In Search of a Soviet Holocaust

[Berianidze]

In Search of a SOVIET HOLOCAUST

A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right

By Jeff Coplon

Originally published in the Village Voice (New York City), January 12, 1988.

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies.... The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed."

-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

The girl is dying. She looks about five years old, but we know she may be older, diminished by hunger. She leans wearily against a gate. Her long hair falls lank about bare shoulders. Her head rests against her arm. He neck is bent, like a stalk in parched earth. Her eyes are the worse -- large and dark, glazed yet still wistful. The child is dying, starving, and we feel guilty for our witness...

The Ukrainian émigrés who made Harvest of Despair knew a gripping image when they saw one. The black-and-white still, played over an arching, minor-mode chorus, was chosen to close the Canadian documentary on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. The same photography was used to promote the film, to symbolize a long-dormant cause célèbre: a "man-made" famine, "deliberately engineered" by Stalin to crush Ukrainian nationalism and cow a stubborn peasantry into permanent collectivization. Seven million Ukrainians were killed, the narrator tells us, as "a nation the size of France [was] strangled by hunger."

The result, intoned William F. Buckley, whose Firing Line showed the film last November, was "perhaps the greatest holocaust of the century."

The term "holocaust" still burns the ears, even in our jaded time. As we watch the film and see corpses piled in fields, bloated bodies sprawled in streets, pale skeletons grasping for bits of bread, we wonder: How can such a terrible story have been suppressed so long?

Here is how: The story is a fraud.

The starving girl, it turns out, wasn't found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her pictures was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cynical of swindles -- a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revisionism: a denial of Hitler's holocaust against the Jews.

There was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possibly one or two million, Ukrainians died -- the minority from starvation, the majority from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffering. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.

In 1932, the Soviet Union was in crisis. The cities had suffered food shortages since 1928. Grain was desperately needed for export and foreign capital, both to fuel the first Five-Year Plan and to counter the growing war threat from Germany. In addition, the Communist Party's left wing, led by Stalin, had come to reject the New Economic Plan, which restored market capitalism to the countryside in the 1920s.

In this context, collectivization was more than a vehicle for a cheap and steady grain supply to the state. It was truly a "revolution from above," a drastic move towards socialism, and an epochal change in the mode of production. There were heavy casualties on both sides -- hundreds of thousands of kulaks (rich peasants) deported to the north, thousands of party activists assassinated. Production superseded politics, and many peasants were coerced rather than won to collective farms. Vast disruption of the 1932 harvest ensued (and not only in the Ukraine), and many areas were hard-pressed to meet the state's grain requisition quotas.

Again, Stalin and the Politburo played major roles. "But there is plenty of blame to go around," as Sovietologist John Arch Getty recently noted in The London Review of Books. "It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."

Such a balanced analysis, however, has never satisfied Ukrainian nationalists in the United States and Canada, for whom the "terror-famine" is an article of faith and communal rallying point. For decades after the fact, their obsession was confined to émigré journals. Only of late has it achieved a sort of mainstream credibility -- in Harvest of Despair, shown on PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and at numerous college campuses; in The Harvest of Sorrow, an Oxford University Press account by Robert Conquest; in a "human rights" curriculum, now available to every 10th-grade social studies teacher in New York State; and in the federally-funded Ukraine Famine Commission, now into its second year of "hearings."

After 50 years on the fringe, the Ukraine famine debate is finally front and center. While one-note faminologists may teach us little real history, they reveal how our sense of history is pulled by political fashion until it hardens into the taffy of conventional wisdom. And how you can fool most of the people most of the time -- especially when you tell them what they want to hear.

The Film

Harvest of Despair was the brainchild of Marco Carynnyk, a Ukrainian translator and poet who lives in Toronto. In 1983, Carynnyk found a sponsor in St. Vladimir's Institute, which formed a Ukrainian Famine Research Committee of well-to-do émigrés. The committee raised $200,000 for the documentary, including a major grant from the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (a spiritual descendant of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), and a loan from the similarly right-wing World Congress of Free Ukrainians.

As chief researcher for the film, Carynnyk had two major functions -- to locate and interview famine survivors, and to find archival photographs. Talking heads would not be enough to make a case for genocide. To gain its intended shock value, the film would have to show what the famine was like. "There can be no question," assessed the Winnipeg Free Press, "that without the films and photographs uncovered from the 1932-33 famine, the film would lose much of its authority."

"I gave them two sets of photographs," Carynnyk said. "I told them, `Here are the ones from the 1930s, and here are the ones from 1921-22.' But in the cutting of the film, they were all mixed up. I said this can't be done, that it will leave the film open to criticism... My complaints were ignored. They just didn't think it was important."

One problem, Carynnyk said, was that producer Slawko Nowitski faced an impossible five-month deadline to ready the film during the famine's 50th anniversary. (In fact, Harvest of Despair would not be completed until late 1984). But the researcher believes it was more than mere sloppiness at work. "The research committee was more interested in propagandistic purposes than historical scholarship," said Carynnyk, who has sued the Famine Research Committee for copyright violation. "They were quite prepared to cut corners to get their point across."

In October 1983, Carynnyk left the project -- "relieved of his duties," according to Nowitsky, "because he did not produce the required material." Three years and seven awards later, the lid blew last November at a meeting of the Toronto Board of Education, where terror-famine proponents were pressing to include the film in the city's high school curriculum. The show stopped cold when Doug Tottle, former editor of a Winnipeg labor magazine, stood up and declared that "90 per cent" of the film's archival photographs were plagiarized from the 1921-22 famine.

Tottle traced several of the most graphic photos, including that of the starving girl, to famine relief sources of the 1920s. (Some of these resurfaced in 1933 as anti-Soviet propaganda in Völkischer Beobachter, an official Nazi party organ). Other pictures were lifted from the 1936 edition of Human Life in Russia, by Ewald Ammende, an Austrian relief worker in the earlier Volga famine. Ammende attributes them to a "Dr. F. Dittloff," a German engineer who supposedly took the photos in the summer of 1933. The Dittloff pictures have their own bastard pedigrees --three from 1922 Geneva-based relief bulletins, others from Nazi publications. Still other Dittloffs were also claimed as original by Robert Green, a phony journalist and escaped convict who provided famine material to the profascist Hearst chain in 1935. Green, a convicted forger who used the alias "Thomas Walker," reported that he took the photos in the spring of 1934 -- almost a year after the Ukraine famine had ended, and in direct contradiction of Dittloff.

Although Green was exposed by The Nation and several New York dailies by 1935, right-wing émigrés have used his spurious photos for decades. "It's not that these pictures were suddenly discovered in 1983 and accidentally misdated" in the film, Tottle noted.

