Ukraine and the UN Resolution against “The Glorification of Nazism”: The US Vote at the UN is “Holocaust Denial” – Here’s Why
The UN vote against the glorification of nazism and nazi figures was a watershed insight into understanding what is going on inside western governments today. Eric Zuesse’s article labeling the no vote by the US, Canada, and Ukraine at the UN as supporting the glorification of Nazism and Holocaust denial was understatement at the very least. By this “no” vote these three countries support the rights of nationalist chauvinists to promote nazis like Adolf Hitler or Stepan Bandera as heroes and the murder of their victims as a heroic act.
Two of the three countries that voted to support the right to glorify nazism are home to the largest openly nazi emigre groups in the world. In his lifetime these groups were led by Stepan Bandera directly. In the United States alone the combined grouping by their own reckoning exceeds 20 million members with large political clout to match.
How does this equate to Holocaust denial?
Looking back at WW2 there are two different holocaust narratives told today. The first is one people are familiar with which is the history of Nazi extermination of Jews and every other nationality or group they saw as less than them.
The second holocaust account from the period which the three negative voting countries support denies this. Monsters cannot be victims. Victims cannot be monsters. Reprisals that are done in self defense or to even scores with your enemies are commonplace in history. The second record purports that Jews/ Soviets killed 7-10 million Ukrainians.
It purports that Nazis (Ukrainian nationalists) were the victims and the Jewish populations were either murderous or suicidal depending on the year. It supposes that the Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian victims dug the mass graves, shot themselves, and each person took a shovel of dirt with them in self loathing as they jumped in.
The second narrative is the basis to propose that Jewish Nazi SS Battalions killed the Jews, Ukrainians, and not the Ukrainian nationalists that did this.
The second holocaust which the US, Canada, and Ukraine support with this vote in the name of free speech proposes Nazi forces were the heroes of WW2 as well as its victims.
Holomodor
The history of the Holomodor or Starvation holocaust until now has been left almost entirely in the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists. It is the historical centerpiece for their ideological hatred of Russia today. It is the historical basis of a nationalist Ukraine today. If accepted at face value it also whitewashes Ukrainian Nationalists out of history as prolific mass murderers and genocidal SS soldiers. As victims the Ukrainian Nationalists can soften how the world sees them without changing their positions, acknowledging their crimes, or changing their methods. Ukrainian nationalism only has a base of legitimacy if this tragedy happened according to their version of it.
The acceptance of this as a holocaust is also one of the main justifications for the OUN/UPA becoming soldiers for Hitler’s 3rd Reich. They were the “anti-communists” that steered American history. If their version of history is accepted then there will be no problem when they claim to have fought against Hitler after 1941. They can say they tried to save the Jews from the Nazis. In a nutshell they can make some of WW2’s greatest murderers into heroes instead of leaving them in the waste can of history where they belong. They can continue what they are doing today.
First-Perspective
According to the Ukrainian nationalist perspective 7-10 million Ukrainians died as a result of forced starvation under Stalinism. During the famine years 1932-33 Stalin was forcing people onto collective farms across the Soviet Union. Stalin took advantage of the famine by confiscating what was left of the harvest, reserves, and forced the people to starve to death.
Historically West Ukraine (Galicia) where the Ukrainian nationalists were located and Ukraine’s ideology today was derived existed only outside the areas affected by the famine. According to Ukrainian nationalist scholar Alexander Moytal ” Just as the earlier debates in the West over the famine had been politicized, pitting “anti-Communists” against their critics, so too did the debate over the Holodomor-as-genocide thesis in Ukraine become profoundly political. First, it challenged the nature of Soviet reality. Second, it became the centerpiece of Yushchenko’s nation-building project after the Orange Revolution. And third, it undermined Russia’s hegemony over Ukraine.
… Since the debate also reflected popularly held attitudes–according to a 2009 InterMedia survey, eighty-three percent of Ukrainians in the west, fifty-eight in the center, twenty-eight in the south, and fifteen in the east accept the genocide thesis –the Holodomor quickly became the main focus of efforts by both national democrats and their opponents to mobilize voters in the recent elections.”
