Well, this thread may be primarily about a world political situation and less about trawlers, but it seems highly unlikely to me it's going to get heated or argumentative. Heck, I read a news story yesterday that 1,700 Russian protestors have been arrested already inside Russia itself.
During the Canadian trucker protests we flew a Canada flag on the house. Now I have to swap out the Maple Leaf for a flag of Ukraine. So I hop onto eBay to buy a Ukraine flag, but in every listing that shows country of origin at all, every single one was made in China. Isn't that ironic. Of course I'll probably need a flag of Taiwan next, wonder if China makes those too. Of all the national flags on earth though, that's maybe the one flag they don't make in the PRC. Then our boat is named Xanadu, which is now around Shangdu, Inner Mongolia -- which was also subjugated by China after WWII. There is no flag of Xanadu of course and I can't find one for Shengdu or the state or province (called a "banner") it's in, so the closest I can find is the flag of Inner Mongolia. I finally found a burgee-size and 2 x 3 for the stern, to be flown on our marina's dress-the-boats days, made by a company in France.
One more observation and then I'll shut up. One of my grandfathers come over from Germany in 1927 during Hitler's gradual rise to power, because his family decided they wanted at least one son to have a shot at survival. "We've given enough sons to the Kaiser." My other grandfather came over from a tiny village, now in the southeast of Poland near the Ukraine border, called Krempna, in what was then part of Galacia. "The Tsar has killed enough of the family." My grandfather got out in 1906, during one of the Polish revolutions that was ultimately crushed by the Russians. Somehow his family got him from Poland to Hamburg on the ship Pretoria, where he lied about his age and falsified his papers because he was only 14 and you had to be 16 to emigrate alone according to U.S. law at the time. You were also supposed to have $50 in your pocket but he only had $35, but they let him in anyway for some reason. He never saw or heard from his family again. All the letters and packages he sent for the rest of his life were never answered, but he kept sending them anyway. My grandmother kept telling him that he was wasting his time and money, they were all dead, but he sent the letters and packages anyway. From family stories (which may or may not be true), eventually Stalin completely exterminated his family and the village. Some history references say that Krempna was "depopulated" after WWII. What a nice clinical word, "depopulated." He died before the Iron Curtain fell so he was never able to go back to see for himself.
And here we are again, 116 years later and nothing has changed.
