Sort of reminds me of the jokes between mrAru and myself back when Andrew had slammed Florida and people were hoveling in refugee camps … firstly, if he had been stationed in NTC/RTC Orlando at the time me, driving a large truck with the majority of our belongings would have been gone at least a week in advance, and if we had been stuck in a refugee camp with a dozen other SCA members, we would disappoint CNN interviewers by offering them espresso and crepes suzette while comfortably lounging around in our normal SCA long term Pennsic camp. We wouldn’t have lost anything, because we would not be dumb enough to hang around. The 2 hurricanes I was participating in when I lived there, one I evacuated in advance and stayed away for a week, the other I evacuated to a worksite, where I stood guard for triple time for 48 hours. I made enough money and still didn’t lose anything because I sent my stuff off with my roomie of the time to Richmond.
We also agree, that it is better to evacuate and abandon and stay alive, belongings can be replaced.
I think a major problem (with this regard) with the Yug.war was its complexity and the fact that there were no clear cut good-guys and bad-guys … so the narrative was more like a Fellini movie, as opposed to a Hollywood-action movie.
I remember a story about a medical doctor who was apparently not thriving after living in a cardboard box in a Calais refugee camp for weeks and months. The journalist could hardly recognize him after he was able to smuggle himself into the UK and they met again. Which all goes to show the conditions can vary wildly with some refugees not being welcomed with open arms. Many countries have been accused of actively discouraging refugees from showing up, and/or trying to fob them off on third countries.
The Hungarians have a famously nationalistic leader and have hostile policies to refugees.
But, there are significant Hungarian speaking populations in neighbouring countries and Ukraine is one of them.
Poland benefitted from EU free mobility of labour and and many Poles moved to UK. The jobs they did were filled by Ukrainians, somewhere between 2 and 4 million who are well integrated into the economy. This substantial minority are obviously well disposed to helping their relatives escape a war zone.
When there is an emergency in the country next door, where you have relatives, attitudes are rather more sympathetic than if it was in some far off country with a different language, religion and culture. Also it is quite clear that the reason for leaving are not economic emigration, the refugees are women and children, men of fighting age remain to defend their country.
Maybe there is a tendency towards interpreting this refugee crisis using the tropes that are popular on different sides of the US culture wars. That is a bit lazy, but I guess it took everyone by surprise. It leaves the political pundits desperately trying to develop an angle and an opinion consistent with their position in US politics.
It is not just the US, there is a lot of very fast back peddling in the UK at the moment. On the one hand our populist politicians are going into full Cold War mode condemning Putin’s invasion. On the other, they have just passed a law tightening up the rules for accepting refugees - a key Brexit policy. Unfortunately this prevents a lot of Ukrainian refugees coming to the UK. The rules are being very quickly changed to let them it (but not too many.)
Yup, many of the Floridian refugees ended up in temporary FEMA camps. I regularly cooked for 60 people on an elaborate campfire setup involving baking in dutch ovens, using gridirons to support pots and pans over coals for direct cooking, and oddly I had a 21 inch diameter wok, several 14 inch saute pans, a 24 quart stock pot … so cranking out espresso in a moka pot and whipping up a set of crepes to flambe, easy peasy. I developed ‘crepes benedict’ - scrambled eggs, crumbled bacon, hollandaise sauce and crepes instead of english muffins. Assembly line they are easily cranked out if you are organized.
I am not talking about doing this in Yugoslavia after Russia has rolled in, or in Denmark after they have started sending people to concentrations camps, I am talking about being displaced due to hurricane activity.
The Soviet Union and now its former states always played a big role in providing university education for African and Asian countries, especially in medicine and engineering. I have seen several reports where these students fleeing Ukraine and ending up in Poland have been singled out for discrimination by right-wing nationalists.
One is who gets priority to go through the border. Women and children are prioritised. Men of fighting age are not allowed to leave. There are reports that the students have to wait far longer to clear immigration at some border crossings.
The other issue is on the Polish side of the border. There has been a campaign by right wing groups in Poland who claim that the students are economic migrants from the Middle East committing crimes in border towns. I guess they imagine they are defending Poland from some kind of invasion. Very embarrassing for the Poles to have these idiots causing trouble, I think.
