Without comprehending their history Ukrainians will never make headway. At best. At worst, they will return to their past. James Mace reiterated this thesis in almost every one of his publications. What had he accomplished during his short life? There is the Institute of National Memory (and there are those trying to deprive it of this memory), his books are slowly finding their way to readers, there is the Holodomor Remembrance Day, instituted on Jim’s insistence, when candles are lit. Even if they aren’t lit by those in power, the important thing is that they are lit in millions of windows in Ukraine and abroad.
Often I sorrowfully pick up a sheet of paper with an outline of a book he never wrote, but then I look at a book, a brilliant essay by Volodymyr Vasylenko entitled Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine as an Act of Genocide, in which many of Jim’s ideas are reflected. Anyway, the author and he thought along the same lines. It is hard to add anything to Dr. Vasylenko’s clearly formulated conclusions, just as it is hard to refute any of them. Actually, no one is refuting them, just as no one debated them with Jim. It’s just that today’s ideologues ignore them. They don’t read such books and don’t hear such voices. Instead, there is a large-scale campaign underway, aimed at ridiculing the very Holodomor theme, vandalizing our ancestors’ graves. This process is gaining strength, the ruling party’s mouthpiece Dmytro Tabachnyk is rewriting textbooks, projects that have anything to do with the tragic history of Ukraine are canceled. There is no quest for truth in this process, and truth is not on the agenda. The Holodomor as a crime of genocide is denied and hushed up. This is part of an overall onslaught on a young European-minded democracy, and in a broader sense a crime against the Ukrainian people. We are witness to large-scale preparations for yet another lobotomy, to be sustained by the Ukrainian community. Indeed, a people without memory is easy to intimidate and to manipulate. Yet this means a civilizational impasse. Without the energy of history mankind loses creative energy, the energy of progress.
This time I offer The Day’s readers James Mace’s article which is practically unknown. It was written in 1995 and presented at the Third Ukrainian World Congress in Kharkiv, in 1996. I re-read it and once again realized that the magic law of time loops has its inexorable effect on Ukraine. Today it is hard to figure out whether history is repeating itself or we are all in a time loop, for Mace’s 15-year-old conclusions and warnings sound so very topical. At the time the national democratic media refused to publish this article because of the author’s sharp-worded references to the national elite and government-oriented periodicals, along with a caustic social analysis. Small wonder: the phenomenon of works by Dr. Mace is precisely that the subjects broached are constantly actualized, pointing to where the current dragon’s teeth grow.
