Thread by @GicAriana

Imagine someone invaded your country, rounded up ALL the academics, scientists, artists, musicians, religious leaders, and all political and ideological opponents, and killed them point blank in mass purges.

Imagine the invasion forces instruct you at gunpoint that you may no longer speak your national language, practice your culture, or anything related to your national identity. They burn books and tear down public signage, quickly changing the names of streets and cities.

Imagine that the occupier then killed millions in other “smaller”genocides to ensure compliance with the national and ethnic destruction. Millions killed in a span of a year to ensure the message that any fight for your national identity will be your demise.

Imagine that after slaughtering millions upon millions in mass purges, many millions more via various genocides, and millions more in gulag concentration camps, that the aggressor convinced the world the victim nations willing and eagerly JOINED this evil regime.

Imagine people abroad calling this evil, genocidal, murderous, authoritarian regime a “socialist paradise”, and even romanticized the day to day suffering and humiliation people endured standing in lines all day for a piece of rotten and inedible meat.

Imagine western journalists and politicians deliberately lying about the horrendous and unimaginable evils of this bloody regime so no one would even stop to think that the “worker’s paradise” was in fact hell.

Imagine after 70 years of being occupied, oppressed, tortured and murdered, having absolutely everything about who you are destroyed, and after being told that you are less than the occupier, you finally have a moment of freedom. You escape. And the world tells you, “No, stay.”

Imagine after generations of unimaginable suffering, you are finally able to regain your independence, and the “morally and politically superior” democratic world does not support your independence from the bloody aggressor. And you have to fight for recognition against all odds.

Imagine, with little meaningful support, and being viewed as a “have not” “less than” state, understood by the world through the occupier’s hateful lens, that you make great strides to pull out from under the greatest destructive forces we can imagine. You start to build.

Imagine that your efforts are dismissed because they do not meet a mythical utopian standard of perfection that not one nation in the world has itself managed. Imagine you believe that you are a failure since you haven’t attained that utopia.

Imagine that your historical occupier and destroyer wants to revive that evil, genocidal, authoritarian regime. The people begin to celebrate one of the most heinous figures of that regime. The cult of the bloody dictator is revived.

Imagine that at the same time, your historical occupier has invaded you, but convinced the world that you have a civil conflict it merely supports. No one officially recognizes they are the aggressor waging war on you, but they claim to “support you”.

In the meantime, while fighting an existential militarily and political battle against your nuclear arms bearing aggressor, you are told that your cultural identity is not relevant. That the thing the aggressor seeks to destroy is not something for you to build and protect.

Imagine you are told that your identity should not be what it was before 70 years of active destruction & suppression, & that to be “progressive” & “modern”, you should maintain the identity imposed by force on you by your genocidal occupier who is again waging war on you.

Imagine you are actively encouraged to maintain the identity of the aggressor. The one you were told not to leave who is again working to destroy you. This is “democratic”. To try to revive the national identity your aggressor wants to crush is “backward” and harshly criticized.

Imagine trying to fashion a national political image that would unify the state, and strengthen it against the aggressor’s efforts to crush it, and having no support for this essential means of defence.

Imagine being told that asking everyone in the country to know the indigenous language is “discriminatory”, even while the aggressor absolutely eradicates it from all the territories it occupies in your country, replacing it fully with its own.

Imagine being told not to defend yourself militarily. Imagine the agreements your friends made with you to support you being disregarded and ignored. You stuck to your end of the bargain, and no one did what was required of them.

Imagine “friendly” nations kept telling you to do things which will hasten the demise of your country, and will please or benefit your aggressor. And imagine they partnered with the aggressor on projects over your loud objections. And they are owed gratitude for their “support”.

But you don’t need to imagine any of it. It’s all real.