The More I See of This Ukrainian Government

[bendog]

We shouldn't have been meddling in the region in the first place.

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Why should we care about anything but our own... Is that what you're saying?

You people (I use the term loosely) surely do say that a lot. An awful lot

WARNING! The link has pictures in it that might offend the sissies (dimocraps) among us.

Holodomor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "Extermination by hunger" or "Hunger-extermination";[2] derived from 'Морити голодом', "Killing by Starvation" [3][4][5]) was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933 that killed up to 7.5 million Ukrainians.[6] During the famine, which is also known as the "Terror-Famine in Ukraine" and "Famine-Genocide in Ukraine",[7][8][9] millions of citizens of Ukrainian SSR, the majority of whom were Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.[10] Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by the independent Ukraine and several other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.[11]

Now the Ukrainians would rather be independent. Now, the Ukrainians would rather not give the Russians another chance to murder another 6 or 7 MILLION people.

Yeah, I'm down with that.

OBTW.... Uber scum (dimocrap, of course) Walter Duranty was New Yawk Slimes Bureau Chief in Moscow all during the Holodomor and knew all about it.

Never spoke a word about it in his columns. The Slimes knew about it, too. But all they ever printed were glowing reports of how egalitarian and how equal everybody in the dimocrap heaven of the Soviet Union.

The one good thing about WWII is that we got the chance to kill 5 or 6 Million of those socialist scumbags (the Nazis).

What we missed out on in not annihilating the Soviets is the opportunity to rid the Earth of 20 or 30 Million carriers of the disease called socialism.

This is what happens when you don't follow through on your prescriptions. If you don't kill the disease, it just comes back. Often stronger and more resistant than before.

Now, they call themselves 'democrats'. They're not, of course. They're the scum of the Earth -- socialists.

Did you not do well in reading comprehension?

 

[Pheonixops]

I'm not afraid to admit when I am wrong. And I am beginning to think I may have been wrong in speaking out so strongly against the Russians actions in the Ukraine.

The more I see of this Ukrainian Government, the less likely I am to write off Putin's claim that ethnic Russians in Ukraine are under attack. Yesterday I saw footage from the Ukrainian parliament that showed a legislator who spoke out supporting pro-Russian protesters getting his ass kicked by other legislators.

Is the United States backing the wrong horse? Again?

We shouldn't have been meddling in the region in the first place.

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Agreed, but I am referring to the so-called "post- Cold War" era. I don't think that we should have tried to get some of the former Soviet Republics to join our gang (NATO). If anything; we should have tried to get Russia to join first.

 

[Edgetho]

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Why should we care about anything but our own... Is that what you're saying?

You people (I use the term loosely) surely do say that a lot. An awful lot

WARNING! The link has pictures in it that might offend the sissies (dimocraps) among us.

Holodomor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "Extermination by hunger" or "Hunger-extermination";[2] derived from 'Морити голодом', "Killing by Starvation" [3][4][5]) was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933 that killed up to 7.5 million Ukrainians.[6] During the famine, which is also known as the "Terror-Famine in Ukraine" and "Famine-Genocide in Ukraine",[7][8][9] millions of citizens of Ukrainian SSR, the majority of whom were Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.[10] Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by the independent Ukraine and several other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.[11]

Now the Ukrainians would rather be independent. Now, the Ukrainians would rather not give the Russians another chance to murder another 6 or 7 MILLION people.

Yeah, I'm down with that.

OBTW.... Uber scum (dimocrap, of course) Walter Duranty was New Yawk Slimes Bureau Chief in Moscow all during the Holodomor and knew all about it.

Never spoke a word about it in his columns. The Slimes knew about it, too. But all they ever printed were glowing reports of how egalitarian and how equal everybody in the dimocrap heaven of the Soviet Union.

The one good thing about WWII is that we got the chance to kill 5 or 6 Million of those socialist scumbags (the Nazis).

What we missed out on in not annihilating the Soviets is the opportunity to rid the Earth of 20 or 30 Million carriers of the disease called socialism.

This is what happens when you don't follow through on your prescriptions. If you don't kill the disease, it just comes back. Often stronger and more resistant than before.

Now, they call themselves 'democrats'. They're not, of course. They're the scum of the Earth -- socialists.

Did you not do well in reading comprehension?

What are you trying to say, butt-breath?

Stop being so childishly cryptic, take off your HMWHC T-Shirt and tell us what you think we should hear and maybe we wouldn't misunderstand you.

Damn, but you people are fucking dense

 

[Steinlight]

Ukraine is the asshole of Europe. That becomes more evident by the day. Perhaps untermensch was an apt term to describe these idiots.

 

[Edgetho]

We shouldn't have been meddling in the region in the first place.

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Agreed, but I am referring to the so-called "post- Cold War" era. I don't think that we should have tried to get some of the former Soviet Republics to join our gang (NATO). If anything; we should have tried to get Russia to join first.

NATO was formed exclusively as a coalition against the Warsaw Pact.

NATO still exists as a buffer to Russian aggression.

Russia, even before 1917, was one of the World's Great Powers.

It still is.

Why would we try to get Russia to join an organization that was formed, and still exists, for the sole reason of fighting it?

Makes no sense to me

 

[R.C. Christian]

I'm not afraid to admit when I am wrong. And I am beginning to think I may have been wrong in speaking out so strongly against the Russians actions in the Ukraine.

The more I see of this Ukrainian Government, the less likely I am to write off Putin's claim that ethnic Russians in Ukraine are under attack. Yesterday I saw footage from the Ukrainian parliament that showed a legislator who spoke out supporting pro-Russian protesters getting his ass kicked by other legislators.

Is the United States backing the wrong horse? Again?

They're backing the "right" horse as far as American foreign policy is concerned.

 

[Edgetho]

Ukraine is the asshole of Europe. That becomes more evident by the day. Perhaps untermensch was an apt term to describe these idiots.

So it's okay to murder 7.5 Million of them, huh?

Another good little Nazi... Or communist..... Whatever

Like there's a difference

 

[bendog]

Why should we care about anything but our own... Is that what you're saying?

You people (I use the term loosely) surely do say that a lot. An awful lot

WARNING! The link has pictures in it that might offend the sissies (dimocraps) among us.

Holodomor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Now the Ukrainians would rather be independent. Now, the Ukrainians would rather not give the Russians another chance to murder another 6 or 7 MILLION people.

Yeah, I'm down with that.

OBTW.... Uber scum (dimocrap, of course) Walter Duranty was New Yawk Slimes Bureau Chief in Moscow all during the Holodomor and knew all about it.

Never spoke a word about it in his columns. The Slimes knew about it, too. But all they ever printed were glowing reports of how egalitarian and how equal everybody in the dimocrap heaven of the Soviet Union.

