Greetings from Ukraine. I'm in the Kharkiv oblast, which the huge numbers of Russian speakers all around prefer to call the Kharkov oblast. But, whichever your preferred vowel, this oblast is oh, such a blast. Last night, the actual Russians (from Russia, that is) tried to take a town about fifteen kilometres away from where I am. They were repulsed by the Ukrainians, but the artillery fire, drones and bombs from just beyond the horizon gave me a bit of a sleepless night. Or maybe it was the food, which leaves a lot to be desired compared to Lviv or even Kyiv. Still, if you don't care for Russian cuisine, a few restaurants offer glamorous international alternatives (the occasional Georgian dish).
Despite the aerial bombardment, which is less lethal than a weekend in Chicago, our schedule remains as is. So, even though tomorrow I'll still be prowling the delights of the eastern oblasts, our Saturday music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, will air as usual at 5pm London time - which is 12 noon North American Eastern, 6pm in Western Europe and, for our Ukrainian listeners, 7pm Eastern European Summer Time. This week's episode will offer not just blasts from the oblasts, but also from the Polovtsian empire of blessed memory: you can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
As you know, I have regarded the US/Israeli war against Iran as an unmitigated disaster, but, to assuage those of a pro-war bent, I have been commencing each column by linking to a more optimistic assessment. Today's, recommended by several readers, is from Michael Doran in The Free Press:
Trump's Economic Noose for Iran
If you say so. It seems odd to launch a belated economic stranglehold with six weeks of air strikes that require adding another fifth of a trillion to your budget, advertises to the world the ever shrinking limitations of your power, and depletes your munitions so badly that you're having to transfer them from East Asia and tell the Estonian defence minister that the high-tech weapons system he'd bought from you won't be arriving any day soon.
But I appreciate there are those who think it all makes brilliant sense.
It is sobering to follow the newer, sexier war from the front lines of the war the world forgot. I have been upgraded from Lviv, where as you may recall the air-raid bunker was on "Floor Minus One". In Kharkiv/Kharkov, the card in my room informs me that "the bomb shelter is on the 0th floor". Despite the near constant whine of the sirens, I haven't bothered to seek out the 0th floor (it has no button in the fitfully working elevator), mainly because the surly Russian heavies in these parts seem to like me far less than the amiable totty in western Ukraine did, and I have no desire to die in the former's company.
As you surely know, I have been a world-class demography bore for a quarter-century now. According to the most recent numbers, just under eighty per cent of Kharkiv speak Russian; sixteen per cent speak Ukrainian. That's down from thirty-two per cent Ukrainian speakers in 2001. It is now one of the most bombed cities in the world, and ever more pointlessly so: this hideous Stalinist dump is being returned to the bosom of Mother Russia far more efficiently via day-to-day demographic advantage than by the drones of the Kremlin.
Which is the same story further west: Why would the mullahs need to nuke Berlin or Paris, Stockholm or Brussels, London or Dublin? They are ever more Islamic with every passing day.
In contrast to the hideous kebabs'n'vapes cookie-cutter multiculturalism of western cities, the uniculturalism of Eastern Europe reminds me of the way western countries used to be. Once upon a time, however, what's now Ukraine was a teensy bit more multicultural than today: it was the place Jews came when everywhere else in Europe was more difficult. The old medieval town of Lviv, for example, is surrounded by a more recent Habsburgian city - and both were built by communities long gone. The municipal populace as counted in 1921:
Ukrainians 9 per cent;
Poles 62 per cent;
Jews 28 per cent.
Today:
Ukrainians 88 per cent;
Poles 0.9 per cent;
Jews 0.3 per cent.
The Germans came in during the war and took care of the Jews in their customary fashion. (We had a particularly horrific example on last week's Mark Steyn on the Town courtesy of Leonard Bernstein's ancestral home.) After the war the Soviets took care of the Poles by removing them to the newly delineated Poland.
I love Lviv but, whenever I walk around the town, those two census profiles play in my head. If you walk around, say, Birmingham, England, or Molenbeek, Belgium or Dearborn, Michigan, you would think something similar had occurred: some authority had come in and physically removed the previous population. But, in fact, the representatives of the legacy inhabitants decided as a matter of public policy to bring in a successor population to serve as their own voters' demographic displacement. Nothing the Iranians can do could inflict as much damage on western nation states as the actions of our own political class. In my small New Hampshire town, we have something called "Old Home Day" - started in the late nineteenth century, a grand community feast when old-timers who'd moved out west or south to the Massachusetts mill towns would be invited back home to re-connect with their school chums from 1857 or Great-Uncle Rotheus who used to run the sawmill. On a Ukrainian Old Home Day, the ambitious Jew who'd moved to Vienna in 1912 would return to Lviv forty years later to find not a soul he'd known was left. Same with a Brummie who'd moved to Canada in 1987 and come home to discover the old neighbourhood was now wholly Islamic.
The west's way is weirder. It is the result not of ancient hatreds or world war, but of peacetime policies in liberal democracies. Yet it will wind up being settled the same way - by forced deportations, or something bloodier. I write this from, more or less, the dead centre of Europe ...and the ancient borderlands, between north and south, west and east, between the Catholics and the Orthodox churches, between the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, and indeed the Ottomans and an almost entirely forgotten great power, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was once the great crossroads of Europe, and thus the world: its population transfers were signifiers of the transfers of power. It is, therefore, not a bad place to be as a similar process in the great sweep of history is underway.
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