I live abroad. I have friends here. I love my friends. But…

I get really frustrated when I am being told that Maidan is ruled by right wing extremists. No, it is not! It’s just your blasted media that seeks out the juiciest bits to shock and attract attention. In itself there is nothing unusual about this desire for a hot piece of information, but…

Taking the marginal phenomena, which are hardly avoidable in any big ‘gathering’, and presenting them as central to the whole Maidan creates a highly distorted picture. In the big picture the results, I assume, are pretty clear, so I won’t explicate on them here. That’s just an example of a very bad journalistic practice and a very irresponsible one at the very least considering how fragile, explosive and dangerous the situation in Ukraine is.

On the personal level, however, the result is that some of my friends come up with this “brilliant” idea of sending me those rather skewed reports about Maidan. I am supposed to see the error of my ways now. Well, I am so bl**dy grateful! For two months now I have been now and then (when the tensions were recognizably raising) waking up in the morning not alone but with terror, with fear that while I slept and wasn’t watching over the events something really terrible might have happened. So, these “well-researched” reports and newspaper articles about Maidan being or becoming a project of neo-Nazis should show me (or so some of my friends apparently think) that I shouldn’t really worry about the outcome of this stuggle; the people on the Maidan are after all just a bunch of crazy neo-Nazis or something to this effect…

The first thought, which I try to restrain, that raises in me is “are you f*cking kidding me?!” Sure there are radical elements on the Maidan. I sort of noticed that! Everyone did! Most are shocked just as much as I am to meet with this sort of people for the first time in their lives. What living abroad showed me, however, is that most of European and EU countries have to struggle with the very same problem. From the top of my head I remember newsreports about radicals / ultranationalists / neofascist (and many other differentiating labels) raising their voices in Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Germany. Should we think that those countries and their policies are equal to the most extreme voiced being heard there..? And that their citizens are all just crazy radicals..?  Of course not!

And for like the millionth time: no, the slogan ‘Glory to Ukraine’ is not about the extreme nationalism!! It is about normal people trying to find their long forgotten dignity. It is about the search, I would venture, for self-respect that has been almost eradicated after so many years of being at first homo soveticus and then suffering for over two decades from crippling corruption and human rights abuse. But I give it to you, ‘Glory to Ukraine’ at least in its English rendition does sound cheesy. The slogan is more palatable in Ukrainian, I think… But again it would seem that most protest movements need this or other kind of pep talk to keep going through the hardships, not to give up, not to stumble, just to continue despite the odds. Could you blame the people for this somewhat shouty attempt to figure out what Ukraine is and living in it is all about?

If you don’t believe me, below is a piece by Andreas Umland and his Colleagues. It is much less personal and much more toned down than the above one is. He basically says the same thing about irresponsible journalism, but in much less annoyed fashion. Well, he probably wasn’t bothered just as much by his self-righteous friends as I was…

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/to-journalists-commentators-and-analysts-writing-on-the-ukrainian-protest-movement-euromaidan-kyiv-s-euromaidan-is-a-liberationist-and-not-extremist-mass-action-of-civic-disobedience

This piece was written by:

Just one very annoyed member of the Maidan-As-It-Is Team, who takes full responsibility for the above outburst of long contained emotion