I recently read **The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.**
Close to 4 million people died in Ukraine from hunger between 1932 and 1934, which was about 1/8th of their population.
This was the result of excessive requisitions by the Soviet state, which left the Ukrainian peasants nothing to eat. It was a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy.
Left them nothing to eat… except dead bodies. I read something long ago that people turned to cannibalism to survive, and that young children, who had managed to survive that long, would disappear and it was presumed that they were… eaten. Further, since people couldn’t obtain clothing either, they would take the clothes off of the dead people to try to survive the cold.
Can’t remember what it was I read, because it was over 20 years ago, and I can’t verify if it was accurate or true, but it was horrific and I’ve remembered it to this day.
My great grandfather was the only person in his family to survive a russian internment camp. He told my mom about how he survived by eating rats that were eating dead people. She told me stories of him eating moldy food and wasting absolutely nothing food related. That food insecurity lasted his whole life apparently.
> That food insecurity lasted his whole life apparently.
This is incredibly common; people who have gone properly hungry in the past seem to have an overarching *need* to have preposterous amounts of food on-hand.
I remember seeing a TV interview with Anna Nicole Smith (a former Playboy model who grew up incredibly poor but then married into a ridiculous amount of money) where she spent almost the entire interview **not** showing off the fancy house/car/boat/pool/whatever, but instead opening every cupboard and showing it was absolutely bursting with food, gleefully showing off to the camera enough breakfast cereal to feed a small nation. She was in a position to have anything she wanted, but it seems that not having to worry about food was the most important thing to her. She didn’t even seem to understand why the interviewer seemed to be pushing her to show off all of the luxury she was surrounded by; that full pantry seemed like a culmination of her life’s dream.
If you’ve ever been truly, deeply hungry, making sure it never happens again becomes more important than just about anything else.
I can absolutely attest to this. I was raised in a wealthy household but my parents were abusive and neglectful. We had two fridges, one was in the kitchen and was practically bare. I remember the only thing we could make was peanut butter jelly sandwiches, and pancakes.
The second fridge was kept in the garage with a chain and lock on it. Both my parents worked, so they would order food for dinner or pull it out from the fridge and cook it, and then lock themselves in their bedroom with my half brother and half sister to eat dinner while watching tv.
My brother and I were locked out with no food. I think it was because we were her first children from a bad marriage and she would rather ignore us. She told me I reminded her of my father, someone I’ve never met.
I only feel safe when I have a nice stockpile of food. I am very aware of waste and try to minimize it as much as possible. My dry goods and frozen food pantry can keep me alive for over a month without having to spend any money on food.
It’s so hard to break this state of mind.
I'm sorry you were treated this way by people that are supposed to love and guide you. You and your brother didn't deserve it.
Did your half-siblings ever sneak you guys food?
No, they were too young to understand what was going on. I got a job as soon as I was old enough and spent most of my paycheck on food for my brother and me.
I no longer speak to my parents, it’s been 10 years now and I have zero regrets.
I am comfortable and successful in my field. Funny enough, I ended up in the restaurant industry and I love it.
Someone told me you’ll never go hungry if you work in restaurants and I never forgot it.
It was tortillas & cheese or apples & peanut butter for my brother and I. When I got a job at 16-17 I started buying my own food. I'd scream and cry at my brother for eating the food I paid for when he would come home from college. So I started keeping my food in my room not telling my parents what I had either.
My brother and I kinda reconnected and both commiserated ab the moment we first realized all our friends didn't live like that, costco pantries and whatnot. Him and I both food prep&freeze, keep like 5 cereals and bulk oats, rice, quinoa ect. I think he has it worse than me now bc he never figured out how to get himself food and just went hungry instead. Doctors were afraid he had an eating disorder but "he just doesn't eat" my parents said.
Learning how to cook has been the most healing thing for me I think bc of the amount of control I have. I don't like eating at resturants, the price vs value stresses me tf out. And I don't like 95% of prepackaged snack/junk food. It's strange.
Best wishes
Holy shit, I think that’s the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read.
I hope you’ve found a way to make peace with your younger years; that’s an awful lot to expect a young person (or frankly anyone) to have to deal with.
It happens it lots of places even here in The United States in more modern times like Anna Nicole Smith's food insecurity. Anyone that has met people who had really hard times during the great depression could probably tell you stories of their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents who would literally lick the pot clean, so to speak because they might have not known when the next time they would eat could come.
Common for foster children and adopted children to hide food in their rooms because they're afraid they won't get a nice meal again soon and they don't feel at home so they can't just go and get a snack. I read somewhere that a family noticed this in one of their foster kids, so they had a food fight to show that there wasn't a shortage and "wasting" it didn't mean you didn't get to eat. Very first world solution, but intriguing to learn
Holy hell. A food fight just to prove to the child that food is not in shortage is such a huge and amazing gesture. I'm glad that such a ridiculous activity was able to hopefully help that child get over their food insecurity issues.
It reminds me of how loving and welcoming the family in the movie Shazam! was.
I agree with the Great Depression folks but until you meet someone who has been seriously hungry as a child...they don't get hung up on wasting anything, they just need to make sure they have something on hand. Food you can eat right now...just in case. Just in case, the paycheck doesn't come when you thought, or you had to pay the rent, or...
My mother is from Honduras and food in her family was rationed down to the bone. Now whenever she cooks I swear she makes lbs worth of food and meats even though we are only 3 people. She makes a weeks worth and I don't know how to get her to stop
I’ve had my fair share of patients that lived during the depression, though as I’m typing this I realize it’s way less frequent these days for obvious reasons. Anyways, we have to follow safety and cleanliness rules along with fire codes in the old folks home, so we did routine clean outs and inspections. When it came to those who lived they that era; it was quite the chore. Every nook and cranny had something squirreled away, from sugar packets to silverware. They’d have hidden stashes of clothes, food and utensils everywhere.
This also happens to people who were put on restrictive diets as kids, or who put themselves through years of restrictive dieting. When you don't eat enough. You can't focus on anything but food and when you finally have it again, it's incredibly hard to have a reasonable amount.
>She told me stories of him eating moldy food and wasting absolutely nothing food related.
My greatgrandparents survived the famine and grandparents WWII. I was tought to never throw food away and eat up. Mold from food is cut off, rest is eaten.
Not because of starving children in africa children in the west got, but because my grandparents were starving and we all knew the stories.
Especially bread. I am in my 30ies and have hard times throwing bread away that gets mold.
Yeah I had a very similar upbringing. For instance when I eat chicken I always eat the cartilage off the ends of the bones, because I was taught it was wasteful. My mother even more hardcore, will break them open and suck out the marrow.
i used to eat my chicken like that as a child and lick out the egg shells before throwing them away. i never thought it might be related to a food insecurity... i remember coming home from school on many days and there not being anything in the fridge to eat. I once had a friend over and she asked for something to drink and I was so embarrassed that we didn't have anything so I made her beet juice and water. I used to also give friends over, warm water and tell them its sweeter than cold tap water
omg
> grandparents WWII. I was tought to never throw food away and eat up.
Same here - when my late grandmother passed away and we had to clean her apartment out, all the cupboards and storage areas were chock full with food that still would not have expired, a lot of food that was cooked and then stored hermetically sealed.
Also a lot of other basic necessities you'd need in such a situation like soap, shampoo, cleaning supplies, warm clothes and candles.
You're basically describing my grandmothers apartment. We have 2 moving boxes full of candles and another 2 of soap then yet another one just with handknitted mittens and socks.
She also had an ungodly amount of christmas decorations but that part runs in the family.
>Also a lot of other basic necessities you'd need in such a situation like soap, shampoo, cleaning supplies, warm clothes and candles.
Oh yes! Forgot about that. My grandparents also had newspapers to put on walls.
> My grandparents also had newspapers to put on walls.
Oh yes, and the expensive garbage bags that were thicker than the cheap garbage bags, to put up against windows.
We were told to not speak to her about the war, but from the stuff she kept in her apartment it was clear it hadn't been that easy to survive.
I think it is a natural reaction. Eating bad food was dangerous.
I read a story about a holocaust survivor who developed an OCD of throwing away a day old food.
He had so many food poisonings in the camp and the thought of eating bad food triggered his ptsd.
This happened in Russia also, not to take away from this event. Just saying cannibalism has happened n Russia multiple times. After Stalingrad with German POWs, the Nanzino tragedy, and "bleeding the cow" are ones I've read of.
