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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Ukraine as Victim And Factor of the Globalization of Catastrophes

13 May, 2003 - 00:00


This article is based on a paper presented last August at the Fifth Congress of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies in Chernivtsi and subsequently revised.

Mankind has never lacked apocalyptic visions, be they from Saint John the Divine, Nostradamus, even Bulgaria’s Grandmother Vanga. Meanwhile, scientific predictions have somehow attracted less attention and, projected somewhere onto a vague future, often remain on the margins of consciousness.

Without doubt, this must be characteristic of human psychology: eschatological prophesies are better received than dry scholarly prognoses that require no decisions and sometimes even foster a hedonistic frame of mind or escapism.

In fact, there is little that people or humanity as a whole can do about the situation. They delegate power to their governments and presidents, and then the mechanisms of politics come into play, mechanisms upon which people can exert only minimal influence, especially when we consider those who stand at the podium of world politics. The time of great men seems passed, while more and more the nominees of great clans come to power, people in fact bereft of ethics or a philosophy of existence. Globalization is not only a matter of the economy or commonality of interests, but also of conflicts and causes of technologically caused and natural calamities. Humanity has neither levers of influence nor mechanisms of control, and thus issues now relegated to science fiction could tomorrow well become sinister realities.

One example is cloning. It seems that Dolly the sheep was cloned quite recently. Now they are trying to clone human embryos. The US Congress has categorically forbidden this. Russia also seems opposed, yet it is concerned primarily with not being outdone. Meanwhile a physician like Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty assures us that there are already three women on the planet with cloned embryos. This means that we can expect some very unpleasant surprises on this plane, first of all in the form of genetic misprints and macabre military projects that will relegate zombies and ninja to the background.

Do we actually know who is selling what arms to whom or what is being agreed to (and it is certainly being agreed to) behind closed? What laboratories are producing those deadly viruses of hitherto unknown diseases? What do we know about the latest weapons developments? What do we know about the extent of corruption in our own country? Do we have any degree of control over the security arrangements of our nuclear power stations? Can humanity prevent the conflicts of civilizations, or is the world community capable of stopping the blind cruelty of terrorist acts? All the more so that the configurations of humankind are becoming more and more complex, and the very notion of the world community is running a global crack?

This is not to speak of ecology. Chemicals, radiation, scrap, caches of weapons not disposed of, industrial and nuclear wastes, potential dangers of obsolete technologies, slag heaps, and other toxic factors kept out the public eye by the authorities (like Chernivtsi and Boleslavets, somewhere in the steppe, in the vicinity of the river Konopliany Yar that drains into the Dnipro, adding to Ukraine’s main river’s deadly weight of the contaminated Prypiat, along with all our drains dumping raw sewage).

In a word, it seems easier to discuss the Scriptures: And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter [Revelation 8:11; in Ukrainian chornobyl means wormwood — Ed.], than try to save the Konoplianka, a small Ukrainian river.

In his day Academician Sakharov warned that there is a whole series of indicators that mankind would enter a critical and especially responsible phase in the second half of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, these indicators had become irreversible. There are rumblings of the approaching catastrophe. Not everyone could hear them. Sakharov did, but few heard him. No one really wanted to. Now that we have entered the third millennium, there are already grounds to state that mankind is rapidly and unswervingly entering a period of irresponsibility, so much so that with the spontaneous concurrence of circumstances we might well have no time to draw the proverbial line under our history.

These have ceased to be new realities. This is the new reality.

It approached us long and gradually, then it became surreptitious and struck without warning to become the a sum total of the indices that mark the twenty-first century. The critical mass of unsolved problems, global population imbalance, terrible disturbances of the ecosystem, dependence on depleting energy resources, and constant threat of a worldwide conflict — all this calls for new thinking, new spiritual energy, new political approaches, and the consolidation of all intellectually capable forces.

