Big Bandera supporter?
Posted on 03/02/2014 9:12:40 AM PST by jimbo123
The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century.
Born in 1909, Bandera matured at a time when the cause of national self-determination had triumphed in much of eastern Europe, but not in Ukraine. The lands of today’s Ukraine had been divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy when World War I began, and were divided again between the new Soviet Union and newly independent Poland when the bloodshed ceased. The Soviets defeated one Ukrainian army, the Poles another. Ukrainians thus became the largest national minority in both the Soviet Union and Poland. With time, most Ukrainian political parties in Poland reconciled themselves to Polish statehood. The Ukrainian Military Organization, however, formed of Ukrainian veterans in Poland, followed the movement that sought to change the boundaries of Europe: fascism. With Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 in Italy, as their model, they mounted a number of failed assassination attempts on Polish politicians.
(Excerpt) Read more at nybooks.com ...
Big Putin supporter, are you?
To call Stepan Bandera - who was a U.S. ally in the cold war by the way - a fascist is nothing but a pro-communist smear.
Putin has quite the FR fan club, doesn’t he?
The Lviv pogrom of 1941
Although in April 1941 the Bandera faction of OUN had repudiated pogroms, it was obliged to revise its stand when Reinhard Heydrich explicitly called for such “self-cleansing actions” on June 17.
At that time, OUN was coordinating its military activities with the Germans. On June 25, Yaroslav Stetsko wrote to Stepan Bandera that OUN had “formed a militia to remove the Jews” (usuvaty zhydiv). A week later, on July 1, the pogrom took place.
The head of the OUN underground, Ivan Klymiv, issued leaflets that were affixed to walls in Lviv on July 1. One of them said that revolutionary tribunals would punish enemies of the Ukrainian movement, applying “family and national responsibility for crimes against the Ukrainian State and Ukrainian Army.” Another said: “Nation! Know! Moscow, Poland, Hungarians, Jews are your enemies. Destroy them.”
At this time, OUN was setting up its own Ukrainian state, heralded as a ”Ukraine for Ukrainians.”
The head of the OUN underground, Ivan Klymiv, issued leaflets that were affixed to walls in Lviv on July 1. One of them said that revolutionary tribunals would punish enemies of the Ukrainian movement, applying “family and national responsibility for crimes against the Ukrainian State and Ukrainian Army.” Another said: “Nation! Know! Moscow, Poland, Hungarians, Jews are your enemies. Destroy them.”
https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/the-lviv-pogrom-of-1941-83452.html
Pogroms were committed by all sorts of groups. That didn’t make Bandera a fascist. The largest Jewish civic group in Germany urged their members to vote for the Nazis at least in part because the Nazis wanted to shut down Jewish immigration to Germany and the German Jews thought they were better than those Eastern European Jews! I guess - using your logic - those German Jews were both fascists and anti-Jewish.
The Lviv pogrom pictured above was cheerfully conducted by Bandera and his followers. But you knew that already.
Let’s say that’s true: still doesn’t make him a fascist. Anti-semiticism was common in Eastern Europe in the 1940s and Jews were always believed to be associated with Communists. They were treated horribly. None of that makes anybody a fascist. Jews were sometimes fascists - such as Aldo Finzi.
Ukraine Jews Hunker Down Amid Turmoil
With Revolution and Chaos Comes Danger of Anti-Semitism
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/193384/ukraine-jews-hunker-down-amid-turmoil/#ixzz2upzxihHX
“It’s still a very fluid situation,” said Mark Levin, chairman of the NCSJ, an American organization that advocates for Jews in the former Soviet Union. “The big concern, I think, is ensuring that there’s adequate security for Jewish institutions throughout the country, but particularly in the large cities. And I think that’s where much of the focus within the American Jewish community and Israel lies – that and making sure the flow of services continues.”
Levin also expressed concern that with elections slated for May 25, a future government could result in ultranationalists gaining power in Ukraine. Svoboda, a right-wing nationalist party, was prominent in the protest movement, and party officials have expressed virulently anti-Semitic sentiments.
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/193384/ukraine-jews-hunker-down-amid-turmoil/#ixzz2uq079fHG
http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/1.577114 Not all is gloom and doom for Jews.
Who cares what his political ideology was, the guy was a pig, who murdered Poles, Jews and Russians, many of them children.
Thank you for that. I haven’t looked at Haaretz lately because it’s the Israeli equivalent of the NYT but that was interesting.
“Who cares what his political ideology was, the guy was a pig, who murdered Poles, Jews and Russians, many of them children.”
He may have - although he was in prison when much of the massacres happened so I have no idea what he was and was not responsible for. And yet the Americans considered him a friend even after those massacres. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Bandera was anti-communist. To smear Ukranian patriots by parroting Soviet propaganda about a freedom fighter who was murdered by Russia over 50 years ago shows you to be a pro-Soviet tool. Obama would be proud of you. Go ahead, call me a “Nazi”. It’s about all you have left.
Partisans are rarely angels, if ever. Try to live in the present, if you can.
Sorry, some things I'll never forgive, these were Polish children murdered by Bandera's thugs.
Proof? Maybe they’re German children murdered by the Red Army.
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