CONTINUING REACTION TO "60 MINUTES" REPORT

Letter from U.S. Federation of business/professional groups

Reprinted below is a letter sent by The Federation of Ukrainian American Business and Professional Organizations to Laurence Tisch, chairman, president and chief executive officer of CBS; Eric W. Ober, president of the CBS News Division; and Don Hewitt, executive producer of "60 Minutes." The letter was signed by Lydia Chopivsky Benson, president of the federation.

On the October 23 edition of "60 Minutes," Morley Safer did a feature about Ukraine entitled "The Ugly Face of Freedom." That feature was outrageous, because its portrayal of Ukraine was imbalanced to the point of deformity, suffused with crudely vicious stereotypes, and rife with historical and factual inaccuracies. A license to use the public airways should not be license to engage in trash journalism, in the dual sense of trashing the subject of coverage beyond all recognition and in the sense of treating historical and fact checking as though such were wholly inapplicable to television journalism.

The feature was profoundly skewed and imbalanced because it pretended to offer a bird's-eye view of an entire country, and then chose to adopt a bizarre view by portraying Ukraine as either disintegrating or diseased: "But, Ukraine is hardly a unified entity. The south, Crimea, wants independence. The eastern part feels the pull to Russia ... and the west, where we go tonight, is on a binge of ethnic nationalism ..."

The "60 Minutes" segment was imbalanced because it pretended that a fringe party that won three out of some 300 seats in Ukraine's Parliament represents what contemporary Ukraine is all about. That is akin to a Martians landing in Tel Aviv, taping a JDL rally and then returning to Mars to show the film to those who would otherwise be uninformed about Israel for the purpose of demonstrating that the JDL and its activities represent the essence of Israel; the same point applies if someone taped a KKK rally in this country and then showed that film to an audience of otherwise uninformed persons to demonstrate that the Klan and its activities represent what American society is all about.

The segment was skewed because it also pretends to offer a bird's-eye view of Ukrainian history, a view that borders on the grotesque. According to Mr. Safer, Ukraine is "a nation that barely acknowledges it's part in Hitler's Final Solution." Might it be that Ukraine does not "acknowledge its part in Hitler's Final Solution" because its own role was that of a victim? In 1945, Edgar Snow, an American journalist who had traveled throughout Ukraine immediately after the Germans had been driven out, published an article in the Saturday Evening Post titled "The Ukraine Pays The Bill." In it he wrote:

"This whole titanic struggle, which some are apt to dismiss as 'the Russian glory,' has, in all truth and in many costly ways, been first of all a Ukrainian war. And greatest of this republic's sacrifice, one which can be assessed in no ordinary ledger, is the toll taken of human life. No fewer than 10 million people ... have been 'lost' to the Ukraine since the beginning of the war... No single European country suffered deeper wounds to its cities, its industries, its farmlands and its humanity." (January 27, 1945, p. 18)

More specific estimates after the war provided that out of a total pre-war population in Ukraine of some 40 million, between 5.5 million and 6.7 million were killed by the Nazis. Of this number, it is estimated that 900,000 were Jewish Ukrainian civilians and 3 million were gentile Ukrainian civilians; an additional 2.5 million Ukrainians were taken to Germany for slave labor; furthermore, some undetermined number of the 2.5 to 3 million Soviet POWs whom the Nazis killed were Ukrainian; lastly, there were the military casualties; the millions of Ukrainians who died while serving in the Red Army, or while fighting the Red Army and the Nazis.

There were also those Ukrainian individuals who collaborated with the Nazis in persecuting the Jews, but in contrast to the millions of Ukrainians whom the Nazis murdered or enslaved, the collaborators numbered approximately 11,000. [Source: Stefaan T. Possony "Anti-Semitism in the Russian Area," Plural

Societies, Winter 1974, pp. 91-92. Based on figures of Israel's War Crimes Investigations Office.] (Ironically, it was none other than that same independent Ukraine, which Mr. Safer went to such lengths to vilify, that, in 1992 erected a proper monument at Babyn Yar in Kyyiv to commemorate the Jews who had been killed there, and it was that same independent Ukraine that sponsored a three day public commemoration throughout the city that was attended by Jewish delegations from around the world.)

