quote:

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(Kiev) Olena Tuz was 6 years old when she saw a neighbor throw the body of a naked woman into a pit on the edge of a remote forest in 1932. Flesh had been cut from the body.

"People ate people, mothers ate their own children. They didn't realize what they were doing, they just were hungry," said Tuz, standing at a thousand-strong rally in the capital Kiev to commemorate victims of the Soviet-era forced famine that killed up to 10 million Ukrainians.

On Saturday, relatives and survivors lit 33,000 candles in Kiev -- representing the number of people who were dying daily at the famine's height.

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin provoked what the Ukrainians called the Great Famine in 1932-1933 as part of his campaign to force Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. During the height of the famine, which was enforced by methodical confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cannibalism was widespread.

Those who resisted the confiscation were sent to Siberia; a person taking a wheat ear from a field was to shot on the spot.

"The state system that made possible such crimes should be punished by the court of history," Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko told the crowd.

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[ 27 November 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

The Americans (the west, in general) apparently knew about the famine but chose to do nothing because they wanted the Soviet Union as an ally. The Red Cross was stopped at the Polish border and not allowed in.

quote:

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Originally posted by nuclearfreezone:
Thanks for posting this Hephaestion. My mother is a survivor of this famine. She was 10 years old.

The Americans (the west, in general) apparently knew about the famine but chose to do nothing because they wanted the Soviet Union as an ally. The Red Cross was stopped at the Polish border and not allowed in.

Plus ca change ...

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quote:

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Originally posted by letitbleed:

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Michelle:
I think letitbleed doesn't like it here, or like the people who post here. And I'm kind of tired of his constant snarky remarks at the rest of the community. So I think it's time for him to go.

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Good call Michelle. I was certain that he was going to be booted after making the following comment in this thread:

quote:

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Oh and did I mention the quality of women you attract at that level? Supermodel women throw themselves at you even if you are short, balding and overweight. You have multiple girlfriends and wives you can dispose of with the signing of a prenup. You define your own morals and if your friends don't like it just get new friends. You can do it all- and then do it all over again.

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There is hardly a mention of what had happened in Ukraine in high school history books, unless someone chooses to do genocides in history as a topic for a presentation. I, personally, feel that people should be educated about this and other attempts of pure, malevolent evil.

This is referred to as Holodomor, for further reference.
It does not appear that Cyrillic is a workable thingy ma bob on this board.
[ 27 November 2005: Message edited by: Papal Bull ]

[ 28 November 2005: Message edited by: Papal Bull ]

The Americans (the west, in general) apparently knew about the famine

but chose to do nothing because they wanted the Soviet Union as an ally.

The Red Cross was stopped at the Polish border and not allowed in.

But if I'd researched and wrote "The Harvest of Sorrow," I'd probably be one too.

1. Nobody but nobody would be willing to go to war in the 30s.
2. People were starving around the world - it was the Great Depression. The West and everyone else was in a very isolationist mood.
3. 'The West' hated the Soviet Union - elites in the West had a profound and potentially real fear of Bolshevik revolution at home, and hated the successful one in Russia. One of the prime reasons Western governments were so tolerant of Hitler was because they saw the Nazis as a buffer against the Bolsheviks. They certainly didn't want the Soviet Union as an ally - nobody in the 30s wanted a war at all, except Hitler.

Though I disagree with letitbleed's confusion of the issues and snarky attack on everyone here, his point was correct this time:

It should also be mentioned that Hitler had just come to power, so it's silly for people to claim that the west was complicit because of some supposed desire to form an alliance with the Soviets.

The west most likely did not know much about what was going on, or if it did, did not know that it was a man-made famine. What were we supposed to do, launch a pre-emptive war?

It's one of the worst tragedies of the twentieth century, completely avoidable and intentional, and I think we can lay the blame solely on Stalin (no surprise).

[ 01 December 2005: Message edited by: Andrew_Jay ]

After a quick search of the Globe and Mail's archives, yeah, there are a couple stories from 1931-1933 covering the famine, and even at that time pointing the finger directly at Stalin and Soviet policy for essentially engineering it, through both incompetence and malice.

Then again, several stories are from a reporter apparently taken on a Potemkin-style (or as they put it, a "George Bernard Shaw sight-seeing tour") tour of the country and then roughed up and expelled by the authorities when he tried to cover the famine.

