Ukrainian Scientist: Lukashenka Is Ashamed To Listen

A classic example of a colonized individual who looks at himself through the eyes of his master.

Ukrainian researcher of the legacy of colonialism Mykola Ryabchuk spoke about the main mechanisms of the colonizers and how it worked in the case of Belarus.

"Colonialism is, first of all, the domination of one group of people over another, it is the deprivation of the subjugated, subordinate group of subjectivity," Mykola Riabchuk explained at Belsat. "That is, this group cannot decide anything on its own.

Everything is decided in the imperial center, they know much better what is good, what is bad and who this group is. For example, Moscow knows better than us that there are no Ukrainians, that we are actually Russians who have simply forgotten that they are Russians.

This is typical colonialism, when the empire owns supposedly real knowledge, and we are just small unintelligent children who do not understand.

Of course, every empire brings certain modernization elements. They all built railways in India and Africa. Something was built in the Baltic countries and in Ukraine during USSR rule. This is no exception.

But who dominated, led, who represented all these countries in the international and cultural arena — this is important.

The fact that Ukrainians held high positions in the USSR does not mean anything. They also occupy high positions in today's Russia under the Putin regime. Here is another question: are they Ukrainians?

Dzerzhinsky was a Pole, and Stalin was a Georgian, many Jews were in the Cheka and in high positions in the Soviet secret police, but this does not make the secret police Jewish, it does not make the Soviet Union Georgian or Polish. All these people worked for the empire, they built an empire — not Georgian, not Jewish, not Ukrainian, but Russian.

And it still exists and continues to be quite bloodthirsty.

Therefore, colonialism, first of all, is domination, the dominance of one group over another, the transformation of this group into invisible and silent — it simply does not exist for the rest of the world.

And, secondly, what is very important is a certain ideology of superiority. In some cases, it has racial grounds. In our case, it has more cultural and linguistic grounds.

Our "black skin" is a language that can be mocked, ridiculed, it is, as it were, inferior, it is a sign of this inferiority, it is stigmatized. Such an ideology is enforced.

The main task is to convince the aborigines that they are inferior. They must accept this ideology and learn to look at themselves through the eyes of the colonizer. And then it seems that there is no violence: they themselves want, they themselves agree, they themselves are Russified.

The scientist is convinced that getting rid of colonialism is not enough to get rid of military and political dependence alone.

"In our case, we need to free ourselves in all senses — both militarily and politically, as well as mentally, culturally or civilizationally, because really a lot of people have learned this imperial knowledge, this idea of superiority.

Many people have learned to look at themselves with imperial eyes and see themselves as inferior. The colonized accept the colonizer's point of view — and this is the biggest tragedy.

It is necessary to explain, deconstruct the mechanisms of this domination, which are very often hidden, as it were invisible. It seems that everything goes by itself, no one forces you to speak Russian, I have heard this phrase since childhood — 'no one forces, no one stands with a gun'.

Somehow this happens by itself, it happened historically," the researcher argues.

As one of the vivid examples of a subordinate who mastered the tasks of the colonizers, Ryabchuk cites the Belarusian ruler.

"Lukashenka carried out the Russification of Belarus even more than it was in the Soviet Union. He has said many times that the Belarusian language is a poor language, that Belarusians are Russians with a quality mark.

A classic example of a colonized individual who looks at himself through the eyes of his master. Although I do not know fully how much inferiority there really is in this, and how much simple peasant trickery that plays a certain role.

In any case, it is humiliating, everything he says is, of course, just shameful to hear.

It should be borne in mind that in all cases under colonialism, violence is still hidden. The dominance of one group over another is based on it. In some cases, this violence is direct, associated with conquest, genocide, extermination of aborigines, as it happened in Siberia, in the Far North or in the Caucasus. Russia did not just annex these territories, it destroyed the local population.

But there are also more hybrid methods, when violence is used partially, and at the same time bribery of local elites is used, co-optation is a kind of outsourcing, when conquest is done by the hands of the local comprador elite,” the scientist explained the Belarusian example.

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