about Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, etc.

Amici, 

A friend wrote me some questions about the current situation, so I'm presenting here some of my answers.

My amicus asks:

Have you noticed a major influx of Ukrainian refugees in Budapest? If they decide to stay indefinitely, will it be good for Hungary and it’s economy or one, big financial drain?

I've not noticed any, but I only go into Budapest occasionly these days. I'll write more, at length about this below because Hungary and Poland are taking more refugees than the other E.U. countries, and getting roasted for it! And I mean, losing E.U. money. See citizenfreepress here for details.

An excerpt:

In essence, it means that if conservative countries dissent against the liberal European mainstream on how to govern — for example, Hungary’s passing of legislation which prohibited LGBT+ propaganda to be taught in schools or rejects mass immigration — the offending country could be refused access to European funds they are entitled to, Remix explains.

...

    The parliamentary vote means that the European Union has diverted its attention and resources towards sanctioning two of its own members at a time when the wider European continent is in disarray and Russia is seeking to flex its muscles and assert its dominance in Ukraine, Remix comments.
    It also means that the Hungarian and Polish governments must divert their own time and resources to confronting the hostility from Brussels, as both countries seek to contain the humanitarian crisis is unfolding on the European Union’s external border and take in hundreds of thousands of refugees.

AnP again:

In Europe, if a country doesn't support everything Gay, it will be punished. You can imagine what this will mean for Churches and Christian Believers. Bad days are coming.

You also state:

“The 2021 IMF Assessment of the Macroeconomic Impact of structural Reforms in Ukraine estimated Ukraine would need to grow at close to 7 % for 20 years to reach the level of development of Poland today”.

Yes, indeed. EVERYONE knows that if Ukraine joined the E.U., millions of Ukrainians would flood all of E.U. Europe. They wouldn't stay at home, if they could possibly get out.

You ask:

* Does anyone in this Email group seriously think the Ukrainians will be allowed to return back home to their land to rebuild among the rubble, toppled buildings, statues, and scorched earth?

Personally, I suspect this is an "extermination war" run by the WEF and the Western "Deep State" to recreate "the Western World" as a single oppressive world government with no Constitutional rights and only digital currency, not to mention mandating the hedonistic post-'60s sexual morality that is enervating manhood, erasing womanhood (any guy can claim to be a woman now), and sowing sexual identity confusion in the West – that's not a popular thing to say, but history in unequivocal about it. This current war, my friends, is merely the war Hillary would have fought had she been elected in 2016; but because she lost to Trump, the war had to wait till another Democrat idiot puppet was "installed" and that is why the Powers-That-Be spent ALL FOUR YEARS of Trump's presidency demonizing Trump! But since he was clearly going to win in 2020, they repeated their coup d'état they pulled on the legally elected Ukrainian government in 2014. That's the reason CackleCamel-toes Harris launched Putin's invasion by saying the U.S. looked favorably on Ukraine's entry into NATO. Putin invaded days later. 

Let's assume...

But let's assume we somehow avoid this horrible slave-status they've ordained for us, and answer your question about refugees returning to Ukraine.

 

I think some will, but it will depend on a lot. Most importantly, who will be running Ukraine at that time? Russia or otherwise the WEF (World Economic Forum) and the American Deep State? If Russia, then actual Ukrainian Slavs will probably be allowed to return, after being "vetted", checked for past connections and political affiliation. Gay activists will probably be excluded, and Nazis. (Many of the original Nazi leaders were homosexuals, as were the Frankfurter school Communist intellectuals, BTW; political radicals are rarely family men.)

I doubt the Hungarian ethnics will want to go back, or be allowed to, whoever runs Ukraine. They've been treated extremely badly (as have Ukrainian ethnic Russians) since Obama's – well, the American Deep State's – coup d'état in 2014. They'll probably stay in Hungary.

