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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.
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.
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.
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!
Not sure what you mean here, maybe speaking your point plainly would help.
As the linked OP correctly states, Western governments are happily on board with multiculturalism and cultural diversity, as long as that cultural otherness is only expressed in the form of funny clothes and exotic foods. It seems that in this they are not that different from Stalin.
I don't think that's true at all. If anything, the Western governments (at least as Europe and blue part of the US is concerned) are going to another extreme, treating any request for outside cultures to adapt their mores and behavior to the standards of Western culture as racist, and giving massive amount of deference to the foreign cultural standards. It's everywhere - from demands in schools for everybody avoiding pork in school lunches to not offend Muslims (while asking Muslims to stay away from any foods to avoid offending Westerners would be unthinkable) to criminals coming from outside cultures given massively more lenient treatment than native ones, because they are "unfamiliar" with local customs and thus should be considered exempt from the local laws. Anybody who had been reading news must be aware of it.
Note however that the case of Western governments and Stalin are radically different in one very important regard. In the case of Western government, the representatives of "diverse" culture come to the West, with their hands out for handouts, asking for help. Once admitted, they demand preferential treatment and deference to their culture - the same one that they just fled and claimed that it created conditions which require emergency rescue - and they get the full measure of that deference. Stalin, however, came to those cultures - where they lived, without being asked or invited - conquered their lands and set out to replace their culture and identity with that of "Soviet people".
If we were comparing this to, say, British conquest of Burma or similar events, then the comparison might be more appropriate - though even at the peak of their colonial pursuits, the Brits were much more adoptive of the local culture and willing to blend with it rather than eradicate it. But at least the ideological vibe had been the same. That vibe not only has long gone, it had been declared the ultimate sin of the West, for which it must be atoning forever, and this guilt is the main driver enabling the sorry state of affairs we are witnessing now on the West. Thus, your conclusion is diametrically opposite of what is actually happening.
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