Mark von Hagen - Does Ukraine Have a History?

Wikipedia:

Mark Louis von Hagen (July 21, 1954 – September 15, 2019) was an American military historian who taught Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian history at Arizona State University. He was formerly at Columbia University. He was commissioned by The New York Times to write an independent assessment of Times correspondent Walter Duranty and his reporting on the Soviet Union after the newspaper received a letter from the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding allegations of Duranty's role in the cover-up of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine.

In 2003, The New York Times commissioned Von Hagen to study Duranty's role in covering up genocide in Ukraine. He reported that "after reading through a good portion of Duranty's reporting for 1931, I was disappointed and disturbed by the overall picture he painted of the Soviet Union for that period...but after reading so much of Duranty in 1931 it is far less surprising to me that he would deny in print the famine of 1932-1933." The results of the study led him to call for Duranty's Pulitzer Prize to be revoked, remarking to the press that "for the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."

Asked if his opinion of Duranty's reporting would change if he were to examine only those 13 articles for which Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, Dr. von Hagen replied with a resolute no. The reporting for which he won the Pulitzer Prize was "quintessential of the problems of Mr. Duranty's analysis," Dr. von Hagen said. The professor said that Duranty's award "diminishes the prize's value."

An excerpt from, "Does Ukraine Have a History?" By Mark von Hagen, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995):

One answer to this seemingly simple question was suggested by a Ukrainian scholar when he retorted that if Ukraine has a future, then Ukraine will have a history. He thereby correctly put politics, including international politics, at the center of the discussion. A simple answer to the question is, of course, that the peoples and institutions that occupy the contemporary state of Ukraine have a history, in the sense of lived experience, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, the way all of us have pasts to which we can appeal.

But if we re-ask the question, "Does Ukraine have a history?" and mean this time a written record of that experienced past that commands some widespread acceptance and authority in the international scholarly and political communities, then the answer is not so simple. The title of this paper echoes an important essay by Ukrainian historian Serhii Bilokin', "Chy maemo my istorychnu nauku?"'---literally "do we have historical science?" perhaps more clearly translated "Do we have a tradition of historical scholarship?" Bilokin', by the way, persuasively argues that it is too early to speak of such traditions.

If we leave Ukraine and look to the political geography of history teaching, we find virtually no recognition that Ukraine has a history. In major Anglo-American, German and Japanese academic centers, Ukrainian history as a field (with a couple of important exceptions) does not exist per se; the exceptions only confirm the general rule. The Canadian government and Canadian Ukrainian emigrants subsidize Ukrainian history and culture in Canada, but here an "abnormal" situation exists in that nearly all the scholars are of Ukrainian descent. This fact has allowed "mainstream" historians to characterize Ukrainian history as "searching for roots," national advocacy or some other partisan pleading, and to deny the field the valorization it seeks as "objective history." The domination by scholars of Ukrainian ancestry is also the case at the one US center of Ukrainian studies, at Harvard University. The point of all this is that, by the indexes of the intellectual organization of professional history writing, Ukraine has not had a history.

Ukraine and the History of East Central and Eastern Europe

Why is this? Above all, Ukraine's history must be seen as part of a greater dilemma of eastern and central Europe. During all their tenuous modern existence, the states of eastern and central Europe have been pawns in the international system. Before 1914 the "non-historical peoples" were long subject to three central European dynastic empires: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs. After the collapse of the multi-ethnic monarchies in World War I, these nations have been most directly the pawns of either the German Reich or the Soviet Union.

These geopolitical realities were reflected in intellectual structures that have served to organize our thinking about the region. Because none of the states which exist today between Berlin and Moscow existed at the time of the rise of modern historiography in the early and mid-nineteenth century, their histories continue to carry a taint of artificiality, non-genuineness; real states are Britain, France, Spain, Russia and, with qualifications, Germany. But Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and especially Ukraine are suspect candidates in the international order and somehow undeserving of the prerogatives of genuine statehood. As one of the consequences of the failed or circumscribed statehoods of the peoples in eastern and central Europe, the peoples of the region have been denied full historiographical legitimacy.