The “anti-communists” and national democrats that Professor Moytl mentions are the ideological children of the Bandera years. What is very interesting about this especially in light of what is occurring in Ukraine today is that the areas that were most affected by the “Holomodor Holocaust” don’t remember it the way the storyline was developed in the US, Canada, and most notably by the Galician Bandera that were not a part of it and did not suffer through it.
Central and Southeast Ukraine which includes Donbass and Odessa are the areas that years ago suffered through that famine. The famine also claimed over 1 million lives in Siberia. The suffering extended to Belarus and Kuban. There were starvation deaths in Moscow.
The Soviets (Stalin) were still keeping grain production export quotas the same during this famine regardless of what the harvest actually yielded. The SSR Ukrainian government in Kiev was slow to report the famine and resulting bad harvests after predicting record harvests in their forecasts.
During this period collectivization and mechanized farming were forced on all the countries that made up the Soviet Union. Forced mechanization made the problems a lot more widespread. SSR Ukraine, comprised of Central Ukraine and Southeast (Donbass to Odessa) really suffered the most in the Soviet Union. The US and China faced similar issues during this period of technological change (mechanized agriculture) which created similar conditions in both countries also. This resulted in the Dust Bowl years happening in the US and China’s famine years resulted.
Compounding this was Stalin’s operations to repress anti- Soviets, anti-collectivists(farmers), and the “Kulaks.” Kulaks were local land barons that had horses to plow the fields. If you needed a horse to plow yours, you plowed his field and gave a percentage of your harvest to him. The Kulaks slaughtered their horses in an attempt to stop collectivization because it took their power away. They revolted against collectivization every way they could.
” In combination with the brutal repression of much of the intellectual elite inthe Ukrainian SSR in the years around 1930, the collectivization and famine left deep scars on central and eastern Ukraine. Until the late 1980s, the famine was denied by the Soviet authorities. Even in the diaspora, which was dominated by Western Ukrainians, there was little knowledge of the famine until the 1970s”.- Pers Anders Rudling- Memories of “Holodomor” and National Socialism in Ukrainian political culture
How this adds up to Holocaust-Denial
In the mid 1970’s the role of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust was opened up publicly first with Lucy Dawidowcz’s book “The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 that presented the Ukrainians as far more brutal than the Germans ever were. In 1978 the miniseries “Holocaust” raised awareness of what happened during this time frame and brought the Ukrainian nationalist issues to the forefront. According to Rudling this infuriated the Ukrainian diaspora. Both Canada and the US opened investigations on WW2 War Criminality as a result of the rise in awareness during this time. The Simon Wiesenthal Center started giving Ukrainian nationalists and other Eastern European nationalists increased attention. The great fear was the only thing westerners would know about them was the part they played as prolific collaborators in mankinds greatest mass murder.
” Thus, in 1982– 83, in time for the 50th anniversary of the famine diaspora academics, publicists, and Nationalist activists launched a major effort to produce a new national mythology, centered on the 1932– 33 famine. Diaspora academics referred to the famine as a deliberate genocide, in which the western states were complicit. References to the Holocaust were often explicit : “The victims of the famine in Ukraine were consigned to their slow and agonizing deaths as surely as the Jews of Europe were delivered to the planners of the Final solution…”-Rudling(ibid)
Before 1991 this was in hope of securing the state of Ukraine once it was independent from the Soviet Union. The diaspora demanded the US government let them set up a “Ukrainian” nationalist government. Second,Waffen SS officers and fighters played such a large role in Eastern European emigre life(especially Ukrainian) in the United States and Canada, the same activist scholars started trying to rehabilitate their image as well as repackaging their ideologies to make them look heroic and democratic.
In 1986, the publishing house of the UPA veterans published a book, which explicitly stated that “Zionist Jews” launched the famine as the “real Holocaust” in which Jewish Bolsheviks killed Christians, and in which an allegedly Jewish-controlled press covered up the genocide.- For a discussion of Chumatskyj, Yurij : Why is One Holocaust Worth More than Others?
Within the “scholarly” works came demands for a Nuremberg 2 trial listing all the Soviet leaders including Stalin (as the Georgian Jew) by their Askenazi names. According to the Ukrainian nationalists Soviet Russia was formed and led by Zionist Jewry. The Jews and Soviet Jewish leaders were responsible for all the atrocity.
