Staruszeczce, której rodzina ratowała Polaków podczas rzezi wołyńskiej zdążono jeszcze wręczyć Brązowy Krzyż Zasługi przyznany decyzją Prezydenta RP Andrzeja Dudy. Kilka dni potem odeszła.
Zaangażowani charytatywnie na Ukrainie, całkowicie pochłonięci lovebombingiem ukraińskich nacjonalistów, prominentni przedstawiciele obecnej opozycji odmówili udziału w próbie zorganizowania pomocy lekarskiej ostatniej szansy, jakiej podjął się Wiesław Tokarczuk. Podobnie nie zareagowała Ambasada RP w Kijowie, ale pewnie nie czytają tam wszystkich wpisów na facebooku.
Po ogłoszeniu za wschodnią granicą 2019 "Rokiem Bandery" wypadałoby już tylko spodziewać się "Festiwalu R. Szuchewycza" (tak, tak, pianisty Szuchewycza - według akolitów - takiego samego jak Gilels, Richter, a może jeszcze lepszego, wszak miał grać fruwając w powietrzu jak jakiś Liberace...). W oczekiwaniu na to doniosłe wydarzenie, którego jak najnaturalniej rzeczeni przedstawiciele opozycji będą zapewne honorowymi gośćmi, napisałem tekst po angielsku, jako że skierowany do międzynarodowej publiczności przyszłego festiwalu :
Bandera I the Greatest or the heroes are tired. The post-ideological indigestion syndrome .
”Within both academic and policy discourse the concepts of radicalisation and deradicalisation remain deeply contested. For policymakers there remain challenges in identifying the group that should be the focus of policy interventions and agreeing the terms to be used to describe such groups. Radicalisation can be defined as ‘the processes by which trust in the system declines and people withdraw further and further into their own group because they no longer feel part of society’. The relationship between individuals deemed to have radical views, norms or values and actual participation in violence remains an area that needs to be explored further. There is little known about those who hold views and attitudes similar to those involved in radical groups or organisations but who are not active participants in any group or organisation but rather see themselves as part of a movement. Further research is needed to understand the kinds of support or interventions such individuals would need.” ( 'Stepping Out: Supporting exit strategies from violence and extremism'; project: European Network of Former Extremists, Feasibility Assessment; Institut for Strategic Dialogue, November 2009)
Summer 1991 was a glorious epoch . My Eastern European me found itself exactly where it should have always belonged, that is somewhere along the fantastically non-Eastern European surfer's paradise quest – here I was, in the middle of the southern California. The choice of available activities seemed to be rather modest for nearly exclusively limited to hanging around private beach clubs , turning philosophical next to the Hollywood's golden age relics - the Renaissance Tuscan villas with lapis lazuli pools and lapis lazuli pool houses brought stone by stone from the overseas by their frantic modern day owners and stuffed with the 18th century Mexican silverware , marvelling at spectacular ocean front vistas, hitting with no apparent purpose the number 1 in either direction and dining at the Santa Barbara's Biltmore Four Seasons with my Californian millionnaire sponsor Jinnie. Then more beach, again the beach, beach until the exhaustion and perhaps for the sake of decency some piano practice providing there was any room left in my dense schedule. Many of these places that I used to grace with my Eastern-European sense of being completely out of it actually prohibited their patrons to enter the premises barefoot, now if you ask me I think I remember seeing quite a few 'shoes required' signs at the front door here and there. Or may be it was somewhere else. Anyway, I was living out a Great Gatsby movie, a California dream re-enacted : a reckless sequence of pot, sea, sex and sun, all in a splash of fancy, umbrellitos topped tropical drinks and driven by the mysterious condition commonly referred to around US campuses as ”the yellow fever” . A standard computer back then had the size of a room and Facebook was yet to be invented. It was great and I felt good. My life was terrific.
