24.11.2016, Lugansk.
The bearers of post-maidan ideas are afraid of Christianity and Soviet culture strongly and for a reason, for these can oppose “genetic” nationalism, embraced by current representatives of Ukrainian authorities, claimed the professor of Mikhail Matusovsky Name’s Lugansk State Culture and Arts Academy, culture scientist Nina Ishenko told in an interview to LuganskInformCenter.
Earlier the head of Ukrainian Culture Ministry Evgeny Nishuk said on air of one of Ukrainian national TV channel that Donbass residents, supposedly “brought there” by Soviet authorities from other regions of the country on purpose, lack some sort of “genetics” necessary for correctly perceiving Ukrainian culture. After he was called out on his words, Nishuk tried to apologize for his words and accused “pro-Russian propagandists” for launching the uproar.
“If we analyze the ignorant words of the head of Ukrainian Culture Ministry and try to extract meaning from them, we will receive a long-known ideology which is gaining foothold in Ukraine after the victory of ‘dignity revolution’ (another name for Euromaidan – Editor): residents of a single country are being divided into those who possess the right genes and those who lack the right genes. This means that all people are divided on birth into two categories of different value and different ontological status. This idea has deep roots,” the cultural scientist noted.
“In the first centuries of Christianity the teaching about pneumatics and hylics were professed by gnostics. The cosmology of gnostics was complicated and confusing, but their anthropology boiled down to this: some people have spiritual, pneumatic nature, their souls got to earth from higher light-bearing spheres and will return there after death. All of the rest people, hylics, have a material soul that dies together with the body, and what’s the difference if it happens now or in twenty years? Only pneumatics are valuable for the universe, while hylics are like grass, which grows today and tomorrow will be thrown into a furnace: any kind of behavior is acceptable in regards of the common people, and this is not a sin. Christianity defeated gnostics in the course of a persistent ideological struggle, and such misanthropic teachings were driven into the underground for many centuries. The Renaissance in Europe returned the gnostic teachings to life together with classical culture. Gnostic teachings were considered to be good at least for being persecuted by Christianity. Since then this gnostic stream in European culture never went away, and with appearance of Protestantism and the predestination teaching became decisive in politics as well,” Ishenko said.
“Protestants teach on double predisposition – supposedly, one people are predestined by God to go to Paradise, while others are predestined to go to Hell, and no deeds of a person can change this. It follows from this that those destined for Heaven can allow themselves any kind of immoral behavior – violence, lies, mass murders. This won’t prevent them from being respected in life and go to Heaven after death,” she noted.
“During the times of the Enlightenment, when the Cult of Reason and Science was being formed, there were attempts to scientifically validate gnostic and Protestant teachings, and a concept of local creation emerged. It states that people were created more than once, but several times in several different places, and, of course, those who were created on other continents are not people in the full sense of the word. The concept of local creations was refuted by Kant, which didn’t prevent it from coming back to life in the 19th-20th centuries as a theory of racial disunity of humanity and racial supremacy of one nation over another,” cultural scientist reminded.
“The further fate of this theory is in the modern memory of our people. Residents of Donbass don’t need to be reminded what manifestations such teachings have in reality. The German army demonstrated this in 1941, Ukrainian army – in 2014. In the area of ideas this theory can be opposed not only by Christianity, but also by Soviet culture, which for a reason scares the Ukrainian minister,” Ishenko is convinced.
Source: LuganskInformCenter
