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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2720 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 16, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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IMO it wasn't really about ethnicities. Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one. Sure, there was a dimension to suppress the nationalist movement, but the main idea was to exterminate the class of independent farmers who were completely incompatible with the collectivist centralized agenda of the new power. Holodomor wasn't engineered to destroy Ukrainian nationalists (though by exterminating their base, it was a side benefit), it had been engineered to destroy Kulaks and the concept of independent self-sufficient agricultural production. I'm sure you can play with the definition of "genocide" to place it one way or another, but in my book a concerted social engineering effort to destroy a wide group of people is something that is horrible, and happens often enough that we need a term to call it. If you don't want to call it "genocide", you'd have to invent a new term with exactly the same semantic connotations, by which point there's not really any reason not to just use "genocide".

Americans are very focused on ethnic dimensions of the conflict due to their history but that was more of a class/power conflict than the ethnic one.

True. But it weren't Americans who invented the ethnicist narrative that has been mainstreamed in the West, it was Ukrainian nationalist immigrant activists in America, Canada, the UK etc.

Well, if you target the cultural elites, the narrative "racists tried to ethnically cleanse my people" gets you lots of sympathy, but the narrative "commies murdered 5 millions of my people while trying to establish the worker's paradise" gets you shrugs and "well, you can't build worker's paradise without breaking some eggs...". So it's hard to fault them for playing with the deck they've been dealt.

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