https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VeElBAeas

It’s been a few days since election day since July 21st and as expected from multiple opinion polls over the past month, Vladimir Zelensky and his party “Servant of the People” have won a landslide victory within the Verkhovna Rada. Four exit polls were released as polls closed within the country with the “Servant of the People” garnering more than 40% of the total vote within the country.

Yuriy Boyko’s “Opposition Platform – For Life” expectedly came into second place, followed by Tymoshenko’s “Fatherland”, Poroshenko’s “European Solidarity”, and Vakarchuk’s “Voice” respectively.

Official Results: (with approximately 98.95% of all votes counted)

Servant of the People: 43.1%
Opposition Platform – For Life: 13%
Fatherland: 8.2%
European Solidarity: 8.1%
Voice: 5.8%

Special Mentions to these smaller parties who didn’t breach the 5% threshold

Radical Party of Oleg Lyashko: 4%
Strength and Honour: 3.8%
Opposition Bloc: 3%
Ukrainian Strategy of Groysman: 2.4%
Party of Shariya: 2.1%

Turnout

The complete turnout for the election was approximately 49.8% , which is lower than the previous parliamentary elections in 2014 (which had a turnout of 51.9%).

However, the turnout by oblast and electoral district within the country was varied. The highest regions for voter turnout seemed to be oblasts in the West and the Centre of the country, with Lviv, Ternopil and Chernihiv oblasts leading the way with over 50% of voters showing up to cast their ballot.

. . . .

Ukraine has had both a historic presidential and parliamentary election with an outright majority being achieved for the first time in the country’s recent history, giving him a wide range of power not seen before in Ukrainian politics. However, it remains to be seen how effective and how true to life Zelensky will be to President Holoborodko (his presidential persona in Servant of the People), whereupon there will be distinct effort in pursuing reforms within the country. Reforms which would put him into conflict with Ukraine’s establishment in both business and politics.

No other president in the history of Ukraine has had such resources under his control while facing such a weak and fragmented opposition and enjoying such enormous popularity among his compatriots.
Konstantin Shorkin (Carnegie Moscow Centre)

It is however a bit grating to see media outlets in Western Europe and the United States be a bit too rosy when it comes to him and his election victory and the “shockwaves” it would send to the oligarchs in the country (considering his campaign has heavy connections to Ihor Kolomoisky, another oligarch). His campaign still has conflicting and non-existing statements regarding key issues for the country and committing to a certain cause in these could very well reduce his popular image.

https://randompolitidbits.home.blog/2019/07/23/2019-ukrainian-parliamentary-elections-part-ii/

“Atheists from Moscow tried to impose communism on us, [now] atheists from Brussels try to impose genderism.”

relevant b/c many people wrote to me about Trump-Russia collusion as it related to my being in Ukraine.

And my favorite clip, pertaining exclusively to the term “exonerated”:

The failure to stand up for conservative thinking is leading us into a new cultural dark age.

The intellectual scene always used to have room for great minds from the Right. Today they would be denounced for thought crime by a Left that cannot tolerate dissent.

British intellectual life has always made room for the conservative voice. From Burke and Hume to Maitland and Oakeshott, British philosophers have offered a continuous reflection on our social and cultural inheritance, with a view to understanding the fundamental idea on which conservatism has been founded – the idea of belonging. They have insisted that the goal of our earthly life is not to remake the world but to belong to it, and that the true political virtues are patience, understanding and humility rather than indignation or revolutionary rage.

The conservative voice sounded clearly in the Cambridge, where I studied in the 1960s. I absorbed from the atmosphere of that university a unique conception of social order, in which common-law justice, aristocratic eccentricity and a suspicion of top-down government were tied together in an inextricable knot. This social order, I was taught, is the property of the ordinary person and not the preserve of the state. The attempt by fascists and communists to appropriate it had been defeated, and our duty was both to restore our cultural inheritance, and also to repossess it as our own.

I absorbed the Cambridge lesson from the curmudgeonly Maurice Cowling; others absorbed it from F.R. Leavis, others from the younger dons (John Casey in English, Michael Tanner in philosophy, Norman Stone in history), all of whom saw the curriculum as a cultural bequest. We did not accept this bequest as dogma, but were encouraged to absorb it and also to question it. We learned that the lessons of history are far from simple, and that the truth will never emerge from dogmatic assertions, but only from sceptical and open-minded argument, in which real knowledge rather than comfortable opinion provides the links.

Among the most challenging of our mentors was the late Norman Stone, the Glaswegian historian whose ability to communicate the big picture left a lasting impression on his pupils. Norman was a strong, if ironical, defender of our inherited identity, but, as a Scot, he understood that identity has many layers: a Scot is not forced to choose between being a Scot and a Brit, any more than he is forced to choose between whisky and wine – Norman being, in the matter of alcohol, a believer in a borderless community of the Enlightened. He had a deep knowledge of the European empires, a love of Austro-Hungary, and a remarkable acquaintance with the languages of central Europe. He set an example of imaginative involvement with other cultures that was all the more impressive for the sarcastic wit with which he punctured our patriotic illusions.

When, in later years, I joined the battle against communism, I collaborated with Norman, whose historical vision enabled him to perceive the spiritual depth beneath the malign surface of the Soviet Empire. National identity, he taught, is of the first importance; but it is always part of a wider community in which legal, spiritual and linguistic forces make and re-make the social fabric. I travelled with him in communist Poland, where he showed me the hidden life beneath the polluted surface.