The War of the Two Messiahs

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The Dust Never Settled

Air Dominance Over Gaza

A War With Many Dimensions

A War of Evil Against Evil

The War of The Hypocrites

After The Ayatollahs: A Middle East Without Hezbollah, The Taliban And Islamic Republics

When Cowards Go To War: The America, Iran, And Israel Story

The tit-for-tat warfare that Israel and Iran look to be engaged in, at least for now, has an unpredictable dynamic. Both theological regimes are fundamentally irrational and at odds with history. 

War is their lifeline. Prophecy is their state ideology. Victimhood is their national psychology. That's a dangerous and combustible cocktail.

Regimes that believe they are victims of history and international conspiracy, like Nazi Germany, are more willing to initiate violence than a confident superpower like modern day China.

It must be remembered that the 1979 regime change in Iran was not a popular and smooth transition. Popular anti-government protests were hijacked by a power hungry clique. It was a revolution in name only. The Islamic Republic has ruled its captured populace via state terrorism ever since.

Likewise with Israel. It is not the only "democracy in the Middle East." Far from it. It hasn't known a moment of peace because it chose the path of war against its Arab neighbours from even before its official founding. 

It mastered the dark arts of international terrorism and emotional blackmail to gain legal cover for its constant belligerence. America joined in on its decades-long hysterical act on 9/11 when it too pleaded to be the "victim" of terror. 

This shared, collective trauma allowed the sick leaders of both countries, along with their lame lackeys across the West, to basically lay waste to international laws and dissolve all moral boundaries in their unprovoked attacks on Muslim countries. They weaponized national grief and utilized the natural urge for revenge to achieve their long-planned political and military objectives.

All that could be understood rationally and logically. The conquest of territory, the hunger for world domination and power, the greed of weapons contractors, the vanity of political leaders. But what's harder to grasp is the religious element that clearly motivates the esoterically inclined leaderships of Israel, the U.S., U.K., Iran, and the Western political elite. 

Netanyahu and his theocratic allies have no regard for the safety and long-term security of the Israeli people. And ditto for their Muslim counterparts who believe in their own version of messianism.

These rulers really are batshit crazy. The Covid hysteria proved it, during which Israel was at the forefront of the global collective madness. They all showed themselves to be wolves leading the sheep during that engineered hysteria. 

Not one political leader, not a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, an Atheist, a Buddhist, stood up to denounce the Covid lies. On that front the leaders in Israel, the West, Russia, China, and Iran were all on the same side. So why believe them regarding anything else? Why listen to known liars? 

April Showers In The Desert

 

"War is a necessary part of God's arrangement of the world…Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism." 

- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.

The die was cast a long time ago. 

When the state of Israel was created without an adjacent state of Palestine beside it, war was declared. And Israel won that war very decisively and easily for multiple generations because it had guts, technological edge, and powerful backers.

They still have all those things but it's not 1946 anymore.

The political decision to disenfranchise Palestine and block the formation of a sovereign state created an opening for all sorts of opportunistic actors in the region to make their name, the most successful of which have been Islamic fanatics.

Their political success would not be possible without the policies, choices, and direct interventions of Israel, England and the United States. This fact cannot be disputed. 

Israel, America, and England chose war over peace at every opportunity. They chose fanaticism over compromise. They chose Islam over everything else in the region when they abandoned the Shah in favour of the Ayatollah in the late 1970s. They then doubled down on their strategy by supporting the Pakistani-backed Islamic opposition against the Russian-backed communist government in Afghanistan. 

And it was a successful strategy. During the Cold War they short-sightedly riled up the Muslims to score political victories against Russia in Central Asia, India, and the Middle East. They won the Cold War. Congrats. Thumbs up. 

But they lost the next war. 

They ran away from Afghanistan after two decades of futile killing, gave Iraq away to the clerics, and reduced small nations like Libya, Yemen, and Syria to rubble because they mistake the destruction of towns and cities with victory.

