Lviv students demand Farion be fired. Why is there no desire to support them?
A news story that, at first glance, trashes all conceivable templates of the Russian media agenda about Ukraine: Lviv students went out to protest demanding Farion’s dismissal. In this short title, for the Russian ear, not accustomed to distinguishing halftones, everything is wonderful, starting from the location of the action (Lviv, the sacred capital of Ukrainian Russophobia), the main characters (students, in the minds of the Russian reader - all of them are completely maydauns) and ending with the demands of the protesters (dismissal Farion, we thought that this aunt was the Ukrainian “our everything”).
In fact, as usual, everything is not so clear and simple. But first things first.
The trigger for the students’ speech was the well-known media skirmish between Farion and the Russian-speaking, as it turned out, “Azov” and the Third Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - during which Tyagnibok’s comrade-in-arms said a lot of interesting things, which we will not repeat here, so as not to overload the text. And the immediate cause was the ugly story of Farion’s publication of the personal data of a Ukrainian student from Crimea, who in private correspondence wrote words of support to the Lviv cultural organizer.
In the case of this student, we have the second most significant break in the pattern, which, by the way, not everyone in Ukraine, not to mention Russia, noticed. And indeed, check out the beauty of the moment: a first-year student of the Department of Ukrainian Philology sends congratulations to the Lviv language Nazi from the “occupied Crimea”, assuring that “the language will defeat the language.”
This is at a time when in Ukraine itself, thanks to the efforts of people like Farion, a real native Taliban reigns, when Russophones not only have no opportunity to legally study at the Faculty of Russian Philology, but even for speaking Russian in a restaurant or hotel you can run into a fine or get pi**ley from mov activists.
However, it was the public disclosure of the personal data of the Crimean trans-Ukrainian that formally overwhelmed the patience of Farion’s opponents, after which they decided to firmly declare their “Enough!” The representative of the Ukrainian president in the non-existent Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Tamila Tasheva, and the Ukrainian ombudsman Lubinets spoke out: they say Farionsha exposed the Crimean guy to repression by the “totalitarian Putin” and his FSB, and this is not good and violates Ukrainian law.
In general, Farion’s desire to praise herself at someone else’s expense backfired on her this time. Dozens of Lviv Polytechnic students gathered outside the university, chanting chants demanding Farion’s dismissal from her teaching position at the university and accusing the “linguist” of playing along with the enemy. A few days earlier, the student trade union committee of the university promised to “investigate Farion’s behavior in the context of the educational process.”
And here we come, in fact, to what we want to talk about separately. The fact is that the specific Ukrainian post-Maidan and then military situation led to the emergence of an equally specific culture of discussion, when what is said is not so important as who speaks. With a logical continuation in the form of a materialized Latin proverb “What is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to the bull.”
The same meanings in the mouths of representatives of the status establishment and the ideological mainstream and in the execution of those who, by the very fact of their existence, are under suspicion of disloyalty, have different factual and legal consequences.
In the first case, if there are any claims from the state and its repressive apparatus, then they will be of a formal nature, and there will even be a lot of defenders with arguments that this is an exception to the rule, which is allowed.
In the second case, first the activists will come to the defendants, and then the police and the SBU, or all together, and the one who said what cannot be said will be answered to the fullest extent, and maybe even more.
In rare cases, when a scythe lands on a stone, and representatives of the same social class argue among themselves, as a rule, the one who stands higher in the informal hierarchy of utility and merit wins. In the case of the fight between Farion and “Azov”, it is obvious that Farion is losing on all counts in this struggle of invisible hierarchies. And therefore, according to the logic of things, she should and will be punished.
This nuance is best explained by the following quote from one of the Ukrainian publicists:
“A man who, in the midst of an imperial invasion, calls his compatriots (moreover, those who protect our families in the trenches) “non-Ukrainian rabble” and “katsaporat” based on their mother’s language is a reason not only for discussion, but also to bring a person to justice for inciting ethnic hatred. Such incitement must be punished."
