3 Things For Today - Head Space

weber & mitchell, not just any dress: narratives of memory, body, and identity

It's much more than just these three cities, explosions are almost in every region simultaneously. The attack continues as I'm typing this, the russians are launching more missiles right now.

And what are their targets? For example, this very dangerous kids' playground in Kyiv. Now it's just a crater.

RUSSIA IS A TERRORIST STATE

kherson, evening 11.11.2022. people are celebrating.

Good morning! The Kerch bridge is fucked!

New trend among "apolitical russians" - touring the ukrainian cities destroyed by russian army in order to take "aesthetic" pictures 😍😍😍 and justifying it with "I can go wherever I want in my country" 😍😍😍😍 but also "I'm outside politics" 🥺🥺🥺

Ukrainian soldiers tearing down russian propaganda poster to see old billboard with Taras Shevchenko and his poem:

And glory, mountains blue, to you,  In ageless ice encased!  And glory, freedom’s knights, to you,  Whom God will not forsake.  Keep fighting — you are sure to win!  God helps you in your fight!  For fame and freedom march with you,  And right is on your side!

“Here’s where things get intellectually very interesting. They are swept up by Catherine’s idea of a new Russia. 

So Catherine has this idea, which is very elegant. It’s also a classically colonial idea: that these lands that have just been conquered, these are virgin territories.

So the place is renamed. What’s now Southern Ukraine, where the Cossacks had had power, and the Crimean Peninsula, where the Crimean Khanate had had power, these places are renamed “New Russia”.

Now that word “new” is magical, right? Like with New England, or New South Wales, or New Caledonia. 

More than 200 years later, 300 years later, people are gonna be still drawn by this notion of New Russia. 

But when you say something is new, you’re not saying it’s yours, you’re saying that we want it to be ours, right? That’s the whole point. 

So Novorossiya does not mean something which is Russian, it means something that we’re gonna make Russia, we’re gonna pretend that nothing else is there. 

And how do you do that? 

Well, you send multiple expeditions of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences to Crimea to name everything, find all the species, map everything. 

Because science is one of the tools by which you gather imperial knowledge.

And then the naming — I mean, one has to admit this is quite brilliant on Catherine’s part. They rename everything. 

So all the Turkic names, the Muslim names, the Crimean Tatar names, are replaced. 

And what are they replaced with? Greek names or names that sound Greek. 

Like Kherson, that city that’s being fought over right now. Mariupol, sounds Greek sorta, right? That’s the whole idea.

They took the old names and then they replaced them with Greek names. And when they founded new places, they gave them Greek, or Greek-ish, Greek sounding, Greco whatever names.

And the point of this is to say that Russia is connected with the classical world. And in that we’re European. We’re in the enlightenment. 

Connecting Russia with the classical world, going back all the way 2000 years, means that you obliviate everything that happens in between.

So the Crimeans don’t matter, the Ukrainians don’t matter, it’s Russia here alone with its historical destiny, which goes all the way back to Greece. 

And so it’s New Russia, but it’s justified by this connection to the classical world.”

Source: Timothy Snyder: Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 11.Ottoman Retreat, Russian Power,Ukrainian Populism