Huddersfield exhibition on the horrors of the Ukrainian genocide [Article]

From the Huddlesfield Examiner:

A talk and exhibition about the Holodomor of 1932 and 1933 was brought to the town this week.

It was a tragedy which claimed the lives of millions of people; some estimates put the death toll as high as 14m.

“The famine in Ukraine was brought on to decrease the number of Ukrainians and replace the dead with people from other parts of the USSR and kill the slightest thought of any Ukrainian independence.”

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The Holodomor has not yet been recognized in the UK federally, despite passing resolution in Keighley and Rochdale Borough last year.

[Huddlesfield Examiner]

Ukrainian news round-up – Dec 3 2009

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Man who coined the term: Destruction of the Ukrainian nation as the classic example of Soviet genocide

From the Montreal Gazette:

Dr. Raphael Lemkin’s name and words are better known. He fathered the term “genocide” by combining the root words – geno (Greek for family or race) and – cidium (Latin for killing) then doggedly lobbied the UN’s member states until they adopted a Convention on Genocide in December, 1948, his crowning achievement.

Likewise overlooked were Lemkin’s views on communist crimes against humanity. In a 1953 lecture in New York City, for example, he described the “destruction of the Ukrainian nation” as the “classic example of Soviet genocide,” adding insightfully: “The Ukrainian is not and never has been a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion, are all different … to eliminate (Ukrainian) nationalism … the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed … a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order … if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priest, and the peasant can be eliminated then Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation … This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”

Yet Ukraine’s declaration that the Great Famine of 1932-1933 (known as the Holodomor) was genocide has secured very little official recognition from other states, Canada one of those few. Most have succumbed to an ongoing Holodomor-denial campaign orchestrated by the Russian Federation’s barkers who insist famine occurred throughout the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, did not target Ukrainians and so can’t be called genocide. They ignore key evidence – the fact that all foodstuffs were confiscated from Soviet Ukraine even as its borders were blockaded, preventing relief supplies from getting in, or anyone from getting out. And how the Kremlin’s men denied the existence of catastrophic famine conditions as Ukrainian grain was exported to the West. Millions could have been saved but were instead allowed to starve. Most victims were Ukrainians who perished on Ukrainian lands. There’s no denying that.

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Written by Lubomyr Luciuk

[Montreal Gazette]

Russian Textbooks Attempt To Rewrite History [Article]

While last week we brought you National Holodomor Awareness week, disturbing news of history repeating comes out of Russia, courtesy the Times Online:

In Russian schools, something even more troubling appears to be happening. They call it “positive history” and the man behind it is Putin. In 2007, the former secret police chief told a conference of Russian educationists that the country needed a more patriotic history. Putin condemned teachers for having “porridge in their heads”, attacked some history textbook authors for taking foreign money — “naturally they are dancing the polka ordered by those who pay them” — and announced that new history textbooks were on their way. Within weeks, a new law was passed giving the state powers to approve and to disallow history textbooks for schools.

What does Igor Dolutsky, the author of a history textbook that has been dropped by the Kremlin, make of “positive history”? “It’s an appalling idea which hinders proper teaching in schools. School history should not create patriots, it should teach children to think. Putin’s task is to rule a state edging towards totalitarianism.”

Aleksandr Filippov is the Positive History Man. He has a long, mournful face and the air of a defrocked Orthodox priest. His voice is sorrowful but the message is upbeat: “It is wrong to write a textbook that will fill the children who learn from it with horror and disgust about their past and their people. A generally positive tone for the teaching of history will build optimism and self-assurance in the growing young generation and make them feel as if they are part of their country’s bright future. A history in which there is good and bad, things to be proud of and things that are regrettable. But the general tone for a school textbook should still be positive.”

It is when you analyse the Kremlinapproved “positive history” book in detail that the clock chimes 13. In March 1933 a fearless reporter and fluent Russian speaker, Gareth Jones, evaded the Moscow censors and went to the Soviet Ukraine and southern Russia, from where he reported that “millions are dying in the villages”. The “Great Famine” deaths were caused by Stalin’s forced collectivisation, grain seizures and mass deportations of peasant farmers. Malcolm Muggeridge declared it a man-made famine and Arthur Koestler wrote of seeing “horrible infants with enormous, wobbling heads, stick-like limbs, swollen, pointed bellies . . .”

Back in Moscow, the Great Famine was denied by Stalin’s stooge on The New York Times, Walter Duranty. Two years later, Jones was shot dead in China, some say by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.

One estimate is that four million died in Ukraine and southern Russia during the Great Famine, another puts the figure at ten million. No one counted. The unnecessary deaths of millions were airbrushed from history. So how does the 2009 “positive history” textbook cover this? It dedicates 83 pages to Stalin’s industrialisation — and one paragraph to the famine. The scales are loaded one way, to the benefit of Stalin’s reputation.

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It’s a very worth-reading article and goes on with other horrific examples – lies about the Soviets not starting World War 2 with the Nazis, minimalizing the Great Terror and more.

[The Times Online]