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"What strikes me about the Ukrainian situation, considering what we learn reading the press, listening to the radio etc., is that it is captured and understood according to an operation that I would call the complete stagnation of the contemporary world. The commonplace narrative is to say that Ukraine wants to join free Europe, breaking with Putin's despotism. There is a democratic and liberal uprising whose goal is to join our beloved Europe -- the motherland of the freedom in question -- while the sordid, archaic manoeuvres of the Kremlin's man, the terrible Putin, are directed against this natural desire. What is striking in all this is that everything is framed in terms of a static contradiction. Well before the Ukraine affair there was already a fundamental schema constantly at work, distinguishing the free West from all the rest. The free West has but one mission, that of intervening everywhere it can in order to defend those who want to join it. And this static contradiction has neither a past nor a future.
It has no past because -- and it is particularly typical in the Ukrainian case -- nothing about Ukraine's own real history is ever considered, named or described. Who cared about Ukraine before last week? Many people did not even have much idea where it was... Ukraine, champion of European freedom, suddenly takes to the stage of History; and this is possible because what is taking place there can be described in terms of the static contradiction between Europe, motherland of freedom, democracy, free enterprise and other such splendours, and then all the rest, including Putin's barbarism and the despotism that goes with it.
It has no past because we do not know where all this is coming from, for example the fact that Ukraine is a component part of what was for centuries called Russia; that only very recently did an independent Ukraine take shape, within the framework of a very particular historical process: the unravelling of the Soviet Union.
Similarly, the fact that Ukraine has always had separatist tendencies and that these have constantly been reactive: that is, backed by strongly reactionary powers and even worse. The Ukrainian Orthodox clergy, whose sacred city is Kiev, has played a determining role in all this, and it goes without saying that it is the most reactionary on Earth, a megalomaniac centre of Imperial Orthodoxy. This separatism at certain moments reached extremes that no one could forget, particularly not the Russian people, knowing that the vast mass of the Nazi-armed and organised armies coming from Russian territory were Ukrainian. The Vlasov army was a Ukrainian army.
Today we can even read the history of Ukrainians turning entire villages to blood and fire, including French ones. A good part of the repression of the /maquis/ in central France was carried out by Ukrainians. We are no identitarians, we are not going to say: 'What bastards, those Ukrainians!', but all this does constitute a history, the history of a certain number of the political subjects in Ukraine.
Moreover, the contradiction has no future, because the future is pre-constituted: the Ukrainians' desire will be to rally to good-old Europe, an already-existing citadel of freedom. The operations imposing this finitude here bear on time itself. If time is finished, it is because it has been stopped. The time of propaganda is an immobile time. It is very difficult to make propaganda for a time-in-becoming: we can make propaganda for what /is /but not for what /is/ /becoming/. And here we have the propaganda that the Ukrainian uprising is static, in that it came out of nothing and is heading towards something that already existed, democratic free Europe."
full at: http://simongros.com/text/articles/alain-badiou/alain-badiou-ukraine-egypt-finitude-present-defaults-unless-crowd-declares/
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