Repeat After Me: There Was No Holodomor

Repeat after me. There was no Holodomor, there was no Holodomor, there was no Holodomor, there was no Holodomor. The Holodomor is the terror famine that never happened. According to Holodomor narrative, now official state policy of the Ukraine and also recognized officially by the US, there was a bumper harvest in the Ukraine in 1932. However, to punish the Ukrainians who were resisting collectivization, the USSR confiscated the wheat crop, herded the people into villages that were more like concentration camps and denied them food there. The “terror famine” or “deliberate famine” resulted in the deaths of 5-10 million Ukrainians and broke the back of the anti-collectivization movement there. However, this narrative simply never occurred. It never happened. What happened instead was harvest failure, followed by other problems. Most died of disease in their malnourished state; there were few actual deaths of hunger. The following is a Q and A with J. Arch Getty about the famine in the Ukraine. I am not a specialist on the Ukrainian famine, but I am familiar with the recent research by several scholars on the matter, and think rather a lot of the deep and broad research that Mark Tauger has conducted over many years. That familiarity leads me to believe that there are no simple answers to this. A “man-made” famine is not the same as a deliberate or “terror-famine”. A famine originally caused by crop failure and aggravated by poor policies is “man aggravated” but only partially “man-made”. Why in this field do we always insist on absolutes, especially categorical, binary and polemical ones? True/false. Good/evil. Crop failure/Man made? Reminds me of the Stalinist approach. Many questions have ambiguous answers. 1. Why was the Ukraine sealed off by the Soviet authorities? Not necessarily to punish Ukrainians. It was also done to prevent starving people from flocking into non-famine areas, putting pressure on scarce food supplies there, and thereby turning a regional disaster into a universal one. This was also the original reason for the internal passport system, which was adopted in the first instance to prevent the movement of hungry and desperate people and, with them, the spread of famine. 2. Why were foreign journalists, even Stalin apologists like Duranty, refused access to the famine areas? For the same reason that US journalists are no longer allowed into US combat zones (Gulf War, Afghanistan) since Vietnam. No regime is anxious to take the chance on bad press if they can control the situation otherwise. 3. Why was aid from other countries refused? Obviously to deny the “imperialists” a chance to trumpet the failure of socialism. Certainly politics triumphed over humanitarianism. Moreover, in the growing paranoia of the times (and based on experience in the Civil War) the regime believed that spies came along with relief administration. 4. Why do I read and hear stories of families who tried to take supplies from other regions to help their extended families through the period having all foodstuffs confiscated as they crossed back into the famine regions? The regime believed, reasonably I think, that speculators were trying to take advantage of the disaster by buying up food in non-famine (but nevertheless food-short) regions, moving it to Ukraine, and reselling it at a higher price. In true Bolshevik fashion, there was no nuanced approach to this, no distinguishing between families and speculators, and everybody was stopped. As with point 1 above, regimes facing famine typically try to contain the disaster geographically. This is not the same as intending to punish the victims. 5. If it was a harvest failure, why was the burden of that failure not simply shared across the Soviet Union? It was. No region had a lot of food in 1932-33. Food was short and expensive everywhere. Everybody was hungry. With the above suggestions, I do not mean to make excuses or apologies for the Stalinists. Their conduct in this was erratic, incompetent, and cruel, and millions of people suffered unimaginably and died as a result. But it is too simple to explain everything with a “Bolsheviks were just evil people” explanation more suitable to children than scholars. It was more complex than that. Although the situation was aggravated in some ways by Bolshevik mistakes, their attempts to contain the famine, once it started, were not entirely stupid, nor were they necessarily gratuitously cruel. The Stalinists did, by the way, eventually cut grain exports and did, by the way, send food relief to Ukraine and other areas. It was too little too late, but there is no evidence (aside from constantly repeated assertions by some writers) that this was a deliberately inflicted “terror-famine.” 6. Finally, to deny the Jewish genocide quite rightly brings opprobrium. Surely to deny the terror famine of 1932-33 ought to provoke the same response. This is a position that I personally find grotesque, insulting and at least shallow. Nobody is denying the famine or the huge scale of suffering, (as holocaust-deniers do), least of all Tauger and other researchers who have spent much of their careers trying to bring this tragedy to light and give us a factual account of it. Admittedly, what he and other scholars do is different from the work of journalists and polemicists who indiscriminately collect horror stories and layer them between repetitive statements about evil, piling it all up and calling it history. A factual, careful account of horror in no way makes it less horrible.

