Today, the day after the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the imperial forces of Japan I read about the 75th anniversary of the murder, through forced starvation, of millions of humans in the Ukraine by the Soviet Union. Communists.
Remember the Holodomor
This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, "murder by starvation." This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies. Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes.
Ukraine--which, with Canada and a few other countries, observed Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 23--seeks international recognition for a Ukrainian "genocide." Russia denounces that demand as political exploitation of a wider tragedy. Some Russian human rights activists are skeptical of both positions.
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The partial opening of Soviet archives soon confirmed the extent to which Stalin and his henchmen knowingly used hunger to punish resistance and beat the peasantry into submission. Among the finds was a direct order by Stalin to cordon off starving villages and intercept peasants trying to flee in search of food. The post-Soviet leadership of both Russia and Ukraine was willing to acknowledge the Terror-Famine, though differences soon emerged on whether it should be regarded as a Ukrainian genocide or equal-opportunity mass murder.
Years ago during the Reagan administration, when I worked for a conservative group in Washington, DC, I had produced a simple, but direct bumper sticker that stated, "Communism Kills". I believed it then and I believe it now. Communism is a stain on the history of the world. Many of my friends thought me coarse for stating such a thing about our adversary, the USSR, even stating that such things antaganized them to the point of danger because the communists would never do such a thing. My reply, along the lines of "horsecrap", was not well received. I still see some of those bumper stickers now and then
To this day there are those soviet apologists that deny the Holodomor. Many of them work at the New York Times while many people the leadership of the liberal/progressive movements here in America. The leadership in Russia, longing for a return of the Soviet also still deny it much as the Japanese try to deny the horrors they visited on the people they conquered prior to and during the Second World War. They are all, quite simply, liars. They are not in denial, they are in hope of a world in which socialism and communism rules.
There is no question that the famine caused deaths beyond Ukraine. It is generally believed that about half of the victims were in Ukraine and the predominantly Ukrainian-populated Russian region of Kuban. The millions of others who perished included Russian peasants and close to a third of the population of Kazakhstan.
There is also no doubt that the famine was man-made. Most Soviet peasants resisted the collectivization that began in the 1930s. When joining collective farms was voluntary, few signed up, and many who did soon left. Forcible collectivization was met with peasant rebellions, ruthlessly suppressed, then with quiet resistance. When villagers realized that collective farming meant backbreaking labor for the state at slave wages, many staged work slowdowns. As a result, grain production targets were not met at a time when Moscow relied on grain exports to finance industrialization. The regime then instituted a policy of ruthless confiscation of grain that left no food for the peasants; in many regions, villages that failed to meet the quota were also forced to surrender all other foodstuffs.
Recent articles detailing the Soviet regime's war on the peasantry, based on Soviet archives, describe a living hell: government agents going door to door confiscating food; families in recalcitrant villages forced out of their homes and left to freeze; men and women tortured to make them reveal hidden stockpiles of food; widespread cannibalism. These horrors were by no means limited to Ukraine.
It is nonetheless true that Stalin's fateful decision to blockade famine-stricken areas, issued in January 1933, was initially directed at Ukraine and Kuban. This has prompted French historian Nicolas Werth, coauthor of The Black Book of Communism, to reconsider his view of the Terror-Famine as ethnically neutral class warfare. In an address at the Harvard Ukrainian Institute on November 18, Werth said he now believes there is sufficient evidence to support the "national interpretation" of the famine. This evidence, in his view, includes the fact that the Holodomor coincided with a Soviet campaign against Ukrainian nationalism, with purges and executions targeting Ukraine's political and cultural elites. Yet Werth concluded with a pointed plea to remember all the victims of the Communist war on the peasantry.
Communism kills. It must to survive, but first communism needs a base of liberalism and progressivism to present a face of concern and care within which socialism can grow and flourish into communism.
The murder of millions, whether it occured in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia or in Communist China, must be remembered by adults and taught to children so that it cannot happen again.
This is the hope and change I voted for. Unfortunately, America didn't agree with me which is why I am already working toward the next election to help voters to remember why America is a great nation, that liberalism/progressivism/socialism/communism does not and cannot work and to remind people that it is not government that solves problems and creates opportunity, it is people. The people that communism hates.
