Condescension and the “Little People” Archetype

About Ukraine as a culture, and all the Russians could see in his work was folktale, was this kind of folktale characters, and they kind of did this in a patronizing way… where they kind of look at Ukraine as this place of little people, quaint people. A bit like how previous generation of English people might have used leprechauns to archetype Irish people as somehow inferior.

Source: Indo-European Immanences

The “Little” in “Little Green Men” carries an imperial archetype: Ukraine as a land of small, quaint, folklore-dwelling people who cannot be taken seriously as a sovereign nation. This is the same condescending archetype Russia has applied to Ukraine for centuries — and the same one England applied to Ireland through leprechaun imagery.

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