The one good thing about WWII is that we got the chance to kill 5 or 6 Million of those socialist scumbags (the Nazis).

What we missed out on in not annihilating the Soviets is the opportunity to rid the Earth of 20 or 30 Million carriers of the disease called socialism.

This is what happens when you don't follow through on your prescriptions. If you don't kill the disease, it just comes back. Often stronger and more resistant than before.

Now, they call themselves 'democrats'. They're not, of course. They're the scum of the Earth -- socialists.

Did you not do well in reading comprehension?

What are you trying to say, butt-breath?

Stop being so childishly cryptic, take off your HMWHC T-Shirt and tell us what you think we should hear and maybe we wouldn't misunderstand you.

Damn, but you people are fucking dense

fkck you, dick head. Your inability to read is not my problem.

 

[Steinlight]

Ukraine is the asshole of Europe. That becomes more evident by the day. Perhaps untermensch was an apt term to describe these idiots.

So it's okay to murder 7.5 Million of them, huh?

Another good little Nazi... Or communist..... Whatever

Like there's a difference

The Holomodor was committed by Jewish and Russian Communists(primarily Jews, the planned famine was organized by Kaganovich), not the Russian Federation.

Ironically this anti-Russian hate primarily comes from Galicia in Western Ukraine, which wasn't even part of the USSR during the Holomodor, but was part of Poland. Many ethnic Russians and Russian speaking Ukrainians were killed by the Soviet regime in Ukraine as well.

And if you don't know the difference between National Socialists and Communists, you are an even bigger idiot than you previously let on.

 

[bendog]

We shouldn't have been meddling in the region in the first place.

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Agreed, but I am referring to the so-called "post- Cold War" era. I don't think that we should have tried to get some of the former Soviet Republics to join our gang (NATO). If anything; we should have tried to get Russia to join first.

Yes, the problem is that we've meddled in the Russians militarily dominating satellite states for over 50 years. Having won the cold war, it's sort of intellectually dishonest to say "we have no dog in the hunt." Reagan pretty much promised to stand up for freedom over there.

I think the problem is simple, but the solution very complex. The chances of a EU/US oriented Ukranian govt starving to death 100K Russian speakers is much less than an Russian backed govt doing something along those lines to ethnic ukranians, because the Soviets already did that to the Tartars in crimea.

It also strikes me as very likely that a Russian backed govt would give non Russian speakers less than full citizen status in the very state that historically belongs to non-Russian speakers.

We don't have an armored brigade and mech inf division to provide persuasion, but to the extent we can influence some democratic accommodation between the ethnic groups, we should do so. And Putin's idea of just carving off a hunk of the Ukraine to give to the descendants of the Russians the soviets sent in for ethnic cleansing is a non-starter, imo.

 

[Katzndogz]

I would say it's not so much a case of "backing the wrong horse" as backing any horse at all. The best policy for the U.S. is to simply stay out of the situation completely. They've already done enough damage.

We backed and are still backing al quaeda terrorists in Syria. We support people who disembowel others and eat their livers. That's who we support.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

I would say it's not so much a case of "backing the wrong horse" as backing any horse at all. The best policy for the U.S. is to simply stay out of the situation completely. They've already done enough damage.

We backed and are still backing al quaeda terrorists in Syria. We support people who disembowel others and eat their livers. That's who we support.

I'm aware, but "we" don't support them. The government does.



Sent from my iPhone using USMessageBoard.com

 

[guno]

I'm not afraid to admit when I am wrong. And I am beginning to think I may have been wrong in speaking out so strongly against the Russians actions in the Ukraine.

The more I see of this Ukrainian Government, the less likely I am to write off Putin's claim that ethnic Russians in Ukraine are under attack. Yesterday I saw footage from the Ukrainian parliament that showed a legislator who spoke out supporting pro-Russian protesters getting his ass kicked by other legislators.

Is the United States backing the wrong horse? Again?

Ukraine and the Rebirth of Fascism in Europe
Ukraine and the Rebirth of Fascism in Europe | Global Research

Fears of neo-fascist uprising in Ukraine as far-right group storms Kiev parliament and ex-president calls for independence vote | Mail Online


Ukraine?s Neo-Nazi Right Sector to become Political Party, Nominates Yarosh for President | Global Research

 

[Steinlight]

The Right Sector aren't neo-nazis. They are anti-russian chauvinists of a neo-conservative variety. They have a rather cordial relationship with the nation's Jewish population, having Jews in their ranks. They just met with the head Rabbi of Odessa, vowing to fight "antisemitism". They also helped removed "neo-nazi" graffiti from a holocaust memorial.
Right Sector Ultra-Nationalists Back Odessa Jews over Holocaust Memorial Nazi Defacement

 

[guno]

I'm not afraid to admit when I am wrong. And I am beginning to think I may have been wrong in speaking out so strongly against the Russians actions in the Ukraine.

The more I see of this Ukrainian Government, the less likely I am to write off Putin's claim that ethnic Russians in Ukraine are under attack. Yesterday I saw footage from the Ukrainian parliament that showed a legislator who spoke out supporting pro-Russian protesters getting his ass kicked by other legislators.

Is the United States backing the wrong horse? Again?

Ukraine and the Rebirth of Fascism in Europe
Ukraine and the Rebirth of Fascism in Europe | Global Research

Fears of neo-fascist uprising in Ukraine as far-right group storms Kiev parliament and ex-president calls for independence vote | Mail Online


Ukraine?s Neo-Nazi Right Sector to become Political Party, Nominates Yarosh for President | Global Research

These are the same people in the Ukraine who supported the Nazis and hitler during wwII
LiveLeak.com - The Nazis of Ukraine

 

[guno]

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Why should we care about anything but our own... Is that what you're saying?

You people (I use the term loosely) surely do say that a lot. An awful lot

WARNING! The link has pictures in it that might offend the sissies (dimocraps) among us.

Holodomor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "Extermination by hunger" or "Hunger-extermination";[2] derived from 'Морити голодом', "Killing by Starvation" [3][4][5]) was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933 that killed up to 7.5 million Ukrainians.[6] During the famine, which is also known as the "Terror-Famine in Ukraine" and "Famine-Genocide in Ukraine",[7][8][9] millions of citizens of Ukrainian SSR, the majority of whom were Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.[10] Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by the independent Ukraine and several other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.[11]

Now the Ukrainians would rather be independent. Now, the Ukrainians would rather not give the Russians another chance to murder another 6 or 7 MILLION people.

Yeah, I'm down with that.

OBTW.... Uber scum (dimocrap, of course) Walter Duranty was New Yawk Slimes Bureau Chief in Moscow all during the Holodomor and knew all about it.

