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  • World forgets, Canada remembers

    Winnipeg Sun, Canada
    June 1 2008


    World forgets, Canada remembers


    By ERIC MARGOLIS


    Canada's planned recognition of the 1932-1933 genocide, or Holdomor,
    in Ukraine is very significant, even if long overdue. It was also
    apropos for this week's visit of Ukraine's President Viktor
    Yushchenko, who remains that troubled nation's best hope for democracy
    and continued independence.

    Ottawa's decision was motivated as much by ethnic politics as historic
    justice, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government 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 was shocked to receive letters
    from young Ukrainian-Canadians saying they had known nothing about the
    Holdomor until reading about it in my columns. Hopefully, more now
    will know.

    >From 1932-33, Josef Stalin and henchmen, Lazar Kaganovich and
    V.M. 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
    executions of "anti-State elements." Cannibalism became common.

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

    In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet penal system reached its
    zenith: 5.4 million people were prisoners in the gulag or in frigid
    Siberian exile.

    TO THE GULAG

    Some 300,000 more Ukrainians were sent to the gulag under the
    supervision of Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, and 21,259 were killed in
    Soviet "pacification" campaigns.

    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 F.D. 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. 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 alliances with the biggest mass murderer in history,
    Stalin? His crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor of at
    least four times. Particularly so in the United States, where the
    Second World War has become something of a state religion and is
    invoked endlessly to justify foreign military adventures. 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.

    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
    be reminded of his crimes and reign of terror.

    In "les abuses de la memoire," the Bulgarian-born French philosopher
    Tzvetan Todorov wrote, "Life cannot withstand death, but memory is
    gaining in its struggle against nothingness."


    http://winnipegsun.com/Commen t/2008/06/01/5735361-sun.html
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