Then the messenger of doom in a shape of the drop dead gorgeous Yugo girl descended from the messengers of doom's iron heaven. The first Yugoslav war caught up with the opulent, quiet Santa Barbara's suburb of Montecito. The exotic Yugo girl boasted into the local expert scene virtually overnight and became an instant hot-talk celebrity . The area's radio talk-show hosts engaged in a fiery competition to have her over now that she was a 'must' on Eastern European affairs everywhere and more than eager to patiently explain these dramatic but not less weird , far away events as they were unfolding in the real time to whomever happened to be around and in the mood to listen. While doing so she was typically distasteful and going ballistic, leaving audiences frozen in awe at her exotic passion and a genuine obsession with even more exotic, rather imaginary past. Her thinly veiled ethnofanaticism, a shameless display of pristine, ancestral hate, a complete conceptual void were the only random few on a long list of similar, shall we say Eastern European, antics being showcased. She insisted folks ”learned the real history” , her gloomy message was delivered with an unusual frenzy and the language as if it were borrowed straight from some other distant reality on some other light years away planet. The talk around town soon became about a ”payback time” ( and it wasn't the mortgage), ”justified historical revenge”, ”the unalienable right to be a master of one's own, historically ethnic land”, ” heroes and their heroic struggle” and so on . The sunny California of mine, gently wrapped in the ocean's breeze , epitome of the ”cool” attitude, the world's Mecca for the ”dude” movement proponents , the retreat of discreet, fortune kissed art dealers, a final, mythical destination for generations of see-through Chicanos and what-you-see-is-what-you-get gold diggers was being strangely syphoned through the darkest of holes into a time warp, a parallel paleo-Universe where the 40's ”tchetniks” and ”ustashis” suddenly became of relevance and this for the reasons nobody could really encompass, even less understand. The California dream was over. The sticky, suffocating ectoplasm was oozing from the medium's body rhythmically shivering in a mystical trans (1) like thick, cold blankets of the evening's eery silence unperceptibly falling one after another upon the Pacific coastline.
Many years went by. I was living in Paris and this is where the banderite ”national revolution” of 1941 caught up with me. The standard computer hold in a mobile phone , Facebook was 11 years old or something (2), best suited for amplifying all imaginable fringe pathologies and stuffed full with conspiracy wackos . I was watching the grotesque Russian-Ukrainian war in utter disbelief , more particularly both belligerants' and their proxies' (keyword: ' a proxy') psy-ops (historical memory wars inclusive with their lot of insipid Heldenkriege) directed at the little concerned with the intricasities of the Eastern European history Western consumer. This and the social media echo chamber seen from the French perspective was a phenomenal quagmire. Something more than easily predictable only a short while ago, the French public opinion was already lost to the Ukrainian cause not exclusively because of the centuries old French-Russian bromance and what it may have implied for the modern psychological warfare but rather for the whole entirely different set of reasons, one being more ominous than the rest: the French mainstream was not going to swallow en apéritif simultaneously the first degree 'Bandera – all Ukrainian hero' nonsense and distinctively pro-European slogans of the Maidan revolution in guise of a side salad. The match against the so French expression of the measured, subtle, cruel irony proved impossible. A visible top of the iceberg, the Libération's (3) 'Ukraine Committee', a curious hybrid of the French far left and the Ukrainian far right, the 'reft-light' hybrid response to a brand new setting experimented by Russian agents provocateurs, by succombing to the very much confused but muscled neo-banderite hold up did manage quite an extensive job in not helping the cause but turning it opaque, substandard and suspectful, grossly annoying, instinctively avoidable hence avoided (with a sight of relief) by ces messieursdames distinguées. It would have helped to realise that the instantly recognizable Ukrainian milieu in France was vastly composed of observant, far right addicted ignorati gathered around the network of former Yushtchenko's diplomatic/cultural officers. I praised myself for being probably one of the very rare if not the sole with good high level Ukrainian contacts in Paris to have systematically spoken up on the subject of the neo-banderite refined, “matrioshka”-type diversion (“Pravyi Sektor”) . As a token of recognition I have been hysterically cleansed from Facebook "friend's" lists, smeared and threatened with a slow and painful death from unnatural causes, ridiculed and otherwise targeted. Obviously my own opinion has been made as you may have easily guessed by now . In an uncomprehensively suicidal move, in the ultimate, gore gesture of calculated self-harm, the French neo-banderites have blown up the entire difficult, time consuming, little flexible process of gathering and advantageously employing the frail capital of sympathy into sorry, unrecognizable pieces.