My Cambridge education was completed by those travels behind the iron curtain. I came to see that, unless free enquiry is upheld by universities and the media, the conservative voice will be silenced. The result will be the kind of totalitarian paralysis that I witnessed in Eastern Europe.

Reflecting on recent witch-hunts, my own included, I have been particularly struck by the letters of mass denunciation which are now commonplace in our universities.

Letters against Jordan Peterson and Noah Carl, with many signatures, have recently excluded two important dissidents from the University of Cambridge. I was reminded of the petitions that academics in the communist countries were forced to sign, begging for the punishment of their dissident colleagues. But these new denunciations are all the more disgraceful in that the signatories do not have the secret police at their elbow, guiding their pen. The accusers are enthusiasts, inspired by an ideology that sees conservative views and attitudes as evil – not to be discussed but to be silenced.

Having just survived a Leftist show trial, with no help from the lame Conservative government of Mrs May, I feel a certain alarm at the change in the public culture of this country. The idea of a thought crime has been with us for a long time, of course. We used to look in astonishment on Moscow show-trials, in which the victim, convicted of deviationism, bourgeois idealism, “neo-Schellingism”, Zionist imperialism or whatever, is given a brief chance to confess enthusiastically to his fault, before being taken away to the firing squad. Where was the evidence, we asked, and what exactly was the crime?

Now we see respectable thinkers accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and a host of other thought crimes, on the strength of a word out of context, a long-forgotten friendship, or (as with Jordan Peterson) a photograph proving that you are capable of standing next to someone wearing the wrong kind of T-shirt. The punishments are mild compared with those of the Moscow trials. But they are severe enough, as I and Peterson have both discovered. And in every case there is no defence. For every attempt at a defence entrenches the accusation. If you point out that the thought crimes are largely chosen to mean whatever the accuser wishes them to mean, then that is sure proof that you are guilty.

We are, it seems to me, entering a realm of cultural darkness, in which rational argument and respect for the opponent are disappearing from public discourse, and in which increasingly, on every issue that matters, there is only one permitted view, and a licence to persecute all the heretics that do not subscribe to it. This signifies, to my way of thinking, the death of our political culture, and the rise of a kind of godless religion in its stead.

Both perspectives:

Speech at anti-restitution rally in Polad:

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=r–nMO5YecE

In Warsaw, Pompeo urges Poland to pass Holocaust restitution law

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the issue of Holocaust-era property restitution during his first official visit to Poland.

Poland is the only country in the European Union that has not passed comprehensive national legislation to return, or provide compensation for, private property confiscated by the Nazis or nationalized by the communist regime.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pompeo-in-poland-urges-the-country-to-pass-holocaust-restitution-legislation/

A Ukrainian woman who lost her right leg in the April 2017 Stockholm terror attack is facing deportation from the country, her lawyer said on Monday.

Irina Zamanova, 39, was visiting Sweden as a tourist in April of 2017 when the attack occurred. She was among the ten people injured and her injuries were so severe that doctors had to amputate her lower right leg.

The attack was carried out by an Uzbek asylum seeker, who had sworn allegiance to Isis and hijacked a truck which he drove down a busy pedestrian street in central Stockholm. He was later sentenced to life in prison.

https://www.thelocal.se/20190709/sweden-to-deport-ukrainian-survivor-of-2017-terror-attack

The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, has announced that women in Hungary with four or more children will never have to pay income tax. He has unveiled these measures in order to boost the birth rate. He said that this is Hungary’s answer to the challenges rather than immigration.

Orban stated that this was part of a measure to tackle the shrinking population without depending on immigrants. The Hungarian Prime Minister announced a seven-point “Family Protection Action Plan”, designed to promote marriage and families. This is not the first time Orban (who has five children) has tried to bring up such incentives. Earlier , he had introduced a measure that offered families reduced taxes for every new child.

https://www.shethepeople.tv/news/hungary-axes-income-tax-women-four-kids

New commentary vlog by my friend Andrii Drozda. At the end he talks about the tobacco factory in nearby Vynnyky.

I haven’t asked Andrii, but I have a couple of friend from Vynnyky who told me this:

* Kozlovski (spelling?) who is name and pictured in the video is either the owner or manager of the factory. He is extremely well liked in Vynnyky because he has taken care of everybody.

* The factory was recently search by the SBU. Also a convoy of trucks carrying about $3M of counterfeit cigarettes were seized. The British embassy wrote about the seizure on their FB page:

* There are a whole bunch of other companies in Lviv and Ukraine run by Kozlovki, including Avalon, a builder which buid some prominent residential buildings in Lviv.

* At 6:00, Andrii asks if the real owner of the factory doesn’t live in London. He doesn’t name who this might be, but apparently he makes an allusion to a current or former gangster named Yuri Federov, nicknamed “Youfa”, also nicknamed “musician” because he used to sing in a choir here in Lviv.

Near the start of the meeting, he asks for and gets the immediate resignation of one official.

It may be a publicity stunt – shaking up and re-aligning the corruption – but I remain cautiously optimistic about Zelenski. He’s a break with old, hand-over-fist Soviet corruption and Soviet mentality.