For the first time in the history of independent Ukraine there is broad public debate over complex issues related to the mechanisms, impact, and consequences of propaganda disseminated by totalitarian imperial regimes as they provoked and legitimized the liquidation of peoples during Stalin's Holodomor and deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and Hitler's Holocaust.
On June 2-3, 2015 in Kyiv and on June 5 in Lviv, Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and partners will host an international seminar titled “The Seduction of Propaganda: Mass Violence in Ukraine in the 20th and 21st Centuries”. Discussions in the two cities will focus on, in particular:

• How our knowledge of each of these three tragedies supplements our grasp and understanding of them as a whole, and how current academic knowledge can help counteract the politicized and mythologized interpretations of the tragic events of the historical past.
• How our knowledge and our understanding of the meaning and consequences of totalitarian imperial regimes' propaganda, which was part of the preparation and perpetration of mass killings in the 20th century, help us achieve greater awareness and a deeper grasp of the nature and threat of destructive propaganda at the beginning of the 21st century, which is becoming a tool for stoking inter-ethnic hatred, as well as discrediting and destroying the Ukrainian democratic space.
• Propaganda in our time: disinformation and Putin's war in Donbas.