Holodomor victims commemorated on whole territory of independent Ukraine from east to west

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KYIV, November 22 /UKRINFORM/. Victims of Holodomor 1932-1933 were commemorated on the whole territory of Ukraine from the east to the west. A mourning meeting in memory of Holodomor victims was held in Donetsk. The meeting took place nearby the monument to the victims of political repressions. In the evening residents of Donetsk and Donetsk region will light candles of memory within the All-Ukrainian action Light the Candle.

Within the events on celebration of the 75th anniversary of Holodomor 1932-1933 the 33 Minutes action was held in Luhansk. The action started on September 6 and has already taken place in 90 settlements of Luhansk region. Participating in the action were about 0.5 million people including students of all higher educational establishments of Luhansk region, activists of regional centers of youth organizations.

“The criterion of the scale of the tragedy is not only in figures but in the ability of everyone to perceive the grief of others as one’s own. The globality of the catastrophe may be realized through the shock depth of everyone who considers oneself a human,” head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration Oleksandr Antipov underscored at the action.

He also noted that a large-scale work is being held in Luhansk region on commemoration of people who died because of Holodomor. Over 400 expedition search groups are involved in establishment of names of Holodomor victims.

The service in memory of victims of the Great Famine was held in Izmail (Odesa region, South Ukraine). At 3 p.m. a candle march Light the Candle took place. In the square, in front of the orthodox church of the Ukrainian Near-Danube region a city action 33 Minutes was held as well as the service commemorating the victims of Holodomor 1932-1933.

At 4 p.m. together with the rest of the country Izamil took a moment of silence. Vehicles gave signals and city enterprises turned on sirens. The evening-requiem Black Wings of Holodomor will take place in the local cultural center.

A book of memory Holodomor 1932-1933 in Zhytomyr was presented on November 22 within the 75th anniversary of Holodomor in Ukraine in the premises of the city council. The book commemorates over 8 thousand Zhytomyr residents who died in 1932-1933.

A prayer has been served at the St. Nicholas Cathedral for the Holodomor victims in Mykolayiv (South Ukraine). At the regional Art Museum and at the regional state archives special exhibitions are held “Bells of Memory” of the artistic-documentary character and consisting of archive documents telling about the history of three holodomors in Mykolayiv region, of which the famine of 1932-1933 was the cruelest. According to tentative data of scientists, during the Holodomor 1932-1933 over 400 thousand persons died in the region. 127 villages have disappeared from the map of Mykolayiv region.

The day of memory in Ternopil region started with mourning ceremonies in the churches of cities and villages. The palmers remembered those who went through hell being alive and asked grace for them in another world. At the end of the day, a performance Tears of the God’s Mother will be held in the Regional Academic Ukrainian Drama Theater named after Taras Shevchenko. The performance was stages by the novel of Ulas Samchuk Maria.

There was no famine in Zakarpattia region (West Ukraine) in 1932-1933. At those times the region was included in the present Czech Republic. But being deeply imbued with a sense of the single family, the mountaineers shared grief of all Ukrainian people during meetings and other events and called on doing everything not to make horrors of Holodomor happen again, not to make millions of daughters and sons of Ukraine die from famine.

According to various estimates, the artificial famine organized by the communist totalitarian regime in Ukraine due to seizure of foodstuffs in early 30s of the last century killed 7-10 million Ukrainian residents including about 4 million children which made 25% population at those times.
 
This monstrous genocide is the warning to the humanity.
The warning against intolerance , against exterminism , the warning against inhuman ideology.
The Holodomor is indeed the wound in Ukraine’s heart.
The painful wound which never will be cured.
The genocide against Ukrainian nation must be acknowledged and recognized by the worlds community and must be acknowledged and recognized in all the countries all over the world.
 
Holod 1933

Memory of such horror should be what unites Russian people and Ukrainian people. There is no evidence in any document from Stalin government that this was intended as genocide against Ukrainian people as is now being told by Nasha Ukraina politicians. Holod was a death famine which spread as far as Western Siberia killing 5 million Russians. Direct result of Stalin plans to industralize. Therefore, very tragic that Georgia president M. Saakashvilli when he is in Kyiv is blaming “Russian people” for famine and not mentioning his fellow country man Iosip Vissarionovich who was direct and only cause of Holod.
 
Its not about the guilt of Russians , its not about the guilt of the Jews - its about the guilt of the system.
The inhuman system is guilty.
 
I have got some articles about this topic in order to inform the reader.

James Mace And His Mission

by Oxana Pachlowska,
University of Rome La Sapienza
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

It is awful when you have to say about a close friend whose loss has left lifelong pain, “It is a good thing that he left this world without seeing
this.”

That is what I told myself on Nov. 28, 2006, after the Verkhovna Rada passed the law on the Holodomor. Yes, they passed the law but in a way that stigmatized both individual MPs and the entire nation.

Mace departed from this life without witnessing this disgrace. He died before Ukraine’s ruling political force acknowledged itself-through its de facto refusal to vote-as the legal successor to the authors of the Great Terror, the culprits who tried to destroy Ukraine.

The voting clarified Mace’s idea that Ukrainian society is post-genocidal. What did he mean by this designation? He had in mind precisely a
post-genocidal society rather than a post-colonial one, as some researchers maintain. After all, post-colonial societies typically had civilized colonizers.

