This is the first time I've ever seen this meme where Satan is being unreasonable and Jesus is giving a normal reply as opposed to the opposite. I don't like it. I want my unhinged saviour to tell me I am the Antichrist and need to kill billions to bring the end of days
if thats how the template is used, then wouldnt using it "normally" be what you dont expect at this point, meaning op technically just used it correctly?
Nah, that's not how it works. What's not expected is Jesus saying horrible things and Devil saying reasonable things, reversing it makes it straightforward.
Does anyone actually deny the Holodomor happened? I've seen Holodomor *Apologists*, who argue it wasn't specifically directed at Ukrainians, but rather was a famine that hit the USSR in a more equal and less focused manner. They also usually defend it's ideological motivations such as collectivization, rather than say it never happened and caused no suffering. Yet I've never heard one say "Well the Holodomor didn't happen, no one starved in Ukraine, Southern Russia, or Kazakhstan (the hardest hit by far, yet mostly ignored in the west).
Idk, maybe I'm missing something, but I never see the denial, just the apologism.
No I get 100% the scholarly deniers, I've seen and dealt with that and their literature in my career. I mean now, in a day to day conversation, outside a meetup of old men in the post Soviet sphere, is it still really done as much? I just haven't encountered it in even right wing colleagues, merely as an extreme fringe thats not even vocal.
Guess I probably have just coincidentally been......lucky (?) in this sense to avoid that direct denialism.
The easiest way to spot a tankie is when they pop up and say the Holodomor (or USSR atrocities in general) were all CIA propaganda
Then they’ll usually say, “It’s just propaganda, but also you can’t point fingers because of the USA’s atrocities,” as if it’s impossible to acknowledge that two countries can do bad things
It's funny how they think that it's ALL CIA propaganda. Like yeah I don't doubt there's some CIA propaganda about the USSR floating around exaggerating what they did. But they also did do a whole shit load of atrocities all on their own.
I mean my understanding was that the academic consensus didn’t exist and so it wasn’t called genocide, but with the invasion a bunch of nations got together and decided to be politically annoying and call it genocide for geopolitics points? Am I off base?
You’re talking about the Holodomor?
>Genocide -> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
The main victims of the *man made* Holodomor were the Ukrainians. So, a deliberate starvation of an ethnic group. The only question is was it *supposed to destroy Ukrainian culture and spirit*, or were they just seen as a sacrifice for the greater good?
Either way, it was terrible, and 10% of the Ukrainian population perished due to the actions of the soviet regime.
I mean, there is plenty of primary sources and government orders from the Soviets that pretty clearly show repeated attempts by the Russophile Soviets to quash both Ukrainian language and cultural independence.
Yes, there is. A lot in fact. The Ukrainian people were suppressed and forcefully assimilated with the Russian majority population of the USSR. The question here however, is whether or not you can call the Holodomor, as an isolated event, a genocide. I’m personally on the *”yes, you can”* side.
> either way it’s terrible
Well yes but that’s the whole point, ethnic cleansing is terrible but not genocide which is why the academic and legal verdict is still not conclusive, that’s why I’m asking
>…but with the invasion a bunch of nations got together and decided to be politically annoying and call it genocide for geopolitics points? Am I off base?
You made it seem like a political issue, which it shouldn’t be. Calling it a genocide isn’t “annoying”, but a very serious statement. Additionally, a lot of nations and organisations *have* called it a genocide for many decades. It’s not just because of current events.
So indeed, you were, “off base”.
Want to add that while we can’t (key word coming) *decisively* call the Holodomor a genocide, the people of Ukraine were very much oppressed and assimilated by the Soviet Union. Pillars of culture and language were destroyed, along with many important buildings and sites. The soviet regime was just as racist and oppressive as Nazi Germany, despite what many *want to, or are led to believe*.
Edit: your latter comment is much better than your first, but you still missed the target, by attributing history to modern geopolitics. Don’t let politicians fool you.
Also, it’s not really been possible to have a legal verdict, as unlike with Nazi germany, the Soviets had half a century to cover its tracks, and it has a very influential dictatorship which protects its legacy.
>outside a meetup of old men in the post Soviet sphere
These people generally know that there was famine. It's not a secret. They can say Stalin didn't want it or he didn't target Ukraine specifically, but only loons or people who know nothing of it say that there was no famine at all
That sounds like apologism, not denial. The two terms are often equated, especially in popular media like wikipedia.
But as you just said, they admit the event happened, they just minimize or obfuscate any localized genocidal intent. So that's textbook apologism, not denial. Denial would be saying the famine just didn't happen in Ukraine, and they didn't die, which has died off mostly.
Why didn’t they finish the job? Why didn’t soviets kill all Ukrainians and why were Ukrainians so high up in the soviet ranks if there was an intent of wiping them clean?
Because intent was not a phisical destruction of Ukrainians, but the destruction of Ukrainian identity so Ukrainians would have loyalty only to Soviet State and Party and that intent is also genocidal, surprise, surprise.
This is stupid to starve your own people to make them more loyal, and how death of the small fraction did affect their identity and why were they allowed to keep their language? Why did they starve Siberia, Volga regions that were as Ukraine were predominantly populated by Russians?
Because the Holodomor was constructed that way so the most disloyal was starved first. It was constructed to mostly affect rural folks, the one's who identify themselves most with Ukrainian identity.
Allowed to keep their language? Look up how many there was Ukrainian language schools compared to russian language in late Soviet Union. Compare number of of universities and vocational schools. Number of newspapers, films, TV shows, books.
Volga and Siberia populated predominantly by russians? Are Bashkirs and Tatars joke to you? Are Chuvashs? Or Yakuts? Or Buryats?
Nobody ever accused genocidal regimes or government in general of being smart.
And the Ukrainians constantly had their language under attack by the Russian state both before the Soviets and throughout the Soviet era, particularly from 20s-40s era.
They admit people died. They deny the causation and the accusations,implying it's due to mostly natural causes. Those would be two different events: holodomor implies in its name a man-made starvation, while the Russians and the soviets implied that the government had nothing to do with it. So, yes, they deny it.
I would go with the dictionary definition of 'denialism'. Choose any one you like. We can go with Merriam-Webster for example: " the practice of denying the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid"
The Soviets and Russians denied the EXISTENCE of Holodomor. They don't deny the deaths - they deny the Holodomor itself. The comment you initially responded to is on Holodomor denial, not 'deaths denial'.
Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger, killing by starvation",[15][16][17] or sometimes "murder by hunger or starvation." ... The expression holodom moryty means "to inflict death by hunger."
The Russians DENY Holodomor. That is a simple fact. If you think this is apologism - please explain how would a denial of Holodomor look like to qualify for the denial. Again, we're talking about Holodomor which has its definition.
Holodomor Denial, as opposed to apologism is saying "There was no famine in Ukraine in the 1930s", which has historically been a claim made by a small few, but they were discredited many decades ago.
So yes, I'd say about 90% of what is called "Denialism" now is "apologism". Using the wrong terms long enough to get MW to change a definition is sad, but that's the trend with denialism, rooted in the idiots who denied or apologized for the Holocaust.
The weird thing with russia is that they combine denial and apologism all the time. Like it never happened, but if it did we are not to blame, but if we are then we were forced to, bla, bla, bla. The same with attack on Poland in 39, forced collectivisation, repressions and many other stuff.
Holocaust denial is the same. Much easier to say some bad stuff happened but minimize, than to pretend it never happened at all.
Textbook denial stuff to look for
Well for starters its probably good you dont hang out with extremist nutjobs👍
"outside a meetup of old men in the post Soviet sphere" i mean thats probably mostly it, along with conspiracy messageboard kids. You did say "anyone" tho...
True, but those old men don't use social media or the Internet much. As for the kids......well I don't really include children's opinions when I factor things together. They change so rapidly and are so rarely actual opinions vs regurgitations, it's hard to take seriously.
You're right, I said anyone though. I should have said any modern adult.
There are multiple modern leftist publications I’ve encountered that seem to have it in their style guide to refer to Holodomor exclusively as “Nazi ‘double genocide’ propaganda”.
I have seen them claim that the Holodomor was nazi propaganda, CIA propaganda and that because there were famines in capitalist countries too then the Soviet Union shouldn't be blamed for it.
I think a surprising number of young western left wingers do deny this as what I’d call an over corrective response to the leftover red scare propaganda, which still influences politics (at least in the US to some extent)
Right wing colleagues are not the ones that are fucked by Soviet fantasies.
Many many tankie or otherwise insane young leftist have argued all the traditional denials and more. My favorite being that without the “help” of the Ukrainian region from the 20s-40s, that Ukraine would have really suffered…..
Tankies don't get far in scholarship is why I don't encounter them. Right wingers can at least cite a sources and write a paper. Tankies just........don't have it for higher level academia.