Simultaneously I do get a distant feeling that this is less about Bandera himself (a failed wannabe Fuehrer of the III Reich's satellite state he tenderly fancied but one that never materialised not the least because of the popular Ukrainian rather than Galician (4) role in the anti-Nazi resistance/war effort, a divisive to put it mildly figure even within the nationalist movement) but more about Canadian banderites money trails and their politically bankrupt venture which was the Yushtchenko's own presidency.
Much has been written and said about this cyclical Nazi collaborator and Eastern European ustashi-styled fascist, joyfully vilified by the Soviet and Russian historiography. He was being lionized, worshipped, compared to Napoleon and Washington by his extatic followers, his actual, somewhat minor role in deviant, genocidal actions of banderite nationalists was patently overblown by his detractors, ultimately his murder by the Soviet undercover agent (of Ukrainian descent) turned him against many odds into a nationalist icon. A harmful and a murderous one. Speaking dumb: the French conjecture is rich in obediences, vast being the choice: gaullisme, socialisme, royalisme, bonapartisme, républicanisme, anti-républicanisme, impérialisme, jacobinisme, Action Francaise, OAS, marxisme-léninisme, anti-Communist gauchisme, nouveaux philosophes, nouvelle droite, nouvelle gauche, post-soixante-huitardisme, pétainisme - paponisme - mitterandisme etc. etc. etc.; each on its own right, all within their fossilized universe of static references and rose-teinted, nostalgic folklore, whereas the Ukrainian one momentarily, for a plethora of dubious reasons and through the actions of namely the Ukrainian Institute for National Remembrance ( a hardcore nationalist front window run by neobanderite nationalist Mr Volodymyr Viatrovych, mostly involved in dissipating a sophisticated, fantasmagorical ethno-trash and whitewashing the past) is being brutally formated into a monomaniacal infatuation with a collective, uneducated, unsettled, coercive and blasphemous fraud. Should the Ukrainian public debate even remotely resemble the one in France I bet nobody would even think of entering the polemics or fume at glamourizing the wartime nationalists - I certainly would not object to the fact that a sizeable portion of the public opinion identifies with what 'Bandera' may represent symbolically or even Bandera himself, a perfectly natural, axiomatically assumed phenomenon, fully compatible with any liberal, pluralist democracy. We would be quite a few actually not to care at all, bulk of us who watch Eastern European convulsions from a healthy distance have got other things under the skin to be worrying about. But the equation is all different. Not so long ago an honorable defender of Ukrainian freedoms has asked me why nobody ever cared to correct "these wikipedia lies about Bandera" which I thought quite revealing and symptomatic, also I believe statistically probing - somehow I do not expect to see anybody in France asking to 'correct' these 'wikipedia lies' about the Santo Domingo expedition, Sétif and Guelma massacres or to censor Goya's 'fakes'. To my knowledge there are no plans for "Aussaresses or Bigeard memorial years celebrations" any time soon either. Stampede mode cherry picking besides being logically fallacious is esthetically repulsive and easily countered through breaking it down to the basics: look at Bandera and look at Napoleon, Washington, Alexander, Caesar, the British monarchy... Bandera's cult quite likely masterminded and certainly weaponised by the Kremlin is a threat not only to Ukraine but to Europe's very survival in this intensely troubled moment of History ( “ banderite reconquista” project, international Azov connection ...).
