Denazifying the MYTH about Ukraine /// Is Ukraine controlled by NAZIS?

Discussion with Professor Ben Burgis, from Give them an Argument, about the idea that Ukraine is controlled by Nazis. A popular myth propagated by Putin and Putin apologists that, like all good conspiracy theories, starts by throwing a cornel of truth into a big bucket of crap.

(from Episode 1330)

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Russia’s War Has Nothing to Do With “Denazifying” Ukraine

BY

BRENDAN MCGEEVER

As the disaster in Ukraine unfolds, the German Jewish writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin has often come to mind. In his final text, written as the nightmare of Nazism descended upon him, Benjamin told us that history cannot be understood as progress. Instead, said Benjamin, history is a storm, a “catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage,” producing a “pile of debris” that “grows towards the sky.”

If we think about the Russian invasion from another — this time East European — Jewish standpoint, we can see that a quiet but no less extraordinary transformation in Ukrainian Jewish life has been underway.

A century ago, Ukraine was the epicenter of antisemitism. This was the age of the pogrom, the most violent chapter in pre-Holocaust modern Jewish history. The word “pogrom” derives from the Russian verb gromit’; to plunder or destroy. Like “kiosk,” it is one of the few to have entered the English language from Russian. And it did so just as news spread to the anglophone world of shocking waves of anti-Jewish violence at the turn of the century. Following in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian Civil War saw pogroms in which at least one hundred thousand Jews were murdered, perhaps many more — many of them killed by Ukrainian nationalists fighting in Simon Petliura’s army. There was antisemitism on all sides, but ultimately, it was the Red Army that brought the violence to a halt.

The place names we are hearing on the airwaves just now — Kiev, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Odesa, Uman — were all major sites of anti-Jewish violence a century ago. The historian Miri Rubin describes these places as lieux de memoire (sites of memory) of Jewish history. For Elissa Bemporad, Jewish collective memory has been fortified by these atrocities, as Jewish identity became entwined with catastrophes on Ukrainian land at the start of the last century.

This antisemitism was carried into the middle of the twentieth century through the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the Holocaust. For many Jews, Ukraine became synonymous with antisemitism.

Yet today, as Russia invades, that association no longer holds. The present Ukrainian state is headed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It would have been unthinkable to those Jews in the throes of war and revolution a century ago to envisage a Jewish president of Ukraine. In the passing of time, something significant has clearly taken place. Has the past simply faded from view?

Not really; it exists in plain sight. There are streets in Ukraine today that are named after Simon Petliura, and there is a monument to him in the city of Vinnytsia; the Ukrainian national hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky adorns the five hryvnia banknote, while in Jewish collective memory he is associated with a seventeenth-century massacre in which tens of thousands of Jews perished; there is a Stepan Bandera Boulevard in Kiev, and the pogromist history of the OUN is routinely occluded in official Ukrainian nationalism.

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