Tottle had done his homework. Carynnyk confirmed that "very few" photos in Harvest of Despair could be authenticated, and that none of the famine film footage was from 1932-33. But the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee decided to stonewall. At first they insisted that any photos from the 1920s were used only when the film discussed the Volga famine -- a blatant evasion, since that segment lasts a scant 28 seconds and uses only two still photos, neither especially potent. Committee chairman Wasyl Janischewskyj recently softened that stance: "We have researched further and made discoveries that some photos we thought were from 1932-33 were not ... We are now having further deep investigations of these pictures."

In the main, however, the filmmakers have sought to justify their fraud. "You have to have visual impact," said Orest Subtelny, the film's historic adviser. "You want to show what people dying from a famine look like. Starving children are starving children." A documentary, added producer Nowitski, must rely on "emotional truth" more than literal facts.

"These people have never attempted to refute my claims," said Tottle. (His book on the subject, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism, will be published this fall by Toronto's Progressive Books, an outlet for Soviet releases). "They have tried to lie and cover it up, but they have not tried to refute it."

Nor have the nationalists refuted Tottle's contention that several "witnesses" in the film were Nazi collaborators, including two German diplomats who served in the Third Reich and an Orthodox Church layman who blessedly rose to bishop while the Third Reich occupied the Ukraine in 1942.

"Just because they're collaborators," countered Nowitski, "does that mean we cannot believe anything they tell us? Just because they're Nazis is no reason to doubt the authenticity of what happened."

This slant pervades émigré research on the famine. Soviet sources are rejected out of hand, while Nazi sources (or known liars like Walker and Dittloff) are accepted unconditionally. In the Göbbels tradition, the nationalists' brief always serves their anti-Communism --no matter how many facts twist slowly in the process. Harvest of Despair follows unholy footsteps, and never breaks stride.

[Berianidze]

The Book

According to a 1978 article in The Guardian of London, Robert Conquest got his big break shortly after World War II, when he joined the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. Staffed heavily by émigrés, the IRD's mission was a covert "propaganda counter-offensive" against the Soviet Union. It was heady, hands-on work for a young writer, a chance to slant media coverage of Russia by adding political "spin" to Eastern bloc press releases and funneling them to top reporters. The journalists knew little about the IRD, beyond the names of their mysterious contacts. The public knew nothing at all, even as their opinions were being sculpted.

After Conquest left the IRD in 1956, the agency suggested that he package some of his handiwork into a book. That first compilation was distributed in the US by Fred Praeger, who had previously published several books at the request of the CIA.

The shy and courtly Conquest has come a long way since then, from gray propagandist to éminence grise. He is now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, as well as an associate of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute. But his heart and his pen never left the IRD. The Soviet Union would be Conquest's lifetime obsession. He churned out book after book on the horrors of communism: The Nation Killer, Where Marx Went Wrong, Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps. His landmark work of 1968, The Great Terror, focused on Stalin's purges of the late 1930s. But by 1984, his work had turned surreal; What To Do When the Russians Come was the literary equivalent of that politico-teen-disaster flick, Red Dawn. Yet he remained a mainstream heavyweight, coasting on reputation, his excesses accepted as Free World zeal.

In 1981, the Ukrainian Research Institute approached Conquest with a major project: a book on the 1932-33 famine. The pot was sweetened by an $80,000 subside from the Ukrainian National Association, a New Jersey-based group with a venerable, hard-right tradition; the UNA's newspaper, Swoboda, was banned by Canada during World War II for its pro-German sympathies. (The grant was earmarked for Conquest's research expenses, including the assistance of James Mace, a junior fellow at the URI).

The nationalists knew they'd be getting their money's worth. At the time, faminology was virgin ground. There was little source material available, since the Soviet archives remain sealed. More to the point, most non-émigré historians viewed the 1932-33 famine as an outgrowth of collectivization, not a political phenomenon of itself, much less a stab at genocide. But Conquest was different. In his Terror book, he'd already concluded that more than three million Ukrainians were killed by the famine. Here, clearly, was the right man for the job, a man who once stated: "Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay ... basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor." And with no one on record to dispute the issue, Conquest's rumors could rule.

In The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest outdoes himself. He weaves his terror-famine from unverifiable (and notoriously biased) émigré accounts. He leans on reportage from ex-Communist converts to the American Way. He cites both "Walker" and Ammende. Black Deeds of the Kremlin, a period piece published by Ukrainian émigrés in 1953, is footnoted no less than 145 times.

Conquest can be deftly selective when it suits his purpose. He borrows heavily from Lev Kopelev's The Education of a True Believer, but ignores Kopelev when the latter recalls Ukrainian villages that were relatively untouched by famine, or relief efforts by a Communist village council.

By confirming people's worst suspicions of Stalin's rule, The Harvest of Sorrow has won favorable reviews from The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. But leading scholars on this era are less impressed. They challenge Conquest's contention that Ukrainian priests and intelligentsia -- two major counterrevolutionary camps -- were repressed more ruthlessly than anywhere else in the country. They point out that the 1932-33 famine was hardly confined to the Ukraine, that it reached deep into the Black Earth region of central Russia. They note that Stalin had far less control over collectivization than is widely assumed, and that radical district leaders made their own rules as they went along.

Most vehemently of all, these experts reject Conquest's hunt for a new holocaust. The famine was a terrible thing, they agree, but it decidedly was not genocide.

"There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians," said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. "That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense."

"This is crap, rubbish," said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground in social history. "I am an anti- Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology."

"I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of SUNY- Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. "Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?"

These premier Sovietologists dismiss Conquest for what he is -- an ideologue whose serious work is long behind him. But Dallin stands as a liberal exception to the hard-liners of his generation, while Lewin and Viola remain Young Turks who happen to be doing the freshest work on this period. In Soviet studies, where rigor and objectivity count for less than the party line, where fierce anti-Communists still control the prestigious institutes and first-rank departments, a Conquest can survive and prosper while barely cracking a book.

"He's terrible at doing research," said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College." He misuses sources, he twists everything."

Then there are those who love to twist, and shout --to use scholarly disinformation for their own, less dignified purposes. In the latest catalogue for the Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler At My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its terror-famine, the catalogue notes: "The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been suppressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real `Holocaust' might compete with a Holohoax."

For those unacquainted with Noontide jargon, the "Holohoax" refers to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.

The Curriculum

In 1982, the New York State Department of Education set out to blaze a new trail: a definitive curriculum on the Nazi holocaust. The department assembled a distinguished review committee, including such Holocaust experts as Terrence Des Pres and Raul Hilberg. It assigned the actual writing to three top-rated social studies teachers. The finished two- volume project, which went to classrooms in the fall of 1985, does credit to everyone involved. It is a balanced mix of archival documents, survivor memoirs, and scholarly essays.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the high schools: The Ukrainian nationalists stole the show. Their point man was Bohdan Vitvitsky, a New Jersey attorney and author who was invited to join the state's advisory council, which would steer the curriculum's development. Vitvitsky's first move was to gain inclusion of an excerpt of his book on Slavic victims of the nazis. His second victory was to eliminate all but passing mention of Ukrainian war criminals.