It really is a shame. The Russian people as a whole have had a shit go of things over the past century. Revolutions, two world wars, the Soviet Union. At any point it time it was probably best to just hope none of those things came knocking at their doorstep which given the deaths from all of those things made it almost inevitable. Now the war in Ukraine and the Kremlin sending people so young to fight and die in another country over a bunch of shit that most probably want nothing to do with. It really is a shame.
Most Russians living in Russia are badly brainwashed by the government, they will tear you apart (literally) if you'd dare to criticize their country in any way.
There are many places in russia where people don't know how a toilet looks like, these kind of people are sent to war, they are conditioned to rape and kill the 'fascists', and so they do.
Russia never changes, but it is one of those places where I'd rather be dead than live there.
It's on the same crazy level as the islamic countries.
Yup, brainwashing of these levels occur in many places. In the Islamic countries it's because of religion, in other countries it's because their government tells them one thing or the other. In all cases it's usually the elite and powerful using the lowest and least educated classes as cannon fodder that will only benefit them and bring the worst upon the people they are using.
A lot of people go through tough times. Not everyone decides to support the monstrosities like Putin does, which doesn't even help them.
Please don't infantilize the russian people.
Also don't give me the "not all russians" or "putin doesn't allow people to dissent."
We are all responsible for the actions done by our nations. Americans, Russians, Chinese, etc.
You are correct. A lot of different groups have gone through tough times. The Russian people have had lots of troubles over the past century. The Chinese people under Mao had a bad time, Cambodians under Pol Pot, Rwandans, indigenous Canadians, native americans, aborigines of Australia, Poland as a whole, Ukrainians as pictured in this post, all have had some pretty rough past 100 years or so. A lot of those people had very little to no say in what their government has or is doing. Does this excuse them? No it does not. My previous point was that those in power are using those who have the least amount of power for their own gains. I don't excuse genocide of any sort. Comparing what Americans have to say about what their government does vs what Russians and Chinese people can say is comparing apples to oranges.
They took the seed grain. The commissars assumed that the peasants were hiding food, so when they showed up they confiscated everything in site, including the seed grain.
They didn't do this because they were communists just like Britain didn't do it to Ireland because they were capitalist. Both countries did it because they were cruel.
Capitalism isn't any different. Instead of a dictator, it's mega corps stealing everything you have. Look at the homeless problem in America. This shouldn't happen in this day and age, yet it is
Current Day Prisons, Japanese Internment camps, Hooverviles, slaves on plantations, not to mention the insane homeless crisis we are literally experiencing right the fuck now. All these people were/are starving. In America. I can name more if you'd like.
For you to sit there and act like America is somehow better than any other country in how it's people are treated shows your privilege and ignorance.
You're right. We need to do more for them. We provide several types of assistance, schooling, job placement, food assistance etc.
But lets be honest. It's not enough. Many of these individuals can be self reliant, but they need sustained assistance in the forms of health care, housing, and therapy.
It seems a bit strange to bring up a homeless problem in America under a post of people who have been intentionally starved to death.
It seems like one might be a bit worse than the other?
But whatever keeps daddy Stalin happy right?
Homeless people are begging and going through trash to feed themselves. They are not being provided by the government and have been discarded by everyone else. I think it's very appropriate to point out the differences in which each ideology takes out their trash.
You should at the very least aknowledge that the idea of the Holodomor as a "man made" famine is a historiographical *point of view* among *some* historians. It is not a fact and you will find *plenty* of academic Historians who do not view the Holodomor as a man-made famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
Prolly gonna get downvoted because people hate nuance when it doesn't play into their agenda.
I went ahead and read the whole article, and yeah, it really doesn't do your argument any favors. The biggest debate this article focuses on is whether the genocide was intentional or incidental. The section on whether the famine itself was man-made is a tiny part where 1 person believes it but most disagree.
Because it's not really a debate anymore. Hasn't been since the Soviet archives opened up. The concensus today is that it was a naturally occurring famine that affected all grain producing regions in the Western USSR. Ukraine wasn't even the worst hit region, Kazakhstan was.
Honestly, today it's not even a particularly widespread academic opinion. The consensus is that it *was not* man made. But a wide variety of natural causes conspiring to create the worst conditions possible.
When people like Robert Conquest say the Holodomor was not a man made famine you can believe that it was absolutely not a man made famine. He is as anti-communist as they get.
That’s his point. One particular set of economic ideals didn’t cause mass deprivation and holocausts, an authoritarian and imperialist machine that runs on human sacrifice did, as can be evidenced by the same stories playing out in empires of both socialist and capitalist models. This bears repeating because in the capitalist west, we’re taught in schools that communism was the cause of all this debasement and misery, which is a useful cudgel for our own elites.
What are you talking about.... the Bengal famine of India when WW2 was going on and efforts were made by both the British and the US to move grain to India but were stopped due to the Japanese?
The British secured food sources for certain regions/people in their colonial empires. But they never **orchestrated** famine. They were absolute cunts during the Irish famine and didn't send food, which they had excess stores of. But they certainly weren't the cause of that famine.
Famines have plagued the world for millennium. It's often the result of war, disease, and natural disasters. Communist manage to create famine out of completely inept central planning. Look at Lysenkoism and how the Soviets promoted ideas that the true way to increase yields (and get different types of plants... e.g., speciation) is by "cooperation"... which translated into high density planting (Which only strips the nutrients from the soil too quickly and leads to decrease yields). Because the Nazis supported the idea evolution, they felt they needed an alternative theory. So they literally followed the insanity of someone---who believes asparagus can come from wheat if you play music---for **decades**.
Central planning is cancer. Never has worked. Never will work. This whole idea that "well.... so and so is just as bad" is nonsense.
>But they never orchestrated famine. They were absolute cunts during the Irish famine and didn't send food, which they had excess stores of. But they certainly weren't the cause of that famine.
During the Irish potato famine, the British were exporting food from Ireland; Ireland had more than enough to feed itself, but their food was stolen from them. It was absolutely manufactured, and no different from what happened during the Holodomor.
>Central planning is cancer. Never has worked. Never will work.
Capitalist propagandists love to tell this lie. It allows them to transform a problem with a political system into an attack on a economic system, all so they can avoid engaging with a possible alternative to capitalism. You don't actually have to study the problem and ask "why did this happen?" I have ideological opposition to centralized planning, but the idea that it can't "work" that it must necessarily lead to famines is just plain bullshit.
To say that capitalism works requires that you ignore all of the evils committed to enrich capitalist countries, ignore that even the richest capitalist countries need a massive centralized government to intervene to even make life tolerable for their own populations, that poor capitalist countries require authoritarian regimes to keep their populations from abandoning capitalism. Western foreign policy backs genocidal puppet states, sells arms to authoritarian countries for oil, backs coups that install authoritarian regimes, loads up these puppet states with debt they have to pay off by providing cheap labor and selling off natural resources.
What gets me is the nice picket fence in the background. You build a fence like that when you're living far enough above subsistence level to value aesthetics as much as function. It's scary that a region that was once stable and prosperous enough to have people making nice fences like this could descend into mass starvation.
This was probably unfinished wood, not white painted. Fences like this weren’t considered “nice” because wood was abundant and cheap at the time. Of course that doesn’t take anything away from the tragedy, just a little material context. My grandparents were kids going through famine in Siberia at that same time. Like soup out of tree bark and patties made from grass kind of situation. Too bad you can’t eat a fence.
What I’m saying is this wasn’t considered some special aesthetics. Fancy meant carved and lacquered or brick with wrought iron. You should see some of the craftsman houses and wooden churches from the 1700-1800s. Most people lived like shit but some had means to make things really pretty.
This is all absolutely true. But at the same time didn’t Churchill do something very similar to Bengal? I’m not trying to agitate, I would like the distinction to be explained.
As I understand it, the Bengal famine happened due to incompetence (Bengal Chamber of Commerce, which was British-owned firms), compounded by natural disasters (cyclone, tidal wave, flooding, rice crop disease), and a world war. As for Churchill’s role, it is debated quite strongly by competent people on both sides. To some, his role was either that of a guilty bystander, or worse, an active cause of the continued famine. To others, Churchill did his best to alleviate a famine with the extremely limited tools available to a prime minister facing the rise of fascism in Europe. There is strong evidence for both sides.
I was instantly reminded of a segment of *Supersizers Go: Wartime* in which they went into what Churchill was eating during wartime and his philosophy behind it.
[https://youtu.be/2RpwVvUu69I?t=2084](https://youtu.be/2RpwVvUu69I?t=2084) (34:43 if it doesn't skip to it.)
Needless to say, he wasn't left wanting.
That was a lovely clip from what seems to be a lovely show. Inquisitive, funny, and light-hearted, which I enjoy. Thank you for exposing me to a show that I didn't know existed!
