From the Toronto Sun - December 13, 1998
By ERIC MARGOLIS Contributing Foreign Editor
As Britain's socialist government cleared the way for a gaudy show trial of
that Great Satan of the left, Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 65th
anniversary of this century's bloodiest crime was utterly ignored. Leftists
now baying for Pinochet's head don't want to be reminded of the Unknown
Holocaust.
In 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin (Koba) unleashed genocide in Ukraine. Stalin
determined to force Ukraine's millions of independent farmers - called
kulaks - into collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine's
growing spirit of nationalism.
Faced by resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror and
dispatched 25,000 fanatical young party militants from Moscow - earlier
versions of Mao's Red Guards - to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants
into collective farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective
executions of recalcitrant farmers.
When Stalin's red guards failed to make a dent in this immense number,
OGPU was ordered to begin mass executions.
But there were simply not enough Chekists (secret police) to kill so many
people, so Stalin decided to replace bullets with a much cheaper medium of
death - mass starvation.
All seed stocks, grain, silage and farm animals were confiscated from
Ukraine's farms. (Ethiopia's Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam
used the same method in the 1970s to force collectivization: the resulting
famine cased one million deaths.)
OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines. Nothing
came in or out of Ukraine. Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel.
Ukrainians quickly began to die of hunger, cold and sickness.
When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent henchman
Lazar Kaganovitch to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet
Eichmann, made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent
of all Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. A Ukrainian party member named
Nikita Khruschchev helped supervise the slaughter.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by
Kaganovitch and OGPU hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and
belts, plus bark and roots.
The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's custom-made famine and
Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day. The KGB's archives, and
recent work by Russian historians, show at least seven million died.
Ukrainian historians put the figure at nine million, or higher. Twenty-five
percent of Ukraine's population was exterminated. Millions of victims.
Six million other farmers across the USSR were starved or shot during
collectivization. Add mass executions by the Cheka in Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania; the genocide of three million Muslims in the USSR;
massacres of Cossacks and Volga Germans and Soviet industrial genocide
accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including 20 million war
dead.
The cruelty inflicted by Stalin's Cheka on Ukraine, the Baltic states and
Poland, led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both
communism and their suffering. As a direct result, during the subsequent
Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the region's innocent Jews became the
target of ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.
While the world is by now fully aware of the destruction of Europe's Jews by
the Nazis, the story of the numerically larger holocaust in Ukraine has been
suppressed, or ignored. Ukraine's genocide occurred 8-9 years before Hitler
began the Jewish Holocaust, and was committed, unlike Nazi crimes, before
the world's gaze. But Stalin's murder of millions was simply denied, or
concealed by a left-wing conspiracy of silence that continues to this day.
In the strange moral geometry of mass murder, only Nazis are guilty.
Socialist luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and PM
Edouard Herriot of France, toured Ukraine during 1932-33 and proclaimed reports of famine were false. Shaw announced: "I did not see one under-nourished person in
Russia." New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer
Prize for his Russian reporting, wrote claims of famine were "malignant
propaganda." Seven million people were dying around them, yet they saw nothing. The New York Times has never repudiated Duranty's reports.
Modern leftists do not care to be reminded their ideological and historical roots are entwined with this century's greatest crime - the inevitable result of enforced social engineering and Marxist theology.
Western historians delicately skirt the sordid fact that the governments of
Britain, the U.S. and Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and
Stalin's other monstrous crimes. Yet they eagerly welcomed him as an ally during World War II. Stalin, who Franklin Roosevelt called "Uncle Joe," murdered four times more people than Adolf Hitler.
None of the Soviet mass murderers who committed genocide were ever
brought to justice. Lazar Kaganovitch died peacefully in Moscow a few years
ago, still wearing his Order of the Soviet Union, and enjoying a generous
state pension.
[ 07-21-2001: Message edited by: Wotan ]
