Genocide, Holodomor and Paragraph 130: When will the Ukraine war be declared a genocide?
The following news went somewhat unnoticed in the media today, which at least the FAZ reported dutifully:
“Bundestag wants to recognize Holodomor as genocide
Around four million people once fell victim to a famine in Ukraine caused by Stalin. It is now to be recognized as genocide in a Bundestag resolution – also with a view to Putin’s war. In a resolution, the Bundestag wants to recognize the famine caused by Stalin in the Ukraine in the years 1932/33 as genocide against the Ukrainian people. This emerges from a joint application by the SPD, Greens, FDP and CDU/CSU, which the F.A.Z. present. The text was completed on the commemoration day of the catastrophe known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor, which in Ukraine is always celebrated on the last Saturday in November. The term Holodomor is composed of „holod“, the Ukrainian word for hunger, and the word „mor“ meaning „plague“ or „mass death“. The Holodomor, which killed around four million people in Ukraine, joins „the list of inhuman crimes committed by totalitarian systems, in the course of which millions of lives were wiped out in Europe, especially in the first half of the 20th century“. it in the draft resolution to be voted on next week. The crime is „part of our common history as Europeans“. In the text of the resolution, however, little is known about this “crime against humanity” in Germany and the European Union. MEPs call on the federal government to help spread knowledge about the Holodomor and commemorate its victims. „More than ever, in these days of Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, which at the same time represents an attack on our European order of peace and values, we are advocating that there should be no more room for great power aspirations and oppression in Europe,“ says the text of the resolution. Political classification as a „warning signal“ „Putin follows Stalin’s cruel and criminal tradition,“ says Robin Wagener of the Greens, the initiator of the motion and chairman of the German-Ukrainian parliamentary group in the Bundestag. “Today, Ukraine is again being hit with Russian terror. Once again, violence and terror are intended to deprive Ukraine of its livelihoods and subjugate the entire country.” The political classification of the Holodomor as genocide is a “signal of warning”. The chairman of the Union faction in the human rights committee, Knut Abraham (CDU), made a similar statement: „This recognition is all the more important because Ukraine has once again become the target of Russian aggression.“
The famine of 1932/33 was a consequence of decisions made by the Soviet party leadership. After numerous people in the Soviet Union had starved to death as early as 1931/32 as a result of the collectivization of agriculture and the forced requisition of food, the party leadership under Stalin tightened these measures further in the autumn of 1932. In areas that did not meet the specified grain delivery norms, food was completely confiscated, and the famine areas were cordoned off. Ukraine has been campaigning for years to have the Holodomor recognized as genocide in parliamentary resolutions. Russia categorically rejects such a classification, since not only Ukrainians but also Russians, Kazakhs, Volga Germans and members of other peoples fell victim to the great hunger in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s. In total, the number of people who died from starvation in those years is estimated at around seven million people. The resolution of the Bundestag points out that in the Ukraine, at the same time as the artificially created hunger in the countryside, intellectuals were being persecuted in the cities „with the aim of destroying them as carriers of cultural identity“. While research on the Holodomor has been going on in Ukraine for years, „the authoritarian state leadership in Russia under Vladimir Putin is forcing an ideological history policy that prevents the Stalinist crimes, including the Holodomor, being dealt with,“ the text says. In the Soviet Union, the Holodomor was taboo and its mention was prosecuted.
