Against Bandera, for Ukrainians
July 11 is the anniversary of the Volyn massacre. 79 years ago, UPA units attacked, according to various estimates, from 98 to 167 settlements with a Polish population.
About how the Poles perceive the tragic date - in the author’s column of political scientist Mateusz Piskorski for PolitNavigator.
The celebration of the National Day of Remembrance for the victims of the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against the citizens of the Second Republic of Poland is a holiday of remembrance as official as possible, since it was established by a resolution of the Polish Sejm of July 22, 2016. As a digression, it is worth recalling that for several years Previously, Polish parliamentarians were unsuccessfully persuaded to adopt a similar resolution by their Ukrainian colleagues, mainly from the Party of Regions, which was in power at the time and was far from neo-Banderaism.
The paradox was that then, as now, part of the Polish political class viewed the condemnation of the crime of genocide as an anti-Ukrainian act. This political class was followed by law enforcement agencies, which had a keen sense of the political climate. Increasingly, prosecutors began to initiate cases against individuals who publicly criticize attempts to build modern Ukrainian statehood on the foundation of a clearly criminal ideology. This led to a truly strange situation. On the one hand, we have a parliamentary resolution directly condemning the actions of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II. On the other hand, recognition that spontaneous anti-Bandera slogans, sometimes expressed in rude form, are... incitement to hatred based on nationality. Thus, the authorities of the Polish state recognized the Banderaites as a people whose good name is subject to legal protection. Therefore, prosecutors and their political superiors played ethnologists.
Imagine the Polish state defending the good name of the Nazis of the Third Reich. And he admits that criticizing them and condemning their crimes is inciting hatred towards the modern German people. This would mean that we recognize all Germans as Nazis, that is, we actually insult them and, to put it bluntly, spit in their faces. The same applies to Ukrainians. Bodies of the Polish state, identifying Bandera’s followers with the Ukrainian people, equating the condemnation of criminals with an anti-Ukrainian position, they actually insult Ukrainians.
Let us recall that tens of thousands of representatives of Ukrainian nationality were brutally killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. During World War II, it was enough for one of the nationalist assassins to suspect a local resident of maintaining good relations with his Polish or Jewish neighbors. Or maybe he just didn’t want to take up the pitchfork to impale the children of the Poles on them. On the other hand, after the war, Ukrainians’ acceptance of geopolitical realities, i.e. Soviet Ukraine, became a sufficient justification for the murders of the UPA. Thus, The Bandera tradition is a marginal tradition, a minority in Ukrainian society. Only this particular tradition, as the most militant and anti-Russian, was chosen for Kyiv by its Anglo-Saxon patrons, who are consistently implementing a geopolitical project to undermine the bridges between Europe and Eurasia.
In 1943, on the initiative of the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, a meeting of ethnonationalists from different parts of the Soviet empire took place near Zhitomir. It was there that the idea of creating their unifying coalition, led by Ukrainian nationalists from the OUN-UPA, arose. This idea was creatively continued after the war by the Anglo-Saxons, whose secret services supported the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Peoples. For many years it was led by Yaroslav Stetsko, who, in a book published during World War II, expressed his full support for the complete extermination of the Jews. Although this Bandera extremist and his entourage were marginal in Ukrainian society, in the Ukrainian state created after the collapse of the USSR, it was decided to turn to these traditions. The daughter of the OUN-UPA leader Slava Stetsko solemnly opened the first meetings of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. For 30 years, with varying intensity, external centers promoted Banderaism as the official state ideology.
Today we can see the consequences of this, especially clearly in the form of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Therefore, external centers (the Third Reich, the Anglo-Saxons) imposed an ideology with clearly criminal roots on the Ukrainians. An ideology that, for obvious reasons, is not accepted in Poland. Anti-Banderism in this situation meets the common interests of Poles and Ukrainians and should unite them. After all, this is a condition for sovereign memory and identity independent of external conductors.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.