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

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    [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.

    • volcel_olive_oil [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • SadStruggle92 [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Even bourgeois conservative historian Stephen Kotkin thinks the idea of Stalin intentionally starving Ukrainians is bullshit.