Some thoughts on the present war in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has appeared (perhaps rightly) on the front page of the New York Times for the past three months, well, at least since the Russian invasion on February 24^th. Before that date there were daily indications and warnings that the Russians had begun to assemble troops along the border in anticipation of invading Ukraine. They did so on February 24 and the two countries have been at war since. Much of the Western powers have joined the conflict by imposing sanctions on Russia and arming Ukraine. Today, 3 June, marks the 100^th day of the war and the paper reports that the Russian firepower has made gains in Ukraine’s east. There are explanations for Russia’s war aims, but few of them make much logical sense to me. Of course, power is one strong justification.         On the pages of the New York Times for these three months there has appeared photos from the war portraying the devastation inflicted on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and the Donbas region, displaying images of the bombed buildings; of murdered civilians lying on the streets and amid the rubble, of wounded and dying soldiers, of all the horrors we know surrounding war. War knows no boundaries and follows few rules. And it isn’t only the New York Times that reports on the war: newspapers across the United States and in the rest of the world carry news and horrific images detailing the battles in Ukraine. 

            But . . . I read in a recent article by Magda Teter in the New York Review of Books entitled, “Rehearsal for Genocide,” a review of three new books concerning events in the immediate years following the end of World War I. Specifically the books explore activities in Ukraine and Poland during those years. Connections to the present, though not the focus, is too painfully clear. Teter’s article begins, “The war in Ukraine has simultaneously forced to the surface and upended the memory of a history that had fallen into oblivion. The past, we see once more, can be reinvented and reinterpreted.” Teter argues that the reporting on the current war has reinvented and reinterpreted history, but I do not think she speaks precisely enough: in fact ,as the books under review show, events in Ukraine and Poland following World War I served as a precursor to and foundation of the Nazi murder of most of the Jews in Europe. The history the books narrate recount the massacre of Jews in Ukraine by Ukrainians!. “In Ovruch, where Jews were attacked by troops affiliated with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, one of the officers declared that he wanted to “exterminate all the Jews in the city.” Actions attempted to carry out his threat. Troops tortured hapless Jews in the streets and murdered them in their homes and business places. In Cherkasy a pogrom in May 1919 left over six hundred Jews dead even as a group of Jews, “aged nineteen to sixty,” were beaten, stripped and made to sing songs for the amusement of pedestrians. Pogroms in Dubovo and Fastiv led to the deaths of two thousand Jews who were killed outright or burned alive trapped in their homes or synagogues. In Proskuriv whole communities of Jews were wiped out in a matter of hours. In a footnote Teter writes that Proskuriv is now Khmelnytskyi “named after a Cossack hero who in 1648-1649 led an uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” during which conflict enormous numbers of Jewish citizens were massacred. I find on Wikipedia: “Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.” Indeed! In Dubovo “only twenty-six of the approximately 1,200 Jews” who had lived there in 1918 were still in town by September 1919, the rest having been murdered or cast out as refugees.

            The books reviewed by Teter argue that events in Ukraine in the years immediately following  the end of World War I prepared the way for the genocidal holocaust that occurred in Europe not 20 years subsequent. I am not saying that the tragedies that are now take place in Ukraine aren’t horrific—they are, indeed. Nor do I mean to imply that what Ukraine is now experiencing is just retribution for its complicity in the policies that finally murdered six million Jews. What I suggest is that it is criminal to falsify history by suppressing events that actually did occur; to not acknowledge that the Ukrainian slaughter of the Jews in the years 1918-21—deaths that are not even included in the death count of the Nazi attempt at a final solution had occurred; that the present-day reports of the war paint Ukraine as wholly innocent of crimes of which they are now victim. I am demanding that the participation by the Ukrainians in the murders of the Jews during the years 1918-21 must not be forgotten, concealed, and suppressed. I demand that such facts be a part of the reports now emanating from that country whose citizenry once enacted atrocities of which they now are subject. We must not forget must be part of every contemporary report of the present activities now occurring in Ukraine. Citing the texts she has reviewed, Teter writes, “In the end . . . the Nazis did most of the killing, but it was in Ukraine and Poland that they first grasped . . . ‘that the physical extermination of the Jewish population need not remain a utopian fantasy but could actually be realized.’” The media has the obligation not to erase history.

            In this country today we are pressured to not only reinvent and reinterpret history, but to bury it as well. The arguments from mostly Republican demagogues and conspiracy theorists decry the teaching of Critical Race Theory that explores the presence and effects of racism in the United States that stems from our original sin of slavery; they reject the evidence of the 1619 project that situates America’s founding not in the Revolution (1776-1783) but in the importation of enslaved Africans to this country to be bought and sold.  Historians have offered critique of these movements, but none has denied the lasting effects of slavery in the United States since 1619. This history cannot be (literally) whitewashed, buried, forgotten. The story of Ukraine and Poland in the years 1918-21 might serve as dire warning for the future of the United States.