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‘Andor’ Star: I Refuse to Stay Silent on Gaza (www.youtube.com)
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

This is Hexbear nerd, we don't have downvotes. Quit projecting.

I'm not sure how to respond to this part. Hexbear is a Lemmy instance, there most certainly are downvotes whether you see them or not. Or whether you want to call them "downvotes" or something else... not sure what projection you seem to be trying to point out. Regardless, I'm sure we would agree to put a pin in that one as a semantic argument.

To respond to your comment; Emphasis is the atomic unit of propaganda.

Sure, I won't make an emphatic argument for or against this statement. It doesn't really carry a lot of weight in a vacuum though.

Referring to it as “The Holodomor” and pretending it’s some special things that happened to Ukrainians is an ahistorical, aka revisionist, narrative that attempts to overemphasize the tragedy to a particular people as part of a contemporary political agenda.

This is a strawman... no one here has made any claims or "pretended" that it is some special thing. I won't disagree with you because this statement is true, this definition of the holodomor you give is revisionist, but in a metalogical sense this statement has no bearing on the current discourse here because you're arguing against hypothetical claims no one has actually made. I understand you want to point to people who might make such claims, as this take isn't an unpopular or unfounded opinion in academia. Don't put those words in my mouth, however.

Nobody around here denies there was a famine, but that same famine affected every nationality in the USSR, not just Ukrainians.

I will say, I've definitely seen people deny the famine happening at all in my time online. However, I won't harp on that point or claim the community here propagates that opinion, else I'd be stepping in the same strawman fallacy from before. The famine wasn't limited to just Ukrainians or Ukraine, yes, but I'm not going to stick on that because, again, I never argued otherwise.

Famines were also not atypical of the time period, and while of course they’re great tragedies that should be prevented and those who could have should be criticized for failing to do so,

Famines aren't typical or atypical. At every moment in human history there has been an active famine somewhere. I don't see the point of trying to say "famines were also not atypical of the time period" other than as disingenuous rhetoric that, contrary to what you seem to be arguing here, underplays the significance of the events and the culpability of those responsible.

...it doesn’t make any sense to give this one a super special Holocaust like name associated with a single ethnicity and assign universal blame and condemnation at the feet of one man.

Blaming the entire famine on Stalin or claiming it solely affected Ukrainians would be, again, asinine. Which is, again, explicitly why I did not argue that point. Did you even read what I said or did you just see Holodomor discourse and decide my opinions for me? Further, who's to say the treatment of the Holodomor shouldn't be the norm? Why should the "Great Depression" or the "Bengal Famine" not get the same treatment and use more apt and historical local names for the tragedy? It isn't revisionism to use the term. And, frankly, even if it was, why do you and others take such issue with it? Ukrainians themselves call it the Holodomor. There is evidence of Ukrainians using this terminology even before glasnost. Maybe the problematic terminology isn't "Holodomor" and is more generic names like "Bengal Famine"... people give more of a shit when nouns have gravitas in the West, like it or not. It isn't fair but it is a definite aspect of Western culture and media.

That’s the propaganda getting its hooks into you.

Uh-huh... again, the only person I have seen parroting any rhetoric that might be eschewed as originating in propaganda so far is you, by claiming my own opinions for me with no cognizance for what I actually said. I never made any of the claims that you identify as originating as propaganda; you brought those to the table and claimed someone had said them when that hadn't happened. That is dishonest.

If you gave liberal darlings of history the same treatment you’d be forced to condemn Churchill forever in every conversation because of the Bengali famine that happened during the same time period.

WE FUCKING SHOULD DO THIS!!!!!!!!

For fucks sake dude, YES!! Nobody is arguing otherwise. I agree with this. You are the one trying to bend your words to argue against your ideal strawman. I fucking hate Churchill. Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and others are all equally fucked people. Jesus fucking christ. There isn't some bar I have where once it is crossed the person gets to go in the "genocidal megalomaniac" bucket... I indiscriminately throw all these bourgeoisie fucks in there because they are all monsters who would murder millions of the "poors" before even considering giving up one of their own.

This dishonest fucking rhetoric surrounding the Holodomor in leftist spaces only serves to make the general public see us in the same light as Holocaust deniers.