Never spoke a word about it in his columns. The Slimes knew about it, too. But all they ever printed were glowing reports of how egalitarian and how equal everybody in the dimocrap heaven of the Soviet Union.

The one good thing about WWII is that we got the chance to kill 5 or 6 Million of those socialist scumbags (the Nazis).

What we missed out on in not annihilating the Soviets is the opportunity to rid the Earth of 20 or 30 Million carriers of the disease called socialism.

This is what happens when you don't follow through on your prescriptions. If you don't kill the disease, it just comes back. Often stronger and more resistant than before.

Now, they call themselves 'democrats'. They're not, of course. They're the scum of the Earth -- socialists.

Did you not do well in reading comprehension?

Now for your education!

In 1922 the Soviet Union experienced severe famine conditions in some areas following on from the wars of intervention when imperialist powers had sought to crush the new Soviet state. Famine conditions recurred again in 1933, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Ukraine. There are two versions to this second famine that are radically different. An objective analysis indicates the famine to have resulted from a combination of poor climatic conditions and sabotage on the part of the rich peasants or kulaks in the face of the collectivization of agriculture. Ukrainian nationalists however argue that the famine was deliberately contrived by Stalin in order to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people, and resulted in millions of needless deaths, in fact death and destruction on such a scale that it dwarfs the Nazi holocaust. Documentary evidence produced to support this claim is often endorsed by academics such as Robert Conquest, or James Mace of Harvard University. Such evidence is shaky in the extreme and often relies on discredited accounts from the 1930’s pro-fascist press in America, or even Nazi documents. Despite this it continues to resurface, most notably in the 1980s as part of an attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famine, and at the same time to fuel the cold war rhetoric of the Reagan era.

The same old grainy photographic images appear time and time again, purporting to show victims of the Ukraine famine, but these are almost always undocumented, or if traced back actually come from famine relief documents from the 1922 famine or even earlier. Cobbled together in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’ such pictures were shown on UK television despite having been rejected by some public service networks in the US because of a blatant lack of objectivity. Ukrainian nationalist organisations in Canada and elsewhere continue to propagate the notion of deliberate famine genocide, while carefully glossing over their own anti-semitic, pro-Nazi and collaborationist origins. A search on the web for ‘Ukrainian Famine Genocide’ resulted in 845 references to this ‘man made’ famine, as usual graphically illustrated with pictures for an earlier era. In this talk I will explore some of the background to these various claims and counter claims, with reference to the excellent book on the subject by Douglas Tottle (Fraud, famine and fascism. The Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Progress Books, Toronto, 1987. ISBN 0-919396-51-8)

Journalistic fraud in the 1930s

In the autumn of 1934, an American using the name of Thomas Walker entered the Soviet Union. After less than a week in Moscow, the remainder of his 13 day stay was spent in transit to the Manchurian border, at which point he left the USSR never to return. Four months later a series of articles began in the Hearst press in America, by Thomas Walker, “noted journalist, traveller and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia”. The articles described a famine in the Ukraine that had claimed six million lives, and was illustrated with photographs of corpses and starving children. Walker was said to have smuggled in a camera under “the most difficult and dangerous circumstances”.

Louis Fischer, an American writer living in Moscow at the time was suspicious. Why had the Hearst press sat on these sensational stories for ten months before publication? He established that Walker’s short visit to the Soviet Union could not possibly have allowed him to even visit the areas he described and photographed. He also pointed out that Walker’s photographic evidence was distinctly odd: not only were the pictures suggestive of an earlier decade (Fischer thought probably of the 1921 Volga famine) but contained a mixture of scenes taken in both summer and winter. Fischer also noted that the 1933 harvest in the Ukraine had been good.

Some of the pictures were subsequently identified as showing scenes from the Austro-Hungarian empire and World War 1, and it was known that Hearst newspapers were digging up old pictures and retouching them for use as propaganda. Pictures some times appeared labelled as having been taken in Russia, and at other times the same picture is relocated to the Ukraine for obviously political reasons. Not only were the photographs a fraud, and the trip to the Ukraine a fraud, but Thomas Walker himself was a fraud, turning out to be an escaped convict by the name of Robert Green who had served time for forgery. At his subsequent trial following recapture he admitted that his series of pictures used in the Hearst newspaper articles were fakes and were not taken in the Ukraine as stated. Despite these facts, the same photos are still those used in commemoration posters, on web sites and in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’.

The Hearst Press

The Hearst Press needless to say continued with its famine genocide campaign despite the Walker fiasco. This is not surprising when we consider that Hearst himself was known to millions of Americans as "America's number one fascist". (One of Mussolini's chief sources of personal income during the early 1930s was from being a paid correspondent for the Hearst Press).

In 1934 Hearst visited Nazi Germany and met Hitler. Following this visit, the Hearst Press began to promote famine genocide articles on the Ukraine. French premier, Edward Herriot who had recently returned from travelling in the Ukraine publicised the fact that he had seen no evidence of any famine. Following the Walker articles, Hearst went on to try and convince Americans that the Soviet Union was a land of utter starvation, genocide and cannibalism. At the time this was often recognised as politically motivated sensationalism, but over the passage of years these fabrications have become transformed into "primary evidence".

By noting those features of the 1930s campaign and the selective memories of those who helped the Hearst Press in propagating the famine-genocide thesis, light can be cast on the character of today's famine-genocide campaign.

Simultaneously with the launch of Hearst's 1935 outpourings, the Nazi press in Germany and sympathetic papers elsewhere in Europe began publishing similar stories. At this time a book by Dr Ewald Ammende was published entitled "Human life in Russia". This has had a lasting influence on those who propagate the famine-genocide myth, and was republished in 1984. The book makes little pretence of objectivity crediting Hearst correspondents, accounts from Nazi German and Fascist Italy, and reproducing allegations by unnamed 'travellers' and 'experts'.

Most photographic evidence of the famine-genocide theorists can be traced back either to Ammende's book or to Thomas Walker. The origins of the photographs are not documented, although it should be noted that Ammende was involved with famine relief work in 1921-2. The pictures are said to have been taken in the streets and squares of Kharkov in the summer of 1933, although only 10 of 26 appear to show urban scenes. There are no signs or landmarks to help set them in context. "Human Life in Russia" contains additional pictures that did not appear in the German edition. These are claimed to have been taken by Dr Ditloff, director of the German Government Agricultural concession in the north Caucuses. One might wonder how a Nazi functionary came to be wandering freely around the Ukraine taking photographs, but in any case in later publications the same photographs are either unattributed or attributed to a completely different source. In fact, some pictures have been identified as coming from the 1922 famine, and some show winter scenes despite apparently having been taken in summer. Other publications use the same pictures either with no accreditation or accredited to Thomas Walker, despite the fact that they were used to portray events in 1932/3 and Walker claimed to have taken them in the spring of 1934.

