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| Holodomor memorial in Kiev, Ukraine |
We often lay down, speechless,
crying, and with our hearths full of anger and resentment. This can be the case
of only one man, but it can also be the case of an entire nation, butchered and
mentally tortured just because, as it seems, it was in the wrong place at the
wrong moment.
If you take a little time and you
analyze the history of humanity, you’ll very easily notice that some nations
were destined for a path of progress and domination, the others were destined
for a path of misery and constant aggression from the exterior which will
degenerate in internal turmoil. With all the discussions that were going on
social media and in the news, I came to a very simple conclusion, maybe
actually there are two – people construct their image of world events mainly
through the information that they pic from TV news bulletins and from the
social media; what’s not on TV does not exist, what’s not circulating on
Facebook in the forms of shares and memes does not exist.
Because of this, in the following
lines I want to present to you all an event that left deep scars in our human
history, but shocking or not, it had quite a limited media coverage.
The event that I’m talking about is
the Holodomor – Ukrainian Hunger Genocide
– that took place in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic between 1932
and 1933.
In the last two decades with kind
of formed this idea that Africa is the only place on Earth where people die of
hunger, this was even more sustained by all of the NGOs and celebrities that
made a name for themselves through helping the children of underdeveloped
African nations.
The toxicity of political
correctness and the usage of the “white blame” fooled us in to thinking that
whites have this super-human privilege which makes the immune to famine, war,
and poverty.
This must stop! We should open our
eyes and look at our human history without trying to “make things work: Going
back to the focus point of this article, it should be mentioned that the
Holodomor was not a mistake, it was not something that came out of nowhere or
that it as unpredictable by any means. It was consciously instrumented Stalin
and his close party members as a way of exterminating the ethnic Ukrainians
that were populating the territories of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
and the Kuban region of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the minds of
soviet rulers, this ethnic genocide was necessary as a result of the increasing
determination of the Ukrainians to get out of Russian rule and to form their
own national state. The Ukrainian Revival became more clear after the Bolshevik
Revolution, this wave of social change stressed the importance of Ukrainians
staying true to their own culture and to limit and to eliminate the influence
of russification that become more present in Eastern Europe as an outcome of
Russian imperialism.
Ukraine gravitated more towards the culture of
Central Europe, having strong historic ties with Poland which had a strong
cultural influence in the regions that the country was bordering to the west
and north. The Ukrainian nationalist demanded more autonomy within the USSR,
militating even for the cultural autonomy of the Ukrainian communities from
outside the borders of the Ukrainian SSR. During the early days of the USSR, when
Lenin was in power, the idea of Ukrainian autonomy was well regarded by the
heads of the Communist Party, and by Lenin himself. The Ukrainian Revival
become an impediment when Stalin started a massive industrialization plan that
seek to transform a predominantly backward agricultural USSR in a world known
industrial power. All of this came along
with a violent process of collectivization, its successful implementation in
Ukraine being crucial do to the nation’s huge agricultural potential, being
known as the “bread basket of Europe”. In order to eliminate any thought of
Ukrainian independence, Stalin and his puppets aimed at destroying the three
elements that constituted the columns of Ukrainian identity: the peasantry, the
Church, and the intellectuals. With these three obstacles out of the way, Russian
dominance on Ukraine and its fertile lands was a sure thing. The hunger reached
its highest point in 1933, the famine was produced through two main methods –
raising the amount of wheat that had to be produced by Ukrainians, and through
the forced mass exportation of all the produced wheat in to the Russian SSR,
and from there, to the West. Even if wheat constituted the main target, other
agricultural products were taken away too, this being combined with the restricting
that were imposed on peasants to not live their villages and the closing of
Ukrainian SRR’s borders.
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| Holodomor remembrance art |
About twenty miles south of Kiev, I
came upon a village that was practically extinct by starvation. There had been
fifteen houses in this village and a population of forty-odd persons. Every dog
and cat had been eaten. The horses and oxen had all been appropriated by the
Bolsheviks to stock the collective farms. In one hut they were cooking a mess
that defied analysis. There were bones, pig-weed, skin, and what looked like a
boot top in this pot. The way the remaining half dozen inhabitants eagerly
watched this slimy mess showed the state of their hunger. One boy of about 15
years, whose face and arms and legs were simply tightly drawn skin over bones,
had a stomach that was swollen to twice its normal size
Many families died in that period, some were
broken, many children became orphans, it was a common practice for parents to
abandon their children in urban areas, which were not so effected by the
famine, in order to have the chance to be taken in to orphanages. During the
Soviet rule, any talk about the Holodomor was outlawed, those who would bring
it up could face hard years of prison.
Nowadays the Holodomor came to symbolize one
of the darkest moments of modern Ukrainian history, but in the same time it
strengthen the will of the Ukrainians to stand strong against the evil that
comes from the East.
Holodomor memorials can be found in many
places of the country today, thus becoming an integral part of post-communist
Ukrainian culture. A few interesting examples of memorials dedicated to the
famine victims can be found in the capital Kiev, all reuniting elements that
represent the starved people, hope and Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox symbolism.
And what’s the point of this article?
Quite simple: The aim is that of making people understand that the mass
media does not have the interest, in many cases, to present us the truth.
Dictators, criminals, and politicians realized the power of the mass media on
the public opinion, and the more it has legitimacy on the information that
comes in from different events, the more powerful will became as a weapon of
mass manipulation.
People’s incapacity to critically think and to form their own opinion can
be traced to the way in which we do education, preferring to teach students
what to think rather then teaching them how to think. The majority of people
today lost their capacity to form their own opinion, we don’t understand that
we cannot form a valid opinion only through accessing a single information
source…
We should stop giving the mass media – and especially the mainstream
information sources – so much legitimacy when it comes to letting them shape
our opinions and to look deeper and try to construct our opinions through the
comparison of multiple information sources. If this was the case for the
Holodomor, maybe it would had been better known in this days, and maybe an
exterior intervention would had been possible.
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