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Remembering Modern History's Greatest Crime

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  • Remembering Modern History's Greatest Crime

    REMEMBERING MODERN HISTORY'S GREATEST CRIME

    Foreign Correspondent
    June 2 2008
    Canada

    Toronto - Canada will soon make an important contribution to the cause
    of historical accuracy, human rights, and justice. To coincide with
    last week's visit to Ottawa of Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko,
    the Canadian government announced it planned to recognize the mostly
    forgotten 1932-1933 genocide in Ukraine.

    Ottawa's decision was motivated as much by ethnic politics as historic
    justice: there are 1.1 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent. But
    Ottawa still deserves kudos for doing the right thing.

    For eight decades, the greatest mass murder in modern history has been
    shamefully covered up or ignored. I have been repeatedly shocked to
    receive letters from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent
    saying they had known nothing about the 1930's genocide, or `Holdomor,'
    until reading about it in my columns. Hopefully, more will now know.

    >From 1932-33, Stalin and henchmen, Lazar Kaganovitch and Vyacheslav
    Molotov, conducted a merciless campaign to crush resistance by
    Ukrainian farmers to communism and collectivization. They isolated
    Ukraine, then cut off all food supplies and seeds. Six to nine million
    Ukrainians died from the ensuing man-made famine and mass shootings of
    `anti-State elements' by secret police execution squads. Cannibalism
    became common.

    Large numbers of Ukrainians were also murdered during the Great Terror
    of 1936-38 in which an estimated 2 million Soviet citizens were shot
    and the same number died in Stalin's concentration camps.

    In the late 1940's and early 1950's, the Soviet penal system reached
    its zenith: 5.4 million people were prisoners in the gulag. Some
    300,000 more Ukrainians were sent to concentration camps under
    the supervision of Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, and 21,259 were
    killed in Soviet `pacification' campaigns and against independence
    fighters. Other Ukrainian nationalist leaders were assassinated in
    Western Europe by special Soviet hit teams.

    During the same period, Moscow unleashed terror on the tiny Baltic
    states. From March to May, 1949, 95,000 Lithuanians, 27,000 of
    them children, were sent to concentration camps. In total, 120,000
    Lithuanians, 50,000 Latvians and 30,000 Estonians went to the gulag
    where the death rate was 51% per annum.

    While the Western world rightly commemorates genocide inflicted on
    Armenians, Europe's Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans, and Bosnians, it
    shamefully shut its eyes to the Ukrainian Holdomor because it was
    conducted by a key wartime ally whom President Franklin Roosevelt
    hailed as `Uncle Joe.'

    Nor has the West ever acknowledged genocide against other peoples of
    the Soviet Union. In the Caucasus, Stalin sent most of the Chechen
    and Ingush peoples to the gulag, where 500,000 died. Yet when the
    children of the survivors fought for independence from Russia, the
    West branded them `Islamic terrorists.'

    Up to three million Muslims of the Soviet Union died at Stalin's hands,
    including 1.5 million Kazakhs and Crimean Tatars. Yet no holocaust
    memorials exist for them.

    Nearly 100,000 Moldovans were murdered in a purge conducted by then
    Commissar Leonid Brezhnev, who would later lead the Soviet Union and
    be feted by Western leaders. Add to this butcher's bill Volga Germans,
    Greeks, Cossacks, Armenians and Poles.

    If we keep demanding that Germany and Japan atone for their wartime
    crimes, is it not time for our governments to finally recognize and
    atone their alliance with the biggest mass murderer in history, Josef
    Stalin, a man whose crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor
    of at least three or four times? Particularly so in the United States,
    where World War II has become something of a state religion and is
    endlessly invoked by conservatives and neocons to justify foreign
    military adventures.

    Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill cared to admit they had allied
    themselves with a greater criminal than Hitler to wage their `Crusade
    for Freedom,' nor that the price of this compact with the devil was
    giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets. In the end, the Allies destroyed
    a lesser threat, Germany, and in doing so, created a greater one,
    the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.

    Roosevelt's and Churchill's alliance with Stalin, whom they knew
    to be a mass murderer and tyrant, in my view denies the Allies any
    claim to have been waging a `just' or `good war.' When the lingering
    clouds of wartime propaganda finally dissipate, future historians will
    likely look back on the western Allies as not much morally superior
    to Germany or the USSR, though certainly less murderous.

    Communists and leftists everywhere joined in covering up Stalin's
    crimes. For example, to the end of his life, Jean Paul Sartre
    kept insisting Stalin's gulag was a fiction created by western
    propaganda. The official Communist Party line was that the deaths
    of millions of Ukrainians was simply an unfortunate natural disaster
    that also affected other parts of the USSR.

    In North America, intense attention to the Jewish Holocaust tended
    to push all other national historic tragedies into the background or
    completely eclipse them. The fact that during the 1930's, many senior
    officers of Stalin's Cheka, or secret police, were Jewish, including
    Kaganovitch, led to ferocious reprisals against Ukraine's Jews in the
    following decade. As a result, Ukrainians were permanently branded
    `anti-Semites;' their suffering received scant sympathy.

    Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky demanded a Nuremburg trial for all
    the Soviet crimes, but unfortunately this will never happen. Most
    of the criminals are dead. The Soviet Eichmann, Lazar Kaganovitch,
    died peacefully in Moscow in 1991; Molotov died in 1986. In fact, not
    a single Soviet official was ever indicted for the crime committed
    by the state from the 1920's to 1953, though many Cheskisti were
    liquidated during Stalin's purges.

    Canada's recognition of this historic crime is important for
    two reasons. First, Canada is one of the world's most respected
    nations. Its acknowledgement of the Holdomor will be heard around
    the globe. Second, nostalgia for Stalin is on the rise in today's
    Russia. His memory and politics are being rehabilitated. Russians
    must to be reminded of his crimes and reign of terror.

    In `les abuses de la mémoire,' the Bulgarian-born French philosopher
    Tzvetan Todorov, who studied the Jewish Holocaust, wrote: `Life
    cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against
    nothingness.'

    --Boundary_(ID_TsbKPUOSFNKg 4zu/wlR0vA)--
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