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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28268 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe.

My thoughts exactly. It's vexing how every Red Triber on this forum knows exactly how much they hate their enemy and would not submit to them because the enemy has repeatedly let them know how much they hate the red triber and want their legacy erased... yet all that understanding goes out the window when they look at Ukraine vs. Russia.

Except that whatever things Blue Tribe did, they still did not graduate - at least in the US - to actually engineering a nationwide famine that cost millions of lives, with the explicit purpose of subjugating Red Tribe. Shit like that tends to be remembered.

To interpret the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as a) artificially engineered (i.e. done on purpose) b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians c) with genocidal intent, as if this was self-evidently the one and true possible interpretation is a clear case of consensus-building. I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.

Unless, you know, it actually was a) artificially engineered and b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians (more precisely, of course, by Soviets - which weren't all ethnically Russian, of course) and c) with genocidal intent. Given as Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose, for political aims, and their ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes, and their official position had been that any "nationalism" has to be completely eliminated (which they consistently did in all "national republics" - every single nationalist movement had been brutally repressed) - it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it's not a big stretch to argue it is a duck.

I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.

You can question it all you like, but as I noted above, there is very good evidence pointing to it. I am not saying questioning this evidence makes you literally Hitler, I am saying if you have equally strong opposite evidence, you are welcome to propose it. Or you are welcome to just say "I just don't believe it, whatever is the evidence", that's always an option. I know one thing - dismissing all that by just saying "oh, it's consensus-building, therefore you are wrong" is not an argument.

Frankly I find these claims increasingly baffling. The "Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose"? Other acts of genocide? Where? When? Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes". Fair enough, there were cases where this applied. But against entire ethnic groups? Which is what genocide is? Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?

My lived experience of actual Ukrainians is that they believe this narrative of the holodomor, whether or not you do, and discussion of it would be as welcome as bringing securesignals as a +1 to a bar mitzvah.

Well, duh. Of course they do. Decades of propaganda will do that to you. I'm also sure a great number of African Americans earnestly believe their ancestors built the pyramids.

Other acts of genocide? Where? When?

How ignorant are you in Soviet history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Meskhetian_Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmyks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportation and others.

Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes"

Dude, Gulag. Purges. I mean, they didn't exactly hide it.

Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?

Not necessarily, but the way Stalin did it - it frequently did. I mean, I understand that if you're completely ignorant of history, you find historical claims "baffling". But maybe you should fill up on that before arguing about it?

I’m still baffled. Deportation – to be more precise, the involuntary resettlement of a people – does not equal genocide. The Gulag system was set up not with the aim of mass murder but for the purpose of extracting important natural resources through forced labor. The majority of the victims of political purges were imprisoned or deported, not killed. I have to assume that you’re also aware of all this.

Deportation – to be more precise, the involuntary resettlement of a people – does not equal genocide.

The way Stalin did it, it does. The aim was specifically to destroy the group of people and their way of life. If it didn't include murdering every single one of them personally (though of course nobody was concerned at all if any of them died) - it certainly did intend to destroy them as people.

The Gulag system was set up not with the aim of mass murder

It included mass murder as one of the intended effects. I mean, if after decades of starvation, hard work and inhuman suffering you manage to survive, fine, but if you don't, it's as good. Especially if they could get some work out of you before you croak. Of course, soviets also did outright mass murder too if they thought a specific group is too dangerous, but they were practical enough to consider working someone to death as better way of execution.

for the purpose of extracting important natural resources through forced labor

Nope, Gulag was a punishment mechanism. The fact that it also produced some resources was secondary - like, if we need repress millions of people, we better make some use of them. Of course, it also had a theoretical basis - since the bourgeois are evil and the workers are good, it is clear that more you work, the better you become. So if you engage in wrongthink, it is clear that's because not enough work. Also, if you are stuck cutting trees in Siberia, you surely won't be able to spread your wrongthink to others. The fact that the trees themsevles are also useful is good, but there are many other ways to cut trees, this one in particular had been chosen because they needed Gulag as part of the terror machine, to control the society.

The majority of the victims of political purges were imprisoned or deported, not killed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

Scholars estimate the death toll of the Great Purge at 700,000 to 1.2 million.

