History is not some intellectual pursuit we analyze. It's a cudgel we use to reinforce the interests of the west
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/25/germany-set-to-declare-starvation-of-ukrainians-under-stalin-a-genocide-holomodor
[pasta noises]
It's literally nazi propaganda. It was nazi propaganda originally spread to the West via the Hearst Press (ran by William Randolph Hearst an American fascist and friend of Hitler).
It was war propaganda which would be used to justify Operation Barbarosa (invasion of Soviet Union).
As we watch the film and see corpses piled in fields, bloated bodies sprawled in streets, pale skeletons grasping for bits of bread, we wonder: How can such a terrible story have been suppressed so long?
Here is how: The story is a fraud. The starving girl, it turns out, wasn’t found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her picture was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cynical of swindles — a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revisionism: a denial of Hitler’s holocaust against the Jews.
“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]?”
These premier Sovietologists dismiss Conquest for what he is — an ideologue whose serious work is long behind him.
https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/
Comrade Alaskball already recommended the book Fraud, Famine and Fascism but didn't link it. This needs to be read in full to understand how this went from fringe far right propaganda to the mainstream.
I read the book earlier this year (from a link on this very website :hexbear-shining: )
it's an easy read that efficiently presents the unholy brazenness with which the idea of the holodomor was constructed and spread and it will kill a lot of any remaining liberalism still present in ones' brain
The Holodomor narrative never adequately explains why Ukrainian administration of government of the Ukrainian SSR, from national level all the way down to village authorities, decided to genocide themselves.
Well they don't exist in this timeline/rationalization of events. Everything that happens ever is a direct order from Moscow & is directly overseen & administered by the NKVD/KGB, or just like some kind of party-aligned paramilitary goons.
Even bourgeois conservative historian Stephen Kotkin thinks the idea of Stalin intentionally starving Ukrainians is bullshit.
This is just fucking great. 2022 is the year of Nazi apologia, holocaust whitewashing, and talking about the Holodomer. Vox did an article about it recently. Everything feels like some version of Gladio. I think my head is going to explode.
I'm also getting frayed at the edges man, feels like there's six or seven different types of pogrom already coming down the pipeline. In a few years the media is going to sell the 'moderate', openly white nationalist fascist as a lesser evil than the openly genocidal Nazi terrorist cells doing wet work all over a collapsing Europe.
Kyiv regards the historical event as part of a deliberate campaign by Stalin’s regime to collectivise agriculture and root out Ukraine’s fledging nationalist movement. Historians estimate between 4 million and 7.5 million people were killed in the human-made disaster.
This is an interesting paragraph. "Historians" of course overwhelmingly reject the holodomor narrative, but by putting these two technically true statements next to each other it implies that "historians" agree with the Ukrainian government's position.
Moscow has rejected Kyiv’s version of history, placing the deaths in the broader context of famines that devastated regions of Central Asia and Russia.
And then the entirely legitimate counterargument to the Holodomor narrative is presented as though it's historical revisionism being done by the Russians.
Also "fledgling nationalist movement" Ukraine became a recognized country by Soviet Russia before anyone else, The Bolsheviks supported Ukrainian national identity with a lax they showed for no one else.
Historians” of course overwhelmingly reject the holodomor narrative
Can you point me towards some good sources for that?
askhistorians threads about it are generally good, taking care to point out conservative researchers who concur with the consensus
Even Stephen Kotkin (the lib), who is a highly esteemed academic historian (professor at Princeton), said it wasn't genocide in his Stalin biography. The only revisionism that's happening here is mainstream journos pretending that there is a consensus about calling it a genocide among academic historians.
All of these actions were woefully insufficient for avoiding the mass starvation in the countryside caused by his policies, in the face of challenging natural conditions. Still, these actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 by Stephen Kotkin published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House
Here's Mark Tauger's takedown of Applebaum's Holodomor book:
Some might ask whether Applebaum’s writing is more accessible to “non-specialist” readers. There are many excellent writers among Slavic specialists, and a more accurate account could easily have been presented in clear and simple language. Applebaum’s writing does not “simplify” the truth, it obscures it, as discussed in this review. Red Famine thus does not fit well in the existing scholarly literature, even as “popular history.” Its interpretation resembles that of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, and it does use recent published sources that provide vivid descriptions of many people’s experiences in the famine. But it leaves out too much important information, has false claims on key points, and draws unjustified conclusions on important issues based on incomplete use of sources, making it not even close to the level of genuine scholarship, like Davies and Wheatcroft’s Years of Hunger. Red Famine is better characterized by a passage from Peter Kenez’s book on The Birth of the Propaganda State: “propaganda often means telling less than the truth, misleading people … manipulating and distorting information, lying” and addresses “audiences in simple language…”
Check out the preface to Davies and Wheatcroft’s The Years of Hunger. It’s a scholarly work by mainstream historians that thoroughly debunks it.
Also numbers are simply wrong, 4 million is high-ish upper bound, not lower one.
Guess hanna arendt stays winning though :deeper-sadness:
That is a wild inflation. Most estimates I've seen are around 3 million.
You may want to put progressive in "", because our government does fuck-all about all the progressive policies it wanted to enact after 16 years of Merkelian conservative drudgery.