Post-colonial India has embarked on a democratic course and is turning into an economic colossus. Even the Republic of South Africa, despite the former system of apartheid, is freeing itself from the shackles of colonialism and gaining economic weight. Civilized parent states had the courage to relinquish their colonies at an opportune time and treat them as equals.

However, this is not the case with Ukraine. Unlike civilized parent states, Ukraine’s colonizer never thought of relinquishing its conquered territories. On the contrary, the more it agonizes, the deeper it digs its claws into countries, regions, and entire geopolitical areas. The claws being “fraternal,” this kind of colonialism is not likely soon to become
post-colonialism.

Perhaps this is why the visible colonial heritage in Ukraine is “diffused” in the post-genocidal heritage, often invisible but nevertheless constantly present, and not only in society’s psychology but also in the stimuli, complexes, and nightmares of its psyche.

Mace left us a tragic thought that will take us a long time to reflect on. For years to come, its purport will remain a painful and hidden nerve of our history.

The paradigmatic approach requires that the Holodomor be considered together with two other cases of 20th-century genocide within the span of Christian civilization-the Armenian and Jewish genocides. In addition to the countless
political and economic causes of these two genocides, there were also cultural factors. It was not simply a matter of one nation destroying another.

Rather, these were different ways of destroying Christian civilization. In the case of the Armenian genocide, Muslim fundamentalism was the destructive mechanism. In the case of the Holocaust, an atheistic monster that had
renounced God destroyed a nation that was the historical and cultural cradle of Christian civilization and on whose territory the Christian God was born.

The Holodomor was similar in this respect: the anti-Christian world destroyed the world of Christianity. The newly-created political Moloch
fought against God. Ruining and profaning temples, it destroyed a civilization that was the last Christian stronghold on the already immeasurable expanse of nihilistic Bolshevik barbarism.

Until this day the wound inflicted by the Armenian and Jewish genocides on these nations remains incurable. These tragedies became the new starting point for their history.

It is generally accepted that the Holocaust as genocide cannot be compared to any other genocide. Is this correct? I don’t know. I say frankly: I don’t know. Perhaps those who insist on the Holocaust’s uniqueness have a point.
But equally unique is the Holodomor, even though this genocide was also conducted in the same eschatological vein of Endlosung, or Final Solution. The only difference was that the Holocaust was an act by killers with unconcealed intentions. Germans were true to their meticulousness even here-they had developed both theoretical and practical foundations for this genocide.

In contrast to this, the Holodomor was more of a hallucinatory project accompanied by rhetoric about the friendship of fraternal nations and other clichés produced by the ideological schizophrenia of Russian communism.

In the former case it was all about the Aryan race; in the latter, about the Soviet people as the final product of this criminal social engineering. In fact, there is no difference here: in both cases all those who did not conform to the corresponding paradigm were destroyed.

These two national catastrophes are clearly unique but from two different perspectives. To the Jewish people the tragedy of the Holocaust became the unifying energy needed for self-understanding, strengthening their identity,
and for a new perception of their place and significance in the world.

The Holocaust also became an overwhelming moral shakeup for the whole world and, above all, for Europe. In the postwar period, Europe developed the concept of genocide and posed the question of its own collective responsibility for this crime. For the first time a crime against one people was interpreted as a crime against the entire human race.
 
This idea became the foundation of a new ethos for both people and 20th-century historical science. The scope of the problem is not restricted to Hitler and Nazism, which became the epitome of extreme inhumanity. This
conversion of the human being into a beast was condoned by all those who connived at what was taking place and abetted the crime by means of their consent, cooperation, and silence.

The world was forced to admit that one nation’s tragedy should not be restricted to its own history. Rather, only humanity’s collective memory of the tragedy can guarantee that it will never again be repeated.

This is the origin of Europe’s atonement for wronging the Jewish people-moral atonement that has spanned decades. Germany’s path to a
democratic state began with the recognition of the crime it had committed, its detailed recording, and constant, incessant, and dramatic atonement, both individual and collective.

This is the kind of atonement that pervades every day and every minute-German television channels regularly air programs on the history and analysis of the Holocaust. Europe is also atoning financially. Jews were finally given an opportunity to have their own state. For decades Germany has been paying astronomical sums to the descendants of the six million murdered Jews.

Of course, awareness of the Holocaust was an indicator that postwar Europe had reached democratic maturity. But this understanding was achieved because the Jewish community was able to organize and structure its protest,
self-protection, and, finally, its demand for atonement.

This is what happens when a nation has self-respect. This nation’s drama becomes the moral standard for the conscience of the entire human race.

For the Jews the tragedy of the Holocaust became a protective wall of their memory and a symbol of courage, endurance, indestructibility, and immortality. I remember the November 2005 demonstration in Rome in protest against the threats of Iran’s president to destroy Israel. After all the official speeches in front of Iran’s embassy, in the glow of streetlights and the rustle of plane trees, an orchestra began playing Jewish tunes.

A pair of young Jewish sweethearts suddenly began dancing to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” Among the spellbound people and in front of journalists’ cameras, they danced with such passion and obliviousness that it was clear:
they were a thousand years old- and this was just the beginning.

