{"id":6674,"date":"2026-06-08T11:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/?p=6674"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:48:16","slug":"ukraine-is-running-out-of-heroes-so-its-digging-up-dead-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/08\/ukraine-is-running-out-of-heroes-so-its-digging-up-dead-nazis\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine is running out of heroes, so it\u2019s digging up dead Nazis"},"content":{"rendered":"

A wave of symbolic reburials exposes the fragile foundation of Ukraine\u2019s national identity project<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Ukrainian government is determined to gather the entire (albeit small) pantheon of Ukraine\u2019s 20th-century national heroes in one place. Simon Petliura and Andrey Melnik are to be joined by one of the founders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Evgeny Konovalets, whose remains will be transferred from Rotterdam. This action is more than just a tribute \u2013 it\u2019s a painful attempt to construct a \u2018sacred foundation\u2019 for the nation. But this attempt reveals a tragic void. Kiev has no need of Konovalets as a historical figure; rather, it needs him to fulfill a political function \u2013 to separate friend from foe. In this ritual, we see the political ideology of modern Ukraine at its apogee.<\/p>\n

The reburial of Konovalets\u2019 remains must be viewed through the lens of Carl Schmitt\u2019s book \u2018The Concept of the Political\u2019. The Ukrainian political class is engaged in a fundamental Schmittian act: Making an existential distinction between \u2018friend\u2019 and \u2018enemy\u2019. Schmitt insisted that \u2018the political\u2019 has no substance of its own, but crystallizes in the moment of existential opposition between what he called \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019. The latter is the \u2018hostis\u2019 or public enemy \u2013 i.e. not merely a private enemy. Political community is constituted by the possibility of actual war. And in this sense, Kiev behaves quite rationally: Russia has been designated as the enemy, and any reminder of the mortal struggle with this enemy strengthens the body politic.<\/p>\n

However, Ukraine\u2019s problem as a \u2018young\u2019 state is not the absence of an enemy (there is no problem with that; the enemy has been identified and is consistently demonized), but rather a catastrophic shortage of friends in its own history. Schmitt wrote that the political world requires not just negative identification, but also positive \u201cconcrete order\u201d<\/em> that binds the community together from within. A creative identity requires a pantheon of founding heroes, creators. The tragedy of the Ukrainian national myth is that, lacking positive national heroes, it is forced to appoint the enemies of its enemy (Russia) as \u2018friends\u2019.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian national myth is being built on a foundation of pure negativity. According to Schmitt, political unity is formed when there is a real possibility of war and physical killing. If there is no enemy, there is no politics. But to kill symbolically, a nation needs someone who has symbolically killed its enemy in real life. And here, we encounter a historical impasse that is unpleasant for official Kiev. Ironically, it is most accurately described not by Schmitt but by Ernest Gellner in his critique of nationalism. Gellner believed that nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; rather, it invents nations where they do not exist. Ukraine\u2019s example is one of the most striking illustrations of this thesis.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT\"
Why is Ukraine so eager to start a new war?<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Throughout its documented history, the people of Malorossiya (Little Russia \u2013 a region that constitutes part of modern-day Ukraine) existed within the lens of a triune Russian people. Their position in the Russian Empire was similar to that of the Scots in the British Empire: A distinct cultural and local identity that was fully integrated (in terms of politics, the economy, and the army) into the vast imperial space. The Scots colonized and fought for Britain, not against it. They provided Britain with scientists, poets, and politicians. Similarly, the people of Malorossiya built the empire, not destroyed it.<\/p>\n

Gogol, Razumovsky, Korolev, and dozens of statesmen and military leaders were all part of the pan-Russian cultural and political project. It\u2019s quite hard to find an authentic \u2018fighter against Moscow\u2019 among them. So, to fill the void in its pantheon of \u2018national heroes\u2019, the imagination of Ukrainian ideologists is forced to make a sharp leap forward in time, skipping over centuries of history in which Malorossiya was a co-author, not an antagonist, of Russia.<\/p>\n

Not until the 20th century did Ukrainian history produce true enemies of Russia, those who were eager to shed the blood of \u2018Moskali\u2019 (Ukrainian slur for Russians). Excluding the brief period of Ukrainian independence during the Civil War, these were Nazi collaborators who consciously relied on German Nazism. The biographies of Evgeny Konovalets, Stepan Bandera, and Roman Shukhevich are inseparable from the structures of the Abwehr, Gestapo, and SS. Ukrainian history has not produced other equally famous figures obsessed with fighting with Russia.<\/p>\n

\n
\n Evgeny Konovalets, Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevich.<\/p>\n