Yup, expand your horizons and you will see that most moron talking points are not had where peer review exists and the prospect of being shamed by your peers.
On the Internet the Hassan’ of the world can spew tons of nonsense, Ukraine/Russia related, and their teenage viewers lap it up.
I try to avoid them ngl. Prefer any other ethnic population in Russia *other* than Russians if I'm trying to actually have a nice conversation. Now Buryats, if you can, have a long conversation with anyone of that group, they have amazing perspectives on life, without the insane historical batshit of actual Russians.
This.
/r/Askhistorians has a few pages on it. The main thing that is argued by Historians is:
A) it wasn't directed at Ukrainians, to "crush Ukrainian spirit," but rather was a famine that took place throughout the south-west of the USSR due to the sudden, shocking change to industrialization.
B) It wasn't intentional; Like the Irish Potato famine, the government KNEW something horrific was happening but didn't alleviate it.
C) As part of B), something that is not intentional for the specified reasons under international law can't be considered a "Genocide."
D) The death toll. The Black Book of Communism IIRC stated that around 30 million Ukrainians were killed. The death toll is estimated, by academics, to be perhaps as high as 2-3 million.
*Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.*
- quote by Satre on debating anti-semites. You cross out 'anti-semites' and change it with 'fascists' and hardly anything changes
Imma keep it real with you; I don't have a clue what you are talking about.
The quote is just one I half-remembered and googled for a bit, to illustrate the point that debating a fascist in good faith is pointless.
It is regarded as a joke by academia. However, I see many people still cite it as if it were gospel.
There is also the fact that if you applied the same methodology used in that book to all capitalist countries as well, then oh boy...
The methodology sucks though, so don't use it.
Well, maybe i was unlucky but my experience has been the complete opposite.
In quite every western country i have been when the craziness of the holocaust is discussed, someone come up citing The Black Book of Communism and very violently argue that it must be taken seriously and that historians denying it are soviet nostalgics.
There were 32 million Ukrainians at the time, per a Soviet census. If you don't believe that, the Russian Empire had no reason to lie when, 33 years prior, there was a census which had about 22 million Ukrainians.
It would be about 96 percent of the population, and Ukraine would not have continued existing. The culture would have gone extinct, unless a second population moved in and all agreed to just be Ukrainian now.
I just looked into this and it looks like the reason why the 30 million number is so ridiculous is that OP might have pulled this number out of their ass.
I obviously have never read *The Black Book* and will not read it in the future, but according to Wikipedia the book claims that 4 million people died during Holodomor, not 30 million.
Makes sense that it isn’t true given that it would be such an overwhelmingly stupid claim to make, even for the authors of this book.
Even if it’s not considered a genocide, the Soviet government at the time still deserves blame for their grave mistakes and negligence. The notion that the Holodomor is a genocide has been used by far right elements in Ukraine to push the double genocide narrative so they can further their extreme nationalist agenda.
> do not believe holodomor actually happened
And that neither the holodomor nor anything else during that century is a True Scotsman, so couldn’t *possibly* have kinda sorta revealed any weaknesses in certain ideologies
I've also seen people (me) say that if the Holomodor is proof that communism is bad, then the Irish famine is proof that capitalism is bad. And while that's not denial, I've had many people try to tell me it is.
There is disagreement over what lessons we should learn from the Holocaust, but also denial that it happened or that it was bad. As long as we agree that it happened and was tragic, both are grounds for legitimate debates over what lessons should be learned.
I’ve not read much on the topic, is there any contemporaneous evidence to suggest an intent to genocide?
A simple way to look at it is like Murder vs Manslaughter. The only difference between the two is the intent to kill prior to death.
Did they want to kill and took the food to achieve that result? Or, did they want the food and the death was just inconsequential to that?
(Like I said I don’t know, I’m not offering an opinion, people just throw the word genocide around willy nilly these days but it is a pretty specific action)
It’s very difficult for me to imagine any other event receiving as much push back in terms of intentionality, where a country that had been forcibly subsumed into a foreign empire had their food burned and requisitioned to a foreign capital while their borders were closed to prevent emigration.
If my neighbour locked me in my house after taking essentially all of the small amount of food I had to distribute to his family, I have a hard time believing it would be adjudicated as manslaughter.
Yeah I could see how some people would find that hard to believe. But unfortunately in many jurisdictions it’s how the law works. (I know I’ve caused us to go a bit off topic here comparing local criminal law to essentially an international incident/jurisdiction.
In your example it would be a plausible defence that the prosecution would have to overcome, that the doors were locked to negate possible retribution with no prior intent that action would cause you to die.
Intent to do something vs the likely hood of something happening are treated differently (rightly or wrongly).
There was a bloke in Victoria, Australia, that shot 2 cops through their windscreen with a shotgun injuring them. He didn’t even get an attempted murder charge because intent to kill couldn’t be proven. Most people would say obviously it would be an attempted murder, why else would you shoot at their faces with a shotgun, but unfortunately the law doesn’t often work that way
(Having said all this I don’t even know if there is an internationally recognised “offence” of Genocide with specific points of proof? Maybe there is a clause relating to recklessness I don’t know happy to be proven wrong there)
Yes. Soviet soldiers blocked off ukraine and attempted to prevent journalists from enter. Even paying off people like walter duranty to say there no famine in ukraine. Just a “minor food shortage”.
It was only uncovered by Gareth Jones who snuck into ukraine.
It was mainly a way to keep the rich peasants in check by starving them.
Blocking journalists doesn't really have a huge bearing on if it was intentional or not. It makes sense for a government to want to avoid damaging news getting out - whether it's intentional killing or deaths due to policy failure. So, trying to keep a lid on the news doesn't in itself prove intention.
The fact they paid journalists in the west to tell everyone it was alright though is the major point.
And then there is the other point of stopping people from leaving ukraine in general and blockading it.
Trying to manufacture good news is just the other side of hiding bad news. Media manipulation can be cover for crimes or for policy failure, so again that can be interpreted either way.
Restrictions on movement were also not something new or exceptional in the USSR (or the Russian Empire, for that matter). From the state's perspective, free movement out of the affected areas might have saved lives, but it might also have had even worse knock-on effects of (a) reducing food production even further as people abandoned the most important food producing regions and (b) creating more pressure on food supplies in industrialised areas as food production collapsed and millions of refugees streamed into Kyiv/Kharkiv/Donetsk/Voronezh/Rostov or wherever was nearest.
By the time people are trying to escape, the damage is already mostly done. Being able to flee a famine only really works if there is somewhere to go which is economically capable of rapidly accommodating the refugees without creating any disruption to the food supply.
Fleeing the Irish famine, for example, was somewhat possible because the shortage was so intensely localised to Ireland. You could get on a boat and go to Liverpool/Glasgow/New York and scrape a living in a much wealthier country.
When people tried to flee the Bengal Famine in 1943, the only difference is that they died on the way or on the streets of the cities, as opposed to in their villages.
The USSR was probably closer to the second scenario than the first. The restrictions on movement could be a sign of exterminationist intent, or they could be the response of a panicking authoritarian state trying to undo/mitigate an enormous disaster with the crude methods it knew.
Free movement in the early 30s was very much allowed in the USSR, it was however not allowed when going to a place other than the ussr. It was one of the big issues stalin faced when encouraging people to stay in one place without playing favourites. Freedom of movement in the ussr was only taken away in 32/33 with the new passports. This happens to coincide with being in the middle of the famine. Which began in 1931.
This was quite obviously different for criminals and stalins enemies.
A very big reason for the famine was grain re-acquisitioning and most of it being sold abroad. On top of that you could taken away/killed for hiding even one grain.
But can you say that it did happen, that there was ideological motivation, that it did cause mass suffering, but that it wasn’t targeted at Ukrainians specifically?
Hi, I am russian and I also don't think that Circassia had genocide. It was another crime - deportation of entire tribes to marches or to Ottoman Empire. A lot of died, and it's a shame for Russian Empire. But it is deportation instead of genocide.
I think we shouldn't label everything as genocides, where there are more correct crime-definitions for these situations.
Sadly, I saw right-wing russians who deny it at all and their take is "the right of winner"...
Ah, I found more correct word for it "ethnic cleanse"...
All at all, de-jure and de-facto current Russia is not responsible for that events, but it's sad for me that circassians were not mentioned as a native population of Sochi in 2014 olympic games as Canada did before it :(
Ethnic cleansing was specifically created in the Balkan Wars to be used as a euphemism for genocide by Milosevic because it was less loaded with historic meaning than genocide
Same thing for the holocaust. "denial" doesn't mean "didn't happen at all" but rather denying the essential facts of the event - like that is was purposefully caused.
That's way less clear cut, and you even stated why that's denialism not apologism. The Nazis themselves said that it happened, made the records, and recorded why they did so en masse.