"I took the position they should be dealt with, "said Stephen Berk, a Union College history professor and advisory council member, "but Vitvitsky insisted there should be no dwelling on [Nazi] collaborators." (The Catholic lobby didn't fare so well: over its protests, the curriculum includes a critical assessment of Pope Pus XII's inaction.)

But Vitvitsky's major coup, helped along by a nationalist letter campaign, was to install material on the Ukraine famine of 1932-33. In the curriculum's second draft in 1984, the famine was treated as a 17-page precursor chapter to the second Holocaust volume -- a plan which met heated resistance from Jewish groups. By the time the material reached the schools last fall, however, it had swollen into a separate third volume, with 90 pages on the "forced famine," and another 52 on "human rights violations" in the Ukraine.

A key player in the transition was Assemblyman William Larkin (Conservative Republican, New Windsor), a retired Army colonel, assistant minority whip, and old friend of Gordon Ambach, then the state commissioner of education. Larkin had ample incentive to help; his district contains about 8000 ethnic Ukrainians. He arranged "four or five" meetings between the state education staff and 20 upstate Ukrainian nationalists in 1985. He also enlisted other Republican assemblymen to press for the famine book, and says he spoke personally to Ambach.

The commissioner "offered to do anything he could," Larkin said. "But if we didn't go up there in force, if we didn't push it, it wouldn't have happened."

By most accounts, the political pressure was intense -- enough to squeeze a department deemed relatively apolitical. The Ukrainians mounted "an enormous letter-writing campaign with the Board of Regents," said Robert Maurer, the executive deputy commissioner. "There were phone calls and visits. There's not often that much interest in curriculum matters; it was very unusual."

The famine boosters found an especially sympathetic ear in Regent Emlyn I. Griffith, then chairman of the committee that unanimously endorsed Volume Three in 1985 -- a vote which ensured its future use. "As a member of a minority people put down by a majority government, I empathized" with the Ukrainian nationalists, said Griffith, an ethnic Welshman. "There was s significant lobbying effort ... It was persuasive. It wasn't threatening, it was positive."

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly who made the fatal decision on Volume Three. Griffith said his committee acted on a strong staff recommendation. Ambach failed to return phone calls for this story. Maurer lodged responsibility with Deputy Commissioner Gerald Freeborne, who in turn pointed to Program Development Director Edward Lalor, who referred questions to a low-level official named George Gregory, the chairman of the Human Rights Series advisory committee.

Shrouded by this corporate haze, Vitvitsky ran in an open field. No one challenged his basic premise. The famine `certainly does represent another example of genocide," Gregory asserted. "It was a planned attempt by Stalin to eliminate the Ukrainian people."

("George is the consummate bureaucrat," said one educator involved with the series. "His experience is mainly in grade- school -curricula -- like `Appreciating Our Indian Heritage,' or `The importance of the Finger Lakes Region.' when I started up there, he really didn't know anything about the Holocaust.")

To write the famine material, Gregory hired Walter Litynsky, a Troy High School biology teacher and a local chairman of Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine. For the job of principal reviewer Litynsky recommended James Mace, the Conquest protégé who also directs the Ukraine Famine Commission under a $382,000 congressional appropriation. Mace and Litynsky proceeded to stack the review committee with Ukrainian academics, the omnipresent Vitvitsky, and four upstate nationalists. "No contrary [review] letters were either solicited or received," Berk acknowledged. "I'm sorry this came out, because it was distorted -- but I felt it was a fait accompli."

When asked about contrasting viewpoints from such scholars as Lewin and Viola, Gregory was unmoved. "Quite frankly, we have not heard of any of them," he said. "We tried to present a balanced point of view. We didn't ask for the soviet opinion, since the soviet view was that the famine never happened. [In fact, the Soviets now concede that a famine was "impossible to avoid," because of drought, mismanagement, and kulak sabotage.] We relied heavily on James Mace; he's the leading historian of that time period."

This paean would startle academe, where Mace's work is infrequently read and rarely found in footnotes, the baseline of a scholar's importance. He is widely regarded as a right-wing polemicist, an indifferent researcher who has made a checkered career out of faminology.

"I doubt he could have gotten a real academic job," Manning said. "Soviet studies is a very competitive field these days -- there's much weeding out after the Ph.D. If he hadn't hopped on this political cause, he would be doing research for a bank, or running an export-import business."

The Mace-Litynsky partnership yielded a predictable end product -- the undistilled nationalist line. The state curriculum on the Ukraine famine apes both Harvest of Despair and The Harvest of Sorrow. (The education department now supplies the embattled documentary, as an audiovisual supplement, to any interested teacher.) Like the film and the book, the curriculum features faked photos from Ammende, dubious atrocity tales (including 16 selections from Black Deeds of the Kremlin), and sections of the "Walker" Hearst series, all without caveat. Like Conquest and Nowitski, the famine volume red-baits anyone who challenged the genocide scenario, such as New York Times reporter Walter Duranty. It goes Conquest one better by referring to the region as Ukraine, with no article, in deference to a sovereignty that exists only in nationalist fables.

The curriculum is most obviously exposed in its estimate of the famine death toll: "..it is generally accepted that about 7 million Ukrainians or about 22% of the total Ukrainian population died of starvation in a government- planned and -controlled famine."

How did Litynsky arrive at this talismanic figure, cited over and over again in émigré literature? "I don't pretend to be an expert on this subject," the biology teacher said. "This is not my field. I had a list of people who went from 1.5 million to 10 million. In my reading I saw seven million used more than any other figure, and I decided that was realistic. It got to the point where it was so confusing that you had to decide." (Mace has opted for 7.9 million Ukrainian famine deaths in his own work, with an "irreducible minimum" of 5.5 million. Conquest fixes on seven million famine deaths, including six million Ukrainians, with no appendix to show how his numbers are derived.)

But the magic number, like the genocide theory it shoulders, simply can't pass scrutiny. Sergei Maksudov, a Soviet émigré scholar much cited by Mace and Conquest, has now concluded that the famine caused 3.5 million premature deaths in the Ukraine -- 700,000 from starvation, and the rest from diseases "stimulated" by malnutrition.

Even Maksudov's lower estimates are open to challenge. Writing in Slavic Review, demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver maintain that limited census data make a precise famine death count impossible. Instead, they offer a probable range of 3.2 to 5.5 million "excess deaths" for the entire Soviet Union from 1926 to 1939 -- a period that covers collectivization, the civil war in the countryside, the purges of the late `30s, and major epidemics of typhus and malaria. According to these experts, and Maksudov as well, Mace and Conquest make the most primitive of errors: They overestimate fertility rates and underrate the impact of assimilation, through which many Ukrainians were "redesignated" as Russians in the 1939 census. As a result, the cold warriors confuse population deficits (which included unborn children) with excess deaths.

