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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   33229 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Elections have been suspended.

Why are you and every other pro-russian so consistently dishonest about this? You say that elections have been suspended as if that was somehow a point in favour of Russia.

Let's first ignore the fact that Ukraine can't hold elections. Elections during war is illegal under Ukranian law. Even if they weren't, what do you propose they do?

Either they just let the Russian occupiers conduct elections on the Russian side of the front line, in which case these areas would of course have the electroral outcomes that most favour Russia, or they could have elections only in the parts of the country the Ukranian state controls, in which case you'd be on here whining about the elections not being fair because people in the eastern parts of the country couldn't vote.

I am not pro Russian. Nothing I’ve ever said on this forum is pro Russian.

I assume therefore you are not arguing in good faith.

In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war. We had elections on time and on schedule no matter what.

And so we expect others to hold themselves to the same standard.

In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war

This is an irrelevant argument. It is as relevant to the current situation as a point than ancient Athenians had elections during Peloponnesian War. A better (since more recent) parallel is the suspension of elections by UK during WWII. It is definitely easier to conduct elections before the age of bombers and missiles hitting your polling stations.

However, what matters is that elections are suspended during the state of war according to the Ukrainian Constitution. Lifting the state of war would be criminally stupid when there is an ongoing war (the state of war allows some actions that are illegal during peace, like having a firing positions in private property by the military). Surely, there can be some legal trickery, like rolling suspension of state of war or some other legal tricks but this will not make it any more democratic that what it is now and there is still a matter of missiles raining from the sky. I would not like to see a headline "Presidential elections conducted in Ukraine. 25 dead, 150 injured, and 25,000 ballots destroyed in fires".

In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war.

The South was not included.

Also postwar political violence in the South meant that the 1876 Presidential election could not be counted. Hayes was not chosen as POTUS over Tilden as the result of votes being cast and counted, but because a botched Democratic scheme to bribe the neutral chair of the Electoral Commission led to him resigning.

The US elections that happened in the worst security situation were the 1862 midterms. I haven't found any detailed account of how they were run.

Somehow didn't stop them from getting Virginia's permission to split in half! American democracy is truly incredible.

Vae victis.

The election in 1864 explicitly excluded the seceded states / confederacy, which is exactly what the previous post was talking about. You would consider it fully democratic for the Ukraine government to hold an election only in regions under full control of the Kiev government, then?

You would consider it fully democratic for the Ukraine government to hold an election only in regions under full control of the Kiev government, then?

no, but at least it would be like the election in 2019 which brought the current government and Zelensky into political office originally

Certainly a lot more reasonable compared to “no election.”

I fail to see how holding elections only in the part of the country that isn't guaranteed to vote wrong, implicitly signing off on the rest, is "a lot more reasonable" than suspending elections.

It's especially funny to see people suddenly care about the legitimacy of Ukrainian elections despite normally acting like their elections, along with any elections that aren't the glorious USA true freedom elections, are worth nothing.

I think the payoff is that it slightly expands the options of the Ukrainian public (that is, the portion of the country that would get to vote in the election).

They could conceivably be against the war and vote out Zelensky, an option which they don't really currently have: the press is censored and the country is under martial law, speaking out publicly to overturn Zelensky is probably pretty dangerous.

If they just vote Zelensky back in with overwhelming approval, then things end up exactly as they are with elections suspended, but we at least have the information that their heart is still in the fight, that they had the opportunity to back down in a secret ballot and chose not to take it.

Of course, this is dependent on the elections being conducted fairly, which may not be the case. But if Zelensky holds an election and rigs it/intimidates voters/whatever, that would just put him in the same position he is right now, but with the added risk of information on his actions leaking out.

Just because tyranny is legal (constitutional even) or convenient doesn't make it legitimate.

The Press is totally lawful, I still think the men running after youths to throw them into the meat grinder of a war that's already lost are the dregs of humanity.

But ultimately, it's not like we're talking about France in WW1 where every party is fully committed to national union and postponing elections is a formality. It's closer to a Lundendorff type situation.

Zelensky has ostensibly used war powers to ban his political opposition, kill journalists and pretty much done all that you expect of a corrupt Slavic dictatorship.

Maybe you need to be a dictatorship to survive an existential war, that doesn't mean that it's automatically right to fight a lost war to the last man.

Source on killing journalists?

I assume he is referring to the Gonzalo Lira case. Most outright killings (that we have documentation of) seem to have happened before Zelensky (though not all). There is more evidence of non-killing crackdowns on the press since well before the 2022 invasion.

I think one reason the justification for suspending elections is particularly unsympathetic to Americans is that we held an election even during a raging civil war.

It’s not exactly the same scenario as Ukraine, but it some ways it was worse. And it was 150+ years ago, and we still managed to do it.

That election excluded the confederate states by design, though. Russia apologists would certainly consider such a move for a new Ukrainian election to be illegitimate.

As someone frequently accused of being a Russia apologist, I have to disagree - people living in Crimea should be voting in Russian elections, not Ukrainian ones. If Ukraine doesn't want to let the people in the contested regions vote, they're simply making the implicit case that those regions are not part of Ukraine.

Do you really think that? I’m sure some might make those mouth noises but the argument would be ignored. Whilst the argument for an election is at least not crazy

This is a fair point, and that’s why I said it’s not a precise comparison.

Do we have examples of elections being held in circumstances exactly like Ukraine’s? I genuinely don’t know, although I know elections have been held in war torn countries before.

The Confederate States of America also held congressional elections in 1863-1864 while Grant's and Sherman's armies were busy trashing the place. I think that counts. The CSA didn't hold presidential elections because IIRC the CSA presidency was a 6-year term and the CSA didn't, um, last long enough for Jefferson Davis to have to worry about elections....

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