LinkBlog: ukraine

Western Ukraine was hit by a severe epidemic of unidentified influenza, tentatively diagnosed by doctors as viral pneumonia. The number of dead has climbed dramatically. Doctors advise Western Ukrainians to stay at home and use preventive medication. The first pedestrians wearing face masks have been seen on Lviv streets.

Now the museum of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, a state-created institution, has admitted to taking part in a no less bizarre act. On behalf of the museum, the frescoes painted by Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who came from a Jewish family, were removed from Ukraine, where the town of Drohobych is now located. It was there that Schulz was born and grew up, and where he worked until his murder by the Nazis in 1942, after they forced him to paint for them. The clash between Yad Vashem and Ukraine about whether the paintings were purchased or fraudulently removed has now come to an end with the museum's admission that the Ukrainian version is correct. But the act of deceit was necessary because of something that was obscured here, something no true common sense can explain, and which certainly does not fall within the sphere of international law - namely that the work of an artist who was a victim of the Holocaust belongs to Israel, because the Holocaust is "ours."

The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini. Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and many senior communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across fearful Europe.