War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora

This paper tackles the touchy question of atrocities committed by
Ukrainians during the Second World War as a component, or rather its
absence as a component, of the identity consciousness of the Ukrainian
diaspora. The paper goes very much against the grain of that diaspora’s
current consensus. In fact, I am trying to write here a text that is
indigestible for that consensus, that is aimed at dissenting from it and
creating a space for dissent. I have not conducted an exhaustive study of
the relevant texts of the diaspora, but that is hardly necessary for a paper
such as this. Instead, I have concentrated on current electronic media and
recent years of The Ukrainian Weekly, supplemented with a retrospective
sampling of articles from Svoboda and the volume on Ukrainian-Jewish
relations that came out of an important conference held in 1983.