Memes

https://www.villagevoice.com/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/

The story is a fraud. The starving girl, it turns out, wasn’t found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her picture was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cyni­cal of swindles — a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collabora­tion. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revision­ism: a denial of Hitler’s holocaust against the Jews.

There was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possi­bly one or two million, Ukrainians died — ­the minority from starvation, the major­ity from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffer­ing. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.

In the latest catalogue for The Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler at My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its ter­ror-famine, the catalogue notes: “The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been supressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real ‘Holocaust’ might compete with a Holohoax.”

For those unacquainted with Noontide jargon, the “Holohoax” refers to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.

“They’re always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million,” observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. “It makes the reader think: ‘My god, it’s worse than the Holocaust.’ ”

The original reporting about the "manmade famine" was by a journalist very closely associated with the Nazis in Germany and the USA named Gareth Jones. He happened to publish his articles in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a major supporter of the Nazi party in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)

In late January and some of February 1933, Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and he was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Some three weeks later, on 23 February in the Richthofen, "the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany", Jones, along with Sefton Delmer, became the first foreign journalists, after he became Chancellor, to fly with Hitler. They accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city. He wrote that if the Richthofen had crashed the history of Europe would be changed.

It really would have been good if that plane did crash.

In March 1933, he travelled to the Soviet Union for a third time. On 10th March, he left Moscow for the Russian Black Earth District, south of Belogorod, and the Kharkov district of the Ukrainian SSR, on a journey made possible by an invitation from Oscar Ehrt, Vice Consul at the German Consulate in Kharkov. The Vice Consul's son, Adolf Ehrt, was a leading Nazi propagandist who became head of Goebbels’ Anti-Komintern agency.

Hearst published Jones's account of what had happened in Ukraine. Hearst also arranged for Jones to undertake a lecture and broadcast tour of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst

With "AMERICA FIRST" emblazoned on his newspaper masthead, Hearst celebrated the "great achievement" of the new Nazi regime in Germany—a lesson to all "liberty-loving people." In 1934, after checking with Jewish leaders, Hearst visited Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. When Hitler asked why he was so misunderstood by the American press, Hearst retorted: "Because Americans believe in democracy, and are averse to dictatorship."[60] William Randolph Hearst instructed his reporters in Germany to give positive coverage of the Nazis, and fired journalists who refused to write stories favorable of German fascism. Hearst's papers ran columns without rebuttal by Nazi leader Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, and Hitler himself, as well as Mussolini and other dictators in Europe and Latin America. After the systematic massive Nazi attacks on Jews known as Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), the Hearst press, like all major American newspapers, blamed Hitler and the Nazis: "The entire civilized world is shocked and shamed by Germany's brutal oppression of the Jewish people," read an editorial in all Hearst papers. "You [Hitler] are making the flag of National Socialism a symbol of national savagery," read an editorial written by Hearst. Despite this, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Hearst wrote a column in the New York Journal-American the following day, praising Hitler as the "saviour of Europe", expressed regret that the British policy of "co-operation with Hitler against communism was thrown out" and had hope that "peace can still be made and Europe united against the expansion of Asiatic Communism".

There was a bad famine throughout the region (the last one) that was exacerbated by many issues, but it was not a deliberate policy at any level of the USSR. This is propaganda that has been leveraged by many elements of international capital and fascists for decades to support "double genocide theory" that equivocates the USSR as being as bad as Nazi Germany (Stalin as bad as Hitler), which is completely false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory

According to American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Kristen Ghodsee, efforts to institutionalize the "double genocide thesis", or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), in particular the push during the 2008 financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme social inequalities in both the Eastern and Western worlds as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. She says that any discussion of the achievements by Communist states, including literacy, education, women's rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin's crimes and the "double genocide thesis", an intellectual paradigm summed up as such: "1) any move towards redistribution and away from a completely free market is seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably leads to class murder; and 3) class murder is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust." By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee posits that the elites hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets".