November 25 Promotion of Holodomor Myth

Trudeau Government's Continued Anti-Communist Falsification of History

This year the government of Canada can be expected to once again promote the Holodomor myth about a Ukrainian famine man-made by Joseph Stalin to kill Ukrainians because they oppose the communist regime. Today this is used for purposes of warmongering against Russia. It is usually an occasion to spread all kinds of stale anti-communist lies which originated with the Nazis during World War II. It will be interesting to see what is said by official as well as academics and media this year as they cover up their support for making Canada a refuge for the Nazis and their collaborators who repeat the Holodomor myth.

As of June 2023, only 34 countries out of 193 United Nations member states, recognize what is called the Holodomor, the last being the Senate of Italy on July 26, 2023. Of course, Canada is one of them.

The term Holodomor, in Ukrainian translates as death by hunger. It refers to the alleged starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33 as a result of Soviet policies. It is portrayed as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry who, they claim, resisted Soviet policies. When they speak of Ukrainian peasantry they also always confuse the kulaks, the rich peasants and small landlords who generally played a reactionary role, and the mass of poor peasants many still in serfdom who benefited from and joined Soviet Russia in building a new society.

In 2008, the Harper government declared an official day of remembrance for the Ukrainian victims of what it called the Holodomor 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 including Quebec 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 193 countries at that time a mere 15 of them 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 countries which today number 34 including several countries in Latin America which the United States and Canada have cajoled to join in. No African, Asian, or Arab countries agree with the characterization of the Holodomor as genocide. The Holodomor museum in Ukraine calls this "Worldwide Recognition of the Holodomor as Genocide." Significantly Israel, which of course commemorates the Holocaust, does not agree that what occurred in Ukraine was genocide. This is not because Israel is in any way progressive. On the contrary, we are informed it is because of prejudices against any use of the term genocide which they think belittles the European Holocaust in which so many people identified as Jews perished in the most brutal ways.

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.

The following notes extracted from Wikipedia are interesting because they reveal the profound anti-communism which pervades all Holodomor propaganda. It says:

"With the concurrence of the Canadian Senate, the House of Commons passed An act to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ('Holodomor') Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide, in part stating:

"Whereas the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide of 1932-33 known as the Holodomor was deliberately planned and executed by the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin to systematically destroy the Ukrainian people's aspirations for a free and independent Ukraine, and subsequently caused the death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. ... Her Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House of Commons of Canada, enacts as follows: 1. This Act may be cited as the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ("Holodomor") Memorial Day Act. 2. Throughout Canada, in each and every year, the fourth Saturday in November shall be known as 'Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ("Holodomor") Memorial Day.'"

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."


Soviet poster circa 1930:
"We will keep out the kulaks."

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.


Chicago American, part of the Hearst chain, promoting lie of the Ukrainian famine,
March 3, 1935. Click to enlarge.

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 reader who has an interest in investigating the facts of the matter.

Canada has also signed all four of the joint declarations by delegations at the United Nations General Assembly recognizing and condemning the Holodomor. In 2019, an official statement about the genocide was issued from the prime minister Justin Trudeau on Holodomor Memorial Day, in part reading:

"Today, we remember the millions of innocent people in Ukraine who suffered and died during the Holodomor. From 1932 to 1933, the totalitarian Soviet regime launched a campaign of starvation across Ukraine. Millions died, and countless others were arrested, deported, or executed in a genocide designed to break their will. In the face of these horrors, the people of Ukraine endured, protecting their language, their culture, and their identity. In 1991, after decades of Soviet rule and oppression, they gained their independence. For too many years, the perpetrators of the Holodomor denied its existence and hid the full extent of the unspeakable suffering from the international community. It falls to each one of us to ensure their stories are never erased."

Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec have also passed legislation recognizing the Holodomor similar to those on the national level. The Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan recognized the Holodomor as genocide in 2008 with the passage of the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor) Memorial Day Act. In 2019, the Saskatchewan legislature lit a memorial candle for the duration of Holodomor Memorial Week to commemorate and remember the victims of the famine genocide. A statue titled "Bitter Memories of Childhood" was installed in the park grounds surrounding the Saskatchewan Legislative Building in 2015 to remember the victims of the Holodomor. After attending the candle lighting ceremony in the legislature, Canadian minister Greg Ottenbreit laid a wreath at the statue."

The following information about Saskatchewan underscores just how nefarious the project is. In 2011, Ottenbreit argued against resource revenue-sharing with First Nations, suggesting that First Nations people who get "handouts" would spend it on drugs and alcohol. The comment drew calls for Ottenbreit's resignation from the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, who called the remarks "very hurtful and very inappropriate."

In October 2020, Ottenbreit shared a Thanksgiving message from Texas Pastor Ed Newton, an American preacher who has shared anti-LGBT views and whose church labels homosexuality as an addiction. Ottenbreit has shared messages from pastor John Hagee as well, another preacher who had referred to the Roman Catholic Church as "the great whore" and claimed that Adolf Hitler was fulfilling God's will, promoted conspiratorial views about Jewish people, and claimed Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights. Ottenbreit said he was interested in Hagee's theory of "Blood Moons," which claims that lunar eclipses coinciding with Jewish holidays would trigger a war in Israel and usher in the return of Jesus Christ.

The fact is that state policy should not be based on false ideological beliefs (FIBs).


This article was published in
Logo
Volume 53 Number 25 - November 2023

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/MS53255.HTM


    

Website:  www.cpcml.ca   Email:  editor@cpcml.ca