When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to testify on issues of privacy on the internet before members of Congress most pundits suggested that the Facebook founder would be destroyed by his audience and questioners.
I however was certain that Zuckerberg would acquit himself very well and, in fact, I flippantly stated that after all he would be the smartest person in the room.
Well, smartest was although true, but perhaps not the exact terminology.
Zuckerberg was the most knowledgeable on the subject. For most in the audience he provided a lesson not only on social media, specifically the way it works, but on the overwhelming magnitude and reach of the internet.
In fact members of Congress, unfortunately, are not well-informed on most issues on which they opine, sometimes rule and even legislate. Their knowledge comes from staffers who brief them but who are often merely children or neophytes on subjects they address.
Such is the case with a recent letter to the U.S. Department of State by some 50 members of Congress which apparently originated in the office of Congressman Ro Khanna from California on “recent reports of state-sponsored Holocaust distortion and denial taking place in Europe, particularly in Poland and Ukraine.”
I will limit myself to the allegations set forth in that communication against Ukraine’s “de-communization laws” referred to as “memory laws” in the subject letter since the recent legislation in Poland regarding its Institute of National Memory blaming everybody but Poles for transgressions during World War II is deserving of opprobrium. The Ukrainian legislation of 2015 is entirely different in substance and purpose, but frankly, who among the congressional signees bothered to read the Ukrainian law?
The Ukrainian law attempts to relegate to the ash heap of history, a tragic period of time forced upon Ukrainians by numerous foreign oppressors as a result of which some 20 million Ukrainians perished. The law condemns both Communism and Nazism. No nation suffered more losses than the Ukrainians. They fought back forming clandestine and military formations. Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych whom the subject letter maligns by name were at the forefront of that liberation struggle which fought both the Nazis and Communists.
Neither Bandera or Shukhevych has been substantively accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity by any competent jurisdiction or tribunal other than Soviet. In fact Bandera was interned in a German concentration camp, two of his brothers were murdered by Polish men in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Shukhevych was even more blameless and, in fact, assisted his wife during the war in harboring a Jewish woman, providing her with forged documents.
There is so much more history to these men, their formations the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Contemporary Ukraine is only now learning its history as Soviet Russian disinformation served as the forced educational basis for seventy years.
Should Ukrainian streets and plazas bear the names of Ukrainian heroes and freedom fighters rather than Marx and Lenin? Of course they should and, frankly, those names and their history are way beyond the concern or knowledge of us Americans. The reaction in Ukraine to the subject letter is quite measured attributing it to ignorance. In fact Ukraine`s Institute of National Memory director simply dismissed the letter as a product of misleading lobbying and the ignorance of those being lobbied
I, however, as an American consider it hubris for us Americans to comment on another nation’ s history and heroes without studying the subject sufficiently. We simply do not have the right. Neither does anyone else unless he/she bothers to study and can support his position, and, even then, with some discretion taking into account the historical context.
Similarly Ukrainians do not have the right to protest the use of Ben Gurion’ s name in Israel since he was a Zionist revolutionary who abused the rights of the indigenous population on the territory of what is now Israel or condemn the father of our country George Washington as an extremis. After all he was a revolutionary, not to mention the draftsman of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson not only for his revolutionary extremist zeal, but also for holding slaves and sexually assaulting them.
If Jews, American or otherwise, have a problem with Bandera, Shukhevych, the OUN and the UPA or any other Ukrainian formation or leader I would refer them to the seminal Jewish book on the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews” or the record of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Neither carries an indictment of these people or formations. Ukrainian history will be written by Ukrainians as American by Americans.
April 27, 2018 Askold S. Lozynskyj
