COMMENT: Insane in the Ukraine, in defence of Drudkh

The press officer (and respected metal journo in his own right, which is a rare and paradoxical beast) for Season Of Mist got in touch to raise issue some points from the previous Drudkh blog, more as a massive fan of the band than 'image management', so for interested parties, his points are in bold and my responses are plain:

If correct, I would recommend getting your historical facts on Ukraine from outside of Polish text books (and to look even further back for an explanation of anti-Polish, anti-Jewish resentments in Ukraine). It is quite easy to get the historic background, if one goes beyond WWII.

Obviously I didn't get my information from Polish text books, I'm English. Secondly I did reference the history of anti-Polish sentiment in the Ukraine prior to WWII, which is confusingly acknowledged in a later paragraph (1). Thirdly as what I was writing was in direct response to Drudkh's more overt nationalist references, it wasn't really up to me what I passed comment on.

That comparison to Radovan Karadžić is beyond me, except for the purpose of introducing another murderous war criminal... but while everybody else in Europe is allowed to build nation, Ukraine is obviously not, well according to you: “But what we can pass damning judgment on is that the Ukraine they fought for was defined purely on ethnic lines where clear ethnic lines didn’t necessarily exists – especially as the would-be nation had formed part of a union with Poland and Lithuania for centuries...” (1) as if there had been no struggle against this “union” in those centuries – compare: (and to look even further back for an explanation of anti-Polish, anti-Jewish resentments in Ukraine.) By the way, Lithuanians are part of the Baltic language family and very clearly separated – quite a bad argument for the point you are so desperately struggling to make. Well, you English like “unions” as the Irish can tell part of your empire for centuries, which proves... – (oops, I get polemic, sorry, but I should not pass damning judgement). And where did ever clear ethnic lines exist? That was a romantic notion lacking historic facts all over this... but hey, if you are a Ukrainian patriot at the time, you are obviously a Nazi as defined by you above... err, what?

This point is very confused. I don't think it's up for debate that every people who find themselves without a free homeland are entitled to one, if necessary fight for it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the chunk of this sprawling commonwealth that would become the Ukraine was influenced by centuries of outside influences, its major cities were heavily Polish and, more recently, in the late 18th Century, Russian Jews had been encouraged to settle thereand in Poland - their poverty and obvious outsider status (which even established, cosmopolitan Polish Jews resented) contributing to what would become grotesquely genocidal antisemitism by the time the Einsatzgruppen party squads turned up in their mobile party wagons. But what the individuals and organisations canonised by Drudkh were fighting for wasn't a nation defined by geographic boundaries but by the (often perceived, and by calling it a "romantic notion" you're agreeing that the definition was bogus and no such demarcation between Poles and Ukrainians was realistically possible, which makes your implied apologism of their murderous methods seem a touch bizarre) ethnicity of the people within it, resulting in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing to use contemporary language.

There are plenty of examples of this in history and they are all, without exception abhorrent. The expulsion of Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, the population transfers between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the partition of Pakistan and India, and you'll be particularly excited to note, the expulsion of Irish Catholics from their land in Cromwell's Act of Settlement - all of these are the inhuman actions of a state that values its integrity above human lives, so no, being a Ukrainian patriot at the time doesn't make you a "Nazi", but being a Ukrainian patriot who believes that all Poles and Jews should either leave their homes, or go to a mass grave in the woods, that does put you on the wrong side of any objective moral line.

Why you find comfort in Slayer openly embracing that fascist murderer Pinochet, but condemn Drudkh for choosing to remain silent and let their art speak, is hardly understandable - well have fun with it.

I find comfort in the fact that Slayer are able to have a public/open discourse about their beliefs, yet Drudkh won't - leaving us to draw our own conclusions, which is the point of the original piece. If an English band (with links to openly racist bands) were to embrace murderous, puritanical despot/national hero and defender of parliamentary democracy (delete to fit view) Oliver Cromwell and refuse to do interviews while aligning themselves with a right wing 30s political movement, any sane man would jump to the same conclusion. And I am having fun with it, it's fun to learn and it's fun to discuss. Discussion is, after all, the furnace where views are tempered.