It will be interesting to see when Putin’s Ukraine war will also be classified as genocide. But he justified this with an alleged genocide by the Ukrainian „Nazi“ government, which carried out the orders of a German Nazi government and NATO Nazis on the East Ukrainians of Russian descent, which never took place. At the same time, as anti-fascist alliance Lavrov received the German AfD Nazis in the Kremlin, and Russian TV moderators, who openly talk about „allowing the Ukrainian population to „starve and rot“ reinforce this impression of a second, this time purely Russian Holodomor. But Stalin’s victims were all Soviet people, especially the kulaks, so it was more likely a class question. Although he wanted to create the Soviet people and wanted to eradicate national elites and intellectuals and their nationalism as well as any existing statehood. In addition, entire peoples would sometimes be placed under general suspicion and even resettled collectively. In addition, a Chinese nationalist like Chiang Kaichek was never sure that the Soviet Union was not a new edition of red neo-Russian imperialism and neo-Tsardom under internationalist camouflage. The Ukraine war might be classified next as genocide, especially since Putin’s motives are ethnic-cultural („Russian world, Russian people, Novorussia). The Holocaust was classified as genocide, while the war of annihilation against the Slavs, in which 20 million Soviet people and also Russians and Ukrainians, along with Poles and others were murdered, were not perceived as genocide, but miore seen as imperilaist and colonialist business as usual and there were also masses of Slavic collaborators who supported the German Nazis .For a long time, this was seen as follows: war is war, and the „Slavic subhumans“ the Nazis wanted to use as living slaves for their hoped- for settlement in the eastern colonies and should not be completely eradicated. Therefore, any comparison of genocide with the Holocaust against the Jews was denied, especially during the Cold War. It remains to be seen how this will affect the Uyghur and Armenian question. Denying the Armenian genocide is a criminal offense in France already. Let’s see how the intensification of the German paragraph 130 of incitement to hatred in the direction of relativizing and denying crimes of genocide will then have an effect.
Professor van Ess also said that German history itself would be put into perspective and there was the danger that a kind of final line would be drawn with an end to the end solution :
„It is particularly noteworthy that the Holodomor is now to be condemned as a warning as a genocide, according to the motto: „If you do not behave properly, we will accuse you of genocide.“ A logic that does not suggest an extremely high intelligence quotient. But we Germans are fine. It’s finally clear that others are also capable of genocide.“
But this argument about genocides also arose as a heated debate between the Jewish Shoah associations and the postcolonial, postmodern left, including the so-called Global South, who want to equate the crimes of colonialism or the Hereros with the Holocaust and other genocides. The post-colonial Left criticized the monopoly status of the Holocaust as being Eurocentric and specific to Germany and pointed out that the colonialism and imperialism of the West or East (Japan’s war of aggression) were excluded and relativized towards the subjugated peoples. It is disputed what degree of brutality of the colonialism and imperialism of the time, which was seen as business as usual in contrast to the Holocaust, can be perceived as normal and should not be seen as normal, and these “victim peoples” and their postcolonial lobby also refer to this in the alleged Global West/North opposite of the angry white men. Likewise, it is claimed that there was actually no „real“ genocide against the Jews, since they would have survived and founded a state of Israel that was taken from the Palestinians and Israel was a white, colonialist settler movement, an apartheid state with open-air concentration camps, the IDF as the new SS and what else such post-colonial representatives of the western left and their representatives from the so-called Global South say, who also usually enter into a coalition with BDS. The dispute about the Holocaust and the concept of genocide should not be understood as a German phenomenon, since it is now international. Although that comes together again at a Documenta in Kassel/Germany. There is probably no consensus, but perhaps by stating that all sorts of crimes against humanity have been committed, none of which can be trivialized or put into perspective, but conversely the formerly oppressed peoples should not take „revenge“ on their former oppressors, even if it is China on the Japanese, who now want to take revenge because of the old Japanese war of aggression against China and may become the next aggressor in the Indo-Pacific with the appeal of former victim status if it becomes a world power. Although India also refers to the „genocide“ that Chruchill and the British Epire committed in West Begal and also compares Churchill to Hitler, this does not bring India to a justification for presenting itself as a new imperialist conquering nation like China or Russia and from this a legitimation for derive foreign policy wars of mass extermination. In Putin-Russia you can see very well how a former attacked and oppressed victim nation is now becoming a nation of perpetrators, a state of aggression, a predator with all crimes against humanity, whether we shall call it genocide or not. That’s more of a sophistical question. It is already clear who the aggressor is and that he is committing a crime against humanity.
The Holomodor was not enough, there were also enough „genocides“ between the East Europeans themselves. Above all, this is now an eternal reproach from right-wing Poles against the Ukrainians. Now one could think that a Kaczynskis-Pis or Orban-Fidesz are still the most right-wing spectrum of Eastern Europeans, but there is also Jobbik in Hungary who, like Orban, defends a Greater Hungary, sometimes with a FIFA scarf against rainbow armbands, but in Poland there are also other right-wing extremist forces that see no Eastern European solidarity against the Russians, but first bring up old stories of a genocide commited against Poles by Ukrainians in Volhynia and make them a decision-making criterion. Mind you, both sides are not interested in the massacres of the Jews, which they both committed in collaboration with the Nazis, but in their „own“ massacres among themselves. And Stefan Banderra may well have been highly regarded by the former Ukrainian ambassador in Germany Melnyk, but in Poland Stephan Banderra is a Ukrainian nationalist or even a Nazi who is said to have slaughtered Poland en masse. These disputes within the nationalists of the Eastern European side, for whom nothing democratic for the EU, including in the Ukraine, is to be expected is described in the Berliner Zeitung and the PEN Club only as a „disturbance“ of a lecture presentation event and not as what it represents: Rampant nationalism and fascism among all the Eastern Europeans like the AfD, Le Pen, Vox, etc., even more radical than FIDESZ and PiS or the nationalist Ukrainian parties, ´´and these people are still being wanted more and more to join the EU , up to the whole “colorful” Balkan nationalism. In any case, it’s refreshing how Polish right-wing radicals openly expose all the genocides and massacres of the Ukrainians and their highly praised Ukrainian ex-Nazi Stephan Banderra, when this chapter is never even addressed by the democratic and western side because of all the Ukraine do-gooder propaganda for war purposes and is seen as a „disruption“: • „Right-wing Poles disrupt reading by Ukrainian: „We have to be like the Germans!“
The Ukrainian writer Oksana Sabushko wanted to do a reading in Kraków. Suddenly right-wing extremists shouted: „Bandera has to go!“
Witold Mrozek 11/22/2022 | A protest march of the radical right-wing ONR movement in Warsaw. The ONR movement is critical of Ukrainians „Bandera has to go!“ „He spits in the Poles‘ faces!“ „Long live Greater Poland!“ „End the desertion!“ „End the historical lies!“ Krakow visited. The demonstrators asked the writer if she knew „how many Poles were murdered in Volhynia“. The objections resulted in the meeting with the author being cancelled. The meeting was to take place at the International Cultural Center, a state institution on Kraków’s Main Market Square. The group consisted of about fifty people carrying red and white Polish flags. Some of the men wore the insignia of far-right organizations, while others covered their faces with balaclavas. There were older women too. The writer was escorted out through a side exit by the police, who also took the personal details of the demonstrators. A shameful incident A day later, Oksana Sabuschko received the Stanislaw Vincenz Literature Prize at the ICE Congress Center in Kraków. This time the ceremony went smoothly. Only five nationalists with a banner stood in front of the entrance for a while. Oksana Sabuschko addressed the attack during the ceremony: “The people who took away my opportunity to speak yesterday and instead staged a party gathering like in a 1920s Munich cafe are becoming the culture that is always about the run of history triumphs, do not defile. You will not diminish the dignity of this city in my eyes. However, such behavior and actions confirm that the great war and struggle to which Vincenz dedicated his life and which continues today in Ukraine is also taking place in Poland and around the world. I take this award as proof that we have no right to lose this fight.“ The attack on the Ukrainian writer in Kraków is a shameful incident. Such aggressive and public speeches against Ukrainians are rare in Poland.
Rafal Ziemkiewicz attacks the Ukrainians
However, the failure of the meeting with Oksana Zabuzhko is not accidental. For about a week, the right-wing and far-right press had attacked the writer, accusing her of being anti-Polish. In the newspaper Do Rzeczy, which is funded with money from the Minister of Justice and state-owned companies, Sabuschko was attacked by one of the leading right-wing columnists, Rafal Ziemkiewicz, who frequently criticizes the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party from the right. Without citing specific quotations, Ziemkiewicz accused the writer of praising the Ukrainian nationalists of World War II and denying the crimes in Volhynia. Review of the film „Volhynia“ „I don’t know if Ms. Oksana Sabuschko’s works can be considered valuable from a literary point of view, but I know that even if they were, their reward and promotion in Poland is not only against the principles of ’soft power‘ , but also goes against common sense and normal human decency,” Ziemkiewicz wrote. In his opinion, the role model for Poles are the Germans, who built their “soft power” with literature by promoting writers who, in his opinion, are “pro-German”, such as Stefan Chwin or Paweł Huelle from Gdańsk. Ziemkiewicz himself was refused entry to the UK last year for the xenophobic slogans he was spreading. The nationalist website kresy.pl made even more specific allegations against the writer. She accused her of criticizing Wojtek Smarzowski’s 2016 film „Volyn“ (Volhynia), about crimes committed by Ukrainians against Poland during the war, and pointed to historical inaccuracies that her It is believed to have happened – such as the consecration of knives in a Greek Catholic church, which Polish historians say did not take place. „This is not a good time to make a film like this,“ the writer said at the time, referring, among other things, to the war in Donbass, which by then – in 2016 – was already underway. In the same interview with the Polish newspaper Newsweek, she emphasized that she loves Polish culture and speaks Polish.