Which leaves us with a puzzle: Wouldn't one or two or 3.5 million famine-related deaths be enough to make an anti- Stalinist argument? Why seize a wildly inflated figure that can't possibly be supported? The answer tells much about the Ukrainian nationalist cause, and about those who abet it.

"they're always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million," observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. "It makes the reader think: `My god it's worse than the Holocaust.'"

[Berianidze]

Hidden Agendas

Your husband's courage and dedication to liberty will serve as a continuing source of inspiration to all those striving for freedom and self-determination.

-- letter from President Reagan to the widow of Yaroslav Stetsko, ranking OUN terrorist, murderer, and Nazi collaborator, read by retired general John Singlaub at a conference of the World Anti-Communist League, September 7, 1986.

In the panel discussion that followed Harvest of Despair on PBS last fall, Conquest addressed the issue of Ukrainian war crimes. "It's not the case," he said blandly, "that the Ukrainian nationalist organizations collaborated with the Germans."

Once again, the aging faminologist had tripped on the public record. It is one thing to suggest, rightly, that Ukrainian nationalism had little popular support among the peasantry. (It was actually a narrow, urban, middle-class movement.) Millions of Ukrainians fought with the Red Army and partisans. Many others can be accused of nothing worse than indifference, and a smaller number risked their lives to save Jews from the Germans. But on the matter of the OUN, the principal nationalist group from the 1930s on, the record is quite clear: It was fascist from the start.

In its original statement of purpose in 1929, the OUN betrays a raw Nazi influence: "Do not hesitate to commit the greatest crime, if the good of the Cause demands it ... Aspire to expand the strength, riches, and size of the Ukrainian State even by means of enslaving foreigners." This sentiment was echoed in a 1941 letter to the German Secret Service from the OUN's dominant Bandera wing: "Long live greater independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles, and Germans. Poles behind the [river] San, Germans to Berlin, Jews to the gallows."

As the authoritative John Armstrong, a staunch anti- Communist and pro-Ukrainian, has written: "The theory and teachings of the Nationalists were very close to Fascism, and in some respects, such as the insistence on `racial purity,' even went beyond the original Fascist doctrines."

But the OUN storm troopers, like any terrorist group, prized action over theory. Their wartime brutalities have been amply documented (Voice, February 11, 1986, "To Catch a Nazi,"). They recruited for the Waffen SS, pulled the triggers at Babi Yar and Sobibor, ran the gas chamber at Treblinka. During their brief interludes of Nazi-sponsored "independence" (in the Carpatho-Ukraine in 1939 and in Galicia in 1941), pogroms were the order of the day, in the spirit of their revered Simon Petlura. They strove to outdo the Nazis at every turn.

And when the Third Reich fell, the nationalists fled -- to Munich, to Toronto, and (with the covert aid of the US State Department, which viewed them as potential anti-Soviet guerrillas) to New York and Chicago and Cleveland.

This is not ancient history. The Ukrainian émigré groups still contain more than a few former OUN members, and many of their sons and daughters. The nationalists still heroize their wartime past. On occasion their old passions surface as well -- as in Why Is One Holocaust Worth More Than Others?, recently published by "Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army: "In 1933, the majority of the European and American press controlled by the Jews were silent about the famine."

From this perspective, the "conspiracy" lives on: "In (February) 1986 the Jewish newspaper Village Voice ... published one-and-one-half pages of accusations against a high-standing member of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Mykola Lebed."

And finally, most transparently: "Tens of millions of people have been killed since the Zionist Bolshevik Jews, backed by the Zionist-oriented Jewish international bankers, took over Russia."

Not surprisingly, Ukrainian émigrés are among the harshest and most powerful critics of Nazi-hunting. They have sought to kill both the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations and the Canadian Deschenes Commission -- and with good reason. Sol Littman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto, recently presented the commission with the names of 475 suspected Nazi collaborator. He reports that Ukrainians were "very heavily represented" on the list.

It may not be sheer coincidence that faminology took wing just after the OSI was commissioned in 1979. For here was a way to rehabilitate fascism -- to prove that Ukrainian collaborators were helpless victims, caught between the rock of Hitler and Stalin's hard place. To wit, this bit of psycho-journalism from the March 24 Washington Post, in a story on accused war criminal John "Ivan the Terrible" Demjanjuk: "The pivotal event in Demjanjuk's childhood was the great famine of the early 1930s, conceived by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a way of destroying the independent Ukrainian peasantry ... Several members of [Demjanjuk's] family died in the catastrophe."

Coupled with the old nationalist canard of "Judeo- Bolshevism," faminology could help justify anti-Semitism, collaboration, even genocide. An eye for an eye; a Nazi holocaust in return for a "Jewish famine."

Just as the Nazis used the OUN for their own ends, so has Reagan exploited the famine, from his purple-prosed commemoration of "this callous act" to his backing of the Mace commission. Faced with failing fascist allies around the world, from Nicaragua to South Africa, the US war lobby needs to boost anti-Communism as never before. Public enthusiasm to fight for the contras will not come easy. But if people could be convinced that Communism is worse than fascism; that Stalin was an insane monster, even worse than Hitler; that the seven million died in more unspeakable agony than the six million ... Well, we just might be set up for the next Gulf of Tonkin. One cannot appease an Evil Empire, after all.

As Conquest noted on PBS, after the starving girl's image finally faded from the screen: "This was a true picture we saw ... It instructs us about the world today."

It turns out that the picture is far from true -- that the purveyors of a famine genocide are stealing a piece of history and slicing it to order. It's a brash bit of larceny for Conquest and company, even within the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism. But if they say it loud enough and long enough, people just might listen. Lie bold enough and large enough, and -- as the man once said -- it just might stick.

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html / last modified 11 May 98 / furrg@alpha.montclair.edu /

[A. Radek]

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies.... The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed."
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

The girl is dying. She looks about five years old, but we know she may be older, diminished by hunger. She leans wearily against a gate. Her long hair falls lank about bare shoulders. Her head rests against her arm. He neck is bent, like a stalk in parched earth. Her eyes are the worse -- large and dark, glazed yet still wistful. The child is dying, starving, and we feel guilty for our witness...

The Ukrainian émigrés who made Harvest of Despair knew a gripping image when they saw one. The black-and-white still, played over an arching, minor-mode chorus, was chosen to close the Canadian documentary on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. The same photography was used to promote the film, to symbolize a long-dormant cause célèbre: a "man-made" famine, "deliberately engineered" by Stalin to crush Ukrainian nationalism and cow a stubborn peasantry into permanent collectivization. Seven million Ukrainians were killed, the narrator tells us, as "a nation the size of France [was] strangled by hunger."

The result, intoned William F. Buckley, whose Firing Line showed the film last November, was "perhaps the greatest holocaust of the century."

The term "holocaust" still burns the ears, even in our jaded time. As we watch the film and see corpses piled in fields, bloated bodies sprawled in streets, pale skeletons grasping for bits of bread, we wonder: How can such a terrible story have been suppressed so long?

