Author: Ostap Kushnir

Ukraine in the post-truth environment, or Future shocks of the global village

Posted on by Ostap Kushnir
Ukraine in the post-truth environment, or Future shocks of the global village

When I was a graduate student in Odesa, I liked reading Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan. Both were futurologists theorizing about the impact of information exchange on societies. In the late 1960s, Toffler came up with the concept of future shock, while McLuhan “invented” the global village. I enjoyed combining these two concepts into a sort of “theory of everything” (I bet I was not the only one). Future shock manifests itself in our unpreparedness…

Read More

Lysiak Rudnytsky’s prescience: Ukraine’s political turbulence and trauma of a “non-historical” nation

Posted on by Ostap Kushnir
Lysiak Rudnytsky’s prescience: Ukraine’s political turbulence and trauma of a “non-historical” nation

In the mid-2010s, researchers from the College of Europe in Natolin arrived at an interesting conclusion: contemporary Ukrainians are prone to political nonconformism. If we look at the past three decades in the history of Eastern Europe, Ukraine may safely be placed at the top of the chart of “unstable” states. First was the student-led Revolution on Granite in the 1990s. The outcome of that revolution was a resignation of entrenched high-ranked Soviet officials under…

Read More

Ukraine’s “island” identity: A rock of a nation, surviving all odds

Posted on by Ostap Kushnir
Ukraine’s “island” identity: A rock of a nation, surviving all odds

In the mid-1930s, the Ukrainian writer Yurii Lypa compared the Ukrainian nation to an island in his book Pryznachennia Ukrainy (The Destiny of Ukraine): The Ukrainian race is an island among its neighbours, an island with its own life, its own holy things and all-human values. Foreign and imposed spiritual values are worthless, and even non-imposed values are adopted in time, only if they pass the nation’s test… The Ukrainian race is an island, and…

Read More