Olha HERASYMYUK: “We ourselves chose our second-rate status”
“Why are we used to thinking that our country’s image depends on the actions of individual persons?”
“On the one hand, this is the way we are. Even now you can sometimes hear somebody say, ‘What are you doing? Foreigners are looking at you.’ Not so long ago, I think, a student could be expelled from the college for a commonplace quarrel with a foreigner because this could damage the prestige of state. The foreigners who came here always felt at home. But even now, when opened borders and a new social system have brought about so many changes, our citizen still remembers that ‘his place’ is a bit behind and aside. He has also developed quite a funny habit: to scathingly criticize, before anybody else has classified a certain event, another ‘blow to the image of Ukraine,’ immediately referring this, of course, to the Russian (a must!) and Western media, so they know that all of us are not khokhly, that there people who resolutely fight against and dissociate themselves from this mentality. It is perhaps the job of social psychologists to study this side of our national mentality.
“Very often the world does not link what has happened to the nationality of who committed some crime inappropriate or awful. They judge the individual who did a bad thing without explaining his actions in terms of the peculiarities of his ethnic mentality, as was, incidentally, the case here until recently: a Ukrainian is crafty, silly and treacherous, an Uzbek is stupid and can’t express himself in Russian at all, not to mention Jews, Moldovans, Balts, etc.
“First of all, I think our media decide by themselves what does and does not tarnish the image of the whole country, so the reader or the viewer takes it for granted. I have the right to say so because I saw this, working on this issue. I asked cross-border information consumers whether they connect with Ukraine what, for example, Soltys did. The say, ‘Oh no, don’t say so! We are just shocked with horror, but this could have done by anybody, not only a Ukrainian’.”
“The week before last the media reported about two British servicemen who committed an act of hooliganism in the capital of Lithuania. Britain treated this as a routine offense and punished the guilty accordingly. I can imagine the reaction here to a similar action by Ukrainians. Or is our image so fragile because of our own vulnerability?”
“Sometimes I think that if Uncle Freud read some maligning stories in our newspapers, he would jump with joy, having so much material to analyze. Indeed, if a Ukrainian somewhere spat on the dinner party floor, he is nothing but a lout, but if a drunken Briton did so, it is a lovely example of uninhibited humanity fit for the gossip columns; moreover, highbrows say there is no such thing as British louts.
“Everything depends on how we see ourselves. That Ukraine has now got down to defending the rights of its humiliated citizens who committed crimes abroad is also the object of irony. I agree that the rights of all good people should be defended in the same way, but, unfortunately, one still has to be aware that everyone has the right to have rights. Thus far, only believers are able to achieve this.
“But the press, when writing that Ukrainian diplomats keep watch over the rights of prisoners in the United States, Thailand, and now even somewhere in the United Arab Emirates, is full of bitter irony: just look at them, we’re crashing Europe, they want to look better than they really are and so on. True, we are not used to respecting our own state. The latter has never provided us with any reason to. If, figuratively speaking, an African ostrich pecked a US citizen in the leg, this could become the object of Pan-American worry and a top television story. This is right: every American is protected by the whole of America, which even the youngest US child knows all too well. Our Ivan is the shame of the whole state: we instill this idea in the generations to come. In principle, Ivan has been programmed this way.
“As to the media, there also is an essential difference between ours and theirs. Once in Washington I attended a gathering of journalists, and my colleagues from various continents pounced on the CNN chief, ‘Why are you indifferent to our interests? Why do you broadcast worldwide a hundred times a day that a little plane of yours crashed, and we have to watch this tragedy only, while we have bloodshed filled elections and wars?’ He answered, ‘The interests of an American are above everything else. So we will broadcast this information even to a God-forsaken island where only one American has put up at the only hotel: we will install a dish aerial for him to watch CNN. And your problems will remain your own. We live in a different state’.”
“Soltys is only one Ukrainian. What has his story brought about?”
“Soltys was a Ukrainian citizen. Like very many of our citizens who go abroad, he was not on the embassy’s record. Although not a violation, this makes it quite difficult for the embassy to supervise and render help to our compatriots. Ukraine’s consul-general in Washington, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, kept very professional watch over the investigation of this case, maintaining adequate contacts with all the interested sides: this was an example of how our diplomats should work. As to the crime itself committed by Soltys, the Americans, in contrast to us, were shocked by the cruelty of the crime rather than the nationality of who did it. Only a few philistines made some conclusions about the Ukrainians who live there in large numbers and are distinguished by their great industriousness and modesty. I heard no conclusions about some terrible Ukraine. It is primarily we who said we disgraced ourselves in front of the whole world. Of course, one must probe into the murderer’s and now suicide’s psychology and psyche. Yet, statistics say that the average incidence of this type of crime is almost the same in all countries. In America, this kind of thing did and, unfortunately, still does happen. But I don’t think this relates to the image of the state as a whole.”
