Clara Zetkin, born on this day in 1857, was a German Marxist theorist, activist, and feminist, active in the revolutionary Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
Clara Zetkin was born in Wiederau, a peasant village in Saxony, now part of the municipality Königshain-Wiederau. Because of the ban placed on socialist activity in Germany by Bismarck in 1878, Zetkin left for Zurich in 1882 then went into exile in Paris, where she studied to be a journalist and a translator.
Zetkin was very interested in women's politics, including the fight for equal opportunities and women's suffrage, though always through a socialist paradigm. She helped to develop the social-democratic women's movement in Germany; from 1891 to 1917 she edited the Social Democratic Party (SPD) women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality). She also contributed to International Women's Day (IWD).
Around 1898, Zetkin formed a friendship with the younger Rosa Luxemburg that lasted 20 years. Despite Luxemburg's indifference to the women's movement, they became staunch political allies on the far left of the SPD. Luxemburg once suggested that their joint epitaph would be "Here lie the last two men of German Social Democracy."
In August 1932, despite having recently fallen gravely ill in Moscow, she returned to Berlin to preside over the opening of the newly elected Reichstag. There, she gave a speech urging Germany to reject fascism, stating "all those who feel themselves threatened, all those who suffer and all those who long for liberation must belong to the United Front against fascism and its representatives in government".
When Hitler seized power the following year, Zetkin once again fled Germany, dying in Moscow in 1933 at the age of 76.
"The working women, who aspire to social equality, expect nothing for their emancipation from the bourgeois women's movement, which allegedly fights for the rights of women. That edifice is built on sand and has no real basis. Working women are absolutely convinced that the question of the emancipation of women is not an isolated question which exists in itself, but part of the great social question."
- Clara Zetkin
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Some nerd friends are angry that I refuse to call the Holodomor a genocide. Does anyone have some good sources to convince them that they are just eating up western propaganda?
https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/
The book fraud, famine, and fascism by Douglass Tottle is quite comprehensive if you can convince them to read it (it's on libgen).
Ask them when the holodomor was and how many Americans died of starvation around that period. Its a localized name for the world wide depression in the 30s. Maybe it was worse in Ukraine but we'll never know because Americans kept shoddy records while the USSR kept good records.
This is not true. The situations were not comparable. In 1932 the USSR faced a severe drought on top of a number of political and economic problems which resulted in the 1932 famine.
In the US the Dust Bowl, while it covered a large area, was a very localized phenomena in a very large country. While the 1932 famine drastically hurt agricultural yields across the USSR, causing widespread famine, the dust bowl in the US was limited to one region of the US's many productive agricultural regions. As a result there was no mass famine and few if any deaths from starvation. AFAIK the US also benefited from considerably more mechanization and more mature industries while the USSR was still in the process of bootstrapping up from literally medieval technology.
That's the official story according to the same folks that claim 30 million died in Stalin's death camps.
Individual cases of starvation (and suicide to avoid it) in the USA during the depression are well documented. In 1931 alone New York City recorded 95 deaths due to starvation and that is just the beginning of the depression in a city. The question of how wide spread it was is still up for debate due to bad record keeping and purposeful obfuscation. You think Native american communities were getting handouts on bread lines?
It wasnt a genocide since it was mostly kazakh and russian peasants dying due to a natural drought exacerbated by the civil war, Ukrainians just used it to whine about how they should be allowed to kill jews, because they got killed as well.
It wasn't a genocide because at no point was there any desire or intention on the part of the Soviet government of killing Ukrainians or anyone else. The famine arose from a number of complex causes. Primarily the severe drought of 1932, but also ongoing conflict with kulaks, mechanization, and serious government failures. The most sober analysis that aren't anti-communist madness agree that the Soviet government bears responsibility for much of the dead and starvation, but this was due to failures of governance and administration and was never intentional or deliberate.
It's important to be clear on this - ~3 million people did die, the Soviet Government likely had the ability to significantly mitigate the famine and failed to do so. But the famine was not deliberate, the Soviet government did act to provide relief, albeit too late to prevent many of the deaths, there was a very severe drought. There were ongoing conflicts related to collectivization and sabotage from Kulaks. There were serious failures of administration, especially in communication between levels of government and in the distribution of relief supplies.
The famine happened. It was very bad. The Soviet government bears a great deal of responsibility for the suffering. However it was not intentional and the "Holodomor" narrative is fascist propaganda to de-legitimize the Soviet government, minimize the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi murder of millions of non-Jewish people, and further fascist and anti-communist agendas.
exactly, like even the soviets are not superhuman and are prone to human failures.
A post I made at some libs at the beginning of the Ukraine shit.
Uft. We've done this one so many times. Now that all the old posts are back, if you're willing to take some time, you should be able to turn up a lot of discussions explaining why the propaganda line that the Holodomor was an intentional act of genocide is a lie, and how it was spread by the Nazis. There's also lots of information explaining what did happen, how and why the Soviet government failed in it's responsibility to alleviate the famine, and the numerous conditions that lead to it (drought, kulaks, rapid industrialization, bad logistics, bad communications)
Have they ever heard of William Randolph Hearst and “yellow journalism?”
https://www.garethjones.org/tottlefraud.pdf
it's just double genocide theory. natural famines must be painted as manmade famines in order to make the soviets "just as bad as the nazis." It's part of the "totalitarian" pillar of liberal ideology that says fascism and communism are both the same thing because they're illiberal and authoritarian. It's very convincing to people with a shallow knowledge of history, but every bourgeois accusation is a confession. While Stalin was exporting soviet grain to Bengal, Churchill was deliberately starving them. While all of Europe was signing non-aggression pacts with Hitler, Stalin was suggesting an anti-fascist alliance. When this failed, only then did he sign the molotov ribbentrop pact to buy time and move critical infrastructure further away from where the nazis were going to eventually invade. So liberal ideology relies on deliberately misinterpreting these events by omitting key facts (ukrainian famine was natural drought, not manmade, MR pact was strategic, not ideological).
Also Stalin exported more grain back to ukraine during that famine than Ukraine had recently exported to russia. so there was food aid. and that food aid was a net surplus compared to exports, so it wasn't purely symbolic.