But, but, Walter Duranty said the Children weren’t starving, they were only hungry. There was no Holocaust in the USSR, people just mysteriously disappeared and were never found. Mostly those who disagreed with the Government. The NKVD just shot and buried the people and planted orchards over them. Those who were shipped to the Archipelago were buried in the permafrost after their service in the mines. If what the Russians did was not a Holocaust what the hell was it? A cleansing? It only takes 33% of the population to control the rest, let it be a lesson learned and a warning. Don’t call it conspiracy, call it a lesson from the past.
I don’t disagree with your comments, and they actually are an argument against “genocide” in Ukraine.
The academic debate over the Holodamor is whether the GOAL of the Stalinist terror-famine in Ukraine, mass deportations of kulaks to arctic forestry camps and Siberia, forced requisitions of scarce grain from Ukraine for export, etc., was “genocide” (i.e., primarily, destruction of Ukrainians as a people), or just class warfare, politics, and the rough implementation of communism by a murderous regime. The countryside, especially in Ukraine, voted for the Socialist Revolutionary Party in the elections to the 1918 Constituent Assembly and local Soviets; the south was a major theatre during the Civil War, with “bandit” rebellions thereafter; and, Stalin “needed” to control the grain production of Ukraine to finance industrial development for the proletariat (Marx considered peasant farmers to be petti-bourgeois wannabees).
The thirst to emphasize genocide reflects the social-political values of our times. On the outrage and political sympathy scale, being victims of racial genocide is the gold standard, while being victims of communism gets no love. Blaming it all on “genocide” or ethnic cleansing hides the intrinsic nature of communism, giving it cover it does not deserve. The Holodamor was a “two-fer” situation. Communists used genocide in the furtherance of Stalinist doctrine, and were able to because of communism’s monopoly of power and utter disregard for life or liberty. If Ukraine had been full of pro-Bolshevik, Stalin-worshippers, would they have been exterminated just for being Ukrainian? I think not.