The Meaning of Words; Standing with Ukraine

www.WilliamRussell.net ^ | 3/07/2014 | William Russell

[Bill Russell]

Words have meaning. Sometimes even the small ones by their inclusion or omission can have a huge impact. Most readers in their first glance at the title of this article thought the word “the” was mistakenly dropped from in front of Ukraine. Over the last century, we have become used to referring the nation of Ukraine as “the Ukraine.” This writer has been guilty of the mistake, even in recent writings.

The inclusion or omission of an article of speech like “the” conveys the difference between a sovereign, independent nation of Ukraine and a region or territory claimed by Russia and the Soviet Union. Certainly, Vladamir Putin wants us to keep using “the” when referring to Ukraine, especially when he has invaded its sovereign territory.

But there are words Putin does not want us to use either. “Holodomor” is one of those words. The term Holodomor derives from Ukrainian words referring to death or execution by starvation. It is a word for the genocide of the Ukrainian people that has remained buried behind a massive wall of Soviet propaganda and western under-reporting for over 80 years.

During the years of Soviet domination of Russia and Eastern Europe, the Kremlin did its best to bury the truth of the Holodomor and its role in implementing it. Thanks to laudatory stories of Stalin’s Soviet Union written my New York Times reporter Walter Duranty during Stalin’s reign of terror, and the work of Soviet spies like Alger Hiss (a senior State Department official under President Franklin Roosevelt), the atrocities committed against the people of Ukraine by the Soviets have never been widely publicized in the west.

In 1932 -1933, during Stalin’s great “terror”, approximately 25% of the Ukrainian nation was starved to death on a grand scale. Through systematic Soviet theft of all the grain from the farmers, to include the seed grain stores, in an area known as “the bread basket of Europe,” resistance to the Soviet seizure of independent farms in Ukraine was crushed. Stalin’s point man in charge of the murder of over 8 million Ukrainians was the “Great Reformer” and Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev.

Khrushchev made extensive use of the NKVD (previously known as the Checka and OGPU, later known as the KGB, today referred to as the FSB ) in seizing grain stores and shooting any farmers who hid grain to plant or feed their families. Stalin’s proletarian socialist (Communist) genocide of the Holodomor and Gulag system was in full swing, and served as the model for Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist (Nazi) concentration camp system and “Final Solution” when it was just beginning. The very real Holocaust of the Holodomor in Ukraine was perpetrated by the same organization which gave birth to Vladimir Putin’s career.

The world turned a blind eye in witness to the Ukrainians who had their churches destroyed and many of their family members (often their entire families) starved to death on their farms, or executed if they tried to leave in search of food. The Soviets were all too happy to allow the horrific images of the Nazi death camps and testimonies of the Nuremberg Trials to obscure the suppressed truth of the Holodomor.

It is important for the world to recognize and stand with Ukrainian defiance against domination from post-Soviet Russia. The same organizations and philosophical rationalizations for domination which existed in Stalin’s Russia are alive and well in Putin’s; they just have different names. - In which case, perhaps, words have no meaning.

[Always A Marine]

Your tag line is sadly true. The world is littered with the tortured corpses of America’s former allies. We’re loyal until we decide to move along to the next war or interlude, and then you’re left to face our vengeful former enemies alone. Perhaps if America didn’t get into so many fights, it might not be so quick to abandon its former allies de jour. It is a sad legacy of much honorable service.