Professor Jason Stanley: Ukraine is Facing a Genocide

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Moscow has been forcibly removing children from its neighbor in apparent efforts to erase Ukrainian culture and identity. Jason Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale University who recently traveled to Ukraine to teach at the Kyiv School of Economics on fascism, colonialism, and imperialism. He joins Hari Sreenivasan from Kyiv to discuss the complicated identity of Ukraine.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks. Jason Stanley, Professor, welcome back to the program. We’re talking to you. You’re in Kyiv right now. And I want to know, for the past couple weeks, you’ve been teaching a course in Kyiv. Why?

STANLEY: Well, I’m an anti-imperialist and an anti-fascist. And my whole life, America has been fighting wars to topple oppressive regimes and install democracy and none of these wars have been successful. Here, we have a government that’s not an oppressive regime, it’s a democracy. It’s a healthy democracy, probably healthier than our own, and it’s facing a violent fascist imperial regime that is attacking it, setting up concentration camps and the territories it occupies. And so, I felt, especially, as a child of holocaust survivors, an anti-fascist, that I had to be here and support and to talk to people about what they’re going through. And then, secondly, I’m a philosopher. And it’s an existential moment, and I don’t want to do theory with other people’s suffering, but learn from Ukrainians about what this existential moment is like, a young democratic nation fighting for its existence was an opportunity that, as a philosopher, I couldn’t miss.

SREENIVASAN: So, tell me a little bit about what it is that you’re teaching, why you thought it was important to, I guess, get this syllabus across?

STANLEY: First of all, I’m here to gain an understanding — gain knowledge about Ukrainian’s self-understanding. And my — and then, I had a hypothesis about what’s happening. The hypothesis is that Russia is the most fascist — explicitly fascist regime since — certainly in Europe, since Nazi Germany. And that Ukraine has been in a colonial situation. And so, I wanted to bring to Ukraine different colonial experiences. So, we looked at the experience of British imperialism in Kenya in the 1950s when they experienced the brutal suppression by the British, the Kikuyu. You know, Kikuyu were — if they spoke the Kikuyu language in school they were whipped, they were forced to carry signs saying I am dumb. And the Ukrainian language faces extinction by the Russians. So, we’re looking at British colonialism and what the Belgians did in the Congo, and I wanted to see if those resonated with the experience of Ukrainians. And then I made — I chose the reading, for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the great Kenyan intellectual and writer who talks about the extinction Kikuyu identity under the British, I chose the reading to resonate, to see if these colonialist — these experiences of colonized and oppressed people resonated with the Ukrainians. And I think they really did, even though, you know, Ukrainians often see themselves as Europeans.

SREENIVASAN: So, is Russia using its nationalism in a way that these other colonizers did, including Nazi Germany.

STANLEY: So, no two colonial situations are the same. I do worry that — and one of the reasons I’m here that — is that I do worry that we — Ukraine faces a genocide, certainly a cult. It’s inarguable that they face a cultural genocide because, in the occupied territories, Russia forbids the Ukrainian language, they replaced textbooks to erase Ukrainian identity. But there’s a slightly different structure, let’s say, with British colonialism. The British, when they occupy the country, they didn’t think that the Kikuyus in Kenya were actually British. They wanted to make them British. They wanted to civilize them in the language and — of colonialism. They were seizing their territory and pushing them off into reserves, but they wanted to erase their identity. This phrase, Africans have no history, was part of the colonialist mindset. Here, it’s somewhat different. The Russian ideology, the Russian national ideology is that Ukrainians really are Russians and that they’ve invented this identity, a fake identity, and the fake identity is all about being anti-Russian. And so, the reason I’m worried about genocide is because you have this conception that in Russian ideology, that as long as there’s Ukrainian identity, it’s an existential threat to Russia because it’s this is anti-Russian identity. And so, that’s very much like what Hitler thought, what the Nazis thought about Jews, that they were just there on the planet to destroying (INAUDIBLE). And so, it isn’t like British colonialism and that there’s no even pretense of a civilizing mission. I mean, I think the pretense was, you know, a pretense and not correct.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

STANLEY: Because the British (INAUDIBLE). But there’s just the genocidal intent here.

