Last week saw commemorations of the 75th anniversary of Germany’s Kristallnacht and the 80th anniversary of the Ukrainian Holodomor. Judging from Western news coverage, Kristallnacht wins by a landslide.
On Google News, results for the words “Kristallnacht” and “Holocaust” outnumbered mentions of “Holodomor” at a clip of nearly 80-1. On a general Google search, “Holocaust” outpaces “Holodomor” by a less feverish, yet still insane, pace of 40-1.
Estimates for the death tolls of the Holocaust and Holodomor range all over the place -- usually correlated (surprise!) with how much ethnic and political sympathy the estimator has for the deceased -- but a rough consensus is that the number of victims was roughly the same.
Yet one would have to be smoking banana peels dipped in formaldehyde and sprinkled with PCP to assert that both events receive a similar amount of attention in Western media and academia.
Wait -- aren’t all dead bodies created equal? Why the galloping disparity in public awareness of these dueling atrocities?
Some would say it’s because Western academia is dominated by leftists who are loath to acknowledge their chosen creed’s historical capacity for totalitarian cruelty.
Others would say it’s because Western media is dominated by people who are more sympathetic to Jewish people than to Christians.
Yet others would assert it’s because the USA fought alongside the Soviet Union in WWII and thus wants to avoid appearing complicit in the deliberate starvation of millions.
I’ll pick “all of the above.”
It is generally agreed that Joseph Stalin viewed Ukrainian nationalism as an impediment to global communist ascendancy. Piece by piece, the Soviets attempted to smash Ukrainian identity into the dirt. There was a purge of poets and intellectuals. Then came the decimation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Then came the demonization and divestiture of middle-class farmers, AKA “kulaks.” And then pretty much every lowly farmer in the Ukraine, breadbasket of Eastern Europe, was rendered an unpaid serf during forcible agricultural collectivization. In a manner that can only be deemed punitive, Soviet forces seized Ukrainian harvests and exported them to be consumed in Russia and sold on Western markets. The Ukraine was effectively cordoned off and international charity organizations were turned away at the border, leaving Ukrainians trapped in barren fields of death while the world feasted on their labor.
At the height of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, an estimated 25,000-30,000 peasants, at least 80% of them ethnic Ukrainians, were starving to death daily. The images and film footage is creepily reminiscent of the bony unfortunates rotting away in subsequent German concentration camps during the Holocaust. Decades later this Soviet act of forcible starvation was dubbed the “Holodomor,” which roughly translates as “murder by hunger.”
By the spring of 1933 I saw neither dogs nor cats in our village, they were all eaten by our people that winter, but not just their pets but their children, even the dead were dug up from the cemeteries and eaten. (oral testimony of Michel Korhun)
In January of 1933, Yar learned, the mother had lost her mind, looked out into the farmyard and seen a huge turkey. She rushed out, slew it with a knife, and put it in a cooking pot. After eating her fill of the resulting stew, she looked for her daughter to share what was left. But all she could find was her daughter’s cap, all bloody. Returning to her senses, she realized she had killed her daughter. (oral testimony of Yar Slavutych)
A medical team does a sort of selection process…anyone who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to…buildings, where a constant population of about 8,000 lies dying on straw beds….Most of them are children. People who are already starting to swell up are moved out in good trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so that they can die out of sight. (report from the Italian Consul in Kharkiv)
He told us we would work at night, feeding the horses linseed cakes mixed with chopped straw. He said we should do this when people are asleep, because if they were awake, they would eat the horses’ fodder. We said, “How can we do that? People are more important than horses.” And he said, “We need the horses to cart the corpses away.” (oral testimony of Fedir Wereteno)
The Soviets criminalized any mention of the famine and
continued to officially deny its very existence until the 1980s,
enabled all the while by the slavish gullibility of Western-press
useful idiots such as The New York Times and The
Nation. The most egregious offender and serial denier was
Walter Duranty of the Times, who dismissed rumors
of a Ukrainian famine as “mostly bunk” and pecked out this notorious
line:
Well, and I guess you can’t mention Holocausts without mentioning Jews, either.
Yes, “Jews.” Put down your sandwiches and get ready to type, ye faceless keyboard warriors of the Taki commentariat!
Whether or not one views communism as a “Jewish ideology,” it’s undeniable that there was a drastic statistical overrepresentation of Jews in Russian Bolshevism, particularly in the NKVD police forces. Soviet Jews such as Lazar Kaganovich and Genrikh Yagoda are often fingered as the gleeful masterminds behind the murders of millions of Eastern European Christians. Is it possible they felt justified in striking back against centuries of pogroms and persecution? Ironically, Jewish Bolsheviks may have taught the Nazis a thing or two about the quarantining and mass murder of political, religious, and ethnic enemies.
Should it be a bloody thought crime to wonder whether beneath the surface ideologies of Russian Bolshevism and German National Socialism lurked a far more primal and utterly amoral ethnic power struggle between Europe’s Jewish and non-Jewish elites? Wouldn’t that be a far more reasonable and nuanced approach than the simplistic fairy tale of innate German evil versus compassionate Soviet heroism? Don’t loaded terms such as “anti-Semitism” imply a superhuman Jewish capacity to do no wrong? After all, the Russians won World War II -- and, despite what Hollywood tells you, so did the Jews -- and the winners always reserve the right to declare themselves the good guys rather than the more naked truth, which is that they were obviously the better killers. Or is all this simply too complex for the tribally wired human brain to grasp, and everyone should just shut up and pick sides?
To this day, you have hunchbacked dust mites such as Abe Foxman lecturing Ukrainian politicians not to draw false equivalencies between his people’s suffering and theirs. And thus the eternal status game of genocidal dick-sizing continues unhampered.
People can argue death tolls and intent and whether it’s nobler to kill people over class and ideological trifles than over ethnic competition, but one message emerges clearly from this blood-misted morass of death, misery, and denial:
The Ukrainians definitely need a better PR team.
