Posted on 12/11/2008 9:42:08 AM PST by mnehring
She reacted with incredulity. “How can anyone doubt there was a genocide,” she said, “I saw the starving and dying people myself!” I tried to explain to her the genocide-mass murder distinction embedded in current international law as neutrally as I could, noting some of the justifications offered for it. She, of course, was unmoved, and continued to see the distinction as a dubious contrivance. I have to agree.
So went the conversation of Ilya Somin and his grandmother, both immigrants from Russia to America, about the starvation of millions by Josef Stalin in 1930s Ukraine. Ilya was attempting to explain to his babushka the distinction in international law between genocide and mass murder, the type of conversation only lawyers can have as the dead bodies pile knee-deep all around them.
Ilya Somin, a native of Saint Petersburg, is Associate Professor of Law at George Mason University, author, writer, lecturer and prominent contributor at the legal blog, Volokh Conspiracy. His commentary on genocide and mass murder can be found here, here and here. Somin highly recommends this article, Remember the Holodomor, published at the Weekly Standard by fellow emigre, Cathy Young.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, “murder by starvation.” This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies. Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes.
Furthermore, Young writes:
Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora. Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.
In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. A backlash from the left was quick to follow. Revisionist Sovietologist J. Arch Getty accused Conquest of parroting the propaganda of “exiled nationalists.” And in January 1988, the Village Voice ran a lengthy essay by Jeff Coplon (now a contributing editor at New York magazine) titled “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right.” Coplon sneered at “the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism” and dismissed as absurd the idea that the famine had been created by the Communist regime. Such talk, he asserted, was meant to justify U.S. imperialism and whitewash Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.
Here she describes the horrors of mass starvation of rebelling peasants:
There is also no doubt that the famine was man-made. Most Soviet peasants resisted the collectivization that began in the 1930s. When joining collective farms was voluntary, few signed up, and many who did soon left. Forcible collectivization was met with peasant rebellions, ruthlessly suppressed, then with quiet resistance. When villagers realized that collective farming meant backbreaking labor for the state at slave wages, many staged work slowdowns. As a result, grain production targets were not met at a time when Moscow relied on grain exports to finance industrialization. The regime then instituted a policy of ruthless confiscation of grain that left no food for the peasants; in many regions, villages that failed to meet the quota were also forced to surrender all other foodstuffs.
Recent articles detailing the Soviet regime’s war on the peasantry, based on Soviet archives, describe a living hell: government agents going door to door confiscating food; families in recalcitrant villages forced out of their homes and left to freeze; men and women tortured to make them reveal hidden stockpiles of food; widespread cannibalism. These horrors were by no means limited to Ukraine.
In 2003, after years of immense public pressure, the Pulitzer Prize Committee undertook the subject of whether to revoke the 1932 prize awarded to Walter Duranty for his reporting on the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union. In predictable fashion, Sig Gissler, Committee Administrator, had the unmitigated gall to publicly pronounce, “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case.” The current commissar leading the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said returning the prize would evoke the “Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.” The current deterioration of the health of the New York Times is proof there is eventual justice for that most despicable class of thug, the lying public intellectual.
Arnold Beichman wrote of Duranty in the Weekly Standard five years ago:
I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. (”An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934,” University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP’s Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
And last, but certainly not least, the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, UK Guardian correspondent and contemporary of Duranty who, when asked to describe him said, “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.”
While the halls of the literati in America are still crowded with apologists for Walter Duranty and the object of his affection, Josef, Russia itself needs no help in the revision of history. After all, they perfected that scheme over 70 years of horror and terror. Arkady Ostrovsky, Moscow Bureau Chief for the Economist, published an excellent article, Flirting With Stalin, in the September issue of the UK journal, Prospect, in which he quotes the new history books for schoolchildren in Russia.
“Dear friends! The textbook you are holding in your hands is dedicated to the history of our Motherland… from the end of the Great Patriotic War to our days. We will trace the journey of the Soviet Union from its greatest historical triumph to its tragic disintegration.”
This greeting is addressed to hundreds of thousands of Russian schoolchildren who will in September receive a new history textbook printed by the publishing house Enlightenment and approved by the ministry of education. “The Soviet Union,” the new textbook explains, “was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.” Furthermore, over the past 70 years, the USSR, “a gigantic superpower which managed a social revolution and won the most cruel of wars,” effectively put pressure on western countries to give due regard to human rights. In the early part of the 21st century, continues the textbook, the west has been hostile to Russia and pursued a policy of double standards.