It is clear that the photographic evidence is fraudulent, and was used primarily as part of a campaign to undermine and discredit the Soviet Union. Despite this, they continue to be used to this day.

Cold War

The famine genocide campaign of the 1930s leaned heavily on dubious right wing sources and was not accepted by mainstream historians at the time, leading some Ukrainian nationalists to speak of a pro-Soviet, left wing or even Jewish conspiracy to suppress the truth. In the 1950s the Nationalists published books such as "The Black Deeds of the Kremlin" to propagate their interpretation of history. A section is devoted to Nationalist allegations of Soviet mass executions during the 1930s in Vynnitsa. Unearthed during Nazi occupation in 1943, the graves were examined by a Nazi commission and used in propaganda films. Post war testimony by German soldiers revealed however, that this was a Nazi propaganda deception, the bodies being those of Jews executed by the SS and Ukrainian militia.

The gruesome allegations of cannibalism in volume 2 of "Black Deeds" has lead to it being referred to as the "Ukrainian Nationalist cookbook"!

The numbers game

The famine genocide theorists are keen to establish that millions of people died in the Ukraine. Their methodology, as usual, is highly suspect. A "landmark study" by Dana Dalrymple published in "Soviet Studies", 1964 comes up with a figure of 5.5 million based on averaging the guesses of 20 Western journalists. One of them is our fictional friend Thomas Walker. Dalrymple states that Walker made his survey by breaking away from a guided tour, and had previously spent several years touring Russia. A similar figure by the Archbishop of Canterbury is also quoted; this enthusiastic supporter of Hitler had attempted to raise the famine issue in the House of Lords in 1934 when in fact the Foreign Office stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations against the Soviet government. Needless to say, the testimony of Sir John Maynard, a renowned famine expert who visited the Ukraine in the summer of 1933 and rejected tales of famine-genocide is dismissed by the Nationalists.

The Cold War campaign resurfaced in the 1980s with considerable publicity and scholarly backing from the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, long a centre of anticommunist research. In 1983, the book "The Ninth Circle", first published by Ukrainian Nationalists in 1953 was republished, edited and introduced by Harvard's Dr James Mace. A critical review of this book described it as being "a polemic, devoid of any documentation, and lacking in any scholarship". The author, it was pointed out, fails to give any details about his activity during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and makes not a single derogatory comment about the Nazis. Once again the Thomas Walker fakes are used as illustrations, despite the author claiming to have been an eyewitness to the famine. The "academic" Mace writing of Walker's material states, "American newspaperman like Thomas Walker wrote plainspoken and graphic accounts of the Famine based on what they had witnessed in the Ukraine in 1933". Note the convenient backdating of Walkers trip to 1933 and not 1934.

Another contribution to the famine genocide literature is Walter Dushnyk's "50 years ago: the Famine Holocaust in Ukraine". The foreword to this book is by none other than Dalrymple. Dushnyk's roots can be traced to Europe's pre-war fascist movement when he was active in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. Again a critical reviewer comments that this book, "rather than being a scholarly analysis, the material consists of a highly emotionally charged vitriolic polemic. Indeed it has little to do with scholarship and unquestionably is lacking in objectivity". Once again the same faked or undocumented photographs are used as illustrations. Dushnyk calculates the number of famine deaths by projecting an anticipated population growth, based on the 1926 census, onto the listed population census for the Ukraine in 1939. The difference is 7.5 million and this therefore becomes the number of famine victims. The nonsense of this methodology can be demonstrated by transposing to Canada in the 1930s and showing that 25% of Saskatchewan's population disappeared during the great depression. In fact, the population of the Ukraine increased in real terms from 1926 - 1939 by almost 3.4 million. Whilst it is not possible to give an accurate figure for the numbers of famine victims, the claims of people like Dalrymple, Mace and Dushnyk have been shown up as extreme exaggerations fabricated to strengthen their political allegations of genocide.

Harvest of deception

The famine-genocide campaign reached a climax in 1986 with the publication of Robert Conquest's book "Harvest of Sorrow", and the film produced by the famine research committee of the St Vladimir Institute, "Harvest of Despair". The film is full of the old undocumented pictures, and relies heavily on interviews with former Nazis and Ukrainian collaborators, as well as defectors from the Soviet Union; even Malcolm Muggeridge pops up for a short appearance. The film’s producers apparently viewed more than a million feet of stock footage of film, before selecting a mere 720 feet for use. Instead of any documented evidence of the famine being presented, a montage of undocumented stills are shown including the Walker/Ditlofff pictures, 1921/2 famine pictures, and others from Nazi propaganda publications. With breathtaking disregard for the truth, some scenes borrow from film of the civil war, and Soviet films of the 1920s. In essence, it seems that the film makers scrounged through the archives looking for bits and pieces of old ‘war-and-starvation’ shots that were then spliced into the film to great subliminal effect, bound together by a narrative and interspersed with partisan interviews. So much has even been admitted by some of those involved, yet the film has been widely shown and praised, including on British television. The makers even received grants and logistical support for the National Film Board of Canada and another publicly funded body, Multiculturalism Canada. "Harvest of Despair" was clearly no objective documentary as is claimed, but rather a crude cold war propaganda exercise.

Conquest's book "Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror famine" has emerged as the best attempt of the famine-genocidists at legitimacy. Conquest's right wing affiliations and his holocaust denials are now well known. At one time he was employed by the British Secret Service's disinformation project, the Information Research Department, key targets being 'the third world' and the 'Russians'. Conquest's earlier work "The Great Terror" had alleged that only 5-6 million perished in the 1932/3 period and only half of them in the Ukraine. By 1983 Conquest, however, had upped his estimates to 14 million and extended famine conditions to 1937! Such revisions coincided handily with the 50th anniversary commemorations of the famine.

Conquest presents the various nationalist cliques who held parts of the Ukraine during the Russian civil war and foreign intervention as bona fide governments. The mass slaughter of Ukrainian Jews carried out under nationalist 'independence' in 1918-19 is dismissed in 3 words. The Nazi occupation of the Ukraine is presented implicitly as a breakdown between periods of Soviet 'terror' and the liberation from the Nazis as Soviet 'reoccupation'. There are many examples in the book of Conquest's lack of scholarship. One example is him quoting from accounts by a foreign correspondent who turns out to be none other than Thomas Walker, the man who never was. In his reference note for the quote he even moves the date of the Hearst article from 1935 to February 1933. It is worth repeating the observations of American historian J Arch Getty on the quality of this kind of historical research:

"Grand analytical generalisations have come from second hand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp stories ("my friend met Bukharin's wife in a camp and she said...") have become primary sources on Soviet central political decision making .... the need to generalise from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed rumours into sources and has equated repetition of stories with confirmation".