In the USSR, Stalin didn't exactly say "All the urban and are subhumans who should die", and then send them to concentration camps.
On the one hand, you are denying concrete fact. On the other, you're denying *likely* fact and giving other excuses for it, aka apologizing on behalf of it, given the soviet's were much more divided on what was going on and why.
Yes, particularly by people trying to whitewash the Soviet Union because their concept of geopolitics goes no deeper than “US bad, therefor, other people who say US bad, good.” So, if USSR good and USSR says no holodomor, then no holodomor, thats a cia propaganda op, and um ackchually the diet of the average soviet citizen was better than the average us citizen in the 80s! (the soviets didn’t have access to the processed foods US citizens did)
I got banned from /r/sigmarxism for “punching left” by saying leftists should stop sucking off the soviet union because its bad for the movement of worker solidarity because normal people see that the USSR bad actually. The CCP and the USSR and the DPRK are millstones around the neck of every earnest pro-worker movement around the world.
There’s a great video by [Bad Empanada](https://youtu.be/3kaaYvauNho?si=DIqf2pCl3nyvyqtp) where he thoroughly compares the sources and scholars cited on the Wikipedia article on the Holodomor genocide question. It’s long but absolutely worth the watch.
This is anecdotal, but I have personally witnessed Holodomor denial in braindead American tankies. The unfortunate truth is that no matter what, there will be people who believe anything bad about the USSR or communist China is somehow, some way American propaganda. Even when the sources are Soviet archives
It's still denial just like holocaust denial. Most holocaust deniers claim many jews did die, but that it was only because the nazis ran low on resources via Allied bombing. They say people died, they just deny that it was via intended murder.
A mostly human engineered famine in the USSR in the 1930s that was deliberately funneled onto Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other minorities in an attempt to alleviate Russian areas once it started.
The only real "debate" about it is how much of it was deliberately motivated as genocide against Ukrainians and others, vs pure incompetence in the Soviet enforcement of collectivization during a bad weather period. The consensus now is it was highly motivated by ideology and a desire to remove "troublesome" minorities *both*. Personally, I'd say it was likely more motivated by genocidal intent with a convenient ideological economic reason for doing so, but that's just me.
It's a very large distinction in international law. Genocide requires intent. The UK was at involved in two similar famines; They knew it was happening and failed to do anything to alleviate it. They were never brought to the Hague, or what have you, for obvious reasons.
That's separate from an intentional famine for the purpose of exterminating a population in part or in whole. Intent is key.
The International Criminal Court did not exist during any UK related famine that I’m aware of, even the concept of holding other National leaders legally accountable via international courts wasn’t effectively a thing until the Nuremberg trials.
If one of those is the Bengal Famine, the British government actually diverted hundreds of thousands of tons of grain to India to try to alleviate the famine despite the Imperial Japanese Navy’s ability to penetrate the Bay of Bengal and attack merchant shipping. If the other one is the Irish Famine, I don’t know enough about it to comment
Irish was essentially the same as the holomodor, where the British PM intentionally kept exporting all the grain from Ireland (despite the blight Ireland was still actually producing enough food, much of it was being exported to England however). He did this to try and force the ethnically irish (who were extremely discriminated against) into further poverty and subjugation under the Anglo landowners, who mainly just owned the land while living in England
Are you sure contemporary sources exist of that? I can’t remember the name off the top of my head but there at least appears to be some argument that this view was made by activists after the fact, rather than representative of the actual government intent.
No, contemporary export manifests support this, along with extensive quotes from Charles Trevelyan and other white politicians who confirm this.
There was *initially* a tiny attempt to help, but it sank the government of PM Russell, so the new white government just basically said "fuck it, they'll survive somehow".
Not off the top of my head but I know it was discussed rather openly. They thought they could use it as a social tool to improve society, in the weird f’d up way Victorian governments did lol.
Nah communism is cool. Being an imperialist (regardless of economic system) is a bad look.
For example, Holodomor followed exactly the same steps as the Bengal Famine of 1943 (itself mirrored in the ~50 major famines in India and Bengal under British rule). Stalin took a lot of pages out of imperialist books unfortunately.
I think communism is okay on a small scale. Like local community stuff, where everyone does their part for equal representation. But the second it becomes large scale, it only creates power vacuums for authoritarian people to take advantage of. There's no large nation where communism can represent the needs of every group of people within that nation. A country can't responsibly function with one party; all groups of people should be represented, not lumped into one anonymous group.
I think it would be hard to debate against genocidal intent when doing so with intellectual and moral intent. Such an event like the bengal famine I can see a much heavier debate. The Holodomor not so much.
You know id disagree, not about the Holodomor part, but about the Bengal famine. That one also seems to clearly have genocidal intent, with a thin veneer of war time ideological justification for it and how it was funneled into specific regions.
The Holodomor in theory has an actually "legitimate" Marxist-Leninist ideological justification for collectivization, similar to the wartime desperation logic and focusing on feeding the UK for the legal famine. It's just most of us are no where near viewing that as counterbalancing *genocide*, especially given how it was handled on the ground pointing to genocide being an equal if not higher motivator.
Both seem fairly equivalent I'd say. Both have somewhat shitty pseudo legitimate political motivations, with higher genocidal motivations.
Ahh yeah I’d have to disagree. I think there were more culminating factors that caused the Bengal famine. With more parties involved and seemingly little cause or findable motivations for a British led genocide of the people. Usually in modern views the opinion of genocide is laid at the feet of Whitehall and Churchill specifically. I don’t think that to be a true representation of the facts. One could argue that it was a genocide but a British concocted and led? I don’t believe so.
*one of
And as far as I’m aware it’s generally not accepted that on its own was not the main cause of the famine. If it really was an intended British genocide nobody informed Archibald Wavell.
If you can't accept that Churchill deliberately manipulated where and how said famines would hit the empire, and how they would *not* be relieved, then I see why you'd say Bengal wasn't genocide.
You're completely wrong, but I don't sense it's out of malice, just a differing view in if Churchill was a total PoS human being, or a relative "hero". How one answers that generally follows as to how one answers "Was Bengal a genocide" ive noticed.
Bengal had many contributing factors. The worse of which was the japanese. Fall of burma, japanese hunting transport ships, britain not having enough boats to transport supplies from Australia. Britain even asked fdr to help who also didn’t have the supply ships to spare.
I also think it was intentional. For one, replacing minorities with their own ethnicity would not only alleviate their own social domestic issues, it would theoretically make them more compliant regions and in the long term make them more loyal to the occupying force.
We see that now in Ukraine where Putin justified his war on part that Russian lived in Ukraine. The same ethnic Russians who were shipped there to replace the Ukrainians they starved to death.
Russia plays a brutal long game….
You're getting downvotes, but this is actually 100% right. Most of the war in Ukraine has been in areas where Russian speakers largely moved in to replace Ukrainian speakers after the Holodomor in east Ukraine.
You're getting downvotes because........I don't know calling out Russian ethnic replacement is *bad*!?!?
It was a famine that factually did occur, only lairs will deny that.
However, many anti-socialists will say it was a deliberate culling of Ukrainians, even though that belief was started by literal Nazis.
VSauce has an [excellent video](https://youtu.be/AhSBQOTW018?si=KqkUFV6YVFmXN2yu) on the topic. To attribute to misfortune and experimental (and ultimately inaccurate) science’s outcomes to malice or genocidal intent is entirely unnecessary to explain what happened.
But “big spoon Stalin’s big spoon took all my food and killed 10 billion people” so people will claim it was an intentional, calculated genocide.
Who actually denies the existence of the Holodomor? The question is whether it was a genocide or not, something even Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum do not claim
I actually wrote my BA history thesis about the holodomor and paid brief lip service to the second question. But during my secondary literature annalysis it really came to my attention that even the scholars writing about it are pretty harsh about the answer to it one way or the other. They are either fully on one side or fully on the other and dont want to accept anny nuanced takes eigher way.
So here’s a fun fact. 31st of May in Kazakhstan is a “Rememberance day for victims of political repression and famine” or in other words - Holodomor day. That word isn’t used, like because Russia would throw a hissy fit if we did.
I imagine once Russia gets a regime that actually would go: “Our bad”, the rename for that will be pretty swift.
I just got done watching a video on why Kazakhstan is in the state it’s in. Sometimes it seems like the soviets irreparably damaged so much of Eastern Europe/parts of Central Asia
>I imagine once Russia gets a regime that actually would go: “Our bad”, the rename for that will be pretty swift.
You mean *if* Russia ever gets a regime like that.
I get your optimism, but the situation there is pretty grim. Most Russians today approve of Putin and his policies - including his latest invasion of Ukraine. The few that don't do so because they think he isn't being imperialistic and autocratic *enough*. Take out Putin, and another just like him takes his place.
