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How is that cherry-picking? If you think that I have omitted some important information about Ukrainian nationalists and the support for them from the post-2014
by protomolecule 2y ago
How is that cherry-picking? If you think that I have omitted some important information about Ukrainian nationalists and the support for them from the post-2014 regime in Kiev, tell me, what have I missed.
If you skim the article you linked to, you'll find that despite being written in 2022, the latest example is dated to 2016. That matches my own perception of wide crack-down on neo-Nazis in Putin's time. They've got jailed and some died in prison [0]. I fact-checked a random fact from the article -- the Kremlin tolerance for the music band Kolovrat. It turns out that almost 50 of their songs are listed in the "List of extremist materials" and their distribution is a crime. [1]
"and all were written after the 2014 invasion"
Coincidentally (sarcasm), 2014 is also when Ukrainian nationalists came to power.
Nonetheless, you are welcome to listen to the Bush Sr's speech in Kiev in 1991: "Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred".[2] Americans later did support them, of course. [3]
"Nobody except some Israelis cared about this, and even they cared only so much as to complain in a newspaper."
This statement is surprising. Let me quote the article [4] more extensively:
"The criticism came one day after Ukrainians marked the 111th birthday of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a violently anti-Semitic organization that collaborated with the Nazis. Among Holocaust historians, the consensus is that the OUN and its military offshoot, known as the UPA, were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and up to 100,000 Poles during the war (estimates vary).
In a joint letter to civic leaders in Lviv and Kyiv, Israeli ambassador Joel Lion and his Polish counterpart, Bartosz Cichocki, expressed concern regarding efforts to honor Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, the head of a competing faction of the OUN.
In Kyiv on Wednesday, local officials raised a giant banner with Bandera’s picture over the city administration building, prompting anger from Jewish activists. That came just over a week after the Lviv Oblast Council approved funding for a 2020 celebration in honor of Melnyk.
Israel and Poland, which have clashed repeatedly in recent years over differing interpretations of the history of the Second World War, came together on Thursday to issue a rare joint condemnation of Ukraine over its efforts to rehabilitate nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis.
The criticism came one day after Ukrainians marked the 111th birthday of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a violently anti-Semitic organization that collaborated with the Nazis. Among Holocaust historians, the consensus is that the OUN and its military offshoot, known as the UPA, were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and up to 100,000 Poles during the war (estimates vary).
In a joint letter to civic leaders in Lviv and Kyiv, Israeli ambassador Joel Lion and his Polish counterpart, Bartosz Cichocki, expressed concern regarding efforts to honor Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, the head of a competing faction of the OUN.
In Kyiv on Wednesday, local officials raised a giant banner with Bandera’s picture over the city administration building, prompting anger from Jewish activists. That came just over a week after the Lviv Oblast Council approved funding for a 2020 celebration in honor of Melnyk.
“Remembering our innocent brothers and sisters murdered in the occupied territories of Poland 1935-1945, which now constitute a part of Ukraine, we the Ambassadors of Poland and Israel believe, that celebrating these individuals is an insult,” Lion and Cichocki wrote.
“Glorification of those who promoted actively the ethnic cleansing is counterproductive in the fight against Antisemitism and the reconciliation of our People,” they continued.
...
Thursday’s letter is the second time that Lion and Cichocki have come together to call for a change in Ukrainian memory policy. In June, the pair signed a joint letter to the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankisvsk, protesting the unveiling of a monument honoring Roman Shukhevych, a collaborator with the Nazis who was implicated in the murder of countless Jews and ethnic Poles.
Following Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, the former Soviet republic’s parliament passed a series of bills known collectively as the Decommunization Laws, meant to sever the country’s ties to its Russian and Soviet past. One of the bills prohibited what it called the “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century.”
In practical terms, these bills paved the way for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian ultranationalist figures who had collaborated with the Nazis.
Over the last several years, streets all over Ukraine have been named after far-right figures and steps have been taken to rehabilitate their images, casting them as fighters for democracy whose followers saved Jews from the Germans.
Asked about the letter, Ambassador Lion told The Times of Israel that Israel and Poland “have a common interest in combating Holocaust denial and rewriting of History.” "
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Martsinkevich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Martsinkevich
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Коловрат_(группа)#Запрет_отдельных_песен_в_России https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Коловрат_(группа)#Запрет_отдел...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkjxf76xRTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkjxf76xRTw
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-meets-oleh-tyahnybok-in-ukraine-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-meets-oleh-tyahn...
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-row-over-holocaust-history-israel-and-poland-issue-joint-critique-of-ukraine/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-row-over-holocaust-history-...
- racional 2y agoAnd yet the idea that Russia has or ever had some rational reason to be threatened by any of this noise, or that it any other substantive way led to the invasions of 2014 or 2022 -- is still entirely fake. It's just another form of this basically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead Banderist on the table!’ is what your footnote salad amounts to.
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- protomolecule 2y ago"footnote salad" That's very regrettable attitude to fact-based discussion which is the only kind of discussion that is interesting for me.
- racional 2y agoBut it isn't really fact-based. It only appears that way. It doesn't matter how many individual factoids you lay out -- if the greater narrative you cast around them (and subordinate these facts into) is so plainly and fundamentally broken. That's why your salad wilts at first contact with fresh air, and your essay yields such a terse response. Je ne regrette rien.
- protomolecule 2y agoIt appears that all dang's eloquence [0] was wasted on you. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40755784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40755784
- racional 2y agoC'est la vie.