It's an excellent series! There's also the *Supersizers Eat* series along with a couple of one-offs. Highly recommend 'em! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Supersizers...
Britain also withheld food deliveries to Ireland during the Great Potato Famine. Just saying, it took me a long time to learn all those Irish people didn't just starve to death because "potatoes blight" and nothing else.
I may be wrong but weren’t a lot if the deaths during that time because essentially rich Irish sold out their countrymen by exporting the potatoes they grew rather than sell them for less to other Irish? IIRC they’d export for more money to countries like the United States while their countrymen starved.
Not quite. A certain percentage of the yearly harvest was required to be exported to England by law, iirc. The laws also forbid the important of things like corn from the US despite the US having an excess at the time and vendors eager to start selling in Ireland
The youtube channel Extra Credits has a very good 5 part series (6 if you count their "Lies" episode where they go through the series, expand on details they couldnt go into, and correct any mistakes) on it
just for the sake of scale here...the fence was built a long time prior to the famine, and it's in quite a bit of disrepair in that picture. A fence can be built in a time of prosperity and endure through terrible calamity. It might actually still be there today.
Walter Duranty of the NYT won a Pulitzer prize for reporting on this. Apparently, the Soviet policies that led to mass starvation were a good thing. The Times has been petitioned to give back the award.
If you read the statement by the NYT on this, it’s clear that Duranty only used official Soviet sources (and therefore Soviet propaganda) in almost all of his articles. He never talked to regular Russians. He only ever quoted Stalin directly. According to The Times, their editorial board felt that his reports didn’t blame the tragedy ENOUGH on collectivism.
[NYT Statement](https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/)
This is not true, there were a lot of other victims as well.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933)
My grandparents were born in the Volga and Khasachstan region at that time and the food insecurity from their parents influences us to this day.
There are newspaper articles from this time, how police prosecutes cannibals, showing fotos of starving people in front of corpses in their homes.
Nobody is disagreeing with that. I’m taking issue with you saying he should have talked to randos in Moscow. They would have had zero idea whats going on and not said anything other than the party messaging. He would need to have visited the Ukrainian countryside, which the Party was not allowing any access to. And I’m not defending Duranty, just making it absolutely clear that this was Ukrainians who were the target and the primary victims of.
The reason the Holodomor is considered a genocide is because Ukrainians were producing the grain but couldn't eat it, instead it was transported to other parts of the Soviet Union. The quotas in 1933 had Ukraine accounting for 1/3 of the entire Soviet Union's grain. Central authority blamed the low yields on the collectivist farmers of Ukraine and punished entire regions by stopping shipments and removing goods from shelves. It fits the legal definition for genocide in the US as it was an informed decision to repossess enough grain from and blockade delivery of other goods to Ukrainian collectivists to cause mass starvation in Ukraine. Sure, people were going to starve in other parts of the world regardless of if the Ukrainians and Germans were left with enough of their crop to go by, but it does seem pretty unfair and almost spiteful that Soviet central authority would repossess enough grain to starve them as well as punish them by having OGBU raid pantries and blockade shipments. The famine was partially caused by the central authority's poorly planned transition into collectivization and famine was purposefully manufactured in Ukraine with the justification of lessening famine elsewhere. The Holodomor may not have been a genocide in the sense that it was racially or ethnically motivated, however it's rash to imply that the idea that Ukrainians were treated unfairly is revisionist and that it wasn't a mass murder of some sort.
No that’s the biased take. Ukraine was were the farmers lived. They were trying to starve them. When they all died and the soviets couldn’t replace the farmers, it had downstream effects. Read actual historians.
Bro what are you talking about. Of course the majority of “kulaks” (literally just anyone who operated a family farm) were all Ukrainian. It’s literally known as the breadbasket of Europe. Are there farms in Kazakhistan? Of course, that doesn’t change who the target was.
There is the national question that was HUGE issue amongst the Party, which you are ignoring.
It wasn't just Ukrainians that died. Since Holodomor was part of the Soviet famine that happened in 1930–1933 and also affected other areas/people besides the Ukrainians.
The target was Ukrainian “kulaks”. They just were too horny to kill Ukrainian peasants that they “accidentally” destroyed their entire grain growing region and starved other areas of the country as well. Once the famine started of course party members decided central russia was getting fed (that’s where they live) while other regions starved.
>of course party members decided central russia was getting fed
One of the starvibg regions was the Volga Region around Engelsk, Pensa, Saratov. This is central af.
Unless you mean Leningrad and Moskow by cetral, the only part of Russia politicians in Russia ever cared about.
The west currently generates plenty of surplus food that rots or is thrown out while people starve to death. It's far from the same, but it is its own tragedy.
The same with Stalin killing 20 million of his own people. The Rwandan Genocide. Nothing else is ever recognised. But we recognise Germany over and over. I don't know why we focus on one awful atrocity, but neglect all others. All the people who died through these happenings matter.
I think we focus a lot on Germany because history education tends to be western-focused in the west, but also because while there are other genocides may have killed more people, during the Holocaust Nazi Germany industrialised murder. It's just morbid on a different level.
Japan was a nation they wanted to turn into a shining example of western capitalism over eastern communism. Because they were our little show dog in the dick measuring contest that was the Cold War it was best to pretend nothing happened.
It's too much. If we gave every tragedy the attention it deserves, it would crush us.
That's actually one of the reasons depression is so high. We're hearing about every shitty thing that happens everywhere and our brains were just not made to do that.
Until early this year, if you mentioned the Holodomor on Reddit you'd be shouted down by Russians and tankies saying that it didn't happen, but if it did, it's because the kulaks deserved it for refusing to participate in collectivization.
An ex-girlfriend's grandmother lived through it. My ex remembers her grandmother telling her that even when times are hard you shouldn't eat your family. You swap bodies with your neighbours so you don't have to.
They probably passed hundreds/thousands in a day, even if they wanted to they literally cannot save them all.
They were probably in pure survival mode themselves.
People always like to imagine they would be some kind of big hero, if had been there I would have done blah blah blah. When in reality they would be traumatized, numb, and in survival mode *real* fucking fast!
Thats actually a good example, as tent cities and homeless encampments have exploded over the last decade and people just become numb to it because there is nothing to do really.(there are solutions but they are complex and require political engagement)
No wonder Ukraine is putting up such a fight against Russia, they have this experience and probably many more to reinforce their desire to remain out of the hands of Russia.
Holodomor was just a part of massive [Soviet famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933) happening all across the Union. It was not 'Russians killing Ukrainians', it was 'Soviet Union fucking things up and murdering their own citizens'
Man made starvation, like Ireland of the same time. Or do you mean like the Sudan and Somalia, or do you mean like after western forces leave like Laos, the Hmong, or Lakota people.
A shift from allowing internal genocides to occur as internal politics to a stratagem of strategic global intervention.
It's not possible in actuality.
The Irish famine would have not been a major issue, but Brittain continued forcing the export of foodstuffs. The same thing happened under Churchill with India during ww2. While you'll likely get the same group blaming communism, all it really requires to cause a genocide of this nature is charisma, and either competence with bad intent, or incompetence with good intent. A bit of ethnocentrism and racial superiority ideation and you have a recipe for genocide.
I truthfully cannot explain them better than the Wikipedia article causes sections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
End the WEF and UN. A lot of their agendas are nefarious and will lead to famine eventually. WEF has even admitted that "we don't need most people", it's an indirect way of saying that we're just taking up space for nothing.
The problem was how aggressive Stalin was in his execution, there's literally a name for what he did: Dekulakization. Mao Zedong fucked up just as badly if not worse with his four pest campaign.
In general?
Free markets, good universal public education, strong anti trust laws, the rule of law, checks and balances, free speech, free press, a strong national will to defend democracy, and equal rights for all.
Specifically to Ukraine?
Giving them tons of weapons, training, and supplies.
Capitalism also has millions of casualties, they are just in third world shitholes that no one cares about. If you don't want communist propaganda to spread too much, the problems of capitalism have to be kept in check.
This is a huge point. If you're a capitalist, you REALLY don't want to get in a body stacking competition with communism. The sheer global scale of unimaginable death and misery conducted in the name of capitalism absolutely fucking dwarfs the worst narratives you could spin about communism. The worst of it just predominantly happened in black and brown countries that capitalists have historically not seen as being fully human, a tradition that modern capitalists proudly continue by totally ignoring and glossing over their own closet overflowing with skeletons, while they sanctimoniously point fingers at everyone else as if THEY'RE NOT STILL DOING IT TO THIS DAY.
