[MichaelB_PL]

Originally Posted by Kathy

I think Michael makes a valid point which many in the Ukrainian diaspora did not wish to confront. We were so entrenched in our hatred of communism (with good reason), that we failed to recognize that the interwar period in Western Ukraine was not without some issues. Anti Semitism was rampant, and that is something which, until recently, Ukrainians refused to recognize. Some still do not. There was also a real hatred of Poles.

Yes, there are many such issues, both from the interwar period and from WWII, which I think are quite rarely known or acknowledged.

You've mentioned antisemitism - AFAIK, it was heavily spread both among Polish and Ukrainian population of the region.

As for hatred of Poles (and the corresponding hatred of Ukrainians), I think it was sort of a long chain reaction with multiple "guilty parties" on both sides - the biggest problem with analysing this is that it's hard to determine when to start - around the end of WWI, or much earlier, during the years of the Commonwealth.

Leaving the cossacks and nobles from few hundred years ago alone, we might start looking at the end of WWI and at the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918 - Ukrainians wanted to create independent Ukraine in an area in which they've constituted the majority, but that area contained the city of Lwow(Lviv), which had Polish majority instead and which was one the most important centers of Polish culture.

It's hard to blame Ukrainians for wanting to create their state on area where they have been the majority and it's hard to blame Poles for not wanting to allow one of the major Polish cities to be put under foreign occupation - I think it was a very bad situation to begin with - both sides had valid, sensible claims, but these claims were mutually exclusive - and it led to a conflict.

I think that the situation simply continued later - Poles probably simply remembered the war and remembered one occurance which some today Ukrainians know about, but which had one aspect which might be easily overlooked by an Ukrainian - I mean the seizing of Lwow/Lviv and what did it mean to the (Polish) majority of the population of the city.

Basicly the Polish citizens of a big city which was one of the leading centers of Polish culture, saw foreign, Ukrainian soldiers seizing control and proclaiming that now it is the city of Lviv and now it will be "Ukraine" - and they have fought against the occupation, fighting to free the city they were the majority in, fighting against Ukrainian troops.

To the Poles, that was an act of imperialism and an attempt made by Ukrainians to be the next foreign occupiers - and it probably did have an impact upon Polish attitude toward Ukrainians in the interwar period.

AFAIK Later the Poles tried to eliminate the danger of any kind of reoccurance of the 1918 occupation of Lwow/Lviv and tried to polonise the Ukrainians, to slowly undermine their culture and replace it with Polish one.

They were opposed by the Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom were very determined in their beliefs and who entered a path of confrontation, becoming terrorists who might be called similiar to the IRA or ETA. The terrorists responded to the unjust Polish opression in a equally unjust manner and started to attack goverment officials, burn Polish private property - and they've brought a even more unjust Polish response - the Pacification, which we did discuss in this thread before, during which a certain number of completely innocent Ukrainian civilians died - which of course caused immense hatred of Poles and without doubt contributed to the even more unjust mass murders of Polish in the Volhynia and other provinces.

Moreover, because archives from the area were not available, and many members of UPA formed part of the wave of Ukrainian immigrants from among DP's, the ability to track the truth was not always easy.

Yes, personally I get a strong impression that the OUN-B political option did succeed in spreading it's own, heavily biased version of history among the Ukrainian diaspora, causing most of the Ukrainians in the US or Canada to be completely unaware of the fact that their knowledge of Ukraine's history is de facto a propaganda product of a particular political organisation.

I think there is also some of the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" in this, and those were brutal times for everyone. Can we really judge it one way, Michael? It is complex.

I think that any kind of judging is secondary... first thing which must be done in my opinion is clearing the white spots, establishing the facts - there will be always subjective opinions, but facts are facts.

I have to go now and I can't write some things I wanted to write...


Michael