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On 5/3/19 8:21 AM, Glauber Ataide wrote:
He was the first to LIE about the Holodomor.
There had always been famines in the ex-USSR, but these were not caused
intentionally by Stalin. That's the great lie.
Right. Stalin did not intentionally carry out policies that were
designed to kill millions of Ukrainians. He was not much different from
Winston Churchill who never intended to kill Bengalis during WWII, only
control grain resources in order to defeat Hitler.
I wrote extensively about the Holodomor in the aftermath of Euromaidan,
relying in part not on Conquest, who I've never read, but on the author
of the article I posted a link to.
I debated the idiot Grover Furr on CounterPunch. Here's an excerpt:
Around the time Furr wrote his article, I had already begun reading
scholarly literature on the Holodomor including everything that Tauger
had written on the topic. Despite his reputation as a leading authority
on the famine, he has never written a book about it. At one time, he had
an archive of his articles on the U. of West Virginia but they seemed to
have mysteriously disappeared. One hopes that a Pravy Sektor hacker was
not responsible.
Fortunately, my privileges as a Columbia University retiree has enabled
me to read Tauger’s articles, including one titled “Natural Disaster and
Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933” that can be accessed at
the University of Pittsburgh Carl Beck Papers in Russian and Eastern
European Studies.
I was surprised, but not overly so, to discover Tauger applying the same
methodology to other famines in that article. If you are one of those
leftists who blames British colonialism for the Potato Famine in
Ireland, he will disabuse you of such foolish notions:
Consequently an understanding of the Soviet famine, and of the intense
conflict between regime and peasants over grain procurements emphasized
in most studies, requires an examination of the causes of those small
harvests. Two examples from the vast historiography of famines
demonstrates the legitimacy and importance of such an investigation. In
the case of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1851, a nationalist
literature, similar to the Ukrainian nationalist literature on the
Soviet famine, holds the British government responsible.
The British government responsible? No, we can’t have that. Nor was the
British government responsible for the 1943 famine in Bengal, according
to Tauger’s “The Indian Famine Crises of WWII”:
This “man-made” famine argument, however, rests on uncritical
acceptance of one set of unreliable statistical data that Sen and others
have incorrectly described as “production data.” As will be shown below,
scholars who presented this view of the famine had clear evidence that
discredited these data, but they did not acknowledge this conflicting
evidence, let alone address its implications. As a result their
discussions of the rice harvests in Bengal before the famine have
misrepresented both the data and the causes of the famine. These
scholars also claim that Bengal had no shortage of rice during the
famine, yet they minimize or ignore environmental conditions that did in
fact cause serious shortages. Much more reliable harvest data from rice
research centers in Bengal during the famine show that Bengal had a
major harvest failure in 1942 and a significant shortage of rice.
Of course, it is easy for some on the left to recoil at the idea that it
was natural causes such as drought or blight rather than British
colonialism that was responsible for the deaths of millions of Irish and
Indians. Yet, when it comes to Ukraine, we are used to thinking the
worst. If Victoria Nuland was on the phone with nationalist politicians
prior to Euromaidan, it seems reasonable that Stalin was forced to
unleash a brutal repression in the early 30s to prevent Hitler from
invading Russia—or something like that.
full: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/24/what-caused-the-holodomor/
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