That's only one episode of many. Really, where did you study history? Even Wokepedia is not trying to whitewash Stalin. Where do they teach that Soviet mass terror didn't happen?

As I was reading your argument I wasn't sure what it's reminding me of. Then it occurred to me: the Montana Meth Project memes.

This is not genocide. But under Stalin, it is.

This is not a tool of intended mass murder. But under Stalin, it is.

And so on. I mean...really?!

More comments

The section on Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians in the wikipedia link certainly doesn't provide strong evidence; it shows strongly contested disagreement. If you're referring to your first paragraph, that seems to boil down to 'the Soviets were open to genocide and didn't like countries with strong national identities, so obviously the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate genocide' which seems pretty circumstantial.

If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class. Of course, to properly consider all that evidence, one would need to write a series of books - and there are many books on the subject, of course. I have neither ability nor desire to TLDR them all here, I am just saying this is a well-supported position, and dismissing it with a formula like "oh, that's consensus-building, therefore all that pile of evidence worth nothing" is not proper discussion of the subject.

he section on Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians in the wikipedia

I checked Wokepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and it says "Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made.[46] The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes",[47] though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies.". Now, I have very low opinion about the veracity of any Wokepedia claim on any politically charged subject, and again, seriously evaluating such claims would take much more than I am willing to give, but in short, virtually everybody agrees Stalin did it. Now, imagine - Stalin comes out and says "we will destroy kulaks, if necessary - we will kill them all". Stalin then does things. Kulaks are destroyed, many of them dead. Many other people are dead to. We can establish the causal link between Stalin's actions and the deaths. Now, you tell me that we should seriously consider maybe it all happened on accident? That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food? I don't know, to me it doesn't pass the smell test.

If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class.

The kulak class does not equal the Ukrainian people. Not all Ukrainians were kulaks and not all kulaks were Ukrainian. There was no case of either Stalin or any other Soviet official claiming otherwise.

That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food?

Nobody is claiming that. Yes, everyone broadly agrees that "Stalin did it", "it" being involuntary agricultural collectivization, grain confiscation and the dissolution of the kulaks as a class, the key words being as a class. Stalin was also clearly intent on continuing these policies (although not without alterations) even when their unintended consequence, also due to drought and other factors, was famine. That much is true. But the three main related claims of Ukrainian nationalists, as we discussed in another thread, are a wholly different matter.

The kulak class does not equal the Ukrainian people. Not all Ukrainians were kulaks and not all kulaks were Ukrainian.

Both true of course, but it's not as big argument as you seem to think it is. A lot of Ukrainian food production relied on people who were classified as "kulaks", so with that destroyed not only kulak families themselves died, but everyone who relied on the food they produced did. And of course, the famine was not confined to Ukraine - it happened in other places too. In Ukraine these policies produced a particularly severe effects though.

the key words being as a class.

No, it's not the key. It's not like they were "reclassified" and that's it. They had been stripped of their property, deported, and often murdered. And their capacity to produce food ruined. "As a class" here means on massive, society-wide scale - it's not that some particular kulak was an asshole and had to be repressed, it's that all the backbone of the food production had been forcefully removed, which of course, predictably, caused lack of food. That policy was systemic. That lack of food was not accidental, and it did not cause anybody to stop and reverse the policy. On the contrary, it was largely accepted as the desired effect, and the confiscation policies became more severe.

If you’re saying the soviets were mass-murderers with a yen for collective guilt, I agree with you. Likewise I agree that the famines were broadly Stalin’s fault.

But how does the Soviet desire to kill wealthy landowning peasants, or the role of Soviet economics in the famine more generally, support the specific claim that the Soviets deliberately engineered famine specifically in Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian national identity?

You say that loads of evidence for that specific claim exists but in the nicest possible way you haven’t actually provided any of it. My (very half-assed) investigation (the specific Section about Ukraine that I mentioned) seemed to indicate that it’s a controversial claim that’s being actively debated by academics.