Israel believes it can achieve total victory over the Palestinians. They are implementing a genocidal campaign in Gaza with some success so they may turn out to be right but there are still more Arabs and Muslims than Jews. Have they planned for the murder of them all? Do they want an all out war in the region? Do they not know that the extremist clerics who occupy Iran value an inch of Jerusalem's soil more than the whole Iranian nation? 

The war won't be over when every Palestinian is dead or when Iranian cities are bombarded day and night. Since the Palestinian cause became a Muslim cause the war stopped being about Palestine. Islam put itself on trial. And Israel simply isn't strong, big, or wise enough to take down a whole religion in the court of war. They have to put their hate and desire aside and find a middle ground. 

The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History By Ivan L. Rudnytsky

Wikipedia:

Ivan Pavlovych Lysiak Rudnytsky (27 October 1919 – 25 April 1984) was a historian of Ukrainian socio-political thought, political scientist and scholar publicist. He significantly influenced Ukrainian historical and political thought by writing over 200 historical essays, commentaries, and reviews, and also serving as editor of several book publications. He has been praised as one of the most influential Ukrainian historians of the twentieth century. He is sometimes referred to as Ivan Łysiak-Rudnytsky, but the surname he used was his mother’s name Rudnytsky.

According to Eastern Europe historian Timothy Snyder, Rudnytsky decisively argued against the proposition that Ukraine ought to be a homogeneous nation - that it should be exclusively for and about people who spoke Ukrainian and shared Ukrainian culture. Rudnytsky believed, as Mykhailo Hrushevsky did, in Ukraine's social historical continuity of development towards an independent democratic nation, and also believed, as Vyacheslav Lypynsky did, that its destiny was to be pluralistic. The opposing view in Ukraine was championed by Dmytro Dontsov who took his cues from Italian fascism and became the far right conservative voice of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism. According to Snyder, Rudnytsky’s response to ethnic nationalism won the argument, both in Ukraine and among North American Ukrainian expatriates, about what the Ukrainian nation should be. Instead of the nation looking for legitimacy in dubious historical claims or assertions of a homogeneous culture, Rudnytsky’s view was that a nation is fundamentally the result of political acts of commitment directed at a common future, which means that in principle, anyone can take part in it.

An excerpt from, "The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History" By Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Slavic Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1963):

A striking difference between the historical development of the countries of Western Europe and that of those of the eastern half of the continent has been often observed. The former, particularly France and England, have enjoyed, in spite of some periods of revolutionary upheaval, a millennium of continuous growth. Germany's fate has been much less favorable, and farther to the east it is impossible to find any country which has not experienced, at one time or another, a tragic breakdown and an epoch of a national capitis deminutio, sometimes extending for centuries. Here one will think of the subjugation of the Balkanic peoples and Hungary by the Turks, of the crushing of Bohemia by Habsburg absolutism, of the partitions of Poland.

The Ukraine is a typically East European nation in that its history is marked by a high degree of discontinuity. The country suffered two major eclipses in the course of its development. The medieval Rus' received a crippling blow from the hands of the Mongols, was subsequently absorbed by Lithuania, and finally annexed to Poland. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Ukraine rose against Polish domination, and a new body politic, the Cossack State, came into existence. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of the Cossack Ukraine was destroyed by the Russian Empire. A new upward cycle started in the nineteenth century. The movement of national regeneration culminated in the 1917 Revolution, when a Ukrainian independent state emerged, to succumb soon to Communist Russian control. This third, last great division of Ukrainian history, which lasts from the 1780's to the Revolution, and in a sense even to the present, forms what may be defined as "modern Ukrainian history."

Objectives, Means, And Ends

 

"Antagonisms and passions block the way to an objectively accurate judgment of our own and of foreign interests. The self-conceit of the victor is quite as much of a hindrance to correct judgment, as the exasperation of the conquered." - Count István Tisza, March 15, 1914. From, "Papers of Count Tisza, 1914-1918" By Sidney B. Fay, The American Historical Review, 1924.