Whereas serious historians do not accept hearsay and rumour as historical fact, contrast this with Conquest's stated position that "Truth can only percolate in the form of hearsay" and "on political matters basically the best, though not infallible source is rumour".

The famine

Coming now to the famine itself and its causes, the factors of drought and sabotage during the process of collectivisation are generally given little attention by right wing historians. Interestingly, in "A History of the Ukraine" by Mikhail Hrushevsky - described by the Nationalists themselves as "Ukraine's leading historian" - we read that "Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions; and during the winter of 1932-3 a great famine, like that of 1921-2 swept across Soviet Ukraine". Nowhere does this history suggest that the famine was deliberate and aimed against Ukrainians, and in fact more space is devoted to the famine of 1921-22. There are many references to drought conditions in the Ukraine in 1931 and 1932. Even Ewald Ammende in his "Human Life in Russia" refers to climatic and natural causes of the famine.

While drought was a contributing factor, the main cause of the famine was the struggle around collectivisation of the countryside in this period. In 1928 there were millions of small scale peasant farms, three quarters of the land was sown by hand, one third of the crop areas was harvested by sickle and scythe, 40% of the crop was threshed by flail. Over one quarter of peasant households possessed no draught animals or farming implements, and 47% had only ploughs. The drive to collectivisation was a key feature of the first five year plan launched in 1929. The small minority of rich peasants, the kulaks, opposed socialisation of agriculture and fought against collectivisation with an organised campaign of large-scale destruction. The struggle in some areas including the Ukraine approached civil war scale. Visiting foreign observers at the time noted that kulak opposition took the form of slaughtering their cattle and horses rather than having them collectivised. From 1928-33 the number of horses in the Soviet Union fell from 30 to 15 million, cattle from 70 to 38 million, sheep and goats from 147 to 50 million. Some kulaks burned down the property of collectives and even burned their own crops and seed grain. Many famine-genocide theorists discount kulak sabotage, but others offer enthusiastic descriptions celebrating the opposition to Soviet planning. In addition the famine was compounded by typhus epidemics which undoubtedly claimed many lives. By 1933 there was a successful harvest, enormous efforts were put into improving collective farms and providing mechanised equipment.

Subsequent huge increases in agricultural and industrial output in the Ukraine leading up to the second world war give the lie to allegations or 7 - 15 million starvation deaths only seven years earlier. In addition, the record of Ukrainian resistance to the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist auxiliaries was exemplary. In the largest eastern portion of the Ukraine loyalty was overwhelming and active. There were over half a million organised Soviet guerrillas, and four and a half million ethnic Ukrainians fought in the Soviet army. The Ukrainian nationalist histories acknowledge this, and one can only wonder at the ability of a nation to mobilise such numbers of military aged males in the light of Nationalist claims about famine victims. The reality was that for the bulk of the Ukrainian peasants, workers and the professionals newly emerged from those classes, the Soviet system had demonstrated overwhelming economic and cultural advantages.

The only place where the Nationalists found any kind of base during the Nazi occupation was in what had been up to 1939 Polish Galicia; this is where the Nazis did their bulk of recruiting for the fascist police and SS units. An examination of what happened during the Nazi occupation is revealing not only in terms of the popular support for the Soviets demonstrated by the people of the Ukraine, but also for the role played by the Ukrainian Nationalists.

Collaboration and collusion

In June 1941 the Nazi army entered Lviv, capital of the Western Ukraine. In its vanguard came the German-uniformed Nachtigall Battalion of Ukrainian Nationalists. During the first three days of July the Nachtigall Battalion slaughtered seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lwow. Non-Jewish writers, intellectuals and professionals known to be hostile to Nazism were also killed. In the first 8 months of Nazi occupation 15% of Galician Jews - 100,000 people - were slaughtered by the joint actions of the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. Many thousands of Nationalists who fled to Germany and elsewhere in the wake of the retreating Nazi armies had to cover up their personal and collective guilt in the holocaust and betrayal of their country. Anti-semitic and fascist themes run deep through the history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Leaders of the Ukrainian Nationalists were on the payroll of the Nazi party before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Ukrainian Nationalist battalions were trained in Germany before the war and some were used in the invasion of Poland. The Nachtigall and Roland Ukrainian volunteer detachments fought with the German army and in late 1941 were reorganised into a Police Battalion and employed in Byelorussia. Despite this being well known, the famine genociders portray the nationalists as having fought against both Hitler and Stalin and somehow on a par with the French resistance. Similarly distorted is the role of the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division (also known as the Halychyna Division). Formed in 1943 its main function was brutal anti-partisan work. Even after German withdrawal from the Ukraine, nationalists stayed behind and continued to harass Soviet supply lines. Nationalist troops served Hitler in Ukraine, Poland, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Ukrainian collaborators assisted in the murder of hundreds of thousands in death camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, Yanowska and Trawniki. Such were the "anti-Nazi" credentials of those who nationalists today would present as "national liberation fighters", "heroes of the Ukrainian people" and "patriots who struggled for a free Ukraine".

 

[guno]

Why should we care about anything but our own... Is that what you're saying?

You people (I use the term loosely) surely do say that a lot. An awful lot

WARNING! The link has pictures in it that might offend the sissies (dimocraps) among us.

Holodomor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Now the Ukrainians would rather be independent. Now, the Ukrainians would rather not give the Russians another chance to murder another 6 or 7 MILLION people.

Yeah, I'm down with that.

OBTW.... Uber scum (dimocrap, of course) Walter Duranty was New Yawk Slimes Bureau Chief in Moscow all during the Holodomor and knew all about it.

Never spoke a word about it in his columns. The Slimes knew about it, too. But all they ever printed were glowing reports of how egalitarian and how equal everybody in the dimocrap heaven of the Soviet Union.

The one good thing about WWII is that we got the chance to kill 5 or 6 Million of those socialist scumbags (the Nazis).

What we missed out on in not annihilating the Soviets is the opportunity to rid the Earth of 20 or 30 Million carriers of the disease called socialism.

This is what happens when you don't follow through on your prescriptions. If you don't kill the disease, it just comes back. Often stronger and more resistant than before.

Now, they call themselves 'democrats'. They're not, of course. They're the scum of the Earth -- socialists.

Did you not do well in reading comprehension?

Now for your education!

