Is that the fucking black sun?

  • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Ukrainian heritage organizations in Canada are almost exclusively the descendants of proud Nazi collaborators. The ones who weren't collaborators were Kulaks and similar who fled the oppressive USSR (/s). The Deputy PM hangs out with these types, and she is rumored to be in the running for next NATO Secretary General.

    Edit: /s for clarity

    • StalinwasaGryffindor [he/him, comrade/them]
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, the reason Canada has such a large Ukrainian population is the same reason Argentina has a huge German population. We’ve got multiple memorials to nazi collaborators around the country

      ukkkraine kkkanada

      • SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.ml
        hexagon
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        1 year ago

        I know one monument has been vandalized a few times. Hopefully one day it’ll be removed permanently.

    • CamaradeBoina [comrade/them, any]
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      That's actually not very accurate.

      The original Ukrainian-Canadian population (and their organizations) were by and large ardent socialist supporters, and played a huge role in the strengthening of organized labour and various socialist and communist organisations (such as the communist party of canada!). They supported the USSR and saw it as an inspiration. Most of them had left before 1917. The Association of United Ukrainian Canadians is an inheritence from this time and still controls a bunch of Ukrainian labour temples. They ARE quite small compared to the other ones, particularly the fascist / banderist UCC.

      It gets much darker post WW2, when Canada brought in thousands of nazi collaborators (one of the qualifications for getting in was showing your nazi tattoo...). They then went in a frontal attack on progressive and socialist Ukrainian community orgs, with the Canadian government actively helping the then nascent UCC gain hegemony. Huge ties with the OUN fascists abound, and many nazi collaboration statues can be found across the country.

      So basically; your comment is accurate in its depiction of post WW2 Ukrainian immigrants, but not accurate prior to that, and kind of erases the awesome and good folks of the AUUC trying their hardest to counteract the UCC today. Especially right now in their attempts to organize recent Ukrainian immigrants, many of which are not politicized and generally not particularly fascist or anything. The UCC leadership actually has huge contempt for them (after all they ran away from the "good fight"!), but are doing a lot of efforts to radicalize them on arrival.

      Mandatory fuck Freeland she is a nazi.

      • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        one of the qualifications for getting in was showing your nazi tattoo

        Do you have some links about this? I have some Canadians I would like to poke

          • SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.ml
            hexagon
            ·
            1 year ago

            I saw the Amazon reviews for this book and damn people are pissed off. Only one person gave five stars and an extensive overview which was very refreshing. I’m definitely going to give it a read. Do you think this book would be considered a reliable source for say, I don’t know, academic papers or something?

            • MultigrainCerealista [he/him, comrade/them]
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              edit-2
              1 year ago

              It’s political polemic written by a prominent Canadian trade unionist and communist party member so no it wouldn’t pass muster as an academic source, but it was written with rigor and he cites his sources.

              What he writes is a collecting of facts established by others that he then peppers with (righteous) polemic, and it’s that polemic which makes it unsuitable for academia rather than the reliability of the information within it.

              The three major claims are

              1. The holodomor was not a genocide, which represents the historical consensus on the topic until about 10 years ago when Ukrainian nationalism became a very useful tool for the west which is when Timothy Snyder and Anna Applebaum started popularizing the famine-as-genocide narrative that previously was confined to Ukrainian nationalist circles. For a more academic approach to this topic I would recommend the work of Mark Tauger who is an economic historian who went deep into the data and chose to prioritize data over anecdote and he makes a very convincing case that the holodomor was a famine, not a genocide, and indeed more Russians died in that famine than Ukrainians, and the single most affected ethnicity was in fact the Khazaks as the famine affected all southern USSR. He also includes data that shows the famine in Ukraine was greatly exacerbated by the Ukrainian nationalists - who were supported by Poland at the time which had already conquered parts of Ukraine and Belorussia as part of the Polish military expansionism of the 1920s and 1930s. Most convincingly he explores the efforts at famine relief the Soviets undertook. He got into a fight with Applebaum where she criticized him for being a “genocide denialist” and he criticized her for relying almost exclusively on anecdote. Prior to the Ukraine war, about a third of the wiki page on the holodomor was about Taugers work on the topic (and the thorough debate he had with Wheatcroft which is a series of letters you should look up, Tauger vs Wheatcroft for the most thorough and thoroughly academic exploration of the topic.)
              2. That Canada resettled the Ukrainian SS division, which committed crimes equal to the worst crimes against humanity including organized genocide of Jews, Romani, and other ethnic minorities in Ukraine, giving the Nazi battalion refugee status and carefully looking the other way to avoid acknowledging the very obvious and demonstrable fact that they were war criminals and part of the SS. This group, also known as the OUN, formed a community in Canada which is still extremely nationalist in character and this community are the ones you see flying nazi symbology quite openly in Canada (such as the black sun) and who erected a monument to nazi SS divisions to “honor their ancestors.”
              3. That the holodomor-genocide idea originally comes from Nazi propaganda when the Nazis were seeking to justify their war of conquest against the USSR and to cultivate a “fifth column” of Ukrainian nationalists, seeking to build upon the efforts of Poland to split Ukrainians away from the USSR into the Polish orbit. He shows how the photos used in the Nazi propaganda were first debunked back in the 1930s (eg photos depicting earlier famines or famines in other locations entirely) but then found their way into supposedly respectable academia mostly at Havard and mostly historians who interestingly enough were “former” members of the OSS during WW2 (information and propaganda officers who “retired” from that role to take up positions as historians at Havard) and a lot of the emotive imagery used to prove the genocide were debunked as fake news close to a century ago and furthermore were debunked as fake news written by Goebbels and the Nazis no less.

