The video with a national academic men’s choir «Dudaryk» singing «Bandera our father» appeared on Facebook again and has remained unblocked during the last week. Facebook banned the content 29 October because of complaints from some users. In the video, Dudaryk (the name is a poetic Ukrainian word for «piper») performs the song «Our Father Bandera» in support of a flash mob launched by Ukrainian schoolchildren last month.
Why was Bandera controversial, at least for a few weeks, according to Facebook
Stepan Bandera was a leader of a radical wing of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, who tried to establish an independent Ukrainian state benefiting from the potential confrontation between the Third Reich and USSR. Earlier in the 1930s, he started his activity against Poland, to which Western Ukrainian lands belonged before World War II, and he was sentenced in 1934 for orchestrating the assasination of the Interior Minister of Poland Brinislaw Pieracki.
Released after the invasion of Nazis in Poland, Bandera prepared the Proclamation of Ukrainian statehood and announced it on June 30, 1941, a week after the Third Reich attacked the USSR.
Despite the proclaimed loyalty to Nazis, this program was not approved by the German occupational authorities, and Stepan Bandera with his colleagues were put under arrest by the Gestapo. After spending two years in concentration camp Sachsenhausen, he was released in 1944, and remained a leader of Ukrainian nationalists from exile before he was killed in Munich in 1959 by a KGB agent.
The «Dudaryk» initially reported the fact of blocking on its Facebook page.
«Due to complaints from enemies, our post and video on Facebook in support of the Flashmob ‘Our Father Bandera’ has been blocked! As Facebook considers the post «offensive», we invite you to watch the video on our YouTube channel,» the message reads.
«We have introduced these standards to protect certain groups of people from statements that are commonly used as insults against them,» – Facebook said in an automatic note to the band.
You can watch the video on the choir’s Facebook page and YouTube.
Let us remind you that the flash mob was launched by four schoolgirls from Lviv on the eve of the Day of Defenders and Defendresses of Ukraine (October 14), who sang a song in class, and later the flash mob began to be supported in various cities and villages all over Ukraine.
Read more about the history of Day of Defenders and Defendresses of Ukraine
It continues to gain popularity on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. Pupils and students sing the song in different places. In Sloviansk, located in the unoccupied part of the Donetsk region (another part of the region is temporarily controlled by a Russian-backed pseudo-republic DNR), girls in camouflage costumes danced to a remix of this song and launched red and black fireworks.
We will add that for the first time, this song was sung by servants of Orthodox Church of Ukraine (all-Ukrainian Church under the Kyivan Patriarchy, united in 2018). The members of the ensemble sang the song «Our Father – Bandera» in 2019, in the museum of Stepan Bandera in his native village of Staryi Uhryniv in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. The video appeared in January 2020.
By Vitalii Holich
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