School of hatred

Thus, it is clear that anti-Galician propaganda is part of Russian imperialism’s major ideological and informational propaganda. It is almost entirely based on historical, national, theoretical, and political falsifications, distortions, and omissions. In reality, Galicia’s only “crime” is that in this region Ukrainians managed to create more or less favorable historical opportunities for achieving a true spiritual, cultural, and ethnic identity.

Galicia may be compared with the Roman Empire in the 1st-2nd centuries A.D., when there were only two peoples — the Greeks and the Hebrews — on the gigantic expanses from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia, who saved their full- fledged national identity from imperial assimilation. Within as little as 100-200 years after conquering such peoples with a militant world outlook and highly-developed distinct culture as the Iberians, Celts, and Dacians, the Roman succeeded in assimilating them, and diluting and morally subjugating peoples with thousands of years of state-building traditions, and their own spirituality — the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Syrian, and Arameans.

But they could not do anything with the national identity of the Greeks and Hebrews (this is why they called them contemptuous names: the word “Greek” has a clearly derogatory meaning in Latin, and it was used instead of the traditional term “Hellene”). Neither political blandishments, nor terror, nor cultural synthesizing worked. The only reason is that these two conquered peoples, in contrast to others, had completed a full cycle of nation-building. Their national resolve was based not only on high culture, state-building traditions, and religiosity, but also, and chiefly, on a mystical determination to carry out a separate national mission, an exalted feeling of their own dignity, and passionate desire to speak in their spiritual language with Eternity and God.

As a high culture can be “overridden” by an even higher one, state- building traditions can be forgotten in captivity or overshadowed by the more perfect government systems of others, and religious awareness tends to borrow and become enriched by the religious ideas and rites of other peoples, the national volitional effort always remains the cornerstone of human existence. The nation that managed to build up this kind of consciousness gained eternity. Sometimes it could be a people with a primitive culture and social structure.

Proceeding from these facts, one can say that the history of Ukraine demonstrates the axiomatic formula: “A weakened Galicia always leads to a weakened Ukraine” and vice versa. It would be good if contemporary politicians, who are striving to realize Ukraine’s national and political interests, learned this formula. Without a doubt, Galicia can be reproached today for failing to become the all-Ukrainian Piedmont in the 1990s, for not being the vanguard of Ukrainian cultural development, for being very inactive and disorganized politically, like the other Central European nations, for being mentally provincial, socially inert, and too passive and “soft” to draw up viable intellectual and analytical concepts and ideologies.

Still, it is Galicia that remains the most reliable bulwark of Ukrainians, the most productive generator of national energy, the most effective mammoth “sensor” that receives the subtlest signals about threats to and the destruction of the national body. This occurs because the Galician Ukrainian identity has reached that national depth when people are intuitively feeling the need for an adequate national action.

In this sense, Galicians are irreplaceable today. All attempts to discredit Galicia will come to nothing once you apply the principles and criteria of Ukrainian national interests to them. It will become clear that all forms of Galiciaphobia are just a smokescreen for the Little Russian and anti-Ukrainian forces that are bent on employing destructive strategies and tactics.

Oleh Baham is an expert at the Mohyla School of Journalism