Yes and no. Especially in an inter-war classist society, a German university professor, a Hungarian architect or an Austrian art dealer isn’t necessarily perceived as “poor” even if they have arrived with only the clothes on their backs. Although their financial circumstances may be similar to those of the poor huddled masses, their treatment in society and their prospects are quite different.
Consider even today - if Donald Trump found himself at a given moment with a zero net worth due to ill-timed business decisions or market movements, would he be considered “poor”?
Right. Think of Twain’s story “The Million Pound Note” (or was it …Dollar Bill?). A poor man finds one, and can’t buy anything, because no one has change…but it doesn’t matter, because sycophants trip over themselves to give stuff to the obviously-a-VIP.
(End of hijack…though there is some relevance here, perhaps).
Sorokin turned 30 in prison, but she was in her mid-twenties when she spent time in New York City, telling people she had a $60m trust fund and an ambitious project to create an eponymous arts foundation.
She was, in fact, a recent magazine intern, who came from an ordinary family of Russian immigrants living in Germany. By staying in expensive hotels and presenting a jetset life on Instagram, she managed to trick others into believing her fantasy and picking up her bills. Using fake documents, she even convinced a bank to give her a $100,000 overdraft, before the police finally tracked her down.
She was able to live the life of a wealthy elite, simply because people thought she was one, despite having nothing to her name. Until she got caught, that is. People like Trump don’t ever get caught.
As far as hijack goes, I personally think it’s relevant to consider what the appearance of wealth can give a person. I suspect that’s core to the fate of many of these refugees.
I suspect too the difference between Yugoslavia and Ukraine is the scale of the war - the amount of hardware deployed and the type; I don’t recall a lot of tanks or fighter jets or helicopters (or the missiles to take them out) in the Balkans. The biggest hardware I seem to recall in the news was their artillery. However, what they lacked in firepower they made up for in homicidal viciousness and fratricidal sadism.
As for rich people, they rarely seem to crash and burn. You don’t hear about the multimillionaires who end up living in welfare housing; they seem to land on their feet all the time. Perhaps some of it is knowing the tricks of the system, but even in the midst of bankruptcy they seem to continue living in the same multimillion dollar mansions as before. .
case in point: those multibillionairs are just faces of huge, worldwide groups of companies… even if 99% of those companies go up in flames, you will still have a couple of which are doing well…
and you have to downsize from a billionair’s lifestyle to a millionaire lifestyle.
And some of us, myself included, have actual ancestors who were born in, and fled from, Ukraine. The great-grandmother for whom I am named was one of them. Add two more great-grandfathers who left towns that are now in Ukraine, and others who fled what is now Belarus, Latvia, and Poland, and you can see why some of us feel like we have a direct stake in the whole thing.
As for myself specifically, my roommate when I studied in Russia was Ukrainian, and I was kind of hoping that my master’s degree in Russian & East European Studies (with a focus on ethnic issues) would continue to be useless for the rest of my life. I began my career resettling Soviet refugees, and I really hope I don’t wind it up by doing basically the same damn thing.
Hungarians certainly have sympathy for the ethnic Hungarian refugees from Ukraine, but don’t mistake this for sympathy for Ukraine itself. Hungarian social media is currently chock full of discussions and memes which express everything from mild schadenfreude for the Ukrainian state to full-on support for the Russian invasion. While Putin’s claims of genocide are clearly hyperbolic, it is true that Ukraine has enacted legislation that suppresses the rights of those not belonging to its titular ethnicity. This has led to outrage and resentment by Hungarians both inside and outside Ukraine, and these feelings have been bolstered by recent Russian promises to restore ethnic self-determination in Ukraine by force. Many Hungarians therefore see Russia as a potential protector or liberator of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, and the more irredentist among them are even hoping that Trans-Carpathia will be allowed to secede and join Hungary in much the same way that Crimea seceded to join Russia.
Canada has the world’s third largest Ukrainian ethnic population, behind Ukraine and Russia. I lived in a town that was majority Ukrainian.
Many other Canadians have ethnic backgrounds that date back to the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. I have a friend who arrived with his parents from Czechoslovakia in 1968 with the clothes on his back. Even though he was only a child when he came to Canada, he still hates Russians with a passion.
Back in the 80s we knew a woman who’d escaped from East Germany who also loathed the USSR and its puppet government. Alas, she died of cancer about nine months before the Berlin wall fell.