Mati Puss

[Vladyslav Starodubtsev🌹 @VlStarodubtsev]

"Ірландці російської імперії"

Коли Перша світова війна вщухла, і Ірландія, і Україна посилили свою боротьбу за самовизначення. Ніколи ще долі цих двох націй не були настільки співзвучними. У редакційній статті, опублікованій 1918 року під назвою «День “малих” націй», часопис Nationality раділо ослабленню Росії, яка вже не могла «лежати, мов огидна мокра ковдра, над національними прагненнями малих націй, саму назву й саме існування яких вона старанно приховувала від світу».

Успіх України, стверджував часопис Sinn Féin, був перемогою й для інших новопосталих націй, таких як Ірландія, а зменшення Росії — ударом по імперському пануванню ...

The Watchword of Labour публікувало повідомлення від Української партії соціалістів-революціонерів, яка інформувала, що статті, присвячені боротьбі Ірландії за свободу, з’являлися в головному виданні партії — Боротьбі, і що «українці перебувають у становищі, дуже подібному до вашого в Ірландії».

Звіт, складений 1921 року повноважним представником Sinn Féin у Москві Патріком МакКартаном, показував, що на цьому етапі він уже мав небагато ілюзій щодо більшовиків, з якими мав справу. «Ніхто з тих, хто має владу в Росії, не вдає, ніби думає, що існує така річ, як свобода».

І хоча уряд заявляв, що є диктатурою пролетаріату, він не був, зі слів Патріка «нічим подібним», а радше «диктатурою приблизно півдесятка лідерів Комуністичної партії». Лідер Sinn Féin зазначав, що, попри всі розмови про інтернаціоналізм у Росії, там був «не лише націоналізм, а й імперіалізм», і як приклад наводив ставлення до балтійських держав:

«Росіянин сміється з естонської мови так само, як британці звикли сміятися з ірландської мови. Вона, мовляв, вульгарна, жахлива тощо. Тому я не надто певен, що самовизначення Ірландії викликало б великий ентузіазм в офіційних колах».

Ірландці російської імперії за авторством Доннаха О Бієна

https://t.co/DybMnlebJo

[Craig Unger @craigunger]

8/My closing argument:
Do not wait for the United States to save you. American security guarantees are no longer reliable. European and Baltic defense must rest on foundations that don't depend on the occupant of the White House.

With thanks to @CentrumBalticum and @UniTurku for the invitation.

For full speech: https://t.co/fEhSgNJ3Sf . .

[Adrian P 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇪🇺 @AdrianP_doc]

Beyond the fact that a Persian living in California is encouraging civilians in Iran to be mowed down by machine gun fire, these absolutely insufferable people have no clue what they are talking about.

Owning firearms was strictly regulated in communist Romania. Only people loyal to the party could own a gun and even those were strictly monitored.

The Romanian revolution started with unarmed civilians in the streets and many of them got killed. A few got weapons only after THE FUCKING ARMY SIDED WITH THE PEOPLE.

That didn't happen in Iran
Is not happening in Iran
And will not happen in Iran

These psychopaths just want to see Iranians die

[Martin Günzel 🇺🇦🇪🇺🌹 @MartGuenzel]

Dass die SED-Kommunisten ihr Volk tyrannisierten, ist bekannt. Aber mit ihre Familien gingen sie zT kaum besser um. Das zeigt das Schicksal von Beate Ulbricht, Adoptivtochter der Ulbrichts, die am Ende daran zugrunde ging, wie ihre Eltern sie behandelt hatten. (THREAD)

[Vladyslav Starodubtsev🌹 @VlStarodubtsev]

Famous quote “Why die for Danzig?” originated from an article of the same name by French socialist Marcel Deat.

A fierce pacifist, a truly talanted intellectual, a leftist, argued to prevent the war at all cost, including surrendering Germans both Czechoslovakia and Poland, and then went further — France itself. In that period he completely believed in far-right platform and switched sides to Nazism. He become the leading force in Petainist France.

Of course, he lost. Nazism in Europe collapsed.

Why I mention his example in the context of politics of European Left? No reason.

[Robin Yassin-Kassab @qunfuz2]

You were denounced because you're a pathetic tankie aristocrat from Lahore, a walking insult to the Syrian people, a sad conspiracy theorist, and a general pro-fascist piece of shit.

[Mati Puss @MatiPuss]

@brookecombe Please do it. I am looking forward to hearing how you use the saxophone or trombone in your music.

[Adrian P 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇪🇺 @AdrianP_doc]

I am half blind because of Chornobyl, and I want more nuclear power.