\n \u00a9\u00a0 Wikipedia; Fine Art Images \/ Heritage Images \/ Getty Images <\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Looking at this \u2018heroic\u2019 pantheon, one involuntarily recalls not only Schmitt but also Claude Levi-Strauss and his concept of \u2018bricolage\u2019, explained in his work \u2018The Savage Mind\u2019. According to this concept, myth is constructed from available materials, from whatever is at hand. And the \u2018available material\u2019 for Ukrainian mythmaking turned out to be the corpse of their enemy\u2019s enemy. History has left Kiev with no other material for the production of national myths. And this is not an accident, but the essence of Ukraine\u2019s political construction.<\/p>\n

When a nation\u2019s heritage consists solely of Abwehr agents, and this heritage is steeped in the total rejection of a vast portion of its own cultural ecumene (i.e. Russian literature, canonical Orthodox Christianity, the shared victory over Nazism in 1945), that nation cannot find a friend\u00a0who was engaged in creating something positive, and ends up elevating a friend\u00a0who destroyed and betrayed.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"FILE
Zelensky\u2019s fascism fetish is booming, and the West is still (mostly) okay with it<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hannah Arendt, in her treatise \u2018On Violence\u2019, drew a fundamental distinction between authority and violence. Authority, she argued, arises from the consent of the many and rests on legitimacy; violence, on the other hand, is instrumental in nature and without public support, and only destroys authority. When a national myth is built on figures who were engaged in pure violence (such as terror against the Polish population, ethnic cleansing, collaboration with occupiers) and did not accomplish anything positive on a political level, the nation is bound to lack legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Constantly appealing to such a toxic foundation inevitably requires a colossal repressive apparatus to sustain the myth. Carl Schmitt warned: When a state takes on the task of establishing \u201csubstantial unity\u201d<\/em> through ideological purity, when the political becomes totalitarian, it inevitably moves toward dictatorship. We see this in Ukraine in its most striking manifestation. How can one explain to a resident of Dnepropetrovsk or Odessa why their great-grandfather, who fought in the Red Army, is an \u2018occupier\u2019, while Konovalets, whose militants burned Russian and Polish villages, is a \u2018hero\u2019?<\/p>\n

This was brilliantly addressed by Schmitt\u2019s interlocutor and partial opponent, Giorgio Agamben. In his book \u2018Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life\u2019, Agamben develops Schmitt\u2019s concept of \u2018Ausnahmezustand\u2019 (state of exception) demonstrating how, in modern conditions, exception becomes the norm. Ukraine is a striking example of a nation where the \u2018state of exception\u2019 in the realm of history and identity has been transformed into a permanent regime of governance.<\/p>\n

Decommunization laws, the forced renaming of cities and streets, the dismantling of any monuments that don\u2019t fit into the \u2018bricolage\u2019 made up of Bandera and Konovalets \u2013 this isn\u2019t just cultural policy, but a methodical assertion of the sovereign\u2019s right to decide what is true and what isn\u2019t. Schmitt said the \u2018sovereign\u2019 is the one who decides on the state of exception. The Ukrainian political class, in its unsuccessful attempt to reassemble the nation from a bricolage of collaborationists, has appropriated this sovereign right \u2013 the right to a historical state of exception in which the normal criteria of scientific truth, morality, and common sense are abolished.<\/p>\n

\n Read more<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n \"RT
\u2018Poles, Russians, and Jews must be exterminated\u2019: The bloody history of Zelensky\u2019s heroes (DISTURBING CONTENT)<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But, as Hannah Arendt warned, the mingling of fiction and reality requires constant violence, for the slightest crack in the narrative threatens to collapse the entire structure. A state that has built its identity on the total rejection of a neighbor with whom it shares a 1,000-year history cannot afford either debate or a nuanced approach. It turns into a sort of \u2018besieged fortress\u2019 within which any dissent is regarded as sabotage.<\/p>\n

The reburial itself deserves a separate philosophical commentary. In his book \u2018Political Theology\u2019, Schmitt formulated his famous thesis that all significant concepts of modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts. Therefore, the transfer of Konovalets\u2019 remains is not an administrative procedure, but a sort of ritual act. In a distorted way, the ashes of a nationalist acquire the status of \u2018relics\u2019, and the cult of the heroes of the OUN-UPA is intended to strengthen the Ukrainian political nation.<\/p>\n

Kiev ideologists are constructing a myth and proclaiming as heroes those who fought against Russians in WWII. Ironically, this political decision confirms that Schmitt was right: A sovereign is someone who makes decisions not just about laws, but about what constitutes historical truth, and defines the enemy\u00a0even at the cost of abolishing reality. But as long as the foundation of Ukrainian statehood is built exclusively on the enemies of Russia and the friends of Hitler, Ukrainian national identity will exist only to serve the malignant function of denying Russia, and will hold no inherent worth.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A wave of symbolic reburials exposes the fragile foundation of Ukraine\u2019s national identity project The Ukrainian government is determined to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6674"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6674"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6678,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6674\/revisions\/6678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/youtubexyoutube.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}