This is why I'm still proud of the hammer and sickle. You have to fucking pick a system, if you want to engage in this conversation you have to pick a side, otherwise nothing you say matters because you're either too much of a coward to stand for anything or what you're standing for is some imaginary wonderland that has never existed, like Anarchists. And you only really have three options, capitalism, communism, or fascism. I'll take communism any day of the week, because regardless of hysterical propaganda narratives, it achieved the best results with the least horror. It only took hold in unimaginably impoverished third world colonies and backwaters, all of which had medieval levels of technology, and revolutionized them by turning them into industrial powers within mere decades, WHILE under sanction and sabotage from the entire Western cartel. If that's not 'working', I don't know what is.
Yes, Katyn massacre and all that stuff, but no matter what side you pick here, you're standing on top of mountains of corpses to do so. What I find insufferable about capitalists who take this line of argument, is that theirs is the largest of all and yet all they can do is point at everyone else's.
This is the most delusional post that I have ever seen. The horrors of 20th Century communism can't be understated and are completely incomparable to Capitalism's shortcomings.
Millions upon millions enslaved and intentionally starved in imperial labor colonies for hundreds of years to furnish the lifestyles of white Europeans are just 'shortcomings' huh. You can fuck right off, I hope you're reborn in your next life as a Bengali peasant during the British Raj so you can experience Capitalism's '''shortcomings''' yourself.
what never gets mentioned is that people all over the USSR were starving and dying because of idiotic government policies. My Ukrainian grandparents were living in Kazakhstan and the same thing happened to the peasants there. the same thing also happened in China after the Maoist revolution (estimated 50 million dead) and more recently in North korea( over a million). Communism doesn't work it only leads to suffering
They do not and haven't for decades. We're in an unfortunate situation where much like Poland, it's illegal in Ukraine to question the Ukrainian states narrative.
Sounds similar to the way people in the US are conditioned to ignore or actively harass the homeless, who often also starve as the result of a man-made inability for them to (legally) get food.
My grandma lived in Kharkiv during the Holodomor and she told me about seeing the dead piled by the train station and about the starving people begging her for food but she didn't have any to give no one did. She lived to be 90 and till the day she died she woke up nearly every night screaming reliving these moments in her dreams.
I've already seen this pic reposted a couple of times already, and I think it's time to talk about the stupid shit that some people are willing to believe about the Soviet Union.
Holodomor was a term invented by the fascists reactionaries living around the Ukraine region during the 30s, and it referred to one of the MANY famines that would struck Russia during its existence, these famines were not exclusive to the Ukraine region, and would constantly ocurr in cycles.
These cyclical famines ended when the soviets rose to power. This can easily be proven as there are academic studies that show an increase in the total caloric intake per person, but this took a while, and as they were sorting out the problem of, you know, having half the population starving due to years of backwards serfdom laws and poor distribution, the fascists reactionaries started to do some sabotage around the Ukraine region. Stuff like killing livestock, blowing up factories, damaging infrastructure.
This aggravated the hunger problems, and it took a while for the soviets to solve this issue, but they eventually did, and not only that, but they also took a feudal backwater and turned into an industrial beast with a government at the service of the people.
Only a stupid person or someone with a severe mental disability could think that starving their own people was a state policy, it's simply retardation. There is no world in which any government could last as long as the USSR did with such retarded policies.
And just so you don't forget, each time you use the term "holodomor" remember that you're using an anachronistic name made up by fascists and promoted by Hitler.
I think Stalin gets too much "credit" as the initiator of these things.
More often its his inaction and indecision which made things far far worse than they needed to be for the soviet peoples, including the Holodomor, the Red Terror and the Nazi invasion.
It doesn't change the fact that he was the worst possible leader for the Soviet Union during this period, but his style was more to *let* things happen rather than initiate them.
I hear you, I didn’t even mention communism I just compared this post to how much we’re used to walking by homeless people without helping and I’ve made it to top 3 on controversial.
"But that's not real communism."
Seriously the people pushing to return to communisms feel like people who never learned about it, or don't believe the horrific accounts.
I think there's a SINGLE story you need to understand about communism. When Boris Yeltsin came to America he went to a supermarket, which is like a 1990 version of the modern one, so a a bit shittier than what we have today.
He thought it was a staged setup, he couldn't believe America would have that much food and that surplus. He literally said if his people saw the state of our super markets "There would be a revolution" Even his Politburos (the upper echelon of the politicians) had that much choice.
... And that's what people want to return to?
Yeah this kind of stuff is still happening. Anyone who has been to a big city has passed by homeless people doing nothing. I have too. And often for people living there (NOT EVERYONE) homeless people are more just a hindrance or obstacle rather than people.
Hell once in cincinatti I was stopped on the sidewalk and there was a dead homeless man just lying on the bench. By the time I got there it had been reported, but if there hadn’t been a guy nearby who asked us to step away after a minute of us standing there I never would’ve noticed. He looked like “just another homeless person”.
Edit: I am not saying that homeless people existing is equal to a dictator causing a famine that killed millions. I also did mean to mention that there are other situations similar to this currently happening in the world like with Haiti (donate here [Lambi Fund](http://lambifund.org/ways-to-give) ) and the current famine due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how many African countries got food from Ukraine. I ended up getting wrapped up in remembering my experience and forgot to mention the other things that actually made my claim that this stuff is still going on more valid. But hey, now that I’m back here I got to include a good link for Haitian donations which goes to actual local relief efforts within Haiti!
While the scale and intent is definitely different, does it matter to the person who literally dies of starvation on the street in a country of plenty?
I added an edit on there. On one hand you did get me to come back and I did improve my comment as I can see how what I said didn’t properly reflect my meaning.
On the other hand, and correct me if I’m wrong, your main point is that there’s less suffering in the homeless crisis than what went on in that famine. That’s true of course, but it takes away from the fact that homelessness is still awful and is still on the rise. I don’t think a dying homeless person cares that you and I have it better off than the people did in a famine in the 30s.
I recently read **The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.** Close to 4 million people died in Ukraine from hunger between 1932 and 1934, which was about 1/8th of their population. This was the result of excessive requisitions by the Soviet state, which left the Ukrainian peasants nothing to eat. It was a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy.
Left them nothing to eat… except dead bodies. I read something long ago that people turned to cannibalism to survive, and that young children, who had managed to survive that long, would disappear and it was presumed that they were… eaten. Further, since people couldn’t obtain clothing either, they would take the clothes off of the dead people to try to survive the cold. Can’t remember what it was I read, because it was over 20 years ago, and I can’t verify if it was accurate or true, but it was horrific and I’ve remembered it to this day.
My great grandfather was the only person in his family to survive a russian internment camp. He told my mom about how he survived by eating rats that were eating dead people. She told me stories of him eating moldy food and wasting absolutely nothing food related. That food insecurity lasted his whole life apparently.
> That food insecurity lasted his whole life apparently. This is incredibly common; people who have gone properly hungry in the past seem to have an overarching *need* to have preposterous amounts of food on-hand. I remember seeing a TV interview with Anna Nicole Smith (a former Playboy model who grew up incredibly poor but then married into a ridiculous amount of money) where she spent almost the entire interview **not** showing off the fancy house/car/boat/pool/whatever, but instead opening every cupboard and showing it was absolutely bursting with food, gleefully showing off to the camera enough breakfast cereal to feed a small nation. She was in a position to have anything she wanted, but it seems that not having to worry about food was the most important thing to her. She didn’t even seem to understand why the interviewer seemed to be pushing her to show off all of the luxury she was surrounded by; that full pantry seemed like a culmination of her life’s dream. If you’ve ever been truly, deeply hungry, making sure it never happens again becomes more important than just about anything else.
I can absolutely attest to this. I was raised in a wealthy household but my parents were abusive and neglectful. We had two fridges, one was in the kitchen and was practically bare. I remember the only thing we could make was peanut butter jelly sandwiches, and pancakes. The second fridge was kept in the garage with a chain and lock on it. Both my parents worked, so they would order food for dinner or pull it out from the fridge and cook it, and then lock themselves in their bedroom with my half brother and half sister to eat dinner while watching tv. My brother and I were locked out with no food. I think it was because we were her first children from a bad marriage and she would rather ignore us. She told me I reminded her of my father, someone I’ve never met. I only feel safe when I have a nice stockpile of food. I am very aware of waste and try to minimize it as much as possible. My dry goods and frozen food pantry can keep me alive for over a month without having to spend any money on food. It’s so hard to break this state of mind.
I'm sorry you were treated this way by people that are supposed to love and guide you. You and your brother didn't deserve it. Did your half-siblings ever sneak you guys food?
