Motyl: On nationalism and fascism, Part 3

These reflections suggest that the most useful way of conceptualizing the interwar Organization of Ukrainian Nationalism (OUN) is as a nationalist movement with a nationalist ideology along the lines described above. In turn, this means that the OUN is most usefully compared to other nationalist movements that aspired to national liberation and the creation of nation-states (such as the American revolutionaries of 1776, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Algerian National Liberation Front, the Irish Republican Army, the interwar Croatian Ustasha, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Haganah in the British Mandate of Palestine, to name just a few) and not to fascist regimes or to fascist movements (such as Italian fascism, Nazism, the Polish Falanga, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the like). This is not to say that individual members of the OUN or individual planks of the OUN’s constantly changing ideology were not, or could not have been, fascist, but it is to say that to focus on these fragmentary fascist elements is, first, to mistake the part for the whole and therefore to misunderstand the OUN; second and much worse, to misunderstand both fascism and nationalism; and, third and worst of all, to engage in conceptual nonsense.