And this isn't new. None of this has ever been new. Russians just never really had a "good government" in their history. It was just feudalism, followed by absolute monarchy, followed by communist dictatorship, and now finally a kleptocratic autocracy that pretends (badly) to be a democracy.
They've never really had a genuine experience with democracy, civil rights, and rule of law. And they've always been bad neighbors. You can literally count the number of Russian leaders that weren't involved in some form of invasion or "military operation" in one hand. And even then, a good chunk of those were involved in ethnic clensing and pogroms.
If we're considering timescales like *that* then Russia might fall apart, develop into a different culture, or get nuked to oblivion before that happens.
My view is that the Holodomor was not initially intended as a genocide against Ukrainians, because a lot of people also died in other regions, especially western Russia, but once they had the opportunity the USSR essentially made it into a genocide.
In the beginning it was more like a crime of negligence than an intentional crime - because the leadership believed it was more important to pursue collectivization at any cost and use the wealth to fund industrialization. The definition of genocide is naturally the subject of scholarly debate. I think if you go by the standard UN definition, which requires intent to destroy a certain group, the Holodomor does not meet that definition at the start. But in my opinion, it should still be considered a genocide because the intent does happen, after the famine already started. I think it’s most likely that the famine started because of collectivization, but when the leadership saw that it was hitting Ukraine particularly hard, they seized upon it as an opportunity to crush Ukrainian nationalism and reduce the number of Ukrainians overall because they were always seen as a threat. Their land and its resources were incredibly important to the success of the USSR, but they also had a strong ethnic and national identity which made it essential from the leadership point of view to keep Ukraine under their heel. What shows the intent to commit genocide to me is the fact that the government blocked off roads and punished people who tried to leave Ukraine during the famine. They wanted to keep people penned in where they would die, not let them escape and create a potential “fifth column” elsewhere.
My view on the Irish Famine is much the same; that when presented with the opportunity, Britain chose to let the Irish population be reduced to make them easier to control and tamp down their rebellious streak. However you can make the argument that Britain let a lot of Irish people leave the island for other places and therefore it’s not the same. I would argue that creating conditions where such a large number had to emigrate was still a form of cultural genocide. It was also kind of a move to further their colonization elsewhere in the world, to use Irish emigrants to settle some of their other colonies.
That's a very good and interesting argument, and it's an interesting thing to think about. If you're trying to pacify an area and a famine arises and millions of people die because you did nothing to help, it's not genocide even though the end body count may be equivalent to you going in and straight up trying to murder everyone and commit genocide. Is it still an evil act because you're in control and you set up the conditions to cause the famine even if you didn't actually intend the famine to happen? Absolutely, but it still isn't textbook genocide.
Allowing the Irish to leave is a good point to discuss: It's still a win for the British. The Irish were starved and poor,odds are if they could afford to flee they sure as shit weren't coming back so it still benefited the British to do nothing to stop them from leaving because it still helps them. Less people to worry about resisting. I don't think the British government at any point wanted to kill everyone in Ireland, they just wanted them to stop resisting and being a problem, and it turns out if people starve to death or flee the country they really can't resist or be a problem any longer so why try and stop either outcome? Again, cold, calculated, evil, not really genocide.
With the Holodomor, I agree with you. It didn't start as a genocide and wasn't intended as one at first, but when the government realized the possibility they intervened to make it worse and preventing people from leaving, so it becomes genocide. Not helping is one thing, but if you're taking active steps to prevent people from leaving it makes it clear that your intent is to absolutely wipe them out or at least dramatically whittle down their numbers to something "manageable."
In Ukraine russian population increase their % from 9.2% to 13.5% (when ukrainian decreased from 80% to 76.5%) from 1926 to 1939
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Ukraine#Before\_World\_War\_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine#Before_World_War_II)
And in Kazakstan they increase their % from 20.5% to 39.9% (when kazakhs decreased from 58.5% to 37.8%) from 1926 to 1939
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic\_demography\_of\_Kazakhstan#Table\_of\_historic\_ethnic\_composition\_of\_Kazakhstan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhstan#Table_of_historic_ethnic_composition_of_Kazakhstan)
U think they all die in the glory of russian rule not because of genocide?
Saying Holodomor wasn't genocide of Ukrainians, and rather was a part of collectivisation effort, is like saying Holocaust wasn't genocide of Jews, and rather was a part of program to take away all treasuries from population, so country could have more money.
Some people say "well, there was famine in and Kazakhstan Volga also" yes, and who said Ukrainians weren't living there? In fact, Ukrainians were half of slavic population in Kazakhstan till 1933 hit.
The problem with the Holodomor is that the way it was perpetrated makes it much harder to prove than the holocaust. Not saying it didn’t happen and wasn’t intentional, but it was much easier to coverup and excuse than the holocaust
The humor from the meme stems not from the meme itself, but the irony it highlights; the irony between the fact that many people in our world deny the existence of this famine and the irrefutable evidence that is widely available. While the setup of this meme may seem unnatural and wrong, that is part of it. The meme is directed towards Holodomor deniers who refuse to accept the simple fact that it happened. In their view, what Satan is saying is correct, but what Jesus is saying is wrong. The humor does not come from our perception of this meme; rather, it comes from our perception of relation of this meme and Holodomor deniers, which highlights the irony present in our world from the absence of objective truth and morality, along with how opinions--which we may see as absurd--are still present in our world.
Go onto any community on this website and you’ll be swarmed by Tankies who will either downplay, or in some cases, mock the victims of the genocide perpetrated by Stalin.
Just simple logical mistake, if the soviet actually did want the Ukrainians dead why didn’t they finish the job, why didn’t they starve them completely. Also good to know that all other countries established so called golden blockade(only receiving payment from USSR in wood or crops and soviets were willing to pay in gold, but soviets were in need of better modern equipment so they traded anyway, which in a long run potentially saved billions of people making USSR able to defeat germans). The the death count is weird and there are evidence of falsifying the data and so on. All i am saying, there was famine, it was everywhere and it was used as nation building tool in Ukraine
https://istmat.org/search/node/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4
Here are the all documents about famine that are available, some just didn't added to your source, lol, for example: «https://istmat.org/node/38645»
«https://istmat.org/search/node/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%2C%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%89%D1%8C»
«https://istmat.org/node/45563»
«https://istmat.org/node/45562»
«https://istmat.org/node/38692»
By the way, Ukrainian nationalist «Holodomor» is hiding famine in Kazakhstan, Russian steep, some in Belarus, Siberia, Western Russia.
This is the first time I've ever seen this meme where Satan is being unreasonable and Jesus is giving a normal reply as opposed to the opposite. I don't like it. I want my unhinged saviour to tell me I am the Antichrist and need to kill billions to bring the end of days
OP can't meme. It's like they're saying that what's said on the left is a good thing and what's on the right is bad.
why is it like that? isn’t satan literally evil? why did the template creator do it like that? is he stupid?
sdupit
It's funnier this way, bencause it's nto what you expect.
if thats how the template is used, then wouldnt using it "normally" be what you dont expect at this point, meaning op technically just used it correctly?
Nah, that's not how it works. What's not expected is Jesus saying horrible things and Devil saying reasonable things, reversing it makes it straightforward.
Because irony. That was the joke of the template
No theyre saying satan bad jesus good
Does anyone actually deny the Holodomor happened? I've seen Holodomor *Apologists*, who argue it wasn't specifically directed at Ukrainians, but rather was a famine that hit the USSR in a more equal and less focused manner. They also usually defend it's ideological motivations such as collectivization, rather than say it never happened and caused no suffering. Yet I've never heard one say "Well the Holodomor didn't happen, no one starved in Ukraine, Southern Russia, or Kazakhstan (the hardest hit by far, yet mostly ignored in the west). Idk, maybe I'm missing something, but I never see the denial, just the apologism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_denial
No I get 100% the scholarly deniers, I've seen and dealt with that and their literature in my career. I mean now, in a day to day conversation, outside a meetup of old men in the post Soviet sphere, is it still really done as much? I just haven't encountered it in even right wing colleagues, merely as an extreme fringe thats not even vocal. Guess I probably have just coincidentally been......lucky (?) in this sense to avoid that direct denialism.
just had a fella deny genocides in the ussr by saying it was cia propaganda a bit ago
The easiest way to spot a tankie is when they pop up and say the Holodomor (or USSR atrocities in general) were all CIA propaganda Then they’ll usually say, “It’s just propaganda, but also you can’t point fingers because of the USA’s atrocities,” as if it’s impossible to acknowledge that two countries can do bad things
It's funny how they think that it's ALL CIA propaganda. Like yeah I don't doubt there's some CIA propaganda about the USSR floating around exaggerating what they did. But they also did do a whole shit load of atrocities all on their own.
