Idle: Fairytale Character Map Raises Ire In Russia and Ukraine

The downside of not having ones base of children's stories crafted and maintained by trained storytime engineers from the Disney Corporation has reared its warty head in Russia and Ukraine. A map of purportedly Russian folktale characters' haunts has drawn fire from Ukrainians, who object to what they see as the appropriation (from Ukraine) of such famous characters as miraculously strong Ilya Muromets, the gold-producing Speckled Hen, and Kolobok ("a cheerful talking cake who flees animals eager to eat him"). This seems like nothing that couldn't be cleared up with some artfully mis-pointed highway signs and a few tons of papier-mâché.

Re:Unfortunately

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I always have to marvel at the cognitive dysfunction of people who would rather have cultural antiquities locked away behind a mass of litigation. I can't tell if it is an occurrence of the 'ren-faire fallacy'(virtually everyone in medieval europe was a squalid peasant. virtually everyone at the ren-faire is pretending to be a knight or better...) where they think that they will be the ones who will end up owning it; or if it is a case of vindictive hurt feelings("I feel very strongly about the birthplace of an imaginary talking cake, therefore it must be depicted my way or not at all.")

Either way, WTF, dude?

Re:No shit

[oldhack]

Stalin was a Georgian, though.

Re:No shit

[tetromino]

And to expand on my point: the 1932-1933 Soviet famine wasn't genocide. It was a horrific man-made accidental disaster that affected the entire Soviet grain belt with no regard for ethnicity, and was caused by a combination of poorly thought-out and brutally implemented collectivization, habitual use of fake statistics, and a bureaucratic culture where underlings were afraid to tell their higher-ups that the higher-ups' "wise policies" were rapidly leading to disaster. Thirty years later, the same scenario was played out on an even grander scale, and with even more victims, during China's Great Leap Forward.

Re:No shit

[mangu]

Stalin's grandson excuses it saying genocide was not illegal in 1930's

Yes, it was [wikipedia.org]: "The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law."

The only reason why Stalin wasn't tried at Nuremberg was because a high level bureaucrat [wikipedia.org] at the US government was a Soviet agent. This book [anyoldbooks.com] shows some interesting plans the US and Britain had to invade Europe from the south, instead of northern France. According to the author, it was Soviet influence that made the allies chose the much riskier and harder invasion through the English channel.

After invading Italy in 1943 it would have been relatively easy to invade through Trieste, which would have had the advantage of cutting off the Nazi oil supply from Romania. The reason that they picked Normandy was that this route would leave all Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union .