Seven million died in the 'forgotten' holocaust

Toronto Sun ^ | 11/16/03 | ERIC MARGOLIS

[freedom44]

Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin's Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.

How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole.

So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s, the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% of them Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.

Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSR's Muslim peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters who today are branded as "terrorists" by the U.S. and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.

Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million German girls and women were raped.

Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization.

Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed "anti-party elements." Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Union's Adolf Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.

During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or died of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergen-Belsen death camp.

The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of two million more (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times' Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."

The U.S., British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine.

The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons, Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful Europe.

When war came, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.

Though Stalin murdered three times more people than Hitler, to Roosevelt he remained "Uncle Joe."

The British-U.S. alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe in 1945.

After the war, the left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed.

For the western Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murderers. For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.

The Jewish people, understandably, saw their Holocaust as a unique event. It was Israel's raison d'etre. Raising other genocides at that time would, they feared, diminish their own. This was only human nature.

While today, academia, the media and Hollywood rightly keep attention focused on the Jewish Holocaust, they mostly ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi killers, but not communist killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.

Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.

We know all about the crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria? Were it not for writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.

The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.

[lavrenti]

WWP's rise to prominance surprised me. Like many of these groups, they are more a muddled cult than they are a political organization.

One thing you have to understand about these groups is they usually formed around a handful of individuals thrown out of other, larger organizations, grasped a particular form of M-L communism and just became encounter groups for losers. However, several of these groups managed to get support from various sources. RCP had a couple of rich kids financing the operation, enough to start a Maoist International of sorts and an alliance with the Sendero looneys in Peru.

There were a handful of groups that associated themselves with the ideologies attached to certain countries. There were two, for instance, associated with Hoxha's Albania.

WWP of course, holds the distinction of getting support from who?

Look, even when I was a hard Trotskyist, I thought WWP were weirdos.

Now, they're dangerous weridos.

[MEG33]

When Germany and Hitler lost the war we had all the documentation in our hands for prosecutors,researchers,writers to examine.

The Soviet secrets were not so well known until the fall of the Soviet Union,and we don't know it all.We made a pact with the devil to defeat Hitler and we agreed to let the devil take over eastern Europe.

We saved a lot of allied lives in the process but we got communist China,Korean War,Viet Nam,etc in the bargain to speak nothing of the cost of the cold war.Trusting communists is a dead end.

[lavrenti]

Though Lenni Brenner is not a person I want to quote, his description of the organization this man knew as "those &*%$@ Marcyites" are described here.

Considering Brenner's anti-Israeli stance, his opinion is rather interesting.

http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner02192003.html

[lavrenti]

The value in keeping tabs occasionally on ranting idiots like the article posted above is immense, as you can see.

The WWP are a lot worse than you can ever imagine. Now they are pulling the puppet strings on a "mass movement," currently enabled by those Lenin used to muse regarding as "useful idiots."

Whole lot of enablin' goin' on heah.

[MEG33]

They are communists,leading an anti war movement and the marchers liked their organizing the buses and signs.I cannot believe a non communist is that ignorant.

Not in our Name had similar sponsorship but separated in order not to draw flak.I'd buy my own ticket and make my own sign before marching with commies knowingly.

This is America and people have a right to protest but they should know who they are strengthening in the process.

[MEG33]

I think we are making the same point..I like "a whole lot of enabling goin on heah."Useful idiots" indeed.

[MEG33]

FYI

[Skooz]

Excellent documentary, "The Harvest of Despair,"
chronicles this heinous act of mass murder committed by the hero of the American Left.

The only reason this holocuat is "forgotten" (ie ignored by US popular culture) is because it was committed by communists. But then, you already knew that.

[Skooz]

notice how they suggest that there were 7 million deaths - one million more than than the Holocaust - how convenient

Wrong. The Nazi Holocaust killed 11 million people.

[lavrenti]

We're not talking about "communists", these guys are who Alexander Cockburn called Marxist-Leninist-Bonkerists.

Sam Marcy ran a cult. These guys are freaks, even by the standards set by the people I hung with 15 years ago. The fact they somehow are stage-managing a movement leaves me speechless.

Which, eventually will lead to their downfall. Generally, these people short-circuit, usually at the right time.

Remember: God looks after children, drunks and The United States of America.

[lavrenti]

Stalin bears just as much culpablity for the Holocaust because of his enabling and support of the Nazis between 1939-1941.

Just because Hitler stabbed him in the back never absolves the Soviet aid given to the German military and economy during those days.

I sometimes like to add that number next to his name as well. Along with the 20 million Russians killed during the war. Destroyed his officer corps during the Purges, then sat there and did nothing to prepare for a future conflict with Germany, which was sure in coming.

The Red Army liberated death camps their leader enabled Hitler to build.

[MEG33]

Brian Becker is a name I recognized.The Ramsey Clark bunch is involved in this Movement.They are anti Israel,not anti semite,I see.

Anyone pushing the right of return is looking for the death of Israel in my estimation.It looks like they have some Jewish useful idiots helping.

I read one article by Marcy and agree he's a nut but then I feel that way about socialists,too.If I hear one more word about imperialism I'll retch.

[lavrenti]

The Soviet murder machine was well-documented long before Stalin croaked.

Leon Trotsky was given a lot of information about what was going on and broadcasting to his people from exile.

Leon, now he was a funny guy. Had he been in charge, nothing would have changed. The Five Year Plan was originally his idea (Stalin commented sarcastically at the time "What? Give every peasant a Victrola?"), and he was the head of the Red Army during the Civil War, which was about as evil as any crew handed a Mauser and a target.

Finally, Trotsky was responsible for the slaughter at Kronstadt, which gives a little idea about how he'd run the USSR had he won out in his power struggle against Stalin.

However, he did present and propagate much of the information later confirmed when the archives were opened.

The labor camps, and mass executions were known facts in the 1930s. No one wanted to know about it, though.

Familiar story.

[lavrenti]

The SWP (which Marcy was originally in) was an interesting crew. I once sat and read position papers from none other than Lyndon LaRouche (under his party name Lyn Marcus).

The Trotskyists were, well, unbelievable. There was even a faction that had a political "line" on UFOs.

These guys inhabit a world that I cannot describe.

Clark is a free-lance guy. His politics seem to be populist with a Marxist DSA tinge. Becker is an ass.

You see from the article the odd juxtaposition of factions the WWP helped cobble together then.

Lenni, well, he's obsessed with Zionism during the pre-founding period. I'll let it go at that. Met him once at a Socialist Scholars conference in NYC 1990. He's everything you can imagine, and more. Ugh.

[lavrenti]

I forgot I know all this crap.

Maybe some think-tank should give me a job. It'll certainly validate all those years guzzling beers while reading weighty tomes, and behaving like a thug on campus.

You should have seen some of the women I dated at the time.

Yeah, a job would be payback for my suffering.

[Chad Fairbanks]

I think that a lot of Americans who support communism do so because they think that things should be 'fair,' and that communism reaches that goal. However, if they ever met someone who lived under that system, they would be disabused of that notion in a hurry.

Only normal people. Liberals, of course, would ignore the evidence. We see that everyday.

[MEG33]

You might add something to our knowledge,here.

[Spirited]

"The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice."

Innocent blood spilled has a cry of it's own according to scripture.

[nickcarraway]

BUMP