President, Church and the 'Ministry of Disunification"
On 19 November, President Zelensky presented the "Resilience Plan" in the Verkhovna Rada.
The plan contains many expressive theses, but we would like to focus on two:
• The intention to create the "Ministry of Ukrainians’ Unification";
• The statement that the UOC (Ukrainian Orthodox Church) is a "Moscow Church" and that its time has ended.
At first glance, these theses may seem unrelated, but they are not.
We don't know whether the creation of yet another ministry will help unite Ukrainians, but there is no doubt that our country desperately needs such unity. Therefore, the President's efforts in this direction can only be welcomed.
But how can one simultaneously proclaim a large part of these "unified" Ukrainians as (once again) accomplices of terrorists and enemies of the people?
After all, representatives of the authorities have repeatedly stated that the UOC counts 5-6 million believers. As of today, that is a quarter of Ukraine's population.
How can one, with the left hand, "unite" Ukrainians, and with the right hand, divide them into categories? What kind of "unity" can this be? Basic logic suggests that this is nothing more than disunion, which is murderous in a time of war. In other words, by declaring one thing, the government is effectively producing the exact opposite.
How can one not recall George Orwell's famous novel “1984’, where there are:
• The Ministry of Truth, responsible for disinformation;
• The Ministry of Peace, responsible for conducting military operations;
• The Ministry of Love, responsible for identifying and eliminating people disloyal to the regime, and so on.
The thing is, Orwell wrote a cautionary novel, aimed against any forms of totalitarianism, whereas Ukraine is a democratic rule-of-law state. And we can’t have anything in common with Orwell's world.
Or can we?
