Fco. José Contreras: “The war in Ukraine is a war between freedom and totalitarianism”

This Tuesday, the Culture Commission of the Congress debated a non-legal proposal of the PP on the defense of the cultural heritage of Ukraine.

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For once, this initiative was unanimously approved, with the support of the 36 deputies present at the session. Something worth celebrating, considering what Russia is doing in Ukraine. The video of the debate of this initiative can be seen here. Of all that was said in this debate, it is worth noting the intervention of Francisco José Contreras, deputy of Vox and professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Seville. His speeches, like his books and articles in different media, are always brilliant intellectual pieces, and the one he did yesterday seems to me especially worthy of applause.

Contreras noted that Russia's destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage "is not just a random side effect of the war." The Vox deputy noted that in the invasion of Ukraine "a pattern of specific destruction of historical, cultural, religious heritage is met. UNESCO notes the destruction or deterioration of more than 200 museums, archives and libraries, more than 500 churches, and also not just any churches: specifically bombarded the churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (it is an autocephalous church, therefore independent of the Patriarchate of Moscow), and above all the Eastern-rite Catholic churches, the Uniate churches", linked to the Holy See.

The Vox deputy continued to point out: "We believe that the war in Ukraine is a war between freedom and totalitarianism, that is why we cannot remain neutral, we cannot be passive. We have to support the side that defends our values and that is the Ukrainian side.But of course, one of the characteristic obsessions of totalitarianism is precisely that of changing the past, rewriting the past and this is what can be discerned in this cultural policy deployed by Russian troops: the claim to destroy the historical testimonies of a Ukrainian cultural identity through the centuries. It is known that Putin denies the existence of Ukraine as a zone, as a differentiated identity. For him, Ukraine is simply a invention of the USSR."

Contreras added: "Ukraine already has quite a historical trajectory. Until 1654 the entire western bank of the Dnieper belonged not to Russia, but to the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, and since then, On multiple occasions, Ukraine has tried to assert its identity: with the cultural and poetic renaissance of the 19th century, Tarás Shevchenko, in the nationalist uprising of 1917, in the 18th when the independence of Ukraine was proclaimed , which was crushed by the Bolsheviks, and the punishment for all this was, for example, the Holodomor genocide, when Stalin sentenced millions of Ukrainian peasants to death by starvation, as punishment to this attitude of rebellion, of claiming one's own identity."

You can listen to the complete video with the intervention of Contreras here (the video is in Spanish, you can activate the automatic subtitles in English in the bottom bar of the player):

I applaud Contreras and Vox for this defense of the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion, and for the clarity of principle with which he made his presentation.

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Photo: Vox Congreso.