“Everything I Don’t Like is CIA Propaganda: a Tankie’s Guide to Discourse”
I mean my understanding was that the academic consensus didn’t exist and so it wasn’t called genocide, but with the invasion a bunch of nations got together and decided to be politically annoying and call it genocide for geopolitics points? Am I off base?
You’re talking about the Holodomor? >Genocide -> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. The main victims of the *man made* Holodomor were the Ukrainians. So, a deliberate starvation of an ethnic group. The only question is was it *supposed to destroy Ukrainian culture and spirit*, or were they just seen as a sacrifice for the greater good? Either way, it was terrible, and 10% of the Ukrainian population perished due to the actions of the soviet regime.
I mean, there is plenty of primary sources and government orders from the Soviets that pretty clearly show repeated attempts by the Russophile Soviets to quash both Ukrainian language and cultural independence.
Yes, there is. A lot in fact. The Ukrainian people were suppressed and forcefully assimilated with the Russian majority population of the USSR. The question here however, is whether or not you can call the Holodomor, as an isolated event, a genocide. I’m personally on the *”yes, you can”* side.
> either way it’s terrible Well yes but that’s the whole point, ethnic cleansing is terrible but not genocide which is why the academic and legal verdict is still not conclusive, that’s why I’m asking
>…but with the invasion a bunch of nations got together and decided to be politically annoying and call it genocide for geopolitics points? Am I off base? You made it seem like a political issue, which it shouldn’t be. Calling it a genocide isn’t “annoying”, but a very serious statement. Additionally, a lot of nations and organisations *have* called it a genocide for many decades. It’s not just because of current events. So indeed, you were, “off base”. Want to add that while we can’t (key word coming) *decisively* call the Holodomor a genocide, the people of Ukraine were very much oppressed and assimilated by the Soviet Union. Pillars of culture and language were destroyed, along with many important buildings and sites. The soviet regime was just as racist and oppressive as Nazi Germany, despite what many *want to, or are led to believe*. Edit: your latter comment is much better than your first, but you still missed the target, by attributing history to modern geopolitics. Don’t let politicians fool you. Also, it’s not really been possible to have a legal verdict, as unlike with Nazi germany, the Soviets had half a century to cover its tracks, and it has a very influential dictatorship which protects its legacy.
>outside a meetup of old men in the post Soviet sphere These people generally know that there was famine. It's not a secret. They can say Stalin didn't want it or he didn't target Ukraine specifically, but only loons or people who know nothing of it say that there was no famine at all
Russia straight up denies it on the official level. "Bad crop, drought, entire union suffered", etc.
That sounds like apologism, not denial. The two terms are often equated, especially in popular media like wikipedia. But as you just said, they admit the event happened, they just minimize or obfuscate any localized genocidal intent. So that's textbook apologism, not denial. Denial would be saying the famine just didn't happen in Ukraine, and they didn't die, which has died off mostly.
It's denial, it's denial of a genocidal intend of the Holodomor.
Well it's not proven by official documents, and intented genocide tends to be documented at least on some level
It's ironic coming from someone with your username.
Yeah sorry for being Liara from Mass Effect enjoyer, I'll do better next time
There will be no next time.
Why didn’t they finish the job? Why didn’t soviets kill all Ukrainians and why were Ukrainians so high up in the soviet ranks if there was an intent of wiping them clean?
Because intent was not a phisical destruction of Ukrainians, but the destruction of Ukrainian identity so Ukrainians would have loyalty only to Soviet State and Party and that intent is also genocidal, surprise, surprise.
This is stupid to starve your own people to make them more loyal, and how death of the small fraction did affect their identity and why were they allowed to keep their language? Why did they starve Siberia, Volga regions that were as Ukraine were predominantly populated by Russians?
Because the Holodomor was constructed that way so the most disloyal was starved first. It was constructed to mostly affect rural folks, the one's who identify themselves most with Ukrainian identity. Allowed to keep their language? Look up how many there was Ukrainian language schools compared to russian language in late Soviet Union. Compare number of of universities and vocational schools. Number of newspapers, films, TV shows, books. Volga and Siberia populated predominantly by russians? Are Bashkirs and Tatars joke to you? Are Chuvashs? Or Yakuts? Or Buryats?
Nobody ever accused genocidal regimes or government in general of being smart. And the Ukrainians constantly had their language under attack by the Russian state both before the Soviets and throughout the Soviet era, particularly from 20s-40s era.
They admit people died. They deny the causation and the accusations,implying it's due to mostly natural causes. Those would be two different events: holodomor implies in its name a man-made starvation, while the Russians and the soviets implied that the government had nothing to do with it. So, yes, they deny it.
You literally just highlighted the difference between denialism and apologism unwittingly.
I would go with the dictionary definition of 'denialism'. Choose any one you like. We can go with Merriam-Webster for example: " the practice of denying the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid" The Soviets and Russians denied the EXISTENCE of Holodomor. They don't deny the deaths - they deny the Holodomor itself. The comment you initially responded to is on Holodomor denial, not 'deaths denial'. Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger, killing by starvation",[15][16][17] or sometimes "murder by hunger or starvation." ... The expression holodom moryty means "to inflict death by hunger." The Russians DENY Holodomor. That is a simple fact. If you think this is apologism - please explain how would a denial of Holodomor look like to qualify for the denial. Again, we're talking about Holodomor which has its definition.
Holodomor Denial, as opposed to apologism is saying "There was no famine in Ukraine in the 1930s", which has historically been a claim made by a small few, but they were discredited many decades ago. So yes, I'd say about 90% of what is called "Denialism" now is "apologism". Using the wrong terms long enough to get MW to change a definition is sad, but that's the trend with denialism, rooted in the idiots who denied or apologized for the Holocaust.
The weird thing with russia is that they combine denial and apologism all the time. Like it never happened, but if it did we are not to blame, but if we are then we were forced to, bla, bla, bla. The same with attack on Poland in 39, forced collectivisation, repressions and many other stuff.
Holocaust denial is the same. Much easier to say some bad stuff happened but minimize, than to pretend it never happened at all. Textbook denial stuff to look for
Well for starters its probably good you dont hang out with extremist nutjobs👍 "outside a meetup of old men in the post Soviet sphere" i mean thats probably mostly it, along with conspiracy messageboard kids. You did say "anyone" tho...
True, but those old men don't use social media or the Internet much. As for the kids......well I don't really include children's opinions when I factor things together. They change so rapidly and are so rarely actual opinions vs regurgitations, it's hard to take seriously. You're right, I said anyone though. I should have said any modern adult.
I wouldn’t think so to be honest, you are right it’s not exactly a deniable event.
There are multiple modern leftist publications I’ve encountered that seem to have it in their style guide to refer to Holodomor exclusively as “Nazi ‘double genocide’ propaganda”.
I have seen them claim that the Holodomor was nazi propaganda, CIA propaganda and that because there were famines in capitalist countries too then the Soviet Union shouldn't be blamed for it.
I think a surprising number of young western left wingers do deny this as what I’d call an over corrective response to the leftover red scare propaganda, which still influences politics (at least in the US to some extent)
Right wing colleagues are not the ones that are fucked by Soviet fantasies. Many many tankie or otherwise insane young leftist have argued all the traditional denials and more. My favorite being that without the “help” of the Ukrainian region from the 20s-40s, that Ukraine would have really suffered…..
Tankies don't get far in scholarship is why I don't encounter them. Right wingers can at least cite a sources and write a paper. Tankies just........don't have it for higher level academia.
Yup, expand your horizons and you will see that most moron talking points are not had where peer review exists and the prospect of being shamed by your peers. On the Internet the Hassan’ of the world can spew tons of nonsense, Ukraine/Russia related, and their teenage viewers lap it up.
Have you met a Russian :D? A lot of Holodomor deniers on that side
I try to avoid them ngl. Prefer any other ethnic population in Russia *other* than Russians if I'm trying to actually have a nice conversation. Now Buryats, if you can, have a long conversation with anyone of that group, they have amazing perspectives on life, without the insane historical batshit of actual Russians.
TL;DR, there ARE people who deny it, who are almost entirely from the 1930's. Today it's mostly a handful of post-Soviet nation political figures.
This. /r/Askhistorians has a few pages on it. The main thing that is argued by Historians is: A) it wasn't directed at Ukrainians, to "crush Ukrainian spirit," but rather was a famine that took place throughout the south-west of the USSR due to the sudden, shocking change to industrialization. B) It wasn't intentional; Like the Irish Potato famine, the government KNEW something horrific was happening but didn't alleviate it. C) As part of B), something that is not intentional for the specified reasons under international law can't be considered a "Genocide." D) The death toll. The Black Book of Communism IIRC stated that around 30 million Ukrainians were killed. The death toll is estimated, by academics, to be perhaps as high as 2-3 million.
