A shame to lose her

Earlier this year, WaL reported on the ongoing efforts to restore the al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq; a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was destroyed during the liberation of the city from the Islamic State. UNESCO, the cultural, educational, and scientific wing of the United Nations, regularly condemns conflict in areas of significant “shared world heritage”.

Yet with former President Trump’s decision to withdraw American funding for the UN department, many Americans got a taste of just how defenseless the United Nations is to American ambitions; the U.S. alone provided over half of UNESCO’s contributions.

After his legendarily fraudulent speech to the UN Security Council in 2003, Sec. of State under Bush Jr., Colin Powell, failed to receive authorization for enacting war, but the administration invaded Iraq anyway, and went on to create the conditions for that mosque, along with many other near east Bronze Age monuments to be destroyed.

To this end, UNESCO, the UN, and the entire Christian and European community should be decrying this escalation, as Kyiv is one of their vaunted World Heritage sites—a holy city, whose religious centers are some of the most iconic in the Eastern Orthodox faith.

The streets are flanked by art nouveau style brick facades that escaped destruction in both the First and Second World Wars and have had time to ripen into truly splendid monuments of a past architectural era, that would only presumably become more and more special the longer they remain, and the more wealth the society accumulates to renovate them.

Of course, if Putin’s alleged remarks about “taking Kyiv in two weeks,” are true, which may have been possible 6 years ago, then anyone who believes in UNESCO’s theory of a “shared heritage of humanity” should be adamantly opposed to anything other than complete and total reconciliation.

Any legitimate conflict between Kyiv and Moscow would set off a chain reaction, like the kind seen after Sarajevo, of diplomatic triggers, essentially setting most of the Western world at war with each other overnight, meaning a complete destruction of Kyiv by cruise missiles, perhaps even nuclear-armed ones, unless defense pacts are ignored and cooler heads pick up red-colored phones and sort things out.

Rozoff would go on to explain to WaL that every major arm of the Ukrainian state seems to be employing a mixture of versions of World War II revisionism and iconography to prepare its citizens and countries in the West for a potential war, shocking as that would be, as well as to promote the idea that the conflict in the Donbas, whereas WaL and others have reported is mostly ethnic-Russians reacting to extremely Russophobic racism which came out of Kyiv, is the continuation of the struggle to resist Soviet tyranny, a struggle which may have never really occurred in the first place, but that’s a story for another time.

Regardless of who sits in Kyiv’s presidential office, the territory of Ukraine is filled with beautiful places born of brick and born of nature. There’s a budding Ukrainian cuisine, a revival of techniques nearly lost to time, and centuries of swirling history to enjoy in the form of castles, religious sites, and mountain peoples. Adventure tourism, is growing as well, and everything is still cheap. I’d go back tomorrow if I could, assuming it’s still there when I wake up, and not churned up by the war machine. WaL

Continue exploring this topic — Kyiv — Kyiv’s ‘Podil’ Neighborhood is a Kind of Brooklyn on the Dnieper

Continue exploring this topic — Ukraine — L’viv in a Day — According to World at Large