The haters of Ivan Katchanovski, and other Ukrainian "traitors" like Marta Havryshko

Per reviewing an old piece on my philosophy site about the Self-Besotted Philosopher, Jonathan MS Pearce, I did a deeper dive, without too much time waste, on Ivan Katchanovski.

Pearce, an Islamophobe, Gnu Atheist or lite, and Jesus mythicist or fellow traveler, and, for purposes of this story, a Nat-Sec Nutsacks™supporter and warmonger on Russia-Ukraine issues all documented at that link, called Katchanovski a "Kremlin apologist," and cited this blog with his name on it, full of post-Maidan smears and half truths, plus the Bulwark, as proof. (If the author's purported name is real, of course a Ukrainian Lt. Gen, retired, Igor Romanenko, is going to make up bullshit.)

Romanenko's first piece is a repost of Cathy Young at The Bulwark. Second? From Ian Roms at British site The Sceptic. Roms himself appears to be some sort of all-around wingnut, and a Zionist genocidalist. (His Shitter has much more than the one or two pieces on that subject here.) The site he writes at was formerly "Lockdown Sceptics." In other words, COVID bullshitters.

Taras Kuzio, cited in multiple pieces? Much of his early work, per that Wiki link, was funded by the CIA, even if he was personally unaware. He also has beaucoup research ties to neocons and general US (and UK) Nat-Sec Nutsacks,™

Later smears on Katchanovski portray him as not really an academic and more. In reality, though not having a Wiki page, sadly, he is very much an academic. He is cited in both the English and Polish Wiki pages about the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and is polite enough to describe the OUN as nationalist-fascist rather than Nazi-fascist, as some others do. He also, interestingly, studied under Seymour Martin Lipset, known as "one of the first neocons," when Lipset was at George Mason. Maybe some Ukrainians, and some Nat-Sec Nutsacks, expected a Katchanovski would not turn out as he did?

I've wasted enough time on Romanenko other than to note his slurs extend well before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

I don't know the pre-war dislike of Katchanovski other than his refusal to spout the post-Maidan party line on the Maidan. The first piece by Romanenko, a massive undigested lump in both English and Ukrainian, is from 2015.

That said, per Wiki's article on the original EuroMaidan, let us remember that while Putin may have pressured Yanukovich fiscally, the EU wouldn't assist and the IMF was pressuring it with a crushing neoliberal loan.

Per its article on the actual Revolution of Dignity, the Right Sector, at least, was intransigent about the February settlement deal.

Actually, that's not the real bottom line.

THAT is that the Pearces of the world, the Nat-Sec Nutsacks of the world, whether in government, in media, or elsewhere, simply will not accept any nuance, any hedging, anything but total surrender to the Western narrative of the Euromaidan and Revolution. Of course, with Pearce, that's of a piece. There's no nuance in his Islamophobia, for example.

We know this today.

And, we're getting closer to that bottom line.

As anybody who has in detail followed the last 5-6 years of Ukrainian history knows, in the years before the Russian invasion, the Azov Battalion in particular, along with to various degrees, Svoboda, the Right Sector, and other far right organizations, whether outrightly neo-Nazi or not, got written up regularly in the likes of the New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, etc. After the invasion, it's like they don't exist.

Or take Katchanovski's "blacklisting" by Ukraine and their Western flak. Claims that he's a Russian agent, claims from a wingnut and thuggish Ukrainian list and comments to that end on Reddit that he profits personally over his exposé and more? No nuance allowed. (But plenty of lies are.) More on this below. Per Reddit, I'm talking that 5 months ago, he and Marta Havryshko were put on the Myrotvorets list.

More laughable yet, but also more disgusting, Havryshko, whose academic study and academic work background are in Holocaust issues, is accused of anti-semitism. What she has done is expose Ukrainian ethno-nationalism in general, and as at Jacobin, traced its roots back to the OUN and World War II.

These paragraphs are key:

The alternative history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement existed in the West during the Soviet times and was developed by members of the OUN and UPA who ended up there. It was weaponized by the Western political powers as a part of the Cold War. That’s why the Ukrainian diaspora was the main actor in memory politics. It whitewashed the history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and wanted to construct a very different narrative that opposed the official Soviet one. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this narrative was exported to Ukraine and favored by some far-right political parties like Svoboda.

In 2010, President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine, which sparked heated debates inside Ukraine and abroad. Many people whose grandpas and grandmas fought the Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army felt deeply offended by this decision. They were not comfortable with celebration of Nazi collaborators, when they had their own, true heroes who sacrificed their lives.

These two main memory regimes — the Soviet and the Ukrainian-nationalist — coexisted in Ukraine for a long time. Their influence and dynamic depended heavily on which political forces were in power. Thus, during the presidency of pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, the OUN and UPA were not glorified on the national level, but its cult remained in the local level, in Western Ukraine.

Gee, this all sounds familiar. (I also blocked one nutter at that subreddit.)

More laughable yet, is that Myrotvorets, per its Wiki page, is the Ukrainian word for "peacemaker." What it actually is, from its 2014 creation, just after the revolution, is a thuggish attempt at media intimidation and a pack of lies, that while not formally connected to the Ukrainian government, is clearly informally connected as much as Yevgeny Prigozhin was to Russia's government. Per other info there, it's surely another reason Hungarian supremo Viktor Orban doesn't like Ukraine.

Someone else on a different sub, about global defense issues, raised the Orange Revolution a decade earlier. Yes, and as soon as he became president, Yushchenko started rehabilitating the OUN and UPA overall, and Stepan Bandera by name. See above. Note that the West's "export" ramped up, again per the above, after the Orange Revolution. And, he did so less than a year after his election, as if he didn't have better things to do.

NOW, we're close to the wrap.

Here's what seems to be an OK but not great, relatively neutral analysis of Katchanovski's claims about the Maidan. The author claims that he overstates some things, like conclusiveness of who fired from the Hotel Ukraine, while adding that a fair amount of his big picture holds up. Googling the author, with more eventually going on an even deeper Blogger piece says “OK but not great” is about right. (That site's "about" calls itself a left-wing Ukrainian media group focused on economic issues. Note that Katchanovski's first book was about labor issues and that's his background with Lipset. My even deeper dive will look more at the Ukrainian left.)

My bottom line? Katchanovski may be wrong about bullet issues. He may not be wrong. The use of AI a full decade ago, in its infancy, to "reconstruct" the Maidan shootings was horribly wrong. Look at what the botched autopsy of Jack Kennedy did here in the US. (I am NOT a JFK conspiracy theorist; I'm just saying that his autopsy, rushed at the personal pushing of Bobby Kennedy, and not done on site in Dallas by doctors who likely would have been cognizant of shooting angles, were one factor in opening the door to conspiracy theories.)

And with that, that left-Ukrainian website, Commons, goes too far in criticizing Katchanovski; he may not be right, but it's really impossible to prove him wrong on the narrow issue of the Maidan shootings.

That said, I wonder if it's been intimidated enough itself that it pulls punches. As in Myrotvorets intimidated. Yes, the guest author of the piece is in the USofA; most the editorial board appears to still be in Ukraine.