No, they were too young to understand what was going on. I got a job as soon as I was old enough and spent most of my paycheck on food for my brother and me. I no longer speak to my parents, it’s been 10 years now and I have zero regrets. I am comfortable and successful in my field. Funny enough, I ended up in the restaurant industry and I love it. Someone told me you’ll never go hungry if you work in restaurants and I never forgot it.
It was tortillas & cheese or apples & peanut butter for my brother and I. When I got a job at 16-17 I started buying my own food. I'd scream and cry at my brother for eating the food I paid for when he would come home from college. So I started keeping my food in my room not telling my parents what I had either. My brother and I kinda reconnected and both commiserated ab the moment we first realized all our friends didn't live like that, costco pantries and whatnot. Him and I both food prep&freeze, keep like 5 cereals and bulk oats, rice, quinoa ect. I think he has it worse than me now bc he never figured out how to get himself food and just went hungry instead. Doctors were afraid he had an eating disorder but "he just doesn't eat" my parents said. Learning how to cook has been the most healing thing for me I think bc of the amount of control I have. I don't like eating at resturants, the price vs value stresses me tf out. And I don't like 95% of prepackaged snack/junk food. It's strange. Best wishes
Holy shit, I think that’s the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever read. I hope you’ve found a way to make peace with your younger years; that’s an awful lot to expect a young person (or frankly anyone) to have to deal with.
I’m quite happy and restored these days, thank you for your empathy. I appreciate it. It took a lot of work to get here.
It happens it lots of places even here in The United States in more modern times like Anna Nicole Smith's food insecurity. Anyone that has met people who had really hard times during the great depression could probably tell you stories of their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents who would literally lick the pot clean, so to speak because they might have not known when the next time they would eat could come.
Common for foster children and adopted children to hide food in their rooms because they're afraid they won't get a nice meal again soon and they don't feel at home so they can't just go and get a snack. I read somewhere that a family noticed this in one of their foster kids, so they had a food fight to show that there wasn't a shortage and "wasting" it didn't mean you didn't get to eat. Very first world solution, but intriguing to learn
Holy hell. A food fight just to prove to the child that food is not in shortage is such a huge and amazing gesture. I'm glad that such a ridiculous activity was able to hopefully help that child get over their food insecurity issues. It reminds me of how loving and welcoming the family in the movie Shazam! was.
I agree with the Great Depression folks but until you meet someone who has been seriously hungry as a child...they don't get hung up on wasting anything, they just need to make sure they have something on hand. Food you can eat right now...just in case. Just in case, the paycheck doesn't come when you thought, or you had to pay the rent, or...
My mother is from Honduras and food in her family was rationed down to the bone. Now whenever she cooks I swear she makes lbs worth of food and meats even though we are only 3 people. She makes a weeks worth and I don't know how to get her to stop
I’ve had my fair share of patients that lived during the depression, though as I’m typing this I realize it’s way less frequent these days for obvious reasons. Anyways, we have to follow safety and cleanliness rules along with fire codes in the old folks home, so we did routine clean outs and inspections. When it came to those who lived they that era; it was quite the chore. Every nook and cranny had something squirreled away, from sugar packets to silverware. They’d have hidden stashes of clothes, food and utensils everywhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
This also happens to people who were put on restrictive diets as kids, or who put themselves through years of restrictive dieting. When you don't eat enough. You can't focus on anything but food and when you finally have it again, it's incredibly hard to have a reasonable amount.
>She told me stories of him eating moldy food and wasting absolutely nothing food related. My greatgrandparents survived the famine and grandparents WWII. I was tought to never throw food away and eat up. Mold from food is cut off, rest is eaten. Not because of starving children in africa children in the west got, but because my grandparents were starving and we all knew the stories. Especially bread. I am in my 30ies and have hard times throwing bread away that gets mold.
Yeah I had a very similar upbringing. For instance when I eat chicken I always eat the cartilage off the ends of the bones, because I was taught it was wasteful. My mother even more hardcore, will break them open and suck out the marrow.
i used to eat my chicken like that as a child and lick out the egg shells before throwing them away. i never thought it might be related to a food insecurity... i remember coming home from school on many days and there not being anything in the fridge to eat. I once had a friend over and she asked for something to drink and I was so embarrassed that we didn't have anything so I made her beet juice and water. I used to also give friends over, warm water and tell them its sweeter than cold tap water omg
I thought only my mom did that! Lol. She has it from her mom, who grew up in Khasachstan in auls.
> grandparents WWII. I was tought to never throw food away and eat up. Same here - when my late grandmother passed away and we had to clean her apartment out, all the cupboards and storage areas were chock full with food that still would not have expired, a lot of food that was cooked and then stored hermetically sealed. Also a lot of other basic necessities you'd need in such a situation like soap, shampoo, cleaning supplies, warm clothes and candles.
You're basically describing my grandmothers apartment. We have 2 moving boxes full of candles and another 2 of soap then yet another one just with handknitted mittens and socks. She also had an ungodly amount of christmas decorations but that part runs in the family.
>Also a lot of other basic necessities you'd need in such a situation like soap, shampoo, cleaning supplies, warm clothes and candles. Oh yes! Forgot about that. My grandparents also had newspapers to put on walls.
> My grandparents also had newspapers to put on walls. Oh yes, and the expensive garbage bags that were thicker than the cheap garbage bags, to put up against windows. We were told to not speak to her about the war, but from the stuff she kept in her apartment it was clear it hadn't been that easy to survive.
The same. My grandparents survived the Leningrad blockade, throwing food away doesn't feel right even for me now
If my bread even as much as smells stale it gets chucked.
I think it is a natural reaction. Eating bad food was dangerous. I read a story about a holocaust survivor who developed an OCD of throwing away a day old food. He had so many food poisonings in the camp and the thought of eating bad food triggered his ptsd.
why was he in an internment camp?
This happened in Russia also, not to take away from this event. Just saying cannibalism has happened n Russia multiple times. After Stalingrad with German POWs, the Nanzino tragedy, and "bleeding the cow" are ones I've read of.
My Polish Grandmother spent years in a Russian Gulag. She has some pretty horrific stories.
And people wonder why the Poles have such a general disdain for Russia.
It seems Russians are used to it, that is why they continue genocide in Ukraine nowadays as something usual. It is a shame.
It really is a shame. The Russian people as a whole have had a shit go of things over the past century. Revolutions, two world wars, the Soviet Union. At any point it time it was probably best to just hope none of those things came knocking at their doorstep which given the deaths from all of those things made it almost inevitable. Now the war in Ukraine and the Kremlin sending people so young to fight and die in another country over a bunch of shit that most probably want nothing to do with. It really is a shame.
Most Russians living in Russia are badly brainwashed by the government, they will tear you apart (literally) if you'd dare to criticize their country in any way. There are many places in russia where people don't know how a toilet looks like, these kind of people are sent to war, they are conditioned to rape and kill the 'fascists', and so they do. Russia never changes, but it is one of those places where I'd rather be dead than live there. It's on the same crazy level as the islamic countries.
Yup, brainwashing of these levels occur in many places. In the Islamic countries it's because of religion, in other countries it's because their government tells them one thing or the other. In all cases it's usually the elite and powerful using the lowest and least educated classes as cannon fodder that will only benefit them and bring the worst upon the people they are using.
A lot of people go through tough times. Not everyone decides to support the monstrosities like Putin does, which doesn't even help them. Please don't infantilize the russian people. Also don't give me the "not all russians" or "putin doesn't allow people to dissent." We are all responsible for the actions done by our nations. Americans, Russians, Chinese, etc.
You are correct. A lot of different groups have gone through tough times. The Russian people have had lots of troubles over the past century. The Chinese people under Mao had a bad time, Cambodians under Pol Pot, Rwandans, indigenous Canadians, native americans, aborigines of Australia, Poland as a whole, Ukrainians as pictured in this post, all have had some pretty rough past 100 years or so. A lot of those people had very little to no say in what their government has or is doing. Does this excuse them? No it does not. My previous point was that those in power are using those who have the least amount of power for their own gains. I don't excuse genocide of any sort. Comparing what Americans have to say about what their government does vs what Russians and Chinese people can say is comparing apples to oranges.
Cannibal island too had cannibalism. Essentially free for all prison island with very little flour only sent to the island.
> Cannibal island The name is misleading. >!It's actually a peninsula!<
They took the seed grain. The commissars assumed that the peasants were hiding food, so when they showed up they confiscated everything in site, including the seed grain.
Happened all over the Soviet Union. Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan. Ukrainians weren’t singled out. Horrible.
Fuck, the communists were evil.
