Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

The Fascist Kernel of Ukrainian Genocidal Nationalism, by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe. 2015. Carl Beck Papers No. 2402

Rossolinski-Lieb: Premeditated and Preplanned Ukrainian Genocide on Non-Ukrainians

Nowadays, the WWII OUN-UPA genocide of Poles is often whitewashed as “a Polish-Ukrainian war”, a “fratricidal conflict”, or an unavoidable reaction to the so-called “Polish oppression of Ukrainians”. It was none of those things. It was a genocidal crime that had been part of Ukrainian thinking for a long time before it actually took place.

WHAT ACTUALLY IS FASCISM?

The term “fascist” has long been made into an amorphous derogatory label by lewaks (leftists), who have called anyone and everyone disagreeing with them a fascist. It deserves a concise definition, “To be more specific, this concept should be extended by several negations to regard as fascist only those movements that were entirely or in great part antidemocratic, anti-Marxist, antiliberal, anticonservative, authoritarian, ultranationalist, populist, racist, antisemitic, militarist, and which adopted the Führerprinzip, practiced the cult of ethnic and political violence, and regarded mass violence as an extension of politics.” (p. 4). Note especially the cult of the Leader.

ROOTS OF THE EVENTUAL UKRAINIAN-NAZI COLLABORATION IN THE HOLOCAUST

In describing OUN ideologue Iurii Mylianych and his writing in 1929, the author writes, “Finally, he could not decide how the Ukrainians should ‘solve the Jewish problem’ and only asked some rhetorical questions: ‘Should we allow them further to exploit the Ukrainian national organism? Assimilate them, take them in the national organism, hold them, take them in, amalgamate with them? Remove them from Ukraine? How? Expel them? Where? It is not easy to expel two million people or to get rid of them altogether. Nobody needs this good; everybody is only happy to get rid of them.'” (p. 27). Note that this was written 12 years before the Germans entered Ukrainian-claimed territories and, with considerable Ukrainian help, began to implement the Holocaust.

DO NOT TRY TO MARGINALIZE DMYTRO DONTSOV

Some Ukrainians would have us think that Dontsov was “not that important” in Ukrainian thinking. Think again. Rossolinski-Liebe sets the record straight, “Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973) was one of the most significant ideologists of Ukrainian radical and genocidal nationalism. He had enormous influence on the young generation in the OUN, the Ukrainian youth who lived in Poland, and the diaspora in general… Dontsov called postwar Ukrainian nationalism Ukrainian fascism and regarded it as one of the European fascist movements. He never officially joined the OUN, although the OUN leadership invited him several times to become the head of the OUN propaganda apparatus.” (p. 9). Sounds pretty important to me.

EXTERMINATIONIST UKRAINIAN IDEOLOGY PRECEDED THE UPA GENOCIDE OF POLES BY MANY DECADES

There is no doubt about the fact that OUN thinking evolved in a direction that made the later genocide of Poles not only possible but virtually inevitable. Rossolinski-Lieb comments:

“A very fundamental concept of Dontsov’s works was “amorality” (amoral’nist’). Dontsov declared that amoral’nist’ is good as long as it helps Ukrainians to obtain a Ukrainian state. This concept reversed the “common” and “universal” system of values and morality. It justified all kinds of crimes and violence as long as they were conducted for the good of the nation, or in order to obtain a state.” (p. 11). So now the traditional moral inhibition against mass murder, and genocide, had been removed.

Non-Ukrainians were de-legitimized simply because they had been born non-Ukrainian. Mykola Stsiborsk’yi added fuel to the future genocidal fire. “Stsibors’kyi…demanded confiscation of the land and property of all non-Ukrainians and forbid them to buy back their land and property.” (p. 17).

THE VERY BIOLOGICAL EXISTENCE OF NON-UKRAINIANS BECAME INTOLERABLE

The author writes, “Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi was not a historian, but a politician based in Russian Ukraine. In his writings, he combined racism with national interpretations of Ukrainian history and anti-Russian, anti-Polish, and anti-Jewish discourses…In 1904, Mikhnovs’kyi presented some points of his political program in the “Ten Commandments of the UNP” for the Ukrainian National Party (Ukrains’ka Narodna Partia, UNP). In the third commandment, he claimed ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians!’ and in the tenth, “Do not marry a foreign woman because your children will be your enemies …’ He also demanded the territory ‘from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus” for a Ukrainian state without ‘Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians, and Jews … as long as they rule over us and exploit us.'” (pp. 21-22).

Note the implications of this racist and genocidal ideology. This was an effortless leap from non-Ukrainians as “exploiters of Ukrainians” to non-Ukrainians as existential enemies and as legitimate targets for annihilation solely for being born non-Ukrainian. In fact, during the decades later UPA genocide of Poles, Ukrainians in mixed marriages were ordered, under penalty of death for non-compliance, to kill their Polish spouses and half-Polish children, a fact noted by the author: (p. 24).

AN IMPENDING FINAL SOLUTION TO ALL NON-UKRAINIANS

The author concludes, “During the interwar period, several Ukrainian nationalist ideologists discussed how to use ethnic and political mass violence to establish a homogenous state. The most important of these ideologists was Mykhailo Kolodzins’kyi (1902-1939), a leading OUN member who trained Ukrainian nationalists together with the Ustasa in a camp in Italy in 1933-1934.” (p. 38). Both the OUN-UPA and the Ustasa later conducted genocide.

CONCLUSIONS

Author Rossilinski-Lieb summarizes how OUN thinking had decisively evolved into a genocidal ideation long before the actual OUN-UPA genocide of Poles:

“This kind of reasoning about Jews and Poles demonstrated that Ukrainian radical nationalism created genocidal aspirations by the second half of the 1930s.” (p. 39).

“…ethnicity, eugenics, and racism, which became an integral element of the ideology of the OUN and UPA.” (p. 2).

“In Ukraine, the Ukrainian nationalists united in the OUN, adopted many elements of transnational fascist discourse, considered themselves to belong to the family of European fascist movements, and invented their own version of fascism. The OUN substantially radicalized Ukrainian nationalism and transformed it gradually into an extreme and genocidal ideology that combined the notion of liberation and independence with the policies of mass violence. The OUN planned to establish a homogenous Ukrainian nation state that would be an integral part of the “New Europe,” similar to Tiso’s Slovakia or Pavelić’s Croatia.” (p. 41).