In his Travels to Russia, French writer Marquis de Custine quotes a Russian civil servant proclaiming proudly: “RUSSIA LIES, DENIES THE FACTS, MAKES WAR ON THE EVIDENCE, AND WINS!” ...Ukraine was eventually conquered and occupied. Its religious and cultural treasures were pillaged and ensconced in Russian museums, to be marketed to a breathless, star-dazed world as Russia’s own. …On May 31, 1933, Gradenigo, the Italian consul in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv during the height of the man-made famine, reported to the Royal Italian Embassy in Moscow his discussion with a senior OGPU secret police officer who advised that 10-15 million starvation murders were required to tame, in the OGPU’s words, Ukraine’s “ethnographic material.” Not a nation. Not people. Not human beings. Just “ethnographic material.” Reporting further, Gradenigo said the government strived to ensure that “Russians would constitute the majority of the population” in certain regions of Ukraine, and thus assure that potential political difficulties would be removed. The Italian consul concluded: “However monstrous and incredible such a plan might appear, it should nevertheless be regarded as authentic and well underway…The current disaster will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer be able to speak of a Ukraine, or a Ukrainian people, and thus not even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.” It is the offal of that tectonic ethnic cleansing that underlies the “split” in Ukraine, mouthed with such obliviousness as to its cause. The murder rate was 25,000 civilians a day, or some 20% of Ukraine’s population. By comparison, the U.S. suffered 297 military deaths per day during WWII, accounting for 0.3% of its population. Is this the “common history” between the Kremlin and Kyiv that today the media and others put forth as underpinning Russia’s claims to Ukraine? ...Ukraine lost more than nine million of its population, the greatest human loss of any country in WWII, wrote English historian Norman Davies; more losses than the combined military losses of the United States, the British Commonwealth, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Italy. This was even more horrific than the comparison suggests, since more than half of Ukraine’s losses were civilians. An additional more than two million Ukrainians were deported as slave laborers to Germany. ...In 1935, English journalist Lancelot Lawton clarified the matter in the House of Commons, saying: “The deliberate policy of Russia was to avoid and discourage mention of Ukraine abroad. From the Middle Ages down to the eighteenth century Ukraine figured largely in European literature. But after the first half of the nineteenth century the West was made to forget that there was or had been such a nation…That so little has been heard of it is not surprising, for suppression of the Ukrainian nationality has been persistently accompanied by obliteration of the very word Ukraine, and concealment of the very existence of Ukrainians.” The theft of another country’s history and its essential disappearance has ensconced a larcenous litany. It has been fully absorbed, nurtured and then repeated with breathless conviction by all Western institutions, from elementary schools and Ivy universities, to CNN and FOX News, and to Congress and the White House.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 08:10:02 +0000
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