by Vladimir Goldstein - 7 March 2022
I am frankly tired of listening to the pontifications of people who can''t find Ukraine on the map, yet go on about the "Kremlin Propaganda" and the absence of Nazis in Ukraine.
For starters, it is highly insensitive. If some black person from the US tells you that there is racism in his country, would you, sitting somewhere in Germany or Denmark, have a nerve to start telling them, no, there is no racism, you've had a black president, you have black politicians and mayors, so stop spreading the Russian propaganda about racism. And yes, ever since I remember growing up in Soviet Union, I've heard about racism in America from Russian media.
So if you won't t be telling these facile concepts to a person who feels racism every day by his own skin, why on earth you are telling me these stories?
Of course, there are few people wearing nazi uniforms in Ukraine. Of course, they use Israeli and American money to place memorials in Baby Yar and some other places. Of course, they use the testimony of Ukrainian Jews, who don't want to rock the boat, and prefer to say that everything in Ukraine is hunky dory. Who wants to be accused in aiding and abetting the enemy. Yet, we keep on seeing again and again how these memorials get overturned, cemeteries desecrated, memory erased.
So why are you telling me, who has a rather sensitive radar toward this issue (antisemitism was one of the three reasons I left Russia) that there is no antisemitism.
Just listen to the nonsense that some of the Lviv politicians spew on the subject. Just read the comments to anyone who publicly write something about Holocaust in Ukraine. Only recently, one of the biggest historical liars in Ukraine, the guy in charge of their so called Institute of Memory the main purpose of which is to denigrate Russia and promote Ukraine, has decided to write something to the tune that Holocaust was our, that is, Ukrainian problem.
Boy, he got an earful. All sort of uber-antisemitic crap, that the nationalists-- again, not regular Ukrainians, but the clowns who like this "historical institute" --began to post. Ranging from "Jews deserve it," to "they did it themselves" "they lie about everything and so on. From what I remember they closed this post in order not to get further embarrassment. And we are talking 2021-2, not some ancient history.
Likewise, all these new historians of Ukraine, keep on pushing idiotic stories to their public, that "Bandera was building synagogues, schools for Jewish children, could quote Torah, and once the war started, paid his money to buy Jews from the camps." Can you imagine someone in Germany writing this stuff about Himmler? And people buying it?
So there is nothing wrong to say that war is illegal or immoral. There is nothing wrong in blaming Putin for all possible sins. There is nothing wrong in repeating other prepackaged statements that BBC pushes along. That's fine. There is nothing wrong in pointing at Russian antisemitism or some skinheads in Russia. We can discuss those. But please don't tell me that there are no virulent antisemites, nazis and other bullying as..holes that due to their violence, exercise much more power in the country that their numbers show. This is rude, insensitive, and frankly, antisemitic. Allow a person whose relatives lie buried in Baby Yar to judge that.
And by the way. I am sure that with the exceptions of violent right wing thugs of various Azov battalions and pathetic intellectuals who push Banderostudies, most of Ukrainians, like people everywhere, just want to get with their lives and succeed. Yet, nowhere is the state is that weak, corrupt or debilitated, so it is forced to tolerate, rely on, and be propped by these two obnoxious groups to much greater degree than any other place on earth. When these thugs threaten public officials with machine guns and knives, public officials listen. That's the bottom-line.
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