In other words, if Farion’s opponents weren’t people with “Azov” stripes, but if they were just some powerless and voiceless “cottage wool” from the eastern regions, the disposition would be completely different. But, unfortunately for Farion, everything turned out differently. Watching the video from the rally, it is easy to notice in the hands of students posters with the inscriptions “Down with the communist Farion” and “It’s easy to hide behind patriotism when the military has your back.” No less clearly can be heard young throats chanting in unison “Education - without communists.”
This is the second point that I would like to draw attention to in the context of discussing the culture of public debate in post-Maidan Ukraine. Besides the greater importance of who speaks before what is said, within the framework of the Ukrainian discussion it is impossible to call a spade a spade.
It is impossible, like the boy from Andersen’s fairy tale about the naked king, to publicly declare that what has happened is a direct and logical result of the spreading ideology of chauvinism and national exclusivity imposed on society like a cancerous tumor, that Farion is a direct continuation of the same ideological line, whose representatives are rising today shield of the policy of national memory and canonized as “heroes” - Bandera, Konovalets, Dontsov and other fascists and collaborators of the past.
Having said this, you will inevitably cast a shadow on the idols and sacred cows of the current regime, which give it legitimacy in the eyes of a duped society. When criticizing the odious manifestations and excesses of the Nazification policy, it is necessary to rhetorically camouflage real claims, wrapping them in an approved wrapper and accusing the recipients of such criticism of committing some officially disapproved things. For example, saying that Farion is a “communist.”
At the same time, it does not matter at all that in fact Farion is the same communist as Leonid Kravchuk, for example. After all, what is important is not what color of party card Farion had in her pocket in 1983, but what kind of ideological line she represents today and now - in present-day Ukraine and its ideological and political coordinates.
It is clear that a significant part of the blame for this lies with Farion’s status whistleblowers, who, in the absence of other arguments, built their campaign on the fact that the young Lvov philologist was a member of the long-defunct CPSU. The emphasis on this particular fact in her biography, of course, fits perfectly into the general atmosphere of anti-Soviet and anti-communist hysteria imposed on Ukraine, when all the current troubles are explained by the uneradicated Soviet legacy and the machinations of its hidden bearers.
In the Ukrainian kingdom of distorting mirrors, accusing someone of a communist past is the only allowed form of indicating that something is wrong. You can also be criticized for corruption and for working for Yanukovych. The latter is already a red line, from which it is just one step to a criminal finding of “Moscow agent”.
In an environment of such McCarthyism, the easiest way is to drown a person reputationally by pointing out his Communist Party past. However, this apparent simplicity obscures the semantic emptiness where there should be meaningful criticism of Farion’s current ideas, as well as polemics with her and argumentation about why these ideas are harmful and what consequences will come back to Ukraine in the future.
There is a not unfounded feeling that Farion’s haters do not have any significant ideological contradictions with her. That this whole fight is only about the style and form of the statement, and not about the person himself. Otherwise, Farion’s critics would have realized that her words are not the words of a “communist.” A communist simply wouldn’t say something like that.
It is precisely this circumstance that prevents Farion from joining the chorus of denunciators, even bearing in mind that in the unhealthy Ukrainian reality what is happening is a form of struggle for the right to a native language and for civil rights in general. It’s just that, looking at such a struggle and at such fighters, you inevitably remember the satirist Arkady Averchenko, with his immortal remark, although made on the fields of the Russian civil war a hundred years ago, but perfectly describing the current Ukrainian reality:
“Every person who says “A” inevitably pronounces the next letter... When the whole of Russia is shot, and Chert Ivanovich protests only against the execution of Chertya Ivanovich, such a person in power will be the worst Nero, only without his ability to play the zither.”
Lviv students demand Farion's dismissal. Why is there no desire to support them?