It’s too bad that [Ukraine’s President (2005-2010)] Viktor Yushchenko doesn’t know history very well. With his decree making Stepan Bandera a national hero [of Ukraine], he spat in the soul of animal rights advocates all around the world by awarding an animal abuser.
As a writer, what impresses me the most in the story of the newly minted “hero of Ukraine,” is the completeness of the gastronomical theme. On Bandera’s order in 1934, the Interior Minister of Poland, Bronisław Pieracki, was assassinated as he entered a cafe in Warsaw to grab a bite to eat. The mastermind and organizer of this “attentat” (what they call assassination attempts in Galicia [Ukraine]), the half-educated student Bandera was only 25 years old. He was halfway through his life path which he did not suspect.
Exactly twenty-five years later, the situation will mirror itself. In this case, it is Bandera who will carry a bag of freshly purchased tomatoes in his hands and climb the stairs toward the door of his Munich apartment. He, too, was going to make a salad and have a delicious lunch. But his death was already descending from above embodied by a young man with a pistol loaded with a special poisonous substance that causes instant heart paralysis. In just a second, Bandera will roll down the stairs without having any time to dine just like Minister Pieracki.
Another coincidence is that both Pieracki’s assassin Grigory [Hryhorij] Maciejko and Bandera’s killer Bogdan Stashinsky were both Galicians. The circle is closed again! But the most surprising thing is that Maciejko did not want to kill Pieracki, and Stashinsky did not want to kill Bandera. Bandera forced Maciejko to carry out a terrorist act. Otherwise, his friends in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, themselves threatened to destroy him. And Stashinsky, as he later claimed, became a KGB agent, after having been caught for a petty crime—somehow he decided to ride public transportation without paying for a ticket and got caught by the ticket controller. In the 1940s, he faced being expelled from his university for this incident, and he agreed to first rat people out and then eliminate them.
The end of the Ukrainian nationalist leaders and other characters from the period of great terror differs only in that their death was surprisingly similar to the end of the criminal organization leaders of the 1990s. They were eliminated when, having drunk enough blood, they became almost decent people and started thinking about the ways of spending their retirement comfortably. But their old sins would not allow this! As soon as Bandera’s predecessor as the head of the OUN, Yevgeny [Yevhen] Konovalets, had come into money and happy life in Europe, it was then that he was helpfully delivered in Rotterdam a box of chocolates with a bomb built into it. Symon Petliura, who had disappeared from Ukraine along with the state treasury (let the man enjoy his life!), had barely gotten used to his relaxing walks around Paris, and Sholom Schwartzbard had already jumped in front of him with his revolver. Doesn’t all this remind you of the deaths of Kiev’s criminal [gangster-businessmen] “authorities”—who usually ended up on a short path between their apartment and a recently parked car—obtained through backbreaking criminal gang labor?
Whether you like it or not, Viktor Yushchenko, who once promised prison terms to bandits, posthumously picked out a hero’s star from the state’s “shared fund” precisely for a bandit. A political one, however. But this does not change the essence of the matter because Bandera’s activities were reduced to the extraction of financial gain by using run-of-the-mill robbery. And the fact that he personally did not kill anyone at that time does not excuse the never-to-be-forgotten dead man. He was only unable to do so considering his poor health, crooked legs, osteomalacia he suffered in his childhood, and an overall not particularly masculine, frankly speaking, physique. Pan [Polish “Mister”] Bandera’s height at the peak of his physical development and political career was only 159 cm [5 feet 2 inches]. So, with such athletic characteristics, the future “hero of Ukraine” could only…strange cats with his bare hands. (more...)
Stepan Bandera—the Cat Strangler
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