In Europe awareness of the Holocaust became a moral standard of democracy and a mandatory pass to the civilized world. At a Ukrainian studies conference held in Italy, a well-known Slavist from Israel said that the
attitude of post-Soviet Ukraine to Jews will be its passport to the circle of civilized countries.

It is hard to disagree with this statement. But then an interesting question arises: to what world can Ukrainians’ attitude to their own nation and tragedies be a passport? It is probably a passport to the anti-world or, in
simple terms, to that part of the jungle where no passports are needed and where history begins in the morning and ends in the evening. This is why it is simply redundant.
 
This jungle is not as distant as one may think-government palaces are thick with jungles. If the huge numbers of published (finally!) and reprinted documentary evidence cannot help our MPs, or “people’s deputies” as they are called, to recognize the deaths of millions of our compatriots as genocide (and thus, a crime against humanity), then they do not consider Ukrainian society, which includes their own electorate, part of humanity.

Unlike the Holocaust, the Holodomor was one of the main factors that led to Ukraine’s loss of identity and rendered society’s consolidation impossible. Postwar Europe wrote the history of its catastrophes. Once again the postwar USSR falsified history.
The Holodomor was one of the top-secret topics in this history.

Therefore, having lost its past for the umpteenth time, Ukraine turned out to be incapable of implementing its design for the future.

Hitler sought to wipe out the Jews precisely as a nation because they were scattered all over Europe, without a state or territory of their own. Stalin also wanted to annihilate Ukrainians as a nation but this nation had its own country and land. Hitler wanted to destroy the Jewish culture, but the Biblical people had a culture that was spread all over the world and knew how to preserve it.

In contrast to this, both past and contemporary Ukrainian culture was contained in Ukraine. Therefore, parallel to the Holodomor, Stalin destroyed the temples and books of the past as well as Ukraine’s cultural, artistic, and scholarly elite of the time.

The main idea of the Holodomor was to turn Ukraine into a non-Ukrainian republic, and with time-into an anti-Ukrainian entity.

As we can see, Stalin’s project succeeded. Accomplished only halfway, it nonetheless succeeded. Stalin changed the genetic code of our nation.
 
It was not by accident that Ukraine was the arena of these events-Ukraine was the second most rebellious part of the Russian empire (surpassed only by Poland) and the most recalcitrant one in the Soviet empire. The Moloch of the Stalinist empire suppressed this resistance in an unprecedented sadistic
and cynical way.

It did not kill directly, as was the case during the Holocaust, when a person was at least able to oppose the killers or die with dignity. Russia
killed Ukraine by turning people into vegetative beings, reducing them to an animal-like existence, and making them incapable of resistance, opposition, and moral choice.

Vassily Grossman’s novel Forever Flowing describes the wailing of people in Ukrainian villages. People could not walk; they were only able to crawl to the nearest train station, where this was possible, hoping for some merciful
hand to throw a piece of bread to them. The windows in Odesa-Kyiv trains were then boarded up.

In keeping with the law “on five ears of grain,” women and mothers were shot right in the fields if they were caught picking a few ears of grain for their dying children. And all this took place in the “breadbasket of Europe.”

It was the Holodomor that exposed the Russian world’s total contempt for the human being as such, for fundamental human feelings, and for any moral dimension of human existence. Also uncovered was its pathological hatred of so-called fraternal Ukraine.

Together with people’s lives, the Holodomor took away the feeling of home and the sense and culture of work. But above all, it destroyed love for the and that was transformed from a life-giving resource into a boundless grave devouring both the dead and the living, stirred by their groans, and devouring new lives over and over again.

Instead of human feelings, society was overcome with fear-total, abject fear of being oneself, speaking one’s mother tongue, and remembering one’s dead.

It was the fear of existing. Since Stalinist times Ukrainian society has been paralyzed by the fear of existing.

This led to the abyss of non-presence, non-work, and non-morals. This also caused the greediness of some and the willingness for a half- starved existence and constant poverty of others. As long as they leave us alone, as
long as they don’t torment us. What freedom? What democracy? " We will endure." Having endured the Holocaust, we can endure anything in this world.

This is also where the rejection of our own culture stems from. It has remained in our genome: the sentence for being part of this culture is death.
 
Fear is the only and total legacy that the System left to Ukrainian society. This humiliating heritage is being passed down from generation to generation. It erodes language, dignity, and memory in people. It erodes the human being in people.

This type of society is easy to rule. This society can get only one kind of government for itself-the government of thieves, cynics, and plain
criminals.

The Holodomor destroyed not only a century-long supply of the country’s demographic and economic resources but also the Ukrainian rural cosmos in its cultural, linguistic, and philosophical continuity and, most importantly, its thousand-year-long ethos of Ukraine’s relationship with the earth.

The Ukrainian peasant would not put a loaf of bread on the table upside down-you were not allowed to offend bread because it was given by God. The one who managed to wipe from the face of the earth this rural world that tended its God-given land was then able to lay waste to this land with the help of Chornobyl and bury it under tons of radioactive waste.

Midas, the king of death: whatever he touches turns into death.

Who else besides the descendants of this collective Barbarian would be able to loot the country the way they have done today? Who would be able to force millions of people abroad in search of some humiliating way to earn some money for the same piece of bread that was confiscated in the 1930s?