EDIT: the links from your other post re: deportations are to some extent the kind of thing that I was looking for. At the very least the Soviet Union regularly conducted mass operations to dissolve certain nationalities and ethnicities within the broader USSR, often resulting in mass casualties. I’m not sure that the famine in Ukraine was part of that - the deportations have a much more specific and direct character - and I would generally incline to the view that the famine resulted from a combination of the Soviet hatred of successful farmers + total disdain for learning how farming actually works + total lack of concern about whether the Ukrainians (or anyone else) lived or died. But I’m much more open to the possibility.

support the specific claim that the Soviets deliberately engineered famine specifically in Ukraine in a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian national identity

They did not engineer famine only in Ukraine. The famine had been widespread. But in Ukraine, both the food production and the opposition to soviet takeover had been based on wealthy landowning peasants. So destroying them as a power was a necessity, which inevitably led to more severe and comprehensive famine than in other parts. The soviets were not intending to let the kulak class survive, and if it meant millions of Ukrainians would not survive either, so be it. Wiping out national identity had been the official policy everywhere - everywhere any sense of national identity beyond funny ethnic dresses and composing odes to Stalin in national language had been brutally repressed. Not everywhere it had been done by the means of famine - it's just the conditions in Ukraine specifically made it a convenient way to go: soviets needed food, soviets needed to destroy the kulaks, soviets needed to get rid of any nationalism-inclined groups - in Ukraine, destroying the wealthy landowning peasants achieved all of those. I do not claim if there were a way to achieve the same without the famine and the way to achieve that with famine the soviets would insist "no, we want the famine, it's famine or no go" - maybe if they found the other way, they'd use that. I am just saying that was the way they actually used.

it’s a controversial claim that’s being actively debated by academics.

Everything is a controversial claim debated by academics. That's what they do their whole life, they debate. If you want evidence, just read that debate and you'd get plenty. I am paid for doing other things, so redoing the work of the academics to reproduce it here would be a prohibitive cost for me with zero gain. I mean, just following the links in Wokepedia in the Holodomor article would get you plenty of evidence.

I’m not sure that the famine in Ukraine was part of that

Partially. In the case of Ukraine, deportations did happen, but it was not feasible, as it was with, say, Crimean Tatars, to just round up most of the Ukrainians and send them to Siberia. Ukraine is too big and there are too many of them. However, you could subjugate them by ruining their economic basis - the same wealthy landowning peasants. Then their alternative would be submit to the soviets or die horribly. After millions died horribly, the rest submitted.

Wiping out national identity had been the official policy everywhere - everywhere any sense of national identity beyond funny ethnic dresses and composing odes to Stalin in national language had been brutally repressed.

Plus the exotic food and drinks. You forgot about that part. But yeah, it's perverse! Surely we'll never see democratic, enlightened Western nations display such a callous attitude towards cultural minorities. That'd be a scandal!

More comments

The forced resettlement of so-called traitor nations was done as an act of collective punishment after they were declared to be German collaborators, not as a genocidal measure to dissolve their nationality. Had they been deported on an individual basis and scattered all over the country and not as a nation as a whole, that would be the case, but this is not what happened. Had the regime intended to genocide them, the simple truth is that they would not exist today.

I can believe it of the Soviets, but I would certainly like to see some evidence that it’s true.

My recollection is that the ‘famines brought about by collectivisation’ became ‘the Holodomor’ at exactly the same time that Kiev became Kyiv.

Odd. By my recollection, Famine-33 was published in 1991, during the tail-end of the Soviet Union itself. It wasn't exactly subtle that the nature of the famine was artificial or tied to the collectivisation. It's not exactly hard to find academic literature from the cold war either, albeit more from the glastnost period and the de-classification of various historical documents.

I think everyone broadly agreed that the famines were a product of collectivisation, and the difference between callous indifference + culpable stupidity vs. deliberate malice is hard to differentiate at the best of times.

My complaint is more that in the West it seemed to me we switched over from ‘the famines in the USSR were a semi-deliberate result of Soviet malice and mismanagement’ to ‘the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt by the Russians to destroy Ukraine and now they’re at it again’ and this shift seeed to be based on political needs and vibes rather than the production of new evidence.

Like, every country that’s ever been colonised has a story about how the evil oppressor engineered famine to punish them. Britain gets it from the Irish and the Indians, and at least in the latter case I’ve looked into it (I did a post last month) and the case is very dubious. As a result I distrust these maximalist claims being presented as fact without backing evidence.

