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Notes -
I've banged this drum for a while, so excuse me for repeating myself, but...
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of? Their government is already among the most corrupt governments in the world, and their "Democracy" was already a proxy battle between Russian and USA color revolutions for most of their lifetimes. If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways. The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.
It, frankly, blows my damned mind that European leaders will let virtually every nation on Earth walk all over them, colonize their lands, commit mass rapes, murders, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, but somehow Russia's action are a step too far. There are nearly less English left in London than their are Ukrainians left in Kiev. What's been the greater crime?
What if world leaders just put on blinders, and let Russian people drive all the way to Kiev without firing a shot? What if they told fictions about how they are just immigrants looking for a better life? How dare you accuse them of having dual loyalties? They're perfectly capable of it. It's what they've been doing the last 50 years.
In a word, The Holodomor.
Now, don't worry, I'm not some Ukraine
agentapologist here. I'm just trying to directly answer the question of "What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?" You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. The Ukrainians aren't thinking about the future, they're constantly enraged by the past. The "Politics of Resentment" isn't an invention of 21st American politics - it's the de facto arrangement of most human conflict. To many in Ukraine, allowing a Russian takeover is the equivalent of letting all of the people who killed all of your family members move in to your house. It's pretty easy to get fatalist and irrational to prevent that. "I would rather die than ...." Yeah, well.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.
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 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
revisionismaccuracy.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-
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.
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