The west stood by and did nothing? I imagine the Soviet embargo of all Canadian goods (Globe and Mail, 6 August, 1932) would have made it hard to deliver aid.

If it were reasonable for the west to have done something, I would certainly be appaled and ashamed if we hadn't. However, there was no opportunity to help, and it is foolish to try and cast around blame when we know exactly who is 100% accountable for this crime.

[ 02 December 2005: Message edited by: Andrew_Jay ]

quote:

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Originally posted by nuclearfreezone:
[QB]
The Americans (the west, in general) apparently knew about the famine but chose to do nothing because they wanted the Soviet Union as an ally. QB]

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Not sure if that was the case. Had the famine been instigated during the Great Patriotic War, when the U.S. had formed an alliance with Stalin, it would be correct.

It is possible that the U.S. did nothing, as did the west in general, because they may have believed that letting the famine continue might destablize the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse and the reestablishment of capitalism.
It may also have been that, since this was 1932, and the height of the Depression in the west, that the U.S. and other countries may not have felt they had the resources to spare, given that many in the western world were going hungry at that point.

I've always wondered how Fidel could square his continuing defense of Stalin with the Man of Steel's decision to INTENTIONALLY starve hundreds of thousands, and then millions of people. To him, I ask:

Fidel, finish this phrase:

"ARISE, YE PRISONERS OF __________"

quote:

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
I've always wondered how Fidel could square his continuing defense of Stalin with the Man of Steel's decision to INTENTIONALLY starve hundreds of thousands, and then millions of people.

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I think every world leader has been tarred and feathered on this site, and Stalin was definitely not innocent of genocide, Ken. I think what is wrong, however, is to take certain events in history out of context and then lay 100 percent of the blame squarely on the shoulders of one man for all of it. I think it would be tidy and convenient to say that Stalin and Mao were the only ones who reined during famines, but that wouldn't be telling the truth. The west has been implicated in several unnatural famines throughout the cold war. Anywhere from six to thirteen million children starve to death around the capitalist third world today without so much as the batting of an eyelash from the league of free nations. So let's not be too sentimental over Stalin's war with a bunch of Kulak farmers.

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"Kulak", a Russian word meaning "fist", refers to relatively prosperous peasants. Despite their rhetoric about being an alliance of workers and peasants, the Bolsheviks were essentially an urban phenomenon, and there was always a great deal of distrust between them and the Russian peasantry. In 1929, as part of his drive to collectivize agriculture, Stalin essentially "created" class conflict in the countryside by declaring that the kulaks were the rural equivalent of urban factory owners and therefore the class enemy of poor peasants who must be "liquidated as a class". In the "dekulakization" drive that followed, anyone who opposed the Communists or collectivization was branded as a kulak and ruthlessly dealt with, effectively decimating the Russian countryside of its best and most motivated farmers. By some estimates, over 5 million farmsteads were destroyed, while millions of people were either killed, left homeless, or sent into exile in Siberia. The end result was a collectivized, compliant peasantry and the worst man-made famine in history.

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So let's not be too sentimental over Stalin's war with a bunch of Kulak farmers.

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"a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe even more, out into the taiga and the tundra...This wave poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you and I was well) committed no crime more heinous than this."

-The Gulag Archipelago,Solzhenitsyn

"The first convoy contained 5,070 people, and the second 1,044; 6,114 in all. The transport conditions were apalling: the little food that was available was inedible and the deportees were cramped into nearly airtight spaces...The result was a daily mortality rate of 35-40 people. These living conditions, however, proved to be luxurious in comparison to what awaited the deportees on the island of Nazino...There were no tools no grain, and no food. That is how their new life began. The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up. Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter and without tools...they were trapped. They weren't even able to light fires to ward off the cold."
- Black Book, Nicolas Werth

http://www.anneapplebaum.com/communism/1999/12_16_weekst_blackbook.html

[ 02 December 2005: Message edited by: HeywoodFloyd ]

It's sad how our political predispositions lead us to say silly things.

Fidel, I honestly believe you are committed to social justice, but I have no way of accounting for such things as:

quote:

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I think what is wrong, however, is to take certain events in history out of context and then lay 100 percent of the blame squarely on the shoulders of one man for all of it.

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Tell me, how does one take the deliberate starvation of 5-10 MILLION PEOPLE out of context?

