To już było. A mnie wkurza to, że co władza, to znowu chce kajania się. A może spójrzmy na to, co polscy władcy robili na terenach dzisiejszej Ukrainy. Tacy święci jesteśmy? A jeśli chodzi o Wyklętych, to mój dziadek nawet nie chciał o nich słyszeć (Zamojszczyzna). Historia nie jest czarno-biała. Ma odcienie szarości.
My latest in @TheAtlantic, about the women who form the backbone of Ukraine's resistance.
Many of the drone strikes we're seeing are the last link in a complex kill-chain — one that begins with agents deep behind enemy lines.
I was granted rare access to this network. Their courage is staggering.
https://t.co/HHLgio6QxD
A russian asked a very dumb question on Threads:
When the SMO ends, how many years do you think it will take us to be able to travel to Ukraine as regular tourists?
An Ukrainian replied: To come - yes, you will be able to do so, but come back from here - no way.
You'll meet a woman on the platform who buried her husband. A taxi driver who was wounded, a saleswoman whose son has gone missing... In short, the policeman who'll be looking for you also has combat experience... He won't find you.
The Boston Globe has dedicated a full page in today's edition to the Tartan Army 🏴 🇺🇸
The letter in Boston's largest newspaper reads: "Dear Tartan Army,
"You came for the World Cup, but gave us something more.
"For a week, you turned train stations into singalongs, Fenway into a football ground, and an ordinary June into something we'll be talking about for years.
"Boston has hosted championships, parades, and celebrations of every kind. But we've never hosted guests quite like you all.
"Thank you for the laughter, the bagpipes and the memories. The World Cup will move on. So will the songs, but we'll never forget the joy you brought to our city."
𝘐𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 @SPARScotland
𝘐𝘔𝘈𝘎𝘌: 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵
Poland and Ukraine Are Divided Not by the UPA, but by the Myth About It
Volodymyr Viatrovych
Former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, European Solidarity Party MP
It is commonly believed that Ukraine and Poland are divided by their memory of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). In reality, this is not entirely true.
Increasingly, our countries are divided not by memories of the real UPA, but by a political image of the UPA that has been shaped within Polish society over the past two decades.
This image is based only partly on historical events and is to a considerable extent a product of political needs, information campaigns, and a long-standing communist legacy.
It is an image that some contemporary Polish politicians declare to be beyond discussion and seek to cement through political decisions.
The paradox is that thirty years ago today's perceptions of the UPA were not dominant in Poland. For most Poles, the UPA was not an important part of historical memory at all.
Only those communities originating from the former eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic had direct experience of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. For the rest of Polish society, perceptions of the UPA were shaped primarily by communist propaganda—books, films, and journalism from the 1960s to the 1980s that portrayed the Ukrainian liberation movement exclusively as criminal and anti-Polish. With the decline of communism in the late 1980s, this image also began to crumble. It was precisely then that rapprochement between the Polish and Ukrainian anti-communist oppositions became possible.
For activists of Solidarity and Ukraine's People's Movement (Rukh), awareness of a common enemy—the Soviet empire—was far more important than disputes about the past. During the 1990s, this cooperation developed into a strategic partnership between independent Poland and Ukraine. This fact alone refutes the popular claim today that memory of the UPA supposedly condemns our nations to conflict. If that were true, Polish-Ukrainian rapprochement after 1989 would simply never have happened.
Why the UPA Issue Returned
At the beginning of the 2000s, the situation began to change. Two processes overlapped.
The first was internal to Poland. A significant part of Polish society traditionally viewed its history through the image of Poland as a victim of external aggression and historical injustice.
At the beginning of the new century, this comfortable self-image faced a serious challenge through debates about Jedwabne and the participation of some Poles in crimes against Jews during the Second World War. In this context, the issue of Volhynia made it possible to return to a familiar and morally comfortable framework: Poles as victims, Ukrainians as perpetrators. This is why the topic quickly moved beyond the circles that had direct links to the events of the 1940s.
The second process was geopolitical. Vladimir Putin's rise to power marked the beginning of a policy aimed at restoring Russian influence throughout the post-Soviet space. For the Kremlin, Polish-Ukrainian partnership represented a particular threat because Poland had become one of Ukraine's principal advocates in Europe.
In these circumstances, historical disputes between Ukrainians and Poles became an exceptionally effective instrument of division. Particularly active were circles associated with the so-called Kresy movement, for whom Ukrainian independence was often viewed not as an ally of Poland but as a problem.