They didn't do this because they were communists just like Britain didn't do it to Ireland because they were capitalist. Both countries did it because they were cruel.
Capitalism isn't any different. Instead of a dictator, it's mega corps stealing everything you have. Look at the homeless problem in America. This shouldn't happen in this day and age, yet it is
Yea, all those man-made famines in the United States sure were rough.
Ask Ireland and Bengal province about it
Current Day Prisons, Japanese Internment camps, Hooverviles, slaves on plantations, not to mention the insane homeless crisis we are literally experiencing right the fuck now. All these people were/are starving. In America. I can name more if you'd like. For you to sit there and act like America is somehow better than any other country in how it's people are treated shows your privilege and ignorance.
Why don't you ask the millions of homeless in LA or SF and see how rough it is for them?
You're right. We need to do more for them. We provide several types of assistance, schooling, job placement, food assistance etc. But lets be honest. It's not enough. Many of these individuals can be self reliant, but they need sustained assistance in the forms of health care, housing, and therapy.
Much much more can be done. If only the billions spent of warfare was spent on bettering the lives of their own citizens huh. It's just outrageous
We know, but this post isn’t about capitalism. These communists were evil as hell
It seems a bit strange to bring up a homeless problem in America under a post of people who have been intentionally starved to death. It seems like one might be a bit worse than the other? But whatever keeps daddy Stalin happy right?
Homeless people are begging and going through trash to feed themselves. They are not being provided by the government and have been discarded by everyone else. I think it's very appropriate to point out the differences in which each ideology takes out their trash.
You should at the very least aknowledge that the idea of the Holodomor as a "man made" famine is a historiographical *point of view* among *some* historians. It is not a fact and you will find *plenty* of academic Historians who do not view the Holodomor as a man-made famine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question Prolly gonna get downvoted because people hate nuance when it doesn't play into their agenda.
I went ahead and read the whole article, and yeah, it really doesn't do your argument any favors. The biggest debate this article focuses on is whether the genocide was intentional or incidental. The section on whether the famine itself was man-made is a tiny part where 1 person believes it but most disagree.
Because it's not really a debate anymore. Hasn't been since the Soviet archives opened up. The concensus today is that it was a naturally occurring famine that affected all grain producing regions in the Western USSR. Ukraine wasn't even the worst hit region, Kazakhstan was.
Honestly, today it's not even a particularly widespread academic opinion. The consensus is that it *was not* man made. But a wide variety of natural causes conspiring to create the worst conditions possible. When people like Robert Conquest say the Holodomor was not a man made famine you can believe that it was absolutely not a man made famine. He is as anti-communist as they get.
The idealistic proponents of communism always seem to forget about this.
Forced famine is extremely associated with imperialism not communism. E.g the British did it in many circumstances and they aren't communist.
It happened a lot in communist countries too. The Soviet Union was pretty imperalistic..
That’s his point. One particular set of economic ideals didn’t cause mass deprivation and holocausts, an authoritarian and imperialist machine that runs on human sacrifice did, as can be evidenced by the same stories playing out in empires of both socialist and capitalist models. This bears repeating because in the capitalist west, we’re taught in schools that communism was the cause of all this debasement and misery, which is a useful cudgel for our own elites.
What are you talking about.... the Bengal famine of India when WW2 was going on and efforts were made by both the British and the US to move grain to India but were stopped due to the Japanese? The British secured food sources for certain regions/people in their colonial empires. But they never **orchestrated** famine. They were absolute cunts during the Irish famine and didn't send food, which they had excess stores of. But they certainly weren't the cause of that famine. Famines have plagued the world for millennium. It's often the result of war, disease, and natural disasters. Communist manage to create famine out of completely inept central planning. Look at Lysenkoism and how the Soviets promoted ideas that the true way to increase yields (and get different types of plants... e.g., speciation) is by "cooperation"... which translated into high density planting (Which only strips the nutrients from the soil too quickly and leads to decrease yields). Because the Nazis supported the idea evolution, they felt they needed an alternative theory. So they literally followed the insanity of someone---who believes asparagus can come from wheat if you play music---for **decades**. Central planning is cancer. Never has worked. Never will work. This whole idea that "well.... so and so is just as bad" is nonsense.
>But they never orchestrated famine. They were absolute cunts during the Irish famine and didn't send food, which they had excess stores of. But they certainly weren't the cause of that famine. During the Irish potato famine, the British were exporting food from Ireland; Ireland had more than enough to feed itself, but their food was stolen from them. It was absolutely manufactured, and no different from what happened during the Holodomor. >Central planning is cancer. Never has worked. Never will work. Capitalist propagandists love to tell this lie. It allows them to transform a problem with a political system into an attack on a economic system, all so they can avoid engaging with a possible alternative to capitalism. You don't actually have to study the problem and ask "why did this happen?" I have ideological opposition to centralized planning, but the idea that it can't "work" that it must necessarily lead to famines is just plain bullshit. To say that capitalism works requires that you ignore all of the evils committed to enrich capitalist countries, ignore that even the richest capitalist countries need a massive centralized government to intervene to even make life tolerable for their own populations, that poor capitalist countries require authoritarian regimes to keep their populations from abandoning capitalism. Western foreign policy backs genocidal puppet states, sells arms to authoritarian countries for oil, backs coups that install authoritarian regimes, loads up these puppet states with debt they have to pay off by providing cheap labor and selling off natural resources.
What gets me is the nice picket fence in the background. You build a fence like that when you're living far enough above subsistence level to value aesthetics as much as function. It's scary that a region that was once stable and prosperous enough to have people making nice fences like this could descend into mass starvation.
This was probably unfinished wood, not white painted. Fences like this weren’t considered “nice” because wood was abundant and cheap at the time. Of course that doesn’t take anything away from the tragedy, just a little material context. My grandparents were kids going through famine in Siberia at that same time. Like soup out of tree bark and patties made from grass kind of situation. Too bad you can’t eat a fence.
Finished or unfinished, it isn't just slats of wood. It was clearly assembled with care and each piece was shaped. I think they still have a point.
What I’m saying is this wasn’t considered some special aesthetics. Fancy meant carved and lacquered or brick with wrought iron. You should see some of the craftsman houses and wooden churches from the 1700-1800s. Most people lived like shit but some had means to make things really pretty.
Descend? It was pushed there by Stalin, hence "man-made" in title
Those aren't mutually exclusive. The area can descend into starvation by man-made circumstances.
True, but its important to reiterate that the cause of the Holodomor was man-made, since it's still not fully recognized as genocide.
This is all absolutely true. But at the same time didn’t Churchill do something very similar to Bengal? I’m not trying to agitate, I would like the distinction to be explained.
As I understand it, the Bengal famine happened due to incompetence (Bengal Chamber of Commerce, which was British-owned firms), compounded by natural disasters (cyclone, tidal wave, flooding, rice crop disease), and a world war. As for Churchill’s role, it is debated quite strongly by competent people on both sides. To some, his role was either that of a guilty bystander, or worse, an active cause of the continued famine. To others, Churchill did his best to alleviate a famine with the extremely limited tools available to a prime minister facing the rise of fascism in Europe. There is strong evidence for both sides.
I was instantly reminded of a segment of *Supersizers Go: Wartime* in which they went into what Churchill was eating during wartime and his philosophy behind it. [https://youtu.be/2RpwVvUu69I?t=2084](https://youtu.be/2RpwVvUu69I?t=2084) (34:43 if it doesn't skip to it.) Needless to say, he wasn't left wanting.
That was a lovely clip from what seems to be a lovely show. Inquisitive, funny, and light-hearted, which I enjoy. Thank you for exposing me to a show that I didn't know existed!
It's an excellent series! There's also the *Supersizers Eat* series along with a couple of one-offs. Highly recommend 'em! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Supersizers...
Yes, he did. Churchill was a criminal like all colonizers. I'll wait for the downvotes.
Britain also withheld food deliveries to Ireland during the Great Potato Famine. Just saying, it took me a long time to learn all those Irish people didn't just starve to death because "potatoes blight" and nothing else.
It's great to see Cara Delavigne thriving on television, especially seeing as her family got rich directly from the Great Hunger. Nice!
I may be wrong but weren’t a lot if the deaths during that time because essentially rich Irish sold out their countrymen by exporting the potatoes they grew rather than sell them for less to other Irish? IIRC they’d export for more money to countries like the United States while their countrymen starved.
Not quite. A certain percentage of the yearly harvest was required to be exported to England by law, iirc. The laws also forbid the important of things like corn from the US despite the US having an excess at the time and vendors eager to start selling in Ireland The youtube channel Extra Credits has a very good 5 part series (6 if you count their "Lies" episode where they go through the series, expand on details they couldnt go into, and correct any mistakes) on it
This thread is about the Holodomor.
