Can nations be built with hatred and malice?

Haytham Manna

On a visit to Vilnius (the capital of Lithuania) in August 1973, I met Rima, a political science student, who gave me a list of four students arrested for their “nationalist liberation tendencies” and asked me to send the names and a letter to Amnesty International from Syria, because It does not guarantee that it will not be confiscated by censorship if it is sent by local mail. I asked her: What are the demands of the detained students? She replied: “This communist regime denies our national identity and considers us numbers. We consider him a colonialist who occupied the Baltic countries in 1940 and wants us to be Bolsheviks by force.”.

For many years this talk stuck in my mind and was argued by a number of comrades in the Marxist circles in the 1970s, some of whom adopted the theme of “Stalin’s solution to the national problem in the Soviet Union,” and others said: “It was the Baltic states that asked to join the Soviet Union.” protect it from Nazism. I remember that the late Dr. Maan Mualla said in one of the discussions: “Uncle, they asked for the protection of the Soviet Union from Hitler. When Hitler was killed, they nullified. It is not a Catholic marriage?” … Despite our young age, we were discussing matters at Damascus University, with knowledge and depth, much more than the tragic scene of insignificance, which we have been living in Europe for three months.

Since the entry of Russian forces into Ukrainian territory after February 24, 2022, I have heard officials in the Baltic countries, from the Fast Food generation, expressing their fears of a new Russian occupation, “which will bring us back to the Russian colonialism that we have suffered for half a century.” As I spent my youth studying the totalitarian phenomenon, or the totalitarian project of government, Nazi, communist or Islamist, I feel a kind of misery of history and geography among the post-Soviet generations, especially in Eastern Europe, which was deprived of the “Soviet” enemy, and only found The “Russian” is an alternative to making him an enemy, albeit by rehabilitating the Nazi allies, or installing Stepan Bandera as a hero for Ukraine and glorifying the legendary resistance of the Azov Brigade, who previously called on US Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, head of the Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Subcommittee, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to classify it as: “Foreign terrorist organization”. (In 2019, forty members of Congress demanded that before?).

Any nationalist propaganda needs to build its myths, and in crises and wars, it will not have recourse to historians, jurists and anthropologists. It is enough to read the “Master of Populism” when he says: “The nature of the masses is emotional and their moods are always colored by the colors of feeling and emotion. Successful propaganda is that which is presented to the masses in easy and palatable ways. One of the characteristics of the masses is that they are poorly understood, weak in intelligence, but quickly forgotten. in every lie. What aspect can be believable and the mentality of the masses believes the big lie before the small one. Most readers do not bother themselves to examine and scrutinize what they read of news and they believe everything. (From: My Struggle!)

Watching Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky say “I hate them” and repeat, “Russia made Ukraine hate it, lost it forever.” One feels the pain, not on the Russians, but on the Ukrainians who have given their trust to a comedian, who does not think that he is on stage, but that he thinks that he is the theater, as the psychiatrist Lucian Israel says in his book “Hysterical, Sex and the Doctor.” Zelensky is sure that what he says will not be debated, and that the parliaments of the “very free” world will applaud, no matter what he says and no matter how serious what he says. Does Zelensky know that before him, a decade-old war, which claimed a million and a half lives, did not succeed in creating an eternal rupture between the Iraqi and Iranian peoples? Even before him, Nazism, which caused the deaths of nearly six million Poles, failed to create a rupture between the German and Polish peoples. And that he could divorce his wife with a few legal papers, but wouldn’t change his neighbor even with a nuclear tsunami? Does he not imagine for a moment that, with his hateful rhetoric, he gave his enemy Putin, consciously or unconsciously, the right to speak of a neo-Nazi nationalist mentality? And before the Russian tanks, he set a new Ukrainian border that does not include an essential part of the territory of the Ukrainian Republic?

In an article protesting the 2014 demolition of Lenin’s statues by Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine, the Slovakian philosopher Slavoj Zizek recalled:

“For the golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia – where Ukrainian national self-assertion was thwarted – but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was “indigenization”. Ukrainian culture and language were revived and rights to healthcare, education and social security introduced”[1]. In the Ukrainian Socialist Republic.