I will leave it to the readers to devise their own creative exclamatory reactions to these developments. I am sure yours, like mine, will not make it past moderation. In closing, I remind that the liars and deceivers of history in Europe, in Russia and in America, have no shame, no conscience and no intention of giving up to truth.
Genocide in the Ukraine? Why that never happened just ask the Pulitzer prize winning NYT.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/europe-mainmenu-35/540
Sadly, the most will be a footnote in a history book. The Ukranians and others who where victims need their own version of the Nazi Hunters who aren't resting until those monsters are brought to justice.
I have read more recent estimates that include the Ukraine and the gulags and the Zeks coming close to forty million.
And yet Stalin and his buddy Beria are not reviled one one-hundredth as much as Adolph Hitler.
Ping!
When you get to that level of magnitude of genocide, be it Stalin, Hitler, Mao, whomever, the evil is the same, the only difference is logistics (how many people is one capable of killing in a given period of time.) All the aforementioned deserve a special place in hell and should not be given any pass. I think one reason Stalin is given a pass is that we had to use (necessarily) him to defeat Hitler, thus, we don’t want to cause question to our own necessary war tactic. (as Churchill said, if Hitler invaded hell, he would find something good to say about the Devil in the House of Commons.) Also it took longer to really put together the evil that Stalin was.
You know, it is true: all liberals eventually go to hell.
“We” also don’t criticize Stalin because there were many Stalinists in the US and UK who have continued to frame the debate and tell the history.
Same with the lie that there was no Soviet threat to the US in the 1950s. No Americans working on behalf of the USSR deliberately or as useful idiots working as activists under KGB fronts.
The election of Barack Obama is the culmination of the plans to destroy the West that were first laid down in the Lubyanka in the mid-1920s.
Fixed it for you.
I have a brother-in-law who was your classic New York Irish cop. He in fact was stationed as a motorcycle sergeant at “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” and always claimed he was the only sergeant there who did not have a rabbi.
He was so good that many years ago, the time before last when the Dems had their convention in NYC he was put in charge of security.
His men kept order well and on the last day he let a lot of them go home to their families, keeping a skeleton crew.
It turned out that a hard core Maoist group was waiting for that and they came out and starting marching and attacking people and screaming and yelling about capitalist pigs and death to the pigs and all the usual communist rot.
He went out with his small crew that was left to stop them.
One snuck up behind him and plunged an axe into his back, severing spinal nerves. He had to retire on disability.
Every time some SOB begins about how communists mean well I think of the axe in my brother-in-law’s back.
40 million deaths is the generally accepted figure. Some modern revisionists have put it at 20 million and I recently saw 10 million. They are attempting to minimize the horror of the Soviet Union.
40 million was confirmed to Robert Conquest just after the Soviet Union fell.
My father told me they got drunk and danced in the middle of the highway when Stalin died.
Their story, along with the works of Solzhenitsyn's were major influences in my decision to study Russian language, history and culture, and join the Army to fight them any way I could.
The figures I've seen for just the Ukraine are closer to 12-13 million starved to death. At gunpoint, the Red Army took every stick of grain, every cow, horse, ox, pig, goat, sheep, chicken, dog, cat rabbit, and all other foods out of the country for 4 years. Anyone who even spoke up was shot on the spot. Many were just shot out of spite, out of hand, or apparently for fun.
There were hundreds of entire towns and villages in which every single resident starved to death, and which remained empty for years. There were German accounts of the Wermacht rolling through small, remote farming towns that had been empty for a decade or more. Unlike our "Ghost Towns", theirs still contained what was left of the remains of their inhabitants.
After WWII Stalin forcibly moved Russians into them to work the land in largely unproductive collective farms, and claim it as Russian/Soviet territory.
All, of course, in the name of "the People" and breaking the resistance of the "bourgeois" independent landowning Kulaks to the Russian Communists takeover of agriculture and control of the food supply.
bookmark
I’ve been waiting for Christiane Amanpour special report on this issue. Walter Duranty would be so proud of the modern day MSM. Someone has been running short informational tv ads about the Holodomor because of the MSM news blackout.
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