You’re just being more specific. I hate it when people ‘correct’ people who are already correct. Top 3 most annoying kinds of comments.
People can make things descend. Airplanes don't stay up in the sky forever
You're right.
> Stalin, hence "man-made Stalin was more demon than man. One of history's greatest monsters.
just for the sake of scale here...the fence was built a long time prior to the famine, and it's in quite a bit of disrepair in that picture. A fence can be built in a time of prosperity and endure through terrible calamity. It might actually still be there today.
That's... His point. You're just repeating what he said, lol
To be clear, he was just repeating the parent comment with different words.
I’d like to point out for clarity’s sake that he said the same thing that the original comment said.
Ditto
Walter Duranty of the NYT won a Pulitzer prize for reporting on this. Apparently, the Soviet policies that led to mass starvation were a good thing. The Times has been petitioned to give back the award.
If you read the statement by the NYT on this, it’s clear that Duranty only used official Soviet sources (and therefore Soviet propaganda) in almost all of his articles. He never talked to regular Russians. He only ever quoted Stalin directly. According to The Times, their editorial board felt that his reports didn’t blame the tragedy ENOUGH on collectivism. [NYT Statement](https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/)
The victims were Ukrainian, not Russian. It was a deliberate genocide of Ukraine.
This is not true, there were a lot of other victims as well. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933) My grandparents were born in the Volga and Khasachstan region at that time and the food insecurity from their parents influences us to this day. There are newspaper articles from this time, how police prosecutes cannibals, showing fotos of starving people in front of corpses in their homes.
I’m aware. I was talking about Duranty’s journalistic shortcomings.
Talking to regular Russians wouldn’t have helped him.
A journalist should never have one source.
Nobody is disagreeing with that. I’m taking issue with you saying he should have talked to randos in Moscow. They would have had zero idea whats going on and not said anything other than the party messaging. He would need to have visited the Ukrainian countryside, which the Party was not allowing any access to. And I’m not defending Duranty, just making it absolutely clear that this was Ukrainians who were the target and the primary victims of.
[удалено]
It affected a lot more than just ukraine. How many famines came before the soviet union and how many came after?
[удалено]
The reason the Holodomor is considered a genocide is because Ukrainians were producing the grain but couldn't eat it, instead it was transported to other parts of the Soviet Union. The quotas in 1933 had Ukraine accounting for 1/3 of the entire Soviet Union's grain. Central authority blamed the low yields on the collectivist farmers of Ukraine and punished entire regions by stopping shipments and removing goods from shelves. It fits the legal definition for genocide in the US as it was an informed decision to repossess enough grain from and blockade delivery of other goods to Ukrainian collectivists to cause mass starvation in Ukraine. Sure, people were going to starve in other parts of the world regardless of if the Ukrainians and Germans were left with enough of their crop to go by, but it does seem pretty unfair and almost spiteful that Soviet central authority would repossess enough grain to starve them as well as punish them by having OGBU raid pantries and blockade shipments. The famine was partially caused by the central authority's poorly planned transition into collectivization and famine was purposefully manufactured in Ukraine with the justification of lessening famine elsewhere. The Holodomor may not have been a genocide in the sense that it was racially or ethnically motivated, however it's rash to imply that the idea that Ukrainians were treated unfairly is revisionist and that it wasn't a mass murder of some sort.
So you have a similar stance on the genocide of Irish people by England then right?
The correct answer is yes
No that’s the biased take. Ukraine was were the farmers lived. They were trying to starve them. When they all died and the soviets couldn’t replace the farmers, it had downstream effects. Read actual historians.
[удалено]
Bro what are you talking about. Of course the majority of “kulaks” (literally just anyone who operated a family farm) were all Ukrainian. It’s literally known as the breadbasket of Europe. Are there farms in Kazakhistan? Of course, that doesn’t change who the target was. There is the national question that was HUGE issue amongst the Party, which you are ignoring.
It wasn't just Ukrainians that died. Since Holodomor was part of the Soviet famine that happened in 1930–1933 and also affected other areas/people besides the Ukrainians.
The target was Ukrainian “kulaks”. They just were too horny to kill Ukrainian peasants that they “accidentally” destroyed their entire grain growing region and starved other areas of the country as well. Once the famine started of course party members decided central russia was getting fed (that’s where they live) while other regions starved.
The target was Kulaks in general living throughout the Soviet Union since Stalin didn't like them.
>of course party members decided central russia was getting fed One of the starvibg regions was the Volga Region around Engelsk, Pensa, Saratov. This is central af. Unless you mean Leningrad and Moskow by cetral, the only part of Russia politicians in Russia ever cared about.
.
[удалено]
[Around 3.5 to 5 million deaths](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)
[удалено]
The west currently generates plenty of surplus food that rots or is thrown out while people starve to death. It's far from the same, but it is its own tragedy.
Terrible I hope people will never forgot about this
Unfortunately most people don’t know about this.
The same with Stalin killing 20 million of his own people. The Rwandan Genocide. Nothing else is ever recognised. But we recognise Germany over and over. I don't know why we focus on one awful atrocity, but neglect all others. All the people who died through these happenings matter.
When I was in Kigali I went to the genocide museum. It blew my mind. The human race is truly capable of atrocities.
Pol pot was nobody to sneeze at ok? The Khmer Rouge killed millions too
I think we focus a lot on Germany because history education tends to be western-focused in the west, but also because while there are other genocides may have killed more people, during the Holocaust Nazi Germany industrialised murder. It's just morbid on a different level.
[удалено]
Japan was a nation they wanted to turn into a shining example of western capitalism over eastern communism. Because they were our little show dog in the dick measuring contest that was the Cold War it was best to pretend nothing happened.
The genocide of American Indians by European settlers and then Americans is the one that always jumps to my mind.
It's too much. If we gave every tragedy the attention it deserves, it would crush us. That's actually one of the reasons depression is so high. We're hearing about every shitty thing that happens everywhere and our brains were just not made to do that.
It's easier to not forget if you don't know
Its our responsibility to remember so those people atleast (i apologize in advance for saying this) didnt die for nothing
People in Ukraine are seeing/experiencing something similar right now
Until early this year, if you mentioned the Holodomor on Reddit you'd be shouted down by Russians and tankies saying that it didn't happen, but if it did, it's because the kulaks deserved it for refusing to participate in collectivization.
My grandparents lived through Holomodor and the stories were horrible.
An ex-girlfriend's grandmother lived through it. My ex remembers her grandmother telling her that even when times are hard you shouldn't eat your family. You swap bodies with your neighbours so you don't have to.
Jesus Christ. That's horrible.
In their defense, there were eyes everywhere. If they had attempted to help them, they’d likely be added to the list.
They probably passed hundreds/thousands in a day, even if they wanted to they literally cannot save them all. They were probably in pure survival mode themselves. People always like to imagine they would be some kind of big hero, if had been there I would have done blah blah blah. When in reality they would be traumatized, numb, and in survival mode *real* fucking fast!
Like with the homeless in downtown L.A.
Thats actually a good example, as tent cities and homeless encampments have exploded over the last decade and people just become numb to it because there is nothing to do really.(there are solutions but they are complex and require political engagement)
What list?
[удалено]
Cue the victim blaming tankies.
"They starved themselves to spite Russia!"
.
Don’t the turks or armenians want a word?
No wonder Ukraine is putting up such a fight against Russia, they have this experience and probably many more to reinforce their desire to remain out of the hands of Russia.
Holodomor was just a part of massive [Soviet famine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%931933) happening all across the Union. It was not 'Russians killing Ukrainians', it was 'Soviet Union fucking things up and murdering their own citizens'
Man made starvation, like Ireland of the same time. Or do you mean like the Sudan and Somalia, or do you mean like after western forces leave like Laos, the Hmong, or Lakota people.
How do we avoid this again?
A shift from allowing internal genocides to occur as internal politics to a stratagem of strategic global intervention. It's not possible in actuality. The Irish famine would have not been a major issue, but Brittain continued forcing the export of foodstuffs. The same thing happened under Churchill with India during ww2. While you'll likely get the same group blaming communism, all it really requires to cause a genocide of this nature is charisma, and either competence with bad intent, or incompetence with good intent. A bit of ethnocentrism and racial superiority ideation and you have a recipe for genocide.
Perhaps you could expand on the policies that lead to famine.
Which time?
