We have had conversations with Ukrainians that are scattered around European countries. The usual story that you hear from them goes something like that. When we lived in Ukraine during the times of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian language was suppressed and we were compelled to use the Russian language all the time. That is why we wanted to gain independence and we wanted to recreate our own culture, our own heritage, and – of course – preserve our own language. But then after Ukraine had gained its independence, things went terribly wrong, and eventually – as we know – the war between Ukraine and Russia broke out. Many Ukrainians had fled the country even before the war, some of them during the war if they were lucky enough to be able to cross the border.
The majority of Ukrainians who now live in Europe – be it in Poland, Czechia, Romania, or in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom – say that they are not going to return to their country under any circumstances. They’ve learned the local language – be it Polish or Romanian, be it German or French – and they have found employment in the European countries of their residence. They may also have left Ukraine with their children or they may have birthed children while living in Europe. Surely those children will go to Polish or Romanian to German or Italian schools, and they will have Polish, Romanian, German or Italian friends. Those children will absorb the Polish, Romanian, German or Italian culture, and so on and so forth. In many cases one generation is enough to extirpate that Ukrainian culture in those young people, the children of Ukrainian immigrants. How about yet another generation? Well, of course, many of those youngsters will begin to date Polish, Romanian, German, or Italian partners, and of course they’re going to get married and start families. They’re not going to talk in Ukrainian in such nationally mixed marriages but in the language of the country the residents of which they will happened to be. So the third generation means for all practical purposes the erasure of Ukrainian identity.
But the people that you are talking to – those Ukrainians who have settled in France or Poland, in Germany or Spain – they all claim that they wanted to preserve their Ukrainian identity, which is precisely why they left Ukraine. Where is the logic?
If you listen to Ukrainians talking about such topics, you should be on your guard whether what they say is genuine or whether they repeat what they have heard in Ukrainian mass media or in Ukrainian schools. You should also bear in mind that those Ukrainian people who you are talking to about such things are well aware of the fact that if they only say that they have been discriminated against in their own country, then they can very easily evoke feelings of empathy in their European interlocutors. That’s a simple and well known psychological mechanism. If an immigrant wants to ingratiate himself with the people of the host country, and he knows that the people the host country follow the principles of empathy, then – of course – he is going to strike the empathetic chord in their souls.
What do facts reveal? Facts simply reveal that if Ukrainians claim that they want to preserve their national identity and that is why they leave Ukraine and – which is even worse – and that is why they do not want to come back to their country under any circumstances, then it clearly means that they do not want to preserve their national identity, that they are indifferent to what is going to happen to their children, and grandchildren living in a foreign country in terms of their children’s and grandchildren’s national or cultural identity. Clearly, Ukrainians and their offspring can only preserve their national heritage while living in Ukraine, under whatever circumstances, even if they were to be suppressed there culturally. Why?
Because even if they were suppressed by Russians during the times of the Soviet Union, even if they were Russified, it meant that they were compelled to speak the Russian language – a language that is very, very close to Ukrainian. Linguists will even tell you that Ukrainian is to Russian what Bavarian is general German. So the national feeling or the national identity of Ukrainians – even if being put under Russian pressure – could not be suppressed entirely. Is there anybody who thinks that Bavarians are suppressed in Germany? Some of them continue to speak the Bavarian kind of German but at the same time it does not occur to them to fight for Bavarian independence and the accuse the German Federative Republic of suppressing Bavarian identity.
Coming back to Ukraine. The other aspects of being subdued – if we want to use this term – by Russians is that being dominated by Russia meant that you still used the Cyrillic script. Now a Ukrainian settling anywhere in Europe (of course, apart from Bulgaria, Macedonia or Serbia – but these are not usually the target countries for Ukrainian immigrants) is not going to use the Cyrillic script. Still less his children who, attending European schools and learning respective European languages, are going to learn the Latin script. So another big part of Ukrainian identity (besides the spoken language) is going to be erased.
