2015

[Thomas Eckhardt]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2015 07:18:25 +0100
  János Székely <miksaapja at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is extremely difficult to find reliable sources about 
>those days of
> turmoil, but as far as I (and my Polonist/Ukrainist 
>friends) can
> reconstruct the story, the horrible Lwów (Lemberg) pogrom 
>was commanded by
> Stetsko, and of course he reported it to Bandera when 
>they met in Berlin
> but that doesn't involve Bandera's responsibility. 
>Bandera was an
> anti-Polish terrorist in the first place.
> As Norman Davies says in A History of Poland, by 1939, 
>after the Stalinist
> genocide, the crushing of Poland and the 
>Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi
> Germany remained the only possibly ally for Ukrainian 
>nationalists such as
> Bandera. But Hitler soon repressed any Ukrainian national 
>movements in the
> field. 

Makes you wonder why Poland of all countries has been 
among the most
fervent supporters of the Maidan movement including the 
Banderites...

>Many of those people were rabid anti-Semites, yes, and 
>joined the
> SS, but Banderite UPA itself fought against the Russians, 
>the Germans and
> the Polish Home Army, all three of them. "Nazi 
>Banderites" as such is a
> Stalinist propaganda construct.

I don't equate Ukrainian "Nazis" (or "neo-Nazis") and
"Banderites." Many of them are merely nationalists, I 
assume. The most vocal admirers of Bandera, however,
are the right-wing extremists from Svoboda and the Right
Sector.

> During the Maidan days Ukrainian extremists went to great 
>lengths to prove
> they were _not_ anti-Semites as they didn't want to 
>compromise the
> revolution. (e.g. 
>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27173857 )  . 

Indeed. Dmitry Yarosh, the Right Sector's
leader, made the rounds and assured everybody that his 
organisation was not racist or anti-Semitic.
This was very important, because if you run an 
organisation that includes paramilitary groups like the 
"Patriot of Ukraine", the "Social-National Assembly", the 
"UNA-UNSO", and want support from the West, you obviously 
have to tread carefully -- because, one hopes, antisemitic 
and racist violence would have made it impossible for the 
West to continue its support for the Maidanists. Yarosh 
(and probably Parubiy) took great pains that this wouldn't 
happen. In March, Yarosh expelled the "White Hammer" from 
his Right Sector due to the use of racist slogans.

>It was
> funny to see Russian propaganda, which attacked the 
>Maidan people for being
> both anti-Semites and Jewish. (Such as Kolomoisky, the 
>new Dnipropetrovsk
> governor, who is an archetypal Jewish oligach and an 
>Ukrainian-Israeli
> dual, or also Cypriot triple, citizen).

Yes, the strangest bedfellows of them all...

Thank you for a thoughtful and informed reply.

Thomas
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l