Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And for me, the question is not whether the Ukraine has it, but why even in the conditions of the war, the radical nationalism and extremism and white supremacist is such a marginal force, when in the countries that are not at the war, This is, you look at France, you look at, again, it's not exactly Nazism, but really right, radical right is becoming so important.
Why Ukraine in the conditions of the war is the country that manages relations between different ethnic groups and languages in the way that strengthens political nation. So for me as a scholar and a researcher, what I see is that in Ukraine, the influence of the far right in different variations is much lower than it is among some of Ukraine's neighbors and in Europe in general.
The question is why. I don't know. I have guesses. I don't know the answer, but that's the question that I think is interesting to answer. How Ukraine ended up to be the only country in the world outside of Israel who has a Jewish president who is, my understanding is, a The most popular president in history in terms of how long his popularity goes after the election.
So these are really, from my point of view, interesting questions. And again, we can certainly debate that.
So no nationalist or nationalistic party actually crossed the barrier to get into the parliament. So Ukraine is the country where there is no right or far right in the parliament. We can't say that about Germany. We can't say that about France. So that's just one more way to stress this unique place of Ukraine in that sense. And the year 2018 is the year already of the war.
The war started in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimea. The front line was near Donbas. All these groups were fighting there. So Ukraine, maybe not to a degree that it is now, was already on the war footing, and yet Yet, the right party couldn't get more than 2%. That's the question that I have in mind.
Yes, the war, historically, of course, puts forward and makes the more nationalist views and forces turn them from marginal forces into more central ones. We talked about Bandera, and we talked about Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. They were the most marginal group in the political spectrum in Ukraine in the 1930s that one can only imagine. But World War II comes.
And they become the most central group because they also were from the start go. They had the organization. The violence was basically one of their means. They knew how to fight. So historically, wars indeed produce those results. So we are looking at Ukraine. We are trying to see what is happening there.
Denazification is the trope that is accepted quite well by the by the former Soviet population and Russian population in particular. The most powerful Soviet mythology that then was basically passed as part of heritage to the Russian Federation was World War II, was fighting against fascism.
So once you use terms fascism and Nazi and denazification, suddenly people not just start listening, they just stop analyzing. As a propaganda tool, this is, of course, a very powerful tool. In terms of to what degree this is the real goal or not, we discussed the importance of the far right in Europe and in Ukraine.
If that's the real goal of the war, probably the war would have to start not against Ukraine, but probably against France or some other country if you take this at face value.
I would say this is broader. The war that started under the banner that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people and produces that sort of casualty really goes against also any sort of logical thinking. But Russia is a place where the free press doesn't exist already for a long period of time. Russia is the place where there is an echo chamber to a degree.
As war started first in 2014 and then all-out war in 2022, I came across a lot of people on the personal level but also in the media reporting that they really can't find common language with their close relatives in Russia. people who visited Ukraine who know that it is not taken over by nationalists and is not taken over by Nazis.
But the media around them, the neighbors around them, the people at their work basically say one and the same thing. And we as humans in general, whatever our background, we are very, very, our mind is really, it's relatively easy to manipulate it.
And to a degree that even family connections and even family ties don't sometimes help to maintain that ability to think and to analyze on your own, to look at the facts.
Yes. What happened during World War II was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower, They created sort of foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans, they were created for fighting on the battleground. Because they were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted.
So they were put under the command of Henry Himmler, under command of SS, and became known as SS Waffen Units. And one of such unions was created in Ukraine with great difficulties because Nazis didn't consider Slavs to be generally worthy of even that sort of foreign legion formations.
But they made an exception because those people were coming from Galicia, which was part of Austria-Hungary, which means part of Austria, which means somehow were open to the benevolent influence of the Germanic race, and called the division Galicia. Part of Ukrainian youth joined the division. One of the explanations was that they were looking at the experience of World War I.
and seeing that the Ukrainian units in the Austrian army then played a very important role in the fight for independence. That is one of the explanations. You can't just use one explanation to describe motivations of everyone and every single person who was joining there. They were sent to the front. They were defeated within a few short days by the Red Army.
And then were retreating through Slovakia, where they were used to fight with the partisan movement there, and eventually surrendered to the British. So that's the story. You can personally maybe understand what the good motivations were of this person or that person. But that is at the best one of the very tragic and unfortunate pages in Ukrainian history.
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