Baltimore Ethnic Festivals- Bringing Genocidial Enemies Together

Yesterday, I went to Baltimore's Ukrainian Festival. For you who do not know, it is the weekend every year where Baltimore's Ukrainian population gathers together and celebrates the good parts of their heritage like quality beers, potato pancakes, and meat filled dumplings, but otherwise demonstrating a studied ignorance of the relevant parts.

What was particularly ironic was the decision to hold the Ukrainian festival in front of the Count Pulaski statue. What made this ironic was the large-scale massacre of Poles by Ukrainians during WWII.

Seriously, during the Second World War and afterward, Ukrainian nationalists engaged in a brutal omnidirectional campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing directed towards the Soviets, Poland, and the Jews, among others. They killed tens of thousands. Those groups retaliated, with varying degrees of success, in kind. Historian Kate Brown describes it:

"In the old way, people raided villages, swooped down on supply wagons, slipped off to forests, printed proclamations on foot-cranked presses, and pasted hand-lettered leaflets on the trees of neighboring towns. The woods resounded with the crack of rifle fire and the foot-pounding flight of wounded men and women, many of whom had not yet reached their twentieth year. " [...]

They killed with rifles, but more often, to save ammunition, with the butts of rifles, with knives, sickles, or the blunt surface of a wall. Short on technology and firepower, they fought with brute force of muscle". (1)

Kate Brown excerpted one of the orders of the Ukrainian partisans operated under. I'll copy it:

Liquidate all Polish traces. Destroy all the walls in the Catholic Church and other Polish prayer houses. Destroy orchards and trees in the courtyards so that there will be no traces that someone lived there. Destroy all Polish hits in which Poles lived earlier .... Pay attention to the fact that when something remains that is Polish, then the Poles will have pretensions to our land." (2)

Yet, despite this history, the Ukrainian festival featured Polish sausages and a booth for the Polish National Catholic Church. Like I said, Baltimore Ethnic Festivals bring genocidal foes together.

(1) Kate Brown: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) 222
(2) Ibid., 221