Trudeau Government's Continued Anti-Communist Falsification of History

A Mere 15 Countries Concur with Hitlerite Holodomor Myth

In 2008, the Harper government declared November 25 an official day of remembrance for the Ukrainian victims of what some call the Holodomor, said to be a "man-made famine" or a genocide deliberately carried out in 1932-33 by the Soviet Union. In Alberta, "Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor) Memorial Day," was declared by the Conservative government, also in 2008, through Bill 37. The bill proclaimed the fourth Saturday of November each year as Alberta's Day of Holodomor Remembrance. Other provinces have passed similar bills and now hold similar annual events.

The Harper government created a special day of remembrance for the alleged genocide in spite of the fact that of the world's 194 countries a mere 15 of them have ever officially agreed with the characterization of the Holodomor as a genocide, i.e., as a deliberate policy to exterminate a particular nation or ethnic group. Ukraine, Canada, and the U.S. are three of those 15 countries. No African, Asian, or Arab countries agree with the characterization of the Holodomor as genocide. Significantly, Israel, which of course commemorates the Holocaust, does not agree that what occurred in Ukraine was genocide.

Further, no official documents have ever been produced that would verify the claim that the Soviet government carried out a deliberate policy of starving people living in the Ukraine. In fact, in 1934 the British Foreign Office in the House of Lords stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations against the Soviet government regarding the food shortages, based on the testimony of Sir John Maynard, a renowned famine expert who actually visited Ukraine in the summer of 1933. Other well-known personalities of the day who took the same view included U.S. journalist Walter Duranty, author H. G. Welles, playwright George Bernard Shaw, and French president Eduard Herriot.

Since it first formed the federal government in 2015, the Trudeau government has continued with Harper's policy, issuing annual statements claiming that the 1932-33 famine was a systemic man-made genocide committed by the Soviet government which killed millions through forced starvation, that it was an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian people, and that it is just one more example of suffering under communism. Also emphasized is that Ukrainians have contributed to Canada and that Canada supports the people of Ukraine and their government. Those who deny that the conditions in Ukraine in 1932-33 were a man-made famine are summarily dismissed by Holodomor proponents as "Holodomor deniers," on par with "Holocaust deniers."

The idea of a famine deliberately created by the Soviet government was concocted by the Hitlerite Nazis to discredit the Soviet Union and undermine the great prestige it had amongst the world's peoples. The facts show that while there were food shortages in Ukraine, mainly due to the long imperialist invasion of Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1922, which included Canadian troops and attempts by the remnants of the Czarist regime to mobilize the rich peasants called kulaks against the collectivization of agriculture, no "man-made famine" was ever created. Professor Mark Tauger, associate professor of history at West Virginia University, has done exhaustive research and concluded that hardships in Ukraine were caused mainly by natural factors that waxed and waned, causing severe reductions in agricultural production, including periodic drought and persistence of crop pests and diseases when the means to combat them were still being developed.

But today the genocide myth is deliberately revived and promoted to spread disinformation to cover up the crimes which the U.S. imperialists are committing in their striving to dominate the world, along with the Israeli Zionists and their backers in Europe and North America, which includes the government of Canada.

The Hitlerite Nazis created the genocide myth in 1933 to discredit the Soviet Union, the enemy they most feared. They wrote front page stories in German newspapers, which were then taken up by the reactionary British press, including by Lord Rothermere, owner of the London Daily Mail monopoly press. He was anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-Semitic and anti-labour to the core. A friend of Hitler and Mussolini and sympathetic to Oswald Mosley's British fascist party, Rothermere sent congratulatory telegrams to Hitler before the invasion of Poland.

In September 1934, multi-millionaire William Randolph Hearst, leading U.S. publisher of the "yellow press" and an open supporter of Nazism, met with Hitler and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin and signed a cash deal to promote a positive image of the Nazis in the U.S. The Hearst papers soon carried columns paid for by Adolf Hitler, Herman Goering and Benito Mussolini, and Hearst attended the huge 1934 Nazi Party Nuremberg rally, featured in Leni Riefenstahl's notorious Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. Egged on by the Hitlerites, Hearst's papers became the biggest propagandists for the genocide myth, using fake photographs and printing lies that have been refuted by solid evidence over and over again.

Hearst's fraudulent campaign began on February 8, 1935 with a fabricated front-page headline in his Chicago American: "6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union." But what actually took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a further advancement of the revolution. It was a time of major internal class struggle during which poor landless peasants rose up against the minority of rich landowners, the kulaks, and began a struggle for the collectivization of agriculture. Collectivization was undertaken in conjunction with the campaign to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union so as to meet the needs of the Soviet people and to defend the Soviet Union against foreign aggression.

