Irina Farion may have been killed, but her destructive quest for the “racial purity” in Ukraine lives on. InfoDefence reports:

In Ivano-Frankovsk in western Ukraine, the first language patrols will begin their work, the city’s mayor announced.

On October 24, Ukraine’s Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language, Taras Kremin, once again declared a shift toward “aggressive Ukrainization” of the country’s public life.

According to him, authorities now have all the tools needed to enforce language norms among citizens.

This is a logical next step of the course taken by that quasi-state in 2010-s, when Irina Farion was taunting schoolchildren for having “wrong” names:

In connection with this development, we want to present a translation of an article from Ukraina.ru, which came out on the 27th of July 2024, shortly after Farion was shot.

The hegemony of linguonationalism. Why did Farion win

Irina Farion is a Nazi and a cannibal, but I would not like to rejoice in the murder of a 60-year-old auntie. In general, our lawyers took the right position — they said they would like her to live till trial. And regular political assassinations are something that categorically does not suit us in Ukraine and this should not happen either here or in any other place.

Farion is a radical linguonationalist, linguoculturologist, an ideological heiress of Fichte, the neo-Humboldtians, Sepir with his accomplice Whorf and court linguists of the Third Reich (such as Weisgerber and Schmidt-Rohr), who explained the superiority of the Germans by the superiority of the German language. At one point, they even quarrelled with Hitler, trying to prove to him that race is nonsense, it’s all about language, and a German—speaking Jew is a German.

Farion is the embodiment of the very “Iдеї Naziї” (“National Idea”) of the modern Ukrainian state, which by bloody methods gathers a homogeneous space precisely around the language. You can be a hundred times Ukrainian by origin, says Farion, but if you are not Ukrainian-speaking, your origin is worthless, you are spoiled, “confused” (here an artificial Ukrainian word is used), etc.

It is the texts of Farion that are given in the motivational part of the decision of the Supreme Court of Ukraine of 2021, which determined that there are no Russian-speaking Ukrainians (these are “Moskalited” who need to be returned to their true Ukrainian roots), respectively, they do not have any separate cultural and linguistic rights.

This court decision is a perfect illustration of how the Gramscian cultural hegemony of Galicia, of which Farion has been the face for many years, works.

Ukrainian philologists, who are annually stamped by universities, are the army of this hegemony, and Farion is only one of its political instructors, the most media-oriented.

I had a friend in Zaporozhie from a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family, with a Ukrainian surname, but relatives in the Russian Novotroitsk, where he visited annually. He was a normal, sane man, but by the will of fate he married a Ukrainian philologist with a Russian surname. Her Ukrainian language made her a “proper” Ukrainian, despite her Russian origin, and his dual identity and apolitical attitude very quickly turned him into a victim of brain slugs and all these “suitcases, train stations” began, after which we could no longer communicate with him.

And I also had a friend named Sidorov. It is clear that he is Russian. His smart sister left for Moscow a long time ago and, I think, even took her parents there. While he was expelled from the capital’s university several times for alcoholism, which is why he had to string for a yellow newspaper of the local oligarch and start inciting: first against the competitors of this oligarch, who bet on the “Party of Regions”, and then against the pro-Russian electorate of competitors, against his constitutional rights and he got self-irradiated. He (Sidorov) ended up wearing an embroidered shirt and went to denounce me to the SBU.

Who, if not Farion, deposited her larvae in them?

Yes, by and large, the Galicians have gained nothing for themselves from this cultural hegemony. Neither the philologists nor the Sidorovs won. But they shouldn’t have either.

The essence of the ideology of nationalism (both linguistic and of any other kind) is to justify the power of a group of “respected people” within certain boundaries, called the national state. The point is to explain to the taxable population why money needs to be deposited to this particular group. If the population inside the borders of Ukraine is no different from the population of Russia, then what is the meaning of Ukraine’s existence as a separate state and what is the meaning of sending money to people who called themselves the leadership of Ukraine? Therefore, the population inside the controlled borders should consider themselves Ukrainians. This will explain the meaning of “self-identity”.

And cultural hegemony turns this explanation into a “natural” and “god-given” state of affairs, which it would not even occur to challenge. If we live in Ukraine, then we are Ukrainians, and since we are Ukrainians, then there should be a separate Ukraine. The circle closes.

But why are we Ukrainians if we all actually have different nationalities? Because we speak Ukrainian. We’re not really doing that, but Farion explained to us that this is because of the violent Russification that the “Muscovites” have been subjecting us to for centuries.

Some people call Farion a fool. I don’t know. A fanatic — that’s for sure. And her fanaticism was used by the Ukrainian authorities to strengthen their power over the taxable population. In the short term, it worked, but in the long term, they were the ones who were made fools of. The insane policy of linguonationalism first led to a civil war, and then to the intervention of Russia and the danger for the Ukrainian authorities to lose power altogether.

Businessmen who decided to use the fanatical ideology of Farion in their business interests lost, but Farion won. She defeated the Russian-speaking Nazis from Azov, who may have killed her because she called them fake Ukrainians.

By the way, from the standpoint of the ideology described above, she is absolutely right. Perhaps Farion is not very popular now, perhaps she is disliked in Galicia itself, perhaps she will not even be made a bogeyman and a sacred victim killed by vile Russian agents (although Ukrainian opinion makers are already talking about this). But she won, because the grandchildren of the Russian-speaking Nazis from Azov will also call their swastika-tattooed grandfathers “Muscovites” and accuse them of military defeat due to them not being Ukrainian enough. She won because her linguonationalist ideology has become a hegemony and nothing else will happen. There’s no way to fix it from the inside. A nationalised society does not denationalise itself.

And I feel sorry for Ukraine, despite the fact that many opinion makers say that there is nothing to regret. Sorry for it, because one part of the society does not know what it is doing, and the other, through terror and repression, is deprived of the opportunity to explain anything to the first. Only Russia can explain (and therefore save people in Ukraine) now, despite all the sanctions and blockages. Whether she wants to, is a question. But there is no one else.