From Reconciliation to a Politics of Historical Grievances
It is important to remember that in the early 2000s the political mainstream in both countries still recognized this danger. That is why, in 2003, Presidents Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Leonid Kuchma sought to place discussions about Volhynia within a framework of reconciliation. A memorial was opened in Pavlivka, the formula "we forgive and ask forgiveness" was proclaimed, and efforts were made to establish a shared understanding of the tragic past. Notably, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and the Polish Sejm managed to adopt a common statement condemning the mutual killings.
Even more illustrative is the experience of the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. Under his leadership, the Ukrainian state systematically restored figures of the liberation movement to public memory for the first time. It was then that Roman Shukhevych was awarded the title Hero of Ukraine. If memory of the UPA itself were the true cause of Polish-Ukrainian conflict, the crisis should have emerged at that point. But it did not.
President Lech Kaczyński understood the importance of strategic partnership with Ukraine and did not allow historical disputes to undermine cooperation between the two states. Especially after Russia's aggression against Georgia in 2008, he increasingly recognized the common threats facing Warsaw and Kyiv.
The situation changed after 2010. Yushchenko's electoral defeat and the rise to power of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych created new opportunities to discredit the Ukrainian liberation movement. For the first time, anti-UPA narratives began receiving support not only from Moscow and Polish Kresy circles but also from parts of Ukraine's political elite. The death of Lech Kaczyński and his closest political associates in the spring of that year altered the character of Poland's right-wing political camp, strengthening anti-Ukrainian tendencies within it.
The year 2013 was particularly symbolic. Deputies from the Party of Regions appealed to the Polish Sejm to condemn the actions of the UPA as genocide. In this way, pro-Russian forces in Ukraine effectively legitimized external pressure on Ukraine's own historical memory.
That same year, Polish lawmakers used the word "genocide" for the first time in assessing the actions of the UPA, although the adopted resolution referred only to its characteristics. They formally established the term in 2016.
Gradually, the issues of Volhynia and the UPA became one of the central elements of Poland's domestic politics. They ceased to be topics discussed only by specific groups and became part of a nationwide political consensus.
What the Real UPA Was
The problem with this consensus is that it relies less and less on the actual history of the UPA.
The principal objective of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was formulated with complete clarity: the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state. This was reflected in the central slogan of the Ukrainian liberation movement: "You will win the Ukrainian state, or die fighting for it."
Poles were never the UPA's primary enemy. They were regarded as opponents only insofar as they could obstruct the realization of the Ukrainian state-building project.
For Ukrainian nationalists, memories of the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–1919 and the 1921 Treaty of Riga—which deprived millions of Ukrainians of their own state—remained fresh. As a result, distrust of Polish intentions was considerable.
However, conflict between the Ukrainian and Polish underground movements arose not because the UPA was inherently anti-Polish. The reason was different. The Ukrainian and Polish undergrounds represented two national projects claiming the same territories.
The Polish underground sought the restoration of Poland's 1939 borders. The Ukrainian underground regarded Galicia and Volhynia as the foundation of a future Ukrainian state. It was this contradiction that led to conflict.
Yet even during the war, the Ukrainian underground developed a much broader political vision than merely a struggle for territory. This vision was expressed in another key slogan: "Freedom for nations, freedom for the individual."
This slogan embodied a vision of the world as a space of independent national states and free citizens. Above all, it was anti-imperial.
The principal existential enemy of the Ukrainian liberation movement remained Russia, regardless of whether it appeared in the form of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.
This is why, after the most intense phase of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in 1943–1944 had ended, a truce became possible between the Ukrainian and Polish undergrounds, followed by cooperation. Its most striking manifestation was the joint action carried out by the UPA and the Polish underground in Hrubieszów in 1946. If the UPA had truly been a movement whose essence lay in fighting Poles, such cooperation would have been impossible.
The Myth of a Xenophobic UPA
The contemporary Polish image of the UPA rests not only on the concept of "Volhynia 1943" but also on a broader claim that the Ukrainian liberation movement was inherently xenophobic.
To support this claim, assertions are repeatedly made that the UPA fought for an ethnically pure state, that it was antisemitic, that it participated in the Holocaust, and that its essence lay in hatred toward other peoples and their elimination from Ukrainian territories as alleged obstacles to the liberation struggle.
On the basis of this image, it is argued that any comparison between the UPA and the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) is impossible—a thesis recently repeated by President Karol Nawrocki.
Yet none of the programmatic documents of the Ukrainian liberation movement provide grounds for such an interpretation. This is easily verified because these documents have long been publicly available.
