Putin, Ukraine and the Jews (Prof. Stephen Berk)

Personality counts in history. The former KGB man rolled the dice. We shall see how they come up. His future and the future of Europe hang in the balance.
Stephen M. Berk, who served as CSP's 10th Annual One Month Scholar in Residence in February 2011, is Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, New York, former Chair of the Department of History, Director of the Program in Russian and Eastern European Studies and Faculty Advisor to the Jewish Student Organization. He is the author of Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 (Greenwood Press, 1985). He is currently writing a book titled: ”Our People Are Your People: American Jewry and the Struggle for Civil Rights 1954-1965.” The book provides an interesting discussion of an extremely important chapter in the history of the civil rights movement and attempts to dispel the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the Black-Jewish relationship. A recipient of the Citizens Laureate Award of the University of Albany Foundation, Professor Berk has been a consultant to the Wiesenthal Holocaust Center in Los Angeles, has written articles on Russian and Jewish history, anti-Semitism, and the Middle East and has lectured on throughout the United States and Canada including such distinguished colleges and universities as Princeton, Vanderbilt, The University of Texas at Austin and Williams College.

[@franciscouderq1100]

I concour with this presentation and QA session. I learned a few valuable things along the way, thank you.
On the matter of India!s army, for some reasons they just purchased the Rafale jet fighter and are very pleased with it.

[@jindiggs]

It is indeed expected, that the Jewish element could get blamed for the loss of war. Our job is to make sure that this won't happen. We have to defend, we have to protect, and sure as hell.. we have to fight. Thank you for the analysis, helps me keep it going.

[@eugene_iodine_psychedelia1960s]

Putin, Ukraine and the Jews (Prof. Stephen Berk)
Bandera and Khmelnitsky
Thank you for your honest lecture, Mr. Berk!
Everything is set out very clearly and as close to reality as possible. But I also want to make some corrections regarding Khmelnytsky and Bandera. You are a historian, and historical accuracy and the restoration of historical justice are very important to you. I understand and respect this. But you also said that PERCEPTION is tantamount to facticity. So, as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian (who, by the way, no one in the world has ever forced to speak Ukrainian), I want to share how people perceive Bandera and Khmelnitsky. People live for today, only professionals are engaged in sciences. Historical information is presented in fragments, no one has a clear picture, and few people are interested in it. Since 2005, and then since 2014, of course, more people began to be interested in history. In people's minds there are only disordered historical fragments, and I am no exception in this.
To be honest, I learned about the atrocities of Khmelnitsky from you. This is important to you because it concerns the Jewish people. Yes, Khmelnitsky is a national hero of Ukraine (but it should be noted that this has been since Soviet times, that is, it’s completely different from the situation with Bandera), there is the city of Khmelnitsky, there are streets named after him, monuments, a 5 hryvnia banknote bears his image…
But here is what Taras Shevchenko wrote about him…
Khmelnitsky is subjected to the most sincere criticism in the poem "If you, drunken Bogdan ...", which for a long time was forbidden to print:
Great, glorious! But not much.
If you hadn't been born.
Or in the cradle you would still get drunk ...
I wouldn't bathe in a puddle
You great. Amen.
Why did Shevchenko write this?
Apparently, because Khmelnitsky had a pro-Russian vector. See MARCH ARTICLES (1654). This is the same as the Minsk Agreements (2014). Then Khmelnitsky suddenly died, and power passed to his spineless teenage son. This son, Yuri Khmelnitsky, with the PEREYASLAV ARTICLES (1659) crossed out all the work that his father (a flexible diplomat) did, and in fact gave Ukraine into the slavery of Russia. The main point: the dissolution of the Zaporizhian Army. No army, no state.
A Quote from The contested legacy of Bohdan Khmelnitsky
emerging-europe.com/after-hours/the-contested-legacy-of-bohdan-khmelnitsky/
{
Despite Khmelnitsky is one of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nation, he has a complicated and controversial legacy. While revered for his rebellion against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and for laying the foundations of a Ukrainian identity, Khmelnitsky is also decried by Ukrainian nationalists for the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslavl in which Ukrainian Cossacks pledged allegiance to the Tsar of Muscovy. This set the stage for the eventual incorporation of most of the territory of modern-day Ukraine into the Russian Empire.
}
Regarding Khmelnytsky, Ukraine and Poland reconciled with the help of Jerzy Hoffmann's film "With Fire and Sword".
Now about Bandera. Reasonable people don't take him seriously. There are no more far-right idiots in Ukraine than in any European country. They do not interfere with anyone, do not touch anyone. Even the benefit of them is that thanks to them, the Russians did not manage to capture more cities than Donetsk and Lugansk in 2014. They have only a few seats in parliament (see the parliamentary elections 2019). Bandera is a defenseless figure of Russian propaganda, whose mission is to anger Jews, Poles, and quarrel Ukrainians with them and with each other (because in the three most western regions Bandera is treated with more respect than in the rest). This is on the one hand. On the other hand, Bandera is a key element of Putin's propaganda. Putin needs Bandera to turn the population of Russia against all Ukrainians (“all Ukrainians are Nazis and Bandera”), and to justify what he calls “denazification”. Russian propaganda is lying absolutely cruelly and shamelessly, pulling the instinctive strings of "friend or foe." And, as you rightly said, anti-Semitism is the oldest form of interethnic hatred. Therefore, it is very easy to play on this, which KGB officer Putin does (very skillfully and successfully, unfortunately).
Many people do not like the fact that the streets are named after Bandera, but now Bandera serves as a stimulus for the better functioning of the army: everyone either did not know, or had long forgotten about the anti-Semitism associated with it, and turned it into “anti-Moskalism”. The actual, real PERCEPTION of Bandera is “the enemy is Russia”, zero anti-Semitism. How can there be anti-Semitism when the Jews are at war with everyone else against total evil? I repeat once again: all the anti-Semitism that carries the image of Bandera has now been transferred to the direct enemy - the Russians. Unfortunately, on all Russians, and not on those who are really involved in criminal orders and war crimes.
Bandera has the title of a hero (this is also not liked by many), but there are no state awards, prizes, institutes, schools, universities, etc. that would bear his name. You will not find his portrait on the banknotes of Ukraine either, and this says a lot. All monuments to Bandera are concentrated in the west of Ukraine. I repeat, Bandera is specially inflated by Russian agents provocateurs. Most Ukrainians would like to remove the Bandera phenomenon somewhere far away.
Finally, I also want to draw attention to the fact that the followers of Bandera and Bandera himself are different entities. PMC Wagner is named after the composer only because Hitler loved him. I am sure that Richard Wagner himself, if he saw what his works would be associated with, would destroy them. The same goes for Karl Marx, who said that because of the way his work was interpreted in a perverted way, he could not consider himself a Marxist. I’m not a marxist, I use it just as an analogy.
And the anecdote!
This is the most famous anecdote about Banderittes (and the only one I know, and that is because of the war).
Year 1946. Galicia. Two boys are walking through the forest.
They see the grandfather has tied the Muscovite to a tree and is sawing with a saw.
- Doesn't the master have a knife or an ax?
- No, the master has both a knife and an ax, but the master still has time and inspiration!
“Time and inspiration” is a meme in Ukraine.
Thank you again! Mazel tov!
th-cam.com/video/GiBOpkiDha0/w-d-xo.html