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By Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine
September 23, 2003
In 1945 one Raphael Lemkin, who described himself as a totally private man
that coined a term, developed the concept, and wrote the basic international
documents on what we now call genocide, wrote, "Our whole cultural heritage
is a product of the contributions of all peoples. We can best understand
this if we realize how impoverished our culture would be if the so-called
inferior peoples doomed by Germany, such as the Jews, had not been permitted
to create the Bible or to give birth to an Einstein, a Spinosa; if the Poles
had not had the opportunity to give to the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a
Curie, the Czechs a Huss, and a Dvorak; the Greeks a Plato and a Socrates;
the Russians, a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich."
There were untold millions of Ukrainians who perished in the winter and
spring of 1933, condemned by Stalin, along with the intelligentsia that had
given them voice, identity, and pride in who they were. Of course, a life is
a life, one no less important or dear than another, but a cultural community
is also an organism, in which some till the land, others make boots, and
still others write poetry. This writer must confess to being a nationalist
in some sense.
An acquaintance from the Basque Country. Xabier Orxmaetxea, recently wrote
that he had been a nationalist of his people since the age of fifteen, but
that no nation had the right to oppress another, that peoples who had known
oppression should try to help each other, and that for this reason he was
introducing a resolution in the Basque Parliament and through the Basque
representation in the European Parliament one to commemorate the Holodomor
of 1932-1933.
This is an old idea that goes back to the eighteenth century to one Johann
Gottfried von Herder, who did not want to be a counterfeit Frenchman, who
did not speak the language without an accent and preferred not to, but who
recognized that the peoples of Africa had their cultures no less valid than
those of the Europeans who thought they should rule over them.
The Ukrainians have their own tradition of an Asiatic Renaissance in they
could help pass on the highest cultural attainments of Europe to those
outside that continent but who as peoples were no less and no more than
they. This is the heritage of Mykola Khvyliovy, born with the Russian name
of Nikolai Fitiliov, but no less a member of the Ukrainian nation that has
always and everywhere welcomed those who have come to it with good will.
Who knows how many Shakespeares, Goethes, Tolstoys, Dostoyevskys, Dvoraks,
or Mickiewiczes could have sprung from the Ukrainian bosom had there not
been the crimes of the Stalin period? Who knows how many Jews could have
enriched our culture but not for the Holocaust? I was not born Ukrainian,
but they seem to accept me, and I join them in trying to find our own
contributions to our national culture, through it to world culture, and thus
to the common heritage of humanity. Every soul is precious, and every soul
unjustly deprived untimely of life deserves remembrance.
It is not least through memory that we become who we are, through history
that we gain the sense of who we are, and through the simple ritual of
lighting a candle to the memory of those who came before that we confirm the
endurance of that unity of culture that originated before us and that we
seek to continue for our posterity. The humblest deserves no less from us,
for even the greatest of us is no more than he or she. We shall not forget
them.
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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