On April 25, 1986, my mother crossed into the USSR on a two-week work trip. She was six months pregnant. The following day, reactor 4 of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant exploded, triggering the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The Soviet authorities acknowledged nothing. My mother travelled through Ukraine for two weeks, unaware. Three months later, I was born with congenital glaucoma. It is thanks to her stubbornness and a skilled doctor in Romania that I have any vision at all today, and was lucky enough to build a fulfilling life and a career in filmmaking.

Around the time I turned 30, I travelled to Ukraine and Belarus to make a film about people like me, others living with the legacy of Chornobyl. The trip changed my life and set the course for the following decade. That's where I met Helena, who became my co-director and creative partner on several projects that followed.

We met extraordinary people carrying that legacy. In Gomel, Belarus, I met an ophthalmologist who had been studying glaucoma since before the disaster. She told me that after 1986, congenital glaucoma cases rose tenfold. The Soviet authorities, and later the Belarusian government, suppressed her work, because her findings, alongside other studies linking illness to the disaster, pointed directly to an institutional responsibility they had no intention of accepting.

I also met Dima, a musician who had the same illness as me but lost his vision as a teenager because in late-1990s Belarus there was virtually no care available for those affected. Dima doesn't talk politics. In Belarus, you can't, not really. Instead he focuses on what he can control: his family, his music, the community that loves him deeply. He has a good heart and a full life, and he carries it all with a grace I genuinely admire. But I can't help thinking about how different his life might have been had he been born somewhere else, somewhere free, with the same chances I had. Same illness. Different country. Different outcome.

Helena and I made Everything Will Not Be Fine, a personal film about the legacy of Chornobyl and how people born under its shadow live today. Though the film is intimate in focus, we spent four years on research: travelling to the exclusion zone multiple times, speaking to doctors, scientists, and people involved in the cleanup.

What that research confirmed is this: Chornobyl wouldn't have happened in a free society. And even if it had, it should never have become the catastrophe it was.

The accident began with a flawed reactor design the Soviet system refused to acknowledge or correct. When the explosion happened, fear, the defining trait of totalitarian systems where no one wants to deliver bad news upward, delayed the disaster response for critical days. Then, once the scale became impossible to conceal, the authorities did everything they could to minimise and lie about the consequences. A 1991 international assessment, produced in close collaboration with Soviet authorities, concluded that health impacts were limited. That report has since been contested by numerous independent health experts who argue its methodology was shaped more by politics than science. The IAEA knew what it was working with. It went along anyway, because Western nuclear powers had their own industries to protect.

The people who paid for all of this were ordinary people. They always are.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the situation has taken on a darker dimension. Russian forces occupied the Chornobyl exclusion zone in the early weeks of the war, causing significant damage and destroying safety equipment. In 2024, a Russian drone struck the sarcophagus covering reactor 4. Russian attacks have also repeatedly hit electrical infrastructure in the zone, which is needed to keep monitoring and cooling systems operational. This is not incidental. It is a pattern.

It is also no accident that for years before the invasion, Russia aggressively lobbied Western governments to buy its oil and gas, and those governments obliged. The result is that some European countries are still funding this war through their energy bills.

And yet I am still for nuclear power. I believe it can be a safe and reliable energy source in a society that values truth and accountability. The lesson of Chornobyl is not that nuclear is dangerous. It's that authoritarianism is.

The tragedy of Chornobyl has shaped my life in ways I am still understanding. But it also led me to Ukraine, to lasting friendships, and to a sense of purpose, the belief that documenting these lives and keeping this history honest is worth doing, however small the contribution. You do what you can, with what you have, from where you stand.

40 years on, that still feels like enough of a reason.

(pictured, Helena and me, Pripyat and a couple of stills from our film - Everything will not be fine - 2020)

[Abu al-Daraja @AbuDaraja]

The meme is about Islamism, the video is from an Arab Leftist - but it fits perfectly.

This video is not about pain or suffering.

It's about civilizational "dignity," which, unfortunately, in the Arab world mostly still means the same as it did in the colonial 19th century.

[Vladyslav Starodubtsev🌹 @VlStarodubtsev]

“We left SI, as it was filled with authoritarians and moderate social democrats, so we joined PI, that was filled with open fans of Stalin and supported Russian occupation of Crimea, and also a part of DSA, that filled with people who literally praise North Korea, Mao, Russia, Holodomor, etc”

[A. Bartaway🇺🇦❤️✊✌️ @Bartaway]

Watching Rod Dreher’s cope over his project falling apart is helping me rediscover the feeling of joy.