Who would be able to let grain rot in ports and then throw it into the Black Sea? Who would be able to yield to Russia the security and independence of the country-piece by piece, on a regular basis? Who would laugh in the face
of his own electorate?

One state official was recently quoted by The Ukrainian Truth on Feb. 9, 2007, as saying in his garbled mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, “Why don’t I hear applause, I wonder?..Somehow I don’t see joy… on your faces.”

Today we see this post-genocidal anti-Ukraine on every corner, once again mainly in the ruling circles. This anti-Ukraine is robbing the state in
broad daylight. It is humiliating society, trampling on its graves, and continuing the policy of Russification.

It calls intelligentsia a “narrow stratum” - a glaring Freudian slip, an acknowledgement of one’s own post- Soviet descent: where were intellectuals a stratum doomed to destruction if not during the orgy of the lumpenproletariat called the USSR?

This anti- Ukraine will do its utmost to prevent the state from taking a single step toward Europe and keep it in the gray zone of geopolitical non-existence- the only way to have a few more years for its final despoilment.

Here is a picture of post-genocidal society in one isolated region- Kharkiv oblast. When all of two MPs from the Party of Regions voted for the Law on the Holodomor, Yevhen Kushnariov, one of the party’s leaders, in an interview with Radio Liberty magnanimously promised that the party would not discipline the MPs. “For now this will have no consequences,” he said (Dec.
9, 2006, www.pravda.com.ua)).

In November 2006 in Kharkiv oblast, which was happy about Russian obtaining the status of “regional” language, not one local government official attended the official ceremony to commemorate the Holodomor victims. The
proceedings took place at the Ukrainian-Polish Memorial and near the Cross to the Holodomor Victims. But 30,000 people came to Kushnariov’s funeral.

Fact file: during three months of 1933, over 600,000 people died in Kharkiv oblast. The total mortality count reached 2,000,000-one-third of all peasants in the region. As can be seen from archival photographs, peasants died on the city’s central street. Every morning their bodies were dumped into suburban ravines. Every evening the streets were covered with new
corpses.

Kharkiv was then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, so historians call the city in that period “the capital of despair.”
 
These things occurred during the Postyshev terror. Some streets in Kharkiv are still named after the bosses of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who carried out the genocide. Naturally, the city has a Postyshev Prospekt.

It was in Kharkiv, in 1933, that Mykola Khvylovy shot himself. He understood that he was doomed and that Ukraine was destined for this bloody massacre. At the cost of his own life Khvylovy sent a warning. By this one pistol shot
he put a period on the final page of the brilliant and tragic Executed Renaissance.

I can add one more thing: it is good that Mace did not live to see the day when a member of the Communist cadre was appointed director of Ukraine’s historical archives. He would feel hurt. As a person who loved Ukraine so much, he would feel ashamed of the country.

However, as a scholar he would receive full satisfaction: his uncanny thesis about our post-genocidal society has found complete confirmation.

To be a post-genocidal society means to have no memory. It means to have one’s memory in the off position. A society that has been destroyed this way is a lobotomized society. The part of society that managed to withstand the lobotomy does not possess sufficient psychological power and physical strength to push aside this necrotic mass of stifled brain that is pressing down and choking the living brain with its dead weight.

Mace was a scholar. He worked with facts and figures. He gave them rational explanations. But I have always had the feeling that he came to this culture because he had been called by the dead. Probably because they still have not
been buried-for they have not been mourned, and because they have been forgotten.

He heard their voices. He heard them from afar, from a distant country and a different continent. He learned their language. While despicable servants of the System, barely able to stick a few insincere Ukrainian words into their
defective mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, were sneering at his accent, Jim rolled his American “r” in the language of the dead who had called him, and he talked with them freely.

Mace was opposed to any form of contempt for man. This was the algorithm of his intellectual opposition to any manifestations of totalitarianism. In this he was a true son of the finest democratic America that is built on the
spiritual heritage of Washington and Lincoln.

He had such an acute and passionate sense of justice and honesty that it seemed to have burned him from the inside. It was this feeling that brought him to Ukraine-a country that became, possibly like no other country in the
world, a victim of permanent injustice and unfair treatment.

In many countries, involvement in the Holocaust entails criminal responsibility. France is planning to make denial of the Armenian genocide a crime. One of the categorical conditions for Turkey’s accession to the EU is
its acknowledgement of this genocide.

What we hear from the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine even now is “the so-called genocide” and “Mace, the Holodomor dreamer.”

Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine are choked by a noose of streets bearing the names of its persecutors. Monuments to persecutors stand in all Ukrainian cities.

Therefore, it is difficult to hope that a country like this will be reckoned with in the world. Russia understands only the language of force-contemporary official Ukraine can only speak to Russia from the position of weakness and meekness. Europe understands the language of
self-respect. For today’s official Ukraine this is a profoundly foreign word that it does not know how to translate into its political doublespeak.
 
Official Ukraine, as it is today, i.e., lobotomized, will hardly find money in the state budget for a Holodomor Memorial or for the Institute of National Memory. It is erecting monuments to falsifiers of the elections rather than to scholars who are restoring its history from the abyss of
oblivion.

This kind of Ukraine finds millions of dollars for idiotic pre-election advertising and none for the publication of Mace’s works. This is all the more deplorable when we recall that Mace did not write exclusively about the Holodomor-he researched the history of 20th-century Ukraine.