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7 thoughts on “Repeat After Me: There Was No Holodomor”

  1. Holocaust revisionist historians do not deny a huge scale of suffering among Jews, just the manner and numbers. If Irving says a million rather than six and by functional destruction of National Socialism at war’s end, rather than purposeful, is that a denial of huge suffering?

  2. I go along with Ken Hoop. Holocaust deniers are my kind of people. I’ve met some of them and they are really a lot nicer than you’d expect from all the bad press that gets heaped on them. Many are excellent cooks, too. I’m collecting Holocaust denier recipes for a cookbook to raise money for the ones who are currently in jail. I got the idea from Ernst Zundel who figured out a way to make a tasty “Chicken Kiev” from a pencil stub and a packet of powdered coffee creamer while he was being held in solitary confinement in Canada. Kiev is in the Ukraine and hot piping “Chicken Kiev” was something those counter revolutionary kulaks had plenty of during the Holdohoax!

  3. What a wonderful display of 20th century Mother Goose Marxism…it reminds me of my youth. It would surely deserve an A+ had it also included the “The Nazis started WWII” fable.
    Here are the Commies not invadind Poland and not starting WWII with their buddies, the Nazis.

  4. Repeat After Me: Marxism is Judaism in a Hurry. “Holocaust denier” is Zionist hasabrat logic.
    Marxism is Judaism in a hurry. “Holocaust denier” is Zionist hasbarat logic. Marxism is Judaism in a hurry “Holocaust denier” is Zionist hasbarat logic.
    J. Arch Getty says: “Nobody is denying the famine or the huge scale of suffering, (as holocaust-deniers do).” All well and good except that Holocaust deniers don’t deny the Holocaust. They challenge the narrative
    of a collection events called the Holocaust and in order not to be held accountable for the historical discrepancies and scientific improbabilities
    pointed out in this narrative Holocaust “experts” came up with a ploy to avoid debate . This was to call anyone who challenged their self-serving narrative a ” denier” and beneath debate. They even got crazy “the Holocaust is self evident therefore unexaminable” laws passed in Germany so that “deniers” (who don’t deny they just ask inconvenient questions ) can’t be defended by lawyers in the courts. Because it’s been made impossible for Holocaust heretics to defend themselves there Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf were renditioned to Germany for trial and jailed for three and five years respectively.
    “…the Holocaust,” as it is currently presented, contains much more fiction than fact, the Jews who manage and control it are able to maintain the 6,000,000 figure by constantly resorting to the use of the pop culture narrative technique known as “retroactive continuity.” Widely used in other, similar types of lowbrow narratives that feature sex and violence, like comic books, soap operas, and professional wrestling, among others, this technique allows for characters and situations to be written out of a master narrative and to completely disappear, as if they had never existed. The master narrative then continues on, with or without the addition of replacements.
    from Catholic Holocaust Puppet, a review of Fr. Patrick Desbois’ The Holocaust by Bullets by David O’Connell.
    http://www.culturewars.com/2010/Desbois.html
    J Arch Getty gives himself away when he draws an equivalency between the work of Marxist Holdomor apologist Tauger and Holocaust “denial.”
    Inferring that Tauger is spearheading a growing group of academics busy reappraising the genocide committed by Judeo-Bolsheviks in the Ukraine is misleading because Tauger is all by himself out there denying the Holodomor. Eric Hobsbawm might give him gave him a book jacket blurb because he’s a dutiful Marxist, but that would be it.
    NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov presided over the Great Terror. Between late September 1936 and April 1938 , he was responsible for the death of around
    380,000 kulaks and around 250,000 members of national minorities. Russians often refer to the great terror as the Yezhovshchina. Like 90% of the Bolshevik elite he was an ethnic picklesnoot and a huge prick.