What? "Yeah, I starved 5 million men, women, and children to death, but let me tell you why I did it. No! No! Hear me out!"

quote:

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I think it would be tidy and convenient to say that Stalin and Mao were the only ones who reined during famines,

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What's with the passive voice? Stalin and Mao weren't just innocently whistling, and reigning during these famines, they were complicit in them. Though Mao's "Great Leap Forward" appears to have been more the result of incompetence born of megalomanical delusion than as an act of deliberate "class warfare."

quote:

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Anywhere from six to thirteen million children starve to death around the capitalist third world today without so much as the batting of an eyelash from the league of free nations.

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This is true. The Black Book of Communism needs a counterpart, The Black Book of Capitalism (link ain't exactly bang-on but i tried].

quote:

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So let's not be too sentimental over Stalin's war with a bunch of Kulak farmers.

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So, now, Stalin wasn't just passively "reigning" while a famine raged beyond his control? He was at war with "a bunch" [5-10 million?] "of Kulak farmers"?

It's already well documented that "Kulak" was a term tossed about at random to encompass anyone who crossed anybody implementing the famine.

But even if they were all "Kulaks," would it have been justifiable by any measure to starve all those men, women, and children to death?

What utter, monstrous tripe.

On to Malcolm Muggeridge:

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It's something I've written and thought about a great deal, and I think that the liberal mind is attracted by this sort of regime. My wife's aunt was Beatrice Webb, and she and Sidney Webb wrote the classic pro-Soviet book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. And so one saw close at hand the degree to which they all knew about the regime, knew all about the Cheka (the secret police) and everything, but they liked it.

I think that those people believe in power. It was put to me very succinctly when we were taken down to Kharkiv for the opening of the Dnieper dam. There was an American colonel who was running it, building the dam in effect. "How do you like it here?" I asked him, thinking that I'd get a wonderful blast of him saying how he absolutely hated it. "I think it's wonderful," he said. "You never get any labor trouble."

This will be one of the great puzzles of posterity in looking back on this age, to understand why the liberal mind, the Manchester Guardian mind, the New Republic mind, should feel such enormous sympathy with this authoritarian regime.

You are implying that the liberal intelligentsia did not simply overlook the regime's brutality, but actually admired and liked it.

Yes, I'm saying that, although they wouldn't have admitted it, perhaps not even to themselves. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, "Yes, it's true, people disappear in Russia." She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn't help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.

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Why does he have to ascribe this sort of barbarism to "liberals"? While the behaviour of the Webbs on this issue was disgusting, it's not as if "liberals" have a monopoly on authoritarianism, oppression, and cruelty.

From this brief bio it appears that Mr. Muggeridge joined the Catholic Church late in life.

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After years of deliberation, Malcolm and Kitty became members of the Roman Catholic Church in 1983. During this time Kitty translated an edition of Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s The Sacrament of the Present Moment, a classic seventeenth-century treatise on Christian prayer. In his latter years, Muggeridge expressed a growing concern about moral and ethical issues. He opposed abortion and euthanasia while supporting the rights of the mentally and physically handicapped. His opposition to birth control led to his controversial resignation as Rector of Edinburgh University.

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Presumably, he has no problem with the Catholic Church's history of witch burnings, inquisitions, Crusades, censorship, religious wars, forced conversions, and centuries-long plundering of the poorest in society, and the corrupt and greedy management of these funds?

It isn't "liberals" or "communists" or "conservatives." It's authoritarianism. It's the inability of some people to control their desire to simplify the world and utterly dominate their enemies.

The dweebs at CBC Radio who cut off Noam Chomsky's microphone when he started to criticize Canada and they'd expected he was going to trash the US.

[ 03 December 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

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Originally posted by thwap:
Tell me, how does one take the deliberate starvation of 5-10 MILLION PEOPLE out of context?

What? "Yeah, I starved 5 million men, women, and children to death, but let me tell you why I did it. No! No! Hear me out!"

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In 1932, farms in the Lower Volga and Caucasus just didn't harvest full crop expectations due to poor crop yields and which contributed to famine conditions. And being careful not to deflect blame from Stalin here, I will point out Stalin's orders for the deliberate witholding of locally harvested food from Ukrainian farming villages. Yes, that is the truth I will not skirt around or try to ditch as if it were so much trifle. But a serious discussion of any subject should include most of the facts, imo. Russia could not be a neutral Sweden. They chose to ditch centuries of imperial rule for a lack of popular support. All eyes were on Russia, including the banking elite, the western industrialists and the money people like Prescott Bush, Krupps and Thyssen, the latter names of which were recently mentioned in a takeover of Dofasco Steel Corp. in Southern Ontario.

