I avoid quantifying genocide since it can happen in all sorts of ways against all sorts of people. 100,000 dead aboriginals are still as bad as 6 million jews. Genocide is bad, regardless of how many are killed.
Why do you doubt that the Holodomor was a genocide? Either way, the Holodomor was man-made and an atrocity perpetrated by Stalin’s government.
The famine hit all the major grain producing regions of the USSR, not just Ukraine, so it was awfully unspecific for being a targeted act of genocide.
They were exporting grain to fund their program of rapid industrialization, there was a crop failure, and they still exported the grain. Once it became clear to the Soviet government that there was a famine, they reversed course, but the damage was done. This was callous, an atrocity even, but it does not constitute genocide. The idea that it was a genocide was concocted by Ukrainian nationalist exiles (themselves SS veterans) after the war and used to equivocate Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for cold war propaganda.
Thanks for posting in here. It’s extremely rare for a tankie to actually venture to be challenged.
So first, the grain quotas were impossible to meet, and Ukraine specifically was targeted. Ukrainian villages were blacklisted, with food seizures, trade bans and other sorts of blockades. Once starvation began, Ukraine’s borders were forcefully closed to stop peasants from fleeing, that’s not something you do in a legitimate famine. This was also all during the time of suppressing Ukraine’s culture. The fact that the policies were not applied uniformly across the USSR is what makes it a genocide.
They also didn’t reverse course, they knew the starvation was occurring and continued it anyway, even continuing grain requisitions despite the famine. Literally stealing from the starving.
When it comes to genocide, we usually refer to the UN Genocide Convention, which is what we do for Palestine. Stalin saw the Ukranian nationalism as a threat and used the famine as a means of subjugation. The combined starvation, border closures, and ongoing dismantling of Ukrainian culture all indicate that it was a destructive intent towards Ukrainians as a national group. Either way, it’s still an atrocity, and the USSR’s response was morally wrong and led to many deaths.
It’s also wild that you’re holding Ukrainian peasants accountable as SS veterans when the Ukrainian émigrés were contesting famine conditionsin the 1930s, before WW2. Starvation and famine aren’t something that just magically happens, it’s gradual. And even if there were exiles, you don’t starve peasants who have been on the land for generations.
Regardless, millions died, the state seized grain during starvation, restricted movement and trapped starving peasants and oppressed Ukrainian culture. Ukraine considers it to be a genocide, and so do many other nations.
No problem! Actually, I’m not specifically one of the “tankies” you’re contending with. I only recently registered on this site and was not previously aware of the beef between lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (I myself coming by way of lemmy.ca), though you can consider me to be aligned with the former ideologically.
The idea that the famine constituted a genocide is not a settled matter among serious historians - it isn’t just Grover Furr (author of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin And The Soviet Union In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False and Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every “revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) “crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False) that contests it. I would argue that (aside from the aforementioned Grover Furr and presumably some Russian historians) the “constitutes genocide” side is the more heavily politicized.
A lot of scholarship regarding the Soviet famine as a genocide has come out of the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which makes sense given that Alberta has Canada’s highest concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was often overlooked until recently is that the U of A chancellor from 1982 to 1986 and co-founder of the CIUS, Peter Savaryn, was an SS veteran, having volunteered for the 14th Waffen SS Division ‘Galizien’, and that a lot of scholarship coming out of the U of A has served to whitewash the 14th SS and paint it as a group of Ukrainian freedom fighters. In actuality, the 14th SS spent most of its time on anti-partisan actions, including the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The Galician division would not have experienced the famine, as Galicia was controlled by Poland before the war.
You’re probably balking at the mention of Nazis point since Putin poisoned the well on this discussion by invading Ukraine under the pretext of “denazification”, but this is real history. The Ukrainian-Canadian community’s particular problem stems from the importation of Waffen SS veterans, particularly the 14th SS, after the war. The reason we did this comes down to cold war politics - the Ukrainian-Canadian community before and during the war was very left wing, operating Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, with the Ukrainian Labour Hall in Winnipeg was being during the general strike of 1919 as a meeting place and printing house for the strikers. The government imported the nationalists as a locus reliable anticommunists after the war in order to effect a hostile takeover of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and suppress the left more broadly. Following the war, imported Ukrainian nationalists attacked Ukrainian Labour Temples and disrupted meetings, culminating in the 1950 bombing of the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto during a Thanksgiving concert. The operators of the labour temple, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), blamed imported SS veterans for the bombing, while the competing nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) claimed that the AUUC bombed themselves as a false-flag.
