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Drawing inspiration from Vaclav Havel..

https://www.artistespourlapaix.org/3-ans-de-souffrances-ukrainiennes/ 
Par Pierre Jasmin, Artiste pour la Paix, 21 février 2025


1 Vaclav Havel and the Art of Compromise
Unfortunately, I never knew Vaclav Havel personally, even though I gave masterclasses (except for one in Piešťany, Slovakia), concertos, and recitals in the Czech Republic for fourteen summers between 1991 and 2005. I therefore had the privilege of experiencing the miracle of the Velvet Revolution in a country as Eastern European as Ukraine. The ruling communist party, allied with the Soviet army that had bloodily halted Dubcek's revolution, sought out a humanist playwright from prison in 1989 and installed him in the presidential seat. The new Havel government accepted the separation of Czecho-Slovakia less than three years later, without a drop of bloodshed.

Five years after the first Minsk Treaty (UN), mistreated by our Minister Baird, an accomplice of the fascist Poroshenko, a similar hope arose in Ukraine with the election of the comedian Zelensky in May 2019. This unprecedented electoral moment unfolded in the first round with the defeat of the comfortable Russian gas option (to prevent the elderly from dying in their poorly insulated homes) represented by the succession of the corrupt President Yanukovych, deposed by the Maidan revolution in 2014, and then, in the second round, of the outgoing head of state, Poroshenko.
 
But unlike Havel, Zelensky, with 73.2% of the vote, surrounded himself with nationalist Bandera supporters who threatened his life to force him to bomb Donbass and join his country to the militaristic NATO, thus provoking the Russian invasion of his country. In a context of devastating war, he avoided running for re-election.

Our government, Radio-Canada, and professors like Dominique Arel, the only ones authorized to speak (Artists for Peace are censored), are imposing the obstinacy of unconditional Canadian support for this Zelensky, corrupted by Biden's weapons and money, against the imposition of a peace desired by the sacrificed young people in the trenches of Donbass, those who survived, and by the improbable Putin-Trump duo. Other arguments can be read in ().

This point 1 was an “opinion” sent to Le Devoir on Wednesday, which did not publish it. On February 20, Arel was among six university colleagues who cowardly avoided contradicting his pro-Zelensky propaganda, except for Frédérik Gagnon of UQAM: see point 7.

Lviv and its troubled history
Putin is blamed for having wanted to invade the whole of Ukraine as early as the end of February 2022 with his advance near Kyiv, which aimed to bomb the arms factories and munitions located in the capital and in Lviv. Why this former capital of Galicia, which also bore the Austrian name of Lwow, the German name of Lemberg, and the Polish name of Lvov? The answer lies in the murky history revealed in two books I read by Philippe Sands, “Return to Lemberg” and “The Line.” With a complacent ambiguity that delighted his far-right readers at Albin Michel, the Franco-British lawyer recounts the romanticized saga of Charlotte, the Nazi wife of Otto von Wächter. A member of the Nazi Party since 1923, the latter became, after the outbreak of the Second World War, governor of Krakow in Poland, then governor of the district of Galicia, two territories that were noted for the mass extermination of Jews whom he saw as allies of the Bolshevik Soviet Union. “Handsome Otto” praised Lemberg, a place far more welcoming to his family than Berlin and Krakow, as it fully shared Nazi ideology. He evaded justice until 1949, notably due to complicity in the Vatican.

Before his two questionable books, Sands had worked on the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian-Serb massacres, Guantanamo, and the invasion of Iraq by Blair and Bush, but not Jean Chrétien, following our mass demonstrations in Montreal motivated by the UN’s refusal to endorse the war, given the conclusions of the Swede Hans Blix exonerating Saddam Hussein of possessing weapons of mass destruction. We should also read Sands’s 2006 book, prophetic of the recent marginalization of the UN by Biden, Trump, Macron, etc., Lawless World, subtitled Torture Made in the USA (Music And Entertainment Books, 2009), in which he denounced the use of music at Abu Ghraib by CIA agents and the American army, sentenced last November to pay millions of dollars to compensate three victims (who were better defended than the thousands of others).

February 21: A Ukrainian historian exposes the “real” Zelensky

Hosted by Clark University (Atlanta), historian Marta Havryshko, a graduate and professor at the University of Lviv (!), received death threats for criticizing the Ukrainian far right, to which she retorted:

“Every day, we lose parts of our territory. Every day, we lose people. Every day, our children suffer from missile and drone attacks. And we don’t know the consequences.”