To publish his works means to make public a whole array of skeletons in the Russian-Ukrainian political closet. In 1983 Mace published a book in the US on the destruction of national communism in Ukraine. He wrote merciless articles on the political nature of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Some of his results appear prophetic today. For example, Mace wrote about the drama of Ukrainian socialism. “For better or worse, in 20th-century Ukraine socialism was the most influential ideology.” This is the opening
statement in a chapter of his book entitled Ukrainian Statehood in the 20th Century (published in 1996).

Whereas the beginnings of Ukrainian socialism are associated with such prominent figures as Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, in its present stage it features names one feels ashamed even to pronounce in this series.

One can only say, “Jim, unfortunately, the most influential ideology in Ukraine was indeed socialism!” The idealistic socialism of its first
adherent was a significant obstacle in the construction of the Ukrainian state.

Further degeneration of this socialism and its fall from the level of the European tradition to negotiations in the flea market of post-Soviet
politics have proved the political and moral fiasco of this ideology in the history of Ukrainian statehood.

Mace’s paper at the Kharkiv congress of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies in 1996 was entitled “The Sociogenetic Legacy of the Genocide and Totalitarianism in Ukraine and Ways to Overcome It.”

Mace was fully aware that the genocide-produced pathological deviations in Ukraine were proportional to the eschatological dimensions of the genocide itself. They are difficult to eradicate because genocide derives its name from its undermining effect on the foundation of a nation’s gene pool.

Mace opened up before Ukrainian society the book of its Apocalypse and read this Black Book aloud. But society did not really hear him because the areas of its collective brain that are responsible for self- preservation, self-protection, and survival had been neutralized and lobotomized.

On Nov. 26, as you light a candle to commemorate the tens of millions of Ukrainians who were killed only because they had grown crops from time immemorial, just look out of your window. You will see candles lit here and
there. Otherwise-the shimmer of TV screens blasting local or Russian pop music.

It is difficult to say whether society will remain in this vegetative state. Together with his fellow Ukrainian historians, Mace did everything possible to revive the nerve tissue of the Ukrainian nation’s brain-in order to make it send signals, to make memory work, and to help society restore its will to live.

Whether the national brain will indeed start working is not under Mace’s control. It is up to Ukrainian society-and Russian society, for that matter. Russia became the self-appointed heir of the gold and diamond funds of the USSR. It will become a civilized state only when it has recognized that it is also the heir of the bloody fund of the USSR.

Many offensive remarks about Mace have been voiced from the rostrum of the post-Soviet Verkhovna Rada. Looking at parliament we mostly see crowds of vicious political corpses with glassy eyes.

Jim, however, is strangely alive. Perhaps he was privy to some kind of mysticism, as were his ancient Indian ancestors. Maybe he knew the mystery of overcoming death because everything that he occupied himself with was
tragedy. But he was rarely seen without a smile.

Even when he was resentful, with good reason, he exuded a powerful energy of good will and inexplicable optimism that he alone possessed. Jim seemed to believe, despite all indications to the contrary, that common sense would
prevail and man would overcome human-generated absurdities and phantoms.

I believe that all of us who in some way collaborated with Jim will always measure our history by his work, his love for Ukraine, and his intellectual integrity. Most importantly, we will refer to his deep conviction that Ukraine is a nation of astonishing vitality and that one day it will get over its post-genocidal legacy and become a conscious, noble, and orderly European country - a country respected in the world, in particular because it has self-respect.
 
Official Ukraine, as it is today, i.e., lobotomized, will hardly find money in the state budget for a Holodomor Memorial or for the Institute of National Memory. It is erecting monuments to falsifiers of the elections rather than to scholars who are restoring its history from the abyss of
oblivion.

This kind of Ukraine finds millions of dollars for idiotic pre-election advertising and none for the publication of Mace’s works. This is all the more deplorable when we recall that Mace did not write exclusively about the Holodomor-he researched the history of 20th-century Ukraine.

To publish his works means to make public a whole array of skeletons in the Russian-Ukrainian political closet. In 1983 Mace published a book in the US on the destruction of national communism in Ukraine. He wrote merciless articles on the political nature of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Some of his results appear prophetic today. For example, Mace wrote about the drama of Ukrainian socialism. “For better or worse, in 20th-century Ukraine socialism was the most influential ideology.” This is the opening
statement in a chapter of his book entitled Ukrainian Statehood in the 20th Century (published in 1996).

Whereas the beginnings of Ukrainian socialism are associated with such prominent figures as Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, in its present stage it features names one feels ashamed even to pronounce in this series.

One can only say, “Jim, unfortunately, the most influential ideology in Ukraine was indeed socialism!” The idealistic socialism of its first
adherent was a significant obstacle in the construction of the Ukrainian state.

Further degeneration of this socialism and its fall from the level of the European tradition to negotiations in the flea market of post-Soviet
politics have proved the political and moral fiasco of this ideology in the history of Ukrainian statehood.

Mace’s paper at the Kharkiv congress of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies in 1996 was entitled “The Sociogenetic Legacy of the Genocide and Totalitarianism in Ukraine and Ways to Overcome It.”