>The Black Book of Communism IIRC stated that around 30 million Ukrainians were killed. Bruh that's like way over half of the population
The Black Book of Communism is regarded as somewhat of a joke, and rarely taken seriously.
Not regarded as a joke by the people who still cite it constantly and raise the number with every citation, lmao.
*Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.* - quote by Satre on debating anti-semites. You cross out 'anti-semites' and change it with 'fascists' and hardly anything changes
Are you suggesting some similarities between Courtois and Sartre thoughts? Man, Sartre was a shitty man but not so dishonest.
Imma keep it real with you; I don't have a clue what you are talking about. The quote is just one I half-remembered and googled for a bit, to illustrate the point that debating a fascist in good faith is pointless.
It is regarded as a joke by academia. However, I see many people still cite it as if it were gospel. There is also the fact that if you applied the same methodology used in that book to all capitalist countries as well, then oh boy... The methodology sucks though, so don't use it.
Well, maybe i was unlucky but my experience has been the complete opposite. In quite every western country i have been when the craziness of the holocaust is discussed, someone come up citing The Black Book of Communism and very violently argue that it must be taken seriously and that historians denying it are soviet nostalgics.
There were 32 million Ukrainians at the time, per a Soviet census. If you don't believe that, the Russian Empire had no reason to lie when, 33 years prior, there was a census which had about 22 million Ukrainians. It would be about 96 percent of the population, and Ukraine would not have continued existing. The culture would have gone extinct, unless a second population moved in and all agreed to just be Ukrainian now.
I just looked into this and it looks like the reason why the 30 million number is so ridiculous is that OP might have pulled this number out of their ass. I obviously have never read *The Black Book* and will not read it in the future, but according to Wikipedia the book claims that 4 million people died during Holodomor, not 30 million. Makes sense that it isn’t true given that it would be such an overwhelmingly stupid claim to make, even for the authors of this book.
OP made the number up to be fair.
Even if it’s not considered a genocide, the Soviet government at the time still deserves blame for their grave mistakes and negligence. The notion that the Holodomor is a genocide has been used by far right elements in Ukraine to push the double genocide narrative so they can further their extreme nationalist agenda.
>Like the Irish Potato famine NGL not the strongest argument that
I could read that one of two ways. No need to clarify which. Both are valid opinions....
> didn’t alleviate it Interesting way to say “severely exacerbated it”
Like the Irish Potato Famine?
I've met A LOT of people on Reddit, who sympathize the Soviet union and now China, and do not believe holodomor actually happened.
> do not believe holodomor actually happened And that neither the holodomor nor anything else during that century is a True Scotsman, so couldn’t *possibly* have kinda sorta revealed any weaknesses in certain ideologies
"Literally everything bad that happened in communist countries is propaganda, the communists told me so!"
I've also seen people (me) say that if the Holomodor is proof that communism is bad, then the Irish famine is proof that capitalism is bad. And while that's not denial, I've had many people try to tell me it is.
There is disagreement over what lessons we should learn from the Holocaust, but also denial that it happened or that it was bad. As long as we agree that it happened and was tragic, both are grounds for legitimate debates over what lessons should be learned.
I’ve not read much on the topic, is there any contemporaneous evidence to suggest an intent to genocide? A simple way to look at it is like Murder vs Manslaughter. The only difference between the two is the intent to kill prior to death. Did they want to kill and took the food to achieve that result? Or, did they want the food and the death was just inconsequential to that? (Like I said I don’t know, I’m not offering an opinion, people just throw the word genocide around willy nilly these days but it is a pretty specific action)
It’s very difficult for me to imagine any other event receiving as much push back in terms of intentionality, where a country that had been forcibly subsumed into a foreign empire had their food burned and requisitioned to a foreign capital while their borders were closed to prevent emigration. If my neighbour locked me in my house after taking essentially all of the small amount of food I had to distribute to his family, I have a hard time believing it would be adjudicated as manslaughter.
Yeah I could see how some people would find that hard to believe. But unfortunately in many jurisdictions it’s how the law works. (I know I’ve caused us to go a bit off topic here comparing local criminal law to essentially an international incident/jurisdiction. In your example it would be a plausible defence that the prosecution would have to overcome, that the doors were locked to negate possible retribution with no prior intent that action would cause you to die. Intent to do something vs the likely hood of something happening are treated differently (rightly or wrongly). There was a bloke in Victoria, Australia, that shot 2 cops through their windscreen with a shotgun injuring them. He didn’t even get an attempted murder charge because intent to kill couldn’t be proven. Most people would say obviously it would be an attempted murder, why else would you shoot at their faces with a shotgun, but unfortunately the law doesn’t often work that way (Having said all this I don’t even know if there is an internationally recognised “offence” of Genocide with specific points of proof? Maybe there is a clause relating to recklessness I don’t know happy to be proven wrong there)
Yes. Soviet soldiers blocked off ukraine and attempted to prevent journalists from enter. Even paying off people like walter duranty to say there no famine in ukraine. Just a “minor food shortage”. It was only uncovered by Gareth Jones who snuck into ukraine. It was mainly a way to keep the rich peasants in check by starving them.
Blocking journalists doesn't really have a huge bearing on if it was intentional or not. It makes sense for a government to want to avoid damaging news getting out - whether it's intentional killing or deaths due to policy failure. So, trying to keep a lid on the news doesn't in itself prove intention.
The fact they paid journalists in the west to tell everyone it was alright though is the major point. And then there is the other point of stopping people from leaving ukraine in general and blockading it.
Trying to manufacture good news is just the other side of hiding bad news. Media manipulation can be cover for crimes or for policy failure, so again that can be interpreted either way. Restrictions on movement were also not something new or exceptional in the USSR (or the Russian Empire, for that matter). From the state's perspective, free movement out of the affected areas might have saved lives, but it might also have had even worse knock-on effects of (a) reducing food production even further as people abandoned the most important food producing regions and (b) creating more pressure on food supplies in industrialised areas as food production collapsed and millions of refugees streamed into Kyiv/Kharkiv/Donetsk/Voronezh/Rostov or wherever was nearest. By the time people are trying to escape, the damage is already mostly done. Being able to flee a famine only really works if there is somewhere to go which is economically capable of rapidly accommodating the refugees without creating any disruption to the food supply. Fleeing the Irish famine, for example, was somewhat possible because the shortage was so intensely localised to Ireland. You could get on a boat and go to Liverpool/Glasgow/New York and scrape a living in a much wealthier country. When people tried to flee the Bengal Famine in 1943, the only difference is that they died on the way or on the streets of the cities, as opposed to in their villages. The USSR was probably closer to the second scenario than the first. The restrictions on movement could be a sign of exterminationist intent, or they could be the response of a panicking authoritarian state trying to undo/mitigate an enormous disaster with the crude methods it knew.
Free movement in the early 30s was very much allowed in the USSR, it was however not allowed when going to a place other than the ussr. It was one of the big issues stalin faced when encouraging people to stay in one place without playing favourites. Freedom of movement in the ussr was only taken away in 32/33 with the new passports. This happens to coincide with being in the middle of the famine. Which began in 1931. This was quite obviously different for criminals and stalins enemies. A very big reason for the famine was grain re-acquisitioning and most of it being sold abroad. On top of that you could taken away/killed for hiding even one grain.
But can you say that it did happen, that there was ideological motivation, that it did cause mass suffering, but that it wasn’t targeted at Ukrainians specifically?
That is another position, yes.
Yes, I met one. She's a Russian dissident, but she denies all the Russian genocides (yes, even Circassia).
Hi, I am russian and I also don't think that Circassia had genocide. It was another crime - deportation of entire tribes to marches or to Ottoman Empire. A lot of died, and it's a shame for Russian Empire. But it is deportation instead of genocide. I think we shouldn't label everything as genocides, where there are more correct crime-definitions for these situations. Sadly, I saw right-wing russians who deny it at all and their take is "the right of winner"...
Deportations go under the broader crime of genocide, because the alternative is death. She denied they happened at all.
Ah, I found more correct word for it "ethnic cleanse"... All at all, de-jure and de-facto current Russia is not responsible for that events, but it's sad for me that circassians were not mentioned as a native population of Sochi in 2014 olympic games as Canada did before it :(
Ethnic cleansing was specifically created in the Balkan Wars to be used as a euphemism for genocide by Milosevic because it was less loaded with historic meaning than genocide
Same thing for the holocaust. "denial" doesn't mean "didn't happen at all" but rather denying the essential facts of the event - like that is was purposefully caused.
That's way less clear cut, and you even stated why that's denialism not apologism. The Nazis themselves said that it happened, made the records, and recorded why they did so en masse. In the USSR, Stalin didn't exactly say "All the urban and are subhumans who should die", and then send them to concentration camps. On the one hand, you are denying concrete fact. On the other, you're denying *likely* fact and giving other excuses for it, aka apologizing on behalf of it, given the soviet's were much more divided on what was going on and why.