Here is how: The story is a fraud.

The starving girl, it turns out, wasn't found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her pictures was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cynical of swindles -- a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revisionism: a denial of Hitler's holocaust against the Jews.

There was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possibly one or two million, Ukrainians died -- the minority from starvation, the majority from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffering. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.

In 1932, the Soviet Union was in crisis. The cities had suffered food shortages since 1928. Grain was desperately needed for export and foreign capital, both to fuel the first Five-Year Plan and to counter the growing war threat from Germany. In addition, the Communist Party's left wing, led by Stalin, had come to reject the New Economic Plan, which restored market capitalism to the countryside in the 1920s.

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html

Phony Film and Photographs

"The hour-long film ... depends heavily on still photographs of emaciated children and bodies being carted away to recreate the conditions in Ukraine in 1932."

"There can be no question that without the films and photographs uncovered from the 1932-33 famine, the film would lose much of its authority." 6

In 1935, a certain "Thomas Walker" published a five-part story on the famine in the chain of newspapers owned by the fanatical anti-Communist and pro-fascist tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Accompanying the series were photographs, supposedly of starving Ukrainian peasants, which Walker claimed he had taken personally. In March 1935, Louis Fischer, then a pro-Soviet reporter for The Nation, expressed some doubts about "Walker's" photos: "Mr Walker's photographs could easily date back to the Volga famine in 1921. many of them might have been taken outside the Soviet Union. They were taken at different seasons of the year ... One picture includes trees or shrubs with large leaves. Such leaves could not have grown by the `late spring' of Mr. Walker's alleged visit. Other photographs show winter and early fall backgrounds. Here is the Journal [Hearst's New York City newspaper] of the twenty-seventh. a starving, bloated boy of fifteen calmly poses naked for Mr. Walker. The next minute, in the same village, Mr. Walker photographs a man who is obviously suffering from the cold despite his thick sheepskin overcoat. The weather that spring must have been as unreliable as Mr. Walker to allow nude poses one moment and require furs the next."7

The famine stories ran in the Hearst press in February, 1935. Fischer's rejection of them appear early in march. By July, "Thomas Walker" was in a New York City jail, under arrest as Robert Green, an escaped convict from Colorado, where he was returned to serve out his sentence. Green admitted his photos were frauds, not taken in the Ukraine nor by himself. This was reported in all the New York City newspapers. The Daily Worker, paper of the then- revolutionary Communist Party USA, ran two detailed series about "Walker"/Green and some other phony accounts of the famine from July-20, 1935.

On November 17, 1986, Douglas Tottle, a Canadian researcher, exposed the sources of some of the fraudulent photos at a School Board meeting in Toronto, where Ukrainian nationalists and other anti-communists were trying to get the film and a course based upon it into the Toronto high school curriculum.

Stunned by Tottle's dramatic presentation, and in the presence of reporters from all the Toronto newspapers, Ukrainian nationalist professors began to run for cover. One of them, Orest Subtelny, admitted the still shots were from the 1921-22 famine but justified their use by saying the film lacked "impact" without them. "`You have to have visual impact. You want to show what people dying from a famine look like. Starving children are starving children,' said Subtelny. He offered no apologies for the deliberate attempt to mislead."

Another nationalist who had done research for the film is Marco Carynnyk. an article of his appeared in the November 1983 issue of Commentary, a US neo-conservative Zionist monthly, in which Carynnyk bitterly attacked Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty (New York Times Soviet correspondent during the `30s) for "covering up" the famine. but Tottle's revelations forced Carynnyk to admit he'd been a party to the real cover-up. According to the Toronto Star of November 20:

"Researcher Marco Carynnyk, who says he originated the idea of the film, says his concerns about questionable photographs were ignored.

Carynnyk said that none of the archival film footage used in the movie is of the Ukrainian famine and that `very few photos from `32-33' appear that can be traced as authentic.

http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html

Was the Stalin 'genocide' a media hoax?

[Gleb]

Of course it is a fraud. The funny thing is Ukranians themselves started believing this only after the West recognised it based on a fraudelent evidence and now blame Stalin for the famine.

[Ahknaton]

A fraudulent genocide. Imagine that.

[Crowley]

A fraudulent genocide. Imagine that.

Surely there are stringent laws against denying the Ukranian holocaust? People should be locked up, their reputations destroyed forever.

[humanist]

It's actually widely recognised by the best and latest Soviet historians, especially those who have access to the Soviet archives, that the Ukrainian famine was due largely to rather mundane factors -- poor tractor maintenance, incompetence at the lower and local levels, and drought. Look into the research of Getty, Tauger, Wheatcroft and Davies, all very mainstream historians; the last two mentioned devote themselves specifically to Famine research.

This isn't revisionism, this is general historical knowledge among scholars.

[Fade the Butcher]

A fraudulent genocide. Imagine that.

It should be illegal to deny the Soviet Holocaust. :p

[humanist]

It should be illegal to deny the Soviet Holocaust. :p
It won't be, because it has never, ever been an established truth. From the very beginning, and more so nowadays, the idea that the Famine was deliberate has been very seriously questioned, and no serious historian holds such a belief.

[Ahknaton]

It won't be, because it has never, ever been an established truth. From the very beginning, and more so nowadays, the idea that the Famine was deliberate has been very seriously questioned, and no serious historian holds such a belief.
What is "established truth"? I think you'll find it's a very slippery concept.

If free and open academic enquiry is sufficient to establish the falsity of the Ukranian famine being a deliberate genocide, why is it not trusted to establish the authenticity of the orthodox account of the Holocaust?

[humanist]

What is "established truth"? I think you'll find it's a very slippery concept.

If free and open academic enquiry is sufficient to establish the falsity of the Ukranian famine being a deliberate genocide, why is it not trusted to establish the authenticity of the orthodox account of the Holocaust?
I have nothing against Holocaust revisionism.

[Kodos]

The "terror famine" happened too, people denying that don't really have a leg to stand on either( neither do the holocaust deniers really) after Khruschev admitted it following Stalin's death.

[Damavand]

i think a more interesting question is this. why in the zionist media is it acceptable to question the soviet holocaust, even to laugh at it, but not the nazi holocaust?

[Leif]

The "terror famine" happened too, people denying that don't really have a leg to stand on either( neither do the holocaust deniers really) after Khruschev admitted it following Stalin's death.

I gave quite a bit of evidence to the contrary in this thread:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3241&page=2

All evidence brought forward by anti-Soviet forces has hitherto been refuted. I was willing to go on Bregowald's own word in the other thread, but his credibility is sinking as of late.

I ask you again, sir, when did Khrushchev admit to a deliberate famine? :rolleyes:

[Ahknaton]

i think a more interesting question is this. why in the zionist media is it acceptable to question the soviet holocaust, even to laugh at it, but not the nazi holocaust?
Because the moral double standard embraced by Zionist Jews who support nationalism for Jews in Israel but oppose it for Europeans in their respective national homelands can only be justified by the notion that the suffering of Jews at the hands of Gentiles is without parallel and therefore deserving of an exception to the rules that are applied to everyone else.

