Seven million died in the 'forgotten' holocaust

Toronto Sun ^ | 11/16/03 | ERIC MARGOLIS

[freedom44]

Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin's Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.

How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole.

So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s, the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% of them Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.

Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSR's Muslim peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters who today are branded as "terrorists" by the U.S. and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.

Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million German girls and women were raped.

Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization.

Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed "anti-party elements." Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Union's Adolf Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.

During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or died of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergen-Belsen death camp.

The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of two million more (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times' Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."

The U.S., British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine.

The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons, Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful Europe.

When war came, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.

Though Stalin murdered three times more people than Hitler, to Roosevelt he remained "Uncle Joe."

The British-U.S. alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe in 1945.

After the war, the left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed.

For the western Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murderers. For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.

The Jewish people, understandably, saw their Holocaust as a unique event. It was Israel's raison d'etre. Raising other genocides at that time would, they feared, diminish their own. This was only human nature.

While today, academia, the media and Hollywood rightly keep attention focused on the Jewish Holocaust, they mostly ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi killers, but not communist killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.

Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.

We know all about the crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria? Were it not for writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.

The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.

[MEG33]

#97 and more of this thread might interest you.

[MeekOneGOP]

Thanks for that ! ...

The NEW Left (this is what I've been planting on various threads) ...

Exposed: Pelosi's Socialist Ties

Pelosi leader of 'Progressive Caucus'

From those links, these excerpts ...

"DSA/USA, the 'Democratic Socialists of America' are the U.S. arm of the Socialist International. They share the symbol of the fist holding the rose, and they share the tasks to be accomplished — in our case, an altogether different America ...

"Some time ago — the date is missing from the descriptions — 58 members of the U.S. House of Representatives formed a subdivision of the Democratic Socialists of America and called it the Progressive Caucus. Their statement of purpose, as well as their membership list, formed an integral part of the dsausa Web site (www.dsausa.org ). The membership list appeared on the screen with the continuous background of the fist holding the rose, should anyone have missed the connection with the Socialist International."

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the likely [she is now] new minority leader in the House of Representatives, serves on the executive committee of the socialist-leaning Progressive Caucus, a bloc of about 60 votes or nearly 30 percent of the minority vote in the lower chamber.

The Democratic Socialists of America's chief organizing goal is to work within the Democratic Party and remove the stigma attached to "socialism" in the eyes of most Americans.

"Stress our Democratic Party strategy and electoral work," explains an organizing document of the DSA. "The Democratic Party is something the public understands, and association with it takes the edge off. Stressing our Democratic Party work will establish some distance from the radical subculture and help integrate you to the milieu of the young liberals."

Progressive Caucus

[MeekOneGOP]

Thanks for the heads up. Here's a bump hoping I can get back here later to see more of this thread ...

[MeekOneGOP]

Wow ! Thanks for posting this article. Horrendous ...

We know all about the crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria? Were it not for writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.

[MeekOneGOP]

But Ed Asner, who has said he'd like to portray Stalin in a movie some day, thinks Stalin is "misunderstood".

This must all be anti-Stalin propaganda to him.

I bet ! ...

[nuconvert]

OH NO!!! Make It Go Away!!!!

[MeekOneGOP]

hehe !

[nkycincinnatikid]

Relax Olam , most of us concede that there was only one holocaust and are diligently trying to come up with a word for the calculated mass murder of scores of millions of less important people.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

The only reason this holocuat is "forgotten" (ie ignored by US popular culture) is because it was committed by communists. But then, you already knew that.

As much as I would like to agree with you I reluctantly have to disagree, at least in part.

Like it or not the Holocaust is remembered because of Ike.

He was the one the brought in the reporters and made them film the horror. He knew that there was a tendency to gloss over things and he wanted to make sure that this was not glossed over.

That is why we remember, because we saw. Here there was no one to record. To shove it in our face and demand we look. So it is easy to let it drift away.

I know what happened. I have read reports that make me ill. But I have to admit when I think of man's inhumanity to man, it isn't those reports that come to mind. It is the pictures.

[Radioactive]

Try This....... Over 65 Million Killed in the US over a 30 year period.

65 Million babies Murdered by Planned parenthood and their minions over the last 30 years.

Planned Parenthood has plans to kill even more in the US and around the world.

World's greatest HOLOCAUST is still going on.

[Radioactive]

Try This....... Over 65 Million Killed in the US over a 30 year period.

65 Million babies Murdered by Planned parenthood and their minions over the last 30 years.

Planned Parenthood has plans to kill even more in the US and around the world.

World's greatest HOLOCAUST is still going on.

[truthandjustice1]

"The progressive left"

Read: secular, liberal Jews, for the most part.

[Kozak]

Did it ever occur to you that comments such as yours just fuel more anti semitism amoung Ukrainians?

As a child of Ukrainian immigrants I've seen the destructiveness of that antisemitism in the past. As a staunch defender of Isreal, and one who loathes antisemitism, I've had many an argument with fellow Ukrainians who rage at the fact that the death of millions of our fellows is ignored, while the Holocaust is mentioned in inumerable movies, plays, books, museums, seminars.

Please don't minimize our pain and suffering, I don't minimize the horror of the Holocaust, nor do I minimize the suffering of the Armenians, or the deaths of coutless Chinese and Tibetans at the hands of Mao and his butchers.

[CDHart]

Following was on Fox News site--
Indiana Holocaust Museum Apparently Torched

Tuesday, November 18, 2003



TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — A fire destroyed a museum founded by a Holocaust survivor early Tuesday and arson is suspected, a museum official said.

The fire was reported at the CANDLES Museum (search) just after midnight and gutted the building, a former printing plant along U.S. 41 south of the city's downtown.

"The police said there was a brick that had broken the main glass door, and they threw something in there that was an accelerant," said Mary Wright, the museum's education director. "Even the display cases were practically burned down to the ground."

Someone also wrote "Remember Timmy McVeigh" on a wall. Timothy McVeigh (search), the Oklahoma City bomber, was executed at a federal prison outside Terre Haute in 2001.

Terre Haute police referred calls to the Fire Department. A message seeking comment was left with fire officials Tuesday.

CANDLES stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Experiments Survivors. The museum was founded in 1995 by Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, Wright said. It houses artifacts from Auschwitz and documents relating to Dr. Josef Mengele (search).

Wright said the museum had never received any threats.

"People think this doesn't happen in nice little places like Terre Haute, Indiana," she said.

Kor and an identical twin sister were subjected to Mengele's genetic experiments at Auschwitz concentration camp.




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[Tailgunner Joe]

bttt