Political Memes

“There is no evidence it was intention­ally directed against Ukrainians,” said Al­exander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. “That would be to­tally out of keeping with what we know — ­it makes no sense.”

“This is crap, rubbish,” said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Pow­er broke new ground in social history. “I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It’s adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.”

“I absolutely reject it,” said Lynne Vio­la of SUNY-Binghamton, the first U.S. historian to examine Moscow’s Central State Archive on collectivization. “Why in god’s name would this paranoid gov­ernment consciously produce a famine when they were terrifed of war [with Germany]?”

Then there are those who love to twist, and shout — to use scholarly disinformation for their own, less dignified purposes. In the latest catalogue for The Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler at My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its ter­ror-famine, the catalogue notes: “The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been supressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real ‘Holocaust’ might compete with a Holohoax.”

For those unacquainted with Noontide jargon, the “Holohoax” refers to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.

This is not ancient history. The Ukrai­nian émigré groups still contain more than a few former OUN members, and many of their sons and daughters. The nationalists still heroize their wartime past. On occasion their old passions sur­face as well — as in Why Is One Holocaust Worth More Than Others?, recently pub­lished by Veterans of the Ukrainian In­surgent Army: “In 1933, the majority of the European and American press controlled by the Jews were silent about the famine.”

From this perspective, the “conspira­cy” lives on: “In (February} 1986 the Jew­ish newspaper Village Voice … published one-and-one-half pages of accusations against a high-standing member of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Mykola Lebed.”

Just as the Nazis used the OUN for their own ends, so has Reagan exploited the famine, from his purple-prosed com­memoration of “this callous act” to his backing of the Mace commission. Faced with failing fascist allies around the world, from Nicaragua to South Africa, the U.S. war lobby needs to boost anti­-Communism as never before. Public en­thusiasm to fight for the contras will not come easy. But if people could be con­vinced that Communism is worse than fascism; that Stalin was an insane mon­ster, even worse than Hitler; that the seven million died in more unspeakable agony than the six million …. Well, we just might be set up for the next Gulf of Tonkin. One cannot appease an Evil Em­pire, after all.

https://www.villagevoice.com/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/

see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory

Russians, AND Ukranians …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3d0GJlzgc&pp=ygUVaG9sb2RvbW9yIGJhZGVtcGFuYWRh , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM&pp=ygUjVGhlIHNvdmlldCBmYW1pbmUgbWFyeGlzb

ACKSHUALLY the Kazakhs were the most affected by the Famine of 1932 in a per capita basis.

Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on?

Genocides are by definition deliberate.
If you agree that it was not a deliberate action, but an unwanted disaster, then you won't find an argument against that.

Going to note, though, that you seem to be more critical of that than of, for example, what the genocidaires of Palestine have been doing, including the famines they actually caused deliberately.

Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take.

The Irish Famine was a deliberate action, which is indicated in part by the fact that the rest of the empire did not experience issues with food. There is also the fact that the government literally blocked relief for the famine.

The fact that you imply that these two events are both "tragic genocides" betrays both your lack of understanding of what genocides are and of what those events entailed.

I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one.

Why call the famine of 1932 a genocide, then, when you agree that it does not fit the definition, and when you know that it wasn't a repeat event (like what was happening in the Russian Empire, or what NATO has been doing in the world)?

Be actually honest and do some self-reflection on what you believe about your empire's enemies simply because your empire told you to believe that.

Also, I'd like to know what you think of Canada - a state involved in NATO's invasions like the ones of Iraq and Afghanistan, the genocide of Palestine, the kidnapping of Actual American children, etc. - as well as what you think of the OUN - an organisation worshipped by the post-coup Ukrainian state that was trying to do a genocide in Ukraine before WW2 and allied with nazi Germany during WW2?

The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.

So you may think you're an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that's because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren't targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.

Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.

That's honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn't because they were Ukranian, no it wasn't because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it's not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.

What is an "unwanted famine"? Nobody wanted a famine. Lysenko was wrong, and the government backed him because they didn't know he was wrong. It was a mistake, not a deliberate strategem to harm people.

Yeah, that was kinda my takeaway when I finally got decent info. The Nazi groups seem to be getting big enough to be legitimately problematic, but like you said, I can't entirely blame Ukraine for focusing on bigger problems for now, especially when those factions are willing to help defend the country. It's kind of a cursed bargain, but it's not like they have better options right now.