[Юрій Левченко @YV_Levchenko]

Here are some of your mistakes (I'll give you a respectful benefit of the doubt that these truly are mistakes and not conscious manipulations), which make @UkraineSol's reaction absolutely correct and justified. And when you're reading my reply, keep in mind that Iʼm Ukrainian and the leader of the only antineoliberal, pro wealth tax party in Ukraine.

1. You talk about the collapse of the USSR causing the invasion that killed hundreds of thousands, yet you don't mention the intentional starving of Ukrainians caused by the Soviet regime, as well as other repressions that together killed MILLIONS and are actually some of the main reasons why the majority of Ukrainians wanted to leave the USSR.

2. You explicitly single out ONLY the Baltic states from your "new USSR". Why don't you give Ukraine, or Uzbekistan for that matter, the same privilege in your hypothetical?

3. What "democratic basis" are you talking about, if Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted to leave the USSR? And, no, that was not because of the coup attempt in Moscow. The coup forced the Ukrainian communist party elites to finally make the decision and hold the referendum, but where the referendum to be held before the coup, the result would've been very similar, because most of the reasons for leaving were primarily tied to no longer having an appetite for being dictated to by Moscow as to how we should live. REGARDLESS of the type of regime that would sit in the Kremlin.

4. No, there was no "overwhelming vote to keep the Union together", as the ballot paper intentionally did NOT have an independence option and the vote was essentially a typical Soviet propaganda exercise, which, unfortunately you are repeating in your post.

Furthermore, the whole premise of your post is factually incorrect. For some reason you equate "keeping the USSR but making it democratic" with an absence of criminal neoliberal "shock therapy". This is simply absurd. All of the newly independent republics that were democratic in the early 90-s (including the largest ones - Ukraine and Russia) went through various level of neoliberal "shock therapy". So if the parts of the whole did this, why would the whole, were it to survive, behave any differently? Obviously it wouldn't, and to suggest otherwise is simply a groundless fantasy.

Thus, to sum up: you have indeed unfortunately repeated many of the Russian imperialist lies/manipulations that have plagued our people for years, while your main "mitigating statement" is patently false.

[Brian Hioe 丘琦欣 @brianhioe]

Progressive International citing Victor Gao, a man who I was on television with and was like, "Yes, we will reduce you to oblivion and massacre your population and this is all justified because of thousands of years of civilization" (gestures wildly) is hilarious

[Aleksandar Djokic (Александар Джокич) @polidemitolog]

To understand the situation in Serbia, you must first understand the Serbian median voter. He wants European democracy, European investments, visa-free travel, and free education at European universities, but he also wants Russia to conquer Ukraine and dictate terms to Europe, Iran to sink all American aircraft carriers, and to once more put the Kosovo Albanians in their place. You see, it’s not an either/or situation. Serbia’s European future is attainable; its revanchist wet dreams are not. But until the median voter accepts this reality, there will never be democracy in Serbia, there will never be a decent standard of living, and there will never be a future.

[Ahmad Kiarostami @akiarostami]

@IRIMFA_SPOX I remember the night #Kiarostami came back from Cannes bringing the first Palme d'Or home, and "brothers" were waiting for him at the airport to give him a lesson for the kiss he got on his cheeks. And I remember his masterpiece, Taste of Cherry, wasn't permitted to screen in Iran for decades.

To be clear I'm very much against this war and what the US and Israel is doing there, which is destroying ordinary people's houses and lives. But I'm also strongly against what has been done in our country for decades to get us here. Can I be both?

Since you seem to be worried about his house, know that the damage was limited to broken windows. As his son, I'm asking you to stop using my father's name. Keep him out of your rhetoric. Hopefully that house will outlast those who have brought ruin to our homeland.

[Tereza Hendl @TerezaHendl]

Habermas lost me when he wrote a piece on the Russian invasion of Ukraine full of Russian colonial talking points and zero engagement with Ukrainian voices and perspectives. No wonder he continues on his epistemically imperialist trajectory with little care for Palestinian lives.

[A. Bartaway🇺🇦❤️✊✌️ @Bartaway]

Orban is a good avatar for the national populist movement because all of his grievances are fake, everyone who believes him is a moron, and it is all mostly a cover for industrialised corruption.

[King Jack Strong 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ @v8mile]

Account based in France, where they can bravely declare they are anti-military, because they don't have to worry about being woken up by russian missiles

[Britt-Kathleen @mertyder]

Aleksanteri Nevskin katu (Alexander Nevsky street) will be renamed as Liivinmaankatu (Livonia street) in Viikinmäki, Helsinki 🇫🇮

[Mati Puss @MatiPuss]

@hahauenstein Could you refer to those facts? I would like to see some good sources that prove what he says.