It is symbolic that right on Ernst Jünger’s birthday on March 29, in the April issue of the Polish monthly Kurier Wnet, which has a circulation of 80,000 printed copies and 250,000 online coverage, an article by Olena Semenyaka, a Ukrainian researcher of the thinker’s legacy and the coordinator of the Intermarium Support Group, founded by the Leader of National Corps Andriy Biletsky in 2016, was published. A lot of space in it was given to Jünger.
In the article, she i.a. called on the Polish state and society to intensify regional integration with Ukraine in view of the unprecedented attack on the pro-Russian fifth column in Ukraine, unseen during Poroshenko’s term, at least its beginnings, the emergence of the Intermarium inter-faction association in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine cooperating with National Corps, and continuation of the European Union’s economic and energy cooperation with the Russian Federation.
Naturally, Poland is already one of Ukraine’s most ardent geopolitical allies, invariably protesting against the lifting of sanctions on Russia and the construction of Nord Stream-2, as well as reporting on Russia’s war crimes in the Donbas at the international institutions, as discussed at the last conference of the Intermarium Support Group. Polish President Andrzej Duda and other Polish officials are calling for including Ukraine into the Three Seas Initiative, despite the fact that it is not a EU member state.
Yet what a level of synergy could be achieved had Polish and Ukrainian populists not exploited the tragic pages of common history for electoral purposes, stepping on an eternal “rake” of the region! Moreover, neither Poland nor Ukraine needs the explanaitions about the colossal role of the politics of historical memory in the international arena. In fact, the entire hybrid aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the annexation of the Crimea and the occupation of the Donbas are based on the thesis of Russian political technologists about the “Ukrainian neo-Nazism” directed against Russian and Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine. And this thesis keeps finding supporters and sympathizers in the West. Ukraine’s response, namely the equalization of the rights of veterans of the Red Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), as well as the revival of the OUN-UPA’s legacy in general, was misunderstood in Poland. Similarly, as soon as Germany and Israel started talking about the “Polish,” not only German, “death camps,” the Poles hurried to ban this very wording in Poland, adding a ban on glorifying “Banderism” to create an effect of impartiality. This time, it was misunderstood in Ukraine.
That is why Olena Semenyaka drew the attention of the Polish society to Ernst Jünger’s antitotalitarian politics of historical memory, so that Poland and Ukraine could focus on the real culprits of the bloody showdown between them in the last century and jointly oppose the successors of these regimes today. We are talking about Putin’s neo-Soviet revanchism and its sympathizers in the West, who, writing about the “Polish” death camps and Ukrainian “neo-Nazism,” feel totally fine in the same boat with the real aggressor. After all, Ernst Ernst Jünger, unlike the defenders of Stalinism Jean-Paul Sartre or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was one of the first Western intellectuals to raise the awareness about the Soviet crime of shooting Polish officers in Katyn, in particular, in the treatise “Peace” (1941-1943). The fact that the examination revealed an explosive on the wreckage of the plane near Smolensk, which carried Lech Kaczynski and other Polish guests of the planned commemoration of the victims of Katyn (the next anniversary is approaching on April 13), shows that antitotalitarian politics of memory is not just a matter of philosophy politics, critique of ideology and history.
However, the article addressed Ernst Jünger not only as a theorist helping the Ukrainians and the Poles to place the right emphasis in the strategy of reconciling their national policies of historical memory. A special attention has also been paid to the withdrawal of Olena Semenyaka’s scholarship program by the Viennese Institute for the Human Sciences (IWM) due to her links to the “right-extremist” National Corps party, which we covered earlier. It should be recalled that her research project, which won a fellowship on a competitive basis, was dedicated precisely to Ernst Jünger. How low the prestigious Austrian institution has fallen, Olena Semenyaka demonstrated by the example of Anatoly Shariy, who was the first to congratulate the institute on the decision to cancel the Ukrainian researcher’s program: as of today, the Security Service of Ukraine declared him wanted as a person working to the detriment of Ukraine’s national security under the auspices of Russia’s special services, and the Ministry of Justice initiated the process of banning his party. The author has not forgotten about Russia’s “Trojan horse” in the West: pseudo-liberal pseudo-experts who launched a campaign against Olena Semenyaka to the benefit of the Kremlin.
The lively interest and natural indignation of the Polish colleagues is also explained by the fact that the founders of the Viennese IWM were Polish conservative philosophers, friends of Pope John Paul II Józef Tischner and Krzysztof Michalski. Michalski, whose goal was to provide a platform for other Eastern Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, had remained its rector until his death in 2013. What the new rector of the institute, Shalini Randeria of Indian descent, who took office only in 2015, thinks of Michalski’s bequeath, show the results of the program “Ukraine in European Dialogue,” from which Olena Semenyaka was expelled (for the newcomers in the topic, meaning her focus on the globalization and modenization trends in South Asia, whereas Russia’s war against Ukraine and its very identity, in our opinion, is far more urgent for the institute’s events “debating Europe” even without Michalski’s last will). For Józef Tischner was also the spiritual leader of the first broad anti-communist movement in Eastern Europe, Solidarity, and this article was published in Kurier namely with the help of the members of its underground branch, The Fighting Solidarity. Above all, it is about the well-known Polish dissident, publicist, journalist Jadwiga Chmielowska, who is the editor-in-chief of the Silesian branch of the edition and at whose invitation in 2017 Olena Semenyaka spoke at the Polish parliament on the sovereign Adriatic-Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium.
How is it possible that the lifetime activists of the Polish Solidarity invite the representatives of the “right-extremist,” in the eyes of the Viennese renegades of Michalski’s legacy, National Corps party? The answer, again, lies in the realm of historical memory. Peoples who did not have the “luck” of being under the heel of left-wing totalitarian regimes, under the influence of globalist propaganda, tend to perceive anti-Kremlin Eastern European patriotism as “neo-Nazism.” And the danger of the situation, to which Olena Semenyaka called for a solidary response, is that we are talking about specific anti-Ukrainian, anti-Polish, etc. steps at both the state and individual levels, and this trend, unfortunately, is getting worse.
So if these “useful idiots” or even allies of the Kremlin are willing to use administrative and political pressure (the ruling Green Party of Austria played an active role in the cancellation, and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s lobbying of the Russian vaccine recently caused a series of scandals) to “cancel” Eastern Europeans as the “Nazis,” we must bring a mirror to their faces, showing them and the world who they really are: sympathizers of the bloody Kremlin aggressor, historical revisionists and glorifiers of the crimes of (neo-)Bolshevism. Which was done in this and one of the many materials prepared on this topic for different countries.
