Winnipeg Free Press | 30Dec2010 | Orest Slepokura
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/112651999.html

Lost in memory hole

Re: All crimes are not the same (Editorials, Dec. 20, 2010).

Ukrainian Second World War losses amounted to 10 million out of a population of 40 million -- one in four. But Ukrainian losses are hardly, if ever, mentioned in media discourse; they've gone down the proverbial Orwellian memory hole.

Historian Norman Davies said it all: "(N)owhere is it made clear that the largest number of civilian casualties in Europe were inflicted on the Ukrainians, millions of whom were killed by both the Nazis and by the Soviets." This in addition to 10 million who died in Stalin's man-made famine, the Holodomor of the 1930s.

Noam Chomsky often speaks of the division of victims of persecution into "the worthy and the unworthy." Ukrainians as the victims of such will again apparently, notwithstanding a death toll of some 20 million, be accorded an inferior status in Winnipeg's new human rights museum.

OREST SLEPOKURA
Strathmore, Alta.