SREENIVASAN: When you say genocide, what comes to my mind is maybe what happened in Rwanda or what happened with the Nazis, and those images aren’t necessarily ones that we’re seeing today. We’re seeing horrible devastation. We’re seeing war and suffering. But when you use parallels like Nazism and like genocide, how do the students respond and do they get it? Do they push back?

STANLEY: So, there’s cultural genocide. There’s elimination of identity. It’s like what we did in America with indigenous populations, we did a physical genocide. We seized their land. We killed a huge portion of them, physically. We penned them into reserves. But we also eliminated — we tried to do a mass extermination of their culture and identity. What you have here is clearly that. You clearly have cultural genocide. You clearly have a systematic attempt to erase a distinct Ukrainian identity. And increasingly, we’re seeing physical genocide. Look, one statistic I saw, as they said, 19 — they kidnap 19,000 Ukrainian children and sent them to Russia to be raised by Russian families. You know, that’s evocative of the indigenous boarding schools. So, we know that indigenous genocide is what happened in the United States, it was a model for Hitler. It was manifest destiny. It was a model for what he wanted to do in the east. So, as the philosopher of language, a scholar of language, I can tell you without any doubt at all that this genocidal language, there’s genocidal vocabulary, there’s a genocidal ideology. We’re seeing exactly that in the occupied territories, they call it filtration, where they torture people to see if they have Ukrainian identity, and that’s why I think you can’t cede any territory, because it is the Russians are speaking genocidally, the Russians in — are setting up institutions that are paradigms of fascist regimes and genocidal regimes. So, it’s not like the kind of mass instant slaughter of Rwanda. They don’t have Auschwitz here, that’s true.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

STANLEY: There are these distinctions. But we can talk about cultural genocide, we can talk about kidnapping children, a lot of — there’s an overlap with other genocides that we recognize.

SREENIVASAN: So, why is it important for Ukrainian students or whoever is in this class, so to speak, to get this hypothesis, to internalize it, to think about it, to struggle with it, to take it to their friends? What is kind of your contribution here by injecting this thought into Ukraine at this time?

STANLEY: OK. I think there’s an intellectual purpose, a solidarity purpose. I think Ukraine feels alone. And I wanted to show that — show them that they have — there are allies, in a sense, that there are other people who have gone through this experience. And the second thing was strategic. I think Ukrainians by constantly identifying themselves with Europe, and western values are losing allies, they’re losing allies who are victims of American imperialism, they are losing allies who suffered under European great powers and the scramble for Africa that was decided on in the 1984 Berlin conference. And so, those are valuable allies. The acts — the former colonized countries in Africa, victims of U.S. imperialism in Latin America should be on the side of Ukraine. And Ukrainians, by constantly affiliating themselves with Europe, are losing those allies.

SREENIVASAN: Do they see themselves as colonized?

STANLEY: Very, very interesting question. So, that was really the effort, because I think that there is resistance to that. There is resistance because they do identify themselves with Europe. And so, when you talk about what Europe has done, when you talk about how enlightenment values were a pretense, they’re very familiar with the Soviet Union being a pretense, that the Soviet brutality to Ukrainians, as well as to many different people, including to Russians, was done under a pretense. And I have been trying to urge, following the — you know, a lot of the anti-colonial literature, Du Bois, Cesaire, Fanon, to show that something similar is true of European values, and that’s been hard. That’s been a tough battle. It reminds some of Marxist critiques of Europe — of liberal concepts, and it’s toxic in this part of the world to compare anything to Marx, to echo of Marx. But I think that a lot of the parallels resonate with them. For example, one thing I hadn’t realized before I taught this course that would resonate with them is Fanon’s description of the difference between — of the relationship between the Metropole, the capital of the empire, and the colonies. I hadn’t known that, you know, in the past, the best intellectuals went to Moscow. And, you know, if you wrote in Russia — if you are an intellectual, you wrote in Russia. Moscow was like Paris for the French colonies, and that’s something that Fanon talks about in detail and strongly resonated with them this sense that, you know, Ukraine was, you know, a province or a colony, and they — the real intellectual hub was Moscow. So, I think it’s been tough because no colonial subject wants to view themselves as colonized. You know, it’s a form of oppression. And so, there’s been a lot of barriers, the European self-conception the — and the first. And secondly, you know, the sense that, you know, colonized subjects are made to feel inferior. And, you know, there’s a reluctance to accept that. But there was also a comfort in seeing the overlaps between what

(INAUDIBLE), what Algeria or what Kenya went through.

