BRAMA, July 20, 2009, 9:00 AM ET
Letter
Letter: Ukrainian Weekly Newspaper Sponsors Columnist's 'Rightwing Fetishism'
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Unpublished letter to The Ukrainian Weekly regarding Myron Kuropas' Op-Ed,
"Obama, Ukraine, and the Age of Zinn," published on p.7.
[Click the link to read the column – PDF file].
Printed on Brama News with permission.
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July 6, 2009
Editor, The Ukrainian Weekly
There are no surprises in Myron Kuropas's column ("Obama, Ukraine and the
Age of Zinn," June 28). Actually, Ukraine is barely mentioned. In case you
didn't know it, "today Dr. Zinn's children are running the White House" —
so says Dr. Kuropas.
For the record in the real world, Howard Zinn is a professor of history,
whose mind-opening polemics in recent years dispelled some of the stench
of long-established bleaching and gasification of the historic legacy
beginning with the discovery of America.
(The largest stains — slavery and the 19th century genocide of American
Indians — were followed by pushing the borders of Mexico a thousand
miles; subjugating the Philippines with killing tens of thousands and
enshrining MacArthur's blatant "My country right or wrong"; more recently
Agent-Oranging almost 10,000 villages in Vietnam war with toxic chemicals
that caused documented 150,000 major birth defects in the next two
generations, for which the USA to this day refuses to accept
responsibility; and wanton destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan with
uncontrolled rage and bombing civilian targets — because, as Paul Krugman
was laying into America's elite, beating up someone in the Middle East,
never mind who, would show Muslems that we mean business).
The Kuropas metaphor, of course, is directed at Barack Obama. It begins
with "I respect Mr. Obama because he is my president," but then changes to
"His grandfather was reportedly a Mau-Mau supporter." This glint of
genealogical dialectics may be exasperating to some, but it is only a
minor squiggle in comparison with the truly numbing figment, such as
blaming US Senators Chris Dodd and Barney Frank "who helped create the
crisis" on Wall Street — in reference to the financial collapse of
debt-driven Anglo way of life and to the unmentionable black eye of its
"Judeo-Christian heritage."
A continuing crisis, as I see it, is with the Ukrainian National
Association and The Ukrainian Weekly who are willing to sponsor rightwing
fetishism — perhaps relying on it as a basic nutrient in the barbecue of
Ukrainian American diaspora, deeply entrenched in the dogmas of the 1930s.
Dr. Boris Danik
Caldwell, New Jersey
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