Posted by Bohdan A. Oryshkevich on March 09, 2001 at 00:50:53:
In Reply to: You said you are leaving, isn't it ? posted by Ukrainec' on March 08, 2001 at 11:23:45:
I do not need to be lectured by some Internet стукач about the Holodomor.
I marched in my first Holodomor march in 1953. In 1983 I commemorated the Holodomor by bicycling across the USA (4.5 thousand miles) in a campaign to prevent hunger in the future. That project has gone on to other things, fundraising for AIDS, and has raised SO FAR over seventy million dollars for AIDS care in America. I was in the original group.
I met Gongadze and tried to help him. You are no Gongadze. He never did anything anonymously. You are probably afraid to go to his website lest some cookie identify and remove your anonymity.
I heard the stories of Holodomor survivors in the seventies. But I will not believe your versions because of your agenda.
The tragedy of the Holodomor is indeed a great one. As I stated in other posts here I personally feel that Ukrainians and their culture suffered more because of the Holodomor than Jews did because of the Holocaust.
One of the reasons that Ukrainians suffered more is because their culture was more oppressed to start with and less able to cope. The Holodomor penetrated the psyche of Ukrainians. The other reason that the suffering was worse because the system continued for another sixty years after the Holodomor and the healing process of sharing or repairing the suffering could not occur. There was no Palestine to go to. The USSR was built first on oppressing the workers and then on fighting a war of transformation upon the peasantry.
In addition the Holodomor was not as widely known. It occurred in a closed society in which everything was controlled and closed to the outside world. The Holocaust occurred at the time of war and western spies knew everything about the Holocaust but the Allies did nothing about it. The ten years difference between 1933 and 1943 was critical in the development in technology. Germany was less remote than other Ukraine and many of the camps were in other countries. Their work was more decentralized but in visible camps. The Holodomor occurred in areas of residence so it was more easily hidden. There were no campuses of destruction. The concentration camps of Germany were still full of rotting corpses for all to see and bear witness. Many camp victims were saved at the point of death.\
In the USSR Stalin purged and killed many of the people who ran the Holodomor making further direct testimony later impossible.
But I think that there is another fundamental difference between the two. The Holodomor was a step in a long and progressive form of torture and forced change coupled with massive destruction of people, enemies of the state, that is peasants with dignity. In a perverse way the Bolsheviks often recruited the starving children into future cadres of the NKVD. The Holocaust was an attempt at quick and rapid destruction. Both were fundamentally cruel and inhumane. But to participate in a grisly comparison is cruel and childish.
Ukrainians were not the architects of the Holocaust far from it. They were very minor players. But my concern is that today many in the Diaspora have rallied behind the few Ukrainian capos and have revised the history of the Waffen SS Galicia Division to make them into some forerunner of the Ukrainian Army. It is hard to imagine how much damage this has done to the reputation of Ukraine and Ukrainians. Eighty percent of Ukrainians fought against the Germans. But many in the West since want to celebrate the German initiated holidays in Ukraine.
The Jews were not the architects of the Holodomor. Any semblance of Jewish life in Ukraine disappeared before the Holodomor. There were no Jewish organizations left. The Bund was more closely associated with the more Democratic Menshiviks. But it largely left the Social Democrats at the time of the Menshivik Bolshevik split. That was in about 1903. Reputable histories of the of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era have no citations on the Bund. The Conquest book, Harvest of Despair, has only one citation under Jewish. That is about Vasily Grossman who wrote about the Holodomor while apparently living in the USSR in 1972. There are numerous citations on his true to life descriptions of the Holodomor.
I recently completed 2000 pages on the Russian Revolution concluding with the early to mid 1920s. The emerging USSR was a spiraling center of violence where all parties, except for the Bolshevik elite was at risk. Who began what is often unclear. Pogroms, slaughters, betrayals, famines, and chaos in a backward country.
Certainly, total truth about the Holodomor is highly desirable. It is one of the highest cultural priorities in Ukraine more than any monument to independence.. But using the Holodomor as a basis for extending one’s hate towards other ethnic groups is despicable. Ukrainian Canadians have extended this alienation onto the Canadian government and in the US onto the US Government. Ukraine could hate all its neighbors given its history of conquest by others. But it cannot move to another neighborhood. That is difficult to do. There are dilemmas in this.
Certainly, Ukrainians if they were able to discover even a low-level enforcer of the Holodomor in Canada would hound him and seek to expel him. So Jews pursue other collaborators.
If Ukrainians are to publicize the truth about Ukraine and its tragedies, they should become journalists and scholars, historians, and media producers. Jews have educated themselves are in positions of power and influence. If Ukrainians are to make their version of history known they will have to cultivate and mentor their best and their brightest. But no such effort exists in the Diaspora. Students in Ukraine are doing everything to survive.
Anonymous postings by Internet стукачі will not contribute to this knowledge.
Bohdan Oryshkevich
usa.usa@attglobal.net