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Posted on 04/12/2008 7:33:13 AM PDT by OESY
Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolu tion insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine... wasn't genocide.
Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country."
Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.
And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.
The United Nations defines genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Left out of this definition are "modern" political labels for people: the poor, religious people, the middle class, etc.
The oversight was deliberate. The word "genocide" was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was responding to Winston Churchill's 1941 lament that "we are in the presence of a crime without a name." Lemkin, a champion of human rights who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, gave it a name a few years later. But to get the United Nations to recognize genocide as a specific crime, he made compromises....
For many, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge. Ukrainian kulaks, or independent farmers, opposed Stalin's plan for collectivization, so they were murdered for that "greater good."
Today, Mao and Stalin aren't in Hitler's class of evil because Hitler wasn't a "modernizer," he was a racist. Note how the Russians have no problem copping to a mass-murder charge but recoil at suggestions it was racially motivated.
It's a wrongheaded distinction. Murder is murder, whether the motive is bigotry or the pursuit of allegedly enlightened social planning....
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
They are right, as far as it goes. Lefties kill along class lines, not ethnic lines.
Abbreviated mideast ping
The borders were sealed off and the “famine” ended there and other areas to which Ukrainians were exiled.
Other minorities were targeted too - German colonists, Kazaks, and cossacks.
http://www.faminegenocide.com/resources/famine_map.html
Hmmmmm, well then maybe the Chinese should wipe out the Tibetan Monks in one big killing frenzy and then call it social planning......that might ease the concerns of protesting liberals and then the olympics can proceed without further trouble.
...and to establish a precedent for...
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I am finishing Liberal Fascism and it is definitely worth the read.
I used to consider Jonah a lightweight. No more. 'Pod.
“Translation: We didn’t kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.”
Here’s some comforting logic worthy of Dan Rather. It’s consistent with the notion that it’s more reprehensible to kill someone because of their ethnicity than for the change in their pocket or just for fun.
Communism kills.
Ultimately they eradicate or imprison the dissenters.
Same with Islamic theocracy. The question under Islam is: since Imam see muslims as a superior race to the subhuman (offspring of pigs and monkeys) kufir, does Islamic Supremacy constitute racism? Or is it ultimately theocratic political rule and thus akin to Nazism (which told a myth of Aryan superiority by divine right) or Communism (which established Atheism as the State religion and enforced the destruction of religion iconography and churches)?
That is correct. Bad enough that the Russians (including millions living in the Ukraine) were the biggest victims of Communism; but they should not be accused of the crimes of the multi-national conspiracy that included representatives of ALL nationalities including Ukrainian (e.g. Khrushschev). Any attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to claim that the deliberate famine was genocide against Ukrainians fails under the fact that many Soviet leaders of the time were Ukrainians themselves (and almost all the rest were non-Russian-ethnic, such as Stalin). It was class warfare and use of terror to consolidate control, so the present-day Russian parliament’s resolution is simple fact.
So even though both Moa and Stalin systematically murdered far more people than did Hitler they are less evil.
Seems like a meritless distinction.
Why do the Russians want to rehabilitate Stalin is a question worth exploring.
Mark
I just finished it myself and I agree. I'm 57 and I'm amazed at how the "Progressive Movement's" dark side was airbrushed out of everything I was taught.
Followed your link and read some of the eyewitness accounts. Oh God...how terrible.
I wouldn't necessarily agree with that.
Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine was primarily aimed at Ukranians. Later in the 1930s, there were "purges" where the targets were predominantly Jewish.
Another possible counterexample to your theory: Saddam Hussein's mass murders of Kurds. (Saddam could be called a "lefty" because his regime was supported by the Soviets.)
It wasn’t genocide. It was democide and it is a tragedy that Russia does not treat Stalin like Germany now treats Hitler.
BTT
And now, our own gov’t is in cahoots with queers and pedophiles. Something to thimk about?
“Today, Mao and Stalin aren’t in Hitler’s class of evil because Hitler wasn’t a “modernizer,” he was a racist”
Not in his class as Stalin killed twice or three times as many (somewhere between 25 and 35 million depending on who you read) and no one knows how many Mao killed. But the left will never admit that their god Joe was an evil person nor Mao either as that is their religion.
Laotian Communists did it in the 70's, when they went after the Hmong and Meos who'd served in Vang Pao's "secret army" with the CIA.
They did it in Nicaragua, too, when the Sandinistas, back in the 80's, went after the Miskito Indians.
When he died, Stalin was preparing yet another large purge, this one aimed at Soviet Jews. That his doctors were Soviet Jews has been widely noticed in Russia. But then, they were not the only people under threat; Stalin liked to kill Politburo members, too, and even secret policemen.
The fact that Saddam was a socialist is probably why the left did not want us to take him out.
Stalin liked to whipsaw people by changing policy directions fairly frequently and fairly dramatically. What I think he was looking for was leadership talent, natural leaders, and encouraging them to establish themselves and make a mark, so he could identify them and cut them off -- kill them, or send them to the labor camps, and mark them if they survived, for lifetime persecution by the secret police. Because leadership personalities represented a threat to him personally.
Yes leftists see a lot of themselves in socialist dictators, as well as in terrorists who attack America. They are birds of a feather.
The great and entire secret of 20th Century politics is that the purpose of state power is mass death.
Once the ramifications of that sink in, everything else makes sense, including the socially destructive ethos of the welfare state and the various depravities of public education.
Think of Jonestown as amateur micro-scale socialism!
Yes, I had been aware of the infamous Stalin-created “Doctor’s Plot” and the fact that the doctors were Jewish. This incident has rightfully been considered by historians as antisemitic, but whether it qualifies as “genocide” is a matter of semantics.
During WWII Stalin cranked up the old "Mother Russia"/Rodina propaganda, which included glorification of Russian national heroes like Alexander Nevsky, and non-Russians receded into the background. So far as I know, subject to correction, none of the victorious Soviet marshals was a non-Russian.
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