Comparing the Soviet famine of the 30s to the Holocaust is blatant Holocaust revisionism, which is clearly what the word “holodomor” was coined to do. You should use a different term
Ah, and here we have it! Israeli officials state explicit genocidal intent, explicit dehumanization (“they are human animals and will be treated accordingly”), have an explicitly racially supremacist ideology and intent to annex all of Palestine and maintain a Jewis-majority nation, they impose a total blockade on a captive civilian population in Gaza and bomb it to rubble over the course of years while continuing to slowly annex the West Bank and expel the Palestinian population, and that’s just “collateral damage”. But the Soviets having a famine in all the major grain producing areas is a full-on genocide comparable with the Holocaust.
I am not weighing into Holdomor. But you are equating the Gaza tragedy to the targeting and rounding up of Jews in Europe for their ethnicity and exterminating them en-masse, not in combat. ⅔ of the population.
Yes there are evil cunts in the current Jewish government who make explicit statements (Ben-Gvir and Smotrich especially).
But you do not want to acknowledge that the banned phrases in Queensland were explicit genocidal calls by PLO and Hamas… not just by individuals as in Israel’s case. Of course Israel needs to remain a Jewish majority in the light of that.
The Germans did not start off the Holocaust by immediately rounding up and exterminating the Jews. They started through deportations (check), then by mass killings in the areas they took control of through conquest (check, though with some qualifiers), and then finally only settled on extermination in death camps. Israel is likely going to pass a law calling for mandatory execution of all “terrorists”, which in Israeli rhetoric means all Palestinians. They’re very far along on the road!
You seem to be taking the liberal Zionist position that a democratic Israel can exist alongside a penned-in Palestine, a captive nation with limited rights where people exist as noncitizens (but aren’t exterminated, as the right-wing Zionists support). I am telling you that is a dead ideology, and it was always self-contradictory in the first place. It’s a relic from a time when a country could be a “free democracy”, but racially discriminate against citizens or colonial subjects. When black Americans couldn’t vote, when “democratic” France could keep Algerians or a dozen other nationalities as colonial subjects in their own countries, or when South Africa could be a democracy for the white minority and an occupying power for its black residents. It is a fundamental contradiction to believe in rights for one group but not another (for whatever, I’m sure, complex and nuanced reasons), and so the tendency just going all the way into racial supremacy as the right-wing Zionists have done.
You’re going to have to take a serious look at what’s happening, as you’re being led along into a very dark place. I’m sure you’re not a racial supremacist and your concerns are for the safety of the Jewish people, but that isn’t what the Zionist project is, and the liberal position is no longer tenable. What will you tell yourself when you look back and find that you supported a genocide?
Thank you for finally getting this discussion onto a good faith, intellectual footing.
Dunno enough about Nazi Germany to comment on those points.
The “open air prison” of Gaza was due to border controls stopping weapons shipments as Hamas and PIJ kept attacking Israel.
If the attacks stopped then I imagine the borders would have been relaxed to previous levels.
Paradoxically the tedious border checks led to Gazans merchants funding tunnels merely for civilian supplies. Israel would have done well to have funded those checks better to speed them up and remove this incentive.
Israel didn’t expect so extensive a tunnel network. Hamas expected other Arab countries to rally to their war like in 1967. Both sides miscalculated resulting in this tragic spiral (although I suspect the Israel right wing hoped it would spiral).
Israel also would have done well to have not even counterattacked in the name of retribution. They could have instead investigated how the leadership failed in their border security and jumped straight to a hostage/prisoner exchange.
To this day however Hamas are breaching the peace by not surrendering arms and continuing attacks. A large IDF retaliation is unfortunately coming soon.
I avoid quantifying genocide since it can happen in all sorts of ways against all sorts of people. 100,000 dead aboriginals are still as bad as 6 million jews. Genocide is bad, regardless of how many are killed.
Why do you doubt that the Holodomor was a genocide? Either way, the Holodomor was man-made and an atrocity perpetrated by Stalin’s government.
The famine hit all the major grain producing regions of the USSR, not just Ukraine, so it was awfully unspecific for being a targeted act of genocide.