Long story short, the plan was successful. The UCC became the leading Ukrainian-Canadian organization, while the AUUC declined amidst cold war suppression of anyone associated with communism. The Ukrainian-Canadian community became reliably nationalist and anticommunist, and SS veterans like Savaryn became leading figures. It is in this milieu that the idea that the famine was a “terror famine” developed.
There was an inquiry into the importation of SS veterans in 1985 - the conclusion was that the 14th SS was cleared of all wrongdoing, and contravening the decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Galician division was not a criminal organization. The rest of the report was sealed, and the government has to this day refused to unseal it. Why would they refuse to release the full report if the SS veterans were so innocent? Because it would reveal that they imported SS veterans on purpose to suppress the left, and that many leading figures in the Ukrainian-Canadian community were Nazi war criminals. Aside from the embarrassment this would cause the government, it would have also undermined anticommunist propaganda efforts.
Back to the famine itself, Stalin and his government don’t come out squeaky-clean of course. They were extremely paranoid about kulaks hoarding grain and resisting collectivization, and in that air of paranoia and oppression, nobody enforcing the grain quotas was going to disobey orders. People starved and died needlessly, but once the famine ended, it ended. This doesn’t constitute genocide, let alone an equivalent to the Holocaust. The idea that it was equivalent to the Holocaust, the “double genocide theory”, is used by various eastern European nationalists to whitewash their participation in the Holocaust - the most extreme end of it has Lithuanian nationalists claiming that they were only retaliating against the “Judeo-Bolshevists” when they killed 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population, a rate unsurpassed in any other country.
Stalin made a lot of mistakes, but the crimes of his opponents, not only the Nazis themselves but the imperialist powers, were so much worse and numerous that Stalin’s crimes pale in comparison. All in, Joe Steel did more good than bad.
Comparisons don’t magically change the holocaust. Both were genocides, that’s the point.
There’s no revision going on here
Comparing the all time number one genocide to something that isn’t a genocide is Holocaust denial
I avoid quantifying genocide since it can happen in all sorts of ways against all sorts of people. 100,000 dead aboriginals are still as bad as 6 million jews. Genocide is bad, regardless of how many are killed.
Why do you doubt that the Holodomor was a genocide? Either way, the Holodomor was man-made and an atrocity perpetrated by Stalin’s government.
The famine hit all the major grain producing regions of the USSR, not just Ukraine, so it was awfully unspecific for being a targeted act of genocide.
They were exporting grain to fund their program of rapid industrialization, there was a crop failure, and they still exported the grain. Once it became clear to the Soviet government that there was a famine, they reversed course, but the damage was done. This was callous, an atrocity even, but it does not constitute genocide. The idea that it was a genocide was concocted by Ukrainian nationalist exiles (themselves SS veterans) after the war and used to equivocate Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for cold war propaganda.
Thanks for posting in here. It’s extremely rare for a tankie to actually venture to be challenged.
So first, the grain quotas were impossible to meet, and Ukraine specifically was targeted. Ukrainian villages were blacklisted, with food seizures, trade bans and other sorts of blockades. Once starvation began, Ukraine’s borders were forcefully closed to stop peasants from fleeing, that’s not something you do in a legitimate famine. This was also all during the time of suppressing Ukraine’s culture. The fact that the policies were not applied uniformly across the USSR is what makes it a genocide.
They also didn’t reverse course, they knew the starvation was occurring and continued it anyway, even continuing grain requisitions despite the famine. Literally stealing from the starving.
When it comes to genocide, we usually refer to the UN Genocide Convention, which is what we do for Palestine. Stalin saw the Ukranian nationalism as a threat and used the famine as a means of subjugation. The combined starvation, border closures, and ongoing dismantling of Ukrainian culture all indicate that it was a destructive intent towards Ukrainians as a national group. Either way, it’s still an atrocity, and the USSR’s response was morally wrong and led to many deaths.