The Soviets blamed shortages on kulak sabotage of state farm equipment and, in some cases, deliberately not planting fields fully or not at all. We're not talking about N. America where people were running around hungry and emaciated in the midst of vast regions of arable land in Canada's west or lush farmlands across the United States. We're discussing a region of the world that had fewer agricultural options at a time not long after Russian's had the life kicked out of them by successive conscript wars and then civil war fueled by fascist interests in perpetuating chaos and disarray in Russia. Similar to the way laissez-faire capitalism did not allow farmers in the U.S. to afford farm equipment upgrades to produce more food in near perfect farming conditions in the USA, Lenin's free market farming methods simply weren't producing the amount of food necessary for Northern Russia's needs in feeding a push for accelerated industrialization of its economy. Stalin attempted to transform a backwards agrarian society to one of industry in ten years where it took the west 300 years and definitely not a smooth transition at that. Why did Stalin decide to put Marxist-Leininism on-hold ?. Because enough was enough. I'll admit, Stalin probably didn't realize what Hitler had planned for Russian's, Lativian's, fire-Estoney's, Lithuanian's, Slavs and European Jewry. He actually planned to enslave Russian's and everyone who wasn't pure. The Nazis would have worked tens of millions .., to death, really. And then what of millions of "useless eaters" in what would become the future Iron Curtain nations and not "Iron Cross nations" ?. It said as much right in Hitler's diary. So subtract the then bread basket of Russia, Ukraine, from Russian efforts to industrialize leading up to 1941. What happens then ?. Could Stalin have said to western banks at the time, Look here at our plans to industrialize based on nationalization of the economy. Do you good chaps think we could have a few dollars, a few marks and pounds?. We'll pay you back with equivalent barter?. The west would look to socialist ideas to save capitalism from itself in JM Keynes.

And Germany would prepare for yet another war with Russia. Stalin and just about every Russian widow and widower from previous German wars of aggression realized the same thing. It was time to put away ideas of meak and mild Marxism and get on with the realization that death and destruction were both an ideological tool of fascism as was profiteering from war.Socialists across Europe called for the raising of taxes on those who profited from that war. Hitler borrowed heavily from his banking friends and gave generously to German and American industrialists to build a war machine - for German aggression against Russia part II or even III if we count their contribution to the 14 western nation's attempt to put down the revolution in 1922.

quote:

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Originally posted by far away eyes:

Yes, Ghost of the Navigator, I agree, but look what happened to letitbleed when he berated the Stalinists. He got banned. Rantings of the left are naturally, more condoned on this site than the right.

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It's simply incredible how you guys can remotely blame a famine that was the fault of Stalin's insane policies on the West. Then, link this with Western policy on Iraq and Afghanistan.

No wonder the voters don't let you near any position of influence or power.

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I think letitbleed doesn't like it here, or like the people who post here. And I'm kind of tired of his constant snarky remarks at the rest of the community. So I think it's time for him to go.

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Originally posted by Fidel:

In 1932, farms in the Lower Volga and Caucasus just didn't harvest full crop expectations due to poor crop yields and which contributed to famine conditions.

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... fine, but nobody believes this was a natural famine.

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And being careful not to deflect blame from Stalin here, I will point out Stalin's orders for the deliberate witholding of locally harvested food from Ukrainian farming villages. Yes, that is the truth I will not skirt around or try to ditch as if it were so much trifle.

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... well, let's see.

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But a serious discussion of any subject should include most of the facts, imo.

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okay.

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Russia could not be a neutral Sweden. They chose to ditch centuries of imperial rule for a lack of popular support. All eyes were on Russia, including the banking elite, the western industrialists and the money people like Prescott Bush, Krupps and Thyssen, the latter names of which were recently mentioned in a takeover of Dofasco Steel Corp. in Southern Ontario.

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all completely and totally irrelevant.

quote:

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The Soviets blamed shortages on kulak sabotage of state farm equipment and, in some cases, deliberately not planting fields fully or not at all.

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The Soviets, especially Stalin, were always complaining about "wreakers" and "sabotage." There's was probably a lot of truth to this, but it was also a problem of the Central Authority's own incompetence.

Farmers in the USSR often did not plant grain, because they weren't paid to. Farming is hard work, and few people are willing to do it for free.