In 1922 the Soviet Union experienced severe famine conditions in some areas following on from the wars of intervention when imperialist powers had sought to crush the new Soviet state. Famine conditions recurred again in 1933, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Ukraine. There are two versions to this second famine that are radically different. An objective analysis indicates the famine to have resulted from a combination of poor climatic conditions and sabotage on the part of the rich peasants or kulaks in the face of the collectivization of agriculture. Ukrainian nationalists however argue that the famine was deliberately contrived by Stalin in order to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people, and resulted in millions of needless deaths, in fact death and destruction on such a scale that it dwarfs the Nazi holocaust. Documentary evidence produced to support this claim is often endorsed by academics such as Robert Conquest, or James Mace of Harvard University. Such evidence is shaky in the extreme and often relies on discredited accounts from the 1930’s pro-fascist press in America, or even Nazi documents. Despite this it continues to resurface, most notably in the 1980s as part of an attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famine, and at the same time to fuel the cold war rhetoric of the Reagan era.

The same old grainy photographic images appear time and time again, purporting to show victims of the Ukraine famine, but these are almost always undocumented, or if traced back actually come from famine relief documents from the 1922 famine or even earlier. Cobbled together in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’ such pictures were shown on UK television despite having been rejected by some public service networks in the US because of a blatant lack of objectivity. Ukrainian nationalist organisations in Canada and elsewhere continue to propagate the notion of deliberate famine genocide, while carefully glossing over their own anti-semitic, pro-Nazi and collaborationist origins. A search on the web for ‘Ukrainian Famine Genocide’ resulted in 845 references to this ‘man made’ famine, as usual graphically illustrated with pictures for an earlier era. In this talk I will explore some of the background to these various claims and counter claims, with reference to the excellent book on the subject by Douglas Tottle (Fraud, famine and fascism. The Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Progress Books, Toronto, 1987. ISBN 0-919396-51-8)

Journalistic fraud in the 1930s

In the autumn of 1934, an American using the name of Thomas Walker entered the Soviet Union. After less than a week in Moscow, the remainder of his 13 day stay was spent in transit to the Manchurian border, at which point he left the USSR never to return. Four months later a series of articles began in the Hearst press in America, by Thomas Walker, “noted journalist, traveller and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia”. The articles described a famine in the Ukraine that had claimed six million lives, and was illustrated with photographs of corpses and starving children. Walker was said to have smuggled in a camera under “the most difficult and dangerous circumstances”.

Louis Fischer, an American writer living in Moscow at the time was suspicious. Why had the Hearst press sat on these sensational stories for ten months before publication? He established that Walker’s short visit to the Soviet Union could not possibly have allowed him to even visit the areas he described and photographed. He also pointed out that Walker’s photographic evidence was distinctly odd: not only were the pictures suggestive of an earlier decade (Fischer thought probably of the 1921 Volga famine) but contained a mixture of scenes taken in both summer and winter. Fischer also noted that the 1933 harvest in the Ukraine had been good.

Some of the pictures were subsequently identified as showing scenes from the Austro-Hungarian empire and World War 1, and it was known that Hearst newspapers were digging up old pictures and retouching them for use as propaganda. Pictures some times appeared labelled as having been taken in Russia, and at other times the same picture is relocated to the Ukraine for obviously political reasons. Not only were the photographs a fraud, and the trip to the Ukraine a fraud, but Thomas Walker himself was a fraud, turning out to be an escaped convict by the name of Robert Green who had served time for forgery. At his subsequent trial following recapture he admitted that his series of pictures used in the Hearst newspaper articles were fakes and were not taken in the Ukraine as stated. Despite these facts, the same photos are still those used in commemoration posters, on web sites and in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’.

The Hearst Press

The Hearst Press needless to say continued with its famine genocide campaign despite the Walker fiasco. This is not surprising when we consider that Hearst himself was known to millions of Americans as "America's number one fascist". (One of Mussolini's chief sources of personal income during the early 1930s was from being a paid correspondent for the Hearst Press).

In 1934 Hearst visited Nazi Germany and met Hitler. Following this visit, the Hearst Press began to promote famine genocide articles on the Ukraine. French premier, Edward Herriot who had recently returned from travelling in the Ukraine publicised the fact that he had seen no evidence of any famine. Following the Walker articles, Hearst went on to try and convince Americans that the Soviet Union was a land of utter starvation, genocide and cannibalism. At the time this was often recognised as politically motivated sensationalism, but over the passage of years these fabrications have become transformed into "primary evidence".

By noting those features of the 1930s campaign and the selective memories of those who helped the Hearst Press in propagating the famine-genocide thesis, light can be cast on the character of today's famine-genocide campaign.

Simultaneously with the launch of Hearst's 1935 outpourings, the Nazi press in Germany and sympathetic papers elsewhere in Europe began publishing similar stories. At this time a book by Dr Ewald Ammende was published entitled "Human life in Russia". This has had a lasting influence on those who propagate the famine-genocide myth, and was republished in 1984. The book makes little pretence of objectivity crediting Hearst correspondents, accounts from Nazi German and Fascist Italy, and reproducing allegations by unnamed 'travellers' and 'experts'.

Most photographic evidence of the famine-genocide theorists can be traced back either to Ammende's book or to Thomas Walker. The origins of the photographs are not documented, although it should be noted that Ammende was involved with famine relief work in 1921-2. The pictures are said to have been taken in the streets and squares of Kharkov in the summer of 1933, although only 10 of 26 appear to show urban scenes. There are no signs or landmarks to help set them in context. "Human Life in Russia" contains additional pictures that did not appear in the German edition. These are claimed to have been taken by Dr Ditloff, director of the German Government Agricultural concession in the north Caucuses. One might wonder how a Nazi functionary came to be wandering freely around the Ukraine taking photographs, but in any case in later publications the same photographs are either unattributed or attributed to a completely different source. In fact, some pictures have been identified as coming from the 1922 famine, and some show winter scenes despite apparently having been taken in summer. Other publications use the same pictures either with no accreditation or accredited to Thomas Walker, despite the fact that they were used to portray events in 1932/3 and Walker claimed to have taken them in the spring of 1934.

It is clear that the photographic evidence is fraudulent, and was used primarily as part of a campaign to undermine and discredit the Soviet Union. Despite this, they continue to be used to this day.

Cold War

The famine genocide campaign of the 1930s leaned heavily on dubious right wing sources and was not accepted by mainstream historians at the time, leading some Ukrainian nationalists to speak of a pro-Soviet, left wing or even Jewish conspiracy to suppress the truth. In the 1950s the Nationalists published books such as "The Black Deeds of the Kremlin" to propagate their interpretation of history. A section is devoted to Nationalist allegations of Soviet mass executions during the 1930s in Vynnitsa. Unearthed during Nazi occupation in 1943, the graves were examined by a Nazi commission and used in propaganda films. Post war testimony by German soldiers revealed however, that this was a Nazi propaganda deception, the bodies being those of Jews executed by the SS and Ukrainian militia.