I'm not even talking about the plans to legalize weed, which will first be reviewed by the EU, which means either France or Sweden will kill them. I'm talking about how these Vaushite Rosa killer hemorrhoids are pissing my rights as an LGBT person away because the only thing they care about is sending weapons to fucking neo-nazis and criminalizing climate protests.
When they signed their coalition agreement after the election, they made this big plan for queer rights action. "we've already drafted all of this, it only needs to be ratified, it will all be passed within a year." The situation now, after half of the legislative period is over is still:
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hate crimes against gay and especially trans people are steadily increasing, we're on the Trans Murder Monitor for the first time again since 2008. Anything done against this is restricted to "we hear you, we see you" plattitudes and egregious pinkwashing.
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finally offering legal recognition of trans people as a protected group, increasing our protection from hate crimes? LOL kiddo, we need a 2/3 majority for that, no way the CDU fascists will play along with a law that makes it harder for them to misgender me without consequences.
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in spite of this clearly going against EU asylum laws, Germany still does not fully recognize persecution of LGBT people as a reason to become a refugee. One of our nazi judges recently ruled that a gay man from Algeria, who had gone on national TV under his real name and showing his face, talking about how he's persecuted for being gay should be sent back to Algeria because "it would be no problem for him to just hide that he is gay."
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the reformed law for name and legal gender changes that was supposed to replace the Transsexuellengesetz (as outdated as the name implies, ruled to be unconstitutional by our supreme court twice already) has been postponed to "hopefully next summer". This means i still cannot change my name and cannot get my gender recognized without paying 2000 € for psychological evaluations and court fees and going in front of a tribunal that would do inquisition style questioning about my gender identity, sex life, if i conform enough to the accepted cliché of a tradwife bimbo etc.
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Reformed laws for lesbian motherhood that would mean the second mother no longer needs to formally adopt the child and no longer is listed as the child's father? Postponed as well.
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Same for laws recognizing rainbow families and allowing for kids having up to four legal guardians.
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Oh, donating blood as a trans person or as gay man? Still only possible if you're in a steady monogamous relationship, otherwise you're ruled too much of a redacted to give blood.
So no, our government does not deserve to be called progressive even ironically. They are traitors, they are furuncles on my ass, they are cowards who fold to TERFs and nazis. It is really no surpise they love Azovites so much. Fuck them. Fuck them with a rusty rake.
:germany-cool: Deutschland soll in Flammen stehen. :germany-cool:
Greens are the perfect fit for people who want to change nothing while not thinking of themselves as the conservatives they really are.
Deutschland speedrun to singing "Deutschland über allen" round 2
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notably not the first time a German government has made such a claim
love for the people who killed at least twice as many ukrainians in ww2 to be crying tears for the ukrainians stalin personally killed with his big spoon
On 20 July, the United Nations officially declared famine in two regions in the southern part of the country (IPC Phase 5), the first time a famine had been declared in the region by the UN in nearly thirty years.[15][16] Tens of thousands of people are believed to have died in southern Somalia before famine was declared.[15] This was mainly a result of Western governments preventing aid from reaching affected areas in an attempt to weaken the Al-Shabaab militant group, against whom they were engaged.[17][18]
I WONDER WHICH WESTERN GOVERNMENTS THOSE WERE :thonk:
2009–present:
🇸🇴 Somalia Federal Government of Somalia
🇺🇳 AMISOM
🇺🇲 United States[1][2]
Supported by:
🇬🇧 United Kingdom[3]
🇹🇷 Turkey[4]
🇮🇹 Italy[5]HMMMMMMMMM
Casualties:
350,000–1,000,000+ killed[12][15][16][17]
Displaced:
2,000,000–3,800,000 displaced[18][19]So, a US-Supported anti-government group takes over as the legitimate govt as a bulwark against those darstardly Russians. An alliance forms against the new US-friendly govt in order to establish an independent nation. Millions are displaced in the fighting. Sounds like the same playbook.
Will Germany allow me to walk around with the black sun symbol or a tshirt with Stephan Bandera since they’re Ukrainian icons of anti communist resistance? I think the folks at the synagogue would really appreciate my support for Ukraine
So basically fuck everybody who wasn't Ukrainian that was hurt by the Soviet famine of the '30s, especially Kazakhstan, because we have a political agenda to push. I will from now on characterize the "holodomor" as erasure of every non-Ukrainian who struggled.
No, apparently some Khazaks are trying to put forth a genocide narrative now, too.
I may have to resort to West Bengal whataboutism at some point if i want to discuss this subject publicly without being brought to court for it.
Not even kidding. This law is only one part of how absolutely bonkers the situation will get in Germany. The parliament also recently passed a law that makes denial of any genocide a criminal offense. They did not specify what is a genocide, though, so nobody knows if it also applies to the Bengal Famine, if it applies to the Korean War, if it applies to the US sanctions on Iraq etc. But if this also passes, it will definitely apply to the "Holodomor".
We all know whether that law applies to the genocides in Bangladesh, Korea or Iraq. It's not a question about what happened or how many people were murdered, it's all about who was murdered and who the murderers were.