Mace was fully aware that the genocide-produced pathological deviations in Ukraine were proportional to the eschatological dimensions of the genocide itself. They are difficult to eradicate because genocide derives its name from its undermining effect on the foundation of a nation’s gene pool.
 
Mace opened up before Ukrainian society the book of its Apocalypse and read this Black Book aloud. But society did not really hear him because the areas of its collective brain that are responsible for self- preservation, self-protection, and survival had been neutralized and lobotomized.

On Nov. 26, as you light a candle to commemorate the tens of millions of Ukrainians who were killed only because they had grown crops from time immemorial, just look out of your window. You will see candles lit here and
there. Otherwise-the shimmer of TV screens blasting local or Russian pop music.

It is difficult to say whether society will remain in this vegetative state. Together with his fellow Ukrainian historians, Mace did everything possible to revive the nerve tissue of the Ukrainian nation’s brain-in order to make it send signals, to make memory work, and to help society restore its will to live.

Whether the national brain will indeed start working is not under Mace’s control. It is up to Ukrainian society-and Russian society, for that matter. Russia became the self-appointed heir of the gold and diamond funds of the USSR. It will become a civilized state only when it has recognized that it is also the heir of the bloody fund of the USSR.

Many offensive remarks about Mace have been voiced from the rostrum of the post-Soviet Verkhovna Rada. Looking at parliament we mostly see crowds of vicious political corpses with glassy eyes.

Jim, however, is strangely alive. Perhaps he was privy to some kind of mysticism, as were his ancient Indian ancestors. Maybe he knew the mystery of overcoming death because everything that he occupied himself with was
tragedy. But he was rarely seen without a smile.

Even when he was resentful, with good reason, he exuded a powerful energy of good will and inexplicable optimism that he alone possessed. Jim seemed to believe, despite all indications to the contrary, that common sense would
prevail and man would overcome human-generated absurdities and phantoms.

I believe that all of us who in some way collaborated with Jim will always measure our history by his work, his love for Ukraine, and his intellectual integrity. Most importantly, we will refer to his deep conviction that Ukraine is a nation of astonishing vitality and that one day it will get over its post-genocidal legacy and become a conscious, noble, and orderly European country - a country respected in the world, in particular because it has self-respect.
 
After all, the Orange Revolution proved that this European Ukraine is already nascent. Despite hardships, it is coming into being or, more exactly, beginning to revive.

When I asked Jim to meet one of my Italian doctoral students, who was researching Khvylovy, he said, “Oh, sure thing! A friend of Khvylovy is a friend of mine!” - as if Khvylovy had not shot himself in 1933 but lived
somewhere near Jim, across the street, and from time to time they would get together for a cup of coffee.

Now Jim is definitely drinking coffee with Khvylovy.

Some day we may be able to see Mace carved in stone on a Kyiv street. Lively and passionate as he was, he would take it in good stride because he does not need a monument. What was more important to him was a monument that he himself worked on-a monument to millions of innocent Ukrainians who were tortured to death.

Perhaps a monument to Mace is necessary above all for Ukraine. It would be an important landmark indicating that the country is starting to awaken from its post-genocidal state, which means that it is beginning to distinguish
destroyers from those whose love for Ukraine cost them their lives.

For our country this would be a small step but one that would bring it closer to Europe. And this step would be taken thanks to the American, James E. Mace.
 
There is also interesting article
by Oleksiy Trachuk
which is translated into English.
‘’ About Holodomor ‘’

I would like to return to my reflections on the fortune of Ukrainian people and the cause of their behavior during the Holodomor.

One of the reasons is that Ukrainians very deeply, with their whole soul, absorbed Christian faith during the millennium, which spiritually enslaves person, releases from responsibility for the personal actions and shifts this responsibility onto God.

As an example, let us look how Lesia Ukrainka perceived Christian values? Poetess said that “in the most ancient monuments, in the evangelical events, in the authentic fragments of the primitive Galilee propaganda I see a grain of that slave spirit, the narrowly hearted political kvijetyzm, which flourishes even more later in the Christianity” (V.12.-P.154-155. Collection of works: In 12 v. К., 1974-79.). Similar view on the role of Christianity Lesia Ukrainka expresses in “The Notes about article “Politics and ethics”: “Christians …were killing the spirit so much, no Caesar could have killed… ”

Lesia Ukrainka’s criticism of Christianity as a culture of nihilistic character is determined for her by the priority of the anthropological values,… she prefers personality, a person as an individual, who has independent living, not imposed by the pressures from the society.

The thousand years of spiritual enslavement of Ukraine – (“the snake’s flood” of the Byzantine’s Christian dogmatism) – was also uncovered by the great Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda. He wrote about the condition of the society of his time (it is our time as well): “World is sleeping - deeply stretched. And mentors, who are shepherding Israel, instead of awaking him reassuring: “Sleep, don’t be afraid.”

By freeing himself from the biblical illusions, Skovoroda felt the necessity to share with people the horizons that had opened to him, the kingdom of heaven that he had found in his heart and his spirit. This fire of his spirit was Skovoroda’s inner source and the engine of his numerous works. The activity of the sacred fighter for Spirit hidden at the bottom of his soul gave him the strength, the vigor and the eagerness to work on the awakening of the spiritual life in Ukraine. He didn’t walk, he run and measured several times across the whole large Ukraine by his senile feet. Only the active and painfully strong desire to raise his fellow countrymen to those spiritual heights, where he was living himself, explains Skovoroda’s tireless strength, which supported his journey.