For example, Famine-33 is a fictional work made 60 years after the events it depicts, based on a novel written by a Ukrainian (Vasyl Barka) who as far as I can tell wasn’t actually there at the time, having gone to work in an art museum in Krasnodar in 1928, four years before the famine.

Again, I’m not asserting anything. I merely note that I distrust very heavy claims (deliberate genocide of Ukrainians) being made at a time of high political tension based on little or no presented evidence. I am quite happy to be shown something more substantial.

If you distrust of he event is solely based on that you first started noticing / hearing about the topic 80+ years after it happened, that may be a starting point for skepticism, but the point of noting that historical fiction was covering the events even amongst the perpetrating state when it was still living memory for people who were young at the time it occurred is a point of evidence that the topic did not get invented 20-25 years later when you first noticed it, but was a subject of academic, historical, and popular culture coverage decades before you started paying attention.

Now, if you're happy to be shown more substantial evidence, and are willing to do your own sifting for whatever standard you feel makes things qualify, here is a link to the Holodomor wikipedia page, of which the point of interest for you is the several hundred citations not just from books after the Maidan Revolution period of the 2010s, but from the 2000s, 1990s, and 1980s, well before Euromaidan tensions. These books, in turn, have their own, earlier, references within. Among these reports includes the findings of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine from 1988, which was not a particularly high political tension period unless you want to arbitrarily disqualify any US source not from the post-Soviet period / pre-Maidan period (for which there are multiple in the wiki above, even if you ignore the nature of various evidential sources linked in the Congressional report.).

These findings include, with some bolded for emphasis-

///

There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.

The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.

Official Soviet allegations of "kulak sabotage," upon which all "difficulties" were blamed during the Famine, are false.

The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought.

In 1931-1932, the official Soviet response to a drought-induced grain shortage outside Ukraine was to send aid to the areas affected and to make a series of concessions to the peasantry.

In mid-1932, following complaints by officials in the Ukrainian SSR that excessive grain procurements had led to localized outbreaks of famine, Moscow reversed course and took an increasingly hard line toward the peasantry.

The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procurements quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to extract the maximum quantity of grain from the peasants.

In the Fall of 1932 Stalin used the resulting "procurements crisis" in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensify grain seizures further.

The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.

Officials in charge of grain seizures also lived in fear of punishment.

Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.

In January 1933, Stalin used the "laxity" of the Ukrainian authorities in seizing grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life.

Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: to intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR.

While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin's interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are parallelled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.

Attempts were made to prevent the starving from travelling to areas where food was more available.

Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.

The American government had ample and timely information about the Famine but failed to take any steps which might have ameliorated the situation. Instead, the Administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November 1933, immediately after the Famine.

During the Famine certain members of the American press corps cooperated with the Soviet government to deny the existence of the Ukrainian Famine.

Recently, scholarship in both the West and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union has made substantial progress in dealing with the Famine. Although official Soviet historians and spokesmen have never given a fully accurate or adequate account, significant progress has been made in recent months.

///

So by the evidence available to academics and legislators in the 1980s, the Holdomor was a famine in which the Soviet Union deviated from its then-contemporary practices for how it responded to natural famines, went out of its way to make things worse after the problem of famine was already known, took active efforts to prevent refugees from fleeing the starvation zone, and the political policy leaders who implemented these policies did so with a mandate that, beyond just selfish profit seeking of stealing more food, was to 'eliminate such modest national self-assertion.' The level of national leader policy intervention, in turn, was only paralleled by interventions in a separate ethnic Ukrainian region.

I am not going to say 'but Americans report that, so it can't be trusted.' You have access to the resources, and sources, the Congressional report writers had access. If you want to discredit long-pre-Maidan sources, feel free, but I would like to think we can agree they were not motivated by US/EU foreign policy dynamics of the mid-2010s. If you want to deny all western sources from the Cold War, that certainly would be another level of categorical dismissal of potential evidence, but at that point I would just point you back to the Ukrainian sources from the Holodomor article, some of which go back to Soviet documentation.