It’s also wild that you’re holding Ukrainian peasants accountable as SS veterans when the Ukrainian émigrés were contesting famine conditionsin the 1930s, before WW2. Starvation and famine aren’t something that just magically happens, it’s gradual. And even if there were exiles, you don’t starve peasants who have been on the land for generations.
Regardless, millions died, the state seized grain during starvation, restricted movement and trapped starving peasants and oppressed Ukrainian culture. Ukraine considers it to be a genocide, and so do many other nations.
Why do you doubt this?
No problem! Actually, I’m not specifically one of the “tankies” you’re contending with. I only recently registered on this site and was not previously aware of the beef between lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (I myself coming by way of lemmy.ca), though you can consider me to be aligned with the former ideologically.
The idea that the famine constituted a genocide is not a settled matter among serious historians - it isn’t just Grover Furr (author of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin And The Soviet Union In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False and Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every “revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) “crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False) that contests it. I would argue that (aside from the aforementioned Grover Furr and presumably some Russian historians) the “constitutes genocide” side is the more heavily politicized.
A lot of scholarship regarding the Soviet famine as a genocide has come out of the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which makes sense given that Alberta has Canada’s highest concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was often overlooked until recently is that the U of A chancellor from 1982 to 1986 and co-founder of the CIUS, Peter Savaryn, was an SS veteran, having volunteered for the 14th Waffen SS Division ‘Galizien’, and that a lot of scholarship coming out of the U of A has served to whitewash the 14th SS and paint it as a group of Ukrainian freedom fighters. In actuality, the 14th SS spent most of its time on anti-partisan actions, including the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The Galician division would not have experienced the famine, as Galicia was controlled by Poland before the war.
You’re probably balking at the mention of Nazis point since Putin poisoned the well on this discussion by invading Ukraine under the pretext of “denazification”, but this is real history. The Ukrainian-Canadian community’s particular problem stems from the importation of Waffen SS veterans, particularly the 14th SS, after the war. The reason we did this comes down to cold war politics - the Ukrainian-Canadian community before and during the war was very left wing, operating Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, with the Ukrainian Labour Hall in Winnipeg was being during the general strike of 1919 as a meeting place and printing house for the strikers. The government imported the nationalists as a locus reliable anticommunists after the war in order to effect a hostile takeover of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and suppress the left more broadly. Following the war, imported Ukrainian nationalists attacked Ukrainian Labour Temples and disrupted meetings, culminating in the 1950 bombing of the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto during a Thanksgiving concert. The operators of the labour temple, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), blamed imported SS veterans for the bombing, while the competing nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) claimed that the AUUC bombed themselves as a false-flag.
Long story short, the plan was successful. The UCC became the leading Ukrainian-Canadian organization, while the AUUC declined amidst cold war suppression of anyone associated with communism. The Ukrainian-Canadian community became reliably nationalist and anticommunist, and SS veterans like Savaryn became leading figures. It is in this milieu that the idea that the famine was a “terror famine” developed.
There was an inquiry into the importation of SS veterans in 1985 - the conclusion was that the 14th SS was cleared of all wrongdoing, and contravening the decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Galician division was not a criminal organization. The rest of the report was sealed, and the government has to this day refused to unseal it. Why would they refuse to release the full report if the SS veterans were so innocent? Because it would reveal that they imported SS veterans on purpose to suppress the left, and that many leading figures in the Ukrainian-Canadian community were Nazi war criminals. Aside from the embarrassment this would cause the government, it would have also undermined anticommunist propaganda efforts.
Back to the famine itself, Stalin and his government don’t come out squeaky-clean of course. They were extremely paranoid about kulaks hoarding grain and resisting collectivization, and in that air of paranoia and oppression, nobody enforcing the grain quotas was going to disobey orders. People starved and died needlessly, but once the famine ended, it ended. This doesn’t constitute genocide, let alone an equivalent to the Holocaust. The idea that it was equivalent to the Holocaust, the “double genocide theory”, is used by various eastern European nationalists to whitewash their participation in the Holocaust - the most extreme end of it has Lithuanian nationalists claiming that they were only retaliating against the “Judeo-Bolshevists” when they killed 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population, a rate unsurpassed in any other country.
Stalin made a lot of mistakes, but the crimes of his opponents, not only the Nazis themselves but the imperialist powers, were so much worse and numerous that Stalin’s crimes pale in comparison. All in, Joe Steel did more good than bad.