The gruesome allegations of cannibalism in volume 2 of "Black Deeds" has lead to it being referred to as the "Ukrainian Nationalist cookbook"!

The numbers game

The famine genocide theorists are keen to establish that millions of people died in the Ukraine. Their methodology, as usual, is highly suspect. A "landmark study" by Dana Dalrymple published in "Soviet Studies", 1964 comes up with a figure of 5.5 million based on averaging the guesses of 20 Western journalists. One of them is our fictional friend Thomas Walker. Dalrymple states that Walker made his survey by breaking away from a guided tour, and had previously spent several years touring Russia. A similar figure by the Archbishop of Canterbury is also quoted; this enthusiastic supporter of Hitler had attempted to raise the famine issue in the House of Lords in 1934 when in fact the Foreign Office stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations against the Soviet government. Needless to say, the testimony of Sir John Maynard, a renowned famine expert who visited the Ukraine in the summer of 1933 and rejected tales of famine-genocide is dismissed by the Nationalists.

The Cold War campaign resurfaced in the 1980s with considerable publicity and scholarly backing from the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, long a centre of anticommunist research. In 1983, the book "The Ninth Circle", first published by Ukrainian Nationalists in 1953 was republished, edited and introduced by Harvard's Dr James Mace. A critical review of this book described it as being "a polemic, devoid of any documentation, and lacking in any scholarship". The author, it was pointed out, fails to give any details about his activity during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and makes not a single derogatory comment about the Nazis. Once again the Thomas Walker fakes are used as illustrations, despite the author claiming to have been an eyewitness to the famine. The "academic" Mace writing of Walker's material states, "American newspaperman like Thomas Walker wrote plainspoken and graphic accounts of the Famine based on what they had witnessed in the Ukraine in 1933". Note the convenient backdating of Walkers trip to 1933 and not 1934.

Another contribution to the famine genocide literature is Walter Dushnyk's "50 years ago: the Famine Holocaust in Ukraine". The foreword to this book is by none other than Dalrymple. Dushnyk's roots can be traced to Europe's pre-war fascist movement when he was active in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. Again a critical reviewer comments that this book, "rather than being a scholarly analysis, the material consists of a highly emotionally charged vitriolic polemic. Indeed it has little to do with scholarship and unquestionably is lacking in objectivity". Once again the same faked or undocumented photographs are used as illustrations. Dushnyk calculates the number of famine deaths by projecting an anticipated population growth, based on the 1926 census, onto the listed population census for the Ukraine in 1939. The difference is 7.5 million and this therefore becomes the number of famine victims. The nonsense of this methodology can be demonstrated by transposing to Canada in the 1930s and showing that 25% of Saskatchewan's population disappeared during the great depression. In fact, the population of the Ukraine increased in real terms from 1926 - 1939 by almost 3.4 million. Whilst it is not possible to give an accurate figure for the numbers of famine victims, the claims of people like Dalrymple, Mace and Dushnyk have been shown up as extreme exaggerations fabricated to strengthen their political allegations of genocide.

Harvest of deception

The famine-genocide campaign reached a climax in 1986 with the publication of Robert Conquest's book "Harvest of Sorrow", and the film produced by the famine research committee of the St Vladimir Institute, "Harvest of Despair". The film is full of the old undocumented pictures, and relies heavily on interviews with former Nazis and Ukrainian collaborators, as well as defectors from the Soviet Union; even Malcolm Muggeridge pops up for a short appearance. The film’s producers apparently viewed more than a million feet of stock footage of film, before selecting a mere 720 feet for use. Instead of any documented evidence of the famine being presented, a montage of undocumented stills are shown including the Walker/Ditlofff pictures, 1921/2 famine pictures, and others from Nazi propaganda publications. With breathtaking disregard for the truth, some scenes borrow from film of the civil war, and Soviet films of the 1920s. In essence, it seems that the film makers scrounged through the archives looking for bits and pieces of old ‘war-and-starvation’ shots that were then spliced into the film to great subliminal effect, bound together by a narrative and interspersed with partisan interviews. So much has even been admitted by some of those involved, yet the film has been widely shown and praised, including on British television. The makers even received grants and logistical support for the National Film Board of Canada and another publicly funded body, Multiculturalism Canada. "Harvest of Despair" was clearly no objective documentary as is claimed, but rather a crude cold war propaganda exercise.

Conquest's book "Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror famine" has emerged as the best attempt of the famine-genocidists at legitimacy. Conquest's right wing affiliations and his holocaust denials are now well known. At one time he was employed by the British Secret Service's disinformation project, the Information Research Department, key targets being 'the third world' and the 'Russians'. Conquest's earlier work "The Great Terror" had alleged that only 5-6 million perished in the 1932/3 period and only half of them in the Ukraine. By 1983 Conquest, however, had upped his estimates to 14 million and extended famine conditions to 1937! Such revisions coincided handily with the 50th anniversary commemorations of the famine.

Conquest presents the various nationalist cliques who held parts of the Ukraine during the Russian civil war and foreign intervention as bona fide governments. The mass slaughter of Ukrainian Jews carried out under nationalist 'independence' in 1918-19 is dismissed in 3 words. The Nazi occupation of the Ukraine is presented implicitly as a breakdown between periods of Soviet 'terror' and the liberation from the Nazis as Soviet 'reoccupation'. There are many examples in the book of Conquest's lack of scholarship. One example is him quoting from accounts by a foreign correspondent who turns out to be none other than Thomas Walker, the man who never was. In his reference note for the quote he even moves the date of the Hearst article from 1935 to February 1933. It is worth repeating the observations of American historian J Arch Getty on the quality of this kind of historical research:

"Grand analytical generalisations have come from second hand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp stories ("my friend met Bukharin's wife in a camp and she said...") have become primary sources on Soviet central political decision making .... the need to generalise from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed rumours into sources and has equated repetition of stories with confirmation".

Whereas serious historians do not accept hearsay and rumour as historical fact, contrast this with Conquest's stated position that "Truth can only percolate in the form of hearsay" and "on political matters basically the best, though not infallible source is rumour".

The famine

Coming now to the famine itself and its causes, the factors of drought and sabotage during the process of collectivisation are generally given little attention by right wing historians. Interestingly, in "A History of the Ukraine" by Mikhail Hrushevsky - described by the Nationalists themselves as "Ukraine's leading historian" - we read that "Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions; and during the winter of 1932-3 a great famine, like that of 1921-2 swept across Soviet Ukraine". Nowhere does this history suggest that the famine was deliberate and aimed against Ukrainians, and in fact more space is devoted to the famine of 1921-22. There are many references to drought conditions in the Ukraine in 1931 and 1932. Even Ewald Ammende in his "Human Life in Russia" refers to climatic and natural causes of the famine.

