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The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin’s Doomed Meteorologist
- gnarbarian 9y agothis is a great article. It's shocking how many people have never heard of Holodomor [0]. Or the extent of Stalin's brutality long before the second world war began. 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
- IntronExon 9y agoI think there is, or was, a sense that focusing too much on contemporaneous genocides when considering the period around the Nazi Holocaust, might dilute the horror of it all? I don’t know, maybe it’s just that for a significant portion of history until recently, studying the Holodomor and Stalin (or Mao) in general would mean empathizing with people we still considered rivals or deadly enemies? Whatever the reason, the Nazi holocauust, the Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward represent a spasm of evil that claimed far more lives than all previous armed conflicts combined. All of the above is very much my idle speculation.
- vkou 9y agoYou don't have to be a fascist to condemn the Holodomor. It's also shocking, though, how unaware we are of atrocities committed by Western powers. It is difficult, for example, to understate the culpability of the British Empire, and its economic system in Ireland's Great Famine. Much like the Holodomor, it was an engineered famine - there was no shortage of food - it was just not very evenly distributed. The free market, and British colonial policy proved itself to be highly effective at providing a solution to the "Irish Question"[1] - which involved killing a quarter of Ireland's population. Utter contempt for human life is a function of power, not of economic system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_question
- gnarbarian 9y agoThere was no real free market for the Irish though. The Irish weren't allowed to fish or hunt or eat other crops which were slotted for English consumption. Nor were the Catholic Irish allowed to own land. They were essentially only allowed to eat potatoes... The famine was a genocide justified as divine retribution against the Catholics of Ireland.
- vkou 9y agoThat's not the whole picture - Ireland exported food throughout the famine - more then enough food then it needed to feed itself. The problem was that exporting food to England was more profitable then selling food domestically. The reason that the Irish poor ate potatoes was not because they were forbidden from other food, but because that was all they could afford. The invisible hand of the market, and the very visible hand of Parliament was content to see a million people starve to death. Note that one of the causes of the Holodomor was the Soviet Union exporting food during the famine. History repeats itself.
- IntronExon 9y agoNot just content to see them die, eager I think. Maybe not as explicitly eager as Stalin or Hitler, but more than Mao in his incompetence and arrogance.
- gnarbarian 9y agoI agree with the caveat that had their land not been taken from them and given to protestants in the first place, they could have done a much better job of feeding themselves.
- vkou 9y agoNearly all land has been taken away from someone or other, at sword or gunpoint, at some point in time or another. Do markets only work when land is distributed fairly as a starting condition?
- 9y ago
- gnarbarian 9y agonot just idle speculation, Communism lead to somewhere between 85 and 100 million deaths in the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes#cite_note-Malia_1999-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
- Tech-Noir 9y ago> Communism lead to somewhere between 85 and 100 million deaths in the 20th century: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes#cite_note-Malia_1999-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_... All your link to a single footnote on a Wiki page shows is that some anti-Communist contributer to some anti-Communist book about how the Nazis and the Holocaust were nothing special - disowned and discredited even by its own main authors - claims "between 85 and 100 million" victims of Communism. Numbers arrived at by including: 1. Forces invading Communist countries 2. Civilians in Communist countries killed by foreign aggressors 3. Anti-Semitic militias who carried out mass murders against Jews 4. Simply adding millions from nowhere (admitted by at least one author of the book) Nobody in their right mind takes that book seriously; not the authors and not the people who use it to score political points.
- IntronExon 9y agoPlease don’t hijaack this thread for another ideological flame war. Just re-read this to yourself as needed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16417262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16417262
- Tech-Noir 9y ago> Please don’t hijaack this thread for another ideological flame war. The very first post in this thread - paying the briefest of lip service to the article before the poster (with 6 out of 18 comments here, not one of which actually discusses the article) gets to what he really wants to talk about - is ideological flame bait, which you were happy to go along with and egg on. So don't tell me, effecting the tone of a moderator, to do something you're unable to do yourself. If you don't like me challenging fictional, completely politicized claims that poison virtually every thread like this these days, then take your own advice and read something else instead.
- pvg 9y agoLots of people haven't heard of the Holodomor but even the most vague and generic perceptions of Stalin's brutality are not based on the second world war.
- tropdrop 9y agoNote Holodomor was actually a subset of a general attack on peasants in all of Soviet Union - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%9333 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_famine_of_1932%E2%80%931933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_famine_of_1932%E2%8... Between 15% and 42% of the entire Kazakh population died in this same fell swoop. Essentially, grain silos that the (Ukranian, Russian, Kazakh, [insert peasant population and Republic]) peasants had reserved to feed themselves during a year that had poor crop yields had been previously taken by force to feed people in cities. When the very harsh winter of '32-33 came, that meant death of starvation for all these peasants, of all these nationalities. The breadbaskets of USSR (Ukraine and Kazakhstan) had a particularly high concentration of peasants, and therefore, particularly high death rate.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoI think part of this lies with the fact that Stalin and especially Communism had a lot of highly placed admirers in the West. One of those was Walter Duranty, who even won a Pulitzer Prize for for his work as the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He worked to deny and discredit those who tried to tell the world about the atrocities of Stalin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/ https://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pu...
- gnarbarian 9y agoIt continues today in the social sciences: "Overall, Marxism is a tiny minority faith. Just 3% of professors accept the label. The share rises to 5% in the humanities. The shocker, though, is that as recently as 2006, about 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxists" http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...
- blackbagboys 9y agoMarxism and Stalinism are different things.
- gnarbarian 9y agoYes I agree. Just as there is a difference between theory and practice. Marxism is to Stalinism as theory is to practice.
- goldenkey 9y agoMarxism doesn't have to be undemocratic. Isn't the losing pattern here - dictatorship vs democracy, not Marxism vs Capitalism?
- gnarbarian 9y ago
- emmelaich 9y agoEveryone should should read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago too.
- Fins 9y agoI am not sure how readable Solzhenytsin is in English, but his Russian is atrocious (he was also obviously not a nice person). For sheer horror of life in worker's paradise, I think Varlam Shalamov's [0] Kolyma stories are much better written. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov
- emmelaich 9y agoYeah, no-one in the west liked him much either. Perhaps it takes an angry unpleasant person to tell the truth? Thanks for the link; I'll look it up.
- Fins 9y agoYou don't necessarily have to be a self-promoting a*hole either, though. You're welcome. Haven't really checked if translations of Shalamov into English are any good, but originals are. Not something you would read for pleasure though.
- yantrams 9y agoSad and touching story. His illustrations remind me of the Soviet children's books[0] I grew up with as a kid. 0 http://linkdot.link/sooviytt-prcurnnlu-childrens-books.html http://linkdot.link/sooviytt-prcurnnlu-childrens-books.html