Mr. Safer further demonstrated his historical acumen in "The Ugly Face of Freedom" by opining that "Western Ukraine also has a long dark history of blaming its poverty, its troubles on others." He apparently means that Ukraine's having been enserfed, colonized, exploited and oppressed was all its own fault. He must also mean that Ukraine's having repeatedly been invaded during World War I by the Red Army, Denikin's White Russian armies, the German army and the Polish army; having its territories be the theater of incessant warfare; and having millions of its people killed as a result was similarly Ukraine's fault.

Mr. Safer must likewise mean that it was the fault of the 7 million Ukrainian peasants purposely starved to death during what Robert Conquest has called the genocidal "Terror-Famine of 1932-1933" that Stalin chose them for such distinction. And Mr. Safer must also mean that it was again the fault of the Ukrainians that the Nazis considered them, along with all the other Slavs, to be subhumans (during the German occupation, a sign at the Kyyiv ballet theater read: "No Ukrainians or dogs allowed"), and that they suffered the kind of devastation of which Edgar Snow wrote in 1945.

Lastly, Mr. Safer must also mean that it was the fault of the Ukrainians that the Russians decided to deport millions of their priests, intellectuals, writers, scientists, entrepreneurial peasants, and some who merely wanted to speak and write in their native tongue to the gulag.

There is a point in each narrative when it becomes difficult to accept that so much ignorance can purely be attributable to innocence.

If, however, any doubts about Mr. Safer's sentiments towards his subject still remained, he dispelled them with his hideous stereotyping of Ukrainians as moronic, but nuclear-armed thugs: "The western Ukraine is fertile ground for hatred. Independence only underlined its backwardness. Uneducated peasants, deeply superstitious in possession of this bizarre anomaly - nuclear weapons." (Ironically, Ukraine is thus far the only country in the world that has agreed to denuclearize.)

And, by scoffing at the Ukrainian Church's and government's assurances "that Ukrainians, despite the allegations, are not genetically anti-Semitic," he suggests that they indeed are "genetically" anti-Semitic!

Happily, Morley Safer is so intimately acquainted with Ukrainians that he knows how they all think and feel: "In the flower garden square ... every day of the week ... [m]en and women ... disagree about plenty, but they do have two things in common, their own enemy, Russian communism, and their old, old enemy, the Jews."

Next to Mr. Safer's open attempt to delegitimate Ukraine, the specific factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations found throughout the segment seem pale by comparison, but they too play an important role.

The central misrepresentation involves the volunteer SS Galicia Division, of whom Mr. Safer said: "Thousands of Ukrainians joined the SS and marched off to fight for Nazism. In the process they helped round up Lvov's Jews, helped march more than 140,000 of them to extinction."

There are three critical inaccuracies in that statement, two of which are libelous. First, Ukrainians did not join the Division "to fight for Nazism." How could they, given that the Nazis considered them to be subhumans? On page 472 of his "Ukraine: A History" (University of Toronto, 1988), Prof. Subtelny explains:

"In spring 1943, after the stunning German defeat at Stalingrad, Nazi authorities belatedly decided to recruit non-German 'easterners' into their forces. Consequently, Otto Wachter, the governor of Galicia, approached the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) with a proposal to form a Ukrainian division in the German army. After much debate and despite opposition from the OUN-B, ... [the UCC] agreed. Their immediate reason for the creation of such a division was the hope that it might help to improve German treatment of the Ukrainians. The specter of 1917-1920 was also extremely influential in persuading the UCC leadership, for ... [they] (as well as Metropolitan Sheptytsky himself) were convinced that it was the lack of a well-trained army that had prevented Ukrainians from establishing their own state after the first world war. Realizing that the defeat of Germany was probable, they were determined that this time Ukrainians would not be caught in the ensuing chaos without a regular military force."

Volunteers for this military unit were recruited in June of 1943. Part of the agreement leading to its creation stipulated that this unit would only be used against the Red Army.

The first of the two libelous misrepresentations are that the SS Galicia Division "helped round up Lvov's Jews." The Galicia Division could not have rounded up the Jews in the city, because the Division was not formed until 1943, and the Jews had already been rounded up two years earlier, in 1941. The second of Mr. Safer's libelous misrepresentations is that the Division "helped march more than 140,000 of [the Jews] to extinction."

