European Parliament adopts literally Nazi propaganda as official doctrine
Yet another piece for the "liberals hate socialists more than they hate fascists" pile
Are you joking? There was a clear push towards normalizing nazi propaganda in the EU for years, including recognizing Hearst's "Holodomor" as historical fact.
The only thing the Russian intervention did was speed up the timetable of how fast the EU and US goes mask off fascist collaborators
It's very funny that Ukrainian cultists aligned with the Nazis who very deliberately killed millions of Ukrainians have managed to accuse the government that saved Ukraine from the Nazis of deliberately murdering millions of Ukrainians in order to discredit the Government that didn't intentionally kill Ukrainians in order to normalize and re-write history in favor of the government that did very intentionally kill Ukrainians.
Damn, that sucks. I wonder what people were fighting about in that part of the world? Oh well. I'm sure it's nothing important.
Edit: Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm an asshole, but as a Jew with some historical awareness, I get kinda annoyed that the fight to liberate Jews from the antisemitic landlord class of Ukraine is portrayed as the greatest crime in modern history.
Again, maybe I'm insane, but it seems to me that no one denies that the tsarist era elite (particularly in Ukraine, which as a matter of policy was heavily Jewish) encouraged antisemitic violence as a way to redirect class resentment. The Russian state responded to all three Russian revolutions by encouraging pogroms against Jewish communities. There doesn't seem to be any controversy at all around this idea, and it's heavily documented.
Using racism to protect the elite and undermine solidarity is why racism exists. In Ukraine, just like every other place where most people are made to endure false scarcity, racism is an essential tool for preserving the social hierarchy. To anyone in the US or Europe this should be pretty obvious, but we have to pretend like this dynamic doesn't apply to challenging the landlord class in post 1917 Ukraine.
This is all broad strokes, but it's the only way I can make sense of history in this part of the world, and my theory seems to accommodate everything. I'm not a historian, but my family history is absolutely defined by antisemitic violence in Ukraine, and I've really worked to understand it.
Edit: I'm open to criticism on these ideas. Understanding the history of Jews in Ukraine is really important to me, so if there's something flawed in the analytical lense I'm using, please let me know.
Edit 2: Wtf does this have to do with the famine? At a critical moment Kulaks trying to keep powet undermined what was already going to be a poor harvest. They had the option to leave peacefulky but didn't. Some unknown but large number of people died. The reactionary/victim blaming view is that if the elites had never been challenged the famine would've never happened and the Jews will just have to continue to be killed. Don't talk about it because you're defending Stalin. This probably isnt really true because there were also climate factors that contributed to the famine. The correct view, which is the one I hold, is that the best chance to avoid a famine would've been for the agrarian landlords of Ukraine to kill themselves.
I really think you are on to something here. There has to be at least Soviet sources that documented the history of the Jewish people in Ukraine in the first couple decades after the revolution. So hard to get good info at the moment because anything that dares paint Ukrainians in a negative light gets buried.
There's fascinating primary source documents, called yitzkor books. People wrote these as memorials to their villages (very often in Ukraine), giving personal and community histories, often including the holocaust and it's aftermath. Some are boring. Some are harrowing. A lot are not translated to English, but some are. I love reading these. I've found some wild and illuminating tales, and at least what I've encountered has been universally pro soviet.
Here's a good source: https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/
They're great. There's no external ideological filter or censor making you wonder what's missing. The most interesting narratives are from absolutely marginalized people, so these have no presence at all in the capitalist narratives that are about what happened to these people.
There's a realky compelling one, which I can't find anymore, about a Jewish man living in a barn with other Jews that were given as slaves to a farmer (I think in Ukraine). He watched his son get shot and killed for stealing clothes and get left on a pile of corpses in front of the barn. One day a Soviet plane flew over, so he knew their liberation was imminent.
The farmer, hoping for leniency, at the last moment begged him to tell the Soviets that he hadn't been too cruel.
just gonna leave this here if anyone needs it - from 1988:
https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/
edit: adding a few choice quotes
“They’re always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million,” observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. “It makes the reader think: ‘My god, it’s worse than the Holocaust.’ ”
Your husband’s courage and dedication to liberty will serve as a continuing source of inspiration to all those striving for freedom and self-determination. — Letter from President Reagan to the widow of Yaroslav Stetsko, ranking OUN terrorist, murderer, and Nazi collaborator, read by retired general John Singlaub at a conference of the World Anti-Communist League, September 7, 1986
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.
About Somewhere around 3 million is the most credible number for Ukraine, with something like 1.5 million in the rest of the USSR.
