“Ukraine for the people”: The president’s portrait and party program greeted the children of School #134 in Dnipropetrovsk on Sept. 1. (UNIAN)
Yanukovych is a homo: Homo sovieticus. Yanukovych and his entourage think they’re living in the USSR.
For example: when Ukrainian children went back to school on Sept. 1 they found “Yanukovych corners” in their classrooms where “Lenin (Stalin, Brezhnev) corners” once stood. These corners serve to inform children about the Great Plans their Great Leader has made for at least the next five years.
The danger of this throwback to Soviet times was not lost to Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk. “You shouldn’t force children in school to sing praises to the government. They shouldn’t have to learn about the president’s program, but about what the president is doing,” Kravchuk told the Argumenty i Fakty v Ukraini newspaper on Sept. 7. “I don’t want to live to see the day when some idiot hands my great granddaughter a portrait of some president and forces her to sing dithyrambs [hymns of glorification] to him.”
Kravchuk will see another example of “throw back” when the Party of the Regions holds its Annual Meeting on Sept. 11. The “party in power” proceedings are scheduled to be televised live on State TV Channel One. No other party enjoys such access to the airwaves ahead of the October local government elections.
The further Yanukovych goes back in time, the shorter his term will be. Yanukovych, it seems, could benefit from going back to school himself and re-reading the chapter on “cult of personality,” if it’s still in the textbooks.
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Kravchuk’s warnings to Yanukovych (Ukrainian): http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-394637.html
2 comments:
Steve,
You are absolutely right here and the problem is that the role that the Party of Regions is playing at all levels of Ukrainian life not even on the territory of Ukraine. I just filed my weekly radio segment. In putting it together there were a few things that I discovered that upset to such a degree I had a hard time to sit down and write copy for the segment. I still have to do a little bit of digging, but it won't take too long and I should post my findings on my blog shortly.
Cheerz from YUL.
While I didn't see any personality cult stuff in the Dora School (Yaremche, I was struck by the fact that my neighbor's 16-year old had to do a piece on Marx as his first assignment in "Foreign (World) Literature." Since when Marx, Freud, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche wrote what we generally call creative literature, I don't know. Perhaps this was intended to be a comment on the nature of their writing--except that this Grade 11 kid had to look up about Marx's life and accomplishments. What any of this has to do with world literature, I would love to know.
Incidentally, this school principal has never required that teachers and pupils actually sing the national anthem at assemblies. At this year's First Bell, I was only one of about 5 people who opened their mouths. The rest took cover under the full choir that sang the anthem over the loudspeakers.
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