I'm more than willing to say that Lenin had his work cut out for him. In the book The Russian Anarchists there's a reprint of a statement of an anarchist group condemning the Bolsheviks for a number of things, including forced grain requisitions from the peasantry AND failure to provide adequate food supplies for the cities.

Partly, Bolshevik brutality was at fault, but the conditions of the war and the civil war made feeding the cities an impossible task probably. But, again, the terror famine was a deliberately induced holocaust.

quote:

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We're not talking about N. America where people were running around hungry and emaciated in the midst of vast regions of arable land in Canada's west or lush farmlands across the United States. We're discussing a region of the world that had fewer agricultural options at a time not long after Russian's had the life kicked out of them by successive conscript wars and then civil war fueled by fascist interests in perpetuating chaos and disarray in Russia.

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Again, whatever genuine agricultural problems that were experienced in the Ukraine, it was Stalin who created the artificial famine that resulted in those millions of deaths.

quote:

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Similar to the way laissez-faire capitalism did not allow farmers in the U.S. to afford farm equipment upgrades to produce more food in near perfect farming conditions in the USA, Lenin's free market farming methods simply weren't producing the amount of food necessary for Northern Russia's needs in feeding a push for accelerated industrialization of its economy.

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Lenin's NEP brought an increase in agricultural productivity. Stalin's collectivization was a theoretical [dogmatic acutally] pipedream that never worked. And, my personal opinion is that the Soviet Union had far more productive potential than capitalist callousness or Bolshevik brutality could have ever imagined. Much grain, mountains of it, sat unused, decomposing, as millions starved. Stalin lost a lot of agricultural productivity and he still achieved the massive industrialization before WW II. What that country could accomplish under a democracy we can only imagine.

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Stalin attempted to transform a backwards agrarian society to one of industry in ten years where it took the west 300 years and definitely not a smooth transition at that.

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And he lost ground with his brutality. And the terror-famine remains a deliberate act of mass-murder.

quote:

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Why did Stalin decide to put Marxist-Leininism on-hold ?. Because enough was enough. I'll admit, Stalin probably didn't realize what Hitler had planned for Russian's, Lativian's, fire-Estoney's, Lithuanian's, Slavs and European Jewry. He actually planned to enslave Russian's and everyone who wasn't pure. The Nazis would have worked tens of millions .., to death, really. And then what of millions of "useless eaters" in what would become the future Iron Curtain nations and not "Iron Cross nations" ?. It said as much right in Hitler's diary. So subtract the then bread basket of Russia, Ukraine, from Russian efforts to industrialize leading up to 1941. What happens then ?. Could Stalin have said to western banks at the time, Look here at our plans to industrialize based on nationalization of the economy. Do you good chaps think we could have a few dollars, a few marks and pounds?. We'll pay you back with equivalent barter?. The west would look to socialist ideas to save capitalism from itself in JM Keynes.

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Once again you revert to irrelevant discussions of the Bolshevik's enemies to distract attention from their monstrous crimes. Stop it.

quote:

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And Germany would prepare for yet another war with Russia. Stalin and just about every Russian widow and widower from previous German wars of aggression realized the same thing. It was time to put away ideas of meak and mild Marxism and get on with the realization that death and destruction were both an ideological tool of fascism as was profiteering from war.Socialists across Europe called for the raising of taxes on those who profited from that war. Hitler borrowed heavily from his banking friends and gave generously to German and American industrialists to build a war machine - for German aggression against Russia part II or even III if we count their contribution to the 14 western nation's attempt to put down the revolution in 1922.

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Again, completely irrelevant to Stalin's murder of 5-10 million people. That was Stalin's crime, the Bolshevik's crime, and not anyone elses.

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There would be no smooth transition from imperialism to democracy in the last century. We can discuss "what if's" until history unfolds more to our liking and hindsight. But the realities were that before the revolutions, millions of Asian's suffered chronic hunger with infant mortality and longevity making high ground only after those significant historical changes. History is not a very good bedtime story for the moralizers and perfectionists, I agree with that.

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Face the music. The political movement to which you hold allegiance is guilty of monstrous atrocities. It would be one thing if you were to acknowledge this, express contrition, and say "but I'm trying to support a new movement, doing Marxism-Leninism the proper way."

I'd still think that was lame. I'd still think that was deluded, but I wouldn't accuse you of being an apologist for Stalin. And a denier of a holocaust, which is what you're doing here, and which is why i won't be discussing much with you anymore.

