Abstract
German historian of modern Ukraine Tarik Cyril Amar positions the third year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (February 2022) between an analysis of escalated culture wars within Ukraine and its resonance for Anglo-American/European liberalism, whose most influential representatives suppress consideration of class-based, ethnicized contradictions that underlie the appeal to national self-determination, following the Maidan revolution of 2014. The discussion considers how notable “bellicists” of contemporary Anglo-Atlantic liberalism mobilize the Maidan's aspiration for EU and NATO membership (envisioned as the accomplishment of higher standards of living and a middle-class European Ukraine) while instrumentalizing the brutalities of the Russian invasion for a conjuncture marked by the eclipse of the “war on terror,” and the attendant exigencies of US-led realignment. Also a historian of the Holocaust, Amar reflects on his established study on the anomalous origins of “Soviet Ukraine” in the city of Lviv during the course of alternating occupation by Soviets and Nazis, in order to draw a sobering link between the twentieth century; the current, state-led “normalization” of memories of collaborationist violence during the interlude of Nazi rule (1941 – 44); and the prospect for a meaningful political future for Ukraine, in the wake of this war. Amar also indicates the unpopularity of such a position in the aftermath of February 2022 by pointing to the emergence of a new-left politics of identity, which, under the sign of “decolonization,” accelerates previous state-led efforts to erase traces of communist or Russian history from the built environment, cultural production, literature, and textbooks, even while consigning to illiberality the generally poorer, less educated Russian-speaking opposition to Maidan (from eastern and southern Ukraine). While Amar emphasizes unevenness within his discussion of the sovereigntist position and, more specifically, its uses by an Atlanticist geopolitical agenda, he also indicates its own appropriation of “third-world” vocabularies of emancipation (circulated through the rubric of “decoloniality” out of academic and cultural institutions of the West). The discussion draws links to the ongoing obliteration of Gaza and its alibi—insufficiently challenged by the Maidan generation of activists—in the West's memory culture of the Holocaust.