The same painful aspiration we find in T.H. Shevchenko – “let’s drain from the nation’s veins that sugary blood and fill them with a pure and sacred Cossacks’ blood!”

What is the nature of a spiritual, philosophical and religious breakthrough in Skovoroda’s world-view? The Skovoroda’s follower and biographer Kovalyns’kyi wrote: “Till this time his heart believed in God as His slave, and from now it loves Him as a friend”. This short message is very important. It indicates a moment when important change has taken place that is later reflected in the whole Skovoroda’s creation.

“God is a tyrant, the Supreme Being, and you are his worthless slave, worm, dust, footstool”- that is the main Bible’s directive. “God is yourself, it is a divine origin of your spirit. God is a divine Man. You are God’s friend, God’s son, God yourself”, that is the main directive of Skovoroda’s world-view. You are God’s slave! - No! - You are God yourself! - Abyss divides these two world-views.

In ХІХ century the famous German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach came to the same conclusion. “God, - according to Feuerbach, - is alienated himself from a man and brought to the absolute human essence. All qualities of God are in the essence man’s qualities but they are separated from a man and presented as independent, personified in God.” (Short philosophical dictionary. Moscow,1954, p. 623).
 
( Continued )
In his last work “The Creation of the Universe” Ivan Franko (The Great Kameniar) concludes: “That, in what we used to believe as not the appealed truth, as if it was given by God himself (Bible, auth.) is crumbling away to dust, and the small circle of the defenders of the old ideas are asking themselves with undisguised fright: - What should we do next, and on what should we base ourselves in the future, where Science has mercilessly and irreversibly broken the hard rock, on which was based our previous faith? Comparative religion proved that many things we though belonged only to Jewish religion in fact are in the religious beliefs of many nations in the whole world: Science and archaeology certified immense antiquity of mankind: - “In what then can we believe? ” – they are asking frightened, - and receive from everyone the same steel-cold answer: - It’s lost. Theology and priests ruling is over forever. But what caused in modern people’s views such a radical changes? Answer is short: It’s the science. We don’t live in the times of Ptolemy’s theory when Earth was considered the centre of the world and was imagined as a circle over which there is a sky on hard vault not very far from us, and under which there is a cave, home of the dead, or - as later considered - home of sinful souls - the hell. Copernican theory completely changes our idea of universe, discrediting herewith main Christian theological system, which in spite of all obvious Science researches insistently sticks to the outdated theory about universe even until now. ”

Prophet of the evolutional development of humanity, Volodymyr Vernadsky predicted:

“Present attempts to replace free development of scientific research with a political or social oppression are destined to failure because their roots are as deep as the roots of the religious beliefs and the ancient struggle is finished with the scientific idea’s victory. One of the causes of today’s revolution is the liberation of scientific idea and scientific research, its considerable liberation from the pressure of religious, philosophical and political structures. The struggle for possibility of a new future, which is opening before mankind, is nearly finished, and after several generations passed it will be inevitable, like a natural elemental process, when it will reveal itself in the noospheric reality.” (“Chemical structure of Earth’s biosphere and its surrounding”. Moscow, 2001)

I apologize for my references to the authoritative people, but they may help to answer the question - why Ukrainians so obediently gave their last grain to the communists while their children were swelling from hunger?

Another important reason for the Holodomor tragedy was the absence of a true history of Ukrainian nation, without which people lose their connection with the past and the future, so they have no future any more for which they should struggle. The nation’s history, which is integrated into world history, cannot be written without the authority of its own state among world community. The history, the traditions, the culture, the national language and the customs are roots of the nation’s life tree, and the ethnic creativity is the nation’s soul.

What were we able to achieve for 11 years? Very little. Ukrainian scientists are practically absent. Among historians and ethnographers only a few feel like Ukrainians and even they have no strong will. They earn their bread and have no inspiration to defend the truth about our forefathers.

To prevent another Holodomor of our time and to prevent our children from going to Russia and to America again to ask about the reasons for the Holodomor on the rich Ukrainian soil, we should create opportunities for wide access to the truthful history of Ukraine, for uplifting national consciousness, self-respect and patriotism.

Oleksiy Trachuk
email: kolo-ra@i.com.ua
 
The article of Borys Iskra.

“How could this have happened?”

Holodomor … this terrible word today, in an era of virtual reality, lacks potency, and is experienced almost unemotionally. Perhaps we had gradually forgotten the consequences of this great evil, which was played out in the life of our nation. It is perhaps already apparent, that this famine pervaded a predominantly ethnic Ukrainian territory (I use the word Ukrainian, but for the given moment the word Ukrainians is synonymous with other names of our people, such as the historical name Rusy, or Rusyny; this is, however, another discussion). And everybody should be aware that the territories that fell victim to the famine included Podniprovya, Prychornomorya, and a great part of Slobozhanschyna – that is, the greater part of Soviet Ukraine. In 1935-1937, the famine reached Ukrainian Kuban’ and Prydonnya. During those years of hunger, close to 14 million ethnic Ukrainians, who had lived within the borders of the Soviet Union, had perished. Stalin himself had boasted, in a discussion with Churchill, that by the end of 1933, 10 million Ukrainians had died. However, as you already know, the famine went on even longer …

It is worthwhile to note, that during the 20th century, the Soviet machine liquidated (I have in mind the physical destruction as well as the ethnic cleansing) close to 50 million Ukrainians! Think about these figures. These are not just statistics, this is our sorrow. More Ukrainians had died throughout the 20th century, than we currently have now living here. Those that had perished were predominantly the flower of their generation: the national intelligentsia and the peasantry (those very same land workers, which for centuries provided for not only Ukraine, but large parts of Europe as well). The whole nation slid into non-existence…

How did this happen?