Since other genocides challenge the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they must be minimised or played down, as is the case with the initial post of this thread, which more or less asserted that Ukrainian suffering doesn't make the grade when compared with that of the Jews.

[Damavand]

Because the moral double standard embraced by Zionist Jews who support nationalism for Jews in Israel but oppose it for Europeans in their respective national homelands can only be justified by the notion that the suffering of Jews at the hands of Gentiles is without parallel and therefore deserving of an exception to the rules that are applied to everyone else.

Since other genocides challenge the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they must be minimised or played down, as is the case with the initial post of this thread, which more or less asserted that Ukrainian suffering doesn't make the grade when compared with that of the Jews.yes this i do agree, my question was of rhetorical nature. if a picture is made of the prophet being urinated upon, the jew says that is "free speech". if a paper is made showing scientific evidence that the nazi holocaust was exaggerated, the jew says "throw him in jail". only if brainwashed could one not notice the hypocrisy.

[Kodos]

I gave quite a bit of evidence to the contrary in this thread:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3241&page=2

All evidence brought forward by anti-Soviet forces has hitherto been refuted. I was willing to go on Bregowald's own word in the other thread, but his credibility is sinking as of late.

I ask you again, sir, when did Khrushchev admit to a deliberate famine? :rolleyes:


Have you read The Court of the Red Tsar?

[Ixtab]

Have you read The Court of the Red Tsar?The fact of the matter is that R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft are practically the only historians who have done the research on the Ukrainian famine, and are devoted specifically to Famine research. That you prefer the writings of others who merely write on the issue in passing (you mention here a work by Montefior, who has not done any particular analysis of the Ukrainian famine) over them is proof positive of your ignorance that you talk that of which you ought not to be talking.

I repeat the causes of the Ukrainian famine:
(1)poor climactic conditions
(2)failure of tractor and fertiliser policies
(3)incompetence at the lower and local levels.

You can also read all about the measures which were taken to alleviate the famine in any number of sources. With knowledge of the agricultural history of Russia and the Ukraine, you can likewise see that the famine was far from a 'unique' or special event in the USSR.

[Kodos]

With knowledge of the agricultural history of Russia and the Ukraine, you can likewise see that the famine was far from a 'unique' or special event in the USSR.

I never said that there were other bad famines in Russian history( though none I believe as severe).

[Ahknaton]

yes this i do agree, my question was of rhetorical nature. if a picture is made of the prophet being urinated upon, the jew says that is "free speech". if a paper is made showing scientific evidence that the nazi holocaust was exaggerated, the jew says "throw him in jail". only if brainwashed could one not notice the hypocrisy.
Indeed. I appreciate that your question was rhetorical, however we can both speculate differently as to the motivations behind this double standard. Obviously it serves multiple purposes.

[humanist]

Indeed. I appreciate that your question was rhetorical, however we can both speculate differently as to the motivations behind this double standard. Obviously it serves multiple purposes.
The reason Holocaust denial is in many countries not allowed is because
(1) it is thought to be political, and thought (correctly or incorrectly) that neo-Nazis are its main promoters, and
(2) it is considered gratuitous revisionism

Ukrainian famine researchers, on the other hand, are
(1) disinterested historians, none of the prominent such historians are communists, they aren't doing it for any overt political purposes, not trying to resurrect communism-- in fact the greater proportion of them are typical anti-communists who sometimes believe that the famine is an instance not of genocide but of incompetence in the Soviet Union. And
(2) these historians aren't even 'revisionists'!

So, you can say, with some grounding, that the Holocaust denier is merely promoting neo-Nazism or anti-Semitism (not necessarily true, but one must admit, there is some sense in this); while the Ukrainian famine historian cannot logically be called a promoter of Stalinism, in fact they are invariably anti-Stalinists.

That's why it is considered "okay" to call the Ukrainian genocide a hoax, and not "okay" to call the Holocaust a hoax.

Plus the evidence that the Ukrainian famine was caused by the factors Bregowald mentioned is overwhelming, and almost universally agreed upon by Ukrainian famine researchers. So it also has the "truth factor", unlike Holocaust denial.

[Berianidze]

I believe I already posted the full-version of this article a while ago, found here (http://thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1273).

[Sulla the Dictator]

i think a more interesting question is this. why in the zionist media is it acceptable to question the soviet holocaust, even to laugh at it, but not the nazi holocaust?

Soviet "Holocaust denial" is not a real issue here in the United States. Serious people don't deny that regular acts of slaughter and bloodshed happened in the USSR.

Serious people don't deny the Nazi Holocaust here either, but more silly people do. :p

And it isn't illegal in the United States to deny either acts.

[Ahknaton]

Soviet "Holocaust denial" is not a real issue here in the United States. Serious people don't deny that regular acts of slaughter and bloodshed happened in the USSR.

Serious people don't deny the Nazi Holocaust here either, but more silly people do. :p

And it isn't illegal in the United States to deny either acts.
It's illegal in Europe. That's bad enough. Its proponents mean that precedent to spread.

"A threat to free men anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere".

[Sulla the Dictator]

It's illegal in Europe. That's bad enough.


Plenty of things are illegal in Europe. Its a matter of laziness on their part, not conspiracy.


"A threat to free men anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere"

Its ridiculous for people to suggest that laws which forbid Holocaust denial are somehow part of a "Zionist plot".

[Ahknaton]

Plenty of things are illegal in Europe. Its a matter of laziness on their part, not conspiracy.
What, so the laws just materialised onto paper of their own accord, because Europeans were too "lazy" to prevent it?

Laws such as those against "Holocaust denial" and "hate speech" are put in place after concerted lobbying efforts on the part of ethnic special interest groups (and not just Jews either). Calling it a "conspiracy" is probably a poor choice of words because of the connotations of secrecy. On the contrary, groups such as the ADL lobby for these laws out in the open.
Its ridiculous for people to suggest that laws which forbid Holocaust denial are somehow part of a "Zionist plot".Why did you put "Zionist plot" in quotes? I didn't use that phrase. Don't put words into my mouth.

[Sulla the Dictator]

What, so the laws just materialised onto paper of their own accord, because Europeans were too "lazy" to prevent it?


No, the laws are due to European laziness. The Europeans, having experienced the Nazi scourge, have no interest in debating it, or seeing it rehabilitated. They despise it. They don't want to deal with it.

Whereas in the US, we have allowed them to exist and embarass themselves thorugh exposure and debate. I have no doubt that the European 'movement' is filled with Glenn Millers. Laziness is the distinction.


Laws such as those against "Holocaust denial" and "hate speech" are put in place after concerted lobbying efforts on the part of ethnic special interest groups (and not just Jews either).


Well after the Holocaust there aren't many Jews left in Europe. Laws against Holocaust denial have more to do with the motive for it, which is the rehabilitation of Nazism.


