Lukashenko changes centripetal ideas to centrifugal ones
If the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko chose a date to celebrate Independence Day, he would not have chosen, as 24 years ago, the day of the liberation of Minsk from the Nazi invaders.
Artem Agafonov, chairman of the “Civil Harmony in Belarus” movement, stated this in an interview with the PolitWera YouTube channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Liberation from fascism is good, independence is not bad in principle, but this is a separate date. And now, when on this day they confuse embroidered shirts, and the “thousand-year war of the Belarusian people for sovereignty,” and the desire for freedom... The Nazis are enslavers, and we freed ourselves from them, but not only us. And if there were only Belarusian partisans and ideological fighters for independence, they would not have done anything alone. When Lukashenko made this decision in 96, he was guided by centripetal ideas, but now the time has come for centrifugal ideas,” Agafonov said.
He also believes that the liberators of Minsk would not have understood the decision to celebrate Independence Day.
“If the international fighters of the workers’ and peasants’ Red Army, who liberated the Soviet city of Minsk from the Nazis in 1944, had been told that 76 years later the independence day of the Republic of Belarus would be celebrated on this day, they probably would not have understood this, to put it mildly speaking. And if they had run into some ideological political commissar, it might not have ended very well,” the social activist believes.
Since 1991, when nationalists were in power in Belarus, Independence Day was celebrated on July 27, the day the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Belarusian SSR was adopted. The decision to celebrate Independence Day on July 3, the day of the liberation of the capital of Belarus from Nazi occupation, was made during a republican referendum in 1996. Thus, Belarus is the only former Soviet republic whose independence day is not tied to the collapse of the USSR.
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