This was especially true for us under the conditions of a new state. We cannot take the road of this new world carrying the same old problems. Things archaic might be attractive like items on museum display, but anachronisms look bad, and there is nothing anyone can do to make them look any better. Anachronism originates from the Latin anachronismus and Greek anachronismys, out of time. It leads to conservatism and fosters a maniacal propensity for stereotypes.

One such stereotype consists in the chronic tendency to treat Ukraine as an eternal victim of history, continually subject to somebody’s evil intent and thus inherently unable to do anything to better itself even as an independent nation state, let alone to join the ranks of the free and worthy nations of the world. There are no peoples with easy histories. Ours is no exception. But constantly presenting it exclusively as the eternal victim, with such a bouquet of special features such as the lack of national dignity, the slavish habit of never getting up off its knees, susceptibility to discord and fratricidal conflicts that out inertia was thoughtlessly adopted and actively declared from the very beginnings of its statehood would be fatal to its further development. In place of the dynamic impulses appropriate to the new independent status of the nation, it has had grafted onto it an inferiority complex, provincialism, and a sense of the secondary status of its language and culture. The public refrain of lamentation has been the question, Who are we as a people? We have repeatedly called upon ourselves to get up off our knees, squeeze out the slave within us (as if we were only so many tubes to be squeezed), engaged in unceasing criticism of our own mentality, cried in panic that this is our last chance, that we have no national elite, no national idea, that we lack even a nation, and that it has yet to be formed. Whether the result of someone’s farsighted implantation from without or of our own being poisoned by the fetid discharge of history, in each case this has damaged the very foundations of our national identity and, given the new realities, has painted a far from presentable silhouette of the nation: a certain type of patriots in a paroxysm of reverie in its own pathos cast into relief by its own footlights.

The young, of course, were repulsed and forsook such contexts that lacked prestige in favor of a counterproductive form of skepticism. The Ukrainian diaspora opened its collective heart and did everything possible to help by financing all kinds of projects, effective and not, yet instead of the Ukrainian nation state they had dreamt of, they saw post-totalitarian Ukrainian reality and faced it with disappointment and resignation. Meanwhile, Ukrainian society was becoming tired, disoriented, and, discouraged by the kind of democracy it had been offered, it lost faith. And then upon it was imposed yet another demoralizing postulate: after the period of romanticism ended, euphoria was replaced by apathy, and it came time for pragmatists to build the state. They did so on the ruins of the tower of Babel, using the same building materials and slave foremen. Much was stolen, the dirtiest possible political technologies were applied, and society lived through the most odious scandals and political crises. The Ukrainian nation was surrendering its positions one after the other, disarmed on the broadest scale possible and driven by the highest degree of eating its own.

This was the first moral defeat of the young Ukrainian state.

Another was connected closely with the first. Ukraine’s absence in the world and at the same time the whole spectrum of distorted prescriptions, political entropy, and chronic lack of contact with the priorities of world culture, the lack of being accustomed to being prestigiously represented, and the sore spots of its own national problems all resulted in Ukraine lacking a humanitarian aura in the world’s eyes. Despite sporadic cultural exchanges, international conferences, personal contacts, and at times even quite successful cultural projects, the situation has shown no cardinal change. Even though the works of Alexander Archipenko are displayed in Philadelphia side by side with Chagall, the French were enchanted by Ukrainian artists exhibited in Toulouse, Venediktov’s choir met with standing ovations in Germany, and Turin was amazed to discover the Ukrainian cinema of the 1960s — all this fails to form the inimitable whole according to which a nation is identified in the world. Several outstanding events in the Ukrainian diaspora in the Free World might seem worthy of the world cultural context, but apparently the specific qualities of the ОmigrО ghetto kept this from happening. Of course, the selfless efforts of a few scholars and translators abroad are especially valuable now that the interest in Slavic studies is obviously on the wane, yet none has been heard of supported here. Cultural-educational institutions to improve Ukraine’s image worldwide — like the Goethe Institute in Kyiv or the Polish Center — show no increase in number, while even the existing ones now experience various problems and receive no help. What kind of opinion of Ukraine can we hope for after setting such a tone?