Poland, on the other hand, is likely getting standard Ukrainians, and I don't think Poland will want to keep them. Poland ruled parts of Ukraine, off and on, for centuries, and the Ukrainian city of Lviv used to be Lvov, a wholly Polish city. The region surrounding Lvov was Ukrainian-speaking, but not the city. All those Poles were killed or driven out after World War II. (Pretty much, in 1945-46 the entire eastern half of Poland was forcibly moved to the eastern quarter of Germany, and those Germans living there were forced into what became "East Germany".) But the Hungarian-speaking part of Ukraine had been part of the Hungary proper, historically. So, Ukrainian territory that had Hungarian speakers used to actually belong in the Kingdom of Hungary. All that land is probably lost to ethnic Hungarians.

N.B. An idea of how complicated this situation is:

A huge section of northwestern Romania, actually Transylvania (forget Dracula), actually was part of the Kingdom of Hungary too, and many living there still speak Hungarian and identify themselves as Hungarian. Modern Hungarians have a loving longing for Erdély, as it is known in Magyar, and it remains a sort of a "lost Magyar Shangri-La" to them, stolen by the Western allies who fought the war to prevent what they then imposed on the defeated! Erdély also has the least people per square mile in Europe, I believe, and remains largely forested. It is unique in that after the Turkish conquest of Hungary in 1526, the Turks left Transylvania moderately free as a quasi-independent principality (it's mountainous, also) for centuries whereas they depopulated the central Hungarian flat agricultural lands they had captured. Also, the entire southern third of Slovakia is historically Hungarian, as are sections of what is now northern Serbia (and a narrow slice of eastern Austria: i.e. parts of "Burgenland").

The historical Kingdom of Hungary had various ethnic groups within its borders, and these grew to detest Hungarian rule after the Hungarians and the Austrians created the "Austrian-Hungarian Empire" in the 1860s. ("National identity" began rising in the early 1800s across all of Europe, and in the later half of the century, Hungarian authorities tried to impose Hungarian language learning on "the ethnicities", something these ethnicities in turn imposed on Hungarians after WWI!) Because of historical twists and turns, the entire nation of Croatia had become attached to the Kingdom of Hungary. And I mean, this happened as far back as 1102 and the Pacta conventa, under which Croatia joined with Hungary in a "personal union" via dynastic intermarriage.

So, after World War I, the Western Allies broke off large chunks of Hungary via the Treaty of Trianon – in the case of Croatia, this partition made sense because of language and ethnic differences, but then the British and French immediately welded Catholic Croatia to Orthodox Serbia. Talk about a shotgun wedding! The two didn't like each other; they spoke basically (more or less) the same language and were (kinda sorta) a single ethnic people originally, before Christianity, but a 1,000 years of religious division made them two separate people – so together they went whether they liked it or not! When Communism fell, they immediately "divorced". Anyway, as you can see, this region's history is extremely complicated.

Language

One language note about Ukrainian because it gives a notion of how fluid national identity can be: sometimes called Ruthenian (and Ukrainian Eastern-Rite Catholics were sometimes called Ruthenians), Ukrainian is an eastern-Slavic dialect with close affinity to both Russian and Belarusian – they are all three actually to some extent mutually intelligible, like Scots-Gaelic and Irish. What they represent is a linguistic continuum. However, unlike say, Irish-Gaelic, which (along with Welsh) has the oldest literary tradition in Europe, after Latin and Greek, Ukrainian has no literary history at all until about the early 18th century, and thus has no literary tradition until that time, when young Ukrainian intellectuals began to build on what Ukrainian identity existed. Compare that to Polish, which has its earliest longer prose pieces going back to the early 1300s or Hungarian, whose literary history goes back to 1200 with the Halotti beszéd, a brief funeral speech composed about 1200, with many translations from Latin starting thereafter.

This language business stands as significant because it suggests that Ukrainian ethnic identity, while real, is a lot more recent and thus politically problematic in terms of basing a modern Ukrainian identity on. Also, you can see why ethnic Russians in Ukraine would be angered about their version of Eastern Slavic being 'dissed' by the post-2014 coup western-gov "installed" Ukrainian regime. The Ukrainian government truly tried to "go to war" with both Russian and Hungarian languages (and whatever Polish survives) in Ukraine! Finally, I've read where, in this invasion, brothers – actual brothers – are fighting each other on the different sides. So, that in itself demonstrates how complicated this situation, and that no easy answers exist to this mess.

An Préachán