As far as I know it's the number accepted by historians who aren't fascists. It really was a very bad famine. There was a bad drought that year. Efforts to sabotage collectivization caused serious problems. Large portions of arable land weren't even seeded, and large parts that were weren't harvested. Grain quotas were way off because the local administration was lying to the central administration, causing the central admin to requisition a much larger percentage of grain based on the false numbers. Poor communication existed at every level, and meant that the central government didn't understand the scope of the famine until it was already well under way. Relief efforts were hampered by poor organization at the local level.
It was a complete clusterfuck top to bottom. The general consensus is that the Soviet government had the resources to avert the worst parts of the famine, but due to a variety of factors failed to react appropriately to do so. Credible socialist and neutral historians tend to agree that the government was criminally liable for what happened as they had a responsibility to use available resources to help, but failed in their responsibility to do so. The consensus is that it was a crime akin to manslaughter; Unintentionally causing a death that the perpetrator could reasonably be said to have prevented if they had acted differently.
However their actions were not intended to kill anyone and there was no plan or deliberate action to exacerbate the famine. When the scope of the famine eventually became clear to the central government they did take action to provide relief, however imperfectly. The whole concept that it was deliberate is ridiculous anyway; It requires one to uncritically believe that the Ukrainians in the lower levels of the Ukrainian SSR conspired in planning and implementing a genocide against themselves. And to the best of my knowledge there's no real motive attributed to the alleged genocide. Why the Soviet government would want to kill a fraction of the Ukrainian peasantry is never really explained.
It's indisputable that the process of collectivization and mechanization of agriculture caused a great deal of hardship for several years, but the goal was obviously and unquestionably to end the periods of famine and poor harvests that had plagued the region for centuries, and once the projects were actually implemented they were very successful and there wasn't another famine except 1945-46 in the context of the devastation of WWII.
They’re always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million,” observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. “It makes the reader think: ‘My god, it’s worse than the Holocaust
Didn't the holocaust kill 11 million total. It feels weird to discount the 5 million Roma, gay people, communists, disabled people etc who were systematically murdered
They will recognize Nazi propaganda before recognizing their own actions against the native Americans
to be fair here the native American thing was more the Americans and other creole peoples. Europe did Africa and Asia
Rewriting history to own the Russians. Even if they came to this conclusion based on actual facts (they didn't), why don't they care about the non-Ukrainians who died?
also 5 years ago when we talked about this we just used to say Russians died because we only started making the distinction extremely recently
It’s a multi-combo!
- Russia bad!
- Socialism bad!
- Holocaust wasn’t as bad!
- Rehab Hitler!
No way, I cannot believe the fourth Reich has engaged in holocaust denial. :shocked-pikachu:
Fourth Reich? Please. Don't be so dramatic.
The Third Reich never ended—they just re-branded.
(THIS IS INTENDED TO BE TAKEN TONGUE-IN-CHEEK, NOT SERIOUSLY.)
As a quick fact to throw at libs: not only was the famine present across all of the USSR, but Ukraine wasn't even the worst hit - Kazakhstan lost a greater percent of it's population, but never do you hear talk of a "Kazakhdomor".
don't give them any ideas, i've heard reactionaries from all the famine hit regions whine about how the ukrainians get their genocide recognized but their's aren't
Love to be a criminal because Nazi propaganda has become the official version of history.
disagreeing with Hitler is probably the coolest crime you can do if it's any consolation
I hate Europe with the fury of a thousand suns. Continent of genocidal barbarians who manage to be sanctimonious at the same time.
Europe sucks ass. Sorry literally everybody else who was historically hurt by those famines, which afflicted the entirety of the USSR, especially Kazakhstan.
EDIT: Sorry to Jewish people too --
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
https://spme.org/spme-research/analysis/clemens-heni-the-prague-declaration-antisemitism-with-a-democratic-face/7822/
That top article was interesting. It's a good read, but if you don't have time I'll sum it up with two main ideas:
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The Soviet repression against perpetrators of the holocaust and other rightwingers was brutal, and sometimes innocent people were caught up in it, but it is not equal to the holocaust. History shouldn't be rewritten around a false assumption of moral equivalence.
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There would be a lot of pushback around this re-writing of history to equate communism with the holocaust, but 6 million of the jews that could speak against it were killed. The only voices left are the perpetrators and their sympathizers.
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I'm increasingly convinced that much of Europe is just extremely anti-semitic and aren't that bothered by complaints about anti-semitism
