• Anarcho-Bolshevik
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 month ago

    “The flag is upsetting not just for Ukrainians who have family members there right now, but any Ukrainian alive today who has parent, or a grandparent, or a great-grandparent that suffered the atrocities of soviet rule.”

    The flag is upsetting because it is associated with atrocities? Fine. Quoting Grzegorz Rossoliński‐Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, pages 184–5:

    The building in which the militia station would be established was to have a yellow‐and‐blue Ukrainian flag on it.¹¹⁸ For the purpose of establishing the militia, the OUN‐B was wary of “provincial cities that are inhabited with foreign‐national elements.” In such cases, the Ukrainian militiamen were to be recruited from adjacent villages.¹¹⁹ The Ukrainian militiamen from villages were expected to establish “order [lad i poriadok]” in the cities and to “cleanse” them of “Soviet intelligence, counterinsurgency, etc. officials, Muscovites, Jews, and others.”¹²⁰

    Pages 186–7:

    Spreading rumors about the death of Stalin or the start of a revolution in Moscow was also intended to become an important activity of OUN‐B activists during the “Ukrainian National Revolution,”¹³⁰ as were putting up yellow‐and‐blue […] flags at every administrative building, painting tridents in black on buildings, printing posters, hanging them in public spaces, prompting the population to participate in parades, greeting OUN‐B members from the area of the General Government, cheering and greeting the [Axis] troops in the name of the Leader Stepan Bandera, organizing propagandist funerals for dead revolutionaries, and so on.¹³¹

    In addition, the OUN‐B revolutionaries were to motivate the population to refuse to help wounded enemies. They were also expected to inform everybody in the revolutionary territories that there would be no mercy for those who did not follow the rules and orders of the OUN.¹³²

    Page 214:

    Because the pogrom in Lviv took place at the same time as the proclamation of the Ukrainian state, the city was full of yellow‐and‐blue and swastika flags, and posters blaming the Jews for the murder of the prisoners, or celebrating Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler with slogans such as “Long Live Stepan Bandera, Long Live Adolf Hitler.” The “Great German Army,” the OUN, and the war against “Jewish communists” were also celebrated on posters, under which fell the bodies of murdered Jews.

    (Emphasis added in all cases.)

    Unfortunately for us, anticommunists already have their response ready.