It’s hard to be honest with yourself

It’s especially hard to make a stand in a peaceful time, because in peaceful time the enemies are vague and sometimes they even look like your friends. In such periods the horrors of the past are forgotten, which is why the history lessons become boring. “Why do you need to rake over the past?” Ukraine’s second president told Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky about the honoring of the Holodomor victims. The latter was smiling. Kuchma said then, “Why do you need to scare the people with the crosses?” At the same time the Luhansk Communists were making jokes, saying that on the day the people “obsessed with commemorating the famine victims,” we are making kebab.

 It was hard to point at the danger in peaceful time, because you risked to be left alone. James Mace, an ethnic Indian, a US citizen, whose origins were left in the other hemisphere, clearly showed the Ukrainians where the trouble to our land would come again. The reason was not in his being a prophet. He just wanted to be honest. That was the reason why he was often alone. A historian needs to be honest, if he wants to understand the depth of processes. First of all, he should be honest with himself. Mace couldn’t lie to himself for the mere reason that his ancestors at their time suffered from genocide and annihilation as well. He understood very well what it meant to preserve your own identity and national memory.

Den/The Day became for Mace an island where he could preserve his own stand in spite of the wind roaming around. There is no doubt that it was the merit of Den’s Editor-in-Chief Larysa Ivshyna, who gives one an opportunity to defend their stand within the walls of Den/The Day, whereas many other newspapers become leaflets of specific forces and clans, and entire TV channels more resemble a feast during the plague, a harlequin show during a catastrophe, when a distorted reality is inserted in people’s mind, so it’s easy to deceive millions. Before the war they tried to create an illusion of a comfort zone, where the one sharpening the knife was looking like a brother, not just a neighbor, and at the same time they were devising image of another enemy allegedly working within the country. A “Banderaite” was created for Luhansk residents, whereas the Lvivites were told tales about a stupid and rude gangster from the Donbas, who had just gotten out of a mining waste pile. At the same time, Russia, to which in 1932-33 provision was taken out in echelons from my native town Svativ, was shown as a great kind judge over our rows.

Mace didn’t live to see his prophecy come true, whereas former blind, who took Russia as their friends, have immediately become “wise” peacekeepers, the “wise men” supporting many-vector policy have become great patriots, and ordinary men – unknown heroes buried in Donbas land. Maybe, it was his luck that he does not have to see this now, and our tragic history has remained for him on paper of books and documents, not in terrible online reports. For us it is important to live to see our victory. And the Ukrainian Indian can teach us a lot, first and foremost, to be honest, not to lose his way again in the darkness of the distorted history, where we have been given only the pages that were torn, and not to get into the abyss of new catastrophes.