This is a sort of follow-up to my last post, Země se fakt zblázní (‘The world is really going mad’), in that’s it’s about another example of the world suddenly adopting wildly different standards to what we’ve been accustomed to, and how very few people seem to be noticing.
Within an hour of publishing yesterday’s post I walked around my suburb of Prague, and I saw this car parked on the pavement:
The first shocking thing about the image (or it would be if I hadn’t concealed the license number, I ain’t no snitch) is the fact that that is a disabled parking space and it’s not reserved for that vehicle. The second shocking thing about it is the slogan on the back window (“Slava Ukraini / Heroyam Slava”, or “Glory to Ukraine / Glory to the Heroes”), which was the slogan of the faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (or OUN) led by Stepan Bandera (he led the OUN-B after they split into that and the OUN-M), who allied with the Nazis during WW2 (The Great Patriotic War in Russian parlance) and committed some of the worst atrocities against Jews, Poles, Russians and even Ukrainians, as fascists are wont to do.
Perhaps I should add here that 2.5 years ago, I would have had no idea about the historical significance of that slogan, nor would I even have been able to read it without help from Uncle Google. I imagine a lot of people who see it still don’t know the significance of it.
This slogan has become oddly ubiquitous - I mentioned before that I heard it a lot at a pro-Ukraine rally in Prague in the days following the Russian invasion - but its origins are often obscured (if not actively misrepresented1), especially because “Slava Ukraini” on its own predates its use by the OUN. Even that Wikipedia article concedes that the OUN-B
adopted a fascist-style salute along with calling "Glory to Ukraine!" and responding with "Glory to the Heroes!".
It has been reported that the call-and-response slogan was adopted as a homage to “Heil Hitler / Sieg Heil”, but proof of that is hard to come by. Nonetheless, the fact that the group who used the slogan were Nazi collaborators isn’t disputed, so it’s been jarring to see world leaders shouting it so enthusiastically, usually grinning like kids at a birthday party when they do it.
Perpetual birthday boy Justin Trudeau, who either invited or didn’t object to the invitation of a Ukrainian veteran of the Waffen SS to the Canadian Parliament last year, had fun shouting it during the class photo after the daft Swiss ‘No-Putins-Club’ Peace Summit a couple of weeks ago, looking for all the world like he was doing it for a dare:
If Trudeau still doesn’t know the history the phrase, you’d hope someone might have told him after he said it in April 2023 at an event in Canada with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmygal, at which Shmygal was even nice enough to add “Slava Kanadi” into the mix:
But of course Trudeau knows the significance of the phrase. This is all in the context of history being gradually rewritten to cast Ukraine as having been on our side in WW2 against the Nazis, but also against Russia (as the OUN was), when it’s expedient to say that instead. This isn’t entirely untrue, but only because Ukraine was so divided at the time. Ukraine is now Schrödinger’s Ukraine in the imagination of the media and political classes: both with us in our historical fight against Nazism (when we ignore Russia’s role), and also with us now in their fight (which is really our fight) against Russia. The fact that the side that was fighting against Russia then were allied with the Nazis, and that that is the side we are explicitly venerating now with the slogan, is apparently not relevant.
To illustrate that fact, here’s a photo of Boris Johnson at a publicity op recently with the Azov battalion:
And here he is last year saying that the Allies won WW2 with Ukraine’s help:
Does he have any idea what he’s doing? Does he even care? I guess it doesn’t matter, because the only people who notice are those of us who have been long dismissed as Putin bots, Russian propagandists, Nazis(!) and all the rest.
One has to wonder whether, when the project eventually comes crashing down and the media and politicos admit that Ukraine has lost, Schrödinger’s Ukraine will become the Ukraine that allied with the Nazis, and they will desperately try to distance themselves from it and pretend they didn’t say all the nice things they said about it. A lot of things will have to happen before we reach that point - hopefully not including British and American conscripts being sent to the front line to put it off - but we’ll have to wait and see.
That article says that the “origins [of the phrase] are murky”, but that “it commemorates the Ukrainian heroes who died resisting the Nazi invasion”. That is simply untrue.