Remembering Genocide 75 Years Later

It's much more politically correct to honor those killed by Nazi Germany. I don't know why this is.

Stalin and his Commie buddies killed even more people and in the Ukraine deliberately initiated a starvation genocide that is estimated to have killed between 6 and 10 million individuals.

Today is the 75th anniversary of "Holodomor" ... the beginning of this deliberate starvation. I'm 25% Ukrainian but I think my great-grandmother and grandfather were already in the U.S. in the early 1930s. They had to be because my grandmother was here during that time and she remembers the Great Depression in the U.S. But I'm sure that they had relatives back in the Ukraine ... I wonder how many of my relatives were murdered.

A huge thank you goes to propagandist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty - a New York Times correspondent who wrote in glowing terms about the Soviet "experiment." No problems here. Everything is hunky dory. Move along now. (I'm reading The Forgotten Man and I'm shocked by how many people thought America should model itself after Stalin and Mussolini's governments...truly shocked.)

Ah, how easy it is to revise history and cover up the ugliness. It's much less messy than acknowledging the terror caused by Communism.

"The partial opening of Soviet archives soon confirmed the extent to which Stalin and his henchmen knowingly used hunger to punish resistance and beat the peasantry into submission. Among the finds was a direct order by Stalin to cordon off starving villages and intercept peasants trying to flee in search of food."

Is it worse or better than the Nazi genocide of the Jews? I say neither. They are equally horrific and equally man made.

"It is generally believed that about half of the victims were in Ukraine and the predominantly Ukrainian-populated Russian region of Kuban. The millions of others who perished included Russian peasants and close to a third of the population of Kazakhstan. There is also no doubt that the famine was man-made. "

Those who deny history also deny the future capability of evil ideas to cause human suffering.

"Recent articles detailing the Soviet regime's war on the peasantry, based on Soviet archives, describe a living hell: government agents going door to door confiscating food; families in recalcitrant villages forced out of their homes and left to freeze; men and women tortured to make them reveal hidden stockpiles of food; widespread cannibalism. These horrors were by no means limited to Ukraine. It is nonetheless true that Stalin's fateful decision to blockade famine-stricken areas, issued in January 1933, was initially directed at Ukraine and Kuban."

Putin's Russia works hard to deny the genocidal aspects of the Soviet area forced starvation, except when convenient.

"...the Russians do not deny that millions of people were deliberately starved to death during the collectivization campaign. Instead, they focus on denying the "genocide" charge..."it seems that the only time Russia's government remembers the Russian victims of the Terror-Famine is when it needs them to counter Ukrainian claims [of genocide].""

Regardless of what we call it ... millions were murdered through the actions of the State. We should always fear the actions of the State ... especially when they say they are acting in our "best interests."