They were exporting grain to fund their program of rapid industrialization, there was a crop failure, and they still exported the grain. Once it became clear to the Soviet government that there was a famine, they reversed course, but the damage was done. This was callous, an atrocity even, but it does not constitute genocide. The idea that it was a genocide was concocted by Ukrainian nationalist exiles (themselves SS veterans) after the war and used to equivocate Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for cold war propaganda.
Thanks for posting in here. It’s extremely rare for a tankie to actually venture to be challenged.
So first, the grain quotas were impossible to meet, and Ukraine specifically was targeted. Ukrainian villages were blacklisted, with food seizures, trade bans and other sorts of blockades. Once starvation began, Ukraine’s borders were forcefully closed to stop peasants from fleeing, that’s not something you do in a legitimate famine. This was also all during the time of suppressing Ukraine’s culture. The fact that the policies were not applied uniformly across the USSR is what makes it a genocide.
They also didn’t reverse course, they knew the starvation was occurring and continued it anyway, even continuing grain requisitions despite the famine. Literally stealing from the starving.
When it comes to genocide, we usually refer to the UN Genocide Convention, which is what we do for Palestine. Stalin saw the Ukranian nationalism as a threat and used the famine as a means of subjugation. The combined starvation, border closures, and ongoing dismantling of Ukrainian culture all indicate that it was a destructive intent towards Ukrainians as a national group. Either way, it’s still an atrocity, and the USSR’s response was morally wrong and led to many deaths.
It’s also wild that you’re holding Ukrainian peasants accountable as SS veterans when the Ukrainian émigrés were contesting famine conditionsin the 1930s, before WW2. Starvation and famine aren’t something that just magically happens, it’s gradual. And even if there were exiles, you don’t starve peasants who have been on the land for generations.
Regardless, millions died, the state seized grain during starvation, restricted movement and trapped starving peasants and oppressed Ukrainian culture. Ukraine considers it to be a genocide, and so do many other nations.
No problem! Actually, I’m not specifically one of the “tankies” you’re contending with. I only recently registered on this site and was not previously aware of the beef between lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (I myself coming by way of lemmy.ca), though you can consider me to be aligned with the former ideologically.
The idea that the famine constituted a genocide is not a settled matter among serious historians - it isn’t just Grover Furr (author of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin And The Soviet Union In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False and Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every “revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) “crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False) that contests it. I would argue that (aside from the aforementioned Grover Furr and presumably some Russian historians) the “constitutes genocide” side is the more heavily politicized.
A lot of scholarship regarding the Soviet famine as a genocide has come out of the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which makes sense given that Alberta has Canada’s highest concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was often overlooked until recently is that the U of A chancellor from 1982 to 1986 and co-founder of the CIUS, Peter Savaryn, was an SS veteran, having volunteered for the 14th Waffen SS Division ‘Galizien’, and that a lot of scholarship coming out of the U of A has served to whitewash the 14th SS and paint it as a group of Ukrainian freedom fighters. In actuality, the 14th SS spent most of its time on anti-partisan actions, including the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The Galician division would not have experienced the famine, as Galicia was controlled by Poland before the war.
You’re probably balking at the mention of Nazis point since Putin poisoned the well on this discussion by invading Ukraine under the pretext of “denazification”, but this is real history. The Ukrainian-Canadian community’s particular problem stems from the importation of Waffen SS veterans, particularly the 14th SS, after the war. The reason we did this comes down to cold war politics - the Ukrainian-Canadian community before and during the war was very left wing, operating Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, with the Ukrainian Labour Hall in Winnipeg was being during the general strike of 1919 as a meeting place and printing house for the strikers. The government imported the nationalists as a locus reliable anticommunists after the war in order to effect a hostile takeover of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and suppress the left more broadly. Following the war, imported Ukrainian nationalists attacked Ukrainian Labour Temples and disrupted meetings, culminating in the 1950 bombing of the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto during a Thanksgiving concert. The operators of the labour temple, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), blamed imported SS veterans for the bombing, while the competing nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) claimed that the AUUC bombed themselves as a false-flag.