Calling it a "conspiracy" is probably a poor choice of words because of the connotations of secrecy. On the contrary, groups such as the ADL lobby for these laws out in the open.


What role, exactly, did the ADL have in crafting these laws?

[Ahknaton]

No, the laws are due to European laziness. The Europeans, having experienced the Nazi scourge, have no interest in debating it, or seeing it rehabilitated. They despise it. They don't want to deal with it.
That's an unsubstantiated assertion, given that

a) Naziism is on the rise in Europe, so they don't uniformly "despise" it
b) Laws against Holocaust denial weren't passed in Germany until 1985, whereas the effects of the Nazi scourge on Germany would have been most immediate after the war.

The laws came into being as a result of committed activism.
What role, exactly, did the ADL have in crafting these laws?Putting words into my mouth again. I didn't say that the ADL crafted the laws against Holocaust denial in Europe, I said that they lobby for similar laws against freedom of speech (e.g. "hate speech" laws).

[Donny the Punk]

Nazism is on the rise in Europe to precisely the same extent as Monarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism. I never understood how you people could live in such a fantasy world.

[Ahknaton]

Nazism is on the rise in Europe to precisely the same extent as Monarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism. I never understood how you people could live in such a fantasy world.
Neo-Naziism on the rise in Germany (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1301347.stm)

The story is a few years old, but it's still relevent (particularly in what was East Germany). The skinhead music scene over there is huge too.

Personally I don't support NS, but you can't deny that it's still got a following.

Also, consider that the kind of person who is willing to publically identify with Naziism and Nazi symbology (especially in such a legally hostile environment) is the tip of the iceberg. Plenty of other people are getting tired of the failures of multiculturalism and are flocking to right-wing anti-immigrant parties.

[Donny the Punk]

'Neo-Nazism' is no longer a political vehicle, it is a stunt. Disaffected and unintelligent youth looking for reactionary solutions to their current impasses cling to it for the shock value, which they feel gives them power. This is most clearly seen among Polish 'neo-nazis', so laughably ignorant as to be unaware that their ideology advocates their enslavement and destruction. In Germany, it has particular resonance for youth humiliated and emasculated by their own history, foolishly wishing to vindicate it instead of accepting responsibility and its concomitant consequences. As such, it is a fashionable form of teenage rebellion, though this time helplessly and thankfully sterile.

And to reinterate unnecessarily, even more defunct ideologies have greater support than Nazism does. These scum are only demarcated and made visible by the violences they inflict upon those whose benevolence tolerates their existence, indelibly illustrating their illegitimacy forever more.

[Fade the Butcher]

Nazism is on the rise in Europe to precisely the same extent as Monarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism. I never understood how you people could live in such a fantasy world.

Hey. Cut me some slack man. I'm an idealist.

[Thomas777]

Soviet "Holocaust denial" is not a real issue here in the United States. Serious people don't deny that regular acts of slaughter and bloodshed happened in the USSR.


Sure they do. The average Liberal Arts curriculum in an American University touts the myth that Communism "looks good on paper" and is a noble idea that just had some shortcomings in practice.

It seems like everytime I am in Lincoln Park, I happen across packs of neophytes wearing trendy t-shirts emblazoned with Soviet kitsch or images of "Che".

Hollywood regularly assails us with heroic depictions of people like "Che" Guevara, the Rosenbergs, and Alger Hiss.

Do you see what is wrong with this picture?

[Berianidze]

Soviet "Holocaust denial" is not a real issue here in the United States. Serious people don't deny that regular acts of slaughter and bloodshed happened in the USSR.
There were acts of slaughter or course, but to imply they were as arbitrary as some (mainly western, notorious anti-communist commentors) make them out to be is absurd; and most mainstream historians recognize this. The actions of the Bolsheviks were completely justified, while not many in the Bolshevik camp would deny that state sanctioned executions were essential to the success of socialism, or that some mishaps did occur which should be corrected in the future.

Sure they do. The average Liberal Arts curriculum in an American University touts the myth that Communism "looks good on paper" and is a noble idea that just had some shortcomings in practice.

It seems like everytime I am in Lincoln Park, I happen across packs of neophytes wearing trendy t-shirts emblazoned with Soviet kitsch or images of "Che".

Hollywood regularly assails us with heroic depictions of people like "Che" Guevara, the Rosenbergs, and Alger Hiss.

Do you see what is wrong with this picture?

These people whom you speak of as those liberal marxists whom ironically show their political alliance with socialism simply by wearing Che Guevara t-shirts are not real socialists, and often times think of Che as an extension of themselves; pot-smoking, sexually liberated, beacons of bourgeois western marxist analysis. These people fail to realize that their line of socialism stands in staunch contrast to the ideas put forth by the "old left" socialists. This has been discussed in detail numerous times in a variety of threads.

[Thomas777]

These people whom you speak of as those liberal marxists whom ironically show their political alliance with socialism simply by wearing Che Guevara t-shirts are not real socialists, and often times think of Che as an extension of themselves; pot-smoking, sexually liberated, beacons of bourgeois western marxist analysis. These people fail to realize that their line of socialism stands in staunch contrast to the ideas put forth by the "old left" socialists. This has been discussed in detail numerous times in a variety of threads.

I am aware of that, and I agree.

The point I was making is that Marxism and Soviet Communism are embraced by the intellectual establishment in America while National Socialism is psychotically villified.

[Berianidze]

I am aware of that, and I agree.

The point I was making is that Marxism and Soviet Communism are embraced by the intellectual establishment in America while National Socialism is psychotically villified.

Very true; but I would disagree that Soviet Communism is embraced by the intellectual establishment in America, perhaps in a more indirect apologetic sense; but it is not (particularly in the era of Stalin) wholly embraced by any means. Most intellectuals prescribing to any sense of marxist theory have in fact adopted a more western variety of western thought, adapted out of more western traditional/American values such as social liberalism, etc. In America, even the mainstream communist parties reject the most basic elements of Soviet Communism, and have thus stated they support socialism with American trends, such as constitutionally protected rights that are believed to be staples of American society.

But to the extent of the point which you are trying to make; yes, I agree that national socialism has been marginalized and ostracized from mainstream political discourse (certainly amongst the political elites) than Soviet Communism has.

[WAM]

What the Liberal useful idiots and Conservative idiots have never grasped about Communism is that it never was about some inane 'brotherhood of man' or redistributing wealth from rich to poor;from the outset it was a movement by international business and finance elites,largely Jewish,(Communism comes straight out of the Talmud and Judaism proper)to eliminate the middle classes everywhere and eliminate competition from below so as to create and consolidate their monopolies.Why else were "Capitalists" funding Bolshevik revolutionaries?
Remember what "Capitalist" John D. Rockefeller said:"Competition is the only sin".

