Kulyk legally entered the U.S. in late 2023 along with his wife, 38, and daughter, who’s now 5. The family was sponsored by U.S. citizens as part of the Uniting 4 Ukraine program, a humanitarian program set up in April 2022 to allow Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war to live and work in the U.S. on “parole.”
Once the initial two-year parole period expires, entrants can file for re-parole to remain in the country longer. That’s exactly what Kulyk says he did. His wife and daughter’s applications were approved. But his remained pending.
He said he was putting groceries in his car on Jan. 1 when he was approached by three ICE agents.
“I explained to the ICE officers that the war was killing people, that my wife had a disability, that it was violence, terrorism which we had escaped from but one of them began to laugh,” Kulyk told The Daily Beast. “I asked why he was laughing and I was told that he was pro-Russian, wanted Russia to win the war.”
If america ever has a brief moment of intelligence. And asks itself if we are the bad guy. Ya. You are. And it’s not a new thing. You have been the bad guy a long time. Things like this is just a small symptom. The internal rot is now showing through the propaganda and flag you have been trying to cover it with.
You can lay all that at the feet of the boomer generation and their parents, thank you. American exceptionalism was propagandized in our textbooks, by our media, and worst of all by the voting bloc that now demands we shut up and work harder to get to where they got to. Many of us in gen-x and older millennial’s were just as horrified at the atrocities of our earlier generations as many who faced down the receiving end of that exceptionalism outside the US. However, it wasn’t until the last 20-25 years that we even knew all the awful shit that happened at the hands of American imperialism.
We didn’t learn the same history in school. We didn’t have the ability to push back against the generational propaganda being fed to us from every side. Nor did we have the ability to vote to stop it at any point before the information age. So please don’t throw all American’s under the same umbrella as our government, past or present. Many of us were born into this mess and have been powerless to stop it our entire lives. We may never get a chance to make amends for our past, at this rate, but not for a lack of trying.
Or, if you prefer, we can lump all current citizens of any nation in with their government’s past. Probably wouldn’t seem fair to blame all Canadians for their treatment of native people and the indoctrination schools containing mass graves of Inuit children that seem to turn up regularly, aye?
Talking about America or any country as a single organism with just one train of thought is unproductive.
Let’s not be too quick to judge. Maybe American all support Graham Platner like that guy with his nifty hat with Platners tattoo.
Americans are bifurcated between “people who want to nuke Moscow” and “people who think Stepan Bandera didn’t go far enough”.
But just like with Vietnam, there’s vanishingly little compassion afforded anyone in the region. It’s all just “I hope more of the other team dies”
They think Rambo is a documentary
I mean, First Blood was loosely based on real-life World War II veteran Audie Murphy’s struggles with PTSD. And it was further informed by the deplorable treatment of protesters at the hands of local police and national guard - many of them returning veterans - during the Vietnam War. The original novel was intended to juxtapose this initial horrifying abuse of a homeless American veteran with the events happening half a world away by a US-sponsored dictatorship.
But reactionaries always forget the first film and fixate on the next four, because it lets Rambo embody the mythological special forces superhuman rather than the Vietcong revolutionary resisting imperial oppression.
Which one was dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters?
Yup. American.