Add here the echoes of the political scandals, all those high profile crimes that remain unsolved, endless examinations by foreign experts, the serpentine maze of the cassette scandal, trajectories of the military rockets that hit civilian targets, along with the decay of Ukrainian culture, especially filmmaking and book-publishing. Because of all this the real Ukraine cannot speak for itself, and instead of being a protagonist of the cultural process it falls prey to the clamor of culture, all those television series about bandits and low-class shows, to the accompaniment of surzhyk [the local vernacular that is no longer Ukrainian and not quite Russian — Ed.] and with aggressive negations. Perhaps it is time we finally thought about where we are going.

We are in the twelfth year of our national independence, and Ukraine’s image in the world goes from bad to worse, with all kinds of latent prejudices; because Ukraine seems absent in the consciousness of humanity, but there is still some kind of vague hostility toward Ukrainians as a nation bearing the whole spectrum of organically abhorrent traits: imbecility and, say, vulgarity stamped by even collaboration with the Nazis and anti-Semitism. Suffice it to recall some of the films we have seen recently that from time to time give the readers new injections of disrespect for Ukrainians. This is only exacerbated by the thoughtless sallies by that same certain type of patriots and the mass of all kinds of other characters who carry negative messages of their own distaste for their Fatherland. Perhaps we have boasted enough of our glorious past, and the time has come for us to stop proclaiming we are a special people scattered by fate across the world. It is time to notice that we are also scattering garbage all over the world, that there is drug-trafficking done by Ukrainian sailors, that there are Ukrainian maniacs slaughtering families and Ukrainian houris serving in bordellos; time to stop believing that all Ukrainians abroad are innocent victims — except that in most notorious cases such individuals can be described as Ukrainians only with reservation, for they are merely citizens of Ukraine, but unfortunately, whatever they do, they are regarded as Ukrainians, and this does not enhance the nation’s charm. Such attractive exceptions as the boxing brothers Klychko or the soccer player Shevchenko cannot save the situation. The issue is that of a complete undeformed image of Ukraine that puts forward its real dominants, with its culture alongside all the shortcomings and pathologies that are also to be found in many nations. We have no image of this kind. What we have had so far is either self-abasement or melodramatic declamations concerning our national revival, while Ukraine’s image in the world has sunk to its lowest ebb.

These two defeats can be summed up as a disaster in the humanities.

I have long been reluctant to broach the subject. I even wrote The Nation’s Humanitarian Aura, soft-pedaling the problem, using the metaphor of a misplaced mirror. After all, sapienti sat, it was a lecture meant for students at the start of the academic year, and I was loath to draw the young people’s attention to that labor of Sisyphus.

But Ukraine is neglected. It is neglected physically and morally in all its economic, environmental, and cultural being. It is so neglected that it is already being transformed from the victim into the agent of its own disasters. The third millennium offers a global perspective and the Ukrainian nation, albeit accustomed to its isolated status, confined to its own problems, is thrown into full view for the world see. The Iron Curtain has fallen, yet a prestigious British publication carried an article referring to a curtain of misery. It is about Ukraine.

And here arises the question: What kind of Ukraine?

The kind we would all like to see has not yet come. The kind that we actually have — with its unstable cabinets, permanently ineffective parliament, caveman notions of democracy, rampant corruption, uncontrollable market, reforms going nowhere, and millions seeking their livelihoods abroad — is in its deep essence a non-Ukrainian state but one seen in the eyes of the world as Ukraine and, whether we like it or not, it is identified with us. Deservedly so in the final analysis, for who except the citizens of Ukraine elected this parliament and president, delegated them power, and entrusted them with the conduct of our domestic and foreign policies, thereby determining in advance our living standard and the attitude toward us in the outside world? Why then should we feel offended and consider ourselves victims? On the contrary, it is Ukraine that has fallen prey to its own inert and often unthinking citizenry.