She commented for Aaron Maté on the destruction of her homeland by a proxy war waged between Russia and the United States, with Zelensky’s complicity:

“Those who want to continue this disaster, this hell,” she said, addressing the foreign warriors and those who criticized her for seeking peace, “ARE THEY READY TO SACRIFICE THEIR LIVES, and those of their brothers, sons, and other beloved family members, FOR THE ABSURD IDEA OF ACHIEVING VICTORY? “Russia is bigger, resourceful, with powerful friends. I cannot conceive that anyone who is not mentally disturbed can truly believe that Ukraine can change the situation on the front and reconquer the lost territories.”

Marta observed family members forced to fight and die in this proxy war. She showed Aaron Maté newsreels showing the army Ukrainian forces hunting and kidnapping men to force them to become conscripts to replace soldiers who are dying (or being sent to hospitals).

“Who will recapture these territories? Several of my friends, several of my relatives, are conscripted now. They suffer from suicidal thoughts, they suffer from despair or intense frustration. No one can replace them because of the problems with forced mobilization, and because we simply lack manpower.“

And she explains that everyone (except the neo-Nazis) blames Zelensky:
“His popularity has plummeted (even though television channels are censored). Ukraine under Zelensky is no longer a democracy.“
American Caitlin Johnstone adds that anyone who doesn’t support a ceasefire is a monster (of ignorance, I might add, to soften her attack).

4 abi Yar
Western censorship of Russian music, even that of a genius like Dmitri Shostakovich, is applied, for example, to the excellent Italian film The Rape. Fortunately, in 2019, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Nagano programmed his thirteenth symphony with the choir featuring the composer David Sela. Through a long poem by the Ukrainian Yevtuchenko (whose ex-wife, the poet Bella Achmadulina, I met in Moscow in 1978 and 1987), the Babi Yar symphony, his masterpiece, denounces the worst pogrom of all time, perpetrated by Ukrainian einsatzgruppen: 33,771 Jews murdered on the night of September 29-30, 1941. Why don’t pro-Netanyahu activists say a word about this humanist work? Because NATO supports Israel?

5 – Chrystia Freeland vs. Glenn Michalchuk
We won’t dwell on the nefarious role played since 2015 by the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi, up until the horrific House of Commons ceremony that gave a standing ovation to Zelensky and the old Nazi soldier Hunka, much to the dismay of our dear friend Glenn Michalchuk, National President of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians and a peace activist in Winnipeg, who spoke with the Artists for Peace on November 24 at the Pan-Canadian Justice and Peace Network Counter-Summit ().

6 – Colleague David Mandel
and Sachs, Guterres, Swanson, Rabkin, Philpot, Saul, Seymour, Maté, Lorincz, Stone, etc.
A full professor of political science at UQAM, David, who is Jewish, had a devastating experience following Ukraine’s breach of the UN treaty signed in Minsk in 2014: he spent his summers with trade unionists in the Ukrainian Donbass who were being bombed by the Azov Battalion; here’s a photo that triggers warnings from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on my computer every time I share it, even though my intention is not to claim that the Nazification of Ukraine was a major phenomenon in the population.

(on the original of this photo, the man on the left is making a NAZI salute)

But here as elsewhere, for example in Germany on this election day where the AfD is increasing its support through a fierce campaign against immigrants and the illusion that more money for the army will solve the problems, the vociferous extreme right is taking an exaggerated position.

Supported by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, also an advisor to Antonio Guterres, David Swanson of World Beyond War writes: “NATO is not what its defenders imagine it to be. NATO is neither legal nor legalistic. It is a violation of the UN Charter for a group of nations to swear to join each other’s wars, and it does not legalize, authorize, legitimize, or sanctify a war.” Amen to the British-American wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths. A warning to journalists who still lie about the obvious.

7 – UQAM and the Raoul Dandurand Chair – Forum on February 20 at 12:30
Seven guests, including six university professors, spoke, repeating media nonsense. Third, then first in line to ask questions, the organizers (who know me) interrupted the presentation four minutes before the scheduled start time of 2:00 p.m. PAIX’s opinion is not welcome among intellectuals, who find it too simplistic…and, above all, anti-government.

The APLP really don’t like dictators Putin and Trump, but if they stop the war, on this point alone, we will congratulate them. The same goes for Elon Musk, if he succeeds in cutting the American military budget in half as he says he intends to do. Are the left-wing ideologues disowning us? We reassure them that as soon as these two objectives are achieved (?), we will collaborate in the fight for equality, fraternity and liberty…

8. Good news in Berlin with the award of a special prize on February 18th to the following film, which we loved for its objectivity on Hamas and the fate of civilians in the Gaza Strip following the Israeli bombings that decimated the family of this great humanist

April 24, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine