6 ms·

To place this interview in context, this is right at the time of the holdomor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

RedCondor 4y ago
[dead]
- Claude_Shannon 4y ago
  I had never expected a tankie on HN, truth be told. And I guess Katyń never happened too, or we deserved it? Mass deportations were also a myth, right?
  - RedCondor 4y ago
    The pro-Soviet view is that Katyn was done by the Nazis and blamed on the Soviets after the fact. I've never cared to investigate it in depth. Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/7069/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
    - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
      > Holodomor was invented to make a boogeyman of USSR > Katyn was done by Nazis > Gulags were not that bad > Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok > Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense] > The rape of Berlin never happened Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
      - RedCondor 4y ago
        This is just bargain-bin "spraying shit and seeing what sticks." Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 Seek truth from facts, brother.
        dang 4y ago
        Please edit out swipes and avoid flamewar as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
      - dang 4y ago
        You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - lp0_on_fire 4y ago
    Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot. "Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
    - RedCondor 4y ago
      Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system: >Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.” https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex... There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today. >Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 (Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
      - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
        The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't post ideological flamewar to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. We've had to ask you this before. Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- userforcomment 4y ago
  Not sure about Holodomor, but famine in Kazakhstan which killed almost half of population was real. Third of population fled to China during the 1929-1933 and still remain there. To be honest though while Stalin is cruel, he is more comparable to Kim Jong Un than Hitler.
  - RedCondor 4y ago
    It's unquestionably an enormous tragedy, but it's necessarily to reject attempts to turn it into a cheap ideological talking point, for the sake of the people of Kazakhstan and everywhere else. Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough: >[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941. (Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.) Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70 https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... Or 1947: >“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.” https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199... There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.
bilqis 4y ago
Although it should be said, thay holodomor’s nature is still disputed by historians. Some people, especially politically or nationally biased, claim that that was deliberate genocide of specifically Ukrainians. While it serves specific purpose as a narrative, more historians agree that a) famine affected not only Ukrainians, but all people living in a wide region, including not only what’s considered to be Ukraine today, but millions of other, b) there are no direct evidences supporting the genocide claim, no evidence supporting any deliberation. Much more probable explanation is combination of poor organisation of food collection from the villages and bad weather conditions for multiple seasons (that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there).
- scp_not_gpt 4y ago
  Not really. The nature of Holodomor is only disputed by the historians who care to push a specific agenda - be it politically or ideologically motivated. USSR is also did a fine job to whitewash any of its past crimes. > "that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there" - care to elaborate on this?
  - RedCondor 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
      This not "evidence"; this is your (failed) attempts to build an F-tier argument by "spraying and praying" a bunch of rambling, unrelated sources. Anyway, I'm done wasting my braincells. Good luck in rebuilding communism for the umpteenth time (all previous attempts somehow resulted in deaths of millions and a totalitarian cult of personality springing up). You do you, comrade, I'm sure on n+1th time it will be different
      - 4y ago
littlestymaar 4y ago
A year after more precisely, but I'm not sure Wells would have been aware of it at the time.

RedCondor 4y ago

[dead]

Claude_Shannon 4y ago
I had never expected a tankie on HN, truth be told. And I guess Katyń never happened too, or we deserved it? Mass deportations were also a myth, right?
- RedCondor 4y ago
  The pro-Soviet view is that Katyn was done by the Nazis and blamed on the Soviets after the fact. I've never cared to investigate it in depth. Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/7069/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
  - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
    > Holodomor was invented to make a boogeyman of USSR > Katyn was done by Nazis > Gulags were not that bad > Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok > Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense] > The rape of Berlin never happened Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
    - RedCondor 4y ago
      This is just bargain-bin "spraying shit and seeing what sticks." Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 Seek truth from facts, brother.
      - dang 4y ago
        Please edit out swipes and avoid flamewar as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
    - dang 4y ago
      You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lp0_on_fire 4y ago
  Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot. "Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
  - RedCondor 4y ago
    Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system: >Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today. Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information: She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced. She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.” https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex... There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today. >Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 (Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
    - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
      The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't post ideological flamewar to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. We've had to ask you this before. Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
userforcomment 4y ago
Not sure about Holodomor, but famine in Kazakhstan which killed almost half of population was real. Third of population fled to China during the 1929-1933 and still remain there. To be honest though while Stalin is cruel, he is more comparable to Kim Jong Un than Hitler.
- RedCondor 4y ago
  It's unquestionably an enormous tragedy, but it's necessarily to reject attempts to turn it into a cheap ideological talking point, for the sake of the people of Kazakhstan and everywhere else. Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough: >[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941. (Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.) Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70 https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... Or 1947: >“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.” https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199... There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.

bilqis 4y ago

Although it should be said, thay holodomor’s nature is still disputed by historians. Some people, especially politically or nationally biased, claim that that was deliberate genocide of specifically Ukrainians. While it serves specific purpose as a narrative, more historians agree that a) famine affected not only Ukrainians, but all people living in a wide region, including not only what’s considered to be Ukraine today, but millions of other, b) there are no direct evidences supporting the genocide claim, no evidence supporting any deliberation. Much more probable explanation is combination of poor organisation of food collection from the villages and bad weather conditions for multiple seasons (that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there).

scp_not_gpt 4y ago
Not really. The nature of Holodomor is only disputed by the historians who care to push a specific agenda - be it politically or ideologically motivated. USSR is also did a fine job to whitewash any of its past crimes. > "that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there" - care to elaborate on this?
- RedCondor 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - scp_not_gpt 4y ago
    This not "evidence"; this is your (failed) attempts to build an F-tier argument by "spraying and praying" a bunch of rambling, unrelated sources. Anyway, I'm done wasting my braincells. Good luck in rebuilding communism for the umpteenth time (all previous attempts somehow resulted in deaths of millions and a totalitarian cult of personality springing up). You do you, comrade, I'm sure on n+1th time it will be different
    - 4y ago

littlestymaar 4y ago

A year after more precisely, but I'm not sure Wells would have been aware of it at the time.