This is behaviour worthy of banning, holocaust denial.

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
Fidel, I wasn't sentimentalizing anything or anyone. A first principle of any moral or humanist view of life would naturally be that it was unacceptable to intentionally starve millions of people to death. It was wrong in the Ukraine. It was wrong when Mengistu did it in Ethiopia. It was wrong when wealthy farmers effectively tried to do it in the U.S. and probably Canada as well during the Depression.

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Yes, I think that the power elite in the first half of the last century were left with a difficult task preventing world-wide revolution. They didn't really want Keynesianism but had no choice as capitalism then just wasn't delivering basic necessities of life to millions of impoverished. And then there was this business of famine used as a tool to actually prevent change. Over two million Vietnamese were intentionally starved to death by French occupiers in 1946. Ho Chi Minh wrote letters to the UN and Harry Truman begging for mercy. They ignored him. They learned that they can't do that and not expect bloody revolt. So what seems to be the right's answer to this scenario?. Spend more on military, law and order to uphold cash crop capitalism in the third world.

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The way to have dealt with the Kulaks would have been not to starve the entire Ukraine, but to take the land, give it to those who wanted to work it collectively and use it to feed the people of the Revolution, try and imprison those who had intentionally slow food production, and resettle their innocent countrymen and women.

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Yes, there wasn't really an example of agricultural success for the Soviets to copy
back then. Our own farmers in North America had all the lush and green farmland they could possibly use in the 1930's. That wasn't Russia and western food distribution technology didn't exist yet. I know from my own family history that there were Quebecers who traveled across the country looking for work and suffered malnutrition. Meat packing companies in Montreal dumped loads of beef into the river sooner than offer it to hungry Montrealers. People were thrown out of apartments for non-payment of rent. And politicians like Ernest Manning, Preston's father, promised to help farmers in Alberta. And when elected, old Ernie renegged and farmers went tits up. It was the same story in the States as banks became richer with foreclosures and hard-working farmers lost everything that they and previous generations had worked so hard for. There were political conservatives then who couldn't understand why this had to happen when people were willing to work and work hard. It was economic catastrophe in N. America in the 1930's, and we never came close to having to deal with such massive loss of life and destruction by revolution, civil war and then a world war waged on our front doorsteps as did Russia in that short time frame. After WWI, millions wandered the frozen Russian landscape, starving and freezing to bloody death. Chaos ruled in Russia because the imperialists and superrich didn't want to damn well let go. I'm simply trying to understand myself why Stalin lived on as father Stalin in the minds of millions.

And just to re-emphasize, I never said that witholding food from starving people was rightful in any way for the Soviets to deal with the situation. We now know that grain was held in local storage depots as millions starved to death. I've eyeballed photos of children suffering kwashiorker in 1930's Ukraine and am denying nothing I've been accused of denying by another poster here. Joseph "Stalin" was a personal grim reaper for several million Ukrainians. It was deliberate mass murder, I agree. I'm not endorsing Joe Stalin or his methods. I, personally, don't think of Joe Vissarionovich Djugashvili as father Stalin. No I do not.

[ 03 December 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

I'm Ukrainian. My parents were born in Ukraine; my father in the west near Ternopil where there was no famine; my mother in central Ukraine in a little village not far from Kiev where there was a famine.

Fidel, my mother was not a Kulak nor were my grand-parents. They were ordinary village peasants who lived in a little white-washed mud hut with an earthen floor and a thatched roof. They had 5 children and in the spring of 1933 my mother was the oldest at the age of 10. She was pulled out of school, grade 4, to watch the younger ones while my grand-parents went to work on the cooperative.

I grew up on stories of the famine. There was a case of cannibalism in her village; people who came through the village looking, begging for food but there was nothing to give them and they'd be found in the ditches later, dead; my mother feeding her brothers and sisters boiled weeds with a little bit of salt, or apples that weren't quite ripe until my grand-parents came home with their payment for the day - one loaf of bread which was then equally divided among them.

Years later I was watching the news with my mother. The story was about a famine raging in Africa, starving children. My mother started to cry and she asked, "Why are they still doing this to people?"

And I have to ask the same question because Fidel is absolutely right when he says, "Anywhere from six to thirteen million children starve to death around the capitalist third world today without so much as the batting of an eyelash from the league of free nations."

