Due to the long history of being under the rule of other states , Ukrainians have traditionally been accustomed to considering the state and its authorities as alien, anti-popular, a priori corrupt and predatory, and often continue to think this way even about their own state.
Despite the fact that it is thanks to the organisation of the defence and struggle of the Ukrainian state that Ukrainians in the rear are alive and can enjoy a comfortable life, some Ukrainians consider their state to be the embodiment of all the shameful features and their dislike for their country is hard to exaggerate. For the average Ukrainian, the Ukrainian state, and especially its civil servants, are thoroughly corrupt, deceitful, thieving and immoral.
The idea that the state is inefficient, wasteful and even criminal is supported by a huge part of the Ukrainian people – from peasants and teachers to libertarians and nationalists. The very image of a civil servant is stereotypically associated with corruption, nepotism and bribery. Violence against civil servants is often perceived by the “hinterland people” as an act of justice. And this is despite the fact that there are a lot of honest and hardworking young people in the civil service today who have nothing to do with either “majors” or “bold, bubbly corrupt officials”, as those who have heard about such officials only from memes on social media often imagine.
Despite the fact that the average district ASC today is often a modern and comfortable place of public service, where you are politely served by conscientious employees, for many Ukrainians any state institution is considered a corrupt scum where everyone should be either hanged or shot. For the “common people”, a yesterday’s student working in a regional state administration for a small salary is still “a corrupt state official, a bureaucrat and a capitalist pig”.
But for some reason, society is unwilling to recognize that the Ukrainian state is rapidly changing, Europeanizing, and modernizing, although for many Ukrainians these changes are not a subject of discussion. Thanks to the External Independent Testing and NMT, admission to universities has become dependent on knowledge, not bribes, as it used to be. It has become possible to obtain a driver’s license without corruption and nepotism. Changes have come to a number of public service sectors, but despite the fact that the country has made progress in fighting corruption, no one in private conversations says that things have gotten better, and they continue to complain about the state. Yes, not everywhere the changes have been perfect, but in many ways they have improved.
Criticism of the Ukrainian state has become one of the most successful information andpsychological operations against Ukraine – a deliberate destruction of the trust and authority of state institutions, without which sovereignty itself is impossible.
Thoughtless criticism and mudslinging of Ukrainian state institutions is the same Makhnovism, which in our history has already led its supporters to the Holodomor.
Criticism and discrediting of the authority of the Ukrainian state bodies is the destruction of those institutions, that support the Armed Forces and the entire vertical of government, which in turn leads to defeat.
If Ukrainians constantly and systematically “drown” their state and its constituent institutions, shame and consider everything related to the state as corrupt, at some tipping point, the enemy will intensify its “IPSO” and provoke revolutionary uprisings against the Ukrainian state, in which the Ukrainian people will play the role of useful and free idiots for the Kremlin, helping the enemy to destroy the Ukrainian state.
Yes, we still have a very corrupt and far from perfect state. But many Ukrainians, having travelled abroad, have seen for themselves that in some countries , officials work even worse and there is even more bureaucracy than in Ukraine.
The state is the form of existence of a nation in the world, and if Ukrainians want to survive as a nation, we have no other tool, but the state.
Ukrainians did not fight and die for so many generations to have their own state, for their descendantsto wipe their feet on it so easily today. It is significant that those “ordinary Ukrainians” who criticise officials so vigorously often don’t mind having their “godfather decide in court ” or “uncle put in a good word in the TCC “.
The Ukrainian state needs to be changed, reformed and crime eradicated from state bodies , but no one except the Ukrainian state will provide decent conditions for the survival and development of the Ukrainian nation.
Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk
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