"During the Easter season the whole world was apprehensively watching a terrible bomb timed to explode on May 15 - the date on which the British, as they firmly and repeatedly announced, would abandon the intolerable burden of their mandate over the Holy Land. No one could foresee precisely what the consequences would be. But unless some miracle took place - unless Britain gave a last-minute consent to remain longer or to cooperate with others, or unless the United States or the United Nations secured some very speedy preventive action and prepared to use troops for the enforcement of law and order - it was a safe guess that Palestine would be torn with far more violence and bloodshed than hitherto.

Where is the blame? On many sides. To mention only the most important:

The British government is to blame for irreconcilable promises made to Arabs and Jews during World War I, and for a hesitating and indecisive policy ever since, until it could no longer endure the headache and therefore dumped the problem into the lap of the United Nations. In fair justice to the British, however, it must be said that they have done more both for the Jews and the Arabs than has any other nation.

President Roosevelt during World War II likewise encouraged conflicting hopes in both Arabs and Jews. President Truman made matters worse by urging the British to admit 100,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine while at the same time refusing to accept any responsibility for the consequences; i.e. he would not send any American troops to preserve order in the likely event that the Arabs might oppose Jewish immigration by fighting. The British, who had long borne the burden alone, resented President Truman's attitude. 

The Arabs and the Zionist Jews are to blame for their emotional insistence on their own points of view and their refusal to cooperate in various peaceful, but compromise, proposals.

Even Russia might be said to be to blame, because her exercise of the veto has weakened the United Nations, and her aggressive policy has made Britain and the United States fear the use of Russian troops, either alone or as part of an international police force, in maintaining law and order in Palestine.

Finally, Middle East oil is a factor of enormous strategic and economic importance. Its exploitation is one of the essential elements in the Marshall Plan. As American oil reserves are depleted, it will before long become an important article of import into the United States. At present its development and the pipelines, either being built or in the process, are mainly in the hands of British and American controlled companies; but those companies are threatened by the Arabs with trouble or annulment of their concessions if there is an attempt to enforce the partition of Palestine. Furthermore, Communist control in Western Europe or a Russian move into the Middle East, would deal a fatal blow to the favored hold which British and Americans now enjoy over Middle East oil. The settlement of Palestine thus involves not merely the Arabs and Zionists; it affects the far bigger problems of the most important military raw material and the relations between the totalitarian East and the democratic West." - Sidney B. Fay, "Arabs, Zionists, and Oil" Current History, Vol. 14, No. 81 (May 1948).

The wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land would come to an end overnight if the ruling circles in the United States and England wanted them to.  

Over the course of both conflicts they have used every diplomatic and propaganda tool at their disposal to further the bloodshed and prevent any negotiations from taking place. 

Encouraging small states to engage in wars over territory against their bigger, more powerful neighbours is asking for trouble. 

What are their policy objectives in the war in Ukraine? To put political pressure on Putin, divide Russia internally, and break it up into small pieces? If so, then declare war officially on Russia, and stop using poor Ukraine as a battering ram. Sending dumb Ukrainians to their deaths for cheap political points is shameful.

Money alone doesn't win you wars. Great powers can't bribe their way to victory. Two decades of futility in Afghanistan proved that. 

Ukraine is considered Holy ground in Russia, so they're willing to fight for generations there. And Putin has stated his military and political objectives very clearly and on multiple occasions. That's what a leader is supposed to do before committing his nation to war.

What are the U.S. and U.K. objectives in the Holy Land? The total annihilation of the Palestinians and the complete erasure of their history? If so, then join the war officially on the side of Israel and declare war on Palestine. 

If not, then what's the alternative? Right now they are looking on and assisting Israel at every turn. Are they too afraid of the Zionist Lobby to change course? Have they been compromised and terrorized into silence and compliance?

The fact is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have and should have been solved decades ago had Washington been led by brave, smart, honest, and mature leaders. Instead its God-like power has attracted the worst of the worst over the decades after Kennedy's assassination and those in charge now can't even pretend to lead. They don't know how. They got into power by lying. And liars aren't leaders. 

What the world needs now are true leaders. I think Putin might be the only one. And he isn't even that great because he went along with the Covid nonsense like the rest of them. Lukashenko was a better leader during that crazy period. But he still deserves credit for trying to make peace which is what real leaders do.