Nevertheless, this image is politically extremely convenient. For then the target of criticism becomes not only the UPA itself but also contemporary Ukraine.
If the UPA was a xenophobic force, then any commemoration of it can automatically be presented as evidence of the moral deficiency of the Ukrainian state. This, the author argues, forms the basis of Russian propaganda's claim that Ukraine requires "denazification."
As a result, military unit names, monuments, or references to figures of the liberation movement come to be portrayed as threats to Poland as well. It is at this point that a historical debate is transformed into an instrument of contemporary politics.
Why This Debate Matters Today
To restore Polish-Ukrainian understanding, it is not enough simply to remind people that the UPA fought not only against Poles but also against Nazis and Soviets.
What is required is the deconstruction of the false image of the UPA as a xenophobic and anti-Polish movement. According to the author, this image was created by communist propaganda, later adopted by Russian propaganda, and is now used within the framework of the concept of "denazification of Ukraine."
The problem in contemporary Polish-Ukrainian dialogue is not the existence of different memories of the UPA. The problem is that an image of the UPA rooted in Soviet information campaigns is gaining increasing influence and is more and more often perceived not as a political interpretation but as an unquestionable historical fact.
For this reason, the dispute over the UPA today is far less a dispute about the past than a struggle over the future of Polish-Ukrainian relations.
And that is why deconstructing this myth is necessary not only for Ukraine. It is also necessary for Poland if both states wish to preserve the foundation of mutual understanding once laid by Ukrainian and Polish dissidents, by Jerzy Giedroyc, and by politicians who saw in an independent Ukraine not a problem but a necessary condition for the security of all Europe.
https://t.co/Qk64b2Jkx2
A world renowned historian Timothy Snyder, in a recent interview with Newsweek Polska, offered a warning that Poland’s leaders would do well to heed.
“The war of memory is much more comfortable for Polish politicians than the real war,” Snyder said.
“They can say: we are right, we are innocent, I know history. But one must begin with what is happening now, not with memory. If you skip that, you start with a lie.”
On the controversy over Ukraine’s honoring of the UPA, Snyder cautioned against judging such decisions without context: “To judge Zelensky’s decision to name a unit after the UPA without the context of almost four and a half years of war would be a mistake. This is the longest war of this century, longer than the First World War. It produces emotions that are difficult for the West to understand.”
He also noted that Ukrainians and Poles remember different chapters of the same history: “Ukrainians think about the UPA mainly through its third phase, the struggle against the Red Army after 1945. Poles remember the first phase: 1943, when the UPA killed tens of thousands of Poles in Volhynia. The mistake is to forget the rest of the history.”
And his sharpest warning should concern everyone: “On the battlefield, Russia will lose. In Warsaw and Kyiv, Russia will win the war of memory.”
Stripping President Zelensky of Poland’s highest honor was not an act of wisdom. It was an emotional response that elevated historical grievance over present reality. Ukraine is fighting the longest war of this century, and Poland’s security depends on its survival. To turn an ally into an adversary over unresolved history serves neither truth nor justice – it serves only Moscow. That is the trap Snyder named.
The war of memory cannot be won. It can only be exploited – and there is one power waiting to exploit it.
Interesting paper. They took 10,272 writing prompts and gave each one to a human author and to five AI models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Kimi. From these, they generated 61,608 stories, at around 5,000 words each to see if there was divergence at a narrative level. From the analysis, they found that they could identify a human-written story from an AI-generated one nearly 93% of the time.
Left: Each story is a dot. The story’s 304 dimensional narrative feature vector has been projected down to two dimensions using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Brown dots are human.
Right: Each story gets scored on how rare its narrative feature profile is, then mapped to a percentile: approximate 1.0 means highly unusual relative to the reference set. The models reliably produce narratively “average” stories, while humans more often into unusual territory
https://t.co/M4rLx734rC
Just a random program on Russian state TV.
Host Andrey Norkin calls for planting drugs on black rappers from the US, who come to Russia. So they can be arrested and then exchanged for Russian spies arrested in the US.
This will be interesting to watch for friends of Russians in the US and countries of the Global South.
W kwestii Orderu Orła Białego wrzucę swoje trzy grosze.
To jeszcze nie jest odebranie - ale niezależnie od tego jaki będzie skutek, mojego punktu widzenia to nie zmieni...
Order Orła Białego ustanowił Niemiec – August II Mocny. Tak, król Polski, ale w 100% Niemiec, któremu interesy Polski leżały tam, gdzie słońce nie dochodzi.
Jego panowanie to powolne wpadania Rzeczypospolitej w szpony Moskovii.