Communism was from the beginning a means to consolidate all the world's real wealth and resources into the hands of Anglo/Jewry(one and the same really),while erecting totalitarian police states to keep their monopolies.Whoever feigns to critique Communism without approaching it from this angle is either a liar,obfuscator,or nitwit.Obviously the Liberals and Conservatives are of the latter category;the courtier historians and commentators are almost necessarily the former.

[Donny the Punk]

How do you people sleep at night? :rofl:

[A. Radek]

American Socialism has a much larger populist and Christian Democratic influence than Marxist. This manifested itself in such ideas as the 'Free Silver' movement, trade unionism in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, and the Roosevelt Administration, where the ' Brain Trust' was influenced by Henry George and the Progressive Movement, and the excesses of the English Industrial Revolution more than Karl Marx, though Marx probably influenced the German and Eastern European immigrants of the later 19th and 20th century than it did the mainstream.

If free and open academic enquiry is sufficient to establish the falsity of the Ukranian famine being a deliberate genocide, why is it not trusted to establish the authenticity of the orthodox account of the Holocaust?

Holocaust Denial is not 'free and open inquiry', it's just a few imbecilic loons who thought they could resurrect the poor image and crushing failure of the Third Reich if they made up some silly assed nonsense about the Holocaust being faked and wrap it in psuedo- academic hyperbole. It's intellectually and morally dishonest, just the opposite of 'free and open inquiry'.

Because the moral double standard embraced by Zionist Jews who support nationalism for Jews in Israel but oppose it for Europeans in their respective national homelands can only be justified by the notion that the suffering of Jews at the hands of Gentiles is without parallel and therefore deserving of an exception to the rules that are applied to everyone else.

Since other genocides challenge the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they must be minimised or played down, as is the case with the initial post of this thread, which more or less asserted that Ukrainian suffering doesn't make the grade when compared with that of the Jews.

Actually, It's brought up by Holocaust Deniers quite often, in the vain hopes of somehow justifiying their intellectual dishonesty in denying the holocaust by wagging a finger at the Soviets, as if what the Soviets supposedly did justifies what Nazi Germany did and would have done.

Another reason I brought it up is just to see who here actually bought into the hoax, and also to see who still buys Solzhenitsyn's ridiculous numbers and claims as well, later on.

I repeat the causes of the Ukrainian famine:
(1)poor climactic conditions
(2)failure of tractor and fertiliser policies
(3)incompetence at the lower and local levels.

You can also read all about the measures which were taken to alleviate the famine in any number of sources. With knowledge of the agricultural history of Russia and the Ukraine, you can likewise see that the famine was far from a 'unique' or special event in the USSR.

True.

I believe I already posted the full-version of this article a while ago, found here.

Indeed. You and Leif should post more in the History forum.

Have you also posted on Solzhenitsyn's gross exaggerations and outright false numbers and claims as well?

[Ahknaton]

Another reason I brought it up is just to see who here actually bought into the hoax, and also to see who still buys Solzhenitsyn's ridiculous numbers and claims as well, later on.
I don't "buy into" the Ukranian famine, because I haven't read enough about it to form an opinion. All I'm saying is that if questioning one genocide claim is permitted, then questioning another ought to be permitted also. For the record, I'm not a Holocaust "revisionist", although I do oppose laws against "Holocaust denial" such as those under which David Irving is currently imprisoned in Austria.

[A. Radek]

I don't "buy into" the Ukranian famine, because I haven't read enough about it to form an opinion. All I'm saying is that if questioning one genocide claim is permitted, then questioning another ought to be permitted also. For the record, I'm not a Holocaust "revisionist", although I do oppose laws against "Holocaust denial" such as those under which David Irving is currently imprisoned in Austria.

Fair enough. As for European laws, I have no opinions on them, so I don't really know if they are indeed just being prosecuted for 'Denial', or for promoting Nazism. I'm not aware of any legitimate revisionist being prosecuted, and there are plenty of those around. The David Irvings and Zundels are clearly Nazis and/or Fellow Travellers, and it's easy to see why they would be stepped on. I can't work up much of an 'outrage' over their plight, because I find such people hilarious when they start sniveling about 'free speech', just because of the irony alone.

[Rakhmetov]

Well, there was indeed a famine that included Ukraine. However, it was not limited to Ukraine nor was it "artificial". In fact, the famine resulted from poor harvests in 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters including drought, excess rain, rust, smut, and a severe lack of horses and tractors. Another misunderstanding about this famine is that it related to collectivization and kulaks. By January 1932, some 70% of all agricultural households had been collectivized. Dekulakization ended in 1931 when by that time 1.8 million had been transferred to the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Sibir. Ultra leftists are incorrect when associating the famine to class struggle. The kulaks had already been defeated in 1930-31 and the collectivization campaign had largely been completed.

First, 1.5 million died in famine in Ukraine according to declassified Soviet archives. This totally discredits these sensational, implausable figures of "7 to 10 million". Deaths elsewhere amounted to another 700,000 including 300,000 in the North Caucasus and 275,000 in the Volga. Even the predominantly Velikorusskii northwestern consumer region comprising Moscow and Leningrad endured 90,000 excess deaths. Famine spanned the entire country and affected some 70,000,000 people. It was far from exclusively a Ukrainian famine.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/harrison/archive/hunger/deaths.xls

The declassified Soviet demographic archives recorded 1.5 million excess deaths during 1932-33:

Registered deaths in Ukraine:

1929: 538,664
1930: 538,080
1931: 514,744
1932: 668,158
1933: 1,908,907
total excess deaths (1932-33 total subtracted by 1931)
1.54 million

Next, much of the literature alleging that famine took place because of excessive grain collections by the state is another lie. The harvests of 1931 and 1932 were far worse than in previous and succeeding years. Collections by the state in these poor harvests were not only not excessive, but they were in fact lower than in other years:

USSR grain production; collections (million tons), 1930-33:
1930: 73 to 77 produced ; 22.1 collected
1931: 57 to 65 produced ; 22.8 collected
1932: 55 to 60 produced ; 18.5 collected
1933: 70 to 77 produced ; 22.7 collected

Furthermore, archival documents show that the Soviet government genuinely tried to reduce the effects of the famine among the population:

Between February and July 1933 at least thirty-five Politburo decisions and Sovnarkom decrees selectively authorised issue of a total of only 320,000 tons of grain for food. 50 million people were fed with this relief aid.

On April 6, 1933, a regional official wrote at length to Stalin describing the famine conditions and urging him to provide grain. Stalin received the letter on April 15, and on April 16 the Politburo granted 700 tons of grain to the district. Stalin sent a telegram: "We will do everything required. Inform sieze of necessary help. State a figure." There was a reply on the same day, and on April 22, the day on which Stalin received the second letter, Stalin scolded, "You should have sent answer not by letter but by telegram. Time was wasted"

Sources: Stephen G. Wheatcroft, R.W Davies, "Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriclture, 1931-33"
http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/Tauger,%20Natural%20Disaster%20and%20Human%20Actions.pdf