While drought was a contributing factor, the main cause of the famine was the struggle around collectivisation of the countryside in this period. In 1928 there were millions of small scale peasant farms, three quarters of the land was sown by hand, one third of the crop areas was harvested by sickle and scythe, 40% of the crop was threshed by flail. Over one quarter of peasant households possessed no draught animals or farming implements, and 47% had only ploughs. The drive to collectivisation was a key feature of the first five year plan launched in 1929. The small minority of rich peasants, the kulaks, opposed socialisation of agriculture and fought against collectivisation with an organised campaign of large-scale destruction. The struggle in some areas including the Ukraine approached civil war scale. Visiting foreign observers at the time noted that kulak opposition took the form of slaughtering their cattle and horses rather than having them collectivised. From 1928-33 the number of horses in the Soviet Union fell from 30 to 15 million, cattle from 70 to 38 million, sheep and goats from 147 to 50 million. Some kulaks burned down the property of collectives and even burned their own crops and seed grain. Many famine-genocide theorists discount kulak sabotage, but others offer enthusiastic descriptions celebrating the opposition to Soviet planning. In addition the famine was compounded by typhus epidemics which undoubtedly claimed many lives. By 1933 there was a successful harvest, enormous efforts were put into improving collective farms and providing mechanised equipment.

Subsequent huge increases in agricultural and industrial output in the Ukraine leading up to the second world war give the lie to allegations or 7 - 15 million starvation deaths only seven years earlier. In addition, the record of Ukrainian resistance to the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist auxiliaries was exemplary. In the largest eastern portion of the Ukraine loyalty was overwhelming and active. There were over half a million organised Soviet guerrillas, and four and a half million ethnic Ukrainians fought in the Soviet army. The Ukrainian nationalist histories acknowledge this, and one can only wonder at the ability of a nation to mobilise such numbers of military aged males in the light of Nationalist claims about famine victims. The reality was that for the bulk of the Ukrainian peasants, workers and the professionals newly emerged from those classes, the Soviet system had demonstrated overwhelming economic and cultural advantages.

The only place where the Nationalists found any kind of base during the Nazi occupation was in what had been up to 1939 Polish Galicia; this is where the Nazis did their bulk of recruiting for the fascist police and SS units. An examination of what happened during the Nazi occupation is revealing not only in terms of the popular support for the Soviets demonstrated by the people of the Ukraine, but also for the role played by the Ukrainian Nationalists.

Collaboration and collusion

In June 1941 the Nazi army entered Lviv, capital of the Western Ukraine. In its vanguard came the German-uniformed Nachtigall Battalion of Ukrainian Nationalists. During the first three days of July the Nachtigall Battalion slaughtered seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lwow. Non-Jewish writers, intellectuals and professionals known to be hostile to Nazism were also killed. In the first 8 months of Nazi occupation 15% of Galician Jews - 100,000 people - were slaughtered by the joint actions of the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. Many thousands of Nationalists who fled to Germany and elsewhere in the wake of the retreating Nazi armies had to cover up their personal and collective guilt in the holocaust and betrayal of their country. Anti-semitic and fascist themes run deep through the history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Leaders of the Ukrainian Nationalists were on the payroll of the Nazi party before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Ukrainian Nationalist battalions were trained in Germany before the war and some were used in the invasion of Poland. The Nachtigall and Roland Ukrainian volunteer detachments fought with the German army and in late 1941 were reorganised into a Police Battalion and employed in Byelorussia. Despite this being well known, the famine genociders portray the nationalists as having fought against both Hitler and Stalin and somehow on a par with the French resistance. Similarly distorted is the role of the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division (also known as the Halychyna Division). Formed in 1943 its main function was brutal anti-partisan work. Even after German withdrawal from the Ukraine, nationalists stayed behind and continued to harass Soviet supply lines. Nationalist troops served Hitler in Ukraine, Poland, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Ukrainian collaborators assisted in the murder of hundreds of thousands in death camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, Yanowska and Trawniki. Such were the "anti-Nazi" credentials of those who nationalists today would present as "national liberation fighters", "heroes of the Ukrainian people" and "patriots who struggled for a free Ukraine".

Ukraine acknowledges fakes in a photo exhibition about its Stalin-era famine
Ukraine has extended formal apologies after acknowledging fakes in a Sebastopol photo exhibition about its Soviet-era famine in the early 1930s. Several pictures actually show sufferers of a 1920s famine event on the Volga, and several others, malnourished Americans from the time of the Great Depression. Experts appearing on Russian TV suspected deliberate falsification.

Ukraine has extended formal apologies after acknowledging fakes in a Sebastopol photo exhibition about its Soviet-era famine in the early 1930s. Several pictures actually show sufferers of a 1920s famine event on the Volga, and several others, malnourished Americans from the time of the Great Depression.

Experts appearing on Russian TV suspected deliberate falsification.

Ukraine struggles to portray its 1930s famine as an instance of Soviet genocide of the Ukrainian people. In fact, however, the famine was the result of Stalinist expropriation policies and killed millions of people in the Volga area, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan, as well as Ukraine.
Read more: Ukraine acknowledges fakes in a photo exhibition about its Stalin-era famine - News - The Voice of Russia: News, Breaking news, Politics, Economics, Business, Russia, International current events, Expert opinion, podcasts, Video

And yet we have willing dupes repeating the lies of Ukrainian fascists


I lost 4 of my family in the holocaust to these type vermin, and here we have people repeating the lies of the fascist swine

 

[Luddly Neddite]

 

[Pheonixops]

Well, the problem is we HAVE been meddling since Churchill gave that Iron Curtain Speech in 1946 or so

Agreed, but I am referring to the so-called "post- Cold War" era. I don't think that we should have tried to get some of the former Soviet Republics to join our gang (NATO). If anything; we should have tried to get Russia to join first.

NATO was formed exclusively as a coalition against the Warsaw Pact.

NATO still exists as a buffer to Russian aggression.

Russia, even before 1917, was one of the World's Great Powers.

It still is.

Why would we try to get Russia to join an organization that was formed, and still exists, for the sole reason of fighting it?

Makes no sense to me

Because we were trying to head in the direction of better relations with Russia. We both have a common enemy, we could bolster trade between two Our nations, and we could consolidate military power if the need arises.

Oh, there are plenty of Warsaw Pact nations who are now part of NATO.

Member states of NATO - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Steinlight]

Guno is right on one thing in his diatribe, you can't compare the Holomodor to the "Holocaust". The Holomodor actually happened.