Pierwszy odznaczony: Iwan Mazepa.
Dostał order nie za walkę o niepodległość Ukrainy ani za przyjaźń z Polską, tylko za wierną służbę Piotrowi I.
Potem przyszła kolej na kacapów: car Piotr I, Katarzyna II, Potiomkin oraz kilku kacapskich generałów, którzy tłukli polskie konfederacje i insurekcje.
Najbardziej haniebne nadanie to Aleksander Suworow – ten sam, który w 1794 roku kazał wyrżnąć ludność warszawskiej Pragi. Do dziś nikt nie wpadł na pomysł, żeby mu order odebrać.
Benito Mussolini dostał order w 1923. Na tle wymienionych wyżej kacapów to i tak świętoszek.
Z historii najnowszej Gerhard Schröder – od 2002 kawaler orderu. Jeden z najwierniejszych piesków na smyczy Putina .
=====================
I sprawa najwyższej wagi:
Wincenty Witos – jedyna dotąd postać której ten order formalnie odebrano.
Polski patriota, trzykrotny premier RP.
Przedstawiać chyba nie trzeba.
Postać która na pewno zasłużyła na najwyższe odznaczenie państwowe Rzeczpospolitej.
Zelenski może być dumny, że jest w tak zacnym gronie "wyklętych".
Sława Ukrainie!
Niech żyje Polska !
( na pohybel moskalam i ich przydupasom!)
Apparently the Israeli minister Ben Gvir converted to Islam, because today he made a statement that every single Muslim has repeated thousands of times in every mosque on the planet:
"Oh Allah, make the children of the infidels orphans and their wives widows. Oh Allah, send earthquakes to destroy them. Oh Allah, let the earth split and swallow them. Oh Allah, leave none of them alive."
This is a typical Islamic prayer that we used to repeat daily, especially after the dawn prayer, and it is still cited daily by millions of Muslims around the world.
Researchers analyzed 14 million academic papers published between 2010 and 2024. They tracked every word. They found that ChatGPT is rewriting the English language.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, certain words that had been stable in academic writing for over a decade suddenly exploded in frequency. The researchers at the University of Tübingen and Northwestern University mapped every excess word and categorized them.
The words are ones you already recognize.
"Delve." "Intricate." "Meticulous." "Commendable." "Underscore." "Pivotal." "Nuanced." "Landscape." "Comprehensive." "Multifaceted." "Showcasing." "Groundbreaking." "Innovative." "Invaluable."
329 excess style words appeared in early 2024 that were not there before. The spike is unprecedented in the history of the dataset.
Here is what makes this different from every other vocabulary shift ever recorded. During COVID, excess words also appeared. Up to 188 of them in 2021. But those were content words. "Respiratory." "Remdesivir." "Ventilator." Words that described a new reality.
After ChatGPT, the excess words are not content words. They are style words. Not what people write about. How people write. The subject matter did not change. The voice did.
The researchers estimate that at least 10% of all academic papers published in 2024 were processed with ChatGPT. Not written entirely by AI. Processed. Edited. Polished. Run through the model and published with its fingerprints still on the page.
You have seen these words everywhere. In emails. In LinkedIn posts. In articles. In cover letters. In reports your colleagues sent you. You could not explain why everything started sounding the same. Now you can. The entire internet passed through the same model. And the model left the same fingerprints on everything it touched.
The researchers proved something else. The contamination is not slowing down. The number of excess words grew from 188 during COVID to 329 after ChatGPT. The curve is still climbing.
ChatGPT did not just change what we can do with language. It changed the language itself. One model. One voice. Fourteen million papers. And a vocabulary shift larger than a global pandemic.
Social media trends have turned the world’s most beautiful places into endless bathroom lines at a concert, where everyone waits for hours just to take the same photo to show to people who couldn’t care less 🌎📸
Nothing captures the shallow decay of our time better than this
Danas smo, u čast naših Zmajeva, otvorili stranicu Sarajevske hagade s prikazom zmaja.
Ovaj rijetko izlagani motiv, koji se nalazi na jednoj od najvrjednijih rukopisnih knjiga na svijetu, simbolično smo odlučili predstaviti upravo sada–u znak podrške našim nogometnim Zmajevima
@bojana_mala Pri prvom posjetu pokojnog pape Ivana Pavla II. je u propovijedi upotrijebio metaforu utoka Save u Dunav koja se kasnije obično izostavljala iz citata.
Feral Tribune je od dijelova njegove propovijedi bio sastavio izmišljeni intervju, s fotomontažom kako s urednicima pije pivu.