The Hearst press articles were the origin of the larger myth alleging millions died in the Soviet Union. These myths were taken up by the CIA and Britain's MI5 and, in the post-war period, by the McCarthyite witch hunters, and by paid propagandists such as Stanford Professor Robert Conquest, a former MI5 agent. For decades, such slanders have spread a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union. Combatting these fabrications, in 1987, Canadian trade unionist Douglas Tottle published a well-researched book called Fraud Famine and Fascism, which systematically exposed the Holodomor myths. The book has been reproduced online and is accessible to any objective reader.

The Trudeau government is more and more revealing that it openly supports the most reactionary forces in all contexts. Its policy is one of appeasement of U.S. imperialist crimes against humanity. Another example is how revelations in 2017 exposed then Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland's blatant cover-up of her grandfather's role as a Nazi collaborator in wartime Poland and Austria. This, in turn, led both government ministers and many media pundits to expose themselves as apologists for the Nazi-fascist occupation of Europe during World War II and its collaborators.

6th Convention of the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA), in front of the
Ukrainian Labour Temple in Winnipeg, January 1925. In 1940, the Canadian government banned the ULFTA, seized its assets and gave them to the pro-fascist Ukrainian National Federation.

In their eagerness to exonerate the Foreign Affairs Minister for lying about her family history and presenting her Nazi-collaborator grandfather Michael Chomiak as a "victim of communism" and Russian aggression, some have gone as far as to justify Chomiak's actions and those of other participants in the genocide of the European Jews and other myriad atrocities as morally acceptable or even as making the best of a bad situation. Others say that from the relative peace today, no judgement can be cast on those who decided, for one reason or another, to aid the fascist enslavement of Europe. Certainly the millions who fought and died in the successful fight to defeat the Nazis would vehemently disagree.

Trudeau has also continued Harper's project to build a memorial to the so-called victims of communism. The project was said to have been first proposed to Harper in 2008 by Czech Ambassador Pavel Vosalik. Not coincidentally, in 2009, the House of Commons of Canada unanimously adopted a resolution to designate August 23 as the national day of remembrance of Canada for the victims of "Communism and Nazism," a feeble attempt to equate Communism and Nazism. Due to continued opposition from the people, the anti-communist memorial has been repeatedly delayed, as well as scaled back both in size and location. After the fall of Harper in 2015, the Trudeau government revived the project and is currently building a design chosen in June 2018.

Another example of blatantly supporting reactionary forces is that the Trudeau government's representative at the United Nations, no doubt under orders, continually abstains when the annual Russian resolution combatting the glorification of Nazism is put forward in November. The resolution's full title is: "Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance." In November 2019, the United States and Ukraine were the only countries that voted against the U.N. resolution which passed easily with 121 countries voting in favour.

Also of note is that the Trudeau government has never once officially denounced the fact that the Nazis exterminated over three million people in Ukraine. These horrendous crimes have disappeared into thin air. It is as if the Nazis were Canada's war-time ally, not the Soviet Union. In addition, no Canadian government has made official government announcements or created any memorial days or launched any national campaigns to honour those slaughtered by the Nazis in Ukraine and to denounce their murderers.

The Trudeau government has also remained silent about how the Canadian state allowed known Nazi war criminals into Canada after the Second World War and then protected them from prosecution. This includes the 2,000 members of the Ukrainian-based Galicia Division -- denounced as a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials -- who came to Canada after the Second World War, even though they were members of the Nazi SS and fought for the Nazis against the Soviet Union and its allies, including Canada.

Finally, no Canadian government, including Trudeau's, has yet created any official day of remembrance commemorating the myriad indigenous victims of the ongoing genocide perpetrated during the colonization of what are now Canada and Quebec, which began hundreds of years ago. This is the case even though the recent national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman and Girls stated that Canada had committed "race-based genocide" against its indigenous peoples. In a supplementary report explaining its rationale for the genocide ruling, MMIWG commissioners noted Canada had "displayed a continuous policy to destroy Indigenous peoples physically, biologically, and as social units."

The Trudeau government's wholesale promotion of anti-communism is yet another attempt to rewrite history in order to peddle its self-serving imperialist conception of freedom, democracy, human rights and government of police powers. The aim of this ongoing campaign must be vigorously opposed. That aim s to join the U.S. imperialist chorus which has declared Russia an enemy and to disorient Canadians so that they cannot organize themselves to wage an effective defence of their right to conscience and lay the claims which they must to make Canada a zone for peace and to defend the rights of all.

This article was published in

Volume 50 Number 9 - November 24, 2020

Volume [volume] Number [issue] - [date]

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Trudeau Government's Continued Anti-Communist Falsification of History: A Mere 15 Countries Concur with Hitlerite Holodomor Myth

    

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