Why Ukraine Fights

This longform piece by Tamar Jacoby is something special. Tamar has been living in Ukraine during the war and she has done deep reporting trying to understand the nationalism that is growing there.

It’s a story about colonialism and oppression, democracy and illiberalism. It’s going to educate you—I promise you’ll learn a lot you didn’t know before. But it’s also going to challenge you. Because nationalism has an absolute value sign around it. Some of it is great. Some of it is troubling. None of it can be understood outside the context of a war in which the invading power tortures and murders civilians and literally steals Ukraine’s children in an attempt to erase their country’s identity.

The amount of research and reporting that goes into a piece like this is substantial and we can only publish it because of the support of Bulwark+ members.

But we’re making it free for everyone to read, because it’s important.

 
Why Ukraine Fights

ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR MEMES circulating on Ukrainian social media in the past year used an image, first popularized on Russian social media, of a grotesque creature with the body of a fish and the snout of a pig—a shvino karas, or pig fish. “A few decades ago, almost all Ukrainian popular culture was derivative of something Russian,” online meme curator and web developer Bohdan Andrieiev, 32, explained. “Before independence and for more than a decade afterward, we had no popular culture of our own.” This has changed dramatically in recent years, culminating in a burst of new Ukrainian creativity since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Social media, meme culture, pop music, and viral jokes have emerged as powerful tools of national solidarity—the bottom-up, ironic Ukrainian equivalent of old-style totalitarian propaganda.

Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: plus.thebulwark.com