Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.
Seriously. Was Holodomor a deliberate genocide? This is the hill you’re going to die on? Yes, the famine affected a lot of people, but we all know which people were least affected and it wasn’t the Ukrainians who were trying to actually grow the food. Much like the Irish Famine was only a tragic genocide because the British overlords wouldn’t put up with reducing their own take. The blight was real, but the decimation was pure unjustified cruelty.
I’m a leftist, but I’m an honest one. We gain nothing by denying the past and refusing to learn from it. It does a disservice to us all to hide the fact that old ethnic and cultural violence behind a window dressing of systemic failure. Systemic bigotry is still bigotry.
The kazhaks lost more people per capita than Ukraine did. Major non-Ukrainian Russian populations centers suffered equally or very nearly as much as Ukraine did.
So you may think you’re an honest leftist, but you might not be. As an honest leftist myself, I recognize that the Soviet government made tragic decisions, many of them punitive, none of them directed at ethnic cleansing, because the Soviet Union did not have an analysis that included specific ethnicities being material to their political goals as ethnicities. They understood, documented, wrote about, discussed, debated, legislated, and enforced the exact opposite of ethnic cleansing constantly. Yes, Ukranian suffered a lot through the transition to collectivized agriculture, more than most. But that’s because the majority of Ukranian peasants were freeholders of land, whereas the majority of Russian peasants were serfs. As freeholders, they would lose their claim to their farms. Serfs would suffer no such loss. This was structural. Russian peasants weren’t targeted for collectivization because under the Tsar they were already collectivized, whereas Ukranian peasants had private ownership of the land they worked.
Collectivization was not ethnic cleansing, the famine was not ethnically targeted, and the punitive actions of the Soviet Union were not ethnically motivated by an ethnic strategy of ethnic supremacy.
That’s honesty. Honesty is doing the reading, doing the research, and not discarding all the evidence that contradicts the obviously contrived narrative. Yes there was a famine. Yes it killed more Ukranians in absolute numbers. Yes the Soviet leadership made deliberate decisions that were intended to punish people who were Ukranians. No it wasn’t because they were Ukranian, no it wasn’t because the Soviet leadership thought that ethnic cleansing would achieve their intended goals, no it’s not because the Soviet leadership decided to artificially starve all of those people out of malice or ethnic supremacy.