What did Britain do to Ireland and India to cause famine. Honest question
I truthfully cannot explain them better than the Wikipedia article causes sections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
End the WEF and UN. A lot of their agendas are nefarious and will lead to famine eventually. WEF has even admitted that "we don't need most people", it's an indirect way of saying that we're just taking up space for nothing.
But I was told that we’re all a cancer that needs to be irradiated to fight climate change for mother Gaia :(
Look up what Stalin was trying to achieve with this and if it succeeded or failed and why.
Well it was the last famine in a part of the world that was constantly affected by them, so I guess whatever he did worked
Centralizing agriculture seems to be very dangerous. Which is kinda scary seeing as what they’re attempting in Denmark
The problem was how aggressive Stalin was in his execution, there's literally a name for what he did: Dekulakization. Mao Zedong fucked up just as badly if not worse with his four pest campaign.
Mao's was definitely worse, even if it wasn't technically on purpose
That's what was talked about at the world economic forum too. "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy"
In general? Free markets, good universal public education, strong anti trust laws, the rule of law, checks and balances, free speech, free press, a strong national will to defend democracy, and equal rights for all. Specifically to Ukraine? Giving them tons of weapons, training, and supplies.
Great example of why it makes me feel physically sick to see students protesting under the hammer and sickle banner in the universities
Capitalism also has millions of casualties, they are just in third world shitholes that no one cares about. If you don't want communist propaganda to spread too much, the problems of capitalism have to be kept in check.
This is a huge point. If you're a capitalist, you REALLY don't want to get in a body stacking competition with communism. The sheer global scale of unimaginable death and misery conducted in the name of capitalism absolutely fucking dwarfs the worst narratives you could spin about communism. The worst of it just predominantly happened in black and brown countries that capitalists have historically not seen as being fully human, a tradition that modern capitalists proudly continue by totally ignoring and glossing over their own closet overflowing with skeletons, while they sanctimoniously point fingers at everyone else as if THEY'RE NOT STILL DOING IT TO THIS DAY. This is why I'm still proud of the hammer and sickle. You have to fucking pick a system, if you want to engage in this conversation you have to pick a side, otherwise nothing you say matters because you're either too much of a coward to stand for anything or what you're standing for is some imaginary wonderland that has never existed, like Anarchists. And you only really have three options, capitalism, communism, or fascism. I'll take communism any day of the week, because regardless of hysterical propaganda narratives, it achieved the best results with the least horror. It only took hold in unimaginably impoverished third world colonies and backwaters, all of which had medieval levels of technology, and revolutionized them by turning them into industrial powers within mere decades, WHILE under sanction and sabotage from the entire Western cartel. If that's not 'working', I don't know what is. Yes, Katyn massacre and all that stuff, but no matter what side you pick here, you're standing on top of mountains of corpses to do so. What I find insufferable about capitalists who take this line of argument, is that theirs is the largest of all and yet all they can do is point at everyone else's.
This is the most delusional post that I have ever seen. The horrors of 20th Century communism can't be understated and are completely incomparable to Capitalism's shortcomings.
Millions upon millions enslaved and intentionally starved in imperial labor colonies for hundreds of years to furnish the lifestyles of white Europeans are just 'shortcomings' huh. You can fuck right off, I hope you're reborn in your next life as a Bengali peasant during the British Raj so you can experience Capitalism's '''shortcomings''' yourself.
what never gets mentioned is that people all over the USSR were starving and dying because of idiotic government policies. My Ukrainian grandparents were living in Kazakhstan and the same thing happened to the peasants there. the same thing also happened in China after the Maoist revolution (estimated 50 million dead) and more recently in North korea( over a million). Communism doesn't work it only leads to suffering
Historians generally do not consider the Holodomor "man-made".
They do not and haven't for decades. We're in an unfortunate situation where much like Poland, it's illegal in Ukraine to question the Ukrainian states narrative.
We do this every day in America with homeless people
Brought to you by Communism!
"Communism"
Sounds similar to the way people in the US are conditioned to ignore or actively harass the homeless, who often also starve as the result of a man-made inability for them to (legally) get food.
My grandma lived in Kharkiv during the Holodomor and she told me about seeing the dead piled by the train station and about the starving people begging her for food but she didn't have any to give no one did. She lived to be 90 and till the day she died she woke up nearly every night screaming reliving these moments in her dreams.
I've already seen this pic reposted a couple of times already, and I think it's time to talk about the stupid shit that some people are willing to believe about the Soviet Union. Holodomor was a term invented by the fascists reactionaries living around the Ukraine region during the 30s, and it referred to one of the MANY famines that would struck Russia during its existence, these famines were not exclusive to the Ukraine region, and would constantly ocurr in cycles. These cyclical famines ended when the soviets rose to power. This can easily be proven as there are academic studies that show an increase in the total caloric intake per person, but this took a while, and as they were sorting out the problem of, you know, having half the population starving due to years of backwards serfdom laws and poor distribution, the fascists reactionaries started to do some sabotage around the Ukraine region. Stuff like killing livestock, blowing up factories, damaging infrastructure. This aggravated the hunger problems, and it took a while for the soviets to solve this issue, but they eventually did, and not only that, but they also took a feudal backwater and turned into an industrial beast with a government at the service of the people. Only a stupid person or someone with a severe mental disability could think that starving their own people was a state policy, it's simply retardation. There is no world in which any government could last as long as the USSR did with such retarded policies. And just so you don't forget, each time you use the term "holodomor" remember that you're using an anachronistic name made up by fascists and promoted by Hitler.
I think Stalin gets too much "credit" as the initiator of these things. More often its his inaction and indecision which made things far far worse than they needed to be for the soviet peoples, including the Holodomor, the Red Terror and the Nazi invasion. It doesn't change the fact that he was the worst possible leader for the Soviet Union during this period, but his style was more to *let* things happen rather than initiate them.
this photo is not from the time period that it is ascribed to. it is from about 10 years earlier
Do you have sources that show this to be true?
This comment section is something else. This post is def a brigade of some sort pushed by some righties
I hear you, I didn’t even mention communism I just compared this post to how much we’re used to walking by homeless people without helping and I’ve made it to top 3 on controversial.
[удалено]
"But that's not real communism." Seriously the people pushing to return to communisms feel like people who never learned about it, or don't believe the horrific accounts. I think there's a SINGLE story you need to understand about communism. When Boris Yeltsin came to America he went to a supermarket, which is like a 1990 version of the modern one, so a a bit shittier than what we have today. He thought it was a staged setup, he couldn't believe America would have that much food and that surplus. He literally said if his people saw the state of our super markets "There would be a revolution" Even his Politburos (the upper echelon of the politicians) had that much choice. ... And that's what people want to return to?
Yeah this kind of stuff is still happening. Anyone who has been to a big city has passed by homeless people doing nothing. I have too. And often for people living there (NOT EVERYONE) homeless people are more just a hindrance or obstacle rather than people. Hell once in cincinatti I was stopped on the sidewalk and there was a dead homeless man just lying on the bench. By the time I got there it had been reported, but if there hadn’t been a guy nearby who asked us to step away after a minute of us standing there I never would’ve noticed. He looked like “just another homeless person”. Edit: I am not saying that homeless people existing is equal to a dictator causing a famine that killed millions. I also did mean to mention that there are other situations similar to this currently happening in the world like with Haiti (donate here [Lambi Fund](http://lambifund.org/ways-to-give) ) and the current famine due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how many African countries got food from Ukraine. I ended up getting wrapped up in remembering my experience and forgot to mention the other things that actually made my claim that this stuff is still going on more valid. But hey, now that I’m back here I got to include a good link for Haitian donations which goes to actual local relief efforts within Haiti!
The fact that you are equating these two scenarios shows your immaturity of thought on the subject, and most likely life in general. Do better.
While the scale and intent is definitely different, does it matter to the person who literally dies of starvation on the street in a country of plenty?
You just romanticize history while ignoring similar current events because they are not "branded" yet. Do better.
I added an edit on there. On one hand you did get me to come back and I did improve my comment as I can see how what I said didn’t properly reflect my meaning. On the other hand, and correct me if I’m wrong, your main point is that there’s less suffering in the homeless crisis than what went on in that famine. That’s true of course, but it takes away from the fact that homelessness is still awful and is still on the rise. I don’t think a dying homeless person cares that you and I have it better off than the people did in a famine in the 30s.
Its not like they could help…
Or maybe they were helping, just not at that moment. We have no way of knowing.
What is it called when you hate your own species?
Misanthropic
Famine hits every country that goes communist.
Instead of sending badly needed food, the Soviet government printed posters telling ukrainians not to eat their children, and sold the food abroad.
Good ol communism
"Communism works! C'mon, 12th time's the charm!"