In Search of a Soviet Holocaust - After 50 years on the fringes, the Ukraine famine debate is finally front and center.
In Search of a Soviet Holocaust - After 50 years on the fringes, the Ukraine famine debate is finally front and center.
Article is from 1988 FYI, but more relevant than ever.
“They’re always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million,” observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. “It makes the reader think: ‘My god, it’s worse than the Holocaust.’ ”
I hate that it's controversial to point out that the effort to minimize the Holocaust by not teaching it in schools, normalizing jokes/denial, and deflecting accountability is all deliberate and needs to be fought every time.
It's stunning how much effort they'll go to just to find a worse atrocity.
I mean it's obvious why - the mechanisms in place that enabled the Holocaust are alive and well in the world. Powerful people don't want to lose what they've acquired through blood and so they have a vested interest in people forgetting the Holocaust.
The US and EU have both been supporting the "double holocaust" narrative the last couple of years to court fealty from the reactionaries in Eastern Europe. I believe the EU parliament recently passed some kind of resolution saying that denying that the "holodomor" was a deliberate act of genocide was a crime. It's scary. I never thought I'd see Holocaust denial become government policy in the US and EU.
Anglo scholarship is primarily centred around the idea it was from political errors-bordering on negligence-but it was not with the intent of destroying the Ukrainian people as a national group. Hence while it was mismanagement to the point where it was perhaps even criminal, it was not genocidal. I am not pro-Stalin but from what I gather there is not evidence that the Ukrainian people were systemically targeted to destroy their national group as such.
IF anything has a legitimate claim to genocide it'd be the forced denomadisation of the Kazakh people and the agrarian reform there which was much more obviously outrageously stupid and led to the deaths of a huge portion of the population + the ethnic cleansing of others. I don't know enough about it to have a proper opinion on what you'd classify it as though to be honest.
Obviously Ukrainian historiography is very different but I've not read any of it (because it's in Ukrainian) so I cannot assess if they have access to better sources or what-e.g., what the actual historiographical reason is for the divergence in conclusions.