Long story short, the plan was successful. The UCC became the leading Ukrainian-Canadian organization, while the AUUC declined amidst cold war suppression of anyone associated with communism. The Ukrainian-Canadian community became reliably nationalist and anticommunist, and SS veterans like Savaryn became leading figures. It is in this milieu that the idea that the famine was a “terror famine” developed.
There was an inquiry into the importation of SS veterans in 1985 - the conclusion was that the 14th SS was cleared of all wrongdoing, and contravening the decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Galician division was not a criminal organization. The rest of the report was sealed, and the government has to this day refused to unseal it. Why would they refuse to release the full report if the SS veterans were so innocent? Because it would reveal that they imported SS veterans on purpose to suppress the left, and that many leading figures in the Ukrainian-Canadian community were Nazi war criminals. Aside from the embarrassment this would cause the government, it would have also undermined anticommunist propaganda efforts.
Back to the famine itself, Stalin and his government don’t come out squeaky-clean of course. They were extremely paranoid about kulaks hoarding grain and resisting collectivization, and in that air of paranoia and oppression, nobody enforcing the grain quotas was going to disobey orders. People starved and died needlessly, but once the famine ended, it ended. This doesn’t constitute genocide, let alone an equivalent to the Holocaust. The idea that it was equivalent to the Holocaust, the “double genocide theory”, is used by various eastern European nationalists to whitewash their participation in the Holocaust - the most extreme end of it has Lithuanian nationalists claiming that they were only retaliating against the “Judeo-Bolshevists” when they killed 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population, a rate unsurpassed in any other country.
Stalin made a lot of mistakes, but the crimes of his opponents, not only the Nazis themselves but the imperialist powers, were so much worse and numerous that Stalin’s crimes pale in comparison. All in, Joe Steel did more good than bad.
Funnily enough they do forget about the Holodomor! they say it never happened, and if it did happen, then it was good
Comparing the Soviet famine of the 30s to the Holocaust is blatant Holocaust revisionism, which is clearly what the word “holodomor” was coined to do. You should use a different term
Comparisons don’t magically change the holocaust. Both were genocides, that’s the point.
There’s no revision going on here
Comparing the all time number one genocide to something that isn’t a genocide is Holocaust denial
And yet you call the collateral civilian deaths in Gaza genocide.
Ah, and here we have it! Israeli officials state explicit genocidal intent, explicit dehumanization (“they are human animals and will be treated accordingly”), have an explicitly racially supremacist ideology and intent to annex all of Palestine and maintain a Jewis-majority nation, they impose a total blockade on a captive civilian population in Gaza and bomb it to rubble over the course of years while continuing to slowly annex the West Bank and expel the Palestinian population, and that’s just “collateral damage”. But the Soviets having a famine in all the major grain producing areas is a full-on genocide comparable with the Holocaust.
I am not weighing into Holdomor. But you are equating the Gaza tragedy to the targeting and rounding up of Jews in Europe for their ethnicity and exterminating them en-masse, not in combat. ⅔ of the population.
Yes there are evil cunts in the current Jewish government who make explicit statements (Ben-Gvir and Smotrich especially).
But you do not want to acknowledge that the banned phrases in Queensland were explicit genocidal calls by PLO and Hamas… not just by individuals as in Israel’s case. Of course Israel needs to remain a Jewish majority in the light of that.
The Germans did not start off the Holocaust by immediately rounding up and exterminating the Jews. They started through deportations (check), then by mass killings in the areas they took control of through conquest (check, though with some qualifiers), and then finally only settled on extermination in death camps. Israel is likely going to pass a law calling for mandatory execution of all “terrorists”, which in Israeli rhetoric means all Palestinians. They’re very far along on the road!
You seem to be taking the liberal Zionist position that a democratic Israel can exist alongside a penned-in Palestine, a captive nation with limited rights where people exist as noncitizens (but aren’t exterminated, as the right-wing Zionists support). I am telling you that is a dead ideology, and it was always self-contradictory in the first place. It’s a relic from a time when a country could be a “free democracy”, but racially discriminate against citizens or colonial subjects. When black Americans couldn’t vote, when “democratic” France could keep Algerians or a dozen other nationalities as colonial subjects in their own countries, or when South Africa could be a democracy for the white minority and an occupying power for its black residents. It is a fundamental contradiction to believe in rights for one group but not another (for whatever, I’m sure, complex and nuanced reasons), and so the tendency just going all the way into racial supremacy as the right-wing Zionists have done.