              If you want solid academia that relies on data then refer to Tauger. He’s the only historian I’ve encountered who actually preferences economic data (which he rigorously cross checks against other indicators to ensure it’s reliability, eg comparing grain yields to prices to ensure the data is consistent across various dimensions). He has been trashed over the past decade mostly by Applebaum who relies on anecdote and human stories, frequently from the Ukrainian SS refugees in Canada and also has at times used the same photos the Nazis used that were of previous famines in other locations.

              The other major historian who pushes the genocide narrative in the west is Timothy Snyder mostly in his work “bloodlands” which was written for a popular audience rather than an academic audience, which also is notable for relying significantly on anecdote. His work also suffers from the way he tells his story, which he presents alongside the Nazi atrocities and sometimes Polish atrocities, seeking to join all these events together in a narrative sense by telling these accounts side by side even though there is little reason to group all these events together.

              Edit: oh and Wheatcroft is another much earlier proponent of the genocide narrative who attempted to engage Tauger on the data and Tauger gave him an absolute smack down in a series of essays, which were published but written as letters more or less. Wheatcroft ends up basically name-calling as Tauger gives a veritable smack down based on data and for a while this represented something of the consensus position, that it was a famine mostly driven by natural causes, partly exacerbated by collectivization, that the Soviets paused collectivization once they realized how bad things were on the ground, how the Soviets also engaged in famine relief efforts, and how the single biggest man-made contributor to the famine was the mass slaughter of animals especially horses and cattle by the small percent of the population who owned a lot of land, not a genocide.

              Also other historians who are extremely hostile to the USSR such as Stephen Kotkin also say it wasn’t a genocide, which indicates the general consensus that existed on this topic before Ukrainian nationalism became useful to US foreign policy goals.

              • SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.ml
                hexagon
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                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Thank you so much for this, I’m heading back to university for my next semester and need all the guidance I can get. I was definitely heading in the direction of going over the sources he sites in the book but your extra information and clarifications are incredibly helpful.

                Edit: I have this comment and many others, including posts, favourited to keep all this amazing information easily accessible to me for when I write my essays and papers! I love Lemmygrad so much ❤️

                • MultigrainCerealista [he/him, comrade/them]
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                  1 year ago

                  You’re very welcome but honestly in the current political climate you’d be best not touching this topic at university because people will come after you.

                  But it’s a very interesting history, by which I mean the history of how the narrative was created is very interesting.

                  There is another work that is completely unrelated to the Ukrainian genocide, completely not related, but it does an excellent job of describing how history is constructed by the elites of society to support their ideology. It’s “the assassination of Julius Caesar” by Michael Parenti. I’ll repeat that it has absolutely nothing to do with ukraine, as the title suggests it’s about the assassination of Julius Caesar but more than that it’s an exploration of the way history is written by elites and propagated by “respectable” parts of society, invariably the institutions aligned with the wealthiest parts of society, and how history serves a vital role in propaganda.

                  If you’re studying history, you’ll love it.

                  • SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.ml
                    hexagon
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                    1 year ago

                    My majors are in psych and polisci but I’m sprinkling in some history classes as well. This semester I’m taking a history class so I’m really looking forward to it.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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                    1 year ago

                    I love the title because, aside from the actual assassination, it's about character assassination.

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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                1 year ago

                Pardon me, but is there a title that the collection of Wheatcroft / Tauger letters are published under?

                • MultigrainCerealista [he/him, comrade/them]
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                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  I’m not sure if they’ve been collected. They were a series of letter-essays published in journals of economic history / political sciences.

                  Eg

                  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232889148_Arguing_from_errors_On_certain_issues_in_Robert_Davies'and_Stephen_Wheatcroft's_analysis_of_the_1932_Soviet_grain_harvest_and_the_Great_Soviet_famine_of_1931-_1933

                  https://agrarianstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/papers/TaugerAgrarianStudies.pdf

                  Edit - most or all seem collected here https://newcoldwar.org/archive-of-writings-of-professor-mark-tauger-on-the-famine-scourges-of-the-early-years-of-the-soviet-union/

                  You can steal most of Tauger’s work from libgen http://libgen.is/search.php?req=Mark+tauger

    • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I'm sure it's just a coincidence that all those Ukrainian "refugees" ended up in Canada right after WWII

    • comvedml@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think most were nazi collaborators, kulaks largely stayed inside the soviet Union and were reabsorbed into the soviet system after WW2. I heard stories from Russian people that how their kulak great grandfathers were repressed but when Nazis showed up they didn't hesitate to take arms against their enemies.

    • darkcalling@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      who fled the oppressive USSR

      Um, excuse me? What the fuck. Anti-communism on lemmygrad? More likely than I thought apparently.

      • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Whoops, I meant that ironically, or from the Kulaks perspective.

        If you look through my comments history you'll see that I don't actually think that.

    • Fuckass
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, that was all about the Deputy PM I mentioned, Chrystia Freeland.

        Of course the sins of the (grand)father are not the sins of the child and all that, but Freeland has made it very clear by her associations with modern Ukrofascist groups and PR choices that she follows very closely in his footsteps.