It is funny to change the names of streets and landmarks in campaigns that began eight years ago, including the names of scientific, cultural and artistic symbols, and it is even more funny, that “Europeans” solidarity with Kyiv to boycott the living and the dead if it is Russian, but can anyone, after the storm calm, He says, “This was necessary to resist the invasion”? In this case, how can all those who lost their parents and grandparents in the Holocaust explain the picture of Zelensky in December 2021, before the invasion, presenting the “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascist “right sector” at a ceremony in the Verkhovna Rada? …

Ruse of the history, the various national projects in most Eastern European countries were inspired by the model of the first President of the Russian Federation (Boris Yeltsin). Who put an end to the monopoly of state capitalism and opened market capitalism to its comfort, and that it was his era that created the so-called “Russian oligarchy” and the “Russian Mafia” two decades ago, which spawned the “Ukrainian oligarchy” and its sisters? And that what he called radical economic reforms were behind the destruction of the living standards of most of the population in Russia. It led to a sharp deterioration in services and the standard of living and a significant increase in unemployment, corruption and inflation rates… Also, from the cunning of history, Boris Yeltsin was one of the few “Russian” officials who ruled the Soviet Union. And that he was the first popularly elected president of the RSFSR in history with a majority of 57% of the vote. Before it became the official name: Russian Federation.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin, born in the Russian city of Simbirsk (posthumously renamed Ulyanovsk), was the most powerful figure in the party and the state, and one of his most important decisions was to give the right of self-determination to the peoples of the Russian Empire, including political separation and building their own nation at the forefront. Ukraine Republic. Stalin and a number of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party were against this decision.

On August 30, 1918, Fanny Kaplan, as a militant in the Russian Socialist Party, and not as an Ukrainian Jew, approached Lenin and shot him three times, seriously wounding him. He lived three years later, did not fully recover, and the bullet that hit his neck had the greatest impact on the collapse of his health and his departure from power. Loseb Jughashvili (Joseph Stalin), a Georgian, took over the General Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party for thirty years 1922-1952.

After a short transition period, Nikita Khrushchev, from an Ukrainian family, ruled the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Born in Kalinovka on the border between Russia and Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev rose to his party responsibilities until he became General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party/ Ukrainian and not Russian?/. In 1954 Khrushchev annexed Crimea for the first time in history into the Ukrainian Socialist Republic. The majority of the population of Crimea was Tatars, then Russians, with a minority from Ukraine. Does the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, who expanded the territory of Ukraine by a political decision, deserve at least that his name not disappear from history and geography?

Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev was born on December 19, 1906 in the city of Kamianske (Ukraine). He led the Communist Party and the Soviet State from 1964 to 1982.

Yuri Andropov, who took office from 1982-1984, was born in Nagotskoye, with a Turkmen majority, his mother Yevgeniya Faynshtein was Jewish and considered himself agnostic when he joined the Communist Party in his youth.

Even Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we find in his biography:  Born in the village of Privolnoys, Stavropol Krai into a Russian-Ukrainian family, Gorbachev’s paternal family were ethnic Russians; his maternal family were of ethnic Ukrainian?

This is a real history, which no one, by changing the name of an arena or preventing the learning of the Russian language, can erase. This intertwined history of mixed marriages to mutual migrations to coexistence and political, social and cultural overlap… cannot be erased with populist theatrical performances in which the “Politics dwarves” applaud with cleverness, or shortsightedness.

This is what we fought for, brotherhood between the peoples of our region, Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Iranians, and Turks… We did not, and will not, carry the burdens of their rulers on any of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. This is what we wish for all the peoples of the world…

Sooner or later the dark scene will end, and Putin and Zelensky will step down from the lead. On that day, it will stand up to all the nationalist extremists, whoever emphasizes the basic solidarity between Ukrainians, Russians and the rest of the peoples… Because otherwise, as Zizek noted: “we will be left with a conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs. Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics”.

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Haytham Manna: Writer, researcher, and human rights defender for more than forty years. Born in Syria, he studied medicine, psychotherapy, Anthropology and International Law. He published more than fifty books on human rights, non-violence, democracy, citizenship, the most prominent of which is the “Short Universal Encyclopedia of Human Rights”.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/10/ukraine-slavoj-zizek-lenin