Fucking honestly, they might have good reason to do so when people like you do Olympian mental gymnastics like this to try and suck the balls of yet another flawed human government from history that, like every other society ever, has contentious and problematic events. I very intentionally have made no personal arguments about the veracity of the Holodomor as a genocide thus far. My fucking point is that this sort of behavior in our spaces helps nobody other than stroking the egos of people like this, like you.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    You know what, to some extent here, mea culpa. I misread the intent of your original comment. Without going through with a comb I'll just gesture at an apology for most of it, but disagree on two particularly important matters.

    You're still wrong in your attitude regarding "I fucking hate Churchill. Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and others are all equally fucked people," statement in your comment. Churchill's famines were driven by willful negligence and contempt of a people he deemed subhuman, thus worthy of starvation and instrumentalization towards other goals. This kind of racist disregard for people is still seen today and doing harm given how calamities that disproportionately affect the global south are treated as secondary to matters that affect white people. Just look at the "civilized world's" response to the Russo-Ukraine war and genocide in Palestine. Same thing has been happening for decades, where horrendous civil wars, acts of oppressive violence, and all manner of disaster whether man made or natural, are treated with polite brow furrowing at best from "The West," if not readily permitted and supported. Churchill's Brand of racism is alive and well and it's body count grows annually. Hitler and Nazism were/are uniquely evil in their explicit intent to murder people not out of a lesser regard for their humanity, but a complete denial of it. The mere existence of Jews, LGBTQ+ folks, Roma, the disabled, and anyone else considered an "untermensch" was itself treated as a threat that needed to be eradicated. This is distinctly worse than liberal/capitalist racism's deprioritozation of black and brown or disabled people. At least under capitalism's grotesque logic you have a right to exist so long as you're economically valuable to the bottom line, it's no willful extinction drive.

    Compare those two ideologies and their champions to Communism and Stalin, and you've gone and done a grave injustice to history. There's no evidence that Stalin had any kind of animosity to Ukrainians themselves, nor racial prejudice guiding his policies and politics. Deaths that occurred in the Soviet Union may have been prevented and that is unfortunate, but this is in the context of Stalin rapidly industrializing the least developed nation in Europe in the face of the genocidal threat of Hitler, something so unique and evil it simply cannot be compared to any other kind of atrocity in history, and to do so is to inadvertently white wash it from the start. The entire framing of Stalin as some kind of moral equivalent of Hitler is pure anti communist brain worms.

    Second matter is in regards to your line, "Ukrainians themselves call it the Holodomor. There is evidence of Ukrainians using this terminology even before glasnost."

    I appreciate another user of lemmgrad for linking a relevant source for how the framing of the Holodomor as some super special event worthy of breathless condemnation at every mention of the Soviet Union originates from and perpetuates Nazi ideology. I'll include another source which identifies similar patterns across Eastern Europe.

    https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory

    Relevant quote:

    "The Holocaust is not referred to simply as the “Nazi genocide,” but has its own names — Yiddish, der Khurbn, Hebrew, ha-Shoah, English, the Holocaust — to signify a unique event. It is more than a linguistic curiosity that postwar attempts by some Jewish groups to subsume the Holocaust as one of the historic massacres endured by the Jews that are mourned on Tíshebov (Tisha b’Av) failed, because of the virtually unanimous feeling among survivors that this one, in 20th-century Europe, was so very different, and intrinsically incomparable with even the primary ancient national catastrophes of destruction and exile.

    The Holocaust cannot, must not, be subsumed — but that is precisely what the Double Genocide theory seeks to do. It is the primary new mainstream form of Holocaust Denial, and should be treated with at least as much outrage as President Trump’s invocation of supposed moral equivalence between people who came to Charlottesville, Virginia in Nazi-style torch-lit processions to chant, “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazis’ “Blood and Soil” in English translation (they had to make their connection to Hitler-era Nazism), and those who came to protest them. Infinitely, infinitely less can the Holocaust itself be considered as a moral equal of some other “bad thing” from its period in history — other than for the proponents of Bogus moral equivalence, who use it as a tool of discourse, sophistry, casuistry, to talk the Holocaust out of history without denying a single death."

    Lastly, a point of order. On Hexbear there are not downvotes. Comments and posts on our instance do not show them nor even have an option for us to use them. For me, your comment is locked at 1 because presumably nobody has upvoted it. While I don't expect that to change, nobody is going to downvote it either.

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