You’re going to have to take a serious look at what’s happening, as you’re being led along into a very dark place. I’m sure you’re not a racial supremacist and your concerns are for the safety of the Jewish people, but that isn’t what the Zionist project is, and the liberal position is no longer tenable. What will you tell yourself when you look back and find that you supported a genocide?
Thank you for finally getting this discussion onto a good faith, intellectual footing.
Dunno enough about Nazi Germany to comment on those points.
The “open air prison” of Gaza was due to border controls stopping weapons shipments as Hamas and PIJ kept attacking Israel.
If the attacks stopped then I imagine the borders would have been relaxed to previous levels.
Paradoxically the tedious border checks led to Gazans merchants funding tunnels merely for civilian supplies. Israel would have done well to have funded those checks better to speed them up and remove this incentive.
Israel didn’t expect so extensive a tunnel network. Hamas expected other Arab countries to rally to their war like in 1967. Both sides miscalculated resulting in this tragic spiral (although I suspect the Israel right wing hoped it would spiral).
Israel also would have done well to have not even counterattacked in the name of retribution. They could have instead investigated how the leadership failed in their border security and jumped straight to a hostage/prisoner exchange.
To this day however Hamas are breaching the peace by not surrendering arms and continuing attacks. A large IDF retaliation is unfortunately coming soon.
i mean you’re also excluding the starvation of gaza, which affects civilians more than hamas.
I avoid quantifying genocide since it can happen in all sorts of ways against all sorts of people. 100,000 dead aboriginals are still as bad as 6 million jews. Genocide is bad, regardless of how many are killed.
Why do you doubt that the Holodomor was a genocide? Either way, the Holodomor was man-made and an atrocity perpetrated by Stalin’s government.
The famine hit all the major grain producing regions of the USSR, not just Ukraine, so it was awfully unspecific for being a targeted act of genocide.
They were exporting grain to fund their program of rapid industrialization, there was a crop failure, and they still exported the grain. Once it became clear to the Soviet government that there was a famine, they reversed course, but the damage was done. This was callous, an atrocity even, but it does not constitute genocide. The idea that it was a genocide was concocted by Ukrainian nationalist exiles (themselves SS veterans) after the war and used to equivocate Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for cold war propaganda.
Thanks for posting in here. It’s extremely rare for a tankie to actually venture to be challenged.
So first, the grain quotas were impossible to meet, and Ukraine specifically was targeted. Ukrainian villages were blacklisted, with food seizures, trade bans and other sorts of blockades. Once starvation began, Ukraine’s borders were forcefully closed to stop peasants from fleeing, that’s not something you do in a legitimate famine. This was also all during the time of suppressing Ukraine’s culture. The fact that the policies were not applied uniformly across the USSR is what makes it a genocide.
They also didn’t reverse course, they knew the starvation was occurring and continued it anyway, even continuing grain requisitions despite the famine. Literally stealing from the starving.
When it comes to genocide, we usually refer to the UN Genocide Convention, which is what we do for Palestine. Stalin saw the Ukranian nationalism as a threat and used the famine as a means of subjugation. The combined starvation, border closures, and ongoing dismantling of Ukrainian culture all indicate that it was a destructive intent towards Ukrainians as a national group. Either way, it’s still an atrocity, and the USSR’s response was morally wrong and led to many deaths.
It’s also wild that you’re holding Ukrainian peasants accountable as SS veterans when the Ukrainian émigrés were contesting famine conditionsin the 1930s, before WW2. Starvation and famine aren’t something that just magically happens, it’s gradual. And even if there were exiles, you don’t starve peasants who have been on the land for generations.
Regardless, millions died, the state seized grain during starvation, restricted movement and trapped starving peasants and oppressed Ukrainian culture. Ukraine considers it to be a genocide, and so do many other nations.
Why do you doubt this?
No problem! Actually, I’m not specifically one of the “tankies” you’re contending with. I only recently registered on this site and was not previously aware of the beef between lemmy.ml and lemmy.world (I myself coming by way of lemmy.ca), though you can consider me to be aligned with the former ideologically.