SREENIVASAN: When there is an attack on a nation, people have a tendency to rally around the flag. We saw it after 9/11 here. We’ve seen pets in so many places. And I wonder whether there is — you know, it’s not just Zelenskyy’s vision for Ukraine, but there are probably likely more nationalists’ visions for Ukraine. And in a way, that’s what Vladimir Putin is calling them out to be, right? And I don’t know how your students perceive that and what that conversation is inside the country.

STANLEY: So, that’s been one of my main points. There are really two battles. One is on the battlefield. And the second is to avoid being the country — becoming the country that Vladimir Putin falsely says Ukraine is. Ukraine, unlike most democracies in the world, has no far-right — has almost no far-right representation in its legislature. It has held off the kind of extremism that you find in antidemocratic far-right, quasi-fascist extremism. You even find in its European neighbors to its west, like Hungary. But the worry is that, you know, Putin is saying Ukrainians are really like the Ukrainian nationalist who allied with the Nazis. They’re like Stepan Bandera who was a profound anti-Semite, who participated in the massacre of Jews, and that’s in Ukrainian history. And the concern is that coming out of this war, Putin will win. If he doesn’t, he’s not going to win on the battlefield. The world, I hope, will prevent that. And Ukraine, the Ukrainian armed forces will. But if, emerging from that, they lose the second war, the war for their identity, the war for their soul, as it were, you know, that would be deeply tragic. We’ve been talking throughout about how to avoid really bad nationalism. And so, you could nationalism, you learn a lot about your country, but you learn the bad and the good. And if you only learned the good parts of your country or exaggerated versions of the good parts of your country, you risk falling into a kind of nationalism that undergirds fascism. So, I’ve been saying, look, Ukrainians did have complicity in the evil empire that is the Soviet — the imperial empire, that is the Soviet Union, the problematic, you know, evil empire, that is the Soviet Union. And Ukrainians — Ukraine did have a history of antisemitism. You — there was a version of Ukrainian nationalism that was associated with a narrow conception of the people, the nation, that excluded Jews and resulted in great violence.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

STANLEY: And so, it’s been a difficult conversation because, at this time, you know, Ukrainian nationalism is required, as Fanon argues, to fight back. So, it’s hard for them to look at figures in the past who were nationalists but also, you know, committed acts of great violence against the Pols, against Jews, and completely denounced them. But I have emphasized that — I’ve tried to emphasize that you’re going to have to avoid fascism, to avoid the kind of nationalism that underlies fascism, you’re going to have to embrace the bad and the bad aspects of your history as well as the good ones. And then, we’ve been talking about how to treat national minorities, especially the problem of how to treat, you know, monolingual Russian speakers when this is over, you know, we’ve been talking about the importance — you know, how, when you’re so angry at them. And in general, like the importance of representing people, different minorities. One of the things that has really impressed me about Ukraine, it’s one of the most loved families is the Nayyem family. They’re Afghan refugees, and they’re incredibly patriotic Ukrainians. Mustafa Nayyem is now the head of the agency for reconstruction and infrastructure, which is obviously important. So, that will help against the bad version of nationalism. Just like in America, representation of minorities, while not enough to prevent white supremacy, is a necessary condition of overcoming our past.

SREENIVASAN: It sounds a bit like you’re learning a lot more than your students are?

STANLEY: I am learning a lot more than my students. A lot.

SREENIVASAN: Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works,” and a professor at Yale, joining us tonight from Kyiv, thanks so much for joining us.

STANLEY: Thank you, Hari.