To be clear, I have no particular interest if you have general skepticism of new claims of past atrocities. Some level of skepticism is healthy. But when you say this-

My complaint is more that in the West it seemed to me we switched over from ‘the famines in the USSR were a semi-deliberate result of Soviet malice and mismanagement’ to ‘the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt by the Russians to destroy Ukraine and now they’re at it again’ and this shift seems to be based on political needs and vibes rather than the production of new evidence.

My inclination is to wonder what new claims you think were being 'switched over from,' as opposed to you previously being ignorant of old conclusions from even older evidence that motivated parties ignored for motivated reasons.

Now, to be fair to you and casual observers, that old evidence was stuff that non-trivial parts of the American cultural left had a historic interest in downplaying [due to the willingness of past political heroes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Franklin_D.Roosevelt(1933%E2%80%931941) and institutional political allies of the era to cover up and ignore the atrocities that were recognizable at the time. Democrats and Blue Tribe cultural actors aren't exactly going to implicitly condemn Franklin Delanor Roosevelt for turning a blind eye to genocide, particularly when doing so was sold to the American public by Communist-aligned agents in media. That's like red meat for the red tribe anti-communist/anti-socialist sentiments.

Additionally, the Obama administration in the years pre-Eurmaidan did not call the Holodomor a genocide in its first remarks on Holodomor remembrance in 2009. This might have had something to do with how part of Obama's anything-but-bush policy was trying to distinguish itself from the Bush administration's Russian-skepticism with the so-called Russian reset of the same 2009-2013 era. Which is to say, the Obama administration did not call the Russians historical genociders at a time when they were attempting to diplomatically make nice with the Russians, particularly a strongman leader who has well known feelings about that sort of historical revisionism accuracy.

This did not, however, prevent Republican president Bush himself, even further away from the Maidan geopolitical tensions you allude to, from signing Public Law 109-340 on October 13, 2006, which states / permits-

SECTION 1. AUTHORITY TO ESTABLISH MEMORIAL. (a) IN GENERAL.—The Government of Ukraine is authorized to establish a memorial on Federal land in the District of Columbia to honor the victims of the Ukrainian famine-genocide of 1932-1933.

Bill Clinton, the Democratic president preceeding Bush 2, did not have his own Holdomor recognition. To be fair to him, he was at the time trying to convince Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons, which is as valid a reason as any not to highlight past genocidal issues even if one does believe in them.

Whereas the Republican Presidency period of Reagan-Bush 1 before Clinton is when the Holodomor commission previously cited initiated, and which included the sort of Soviet archival information that had not been available much earlier due to, well, Soviet secrecy that was starting to loosen in the late Cold War.

So we have a Democratic president who knew about the Holodomor but ignored it at the time in order to normalize relations with the Soviet Union while his political-media allies lied about it to American public, about 50-60 years later you have the US government under opposing party Presidents investigate it and acknowledge it as a genocide, you have the next Democratic president ignore it while seeking to convince the genocide victims they don't need nuclear weapons, you have the next Republican president support and pass a law acknowledging it as a genocide (again), and then you have the next and last Democratic president downplay it while trying to reset diplomatic dynamics with Russia, at least until that effort broke down circa maidan.

Now, this could suggest differing interpretations.

On one hand, maybe the Obama administration switched its tone because of Euromaidan, embraced animosity with Russia as a new policy, and was willing to invent a new genre of academic literature to fuel a charge it didn't believe by generating new evidence to justify a policy shift.

On the other hand, perhaps the Obama administration switched its tone because of Euromaidan, writing off reproachment with Russia as failed old policy, and was willing to accept and leverage an established genre of literature to acknowledge a charge it long acknowledge but generally didn't feel it was polite to mention to the people it previously wanted stuff from.

I can understand, to a degree, why someone with less historical awareness of the subject matter and its emergence may make one of those judgements if their frame of referenced started by accepting the last two Democratic presidents before Euromaidan as the historical baseline.

But, well, they weren't the academic baseline.

That 1988 report is somewhat curious. For one, the summary does not even make reference to Soviet Kazakhstan, where the famine mortality rate was regionally the highest. I also suspect that the authors and Soviet officials at the time were simply using a different definition of the word ‘sabotage’. The summary also leaves some questions open. Was there a drought after all or not? As far as I know, yes. Was the official Soviet response implemented after all or was it just BS?

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