Last, the issue of Poland expressing the supposed 'unease' over alleged "banderization" of Ukraine is multi dimensional . Poland's (Warsaw's) self-absorbed, ambitious, cynically calculating, falsely complacent and falsely malleable, conspiring and de facto warmongering elites from the entire political spectrum, confronted over the time with an impossible zero-sum scenario bear a painful responsibility, including logistic and (broader) historic, in Ukraine's banderite revival. The current amateurish, chaotic, locally divisive ( "Ogien's" Podhale's - one of the remotest corners of Poland - tragedy used by the now disgraced Defense Minister Macierewicz as a political tool, another, "Bury's" case (5) being instrumentalised by the far right ONR and wreaking havoc in a particularly sensitive borderland community, all with tacit/explicit approval of the ruling PiS party ; both war criminals are in the process of being "rehabilitated" by the Polish official narrative and unsurprisingly employed by banderophiles in the 'what about'-type of the argument), adopting the extreme right discourse and deconstructing blow by blow the partially established, so far workable consensus the humongously problematic Polish memory politics adds symetrically only fuel to the regional fire. Poland, with few endemic exceptions ( Cold War epigones cozying up to the old networks, pan-nationalist flirt patners, pragmatic Polish Eastern policymakers ) appears to be deadlocked with Ukraine in a reciprocal, self-feeding, mutually agressive, reactive co-radical binome.
My own, emigré Pole's conclusion is that regardless of tribal connotations we must resent the Heldenkult, object of which are notorious war criminals, violent, totalitarian ideologues and other barbarians shoved down the throat of innocent, unsuspecting individuals and/or populations . I am a putrid cosmopolite who believes that nations are invented communities, artificial constructs based on mythologically attractive enough offer and following, usually to a different degree forced, agreement. I also believe it is a rational stance to adopt otherwise we head straight into the inevitable conflict of values, which at the core this is all about . I maintain that juxtaposing in one breath "Bandera streets" in Ukraine and "AK streets" in Poland (another favourite 'what about' - argument in the arsenal of neobanderite reasoning) is plain ludicrous, the two being in no way comparable. There exists no sufficient critical evidence to corroborate the thesis of Bandera's UPA – AK (6) equivalence; the mihrohistoric research, when possible, produces still more contradictory, confusing results and reveals an unconclusive picture of great complexity in respect to the nature of Bandera's UPA 'freedom fighting'. It is most reasonable to disagree that this kind of knowledge, providing there is one in the air, should be in any way ritualised, politically/ideologically hijacked and fetishised rather than simply collected, preserved and professionally interpreted. Idem for its lack, since it morphs into the same, equally ahistoric, anti-mnemonic, conditionally reflective, emotionally manipulative control tool and a tribal cohesion mechanism through the means of promotional branding/marketing tactics. Both former contradictory attitudes represent two entirely different paths for the informed, intellectually coherent reflection.
"Banderism is a secondary nationalism based on false memories" - Bohdan A. Oryshkevich (Facebook). Fascism is not a respectable, scholarly debatable idea but it amounts to a major cognitive disorder with disastrous socio-political and cultural implications to be rejected en bloc. Perhaps the time is ripe to move on and beyond Bandera. Move beyond Petlura, Bulak- Balachowicz, Polish ”Doomed Soldiers” as well (7).
Vampires of the past must vanish in the sunlight.
About the Author:
Jozef Kapustka is a Polish pianist, lives in Paris. He performed many times in Soviet/independent Ukraine and in Russia. His extracurricular interests range from Flemish tapestries to the contemporary Eastern European neo-Nazi problem. This text was written in response to Ukraine officially declaring 2019 the ”Stepan Bandera Year”.
Some of above events never took place and these stories never happened. Some of portrayed events/characters are the work of pure fiction and have been purposedly invented as such. Any by definition accidental resemblance with actual events and real life characters is unintended and fully coincidental. _______________________________________________________________ ________________
EXPLANATORY NOTES
(1) the image after L. Pauwels ”Le matin des magiciens”
(2) quote from the French film ”Le Boulet” , by T. Langmann
(3) influencial French leftist newspaper
(4) ukr. Halytchyna, nationalist stronghold region in Western Ukraine
(5) controversial WWII figures charged with war crimes committed against civilian populations/ethnic minorities
(6) Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Polish Home Army – WWII underground formations
(7) warlords and armed formations of the past credited with anti-Jewish attrocities.
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