The Success of Russia’s Propaganda: Ukraine’s ‘Banderovtsy’
...
After the Second World War, the term banderovtsy came to represent all forms of Ukrainian nationalism regardless of its ideological association with Bandera, or lack thereof, and became a commonplace descriptor of ‘anti-Soviet’ Ukrainians, who were portrayed in Soviet propaganda as fundamentally ultranationalist, extremist, and bourgeois.
According to Dr. Rory Finnin, senior lecturer in Ukrainian Studies and head of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, Bandera has historically served as a totem upon which different political actors have projected a variety of fears, ideas, and aspirations. “Ukrainian nationalists tend to view him as an uncompromising, unyielding agitator for independence; Russian nationalists, like Putin, see him as a fascist collaborator with Nazi Germany; Poles, meanwhile, hold him responsible for terroristic acts of ethnic cleansing against Polish communities in what is now western Ukraine, above all in Volhynia,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Globalist. It is the divisiveness of the historical figure that gives the term banderovets its currency in the present conflict.
...
Presently, the term appears predominantly in Russian state-sponsored propaganda and in pro-Russian-separatist campaigns to describe all western, patriotic Ukrainians supportive of nation-building and inclined towards increased cooperation with Europe. The term has been so widely applied that it is used indiscriminately to disparage a wide range of Ukrainian political parties, including democratic parties, whose rhetoric is, expectedly, not reminiscent of fascism or ethnicity-based discrimination.
...
“The consequences [of the use of the term banderovtsy] are the alienation of much of eastern Ukraine and parts of southern Ukraine from the government in Kyiv,” said Dr. Marples. Additionally, right-wing extremist rhetoric has inappropriately come to represent the full spectrum of Ukrainian politics and tainted the entire Ukrainian protest movement in the eyes of ordinary Russian people.
The effectiveness of Russian state-sponsored propaganda at inciting feelings of hatred, paranoia and victimisation is indisputable. Tangible results, such as the formation of ideological rifts within families split geographically between Russia/Eastern Ukraine and Western/Central Ukraine and the circulation of rumours of Ukrainian-organised crucifixions of Russian-speaking boys in Eastern Ukraine, serve as evidence of the tremendous effect that propaganda has had on people’s convictions.
With the goal of uniting people in fear and ensuring mass loyalty to the state in a time of crisis, an essential tactic of Russian-state propaganda has been the creation of a sense of confusion, even chaos, in the minds of the populace. One of the mechanisms by which this chaos is achieved is that of intellectual laziness, which is evidenced by the fact that the term banderovets is often misspelled and even mispronounced as the non-existent benderovets, which presumably derives from the surname of fictional con man Ostap Bender from the 1928 Soviet novel The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov. Another manifestation of this laziness is the fact that propagandist slurs consistently refer to Nazi collaborators and use the words Nazism and fascism synonymously.
Various ideas are circulated and used interchangeably, without being substantiated upon. The populace immediately develops an image of an enemy that is the amalgamation of everything that it has come to see as antagonistic, belligerent, and even immoral over a period of decades. At times ignorant of the nuances of each term, people do not sit down to think of whether any of these accusations might be irrelevant in the context of the modern political arena. For instance, can there logically be Nazi collaborators living in present-day Ukraine considering that there no longer exists a Nazi-led political entity to be collaborated with?
Furthermore, is it appropriate to use the terms fascist and Nazi interchangeably? Fascism is a political ideology advocating a totalitarian state and emphasising the formation of a society united in principles and ritual. Nazism is a subset of fascism that has added elements of racial purity and anti-Semitism. Fascism is not a subset of Nazism, by the same logic that not all rectangles are squares, though all squares are rectangles. Keeping these definitions in mind, what exactly can accusations of fascism and Nazism against the entire Western/Central Ukrainian population signify?
...
Dr. Finnin argues that it is civic nationalism, and not the ethnic nationalism that Bandera espoused, that has been the most decisive political force in Ukraine’s modern historical development. “Ukraine emerged as a sovereign state, because its most effective and persuasive activists conceived it as a multiethnic, multi-confessional country and co-opted Poles, Russian, Jews, Crimean Tatars into the national project,” he said. The predominant civic nationalist tradition in Ukraine, he added, is founded on the idea that one can become ‘Ukrainian’ regardless of ethnicity or faith or language. “Maidan was a powerful testament to this tradition: we need only think of the first protestor slain, the Armenian-Ukrainian Serhii Nihoyan.”
The only logical implication of the accusation banderovets is, therefore, that of being a nationalist. Once again, just as in Soviet times, the term is being used pejoratively to describe any Ukrainian supportive of his country’s political independence, regardless of his religious convictions and position on ethnic relations. It is in this practical context that the ambiguities inherent to the very definition of nationalism become problematic, begging the questions of what exactly it means to be a Ukrainian nationalist and whether nationalism in general is inherently morally questionable.
...
https://cambridgeglobalist.org/2015/01/ ... nderovtsy/ (29 January, 2015)
#Кадыров #Делимханов #Россия #Чечня #100летЧеченскойгосударственности