"They" are still doing it to us and it doesn't matter which "-ism" is in power. Stalin did it by literally taking the grain away from the people to bend them to his will. The capitalists do it by raising the prices and lowering the wages and literally taking our buying power away while their millions sit in coffers all over the world. Meanwhile, people are hungry, people are starving.

In reality not much has changed since the famine of 1933. The delivery methods might vary, that's all.

The "blame game" is the same, too. Stalin said, "oh, those lazy Ukrainians refused to work the fields, that's why they're starving." The capitalists say, "oh, those lazy welfare bums (single mom, druggie, etc.)refuse to get a job, that's why they're poor."

The loaf of bread as payment for my grandfather is like the 25 cents a day a third world child labourer gets. And then "they" say "hey, but we paid you and that's better than nothing."

Peace out

[ 03 December 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

quote:

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Originally posted by far away eyes:
Yes, Ghost of the Navigator, I agree, but look what happened to letitbleed when he berated the Stalinists. He got banned. Rantings of the left are naturally, more condoned on this site than the right.

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Oh for frig sakes. I just took a look through some of far away eyes' previous posts, came upon this thread, and discovered that, surprise surprise, he has the same IP address as letitbleed.

quote:

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Originally posted by Michelle:

Oh for frig sakes. I just took a look through some of far away eyes' previous posts, came upon this thread, and discovered that, surprise surprise, he has the same IP address as letitbleed.

I should've know. Guess this time I'll ban the IP as well.

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Edit: it was not just an economic depression, it was an environmental disaster. And maybe you are thinking of Aberhart, premier from 1935-1943; Manning was in his government and became premier when Aberhart died in 1943.

[ 13 December 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Fidel, where are you getting this idea of lush green farmland in North America in the 1930's? You know, the Great Drought? The Dustbowl? There may have been green fields in some areas, but there was a hell of a lot of dust in others.

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Yes by what I've read, drought conditions affected mainly the south west High Plains region of the U.S. and less so in the northern parts.Farmers would plow and plant, but nothing would grow. And as happened here in Canada, they ran into financial problems during the depression. The 30 year experiment in Smithian laissez-faire capitalism produced dollar a day wages on average. Money and credit were hard to come by for farmers who couldn't afford to upgrade tractors and all sorts of equipment. Millions were out of work in both countries. And by the time 1939 rolled around and even with New Deal Keynesianism having reduced unemployment in the U.S from 24 percent down to around 5 percent, USian and Canadian army recruiters said they'd never seen so many emaciated young men who were unfit for combat.

But we have to realize that North America wasn't entirely dependent on the High Plains region for agriculture in the same way that a northern latitude country like Russia was on its southern neighbors.

Russia did not have lush, green farmland that is Florida, California, Kentucky, Kansas, Idaho etc, almost a billion acres of fertile land for growing and supporting its rapidly industrializing society. That's a lot of farmland. A single ranch in Texas that I know of is over 800K acres. By contrast, N. Korea is small with about 14 percent arrable land in a mainly mountainous country that would fit within the State of Mississippi.

And then there is Canada. Absolutely huge but under-developed nation still today. We have lush farmlands in Okanagen and Ottawa Vallies. We have so much fertile farmland in Saskachewan and Manitoba. PEI grows some of the tastiest taters you ever. North American's would look a bit foolish for ever being home to hungry people. But we are and we do, just the same, and it's a national disgrace.

And yes, they were preparing armaments to defend against fascist aggression part two, or three, depending on whether we include the incident in 1922 when an international contingent attempted invade Russia to put down the revolution.

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Edit: it was not just an economic depression, it was an environmental disaster. And maybe you are thinking of Aberhart, premier from 1935-1943; Manning was in his government and became premier when Aberhart died in 1943.

[ 13 December 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

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The drought in south Alberta lasted from 1930 to 1937. In Alberta: A New History the Palmers write:

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...Dry and dusty as 1930 was, 1931 was worse. On October 9, clouds of dust blanketed all of southern Alberta. City traffic virtually halted, and daytime streetlights had little effect. Over time, on the farms, soil drifted to the tops of fences. By the mid-1930s, the CPR had to use snowplows to clear the tracks of soil drifts up to ten feet high...

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Part of the problem was the farming practice of summerfallowing; eventually government programs [PFRA] mitigated it by pushing trash farming [leaving stubble in the soil to keep it from blowing away] and putting some land in the driest areas back to pasture.