Louis Proyect discovers not all Ukrainians were anti-semitites
Take it away, Louis;
A Ukrainian protest near my building
I understood that the yellow and blue banners were carrying the Ukrainian colors but couldn’t figure out the crescent and star banners with a red background that looked like the Turkish flag. It turns out that it was a contingent of Crimean Tatars, who after all are Turkic peoples.
I threw on my coat and followed the crowd toward 5th and 91st, where the Consulate is housed. It looked like a couple of thousand people there. On the way over I chatted with a young couple from Ukraine who were students here. When I raised the question of whether Maidan was a fascist plot, they looked at me like I had two heads.
Once there I noticed a guy in his 30s being interviewed by what looked like a Cable TV reporter. Since he seemed knowledgeable, I struck up a conversation with the guy, whose name is Bogdan. On the question of fascists dominating Maidan, he denied it vehemently. He then went on to talk about anti-Semitism, another charge leveled against the movement. He said that Ukrainians protected Jews during WWII and that Jewish divisions fought alongside Ukrainian units. Apparently there is some basis for this. A Greek-Orthodox Metropolitan (a title roughly equal to Cardinal from what I can gather) named Andrey Sheptytsky stood up for the Jews. This is from an article in the Ukrainian Week, an online newspaper. I have a feeling that the author’s first language is Ukrainian so some of the formulations are a bit odd but you will have no trouble understanding the main points:
As Bogdan and I continued our conversation, the crowd chanted “Down, down Putin” and “Peace in Ukraine”. From what I have been hearing from the Putinite left this week, you almost expected them to be singing “Deutschland Uber Alles”. Bogdan is a software developer and an extremely reasonable person. He struck me as exactly the sort of person who rallied in Kiev. Indeed, he told me that a good friend of his had been part of the protest there and got shot in the back by the secret police. He is now a paraplegic.
One of the things I try to do when confronted by a movement that does not fit into the neat boxes the dogmatic left likes to create is see it firsthand. I traveled down to Washington in 2011 to videotape a pro-Syria rally where the keynote speaker was a Palestinian professor that David Horowitz tried to get fired from a California university. The guy had been an activist for decades, including Central American solidarity and anti-apartheid work.
Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass what other leftists think about Syrians and Ukrainians. I make up my own mind whether or not that makes me part of the in crowd or not. After 11 years of the SWP in a previous lifetime, I learned that is always best to think for yourself,
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I have nothing to add to that except to say that I couldn’t agree more; at the end of the day it’s always best to think for yourself.
Source: http://theviewfromfallingdowns.blogspot.com/2014/03/louis-proyect-discovers-not-all.html
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