Is the mood changing in Poland? Given that Polish public enthusiasm for Ukrainian refugees is fading and that recently two Polish citizens were likely killed near the Ukrainian border by a stray Ukrainian missile, can we expect more anti-Ukrainian speeches? No hasty conclusions should be drawn here, but caution is advised. The Polish government and President Andrzej Duda emphasize that regardless of the fact that the missile that hit the border village was Ukrainian, all responsibility for the tragedy lies with Russia, which waged a war of aggression right on the border with Poland, the European Union and NATO leads. At the same time, the situation is not improved by the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has still not directly admitted that the rocket was actually fired by the Ukrainian military. As I recently wrote, this is being exploited by far-right columnists and activists who have even criticized the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government, which is showing solidarity with Ukraine.”
Review of the film „Volhynia“
„I don’t know if Ms. Oksana Sabuschko’s works can be considered valuable from a literary point of view, but I know that even if they were, their reward and promotion in Poland is not only against the principles of ’soft power‘ , but also goes against common sense and normal human decency,” Ziemkiewicz wrote. In his opinion, the role model for Poles are the Germans, who built their “soft power” with literature by promoting writers who, in his opinion, are “pro-German”, such as Stefan Chwin or Paweł Huelle from Gdańsk. Ziemkiewicz himself was refused entry to the UK last year for the xenophobic slogans he was spreading. The nationalist website kresy.pl made even more specific allegations against the writer. She accused her of criticizing Wojtek Smarzowski’s 2016 film „Volyn“ (Volhynia), about crimes committed by Ukrainians against Poland during the war, and pointed to historical inaccuracies that her It is believed to have happened – such as the consecration of knives in a Greek Catholic church, which Polish historians say did not take place.
This is not a good time to make such a film,” the writer said at the time, referring, among other things, to the war in Donbass, which by then – in 2016 – was already underway. In the same interview with the Polish newspaper Newsweek, she emphasized that she loves Polish culture and speaks Polish. Is the mood changing in Poland? Given that Polish public enthusiasm for Ukrainian refugees is fading and that recently two Polish citizens were likely killed near the Ukrainian border by a stray Ukrainian missile, can we expect more anti-Ukrainian speeches? No hasty conclusions should be drawn here, but caution is advised. The Polish government and President Andrzej Duda emphasize that regardless of the fact that the missile that hit the border village was Ukrainian, all responsibility for the tragedy lies with Russia, which waged a war of aggression right on the border with Poland, the European Union and NATO leads. At the same time, the situation is not improved by the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has still not directly admitted that the rocket was actually fired by the Ukrainian military. As I recently wrote, this is being exploited by far-right columnists and activists who have even criticized the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) government, which is showing solidarity with Ukraine. The reaction of the Polish PEN Club The Polish PEN Club also commented on the termination of the meeting with Oksana Sabuschko. “The aggressive far-right militias that led to the termination of the meeting with Oksana Zabuzhko are reminiscent of the worst tradition of fascist groups of the interwar period. The Polish PEN Club condemns this brutal attack, which is an unacceptable violation of freedom of expression and assembly.”
If you learn anything from this, don’t support nationalists and globalists who try to relativize their crimes against humanity against each other in order to justify and prepare the next crimes against humanity. Be it the Chinese versus the Japanese and the West, the Russians versus the Germans or the West, the US in the Iraq War, or whatever.