How could the famine claim so many lives? Surely, it could have been different? To be optimistic, one can agree that things certainly could have been different; however to be a realist, one has to conclude that the events of the past can be analysed only in light of the causes behind why such a great number of Ukrainian lives were lost.
 
( continued )
Our nation has an interesting mentality, which in the last few centuries of our existence was formed predominantly within the process of enslavement and a permanent struggle for our independence. This condition led to one part of the nation developing an exaggerated love of everything Ukrainian, whilst in the other part of the nation – the more populous part – people instead developed an inferiority complex. These very contradictions sometimes blend together, lead to a mood sometimes of retribution, and at other times, to a slavish obsequiousness to the invader. That liberty, which we were reaching out for, we could not, all the same appreciate, and lost it almost immediately. Perhaps it is because Ukrainians are great dreamers and romantics, the euphoria of freedom mutates into a terrible disease, which passes only when we find ourselves oppressed again under a foreign boot, and again a new stimulus for a new struggle is born.

We have not had any great lasting leaders over the last two centuries. All of our elite was either liquidated, or ended up collaborating with the invader. Our politics, our religion, and our territory, essentially did not belong to us. Consider:

Our territory – at the precise time of the famine, our territory was carved up between Russian-controlled Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. It is precisely on that Russian-controlled, ethnically-Ukrainian territory, that the famine took place. The very fact that this territory belonged to the Soviet Union was a prerequisite to the following.

Our politics essentially did not exist. Over the course of several centuries, Russia and the republics, in the guise of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (the capital in both cases, being Moscow) effectively ensured that a political elite of ethnically-Ukrainian lands, did not exist. Moscow always promoted the policy of the liquidation of our national leadership, or its assimilation, which amounts to just about the same thing. Considering the events of the 20th century, the defeat of the Ukrainian National Republic, and the brutal reactions to Ukrainianisation, none of the Ukrainian communists (nationally minded idealists) had survived. Our peasantry was orphaned, it was orphaned politically. Not having any defenders against the communist machine, the peasants, one could say, were compromised.

Our Religion: It is absolutely not ours. In practice, our ancestors incorporated many primal elements (pagan) into Christianity. But the essential structure of Christianity was unchanged: that people are servants of God, and that the fate of a person directly depends on God’s will, and the person has no effect on all of this. This religion has destroyed and is continuing to destroy our national soul, which was always freedom loving. Even from ancient times, they have described Ukrainians as not being able to tolerate captivity. What has happened in the past millennium? The answer is simple – we changed our religion, and therefore our worldview, we betrayed ourselves… This religion declares that all authority comes from God, and so each Christian should in sufferance, accept the invader. Surely this cannot be right? It seems that religion firstly was invented by the strong to enslave those spiritually weaker than themselves; and secondly, almost effortlessly, these very same people they physically enslaved. Can such a religion be of any use to Ukrainians?
 
( continued )
Our nation has an interesting mentality, which in the last few centuries of our existence was formed predominantly within the process of enslavement and a permanent struggle for our independence. This condition led to one part of the nation developing an exaggerated love of everything Ukrainian, whilst in the other part of the nation – the more populous part – people instead developed an inferiority complex. These very contradictions sometimes blend together, lead to a mood sometimes of retribution, and at other times, to a slavish obsequiousness to the invader. That liberty, which we were reaching out for, we could not, all the same appreciate, and lost it almost immediately. Perhaps it is because Ukrainians are great dreamers and romantics, the euphoria of freedom mutates into a terrible disease, which passes only when we find ourselves oppressed again under a foreign boot, and again a new stimulus for a new struggle is born.

We have not had any great lasting leaders over the last two centuries. All of our elite was either liquidated, or ended up collaborating with the invader. Our politics, our religion, and our territory, essentially did not belong to us. Consider:

Our territory – at the precise time of the famine, our territory was carved up between Russian-controlled Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. It is precisely on that Russian-controlled, ethnically-Ukrainian territory, that the famine took place. The very fact that this territory belonged to the Soviet Union was a prerequisite to the following.

Our politics essentially did not exist. Over the course of several centuries, Russia and the republics, in the guise of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (the capital in both cases, being Moscow) effectively ensured that a political elite of ethnically-Ukrainian lands, did not exist. Moscow always promoted the policy of the liquidation of our national leadership, or its assimilation, which amounts to just about the same thing. Considering the events of the 20th century, the defeat of the Ukrainian National Republic, and the brutal reactions to Ukrainianisation, none of the Ukrainian communists (nationally minded idealists) had survived. Our peasantry was orphaned, it was orphaned politically. Not having any defenders against the communist machine, the peasants, one could say, were compromised.
 
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