Support for Ukraine Is Welcome | Hacker News Reader

Support for Ukraine Is Welcome

15 pointsaxegon_4 comments

I won't do a tl;dr version of the events in the last two days. But recently I decided to change jobs and I was invited to join a Ukrainian company fully remote. For long and irrelevant reasons, I went a different route days before the invasion. That said, I have worked with Ukrainians in the past and they were all amazing people. Likewise, I absolutely loved the people I met in this company albeit over a video call. In addition being from and living in a country which has suffered immensely from Russia over the past almost two centuries, I feel like it's my duty to share our last two emails(redacted for obvious reasons):

https://i.imgur.com/eW8LNWs.png

With that, I want to address all free people on this planet: they need help.

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I’m sorry to say this, but the international order was unable to help the people in Hong Kong, Yemen, the camps in China, Syria, Afghanistan. I am very sorry, things have changed where spheres of influence are no longer dictated by the West. Best of luck. You guys are on your own.

Failure doesn’t mean the world should stop trying. When the world stops trying, we (humanity) have truly lost. I think most people understand the extreme difficulty of the current situation, and that hands are frustratingly tied. Giving up should not be an option, though.

In the heat and tragedy of the current situation, I find this comment incredibly distasteful.

Women in Afghanistan got 20 years of rights and freedoms before the Taliban regained control. Residents of Hong Kong have numerous opportunities for expedited visas/immigration to Western countries.

Things aren't perfect. Things aren't even "good". But help exists. There's a wide spectrum between perfectly solving a problem and doing nothing. We need to all keep working to help where we can, how we can. We can make bad situations less bad, we can save some people, we need to embrace doing what we can.

Ironically, women in Afghanistan also had those freedoms when the USSR took control.

Agreeing with you entirely, I might go further and offer some more concrete advice. If you are feeling helpless, it might be a good idea to turn towards thinking about changes that you can affect in your own country. Which, presumably (ok, statistically, we're on HN), is an affluent democracy. Trying to change policy in China or Russia if you are outside those countries is a self-defeating exercise in futility (sad to say, that may be true even if you live there).

But I mean. Every year there are (rightly) outpourings of grief and rage on the anniversary of Tiananmen square. But the people who are responsible for the Gwangju massacre are living out their lives well within reach of the FBI. The USA is able to fight doggedly to get Julian Assange extradited to the US at enormous expense. But Chun Doo Hwan dies peacefully in his sleep as a wealthy man... Wake up and get a grip. Fixing situations like that is where the hope is.

The set of paired examples that history provides for us on this practically endless.

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