ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY: By Oleksandr Kramarenko
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tue, February 13, 2007

LUHANSK - Our post-genocidal society is by definition a community of morally deformed people from all walks of life -- from ordinary citizens to government officials.

The vast majority of the former cannot imagine a life without bribes, while the latter consider their high offices exclusively as a method of personal enrichment. The root cause of these moral and ethical perversions lies in the specific consequences of our national tragedy, the Holodomor.

Unlike the Holocaust and the Armenian Massacre, the 1932-1933 manmade famine embraced the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian ethnos that was not yet Russified by imperial urbanization.

The main distinction of the Holodomor from all other historical genocides is that about one-half of its victims, who had experienced all the horrors and sufferings of the famine, survived.

This was the basic aim of the Kremlin's engineers of the Holodomor, who were banking on those very peasants who had survived and, as a result of their protracted torture by famine, completely lost their Christian morality and national identity.

For the rest of their lives those people had a visceral fear of starving to death. They also remembered well that the Bolshevik commissars had exposed them to those infernal ordeals simply because of their probity, high morality, and Ukrainian soul.

The commissars only strengthened their grip on power after the Holodomor. This is why peasants brought up their children in such a way that they would never again irk the government with their nationalism, inner freedom, and honesty.

Naturally, when the children of the people who were maimed by the famine were raising their own progeny, they had no alternatives.

Those children and grandchildren flooded into the cities during Soviet industrialization and eventually became our contemporaries: academics, journalists, artists, judges, politicians, parliamentarians, officials, political scientists, and even presidents.

The society they have built in independent Ukraine is causing subdued mirth in the rest of the civilized world, which does no credit to it because if it were a highly moral world, it would be weeping bitter tears, looking at our genocide-disfigured society.

Ukraine recently marked the 89th anniversary of the battle of Kruty. Like before, everything boiled down to extolling only the heroic feat of 300 young people.

Some of our hurrah-patriots went so far as to compare those youths with the Three Hundred Spartans. Is this ignorance or eyewash?

The historical facts attest to something quite different, to put it mildly. There was no battle of Kruty: there was a massacre of Ukrainian youths by Russian sailors under the command of the Bolshevik Mikhail Muravev.

Most of those hapless boys died not during the combat action but afterwards, when the Bolsheviks first tortured them in a way humiliating to their manly pride and then shot them.

This fact by no means belittles the young Ukrainians' exploit, but it is an eyesore to our jingoists in power, who are very reluctant to tell our demoralized society the names of those who are really to blame for the Kruty tragedy because some of them are being turned into national heroes.

These are the Ukrainian National Republic's socialist leaders Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who disbanded the Ukrainian Army in the naive belief that the Russian Bolsheviks would not be hostile to the young "fraternal" republic.

There was also Pavlo Skoropadsky, who agreed to fight Bolshevism only under the leadership of foreign armies. It is no accident that the historical truth is being hushed up.

Today, the political descendants of Hrushevsky have in fact ruined the Ukrainian Armed Forces without obtaining any guarantees of our independence from either NATO or the US.

So Kruty-2 is now just a matter of time, although it looks like Russia will do it this time without direct aggression.

As for our national heroes and heroines, the situation is truly disgraceful. Only a gravely ill nation can take pride in such a person as Roksolana, ascribing to her the virtues that she never had.

Historical facts indicate that when she became the Turkish sultan's first lady, she pursued a tough policy exclusively in the interests of the Ottoman Empire, which did not include Ukraine.

With this in view, it is hard to imagine that a similar Roksolana could be considered a heroine in, say, Poland or Russia. But this is possible in a society morally crippled by the Holodomor.

These examples make it absolutely clear why our public opinion almost unanimously opposes lustration, why the vast majority does not recognize the right of OUN and UPA combatants to veterans' benefits, and sees no sense in Ukraine's accession to NATO.

The worst thing is that since the death of James Mace there is no one to properly diagnose our society, let alone cure it.

---------------------------------------------------
LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/177128/
---------------------------------------------------