Tag Archives: Stalin

Jews and Latvians Imposed The Holodomor On Ukraine

Posted on by

Eric  Margolis at the Toronto Sun:

As Britain’s socialist government cleared the way for a gaudy show trial of that Great Satan of the left, Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 65th anniversary of this century’s bloodiest crime was utterly ignored. Leftists now baying for Pinochet’s head don’t want to be reminded of the Unknown Holocaust. In 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin unleashed genocide in Ukraine. Stalin determined to force Ukraine’s millions of independent farmers
– called kulaks – into collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine’s growing spirit of nationalism. Faced by resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror and dispatched 25,000 fanatical young party militants from Moscow – earlier versions
of Mao’s Red Guards – to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants into collective farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective executions of recalcitrant farmers.
When Stalin’s red guards failed to make a dent in this immense number, OGPU was ordered to begin mass executions. But there were simply not enough Chekists (secret police) to kill so many people, so Stalin decided to replace bullets with a much cheaper medium of death – mass starvation. All seed stocks, grain, silage
and farm animals were confiscated from Ukraine’s farms. […]
OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines. Nothing came in or out of Ukraine. Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians quickly began to
die of hunger, cold and sickness. When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent henchman Lazar Kaganovitch to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch,
the Soviet Eichmann, made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent of all Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. A Ukrainian party member named Nikita Khruschchev helped supervise the slaughter. During the bitter winter of
1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovitch and OGPU hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. Some parents even ate infant children.
The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin’s custom-made famine and Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day. The KGB’s archives, and recent work by Russian historians, show at least seven million died. Ukrainian historians put the
figure at nine million, or higher. Twenty-five percent of Ukraine’s population was exterminated. […]
Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish. The predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders, and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted by Stalin’s Cheka on Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland, led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both communism and their
suffering. As a direct result, during the subsequent Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the region’s innocent Jews became the target of ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts
and Poles. […] Stalin’s murder of millions was simply denied, or concealed by a left-wing conspiracy of silence that continues to this day. … Socialist luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and
Sidney Webb and PM Edouard Herriot of France, toured Ukraine during 1932-33 and proclaimed reports of famine were false. Shaw announced: “I did not see one under-nourished person in Russia.” New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russian reporting, wrote claims of famine were “malignant propaganda.” Seven million people were dying around them, yet these fools saw nothing. The New York Times has never repudiated Duranty’s lies. […] Western historians delicately skirt the sordid fact that the governments of Britain, the
United States and Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin’s other monstrous crimes. Yet they eagerly welcomed him as an ally during World War II. …
None of the Soviet mass murderers who committed genocide were ever brought to justice. Lazar Kaganovitch died peacefully in Moscow a few years ago, still wearing his Order of the Soviet Union, and enjoying a generous state pension.” (Toronto Sun,
“Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust,” December 13, 1998) In a sickening display of Talmudic insolence, Aleksandr Feldman — the leader of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee — sought to undermine a Ukrainian government motion to prosecute a case against the Soviet criminals who orchestrated the Holodomor genocide, for the predictable reason
that all of the names on the published list of conspirators were Jewish:

“KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the “Great Famine” committed in the 1930s. The nation’s security service is pressing
the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the
list were Jewish. Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Feldman, leader of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said last week that it was “a farce” to press the case. “All organizers of the
Great Famine are dead,” he said. Last July, the Ukrainian Security Service released a list of high-ranking Soviet state and Communist Party officials — as well as
officials from NKVD, the police force of Soviet Russia — that essentially blamed Jews and Latvians responsible for perpetrating and executing the famine because most of the names on the list were Jewish. The Ukrainian Jewish Committee called on
the secret service to revise the list, which incited interethnic hatred, in order to clear up the “inaccuracy.”” (JTA, “Jewish Group Objects To ‘Great Famine’ Case,” June 15, 2009)

Murray Rothbard: Hooray For Che!

Posted on by

File under ideological insanity – Rothbard gives props to the people’s poseur, Che Guevara, whom even the anarchist left today has rejected:

“What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of “professional revolutionary.” And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.

Trained as a physician in Argentina, witnessing CIA-fomented counter-revolution by the thug Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Guevara dedicated the rest of his life to the Revolution. He found a promising field first in Cuba, where, as everyone knows, Che was second only to Fidel Castro in waging and then winning the revolution there.”

and this:

But in his mighty heart Che could not refrain from leaping a whole raft of stages, from plunging romantically but recklessly into the premature adventure of armed struggle in Latin America. And so, with tragic irony, Che Guevara, in his daring and courage, was betrayed by the very Bolivian peasantry whom he was trying to liberate, and who barely understood the meaning
of the conflict. Che died from violating his own principles of revolutionary war.

And this, enthusiastically quoting from Fidel Castro’s praise of Che:

“Newspapers of all tendencies have univermlly recognized Che’s virtues… . He is an almost unique example of how a man could win the recognition and respect of his enemies, of the very enemies he faced with his arms in his hands, of those who have been ideological enemies and have nevertheless expressed feelings of admiration and of respect toward Che.”

Murray Rothbard, “Ernesto Che Geuvara: RIP,” Mises.org http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_3/3_3_1.pdf

See also this article from a strict anarcho-capitalist position about Rothbard’s misrepresentation of his views to placate or mislead followers: The 10 Points Of The Libertarian Party Abolitionist Caucus.pdf.

Note – My main objection to an-cap positions is that they are easily manipulated by the state (national and transnational) for its own ends. An an-cap world is possible, but only spottily.

Now, in contrast to Rothbard’s glowing portrait, here is a more candid assessment of Che’s actual record from the anarchistlibrary.org (Che Guevara: why anarchists should view him critically):

Organise, Issue 47, Winter 1997/1998
flag.blackened.net

QUOTE: “After all, the Che cult is still used to obscure the real nature of Castro’s Cuba, one of the final bastions of Stalinism.”

QUOTE: “He demanded the death penalty for “informers, insubordinates, malingerers and deserters.” He himself personally carried out executions. Indeed the first execution carried out against an informer by the Castroists was undertaken by Che. He wrote: “I ended the problem giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain.” On another occasion he planned on shooting a group of guerrillas who had gone on hunger strike because of bad food. Fidel intervened to stop him. Another guerrilla who dared to question Che was ordered into battle without a weapon!”

QUOTE: “With the Castroite victory in 1959, Che, along with his Stalinist buddy Raul Castro, was put in charge of building up state control. He purged the army, carried out re-education classes within it, and was supreme prosecutor in the executions of Batista supporters, 550 being shot in the first few months. He was seen as extremely ruthless by those who saw him at work. These killings against supporters of the old regime, some of whom had been implicated in torture and murder, was extended in 1960 to those in the working class movement who criticised the Castro regime. The anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their press closed down and many militants were thrown in prison. Che was directly implicated in this.”

QUOTE: “Photo opportunities with the peasantry and proletariat, good looks and a dramatic death in no way exonerate him from his historical role in the suppression of the popular classes, state terror and capitalism, and changing Cuba from the semi-colony of one great power the US, to another, the USSR.”

QUOTE: “I’d like to confess, papa, at that moment I discovered that I really like killing” “Hate will be an element of the battle, a merciless hate for the enemy, that will inspire the guerrilla-soldier to superhuman efforts of strength and changes him into an effective, violent, selected, in cold blood killing machine”

State Terrorism: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1933

Posted on by

The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why.  Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.

“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale — between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told  their stories  about concentration  camps and massacres.  The experience  was also  captured  unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”

Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………

“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”

Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.

The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.

Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.

The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”