From our first steps, from the very beginning of our statehood, what was needed was some kind intellectual quick reaction force — political scientists, scholars, analysts, and simply smart people able to diagnose and predict on the basis of a realistic assessment of the situation and not under the influence of some patriotic neurological shock therapy. We have such people, but our information theater is heavily contaminated and our society all too heterogeneous; we have a highly variegated spectrum of political likings. Also, we have all too many invisible destructive forces, whose interests do not include the national and civil consolidation of society.

One again the same old syndrome is at work: modern-thinking progressive individuals have neither been asked their opinions nor have they been heard. Instead, we have witnessed a growing demand for prophets, astrologers, and horoscopes. Fortune tellers, faith healers, and proselytizers have come into vogue. At times the impression is that our people are more interested in the latest global predictions from Globa than anything having to do with the greenhouse effect or the problems of globalization. With all our parties, blocs, centers, foundations, institutes, and institutions, we still lack any real center of ideas. Even worse, one tends to believe what an observant journalist wrote about a negative strategy center operating somewhere in the upper echelons of power. How else can one explain the current status of the Ukrainian economy, energy industry, social sphere, and culture, which our political leadership openly admits is catastrophic? What about the Armed Forces, considering that the Commander-in-Chief has pointed to their becoming a threat to the people? All this can hardly be described using neutral clichОs like shortcomings. Viewed analytically, this looks like the conscious ruination of Ukraine.

On the other hand, the emergence of a harmonious system should not have been expected. The collapse of an empire is also a catastrophe, and not all could have been lucky enough to escape the ruins of this tower of Babel. Hard work was needed to clear the debris and rescue the survivors. What we actually did was to balance on the edge of an abyss created by history, calling it a transition period for reasons that are still to be explained. A transition period is a considerably more harmonious process, marking transition to a new state of being. What kind of transition can there be from an empire to national independence? Democracy does not come like a season of the year; it has to be built consistently and systematically. What we now have is a show of democracy; it is not legally secured or reinforced by political experience, which makes it fraught with countless unpredictable dangers from its very inception. It often reminds one not of democracy but of a jacquerie.

Thus a crisis of the individual in fact become unavoidable. Moreover, this crisis is deepened by the paradox of the totalitarian pattern; a society that has never been civil is becoming intensively politicized. It is one thing to politicize a civil society; it cannot be easily disoriented, for it is fully able to influence politics. Politicizing an uncivil society is an altogether different story, for it thinks in unsystematically. For when it thinks unsystematically the political forces concerned can easily and skillfully change course. This is precisely what has happened to Ukraine.

Here a clear information policy could have helped, yet this policy has proved so misleading over the past decade as to create mechanisms for the manipulation of a public opinion that has lost all faith. In addition, a large sector of that information theater in Ukraine has come under private control, in various hands, and some of them individuals would be eager to trample this country underfoot. All this has resulted in a catastrophe in terms of information, in Ukraine itself and how its image is projected onto the world.

Under the circumstances, even our greatest achievement — peace and accord in Ukrainian society — is far from secure, for that distaste for the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian nation itself, cultivated for centuries, bodes no good for the future. Still unsolved are the problems of the Crimean Tatars, confrontations of political views, the detonator of social inequality, and a host of sensitive antagonisms. In other words, all talk of unity is nothing but empty rhetoric. I have pointed to that unity between the serpents and LaocoЪn; the serpents are strangling him and his sons, his mouth is open in a silent shriek, but he can utter no sound. In fact, I think that this ancient statue would look more relevant on Independence Square; it would make more contemporary sense than the Ukrainian Barbie now standing there emblazoned in gilt.

(To be continued)

By Lina KOSTENKO
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