Remember the Holodomor

One little-known aspect of relatively recent history is the murder of 6 to 10 million Ukranians (and Russians, and Khazaks) in the early 30’s by Soviet collectivists. History is replete with genocides and mass murders on horrific scales… the last century had not just the Holocaust perpetrated on European Jews by the German brand of Socialists in the early 1940’s, but also the wiping out of the Roma by that same merry band of big-government fanboys; the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides of the late ‘teens where Turks exterminated more than two million people who dared to not be members of the Religion of Peace; in Cambodia, the Commie Khmer Rouge did their damndest to reduce the population by about 1.7 million; in the late ’70’s Ehtipian Commies under Soviet-backed Mengistu Haile Mariam killed half a million or so because they might or might not have not been party faithful; in 1994, Rwandan Hutus killed about a million people in the fastest-death-rate genocide in history; then there’s Serbia, Sudan, Congo, Saddam and the Kurds… the list is extensive.

Oddly, though, all of these are better known than what is called the Holodomor. In 1932-33, between two and fourteen million Ukranians starved to death (or died of diseases related to famine). While agriculture that year was apparetnly not all that good world-wide due to bad weather, it really didn’t help that the Soviets were busy trying to appropriate all farms for the State. Ukranian farmers were understandably annoyed at having the fruits of their labor stolen by the “spread the wealth” crowd. As a result of growing nationalism in Ukraine, as well as region-wide resistance by the Russian/Ukranian/Khazak peasantry to the evils of collectivism, Stalin enacted policies that made things far, far worse. If Hollywood had any damned sense they’d make a couple epics about this. But that would annoy three groups:

1) Russians who are currently working hard to whitewash the record of Stalin. Yes, there really are such morons… sort of the equivalent of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, there are many in modern Russia who want Stalin to be seen as a hero, not the irredeemable monster he actually was.

2) People who think that collectivism is Good and that individualism and private property ownership is Bad. In other words, a good chunk of Hollywood…

3) Journalists. See: Walter Duranty.

Read more about the Holodomor here at the Weekly Standard. While the US staggered under the weight of the beginnings of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, we did not see episodes of the Army surrounding farm towns and stealing all the food. Nor did we see mass cannibalism. For those sort of evils, you really need a “spread the wealth” mentality.