And to add to what Christian wrote...may I remind you that the current..and very popular..Prime Minister of Ukraine is a Jew!!! Cornel.
-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-120726906-8441035_at_list.cornell.edu [mailto:bounce-120726906-8441035_at_list.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Christian Herrmann
Sent: 28 August 2016 11:49
To: Czernowitz Mailing-Liste
Subject: Aw: RE: [Cz-L] Happy birthday Ukraine!
Dear all,
May I remember you that on the very beginning of this long threat was my post about the celebration of Ukraine's independence in Czernowitz and its impact on the presevation of Jewish heritage and rebirth of Jewish life. In response some list members were eager to equate Ukrainian independence with Bandera, Petlura and Khmelnitski and from then on the discussion was meandering around the topic of Ukrainian nationalism.
Those who gave the discussion this turn may not know how much Ukrainian nationalists and Putin's propaganda would united join their view and applaude them.
Not only I was present in Czernowitz during the celebration but also other list members, and none of us ran into hordes of Banderites or saw anything that was praising them as heroes.
May I remember you on some facts:
Not only Petlura's soldiers commited pogroms but also Poles when they captured Lviv (Lwow, Lemberg), the Whites when they fought the Bolsheviks, and from Isaac Babel's book about the Red Cavalry you may learn what happened when the Bolsheviks invaded Galicia. How does it come that only Petlura made it into some peoples awareness?
It was said the Holocaust took place in Ukraine. Does that mean the Holocaust was commited by Ukrainians? During the war there was no Ukrainian statehood. Ukrainian lands were split in occupation zones between Germany, Romania and Hungary. First of all the occupation forces have to be held responsible for what was happening. Without doubt there was collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the German occupants at the beginning and the end of the occupation - with all the well known cruelties. But there was also collaboration in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and all other by Germany occupied countries. I have never heared that because of that somebody questioned the right of France, Belgium, the Netherlands or any other country to have independant statehood nor are they predominantly identified with collaboration. May I also remember you that millions of Ukrainians fought in the Red Army and millions were deported as slave workers into the Reich - much more than ever joined OUN or UPA.
All of this does not make Ukrainians better people, but it makes them also not worse than others.
What we face today in Ukraine is a contradictious development. While a vast majority tends to the West and to Western values there is on the other hand an active group of historians - none of them with any international reputation - and nationalist politicians, who have some support in the presidential administration and other institunional bodies since the presidency of Victor Yushtshenko. They are the forces behind the controversal "decommunization law" and the quoted renaming of Moscow Prospect into Bandera Prospect in Kyiv - in particular I'm speaking about Volodymyr Viatrovych, director of Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. Hi-ranking Ukrainian academics and human rights activists have protested against these decisions. We already know comparable developments from other decolonization processes when the British, the Spanish and the French empires collapsed. And nothing else but a decolonization processes we face in Ukraine today - with all its troubles and errors.
If you like to know what a majority of Ukrainians thinks about Jewish-Ukrainian relations, I recommend to read the speech of Ukraine's president Petro Poroshenko, held on 23 December 2015 in the Israeli parliament:
http://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/media1/media-kit/latest-news/15-latest-news/807-speech-of-the-president-of-ukraine-in-the-israeli-knesset-
Best,
Christian
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Received on 2016-08-28 04:26:59