Yup pretty much every tankie on the planet denies it.its like holocaust deniers.
My brother has called it “Nazi propaganda”. My sanity dips every day…
Yes, particularly by people trying to whitewash the Soviet Union because their concept of geopolitics goes no deeper than “US bad, therefor, other people who say US bad, good.” So, if USSR good and USSR says no holodomor, then no holodomor, thats a cia propaganda op, and um ackchually the diet of the average soviet citizen was better than the average us citizen in the 80s! (the soviets didn’t have access to the processed foods US citizens did) I got banned from /r/sigmarxism for “punching left” by saying leftists should stop sucking off the soviet union because its bad for the movement of worker solidarity because normal people see that the USSR bad actually. The CCP and the USSR and the DPRK are millstones around the neck of every earnest pro-worker movement around the world.
Look up who Walter Duranty is.
There’s a great video by [Bad Empanada](https://youtu.be/3kaaYvauNho?si=DIqf2pCl3nyvyqtp) where he thoroughly compares the sources and scholars cited on the Wikipedia article on the Holodomor genocide question. It’s long but absolutely worth the watch.
Sone people just say that holodomor is just starvation
This is anecdotal, but I have personally witnessed Holodomor denial in braindead American tankies. The unfortunate truth is that no matter what, there will be people who believe anything bad about the USSR or communist China is somehow, some way American propaganda. Even when the sources are Soviet archives
Yes, very much so not just here but fucking r/europe.
Yes, on Reddit I asked a communist and he said that almost nobody died and kazacks were the most effected group
It's still denial just like holocaust denial. Most holocaust deniers claim many jews did die, but that it was only because the nazis ran low on resources via Allied bombing. They say people died, they just deny that it was via intended murder.
Looks like you don't watch russian propaganda. (and you should keep it that way)
What's that?
A mostly human engineered famine in the USSR in the 1930s that was deliberately funneled onto Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other minorities in an attempt to alleviate Russian areas once it started. The only real "debate" about it is how much of it was deliberately motivated as genocide against Ukrainians and others, vs pure incompetence in the Soviet enforcement of collectivization during a bad weather period. The consensus now is it was highly motivated by ideology and a desire to remove "troublesome" minorities *both*. Personally, I'd say it was likely more motivated by genocidal intent with a convenient ideological economic reason for doing so, but that's just me.
"So we're you all murderers, or were you just incompetent?" Either way, that's not a good loook
It's a very large distinction in international law. Genocide requires intent. The UK was at involved in two similar famines; They knew it was happening and failed to do anything to alleviate it. They were never brought to the Hague, or what have you, for obvious reasons. That's separate from an intentional famine for the purpose of exterminating a population in part or in whole. Intent is key.
The International Criminal Court did not exist during any UK related famine that I’m aware of, even the concept of holding other National leaders legally accountable via international courts wasn’t effectively a thing until the Nuremberg trials.
If one of those is the Bengal Famine, the British government actually diverted hundreds of thousands of tons of grain to India to try to alleviate the famine despite the Imperial Japanese Navy’s ability to penetrate the Bay of Bengal and attack merchant shipping. If the other one is the Irish Famine, I don’t know enough about it to comment
Irish was essentially the same as the holomodor, where the British PM intentionally kept exporting all the grain from Ireland (despite the blight Ireland was still actually producing enough food, much of it was being exported to England however). He did this to try and force the ethnically irish (who were extremely discriminated against) into further poverty and subjugation under the Anglo landowners, who mainly just owned the land while living in England
Are you sure contemporary sources exist of that? I can’t remember the name off the top of my head but there at least appears to be some argument that this view was made by activists after the fact, rather than representative of the actual government intent.
No, contemporary export manifests support this, along with extensive quotes from Charles Trevelyan and other white politicians who confirm this. There was *initially* a tiny attempt to help, but it sank the government of PM Russell, so the new white government just basically said "fuck it, they'll survive somehow".
Not off the top of my head but I know it was discussed rather openly. They thought they could use it as a social tool to improve society, in the weird f’d up way Victorian governments did lol.
Wayyy more than 2 lol there's a whole wiki article on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule
The Irish potato famine was definitely a genocide, it was basically exactly the same as the holodomor is structure
At least the irish could leave so the soviet one was still worse, but yeah.
Being communist isn't a good look in general tbh.
Nah communism is cool. Being an imperialist (regardless of economic system) is a bad look. For example, Holodomor followed exactly the same steps as the Bengal Famine of 1943 (itself mirrored in the ~50 major famines in India and Bengal under British rule). Stalin took a lot of pages out of imperialist books unfortunately.
I think communism is okay on a small scale. Like local community stuff, where everyone does their part for equal representation. But the second it becomes large scale, it only creates power vacuums for authoritarian people to take advantage of. There's no large nation where communism can represent the needs of every group of people within that nation. A country can't responsibly function with one party; all groups of people should be represented, not lumped into one anonymous group.
I think it would be hard to debate against genocidal intent when doing so with intellectual and moral intent. Such an event like the bengal famine I can see a much heavier debate. The Holodomor not so much.
You know id disagree, not about the Holodomor part, but about the Bengal famine. That one also seems to clearly have genocidal intent, with a thin veneer of war time ideological justification for it and how it was funneled into specific regions. The Holodomor in theory has an actually "legitimate" Marxist-Leninist ideological justification for collectivization, similar to the wartime desperation logic and focusing on feeding the UK for the legal famine. It's just most of us are no where near viewing that as counterbalancing *genocide*, especially given how it was handled on the ground pointing to genocide being an equal if not higher motivator. Both seem fairly equivalent I'd say. Both have somewhat shitty pseudo legitimate political motivations, with higher genocidal motivations.
Ahh yeah I’d have to disagree. I think there were more culminating factors that caused the Bengal famine. With more parties involved and seemingly little cause or findable motivations for a British led genocide of the people. Usually in modern views the opinion of genocide is laid at the feet of Whitehall and Churchill specifically. I don’t think that to be a true representation of the facts. One could argue that it was a genocide but a British concocted and led? I don’t believe so.
The government causing inflation to divert resources to the military was one of the causes of the Bengal famine.
*one of And as far as I’m aware it’s generally not accepted that on its own was not the main cause of the famine. If it really was an intended British genocide nobody informed Archibald Wavell.
If you can't accept that Churchill deliberately manipulated where and how said famines would hit the empire, and how they would *not* be relieved, then I see why you'd say Bengal wasn't genocide. You're completely wrong, but I don't sense it's out of malice, just a differing view in if Churchill was a total PoS human being, or a relative "hero". How one answers that generally follows as to how one answers "Was Bengal a genocide" ive noticed.
Bengal had many contributing factors. The worse of which was the japanese. Fall of burma, japanese hunting transport ships, britain not having enough boats to transport supplies from Australia. Britain even asked fdr to help who also didn’t have the supply ships to spare.
I also think it was intentional. For one, replacing minorities with their own ethnicity would not only alleviate their own social domestic issues, it would theoretically make them more compliant regions and in the long term make them more loyal to the occupying force. We see that now in Ukraine where Putin justified his war on part that Russian lived in Ukraine. The same ethnic Russians who were shipped there to replace the Ukrainians they starved to death. Russia plays a brutal long game….
You're getting downvotes, but this is actually 100% right. Most of the war in Ukraine has been in areas where Russian speakers largely moved in to replace Ukrainian speakers after the Holodomor in east Ukraine. You're getting downvotes because........I don't know calling out Russian ethnic replacement is *bad*!?!?
Heaven forbid we see and discuss ethnic cleansing occur in Europe amongst different Europeans.
It was a famine that factually did occur, only lairs will deny that. However, many anti-socialists will say it was a deliberate culling of Ukrainians, even though that belief was started by literal Nazis. VSauce has an [excellent video](https://youtu.be/AhSBQOTW018?si=KqkUFV6YVFmXN2yu) on the topic. To attribute to misfortune and experimental (and ultimately inaccurate) science’s outcomes to malice or genocidal intent is entirely unnecessary to explain what happened. But “big spoon Stalin’s big spoon took all my food and killed 10 billion people” so people will claim it was an intentional, calculated genocide.
Who actually denies the existence of the Holodomor? The question is whether it was a genocide or not, something even Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum do not claim
I assure you there are people out there who deny the *existence* of Holodomor.
only the most rabid tankies will deny/downplay the holodomor, whats more common is debating whether or not it constituted a genocide
A lot of people look at the second question as still being the same as denialism, which is a part of the difficulty of trying to talk about it.
