The Economist reminds us that a few days ago Ukrainians spent time remembering the terrible man-created famine, the Holodomor, that was used to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and enforce collectivization. I have written about that horror before, here and here, and about the people who lied about it like Walter J. Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winner New York Times journalist and those who dared to tell the truth, like Malcolm Muggeridge and, especially, Gareth Jones, the young journalist who was banned from the Soviet Union and who died under mysterious circumstances in Mongolia not long after.
To say that the Holodomor devastated Ukraine is to use an understatement. However, we must not forget what the same policy of collectivization did to other parts of the Soviet Union: Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Central Asian Republics and the Caucasus. In fact, no part of that country escaped and agriculture never fully recovered.
Not just the Soviet Union either: the same process killed more than 30 million in China and many in North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Ethiopia. In other words, everywhere that was touched by the great experiment of creating a Communist paradise.
When people tell you, as they do with monotonous regularity that unlike the Fascists and the Nazis the Communists meant well and wanted to build a fair and just society though everything kept going wrong, remind them of the men, women and children deliberately starved to death in the name of that ideology. Millions of them, murdered pitilessly. We must never forget.
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