Andrii Bandera, son of the mass murderer published an article stating – “There were 15,000,000 Ukrainian genocide victims next to the 6,000,000 Jewish victims.”- “Major instanced of genocide in the 20th century”, Ukrainian Echo: A Monthly English- Language Supplement to “Homin Ukrainy”, 7 (1983) 3, p. 2.-(ibid) Rudling
Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper used the figure of “up to 10 million people” to back the assertions of Bandera and the OUN emigre population in Edmonton. Canada hosts the World Ukrainian Emigre government (UWC). It must be comforting to Harper to have the direct support of the Bandera family.
They inflated the numbers deliberately to make them as high and much higher than the Jewish Holocaust. This was in the hope of getting recognition. This was also in hope of burying the OUN genocides.
Today the growing consensus among scholars is that between 2.5 and 3.5 million died of famine in SSR Ukraine during 1932-33. The total number of deaths in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Siberia, Caucasus, and throughout Russia are estimated at 5.5-6.5 million people.
” A 2004 study lists the total Ukrainian war deaths (WW2) at 6,850,000 people, or 16.3 % of the population. Of these, a full 5,200,000 were civilians , whereas military victims “only” constituted 1,650,000. Of these civilian deaths,at least 1,4 million, but perhaps as many as 2,1 million Jews were murdered in Ukraine .” – Rudling(ibid)
Why This is Holocaust Denial
By pushing up the numbers of victims higher than the known holocaust Ukrainian nationalists hoped to hide behind those numbers to avoid the figures shown directly above. How can a victim be a murderer? How can a victim of genocide be its perpetrator? Instead the Ukrainian nationalists propose that the violent and angry, self loathing, murderous, and contemptible Jews are behind this and their own woes.
The trouble is real history is not on their side. During the famine the “Ukrainians” were part of another country and culture. They were Polish. They were Galician. Ukraine/Ukrainians/
It was not until Soviet homogenization that Ukraine became one land and one people. The very thing they say they hated the Soviets for is what they are trying to accomplish- Ukrainization.
After 1990 the story of the Holomodor was exported back to Ukraine by the emigre population. Victor Yushenko (nationalist) used it as his centerpiece to build the new Ukraine. Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, head of the SBU, friend and former lieutenant of Dimitri Yarosh (Pravy Sektor) was key to developing this new truth in nationalist Ukraine.
The crimes of the Stalin regime – the 1932-1933 famine-genocide is Ukraine, the major terror of the 1930s – should be fully condemned by the international community. It is the duty of all countries, political and public forces that accept the values of democracy,’ Yuschenko said.
Accepting the New Denial
After the 1917 Revolution Lenin gave Novorussia/Southeast/Donbass to Ukraine because Donbass was the home of the Don Cossacks. The Cossacks were anti-communist monarchists or “White Russians.” The Don Cossacks were the personal guards to the Tzars for centuries. They were not welcome in the new Soviet Union and definitely not Russia. Southeast including Donbass and Central Ukraine lived through the famine of 1932-33. Those families are the people that make up the population here.
For Galicians to hijack this history and call it their own makes as much sense as David Duke gaining the ability to sue for slavery reparations. Why is that surprising?
Almost every lawmaker left in Kiev had David Duke as a university professor. That is exactly how much sense all of this makes.
It is now illegal to question the Holomodor in Ukraine. The historical record needs to be set straight permanently about this tragedy. Support the nationalist version and deny the real Holocaust at your own peril. The scholarship needs to be set straight. Democracy is built on history. Nationalism is built on myth.
Today the perpetrators of genocide from that time period are causing famine conditions in Donbass. Most of the fields were burned or mined. Most of the harvests were lost and stolen. The Nazis are back and just as murderous. If Poroshenko and Nazi Kiev were remotely serious about a famine genocide that they want the world to recognize; how could they try to set up the same kinds of conditions right now?
The real reasons why the US, Canada, and Ukraine voted against the condemnation of Nazism are not that complex. A very large emigre population that votes with pocketbooks exists in North America. To condemn nazi thought means their monuments, books, and speech could be rooted out of the democratic conversation.
It could mean nazi era Ukrainian nationalist presidents in exile could be exhumed and forced to be repatriated to Ukraine. For the reasons above we can only choose one holocaust or the other. Nationalism and Democracy cannot coexist. Which will it be?