The only thing that can still be preserved is religion, the Orthodox Christianity, which is the dominant creed in Ukraine. But this part of Ukrainian identity heavily depends on whether the person is religious or not. Because people who are religiously indifferent have already lost this aspect of Ukrainian identity. What about those who are Christian Orthodox believers? It will be very difficult for them to preserve this faith in any of the European countries where there is no Orthodox Christianity (with the exception of Bulgaria Serbia Macedonia or Romania). Europe is nominally either Catholic or Protestant; in reality, Europe is increasingly agnostic or atheistic, or… becoming Muslim.
All of which means that Ukrainians residing in any of the European countries are exposed to such pressures that will inevitably extirpate their Ukrainian identity. But they say they fled Ukraine, fearing Russification in case Russia won the war…
It would be much more decent to say, I have left my country because of economic reasons and I do not care about my heritage, or about my native language, or about my faith. But of course it sounds not so nice to the ears of the people that you want to ingratiate yourself with. So, you spin stories about being suppressed, discriminated against, and so on.
What we are observing is by no means a new phenomenon. During the Second World War the Germans tried to Germanize for instance Polish children if only they recognised them as racially fit for that purpose. Because Germany was bleeding on the fronts of the Second World War, its human resources were being systematically depleted, and that is why the German authorities arrived at the idea of replenishing the shrinking population with the human material from the conquered countries. So it happened that tens of thousands of very young racially fit children were taken away from their Polish parents and adopted by German foster-parents, while all the traces of their national origin were erased from the documents. The result is that in present-day Germany there are thousands of people who are thought to be German, but in point of fact are Polish by descent. Why are we telling this story and reminding the reader of this procedure that took place during the Second World War?
Because of the same demographic and ideological phenomenon. On the one hand the Polish nation and the Polish authorities recognised this rubbing of children as a national demographic catastrophe, and rightly so. But, on the other hand, very many parents – Polish parents! – almost immediately after the war had come to an end dreamed about their children leaving Poland and resettling in Germany. Poland was a poor country, while West Germany was so rapidly developing that it did not take much time for West Germany to become economically powerful. So, if only an opportunity presented itself, young people started emigrating to Western countries, and very, very many of them to West Germany. Parents and grandparents were glad that their children and grandchildren relocated to West Germany, spoke the German language, sent their children to German schools and so on and so forth. One might say that – generalising – almost those same parents and grandparents who said that they had been harmed during the Second World War by the Germans when those Germans had robbed them of their own children, the same parents and grandparents who would have demanded compensation for the human losses that they had sustained during the Second World War, the very same parents and grandparents were very much pleased if only their children or grandchildren could leave Poland and start their life in Germany. This time it did not bother the parents or their grandparents that their children and grandchildren were Germanized, that their children and grandchildren gradually lost their Polishness. Where was the logic in all of this?
Sure enough, money is the only logic. But of course nobody wants to say that he is motivated by money and money alone, so immigrants spin stories about being discriminated against, about having the national or religious identity suppressed, and so on and so forth as the case may be, depending on which story will have the best effect on the host country citizens.
This is precisely the same phenomenon that Europeans are facing while accepting immigrants from the Third World. The same lack of logic applies here. On the one hand the immigrants – especially those from Africa – will complain about the white man’s racism, but on the other hand they will flock to Europe, they will flock to the place which is infested with racism, rather than staying in their own countries, which are free of white racists. Is there any logic in this?
We have reviewed three similar phenomena: Ukrainians leaving Ukraine and settling in Europe, Poles leaving Poland and settling in Germany, and Africans leaving Africa and settling in the white man’s world. Ukrainians flee Ukraine because they do not want to be turned into Russians, but at the same time they want to be turned into Poles, Germans, Italians or French. The Polish people, who would have demanded financial compensation from West Germany for the stolen Polish children, were more than happy sending their children and grandchildren to West Germany in order to have them become Germans. And lastly, African people who keep complaining about the white man’s racism and at the same time flock to the white man’s countries by the tens of thousands every week to be exposed to… the white man’s racism. In all of these three cases there is the materialistic (financial) base and the ideological superstructure. Very many gullible Europeans fall for this ideological superstructure without seeing this materialistic (financial) base which is the real driving force behind the phenomenon of immigration.