The idea that the famine constituted a genocide is not a settled matter among serious historians - it isn’t just Grover Furr (author of Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin And The Soviet Union In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False and Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence that Every “revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) “crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False) that contests it. I would argue that (aside from the aforementioned Grover Furr and presumably some Russian historians) the “constitutes genocide” side is the more heavily politicized.
A lot of scholarship regarding the Soviet famine as a genocide has come out of the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), which makes sense given that Alberta has Canada’s highest concentration of Ukrainian-Canadians. What was often overlooked until recently is that the U of A chancellor from 1982 to 1986 and co-founder of the CIUS, Peter Savaryn, was an SS veteran, having volunteered for the 14th Waffen SS Division ‘Galizien’, and that a lot of scholarship coming out of the U of A has served to whitewash the 14th SS and paint it as a group of Ukrainian freedom fighters. In actuality, the 14th SS spent most of its time on anti-partisan actions, including the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising. The Galician division would not have experienced the famine, as Galicia was controlled by Poland before the war.
You’re probably balking at the mention of Nazis point since Putin poisoned the well on this discussion by invading Ukraine under the pretext of “denazification”, but this is real history. The Ukrainian-Canadian community’s particular problem stems from the importation of Waffen SS veterans, particularly the 14th SS, after the war. The reason we did this comes down to cold war politics - the Ukrainian-Canadian community before and during the war was very left wing, operating Ukrainian Labour Temples across the country, with the Ukrainian Labour Hall in Winnipeg was being during the general strike of 1919 as a meeting place and printing house for the strikers. The government imported the nationalists as a locus reliable anticommunists after the war in order to effect a hostile takeover of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and suppress the left more broadly. Following the war, imported Ukrainian nationalists attacked Ukrainian Labour Temples and disrupted meetings, culminating in the 1950 bombing of the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto during a Thanksgiving concert. The operators of the labour temple, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), blamed imported SS veterans for the bombing, while the competing nationalist organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) claimed that the AUUC bombed themselves as a false-flag.
Long story short, the plan was successful. The UCC became the leading Ukrainian-Canadian organization, while the AUUC declined amidst cold war suppression of anyone associated with communism. The Ukrainian-Canadian community became reliably nationalist and anticommunist, and SS veterans like Savaryn became leading figures. It is in this milieu that the idea that the famine was a “terror famine” developed.
There was an inquiry into the importation of SS veterans in 1985 - the conclusion was that the 14th SS was cleared of all wrongdoing, and contravening the decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Galician division was not a criminal organization. The rest of the report was sealed, and the government has to this day refused to unseal it. Why would they refuse to release the full report if the SS veterans were so innocent? Because it would reveal that they imported SS veterans on purpose to suppress the left, and that many leading figures in the Ukrainian-Canadian community were Nazi war criminals. Aside from the embarrassment this would cause the government, it would have also undermined anticommunist propaganda efforts.
Back to the famine itself, Stalin and his government don’t come out squeaky-clean of course. They were extremely paranoid about kulaks hoarding grain and resisting collectivization, and in that air of paranoia and oppression, nobody enforcing the grain quotas was going to disobey orders. People starved and died needlessly, but once the famine ended, it ended. This doesn’t constitute genocide, let alone an equivalent to the Holocaust. The idea that it was equivalent to the Holocaust, the “double genocide theory”, is used by various eastern European nationalists to whitewash their participation in the Holocaust - the most extreme end of it has Lithuanian nationalists claiming that they were only retaliating against the “Judeo-Bolshevists” when they killed 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population, a rate unsurpassed in any other country.
Stalin made a lot of mistakes, but the crimes of his opponents, not only the Nazis themselves but the imperialist powers, were so much worse and numerous that Stalin’s crimes pale in comparison. All in, Joe Steel did more good than bad.
Before I bother to reply, I must check, just to set some ground here.
Do you agree that Stalin’s soviet leadership was aware by 1932 of the mass starvation conditions occurring in Ukraine and other regions?
Pretty much like nazis on the Holocaust.
Identical. Even their memes are the same.
‘6 million ovens!’
‘big spoons!’
Genocide is a joke to them.