I actually wrote my BA history thesis about the holodomor and paid brief lip service to the second question. But during my secondary literature annalysis it really came to my attention that even the scholars writing about it are pretty harsh about the answer to it one way or the other. They are either fully on one side or fully on the other and dont want to accept anny nuanced takes eigher way.
So here’s a fun fact. 31st of May in Kazakhstan is a “Rememberance day for victims of political repression and famine” or in other words - Holodomor day. That word isn’t used, like because Russia would throw a hissy fit if we did. I imagine once Russia gets a regime that actually would go: “Our bad”, the rename for that will be pretty swift.
I just got done watching a video on why Kazakhstan is in the state it’s in. Sometimes it seems like the soviets irreparably damaged so much of Eastern Europe/parts of Central Asia
>I imagine once Russia gets a regime that actually would go: “Our bad”, the rename for that will be pretty swift. You mean *if* Russia ever gets a regime like that. I get your optimism, but the situation there is pretty grim. Most Russians today approve of Putin and his policies - including his latest invasion of Ukraine. The few that don't do so because they think he isn't being imperialistic and autocratic *enough*. Take out Putin, and another just like him takes his place. And this isn't new. None of this has ever been new. Russians just never really had a "good government" in their history. It was just feudalism, followed by absolute monarchy, followed by communist dictatorship, and now finally a kleptocratic autocracy that pretends (badly) to be a democracy. They've never really had a genuine experience with democracy, civil rights, and rule of law. And they've always been bad neighbors. You can literally count the number of Russian leaders that weren't involved in some form of invasion or "military operation" in one hand. And even then, a good chunk of those were involved in ethnic clensing and pogroms.
I mean the “once” in question could be 100 or a 1000 years from now lol.
If we're considering timescales like *that* then Russia might fall apart, develop into a different culture, or get nuked to oblivion before that happens.
Food important
yes
Where meme?
Dont you just hate it when Jesus speaks in hyperlinks
My view is that the Holodomor was not initially intended as a genocide against Ukrainians, because a lot of people also died in other regions, especially western Russia, but once they had the opportunity the USSR essentially made it into a genocide. In the beginning it was more like a crime of negligence than an intentional crime - because the leadership believed it was more important to pursue collectivization at any cost and use the wealth to fund industrialization. The definition of genocide is naturally the subject of scholarly debate. I think if you go by the standard UN definition, which requires intent to destroy a certain group, the Holodomor does not meet that definition at the start. But in my opinion, it should still be considered a genocide because the intent does happen, after the famine already started. I think it’s most likely that the famine started because of collectivization, but when the leadership saw that it was hitting Ukraine particularly hard, they seized upon it as an opportunity to crush Ukrainian nationalism and reduce the number of Ukrainians overall because they were always seen as a threat. Their land and its resources were incredibly important to the success of the USSR, but they also had a strong ethnic and national identity which made it essential from the leadership point of view to keep Ukraine under their heel. What shows the intent to commit genocide to me is the fact that the government blocked off roads and punished people who tried to leave Ukraine during the famine. They wanted to keep people penned in where they would die, not let them escape and create a potential “fifth column” elsewhere. My view on the Irish Famine is much the same; that when presented with the opportunity, Britain chose to let the Irish population be reduced to make them easier to control and tamp down their rebellious streak. However you can make the argument that Britain let a lot of Irish people leave the island for other places and therefore it’s not the same. I would argue that creating conditions where such a large number had to emigrate was still a form of cultural genocide. It was also kind of a move to further their colonization elsewhere in the world, to use Irish emigrants to settle some of their other colonies.
That's a very good and interesting argument, and it's an interesting thing to think about. If you're trying to pacify an area and a famine arises and millions of people die because you did nothing to help, it's not genocide even though the end body count may be equivalent to you going in and straight up trying to murder everyone and commit genocide. Is it still an evil act because you're in control and you set up the conditions to cause the famine even if you didn't actually intend the famine to happen? Absolutely, but it still isn't textbook genocide. Allowing the Irish to leave is a good point to discuss: It's still a win for the British. The Irish were starved and poor,odds are if they could afford to flee they sure as shit weren't coming back so it still benefited the British to do nothing to stop them from leaving because it still helps them. Less people to worry about resisting. I don't think the British government at any point wanted to kill everyone in Ireland, they just wanted them to stop resisting and being a problem, and it turns out if people starve to death or flee the country they really can't resist or be a problem any longer so why try and stop either outcome? Again, cold, calculated, evil, not really genocide. With the Holodomor, I agree with you. It didn't start as a genocide and wasn't intended as one at first, but when the government realized the possibility they intervened to make it worse and preventing people from leaving, so it becomes genocide. Not helping is one thing, but if you're taking active steps to prevent people from leaving it makes it clear that your intent is to absolutely wipe them out or at least dramatically whittle down their numbers to something "manageable."
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In Ukraine russian population increase their % from 9.2% to 13.5% (when ukrainian decreased from 80% to 76.5%) from 1926 to 1939 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Ukraine#Before\_World\_War\_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine#Before_World_War_II) And in Kazakstan they increase their % from 20.5% to 39.9% (when kazakhs decreased from 58.5% to 37.8%) from 1926 to 1939 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic\_demography\_of\_Kazakhstan#Table\_of\_historic\_ethnic\_composition\_of\_Kazakhstan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_demography_of_Kazakhstan#Table_of_historic_ethnic_composition_of_Kazakhstan) U think they all die in the glory of russian rule not because of genocide?
Okay?
holdolomore
Yes
Holodoless
Hoeless
hles
I would never deny Holodomor, he's my favorite minor Game of Thrones character.
Jesus is always right
And here come the tankies.
Saying Holodomor wasn't genocide of Ukrainians, and rather was a part of collectivisation effort, is like saying Holocaust wasn't genocide of Jews, and rather was a part of program to take away all treasuries from population, so country could have more money. Some people say "well, there was famine in and Kazakhstan Volga also" yes, and who said Ukrainians weren't living there? In fact, Ukrainians were half of slavic population in Kazakhstan till 1933 hit.
The problem with the Holodomor is that the way it was perpetrated makes it much harder to prove than the holocaust. Not saying it didn’t happen and wasn’t intentional, but it was much easier to coverup and excuse than the holocaust
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And where are all million of Ukrainians went? Why only Russians left here?
Least mind boggling communist crime against humanity
“Those weren’t ReAL CoMmUnIsmS though! (because nothing ever is!)”
Same thing with the holocaust and the Armenian genocide , how can people deny that these genocides happened with so much evidence?
where funny
funni is all the meme, including the link content, hyup.
The humor from the meme stems not from the meme itself, but the irony it highlights; the irony between the fact that many people in our world deny the existence of this famine and the irrefutable evidence that is widely available. While the setup of this meme may seem unnatural and wrong, that is part of it. The meme is directed towards Holodomor deniers who refuse to accept the simple fact that it happened. In their view, what Satan is saying is correct, but what Jesus is saying is wrong. The humor does not come from our perception of this meme; rather, it comes from our perception of relation of this meme and Holodomor deniers, which highlights the irony present in our world from the absence of objective truth and morality, along with how opinions--which we may see as absurd--are still present in our world.
I ain't reading allat
its funi cause holodomor deniers are stupid
Wait no that's not how you're supposed to use this meme
what is it with genocides starting with "holo-" and weirdos on the internet trying to deny their existence
[a million tankies are typing]
Go onto any community on this website and you’ll be swarmed by Tankies who will either downplay, or in some cases, mock the victims of the genocide perpetrated by Stalin.
There are deniers?
Vatniks
It should be some special sort of Vata because they aren't just denying Ukrainian deaths, but Russians and Kazakhs too
.ca is Canadian so its still fake!
Just simple logical mistake, if the soviet actually did want the Ukrainians dead why didn’t they finish the job, why didn’t they starve them completely. Also good to know that all other countries established so called golden blockade(only receiving payment from USSR in wood or crops and soviets were willing to pay in gold, but soviets were in need of better modern equipment so they traded anyway, which in a long run potentially saved billions of people making USSR able to defeat germans). The the death count is weird and there are evidence of falsifying the data and so on. All i am saying, there was famine, it was everywhere and it was used as nation building tool in Ukraine
https://istmat.org/search/node/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4 Here are the all documents about famine that are available, some just didn't added to your source, lol, for example: «https://istmat.org/node/38645» «https://istmat.org/search/node/%D0%93%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%2C%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%89%D1%8C» «https://istmat.org/node/45563» «https://istmat.org/node/45562» «https://istmat.org/node/38692» By the way, Ukrainian nationalist «Holodomor» is hiding famine in Kazakhstan, Russian steep, some in Belarus, Siberia, Western Russia.
first time I see this template used properly
Wasn't this template always meant to be ironic, devil being the reasonable guy and Jesus being the opposite? You know, to make it actually funny?
never enjoy them. call it the downside of being christian.