  5. The final book by Nobel Laureate Alexandr Solzenitsyn (the Russian patriot who sauntered into a hospital in upstate New York and spiritually beat Woody Guthrie to death in his sickbed with Pete Seeger’s banjo) wrote a two volume book before he died about the history of Jews in the Soviet Union. It appeared a decade ago in Russian, German and French editions. An English language edition was scuttled by some tweedy snoid at Yale University who decided it be would be best to keep Solzhynitzyn’s book untranslated so the BS about the Bolsheviki being better for Russia than birthday clowns could be kept circulating in academia. Well, the jig is up for that Jew.
    “The project of translating Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together into English continues apace. The 18,000-word Chapter 19, “In the 1930s” is now available (http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/12/in-the-1930s-chapter-19-of-alexandr-solzhenitsyns-200-years-together/). The decade of the 1930s was tragic almost beyond description. The main idea advanced by Solzhenitsyn is that all segments of Soviet society suffered, including Jews who had been members of the elite. However, the suffering of Jews pales in comparison to the suffering of the Ukrainian and Russian farmers undergoing forced collectivization. Moreover, Jews were never targeted as Jews, and in general Jews remained vastly overrepresented in elite positions throughout the period, even after the purges.
    Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the culpability of the West. The brutal process of industrialization was carried out with the cooperation of Western merchants and bankers eager to do business with the Soviet Union. Such commercial cooperation had been prohibited under the Czars because Jewish activist organizations had pressured governments not to do business with Russia because of its treatment of Jews — much as there are now sanctions against trading with Iran because of the concerns of the Israel Lobby. As we also see today, financial and commercial interests were not concerned with ideological commitment to capitalism or with human rights but simply sought to expand their profits.” (cont.)

  6. Please Help !!
    Im on here to find out a few truths, or facts…
    1. Did Holodomor happen in 1930’s or did it happen before in 1921-23 when Leon Bronstein Trotsky said ”you haven’t seen famine yet, when your women eat your children, then tell me you are starving.” ?
    2. Did Vladimir Ilyanov-Blanc Lenin create a food collective to take food away from vilage people by force and create Gulags?
    3. Were Leon Bronstein trotsky and Vladimir Ilyanov-Blanc Lenin both of Jewish origin?
    4. Was the ‘NAZINO’ Gulag ( also known as cannabal Island) the original reason why the word Nazi got used to describe the German’s in the second world war because the Red Army tried to mask what had been going on in the Ukraine?
    5. During the Second world war, We are told that gold teeth were taken from jewish victims, was this the same method created by Lenin on Cannabal island or were the victims of gold tooth theft still alive during the process on Nazino ?
    6. Under Lenin and Bronstein Trotsky, I heard 200,000 holy men of the Catholic Christian Orthodox church were Tortured, crucified, shot, starved, strangled,disenbowelled etc, but what I want to know is how many Rabbi’s died of the same fate?
    7. I am Scottish, During the 1860’s, it is said that Jews Karl Marx and Moses Hess said that my people were ‘Racial Trash’ and that all Scottish Highlanders must die in a revolutionary holocaust humainly by ‘Gas’.. is this true?
    Peace to everyone on this site..
    Just waiting for the answers to the 7 questions, hope number 7 isn’t true, I have 3 children.

    1. Under Lenin and Bronstein Trotsky, I heard 200,000 holy men of the Catholic Christian Orthodox church were Tortured, crucified, shot, starved, strangled, disemboweled etc, but what I want to know is how many Rabbi’s died of the same fate?
      That one cannot possibly be true?

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