Simon Wiesenthal and Soviet sources of disinformation tried for decades to smear the record of the Division by alleging that it had participated in various atrocities, including killing Jews, helping to put down the Warsaw rebellion, etc. Mr. Wiesenthal's allegations came to a head in Canada in the mid- 1980s, prompting the Canadian government to establish an official commission to determine whether in fact Canada was home to war criminals that had served in the Division. The commission, named the Commission or Inquiry on War Criminals, was established in February 1985 and was headed by Justice Jules Deschenes. In its final report, issued March 12, 1987, it completely exonerated the Galicia Division of all charges that it had engaged in any war criminal activity. Does CBS now take the position that it was wholly unaware of the Deschenes Commission's findings?

In light of the Galicia Division's innocence, Mr. Safer's interview with Cardinal Lubachivsky about the mass the cardinal held for the veterans of that Division takes on a completely different light. The cardinal's partially fumbling answers become understandable as the answers of someone who did not know what Mr. Safer was getting at by making such a big deal about the mass, instead of as the answers of yet another leader of the "genetically anti-Semitic Ukrainians who didn't seem to understand what was wrong with holding a mass for veterans of the dreaded SS.

Other inaccuracies and misrepresentations include Mr. Safer's referring to the city in which he was conducting his interviews as Lvov." The Ukrainian and, therefore, the present name of the city is "Lviv." The Russian name for the city is "Lvov." One would hope that Mr. Safer's choice of names does not betray the source of some of Mr. Safer's ideas about Ukraine.

Mr. Safer describes Symon Petliura as a man who slaughtered 60,000 Jews during World War I. As explained on pages 363-364 of Prof. Subtelny's History, which pages are attached hereto, that statement is untrue.

Mr. Safer also states: "To Ukrainians, [Stepan] Bandera is the father of the modern state. Peace Street in Lvov has been renamed Bandera Street. He's considered a great patriot, even though the Jews remember him as a leader of a notorious army of murderers." Whatever various Ukrainians think about Bandera, who in 1959 was assassinated in West Germany by a Soviet agent who then surrendered to the German authorities, ascribing to him the status of "father of the modern state," whatever that means, is not one of them. But whereas this misrepresentation is amusing, Mr. Safer's claim that Mr. Bandera's organization participated in the Nazi Holocaust as victimizers is less so, in light of Mr. Bandera's having spent part of the war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and in light of his having lost two brothers at Auschwitz.

Still other misrepresentations involve a translation, a photograph and the apparent dangers posed by Ukrainian scouting organizations. The Ukrainian word "Zhyd" was translated by "60 Minutes" to mean "kike." In Ukrainian and Polish, "Zhyd" simply means Jew. In Russian, it does mean something like "kike" (the neutral term in Russian for "Jew" is "Yevrey," i.e., the Russian for "Hebrew"). But when the Ukrainians whom Mr. Safer was interviewing used the Ukrainian word "Zhyd," they were simply saying "Jew," not "kike."

One of the photographs shown during "The Ugly Face of Freedom" as depicting alleged Ukrainian persecution of Jews during World War II, the photo showing a distraught woman, sitting or lying on the sidewalk, was the same photo that had been used by Time magazine in its February 22, 1993, issue for the same purpose. In its April 19, 1993, issue, however, Time published a retraction, admitting that it had not been able to pin down exactly what situation that photo portrays.

Lastly, at the end of the feature, the viewer is shown a group of young men and women in uniform approaching an archway, at which point Simon Wiesenthal proclaims with a seeming heavy heart: "Not to believe," and then "They have not changed." Apparently unbeknownst to "60 Minutes," the young people captured on film are members of a Ukrainian scouting organization participating in some type of scout gathering. Of course, if one goes to Ukraine expecting to see nothing but villains, even scouts can appear menacing.

There are still other misrepresentations, but I think that the point has now been made. What the "60 Minutes" segment at issue revealed was not the ugly face of an independent Ukraine, but rather the ugly face of prejudice combined with journalistic incompetence.

We demand a detailed correction and retraction of "The Ugly Face of Freedom" on "60 Minutes." We also demand that Mr. Safer be relieved of his duties, unless, of course, you take the view that defaming Ukrainians is acceptable.

We will be represented at the meeting in your offices on October 31.

Lydia Chopivsky Benson
President

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 6, 1994, No. 45, Vol. LXII

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