It Was Raining Holodomor Lies

They rained down and down, as far as anyone could see and for as long as anyone could remember. It was a thunderstorm of "Holodomor" lies, and no one knew when they had started. It seemed they would never end.

When you asked around, folks treated the "Holodomor" lies as a normal thing, like the sun, the moon and rain, and about as controversial as any of them. If you questioned their Holy "Holodomor" Lying Grail, they kind of looked at you funny, then they changed the subject. It was 1930's Ukraine in the heart of 2008 America. Everyone knew that Stalin had deliberately starved 6 million Ukrainians to death.

They had all seen the faked pictures of the starving frog boy, the corpses on the street, and all of the other lie pics taken from the Russian Civil War famine of 1921 and glommed by Nazi William Heart onto 1933 Ukraine.

I went to my blog and it was raining "Holodomor" lies again. I knew there was no escape as long as Nazi-symps kept coming to the blog:

Joseph Stalin, the leader of Russia, ordered operatives to remove all the stores of food from farming towns in the Ukraine. Millions of people had no bread--they ate field mice, insects, husks, and dead children. It was 1933.

A Russian-born American couple visited a Ukrainian village. 'We are all dying of starvation,' a villager told them. 'They want us to die. It is an organized famine. There never has been a better harvest, but if we were caught cutting a few ears of corn we would be shot or put in prison and starved to death.' It was August 1933."

- from Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker

I couldn't answer it and it made me uneasy, so I fired off an email to James Slavyanski in Moscow and just as quick he fired back with his pinball brain and his flying keyboard fingertips:

The source is worthless, plain and simple. First it is factually incorrect. Josef Stalin didn't order any of that. The state had procurement quotas every year. 1931 was a bad harvest, but this did not become apparent until a crisis had begun.

Once this had happened, the government instituted rationing, diverted tons of supplies to the Ukraine and other affected areas, cut exports, lowered the procurement quotas to their lowest level in the entire decade, and in some cases returned procured grain back to the collectives.

All of these things are confirmed by formerly secret archival documents, brought to light mainly by Dr. Mark Tauger: Tauger also compares some other famines which occurred under the British and French colonial governments, and had more obvious human factors, yet somehow today nobody accuses either government of genocide.

As for the other aspect of this claim, we have unidentified witnesses talking to an unidentified peasant in an unidentified village somewhere in Ukraine.

By contrast, George Bernard Shaw (and several other identified people) traveled through Ukraine during that time, saw no starvation, and thus are accused today of being "useful idiots" or having been tricked by "Potemkin villages" (documents relating to this alleged propaganda campaign, which would have concealed mass starvation from a passerby, have yet to be found thus far).

Honestly, if we are talking about things like rules of evidence and historical methodology, the anonymous quote is simply laughable. Note that the peasant, supposedly living in this terror-stricken, brainwashed propaganda-laden society, tells the unidentified couple precisely what the author wants us to know.

Notice also that while people like George Bernard Shaw were supposedly sheltered from this starvation and misery, this Russian-American couple just goes into any village in Soviet Ukraine as they please, and a simple peasant happens to see through all the alleged propaganda and tell them there is an "organized famine".

Sure reminds me of that time that an Arab American couple went to Fallujah and an Iraqi told them that American soldiers are systematically killing off all males in the city from 12-30. In other words, this kind of technique allows one to pull claims out of their own ass. I am not even sure if this can be considered hearsay, as we have no evidence that either party even existed.

In conclusion, the man-made famine side has had roughly 18 years to produce some kind of document showing a plan to systematically starve people. Documents of this kind have been found in Nazi archives, that is documents relating to a systematic plan to kill Jews (i.e. Einsatzgruppen reports, Max Taubner verdict, etc), and plans to starve people, as found in documents relating to Generalplan Ost.

No such documents have been produced. Likewise Ukrainian Famine supporters ought to try to explain all the documented aid that was given to Ukraine in terms of fertilizer, tractors, seed, and cattle, during that time. They cannot explain why the quotas were cut back so drastically.

I might also add that these Ukrainian nationalists and their fellow travellers also can't explain why since 1991, as many as 500,000 girls have been trafficked into sexual slavery from Ukraine, due mainly to huge unemployment among women, while at the same time Ukrainian "leaders" are running around trying to get the world to call a famine an act of genocide, and when they are not doing that, trying to join NATO so as to increase military spending at the expense of social programs.

I like this guy. He's smart as a whip and has a mind like an encyclopedia.

It's true that Westerners traveled freely around the Ukraine during this period and did not see any obvious signs of mass starvation, although one observer did see an obviously malnourished boy standing in line outside a medical clinic with his mother. He had fallen ill to one of the diseases sweeping the area - namely cholera and dysentery and was waiting to be served by doctors (!).

There was a famine, not just in Ukraine, but actually all over Russia. There were even famine and famine-related disease deaths in the cities, including Moscow. It was a terrible time, and there is general agreement that 1.5 million died (I believe that the West also refused to supply any food to the USSR at this time).

At this point, the burden of proof is on the "Holodomor" crowd to put up or shut up. Come up with some evidence for your charges or be quiet. If you want to learn more on the subject, check out Mark Tauger's website on the Ukrainian famine. In particular, see his review of Davies and Wheatcroft's book cited below. At this point, he's pretty much the gold standard.

References

Davies, R. W. and Wheatcroft, Steven G. 2004. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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