The atrocities of the past matter as lessons for today. We are all citizens of the global village in a struggle between freedom and oppression, hope and fear, democracy and dictatorship. This brief documentary (summarized in the notes below) is a slice of history that was hidden from the world for ages. It is important today because it sheds some insight into what is happening in Ukraine today, what is happening in America, and what is happening on the global stage. Also, the struggle of humanity always reflects society’s worldview. Though the actors in the particular drama of the Holodomor are no longer alive, the anti-human, anti-Christian, anti-democracy worldview is still very much alive and operational in today’s society. As responsible freedom-loving citizens we need to be able to recognize the symptoms and understand the times in which we live.
To that end, I have drawn some parallels between the modern expression and actions of the worldview of governments (dictatorships or otherwise) that commit genocide against its citizens.
*********************************
There were hundreds of Ukrainian peasant and intelligentsia uprisings in 1929-1930 as the Ukrainian people fought fiercely against Stalin’s collectivism of farms. The people of Ukraine wanted nothing to do with this collectivist plan, nothing to do with communism {COLLECTIVISM, GLOBALISM, COMMUNISM}.
Their display of autonomy, nationalist thinking, and distinctiveness angered Stalin who intended to bring Ukraine under his control and make it a Soviet possession like the other republics. In 1932-1933, Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, purposefully starved to death millions of Ukrainians in the genocide famine known today as the Holodomor, the “Death Famine” created purely for political reasons in order to insure that Ukrainians didn’t present a political problem for Stalin. {SOVEREIGNTY, DISSENT, RIGHT TO SELF DETERMINATION, NATIONALISM}.
How did a ruthless government accomplish such a grand scale political device to impose control over Ukraine, to subjugate a people, and to crush their resistance to communist rule? Systematically.
First, Stalin sent in 12,000 Soviet Secret Police to purge the political party of its rank, and to seize all the grain and all the food from individual farms, taking cattle, pigs, chickens, stored goods, and every other food sustenance from the people, and then withheld all food from them, under the pretext of enforcing the law to protect state property {CONTROL OF FOOD SUPPLY, THEFT, MURDER, CENSORSHIP}.
School textbooks, histories and dictionaries were changed and/or removed {REVISIONIST HISTORY}.
Schools were classified and the Russian language emphasized {CURRICULUM CONTROL, INDOCTRINATION, DUMBING DOWN}.
Legislative, commerce leaders, and intellectual thinkers were either jailed or forced to commit suicide {CENSORSHIP, CANCEL CULTURE, SUICIDED}.
Passport laws were passed forbidding the Ukrainian peasants to go into the cities, and the borders of Ukraine were later blocked so that no one could come in to bring food or aid and no one on the inside could exit to escape the tyranny. As regions were depopulated, a colonization of sorts happened as Russian citizens were sent into the areas to live and the nature of the country was changed {CONTROL OF CITIZEN TRAVEL, OPEN BORDERS, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION}.
Ironically, many of the policies were conducted by locals in the same villages by neighbors against neighbors. We have witnessed the effectiveness of this “divide and conquer” tactic up close and personal throughout the recent c*o*v*i*d ordeal {DIVIDE-AND-CONQUER, CREATE CHAOS, FOMENT HATRED/INSTABILITY}.
The secrecy behind the Holodomor was due, in part, to the impressive success of the Soviet effort to control the media to prevent the narrative from reaching the rest of the world. Journalists and diplomats in Moscow were called in and directed not to report on what was happening in Ukraine. Campaigns were run against anyone trying to tell the truth. Basically, “you are either going to lie with us, or you will never work in Moscow again.” People and school children were forbidden to speak the truth of what they saw and experienced. Everyone was forced into silence. Burial of loved ones was forbidden. [SUPPRESSION OF TRUTH, DESTRUCTION OF FREE SPEECH, MEDIA CONTROL, NARRATIVE CONTROL, MOCKINGBIRD MEDIA}.
At the height of the political famine, in June 1933, 28,000 Ukrainians were dying daily. Ukraine was decimated, and also the institutions, culture, etc. that had supported their former way of life. Stalin crushed the possibility of Ukrainian sovereignty through enforced famine. It broke the ability of the society to resist for decades to come {DESTRUCTION OF INDIVIDUAL AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY}.
As mentioned in this documentary, the study of Holodomor, like the study of any great tragedy is important to understand the nature of our modern world, to understand how human beings think and act {WORLDVIEW MATTERS}.
We should study it as a terrible tragedy, the history of genocide in the hope that people will not allow such things to re-occur.